CHAPTER III — RICHMOND PARK
On the afternoon that Soames crossed to France a cablegram was received by Jolyon at Robin Hill:
“Your son down with enteric no immediate danger will cable again.”
It reached a household already agitated by the imminent departure of June, whose berth was booked for the following day. She was, indeed, in the act of confiding Eric Cobbley and his family to her father’s care when the message arrived.
The resolution to become a Red Cross nurse, taken under stimulus of Jolly’s enlistment, had been loyally fulfilled with the irritation and regret which all Forsytes feel at what curtails their individual liberties. Enthusiastic at first about the ‘wonderfulness’ of the work, she had begun after a month to feel that she could train herself so much better than others could train her. And if Holly had not insisted on following her example, and being trained too, she must inevitably have ‘cried off.’ The departure of Jolly and Val with their troop in April had further stiffened her failing resolve. But now, on the point of departure, the thought of leaving Eric Cobbley, with a wife and two children, adrift in the cold waters of an unappreciative world weighed on her so that she was still in danger of backing out. The reading of that cablegram, with its disquieting reality, clinched the matter. She saw herself already nursing Jolly — for of course they would let her nurse her own brother! Jolyon — ever wide and doubtful — had no such hope. Poor June!
Could any Forsyte of her generation grasp how rude and brutal life was? Ever since he knew of his boy’s arrival at Cape Town the thought of him had been a kind of recurrent sickness in Jolyon. He could not get reconciled to the feeling that Jolly was in danger all the time. The cablegram, grave though it was, was almost a relief. He was now safe from bullets, anyway. And yet — this enteric was a virulent disease! The Times was full of deaths therefrom. Why could he not be lying out there in that up-country hospital, and his boy safe at home? The un-Forsytean self-sacrifice of his three children, indeed, had quite bewildered Jolyon. He would eagerly change places with Jolly, because he loved his boy; but no such personal motive was influencing them. He could only think that it marked the decline of the Forsyte type.
Late that afternoon Holly came out to him under the old oak-tree. She had grown up very much during these last months of hospital training away from home. And, seeing her approach, he thought: ‘She has more sense than June, child though she is; more wisdom. Thank God she isn’t going out.’ She had seated herself in the swing, very silent and still. ‘She feels this,’ thought Jolyon, ‘as much as I’ and, seeing her eyes fixed on him, he said: “Don’t take it to heart too much, my child. If he weren’t ill, he might be in much greater danger.”
Holly got out of the swing.
“I want to tell you something, Dad. It was through me that Jolly enlisted and went out.”
“How’s that?”
“When you were away in Paris, Val Dartie and I fell in love. We used to ride in Richmond Park; we got engaged. Jolly found it out, and thought he ought to stop it; so he dared Val to enlist. It was all my fault, Dad; and I want to go out too. Because if anything happens to either of them I should feel awful. Besides, I’m just as much trained as June.”
Jolyon gazed at her in a stupefaction that was tinged with irony. So this was the answer to the riddle he had been asking himself; and his three children were Forsytes after all. Surely Holly might have told him all this before! But he smothered the sarcastic sayings on his lips. Tenderness to the young was perhaps the most sacred article of his belief. He had got, no doubt, what he deserved. Engaged! So this was why he had so lost touch with her! And to young Val Dartie — nephew of Soames — in the other camp! It was all terribly distasteful. He closed his easel, and set his drawing against the tree.
“Have you told June?”
“Yes; she says she’ll get me into her cabin somehow. It’s a single cabin; but one of us could sleep on the floor. If you consent, she’ll go up now and get permission.”
‘Consent?’ thought Jolyon. ‘Rather late in the day to ask for that!’ But again he checked himself.
“You’re too young, my dear; they won’t let you.”
“June knows some people that she helped to go to Cape Town. If they won’t let me nurse yet, I could stay with them and go on training there. Let me go, Dad!”
Jolyon smiled because he could have cried.
“I never stop anyone from doing anything,” he said.
Holly flung her arms round his neck.
“Oh! Dad, you are the best in the world.”
‘That means the worst,’ thought Jolyon. If he had ever doubted his creed of tolerance he did so then.
“I’m not friendly with Val’s family,” he said, “and I don’t know Val, but Jolly didn’t like him.”
Holly looked at the distance and said:
“I love him.”
“That settles it,” said Jolyon dryly, then catching the expression on her face, he kissed her, with the thought: ‘Is anything more pathetic than the faith of the young?’ Unless he actually forbade her going it was obvious that he must make the best of it, so he went up to town with June. Whether due to her persistence, or the fact that the official they saw was an old school friend of Jolyon’s, they obtained permission for Holly to share the single cabin. He took them to Surbiton station the following evening, and they duly slid away from him, provided with money, invalid foods, and those letters of credit without which Forsytes do not travel.
He drove back to Robin Hill under a brilliant sky to his late dinner, served with an added care by servants trying to show him that they sympathised, eaten with an added scrupulousness to show them that he appreciated their sympathy. But it was a real relief to get to his cigar on the terrace of flag-stones — cunningly chosen by young Bosinney for shape and colour — with night closing in around him, so beautiful a night, hardly whispering in the trees, and smelling so sweet that it made him ache. The grass was drenched with dew, and he kept to those flagstones, up and down, till presently it began to seem to him that he was one of three, not wheeling, but turning right about at each end, so that his father was always nearest to the house, and his son always nearest to the terrace edge. Each had an arm lightly within his arm; he dared not lift his hand to his cigar lest he should disturb them, and it burned away, dripping ash on him, till it dropped from his lips, at last, which were getting hot. They left him then, and his arms felt chilly. Three Jolyons in one Jolyon they had walked.
He stood still, counting the sounds — a carriage passing on the highroad, a distant train, the dog at Gage’s farm, the whispering trees, the groom playing on his penny whistle. A multitude of stars up there — bright and silent, so far off! No moon as yet! Just enough light to show him the dark flags and swords of the iris flowers along the terrace edge — his favourite flower that had the night’s own colour on its curving crumpled petals. He turned round to the house. Big, unlighted, not a soul beside himself to live in all that part of it. Stark loneliness! He could not go on living here alone. And yet, so long as there was beauty, why should a man feel lonely? The answer — as to some idiot’s riddle — was: Because he did. The greater the beauty, the greater the loneliness, for at the back of beauty was harmony, and at the back of harmony was — union. Beauty could not comfort if the soul were out of it. The night, maddeningly lovely, with bloom of grapes on it in starshine, and the breath of grass and honey coming from it, he could not enjoy, while she who was to him the life of beauty, its embodiment and essence, was cut off from him, utterly cut off now, he felt, by honourable decency.
He made a poor fist of sleeping, striving too hard after that resignation which Forsytes find difficult to reach, bred to their own way and left so comfortably off by their fathers. But after dawn he dozed off, and soon was dreaming a strange dream.
He was on a stage with immensely high rich curtains — high as the very stars — stretching in a semi-circle from footlights to footlights. He himself was very small, a little black restless figure roaming up and down; and the odd thing was that he was not altogether himself, but Soames as well, so that he was not only experiencing but watching. This figure of himself and Soames was trying to find a way out through the curtains, which, heavy and dark, kept him in. Several times he had crossed in front of them before he saw with delight a sudden narrow rift — a tall chink of beauty the colour of iris flowers, like a glimpse of Paradise, remote, ineffable. Stepping quickly forward to pass into it, he found the curtains closing before him. Bitterly disappointed he — or was it Soames? — moved on, and there was the chink again through the parted curtains, which again closed too soon. This went on and on and he never got through till he woke with the word “Irene” on his lips. The dream disturbed him badly, especially that identification of himself with Soames.
Next morning, finding it impossible to work, he spent hours riding Jolly’s horse in search of fatigue. And on the second day he made up his mind to move to London and see if he could not get permission to follow his daughters to South Africa. He had just begun to pack the following morning when he received this letter:
“GREEN HOTEL,
“June 13.
“RICHMOND. “MY DEAR JOLYON,
“You will be surprised to see how near I am to you. Paris became impossible — and I have come here to be within reach of your advice. I would so love to see you again. Since you left Paris I don’t think I have met anyone I could really talk to. Is all well with you and with your boy? No one knows, I think, that I am here at present.
“Always your friend,
“IRENE.”
Irene within three miles of him! — and again in flight! He stood with a very queer smile on his lips. This was more than he had bargained for!
About noon he set out on foot across Richmond Park, and as he went along, he thought: ‘Richmond Park! By Jove, it suits us Forsytes!’ Not that Forsytes lived there — nobody lived there save royalty, rangers, and the deer — but in Richmond Park Nature was allowed to go so far and no further, putting up a brave show of being natural, seeming to say: ‘Look at my instincts — they are almost passions, very nearly out of hand, but not quite, of course; the very hub of possession is to possess oneself.’ Yes! Richmond Park possessed itself, even on that bright day of June, with arrowy cuckoos shifting the tree-points of their calls, and the wood doves announcing high summer.
The Green Hotel, which Jolyon entered at one o’clock, stood nearly opposite that more famous hostelry, the Crown and Sceptre; it was modest, highly respectable, never out of cold beef, gooseberry tart, and a dowager or two, so that a carriage and pair was almost always standing before the door.
In a room draped in chintz so slippery as to forbid all emotion, Irene was sitting on a piano stool covered with crewel work, playing ‘Hansel and Gretel’ out of an old score. Above her on a wall, not yet Morris-papered, was a print of the Queen on a pony, amongst deer-hounds, Scotch caps, and slain stags; beside her in a pot on the window-sill was a white and rosy fuchsia. The Victorianism of the room almost talked; and in her clinging frock Irene seemed to Jolyon like Venus emerging from the shell of the past century.
“If the proprietor had eyes,” he said, “he would show you the door; you have broken through his decorations.” Thus lightly he smothered up an emotional moment. Having eaten cold beef, pickled walnut, gooseberry tart, and drunk stone-bottle ginger-beer, they walked into the Park, and light talk was succeeded by the silence Jolyon had dreaded.
“You haven’t told me about Paris,” he said at last.
“No. I’ve been shadowed for a long time; one gets used to that. But then Soames came. By the little Niobe — the same story; would I go back to him?”
“Incredible!”
She had spoken without raising her eyes, but she looked up now. Those dark eyes clinging to his said as no words could have: ‘I have come to an end; if you want me, here I am.’
For sheer emotional intensity had he ever — old as he was — passed through such a moment?
The words: ‘Irene, I adore you!’ almost escaped him. Then, with a clearness of which he would not have believed mental vision capable, he saw Jolly lying with a white face turned to a white wall.
“My boy is very ill out there,” he said quietly.
Irene slipped her arm through his.
“Let’s walk on; I understand.”
No miserable explanation to attempt! She had understood! And they walked on among the bracken, knee-high already, between the rabbit-holes and the oak-trees, talking of Jolly. He left her two hours later at the Richmond Hill Gate, and turned towards home.
‘She knows of my feeling for her, then,’ he thought. Of course! One could not keep knowledge of that from such a woman!
CHAPTER IV — OVER THE RIVER
Jolly was tired to death of dreams. They had left him now too wan and weak to dream again; left him to lie torpid, faintly remembering far-off things; just able to turn his eyes and gaze through the window near his cot at the trickle of river running by in the sands, at the straggling milk-bush of the Karoo beyond. He knew what the Karoo was now, even if he had not seen a Boer roll over like a rabbit, or heard the whine of flying bullets. This pestilence had sneaked on him before he had smelled powder. A thirsty day and a rash drink, or perhaps a tainted fruit — who knew? Not he, who had not even strength left to grudge the evil thing its victory — just enough to know that there were many lying here with him, that he was sore with frenzied dreaming; just enough to watch that thread of river and be able to remember faintly those far-away things...
The sun was nearly down. It would be cooler soon. He would have liked to know the time — to feel his old watch, so butter-smooth, to hear the repeater strike. It would have been friendly, home-like. He had not even strength to remember that the old watch was last wound the day he began to lie here. The pulse of his brain beat so feebly that faces which came and went, nurse’s, doctor’s, orderly’s, were indistinguishable, just one indifferent face; and the words spoken about him meant all the same thing, and that almost nothing. Those things he used to do, though far and faint, were more distinct — walking past the foot of the old steps at Harrow ‘bill’ — ’Here, sir! Here, sir!’ — wrapping boots in the Westminster Gazette, greenish paper, shining boots — grandfather coming from somewhere dark — a smell of earth — the mushroom house! Robin Hill! Burying poor old Balthasar in the leaves! Dad! Home...
Consciousness came again with noticing that the river had no water in it — someone was speaking too. Want anything? No. What could one want? Too weak to want — only to hear his watch strike...
Holly! She wouldn’t bowl properly. Oh! Pitch them up! Not sneaks!.. ‘Back her, Two and Bow!’ He was Two!.. Consciousness came once more with a sense of the violet dusk outside, and a rising blood-red crescent moon. His eyes rested on it fascinated; in the long minutes of brain-nothingness it went moving up and up...
“He’s going, doctor!” Not pack boots again? Never? ‘Mind your form, Two!’ Don’t cry! Go quietly — over the river — sleep!.. Dark? If somebody would — strike — his — watch!..
CHAPTER V — SOAMES ACTS
A sealed letter in the handwriting of Mr. Polteed remained unopened in Soames’ pocket throughout two hours of sustained attention to the affairs of the ‘New Colliery Company,’ which, declining almost from the moment of old Jolyon’s retirement from the Chairmanship, had lately run down so fast that there was now nothing for it but a ‘winding-up.’ He took the letter out to lunch at his City Club, sacred to him for the meals he had eaten there with his father in the early seventies, when James used to like him to come and see for himself the nature of his future life.
Here in a remote corner before a plate of roast mutton and mashed potato, he read:
“DEAR SIR,
“In accordance with your suggestion we have duly taken the matter up at the other end with gratifying results. Observation of 47 has enabled us to locate 17 at the Green Hotel, Richmond. The two have been observed to meet daily during the past week in Richmond Park. Nothing absolutely crucial has so far been notified. But in conjunction with what we had from Paris at the beginning of the year, I am confident we could now satisfy the Court. We shall, of course, continue to watch the matter until we hear from you.
“Very faithfully yours,
“CLAUD POLTEED.”
Soames read it through twice and beckoned to the waiter:
“Take this away; it’s cold.”
“Shall I bring you some more, sir?”
“No. Get me some coffee in the other room.”
And, paying for what he had not eaten, he went out, passing two acquaintances without sign of recognition.
‘Satisfy the Court!’ he thought, sitting at a little round marble table with the coffee before him. That fellow Jolyon! He poured out his coffee, sweetened and drank it. He would disgrace him in the eyes of his own children! And rising, with that resolution hot within him, he found for the first time the inconvenience of being his own solicitor. He could not treat this scandalous matter in his own office. He must commit the soul of his private dignity to a stranger, some other professional dealer in family dishonour. Who was there he could go to? Linkman and Laver in Budge Row, perhaps — reliable, not too conspicuous, only nodding acquaintances. But before he saw them he must see Polteed again. But at this thought Soames had a moment of sheer weakness. To part with his secret? How find the words? How subject himself to contempt and secret laughter? Yet, after all, the fellow knew already — oh yes, he knew! And, feeling that he must finish with it now, he took a cab into the West End.
In this hot weather the window of Mr. Polteed’s room was positively open, and the only precaution was a wire gauze, preventing the intrusion of flies. Two or three had tried to come in, and been caught, so that they seemed to be clinging there with the intention of being devoured presently. Mr. Polteed, following the direction of his client’s eye, rose apologetically and closed the window.
‘Posing ass!’ thought Soames. Like all who fundamentally believe in themselves he was rising to the occasion, and, with his little sideway smile, he said: “I’ve had your letter. I’m going to act. I suppose you know who the lady you’ve been watching really is?” Mr. Polteed’s expression at that moment was a masterpiece. It so clearly said: ‘Well, what do you think? But mere professional knowledge, I assure you — pray forgive it!’ He made a little half airy movement with his hand, as who should say: ‘Such things — such things will happen to us all!’
“Very well, then,” said Soames, moistening his lips: “there’s no need to say more. I’m instructing Linkman and Laver of Budge Row to act for me. I don’t want to hear your evidence, but kindly make your report to them at five o’clock, and continue to observe the utmost secrecy.”
Mr. Polteed half closed his eyes, as if to comply at once. “My dear sir,” he said.
“Are you convinced,” asked Soames with sudden energy, “that there is enough?”
The faintest movement occurred to Mr. Polteed’s shoulders.
“You can risk it,” he murmured; “with what we have, and human nature, you can risk it.”
Soames rose. “You will ask for Mr. Linkman. Thanks; don’t get up.” He could not bear Mr. Polteed to slide as usual between him and the door. In the sunlight of Piccadilly he wiped his forehead. This had been the worst of it — he could stand the strangers better. And he went back into the City to do what still lay before him.
That evening in Park Lane, watching his father dine, he was overwhelmed by his old longing for a son — a son, to watch him eat as he went down the years, to be taken on his knee as James on a time had been wont to take him; a son of his own begetting, who could understand him because he was the same flesh and blood — understand, and comfort him, and become more rich and cultured than himself because he would start even better off. To get old — like that thin, grey wiry-frail figure sitting there — and be quite alone with possessions heaping up around him; to take no interest in anything because it had no future and must pass away from him to hands and mouths and eyes for whom he cared no jot! No! He would force it through now, and be free to marry, and have a son to care for him before he grew to be like the old old man his father, wistfully watching now his sweetbread, now his son.
In that mood he went up to bed. But, lying warm between those fine linen sheets of Emily’s providing, he was visited by memories and torture. Visions of Irene, almost the solid feeling of her body, beset him. Why had he ever been fool enough to see her again, and let this flood back on him so that it was pain to think of her with that fellow — that stealing fellow.