The Forsyte Saga, Volume 2 Page 9

  ‘Hallo, Soames! Come to measure me for my coffin?’

  Soames put the suggestion away with a movement of his hand; he felt queer looking at that travesty of George. They had never got on, but –!

  And in his flat, unemotional voice he said:

  ‘Well, George! You’ll pick up yet. You’re no age. Is there anything I can do for you?’

  A grin twitched George’s pallid lips.

  ‘Make me a codicil. You’ll find paper in the dressing-table drawer.’

  Soames took out a sheet of ‘Iseeum’ Club notepaper. Standing at the table, he inscribed the opening words of a codicil with his stylographic pen, and looked round at George. The words came with a hoarse relish.

  ‘My three screws to young Val Dartie, because he’s the only Forsyte that knows a horse from a donkey.’ A throaty chuckle sounded ghastly in the ears of Soames. ‘What have you said?’

  Soames read: ‘I hereby leave my three racehorses to my kinsman, Valerius Dartie, of Wansdon, Sussex, because he has special knowledge of horses.’

  Again the throaty chuckle. ‘You’re a dry, file, Soames. Go on. To Milly Moyle, of 12, Claremont Grove, twelve thousand pounds, free of legacy duty.’

  Soames paused on the verge of a whistle.

  The woman in the next room!

  The japing in George’s eyes had turned to brooding gloom.

  ‘It’s a lot of money,’ Soames could not help saying.

  George made a faint choleric sound.

  ‘Write it down, or I’ll leave her the lot.’

  Soames wrote. ‘Is that all?’

  ‘Yes. Read it!’

  Soames read. Again he heard that throaty chuckle.

  ‘That’s a pill. You won’t let that into the papers. Get that chap in, and you and he can witness.’

  Before Soames reached the door, it was opened and the man himself came in.

  ‘The – er – vicar, sir,’ he said in a deprecating voice, ‘has called. He wants to know if you would like to see him.’

  George turned his face, his fleshy grey eyes rolled.

  ‘Give him my compliments,’ he said, ‘and say I’ll see him at the funeral.’

  With a bow the man went out, and there was silence.

  ‘Now,’ said George, ‘get him in again. I don’t know when the flag’ll fall.’

  Soames beckoned the man in. When the codicil was signed and the man gone, George spoke:

  ‘Take it, and see she gets it. I can trust you, that’s one thing about you, Soames.’

  Soames pocketed the codicil with a very queer sensation.

  ‘Would you like to see her again?’ he said.

  George stared up at him a long time before he answered.

  ‘No. What’s the good? Give me a cigar from that drawer.’

  Soames opened the drawer.

  ‘Ought you?’ he said.

  George grinned. ‘Never in my life done what I ought; not going to begin now. Cut it for me.’

  Soames nipped the end of the cigar. ‘Shan’t give him a match,’ he thought. ‘Can’t take the responsibility.’ But George did not ask for a match. He lay quite still, the unlighted cigar between his pale lips, the curved lids down over his eyes.

  ‘Good-bye,’ he said, ‘I’m going to have a snooze.’

  ‘Good-bye,’ said Soames. ‘I – I hope – you – you’ll soon –’

  George reopened his eyes – fixed, sad, jesting, they seemed to quench the shams of hope and consolation. Soames turned hastily and went out. He felt bad, and almost unconsciously turned again into the sitting-room. The woman was still in the same attitude; the same florid scent was in the air. Soames took up the umbrella he had left there, and went out.

  ‘This is my telephone number,’ he said to the servant waiting in the corridor; ‘let me know.’

  The man bowed.

  Soames turned out of Belville Row. Never had he left George’s presence without the sense of being laughed at. Had he been laughed at now? Was that codicil George’s last joke? If he had not gone in this afternoon, would George ever have made it, leaving a third of his property away from his family to that florid woman in the high-backed chair? Soames was beset by a sense of mystery. How could a man joke at death’s door? It was, in a way, heroic. Where would he be buried? Somebody would know – Francie or Eustace. And what would they think when they came to know about that woman in the chair – twelve thousand pounds! ‘If I can get hold of that white monkey, I will,’ he thought suddenly. ‘It’s a good thing.’ The monkey’s eyes, the squeezed-out fruit – was life all a bitter jest and George deeper than himself? He rang the Green Street bell.

  Mrs Dartie was very sorry, but Mrs Cardigan had called for her to dine and make a fourth at the play.

  Soames went in to dinner alone. At the polished board below which Montague Dartie had now and again slipped, if not quite slept, he dined and brooded. ‘I can trust you, that’s one thing about you, Soames.’ The words flattered and yet stung him. The depths of that sardonic joke! To give him a family shock and trust him to carry the shock out! George had never cared twelve thousand pounds for a woman who smelled of patchouli. No! It was a final gibe at his family, the Forsytes, at Soames himself! Well! one by one those who had injured or gibed at him – Irene, Bosinney, old and young Jolyon, and now George, had met their fates. Dead, dying, or in British Columbia! He saw again his cousin’s eyes above that unlighted cigar, fixed, sad, jesting – poor devil! He got up from the table, and nervously drew aside the curtains. The night was fine and cold. What happened to one – after? George used to say that he had been Charles the Second’s cook in a former existence! But reincarnation was all nonsense, weak-minded theorizing! Still, one would be glad to hold on if one could, after one was gone. Hold on, and be near Fleur! What noise was that? Gramophone going in the kitchen! When the cat was away, the mice –! People were all alike – take what they could get, and give as little as they could for it. Well! he would smoke a cigarette. Lighting it at a candle – Winifred dined by candlelight, it was the ‘mode’ again – he thought: ‘Has he still got that cigar between his teeth?’ A funny fellow, George – all his days a funny fellow! He watched a ring of smoke he had made without intending to – very blue, he never inhaled! Yes! George had lived too fast, or he would not have been dying twenty years before his time – too fast! Well, there it was, and he wished he had a cat to talk to! He took a little monster off the mantelboard. Picked up by his nephew Benedict in an Eastern bazaar the year after the War, it had green eyes – ‘Not emeralds,’ thought Soames, ‘some cheap stone!’

  ‘The telephone for you, sir.’

  He went into the hall and took up the receiver.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Mr Forsyte has passed away, sir – in his sleep, the doctor says.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Soames: ‘Had he a cig –? Many thanks.’ He hung up the receiver.

  Passed away! And, with a nervous movement, he felt for the codicil in his breast pocket.

  Chapter Eleven

  VENTURE

  FOR a week Bicket had seen ‘the job’, slippery as an eel, evasive as a swallow, for ever passing out of reach. A pound for keep, and three shillings invested on a horse, and he was down to twenty-four bob. The weather had turned sou’-westerly and Victorine had gone out for the first time. That was something off his mind, but the cramp of the unemployed sensation, that fearful craving for the means of mere existence, a protesting, agonizing anxiety, was biting into the very flesh of his spirit. If he didn’t get a job within a week or two, there would be nothing for it but the work-house, or the gas. ‘The gas,’ thought Bicket, ‘if she will, I will. I’m fed up. After all, what is it? In her arms I wouldn’t mind.’ Instinct, however, that it was not so easy as all that to put one’s head under the gas, gave him a brain-wave that Monday night. Balloons – that chap in Oxford Street today! Why not? He still had the capital for a flutter in them, and no hawker’s licence needed. His brain, working like a squirrel in the small hours,
grasped the great, the incalculable advantage of coloured balloons over all other forms of commerce. You couldn’t miss the man who sold them – there he was for every eye to see, with his many radiant circumferences dangling in front of him! Not much profit in them, he had gathered – a penny on a sixpenny globe of coloured air, a penny on every three small twopenny globes; still their salesman was alive, and probably had pitched him a poor tale for fear of making his profession seem too attractive. Over the Bridge, just where the traffic – no, up by St Paul’s! He knew a passage where he could stand back a yard or two, like that chap in Oxford Street! But to the girl sleeping beside him he said nothing. No word to her till he had thrown the die. It meant gambling with his last penny. For a bare living he would have to sell – why, three dozen big and four dozen small balloons a day would only be twenty-six shillings a week profit, unless that chap was kidding. Not much towards ‘Austrylia’ out of that! And not a career – Victorine would have a shock! But it was neck or nothing now – he must try it, and in off hours go on looking for a job.

  Our thin capitalist, then, with four dozen big and seven dozen small on a tray, two shillings in his pocket, and little in his stomach, took his stand off St Paul’s at two o’clock next day. Slowly he blew up and tied the necks of two large and three small, magenta, green and blue, till they dangled before him. Then with the smell of rubber in his nostrils, and protruding eyes, he stood back on the kerb and watched the stream go by. It gratified him to see that most people turned to look at him. But the first person to address him was a policeman, with:

  ‘I’m not sure you can stand there.’

  Bicket did not answer, his throat felt too dry. He had heard of the police. Had he gone the wrong way to work? Suddenly he gulped, and said: ‘Give us a chance, constable; I’m right on my bones. If I’m in the way, I’ll stand anywhere you like. This is new to me, and two bob’s all I’ve got left in the world besides a wife.’

  The constable, a big man, looked him up and down. ‘Well, we’ll see. I shan’t make trouble for you if no one objects.’

  Bicket’s gaze deepened thankfully.

  ‘I’m much obliged,’ he said; ‘tyke one for your little girl – to please me.’

  ‘I’ll buy one,’ said the policeman, ‘and give you a start. I go off duty in an hour, you ’ave it ready – a big one, magenta.’

  He moved away. Bicket could see him watching. Edging into the gutter, he stood quite still; his large eyes clung to every face that passed; and, now and then, his thin fingers nervously touched his wares. If Victorine could see him! All the spirit within him mounted. By Golly! he would get out of this somehow into the sun, into a life that was a life!

  He had been standing there nearly two hours, shifting from foot to unaccustomed foot, and had sold four big and five small – sixpenny worth of profit – when Soames, who had changed his route to spite those fellows who couldn’t get past William Gouldyng, Ingerer, came by on his way to the P.P.R.S. board. Startled by a timid murmur: ‘Balloon, sir, best quality,’ he looked round from that contemplation of St Paul’s which had been his lifelong habit, and stopped in sheer surprise.

  ‘Balloon!’ he said. ‘What should I want with a balloon?’

  Bicket smiled. Between those green and blue and orange globes and Soames’s grey self-containment there was incongruity which even he could appreciate.

  ‘Children like ’em – no weight, sir, waistcoat pocket.’

  ‘I dare say,’ said Soames, ‘but I’ve no children.’

  ‘Grandchildren, sir.’

  ‘Nor any grandchildren.’

  ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Soames gave him one of those rapid glances with which he was accustomed to gauge the character of the impecunious. ‘A poor, harmless little rat!’ he thought. ‘Here, give me two – how much?’

  ‘A shilling, sir, and much obliged.’

  ‘You can keep the change,’ said Soames hurriedly, and passed on, astonished. Why on earth he had bought the things, and for more than double their price, he could not conceive. He did not recollect such a thing having happened to him before. Extremely peculiar! And suddenly he realized why. The fellow had been humble, mild – to be encouraged, in these days of Communistic bravura. After all, the little chap was – was on the side of Capital, had invested in those balloons! Trade! And, raising his eyes towards St Paul’s again, he stuffed the nastyfeeling things down into his overcoat pocket. Somebody would be taking them out, and wondering what was the matter with him! Well, he had other things to think of!…

  Bicket, however, stared after him, elated. Two hundred and fifty odd per cent profit on those two – that was something like. The feeling, that not enough women were passing him here, became less poignant – after all, women knew the value of money, no extra shillings out of them! If only some more of these shiny-hatted old millionaires would come along!

  At six o’clock, with a profit of three and eightpence, to which Soames had contributed just half, he began to add the sighs of deflating balloons to his own; untying them with passionate care he watched his coloured hopes one by one collapse, and stored them in the drawer of his tray. Taking it under his arm, he moved his tired legs in the direction of the Bridge. In a full day he might make four to five shillings – Well, it would just keep them alive, and something might turn up! He was his own master, anyway, accountable neither to employer nor to union. That knowledge gave him a curious lightness inside, together with the fact that he had eaten nothing since breakfast.

  ‘Wonder if he was an alderman,’ he thought; ‘they say those aldermen live on turtle soup.’ Nearing home, he considered nervously what to do with the tray? How prevent Victorine from knowing that he had joined the ranks of Capital, and spent his day in the gutter? Ill luck! She was at the window! He must put a good face on it. And he went in whistling.

  ‘What’s that, Tony?’ she said, pointing to the tray.

  ‘Ah! ha! Great stunt – this! Look ’ere!’

  Taking a balloon out from the tray, he blew. He blew with a desperation he had not yet put into the process. They said the things would swell to five feet in circumference. He felt somehow that if he could get it to attain those proportions, it would soften everything. Under his breath the thing blotted out Victorine, and the room, till there was just the globe of coloured air. Nipping its neck between thumb and finger, he held it up, and said:

  ‘There you are; not bad value for sixpence, old girl!’ and he peered round it. Lord, she was crying! He let the ‘blymed’ thing go; it floated down, the air slowly evaporating till a little crinkled wreck rested on the dingy carpet. Clasping her heaving shoulders, he said desperately:

  ‘Cheerio, my dear, don’t quarrel with bread and butter. I shall get a job, this is just to tide us over. I’d do a lot worse than that for you. Come on, and get my tea, I’m hungry, blowin’ up those things.’

  She stopped crying, looked up, said nothing – mysterious with those big eyes! You’d say she had thoughts! But what they were Bicket could not tell. Under the stimulus of tea, he achieved a certain bravado about his new profession. To be your own master! Go out when you liked, come home when you liked – lie in bed with Vic if he jolly well pleased. A lot in that! And there rose in Bicket something truly national, something free and happy-go-lucky, resenting regular work, enjoying a spurt, and a laze-off, craving independence – something that accounted for the national life, the crowds of little shops, of middlemen, casual workers, tramps, owning their own souls in their own good time, and damning the consequences – something inherent in the land, the race, before the Saxons and their conscience and their industry came in – something that believed in swelling and collapsing coloured air, demanded pickles and high flavours without nourishment – yes, all that something exulted above Bicket’s kipper and his tea, good and strong. He would rather sell balloons than be a packer any day, and don’t let Vic forget it! And when she was able to take a job, they would get on fine, and not be long before they’d saved enough
to get out of it to where those blue butterflies came from. And he spoke of Soames. A few more aldermen without children – say two a day, fifteen bob a week outside legitimate trade. Why, in under a year they’d have the money! And once away, Vic would blow out like one of those balloons; she’d be twice the size, and a colour in her cheeks to lay over that orange and magenta. Bicket became full of air. And the girl, his wife, watched with her large eyes and spoke little; but she did not cry again, or, indeed, throw any water, warm or cold, on him who sold balloons.

  Chapter Twelve

  FIGURES AND FACTS

  WITH the exception of old Fontenoy – in absence as in presence ornamental – the Board was again full; Soames, conscious of special ingratiation in the manner of ‘that chap’ Elderson, prepared himself for the worst. The figures were before them; a somewhat colourless show, appearing to disclose a state of things which would pass muster, if within the next six months there were further violent disturbances of currency exchange. The proportion of foreign business to home business was duly expressed in terms of two to seven; German business, which constituted the bulk of the foreign, had been lumped – Soames noted – in the middle section, of countries only half bankrupt, and taken at what might be called a conservative estimate.

  During the silence which reigned while each member of the Board digested the figures, Soames perceived more clearly than ever the quandary he was in. Certainly, these figures would hardly justify the forgoing of the dividend earned on the past year’s business. But suppose there were another Continental crash and they became liable on the great bulk of their foreign business, it might swamp all profits on home business next year, and more besides. And then his uneasiness about Elderson himself – founded he could not tell on what, intuitive, perhaps silly.