The Forsyte Saga, Volume 2 Page 5

‘Give him to me, Ellen. Come with Mother, darling!’

  Ting-a-ling came, indeed, but only because he couldn’t go, bristling and snuffling and turning his head back.

  ‘I like to see him natural,’ said Fleur.

  ‘Waste of money, a dog like that,’ Soames commented. ‘You should have had a bull-dog and let him sleep in the hall. No end of burglaries. Your aunt had her knocker stolen.’

  ‘I wouldn’t part with Ting for a hundred knockers.’

  ‘One of these days you’ll be having him stolen – fashionable breed.’

  Fleur opened her front door. ‘Oh!’ she said, ‘Bart’s here, already!’

  A shiny hat was reposing on a marble coffer, present from Soames, intended to hold coats and discourage moth. Placing his hat alongside the other, Soames looked at them. They were too similar for words, tall, high, shiny, and with the same name inside. He had resumed the ‘tall hat’ habit after the failure of the general and coal strikes in 1921, his instinct having told him that revolution would be at a discount for some considerable period.

  ‘About this thing,’ he said, taking out the pink parcel, ‘I don’t know what you’ll do with it, but here it is.’

  It was a curiously carved and coloured bit of opal in a ring of tiny brilliants.

  ‘Oh!’ Fleur cried: ‘What a delicious thing!’

  ‘Venus floating on the waves or something,’ murmured Soames. ‘Uncommon. You want a strong light on it.’

  ‘But it’s lovely. I shall put it on at once.’

  Venus! If Dad had known! She put her arms round his neck to disguise her sense of à propos. Soames received the rub of her cheek against his own well-shaved face with his usual stillness. Why demonstrate when they were both aware that his affection was double hers?

  ‘Put it on then,’ he said, ‘and let’s see.’

  Fleur pinned it at her neck before an old lacquered mirror. ‘It’s a jewel. Thank you, darling! Yes, your tie is straight. I like that white piping. You ought always to wear it with black. Now, come along!’ And she drew him into her Chinese room. It was empty.

  ‘Bart must be up with Michael, talking about his new book.’

  ‘Writing at his age?’ said Soames.

  ‘Well, ducky, he’s a year younger than you.’

  ‘I don’t write. Not such a fool. Got any more new-fangled friends?’

  ‘Just one – Gurdon Minho, the novelist.’

  ‘Another of the new school?’

  ‘Oh, no, dear! Surely you’ve heard of Gurdon Minho; he’s older than the hills.’

  ‘They’re all alike to me,’ muttered Soames. ‘Is he well thought of?’

  ‘I should think his income is larger than yours. He’s almost a classic – only waiting to die.’

  ‘I’ll get one of his books and read it. What name did you say?’

  ‘Get Big and Little Fishes, by Gurdon Minho. You can remember that, can’t you? Oh! here they are! Michael, look at what Father’s given me.’

  Taking his hand, she put it up to the opal at her neck. ‘Let them both see,’ she thought, ‘what good terms we’re on.’ Though her father had not seen her with Wilfrid in the gallery, her conscience still said: ‘Strengthen your respectability, you don’t quite know how much support you’ll need for it in future.’

  And out of the corner of her eye she watched those two. The meetings between ‘Old Mont’ and ‘Old Forsyte’ – as she knew Bart called her father when speaking of him to Michael – always made her want to laugh, but she never quite knew why. Bart knew everything, but his knowledge was beautifully bound, strictly edited by a mind tethered to the ‘eighteenth century’. Her father only knew what was of advantage to him, but the knowledge was unbound, and subject to no editorship. If he was late Victorian, he was not above profiting if necessary by even later periods. ‘Old Mont’ had faith in tradition; ‘Old Forsyte’ none. Fleur’s acuteness had long perceived a difference which favoured her father. Yet ‘Old Mont’s’ talk was so much more up-to-date, rapid, glancing, garrulous, redolent of precise information; and ‘Old Forsyte’s’ was constricted, matter-of-fact. Really impossible to tell which of the two was the better museum specimen; and both so well-preserved!

  They did not precisely shake hands; but Soames mentioned the weather. And almost at once they all four sought that Sunday food which by a sustained effort of will Fleur had at last deprived of reference to the British character. They partook, in fact, of lobster cocktails, and a mere risotto of chickens’ livers, an omelette au rhum, and dessert trying to look as Spanish as it could.

  ‘I’ve been in the Tate,’ Fleur said; ‘I do think it’s touching.’

  ‘Touching?’ queried Soames with a sniff.

  ‘Fleur means, sir, that to see so much old English art together is like looking at a baby show.’

  ‘I don’t follow,’ said Soames stiffly. ‘There’s some very good work there.’

  ‘But not grown-up, sir.’

  ‘Ah! You young people mistake all this crazy cleverness for maturity.’

  ‘That’s not what Michael means, Father. It’s quite true that English painting has no wisdom teeth. You can see the difference in a moment, between it and any Continental painting.’

  ‘And thank God for it!’ broke in Sir Lawrence. ‘The beauty of this country’s art is its innocence. We’re the oldest country in the world politically, and the youngest aesthetically. What do you say, Forsyte?’

  ‘Turner is old and wise enough for me,’ said Soames curtly. ‘Are you coming to the P.P.R.S. Board on Tuesday?’

  ‘Tuesday? We were going to shoot the spinneys, weren’t we, Michael?’

  Soames grunted. ‘I should let them wait,’ he said. ‘We settle the report.’

  It was through ‘Old Mont’s’ influence that he had received a seat on the Board of that flourishing concern, the Providential Premium Reassurance Society, and, truth to tell, he was not sitting very easily in it. Though the law of averages was, perhaps, the most reliable thing in the world, there were circumstances which had begun to cause him disquietude. He looked round his nose. Light weight, this narrow-headed, twisting-eyebrowed baronet of a chap – like his son before him! And he added suddenly: ‘I’m not easy. If I’d realized how that chap Elderson ruled the roost, I doubt if I should have come on to that Board.’

  One side of ‘Old Mont’s’ face seemed to try to leave the other.

  ‘Elderson!’ he said. ‘His grandfather was my grandfather’s parliamentary agent at the time of the Reform Bill; he put him through the most corrupt election ever fought – bought every vote – used to kiss all the farmer’s wives. Great days, Forsyte, great days!’

  ‘And over,’ said Soames. ‘I don’t believe in trusting a man’s judgement as far as we trust Elderson’s; I don’t like this foreign insurance.’

  ‘My dear Forsyte – first-rate head, Elderson; I’ve known him all my life, we were at Winchester together.’

  Soames uttered a deep sound. In that answer of ‘Old Mont’s’ lay much of the reason for his disquietude. On the Board they had all, as it were, been at Winchester together! It was the very deuce! They were all so honourable that they dared not scrutinize each other, or even their own collective policy. Worse than their dread of mistake or fraud was their dread of seeming to distrust each other. And this was natural, for to distrust each other was an immediate evil. And, as Soames knew, immediate evils are those which one avoids. Indeed, only that tendency, inherited from his father, James, to lie awake between the hours of two and four, when the chrysalis of faint misgiving becomes so readily the butterfly of panic, had developed his uneasiness. The P.P.R.S. was so imposing a concern, and he had been connected with it so short a time, that it seemed presumptuous to smell a rat; especially as he would have to leave the Board and the thousand a year he earned on it if he raised smell of rat without rat or reason. But what if there were a rat? That was the trouble! And here sat ‘Old Mont’ talking of his spinneys and his grandfather. The fellow’s head was
too small! And visited by the cheerless thought: ‘There’s nobody here, not even my own daughter, capable of taking a thing seriously,’ he kept silence. A sound at his elbow roused him. That marmoset of a dog, on a chair between him and his daughter, was sitting up! Did it expect him to give it something? Its eyes would drop out one of these days. And he said: ‘Well, what do you want?’ The way the little beast stared with those boot-buttons! ‘Here,’ he said, offering it a salted almond. ‘You don’t eat these.’

  Ting-a-ling did.

  ‘He has a passion for them, Dad. Haven’t you, darling?’

  Ting-a-ling turned his eyes up at Soames, through whom a queer sensation passed. ‘Believe the little brute likes me,’ he thought, ‘he’s always looking at me.’ He touched the dog’s nose with the tip of his finger. Ting-a-ling gave it a slight lick with his curly blackish tongue.

  ‘Poor fellow!’ muttered Soames involuntarily, and turned to ‘Old Mont’.

  ‘Don’t mention what I said.’

  ‘My dear Forsyte, what was that?’

  Good Heavens! And he was on a Board with a man like this! What had made him come on, when he didn’t want the money, or any more worries – goodness knew. As soon as he had become a director, Winifred and others of his family had begun to acquire shares to neutralize their income tax – seven per cent preference – nine per cent ordinary – instead of the steady five they ought to be content with. There it was, he couldn’t move without people following him. He had always been so safe, so perfect a guide in the money maze! To be worried at his time of life! His eyes sought comfort from the opal at his daughter’s neck – pretty thing, pretty neck! Well! She seemed happy enough – had forgotten her infatuation of two years ago! That was something to be thankful for. What she wanted now was a child to steady her in all this modern scrimmage of twopenny-ha’penny writers and painters and musicians. A loose lot, but she had a good little head on her. If she had a child, he would put another twenty thousand into her settlement. That was one thing about her mother – steady in money matters, good French method. And Fleur – so far as he knew – cut her coat according to her cloth. What was that? The word ‘Goya’ had caught his ear. New life of him coming out? H’m! That confirmed his slowly growing conviction that Goya had reached top point again.

  ‘Think I shall part with that,’ he said, pointing to the picture. ‘There’s an Argentine over here.’

  ‘Sell your Goya, sir?’ It was Michael speaking. ‘Think of the envy with which you’re now regarded!’

  ‘One can’t have everything,’ said Soames.

  ‘That reproduction we’ve got for The New Life has turned out first-rate. “Property of Soames Forsyte, Esquire.” Let’s get the book out first, sir, anyway.’

  ‘Shadow or substance, eh, Forsyte?’

  Narrow-headed baronet chap – was he mocking?

  ‘I’ve no family place,’ he said.

  ‘No, but we have, sir,’ murmured Michael; ‘you could leave it to Fleur, you know.’

  ‘Well,’ said Soames, ‘we shall see if that’s worth while.’ And he looked at his daughter.

  Fleur seldom blushed, but she picked up Ting-a-ling and rose from the Spanish table. Michael followed suit. ‘Coffee in the other room,’ he said. ‘Old Forsyte’ and ‘Old Mont’ stood up, wiping their moustaches.

  Chapter Seven

  ‘OLD MONT’ AND ‘OLD FORSYTE’

  THE offices of the P.P.R.S. were not far from the College of Arms. Soames, who knew that ‘three dexter buckles on a sable ground gules’ and a ‘pheasant proper’ had been obtained there at some expense by his Uncle Swithin in the sixties of the last century, had always pooh-poohed the building, until, about a year ago, he had been struck by the name Golding in a book which he had absently taken up at the Connoisseurs’ Club. The affair purported to prove that William Shakespeare was really Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. The mother of the earl was a Golding – so was the mother of Soames! The coincidence struck him; and he went on reading. The tome left him with judgement suspended over the main issue, but a distinct curiosity as to whether he was not of the same blood as Shakespeare. Even if the earl were not the bard, he felt that the connexion could only be creditable, though, so far as he could make out, Oxford was a shady fellow. Recently appointed on the Board of the P.P.R.S., so that he passed the college every other Tuesday, he had thought: ‘Shan’t go spending a lot of money on it, but might look in one day.’ Having looked in, it was astonishing how taken he had been by the whole thing. Tracing his mother had been quite like a criminal investigation, nearly as ramified and fully as expensive. Having begun, the tenacity of a Forsyte could hardly bear to leave him short of the mother of Shakespeare de Vere, even though she would be collateral; unfortunately, he could not get past a certain William Gouldyng, Ingerer – whatever that might be, and he was almost afraid to inquire – of the time of Oliver Cromwell. There were still four generations to be unravelled, and he was losing money and the hope of getting anything for it. This it was which caused him to gaze askance at the retired building while passing it on his way to the Board on the Tuesday after the lunch at Fleur’s. Two more wakeful early mornings had screwed him to the pitch of bringing his doubts to a head and knowing where he stood in the matter of the P.P.R.S.; and this sudden reminder that he was spending money here, there and everywhere, when there was a possibility, however remote, of financial liability somewhere else, sharpened the edge of a nerve already stropped by misgivings. Neglecting the lift and walking slowly up the two flights of stairs, he ‘went over’ his fellow-directors for the fifteenth time. Old Lord Fontenoy was there for his name, of course; seldom attended, and was what they called ‘a dud’ – h’m! – nowadays; the chairman, Sir Luke Sharman, seemed always to be occupied in not being taken for a Jew. His nose was straight, but his eyelids gave cause for doubt. His surname was impeccable, but his Christian dubious; his voice was reassuringly roughened, but his clothes had a suspicious tendency towards gloss. Altogether a man who, though shrewd, could not be trusted – Soames felt – to be giving his whole mind to other business. As for ‘Old Mont’ – what was the good of a ninth baronet on a Board? Guy Meyricke, King’s Counsel, last of the three who had been ‘together’, was a good man in court, no doubt, but with no time for business and no real sense of it! Remained that converted Quaker, old Cuthbert Mothergill – whose family name had been a by-word for successful integrity throughout the last century, so that people still put Mothergills on to boards almost mechanically – rather deaf, nice clean old chap, and quite bland, but nothing more. A perfectly honest lot, no doubt, but perfunctory. None of them really giving their minds to the thing! In Elderson’s pocket, too, except perhaps Sharman, and he on the wobble. And Elderson himself – clever chap, bit of an artist, perhaps; managing director from the start, with everything at his finger-tips! Yes! That was the mischief! Prestige of superior knowledge, and years of success – they all kow-towed to him, and no wonder! Trouble with a man like that was that if he once admitted to having made a mistake he destroyed the legend of his infallibility. Soames had enough infallibility of his own to realize how powerful was its impetus towards admitting nothing. Ten months ago, when he had come on to the Board, everything had seemed in full sail; exchanges had reached bottom, so they all thought – the ‘reassurance of foreign contracts’ policy, which Elderson had initiated about a year before, had seemed, with rising exchanges, perhaps the brightest feather in the cap of possibility. And now, a twelvemonth later, Soames suspected darkly that they did not know where they were – and the general meeting only six weeks off! Probably not even Elderson knew; or, if he did, he was keeping knowledge which ought to belong to the whole directorate severely to himself.

  He entered the board-room without a smile. All there – even Lord Fontenoy and ‘Old Mont’ – given up his spinneys, had he! Soames took his seat at the end on the fireside. Staring at Elderson, he saw, with sudden clearness, the strength of the fellow’s position; and, with equal clearness, t
he weakness of the P.P.R.S. With this rising and falling currency, they could never know exactly their liability – they were just gambling. Listening to the minutes and other routine business, with his chin clasped in his hand, he let his eyes move from face to face – old Mothergill, Elderson, Mont opposite; Sharman at the head; Fontenoy, Meyricke, back to himself – decisive board of the year. He could not, must not, be placed in any dubious position! At his first general meeting on this concern, he must not face the shareholders without knowing exactly where he stood. He looked again at Elderson – sweetish face, bald head rather like Julius Caesar’s, nothing to suggest irregularity or excessive optimism – in fact, somewhat resembling that of old Uncle Nicholas Forsyte, whose affairs had been such an example to the last generation but one. The managing director having completed his exposition, Soames directed his gaze at the pink face of dosey old Mothergill, and said:

  ‘I’m not satisfied that these accounts disclose our true position. I want the Board adjourned to this day week, Mr Chairman, and during the week I want every member of the Board furnished with exact details of the foreign contract commitments which do not mature during the present financial year. I notice that those are lumped under a general estimate of liability. I am not satisfied with that. They ought to be separately treated.’ Shifting his gaze past Elderson to the face of ‘Old Mont’, he went on: ‘Unless there’s a material change for the better on the Continent, which I don’t anticipate (quite the contrary), I fully expect those commitments will put us in Queer Street next year.’

  The scraping of feet, shifting of legs, clearing of throats which accompany a slight sense of outrage greeted the words ‘Queer Street’; and a sort of satisfaction swelled in Soames; he had rattled their complacency, made them feel a touch of the misgiving from which he himself was suffering.

  ‘We have always treated our commitments under one general estimate, Mr Forsyte.’

  Plausible chap!

  ‘And to my mind wrongly. This foreign contract business is a new policy. For all I can tell, instead of paying a dividend, we ought to be setting this year’s profits against a certain loss next year.’