No one will want me, I suppose. I wish I had gone back to Germany a week ago. Will they let me now?”
“Why not? This isn’t a seaside place. You’d better go up and see the authorities. I’ll give you a letter to say you’ve been quietly down here.”
“Thank you, Mr. Forsyte. That is kind.”
“I don’t want you to go,” said Soames. “It’s all nonsense; but one can’t control these things”; and, seeing two tears glistening on her cheekbones, he added hastily: “Fleur’ll miss you. Have you got money?”
“Very little. I send my salary to my old parents.”
There it was! Old parents, young children, invalids, and all the rest of it. The pinch! And here he was administering it! A personable young woman, too! Nothing against her except the war! “If I were you,” he said slowly, “I shouldn’t waste time. I’d go up before they know where they are. There’ll be a lot of hysteria. Wait a minute, I’ll give you money.”
He went to the old walnut bureau, which he had picked up in Reading–a fine piece with a secret drawer, and a bargain at that. He didn’t know what to give her–the whole thing was so uncertain. Though she stood there so quietly, he was conscious that her tears were in motion.
“Damn it!” he said, softly, “I shall give you a term’s salary and fifteen pounds in cash for your journey. If they won’t let you go, let me know when you come to the end of it.”
The young woman raised her clasped hands.
“I don’t want to take money, Mr. Forsyte.”
“Nonsense,” said Soames; “you’ll take what I give you. It’s all against my wish. You ought to be staying, in my opinion. What’s it to do with women?”
He took from the secret drawer an adequate number of notes and went towards her.
“I’ll send you to the station. Go up and see the authorities this very afternoon; and while you get ready I’ll write that letter.”
The young woman bent and kissed his hand. Such a thing had never happened to him before, and he didn’t know that he ever wanted it to happen again.
“There, there!” he said, and turning back to the bureau, wrote:
“SIR, –
“The bearer of this, Fraulein Schulz, has been governess to my daughter for the last eighteen months. I can testify to her character and attainments. She has lived quietly at my house at Mapledurham all the time with the exception of one or two holidays spent, I believe, in Wales. Fraulein Schulz wishes to return to Germany, and I trust you will afford her every facility. I enclose my card, and am, Sir,
Faithfully yours,
“SOAMES FORSYTE.”
He then telephoned for a car, having refused so far to have one of his own–tearing great things, always getting out of order.
When the machine arrived, he went out into the hall to wait for the young woman to come down. Fleur and a little friend had gone off to some wood or other; Annette was in the garden and would stay there, he shouldn’t wonder; he didn’t want the young woman to go off without a hand to shake.
First they brought down a shiny foreign trunk, then a handbag, and a little roll with an umbrella stuck through it. The young woman came last. Her eyes were red. The whole thing suddenly seemed to Soames extraordinarily barbarous. To be thrown out at a moment’s notice like this because her confounded Kaiser’s military cut-throats had lost their senses! It wasn’t English!
“Here’s the letter. You’d better stay at that hotel near Victoria until you go. Good-bye, then; I’m very sorry, but you’ll be more comfortable at home while the war’s on.”
He shook her gloved hand, and perceiving that his own was again in danger, withdrew it hastily.
“Give Fleur a kiss for me, please, Sir.”
“I will. She’ll be sorry to have missed you. Well, good-bye!” He was terrified that she would begin crying again, or attempt to thank him, and he added hastily: “You’ll have a nice drive.” As a fact he doubted it, for in fancy he could see her oozing into her handkerchief all the way.
The luggage was in now, and so was she. The car was making the usual noises. Soames, in the doorway, lifted his hand, twiddling it towards her turned red face.
Her lip was drooping, she wore a scared expression. He gave her a wan smile, and turned back into the house. Too bad!
3
Rumours! Soames would never have believed that people could be such fools. Rumours of naval engagements, rumours of spies, rumours of Russians. Take, for instance, his meeting with the village schoolmistress outside the school.
“Have you heard the terrible news, Mr. Forsyte?”
Soames’ hair stood up under his hat.
“No; what’s that?”
“Oh! there’s been a dreadful battle at sea. We’ve lost six battleships. Isn’t it awful?”
Soames’ fists clenched themselves in his pockets.
“Who told you that?”
“It’s all over the village. Six ships–isn’t it terrible?”
“What did the Germans lose?”
“Twelve!”
Soames almost jumped.
“Twelve! Then the war’s over. What do you mean–terrible–why, it’s the best news we could have!”
“Oh! but six of our own ships–it’s awful!”
“War is awful,” said Soames. “But if this is true–” He left her abruptly and made for the Post Office. It was not true, of course. Nothing was true. Not even his own suspicions. Take, for instance, those two square-shouldered men in straw hats whom he met walking down a lane with their feet at right angles, as Englishmen never walked. Germans, and spies into the bargain, or he was a Dutchman; especially as his telephone went out of order that very afternoon. And of course they turned out to be two Americans staying at Pangbourne on a holiday, and the wire had been affected by a thunderstorm. But what were you to think, when the newspapers were full of spy stories, and the very lightning was apparently in the German secret service. As to mirrors in daylight and matches after dark, they were in obvious communication with the German fleet in the Kiel Canal, or wherever it was. Time and again Soames would say:
“Bunkum! The whole thing’s weak-minded!” Only to feel himself weak-minded the next moment. Look at those two hundred thousand Russians whom everybody was seeing in trains all over the country. They turned out to be eggs, and probably addled at that; but how could you help believing in them, especially when you wanted to! And then the authorities told you nothing; dumb as oysters; as if that were the way to treat an Englishman–it only made him fancy things. And there was Mons. They couldn’t even let you know about the army, except that it was heroic, and had killed a lot of Germans, and was marching backwards in order to put the finishing touch to them. That was about all one heard, till suddenly one found it was touch and go whether Paris could be saved, and the French Government had packed their traps and gone off to Bordeaux. And all the time nothing to do but read the papers, which he couldn’t believe, and listen to the click of Annette’s needles. And then came the news of the battle of the Marne, and he could breathe again.
He breathed freely–he had gone weeks, it seemed to him, without taking a deep breath. People were saying it was the beginning of the end, and the Allies–he himself had always called it Allies–and why not? – would soon be in Germany now. He wanted to believe this so much, that he said he didn’t believe a word of it, much as when, the weather looking fine, he would take his umbrella to make sure. And then, forsooth, they went and dug themselves in! This beginning of warfare which was to last four years, produced but moderate premonition in his mind. There was a certain relief in the immobility of things after the plunging excitement of Mons and the Marne. He continued to read the papers, shake his head, and invest in War Loan. His nephew Benedict was training for a commission in Kitchener’s army; Cicely’s boy, also, had joined up, as they called it. He supposed they had to. Annette had said several times that she wanted to go to France and be a nurse. It was all her fancy. She could do much more good by knitting and being economical.
Presently he took Fleur down to her school in the West; and not much too early, for the Zeppelins became busy soon after. In regard to their exploits, he displayed a somewhat natural perversity, for though he had taken his daughter down to a remote region to avoid them, he thought people made much too much fuss about them altogether. From a top window in his Club he was privileged to see one of them burst into flames. He said nothing and was glad of it afterwards–some of his fellow-members had shown their feelings, and those not all they should be. There was provocation, no doubt; but, after all, the crew were being burned alive. Generally speaking, while the war dragged on, the reality of it was kept from him most efficiently not only by the Government, the papers, and his age, but by a sort of barrage put up by himself from within himself. There the thing was, and what was the use of making more of it than he absolutely had to? If one ever came to the end, one might indulge one’s feelings, perhaps. And always the doings at sea, the adventures and misadventures of ships, impinged on him with a poignancy absent from the events on land. Of all that happened in the early part of the war, the bombardment of Scarborough affected him, perhaps, most painfully. It was like a half-arm jab above the heart. His pride was stunned. The notion that ships had dared to come so near as to throw shells into English houses and not been sunk for doing it, was peculiarly horrible to him. What would they be doing next? He had a continual longing for something definite at sea, some sign there of British superiority, as if “Rule Britannia” had got into the composition of his blood. The sinking of the Lusitania gave him at first much the same shock that it gave everyone else, but when he heard people abusing the Americans for not declaring war at once, he felt that they were extravagant. The Americans were a long way off–to talk about their being in danger was as good as saying that England was going to be defeated; which, curiously, considering his constitutional apprehensiveness, Soames never could believe. He had a sort of deep feeling, indeed, that he did not want to be rescued by America or anybody else. But these feelings were curiously mixed up with another feeling that if England had, like America, lost a lot of English people drowned like that, she would have gone to war like a shot, and with his approval, into the bargain.
Early in 1915, owing to depletion of the office staff, he had gone back into regular harness at Cuthcott Kingson and Forsyte’s. He worked there, harder than he had ever worked. In view of national anxieties the legal issues he was dealing with often seemed to him “petty,” but he dealt with them conscientiously; they took his mind off, and incidentally gave him more money to invest in War Loan. After the second battle of Ypres, he had contributed an ambulance, and had the exquisite discomfort of seeing his name in the papers. When in the train, going up and down, or at lunch time in his City Club, he listened to elderly wiseacres discussing the conduct of the war, the nature of Germans, politicians, Americans, and other reprehensible characters, he would look exactly as if he were going to sniff.
‘What do they know about it,’ he would think, ‘talking through their hats like that–it’s unEnglish.’ There was so much in those days that was hysterical and ‘unEnglish’; the papers encouraged it with their “intern-the-Hun” and other “stunts,” as they called it nowadays. If ever there were a time when mouths required shutting, it was now; and there they were, spluttering and bawling all over the place.
In these ways, then, nearly two years passed before in his paper that June morning he read the first official account of the battle of Jutland. Taking the journal in his hand so that no one else should see it till he himself had recovered, he passed out of the drawing-room window on to the dewy lawn, and walked blindly towards the river. There was a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Standing there bareheaded in the sunshine and the peace of leaves and water, with birds all round as if nothing had happened, he tried to get hold of himself. Almost a sense of panic he had. A real battle at last, and all those losses! Under a poplar tree he read the account again. The sting was in the head of it; the tail was all right! Why couldn’t they have reversed the order and begun with the fact that the Germans had run for home? What had possessed them to make him feel so bad? It was a victory even if we HAD lost all those ships. A blundering lot–making the worst of it like that! It was like being shot by your own side. Tell the truth–yes; but not so as to give you a stomach-ache, where there was no need for it. He went back to breakfast with his jaw set.
“There’s been a big battle at sea,” he said to Annette; “we lost a lot of ships, but the Germans cut and ran for it. I shouldn’t be surprised if they never come out again.” Thus out of instinctive perversity did he foretell the future.
The rest of the day and the day after, further reports confirmed his resentment with the authorities for making him suffer like that. What on earth had they been about! They kept all sorts of things from you, and then when they had what really amounted to good news, blurted it out as if it were a disaster.
The death of Kitchener a few days later, though lowering to his temperature, had not the same staggering effect. He had done a lot for the country, and looked like a lion in a Zoo, but in the ebb and flow of world events even his great figure seemed small.
Towards the end of 1916 he had a curious little personal experience which affected him more than he would have admitted, so that he never mentioned it. This was in the train going up to London. From patriotic motives he was at that time travelling third, but on this particular morning, the train being full, he got into a first-class compartment, occupied by a young officer in uniform with his military kit in the rack above, and a pretty young woman whose eyes were red. From behind his paper Soames felt that if they were not married, they ought to be, for they were mutually occupied with each other’s eyes and hands and lips. At stations where their occupation had to cease he observed them round his nose. The pallid desperation of the young man’s face and the look in the girl’s reddened eyes gave him definite discomfort. Here was a case of impending separation, with all the tragic foreboding, and utter grief of war-time partings such as were taking place millionfold all over the world. It was the first Soames had seen, close up, and far more painful than he had realised. They were locked in a desperate embrace when the train ran in to Westbourne Park. The girl was evidently to get out here, and seemed incapable of doing so. She stood swaying with the tears running down her face. The young officer wrenched the door open and almost pushed her out. Her face, looking up from the platform, was so intensely wretched that it made Soames sore. The train moved on, the young officer flung himself back into his corner with a groan. Soames looked out of the opposite window. For a whole minute even after the train had reached Paddington, he continued to gaze in at a deserted carriage alongside. At last, grasping his umbrella, he evacuated the now empty compartment and getting into a taxi, uttered the word “Poultry” in a gruff voice. He was gruff all day. All over the world it was like that–a shocking business! And yet, by now, people seemed more concerned about their sugar and butter rations than about the war itself. Air-raids, ships being sunk, and what they could get to eat, were all people thought about–except, of course, dancing in night clubs and making up their faces. In all his life he had never seen so many made-up faces as he saw now. In coming from the office late and passing down the Strand, every woman he met seemed like the street women he used to see in his younger days. Paint and powder, with khaki alongside!
And so 1917 went by, and Fleur was getting a big girl. He had good reports of her–she was quick at lessons and games; it was some comfort. At her school down in the west, he gathered, they heard and saw very little of the war; and in the holidays he kept her at home as much as he could. There were few signs of war at Mapledurham, though of course khaki was everywhere. When conscription came in, Soames had shaken his head. He didn’t know what the newspapers were about. The thing was unEnglish. Once it was introduced, however, he supposed it was the only thing. All the same, he never approved of the way they bullied those conscientious objectors. He had no sympathy with the fellows’ consciences, of course, but the idea of harassing your fellow-countrymen at a time like this, repelled him; all his native individualism, too, remained in secret revolt against the slave-driving which had become the everyday procedure of abominable times. He had lost two gardeners in the opening year, and now they took the other two and left him with an old man and a boy, so that he often took a spud and dug up weeds himself, while Annette killed slugs with a French mixture. In the house he had never had anything but maids, so that they couldn’t take the butler he hadn’t got, which was some consolation. But if he’d had a car, they’d have taken his chauffeur. He felt he could have lost the lot with composure, if they’d gone of their own free will, but he would not have urged their going. Some reticent, secret belief in the sanctity of private feelings, even feelings about the country, would have prevented him. They had a right, he supposed, to their own ideas about things. If he, himself, had been under forty, he supposed he would have gone–though the mere notion gave him a pain below the ribs, so crude, so brutal, and so empty did all this military business appear to him; but he was not prepared to tell anybody else to go. His retention of this kind of delicacy made him lonelier than ever in the City, in the Club, and in trains, where most people seemed prepared to tell anybody to do anything. Soames himself was almost ashamed of his delicacy; you couldn’t carry on a war without ordering people about. And he tried to conduct himself so that people shouldn’t suspect him of this weakness. But on one occasion it led him into a serious tiff with his cousin George Forsyte at the “Iseeum” Club. George, just a year younger than himself, had, it appeared, gone in for recruiting down in Hampshire; while spending the week-ends in town “to enjoy the air-raids,” as he put it. Soames suspected him of enjoying something else, besides. Catching sight of George, then, one Saturday afternoon, sitting in the bow window of the “Iseeum,” Soames had inadvertently returned his greeting and was beckoned up.
“Have a drink?” said George: “No? Some tea, then; you can have my sugar.”
His japing, heavy-lidded eyes took Soames in from top to toe.
“You’re thin as a lathe,” he said: “What are you doing–breeding for the country?”
Soames drew up the corner of his lip.
“That’s not funny,” he said tartly. “What are you doing?”
“Getting chaps killed. You’d better take to it, too. The blighters want driving, now.”
“Thank you,” said Soames; “not in my line.”
George grinned.
“Too squeamish?”
“If you like.”
“What’s your general game, then?”
“Minding my own business,” said Soames.
“Making the wills, eh?”
Soames put his cup down, and took his hat up. He had never disliked George more than at that moment.
“Don’t get your shirt out,” said George; “somebody must make the wills. You might make mine, by the way–equal shares to Roger, Eustace and Francie. Executors yourself and Eustace. Come and do an air-raid with me one night. Did you see St. John Hayman’s boy was killed? They say the Huns are preparing a big push for the spring.”
Soames shrugged.
“Good-bye,” he said; “I’ll send you a draft of your will.”
“Pitch it short,” said George, “and have me roasted. No bones by request.”
Soames nodded, and went out.
A big push! Would they never tire of making mincemeat of the world? He had often been tempted towards the Lansdowne attitude; but some essential bulldog within him had always stirred and growled. An end that was no end–after all this, it wouldn’t do! Hold on–until! For never, even at the worst moments, had he believed that England could be beaten.
In March 1918 he had been laid up at Mapledurham with a chill and was only just out again, when the big German “push” began. It came with a suddenness that shook him to the marrow, and induced the usual longing to get away somewhere by himself. He went up rather slowly on to a bit of commonland, and sat down on his overcoat among gorse bushes. It was peaceful and smelled of spring; a lark was singing. And out there the Germans were breaking through! A sort of prayer went up from him while he sat in the utter peace of the mild day. He had heard so many times that we were ready for it; and now we weren’t, it seemed. Always the way! Too cocksure! He sat listening, as if–as if one could hear the guns all that way off. The man down at the lock was reported to have heard them once. All me eye! You couldn’t! Couldn’t you? Wasn’t that–? Nonsense! He lay back and put his ear to the ground, but only the whisper of a very gentle wind came to him, and the hum of a wild bee wending to some blossom of the gorse. A better sound than that of guns. And then the first chime of the village church bell tingled his ears. There they would soon be sitting and kneeling and thinking about the break-through, and the parson would offer up a special prayer for the destruction of Germans–he shouldn’t wonder. Well, it was destroy or be destroyed–it all came back to that. Funny thing, life–living on life, or rather on death! According to the latest information, all matter was alive, and every shape lived on some other shape, or at least on the elements of shape. The earth was nothing but disintegrated shape, out of which came more shapes and you ate them, and then you disintegrated and gave rise to shapes, and somebody ate them, and so it went on. In spite of the break-through, he could not help being glad to be alive after a fortnight cooped up in the house. His sense of smell, too, so long confined to eau-de-Cologne, was very keen this morning; he could smell the gorse–a scent more delicate than most, ‘the scent of gorse far-blown from distant hill,’ he’d read somewhere. And to think that out there his countrymen were struggling and dying and being blown to smithereens–young fellows, from his office, from his garden, from every English office and garden to save England–to save the world, they said–but that was flim-flam! And, perhaps, after all these horrible four years they wouldn’t save England! Drawing his thin legs under him, he sat staring down towards the river where his home lay. Yes, they would save her, if it meant putting another ten years on to the conscription age, or taking the age limit off altogether. England under a foreigner? Not for Joe! He scrabbled with his hand, brought up a fistful of earth, and mechanically put it to his nose. It smelled exactly as it should smell–of earth, and gave him ever so queer and special a sensation. English earth! H’m! Earth was earth, whether in England or in Timbuctoo! Funny to give your life for what smelled exactly like his mushroom house. You put a name to a thing and you died for it! There was a lark singing–very English bird, cheery and absent-minded, singing away without knowing a thing about anything and caring less, he supposed. The bell had ceased to toll for service. If people thought God was particularly interested in England, they were mistaken. He wouldn’t do a thing about it! People had to do things for themselves, and if they didn’t, that was the end. Take those submarines. Leave them to God and see what happened–one would be eating one’s fantails before one could say Jack Robinson!
The mild air and a slant of March sunlight gently warmed his cheek pale from too much contact with a pillow. And–out there! If ever this thing ended, he would come up here again and see what it was like without an ache under his fifth rib. A nice spot–open and high. And now he would have to get back to the house and they would give him chicken broth, and he would have to listen to Annette saying that the English never saw an inch before their noses–which as a matter of fact they didn’t–and tell her that they did. A weary business when you felt as he felt about this news. He rose. Twelve o’clock! They’d have finished praying now and got to the sermon. He pitied that parson–preaching about the Philistines, he shouldn’t wonder! There were the jawbones of asses about, plenty, but not a Samson among the lot of them. The gorse–it was early–looked pretty blooming round him–when the gorse was out of bloom, kissing was out of fashion. He wondered idly what had to go out of bloom before killing was out of fashion. There was a hawk! He stood and watched it hover and swoop sideways, and the red glint of it, till again it rested hovering on the air; then slowly in the pale sunlight he wended his way down towards the river.
4
July came. The break-through had long been checked, the fronts repaired, the Americans had come over in great numbers, Foch was in supreme command. Soames didn’t know–perhaps it was necessary, but Annette’s undisguised relief was unpleasant to him, and so far as he could see, things were going on as interminably as before. It was to Winifred that he spoke the words which definitely changed the fortunes of the world.
“We shall never win,” he said, “I despair of it. The men are all right, but leaders! There isn’t one among the lot–I despair of it.” No one had ever heard him talk like that before, or use such a final word. The morning papers on the following day were buoyant with the news that the German offensive against the French had been stopped and that the French and Americans had broken through. From that day on the Allies, as Soames still called them, never looked back.
Those interested in such questions will pause, perhaps to consider whether Soames–like so many other people–really won the war, or whether it was that in him some hidden sensibility received in advance of the newspapers the impact of events and put up the instantaneous contradiction natural from one so individualistic. Whichever is true, the relief he felt at having his dictum contradicted was extraordinary. For the first time in three years he spent the following Sunday afternoon in his picture gallery. The French were advancing, the English were waiting to advance; the Americans were doing well; the air-raids had ceased; the submarines were beaten. And it all seemed to have happened in two days. While he stood looking at his Goya and turning over photographs of pictures in the Prado, a notion came to him. In that painting of Goya’s called “La Vendimia,” the girl with the basket on her head reminded him of Fleur. There was really quite a resemblance. If the war ever stopped, he would commission an artist to make him a copy of that Goya girl–the colouring, if he remembered rightly, was very agreeable. It would remind him of pleasant things–his daughter and his visit to the Prado before he bought Lord Burlingford’s ‘Goya’ in 1910. A notion so utterly unconnected with the war had not occurred to him for years–it was almost like a blessing, with its suggestion of life apart from battle and murder, and once more connected with Dumetrius. And ringing the bell, he ordered a jug of claret cup. He drank very little of it, but it gave him a feeling that was almost Victorian. What had that fellow Jolyon, and Irene, done with themselves all these war years? Had they sweated in their shoes and lost weight as he had done–he hoped so! Their boy, if he remembered, would be of military age next year; for the thousandth time he was glad that Fleur had disappointed him and been a girl.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
“Why not? This isn’t a seaside place. You’d better go up and see the authorities. I’ll give you a letter to say you’ve been quietly down here.”
“Thank you, Mr. Forsyte. That is kind.”
“I don’t want you to go,” said Soames. “It’s all nonsense; but one can’t control these things”; and, seeing two tears glistening on her cheekbones, he added hastily: “Fleur’ll miss you. Have you got money?”
“Very little. I send my salary to my old parents.”
There it was! Old parents, young children, invalids, and all the rest of it. The pinch! And here he was administering it! A personable young woman, too! Nothing against her except the war! “If I were you,” he said slowly, “I shouldn’t waste time. I’d go up before they know where they are. There’ll be a lot of hysteria. Wait a minute, I’ll give you money.”
He went to the old walnut bureau, which he had picked up in Reading–a fine piece with a secret drawer, and a bargain at that. He didn’t know what to give her–the whole thing was so uncertain. Though she stood there so quietly, he was conscious that her tears were in motion.
“Damn it!” he said, softly, “I shall give you a term’s salary and fifteen pounds in cash for your journey. If they won’t let you go, let me know when you come to the end of it.”
The young woman raised her clasped hands.
“I don’t want to take money, Mr. Forsyte.”
“Nonsense,” said Soames; “you’ll take what I give you. It’s all against my wish. You ought to be staying, in my opinion. What’s it to do with women?”
He took from the secret drawer an adequate number of notes and went towards her.
“I’ll send you to the station. Go up and see the authorities this very afternoon; and while you get ready I’ll write that letter.”
The young woman bent and kissed his hand. Such a thing had never happened to him before, and he didn’t know that he ever wanted it to happen again.
“There, there!” he said, and turning back to the bureau, wrote:
“SIR, –
“The bearer of this, Fraulein Schulz, has been governess to my daughter for the last eighteen months. I can testify to her character and attainments. She has lived quietly at my house at Mapledurham all the time with the exception of one or two holidays spent, I believe, in Wales. Fraulein Schulz wishes to return to Germany, and I trust you will afford her every facility. I enclose my card, and am, Sir,
Faithfully yours,
“SOAMES FORSYTE.”
He then telephoned for a car, having refused so far to have one of his own–tearing great things, always getting out of order.
When the machine arrived, he went out into the hall to wait for the young woman to come down. Fleur and a little friend had gone off to some wood or other; Annette was in the garden and would stay there, he shouldn’t wonder; he didn’t want the young woman to go off without a hand to shake.
First they brought down a shiny foreign trunk, then a handbag, and a little roll with an umbrella stuck through it. The young woman came last. Her eyes were red. The whole thing suddenly seemed to Soames extraordinarily barbarous. To be thrown out at a moment’s notice like this because her confounded Kaiser’s military cut-throats had lost their senses! It wasn’t English!
“Here’s the letter. You’d better stay at that hotel near Victoria until you go. Good-bye, then; I’m very sorry, but you’ll be more comfortable at home while the war’s on.”
He shook her gloved hand, and perceiving that his own was again in danger, withdrew it hastily.
“Give Fleur a kiss for me, please, Sir.”
“I will. She’ll be sorry to have missed you. Well, good-bye!” He was terrified that she would begin crying again, or attempt to thank him, and he added hastily: “You’ll have a nice drive.” As a fact he doubted it, for in fancy he could see her oozing into her handkerchief all the way.
The luggage was in now, and so was she. The car was making the usual noises. Soames, in the doorway, lifted his hand, twiddling it towards her turned red face.
Her lip was drooping, she wore a scared expression. He gave her a wan smile, and turned back into the house. Too bad!
3
Rumours! Soames would never have believed that people could be such fools. Rumours of naval engagements, rumours of spies, rumours of Russians. Take, for instance, his meeting with the village schoolmistress outside the school.
“Have you heard the terrible news, Mr. Forsyte?”
Soames’ hair stood up under his hat.
“No; what’s that?”
“Oh! there’s been a dreadful battle at sea. We’ve lost six battleships. Isn’t it awful?”
Soames’ fists clenched themselves in his pockets.
“Who told you that?”
“It’s all over the village. Six ships–isn’t it terrible?”
“What did the Germans lose?”
“Twelve!”
Soames almost jumped.
“Twelve! Then the war’s over. What do you mean–terrible–why, it’s the best news we could have!”
“Oh! but six of our own ships–it’s awful!”
“War is awful,” said Soames. “But if this is true–” He left her abruptly and made for the Post Office. It was not true, of course. Nothing was true. Not even his own suspicions. Take, for instance, those two square-shouldered men in straw hats whom he met walking down a lane with their feet at right angles, as Englishmen never walked. Germans, and spies into the bargain, or he was a Dutchman; especially as his telephone went out of order that very afternoon. And of course they turned out to be two Americans staying at Pangbourne on a holiday, and the wire had been affected by a thunderstorm. But what were you to think, when the newspapers were full of spy stories, and the very lightning was apparently in the German secret service. As to mirrors in daylight and matches after dark, they were in obvious communication with the German fleet in the Kiel Canal, or wherever it was. Time and again Soames would say:
“Bunkum! The whole thing’s weak-minded!” Only to feel himself weak-minded the next moment. Look at those two hundred thousand Russians whom everybody was seeing in trains all over the country. They turned out to be eggs, and probably addled at that; but how could you help believing in them, especially when you wanted to! And then the authorities told you nothing; dumb as oysters; as if that were the way to treat an Englishman–it only made him fancy things. And there was Mons. They couldn’t even let you know about the army, except that it was heroic, and had killed a lot of Germans, and was marching backwards in order to put the finishing touch to them. That was about all one heard, till suddenly one found it was touch and go whether Paris could be saved, and the French Government had packed their traps and gone off to Bordeaux. And all the time nothing to do but read the papers, which he couldn’t believe, and listen to the click of Annette’s needles. And then came the news of the battle of the Marne, and he could breathe again.
He breathed freely–he had gone weeks, it seemed to him, without taking a deep breath. People were saying it was the beginning of the end, and the Allies–he himself had always called it Allies–and why not? – would soon be in Germany now. He wanted to believe this so much, that he said he didn’t believe a word of it, much as when, the weather looking fine, he would take his umbrella to make sure. And then, forsooth, they went and dug themselves in! This beginning of warfare which was to last four years, produced but moderate premonition in his mind. There was a certain relief in the immobility of things after the plunging excitement of Mons and the Marne. He continued to read the papers, shake his head, and invest in War Loan. His nephew Benedict was training for a commission in Kitchener’s army; Cicely’s boy, also, had joined up, as they called it. He supposed they had to. Annette had said several times that she wanted to go to France and be a nurse. It was all her fancy. She could do much more good by knitting and being economical.
Presently he took Fleur down to her school in the West; and not much too early, for the Zeppelins became busy soon after. In regard to their exploits, he displayed a somewhat natural perversity, for though he had taken his daughter down to a remote region to avoid them, he thought people made much too much fuss about them altogether. From a top window in his Club he was privileged to see one of them burst into flames. He said nothing and was glad of it afterwards–some of his fellow-members had shown their feelings, and those not all they should be. There was provocation, no doubt; but, after all, the crew were being burned alive. Generally speaking, while the war dragged on, the reality of it was kept from him most efficiently not only by the Government, the papers, and his age, but by a sort of barrage put up by himself from within himself. There the thing was, and what was the use of making more of it than he absolutely had to? If one ever came to the end, one might indulge one’s feelings, perhaps. And always the doings at sea, the adventures and misadventures of ships, impinged on him with a poignancy absent from the events on land. Of all that happened in the early part of the war, the bombardment of Scarborough affected him, perhaps, most painfully. It was like a half-arm jab above the heart. His pride was stunned. The notion that ships had dared to come so near as to throw shells into English houses and not been sunk for doing it, was peculiarly horrible to him. What would they be doing next? He had a continual longing for something definite at sea, some sign there of British superiority, as if “Rule Britannia” had got into the composition of his blood. The sinking of the Lusitania gave him at first much the same shock that it gave everyone else, but when he heard people abusing the Americans for not declaring war at once, he felt that they were extravagant. The Americans were a long way off–to talk about their being in danger was as good as saying that England was going to be defeated; which, curiously, considering his constitutional apprehensiveness, Soames never could believe. He had a sort of deep feeling, indeed, that he did not want to be rescued by America or anybody else. But these feelings were curiously mixed up with another feeling that if England had, like America, lost a lot of English people drowned like that, she would have gone to war like a shot, and with his approval, into the bargain.
Early in 1915, owing to depletion of the office staff, he had gone back into regular harness at Cuthcott Kingson and Forsyte’s. He worked there, harder than he had ever worked. In view of national anxieties the legal issues he was dealing with often seemed to him “petty,” but he dealt with them conscientiously; they took his mind off, and incidentally gave him more money to invest in War Loan. After the second battle of Ypres, he had contributed an ambulance, and had the exquisite discomfort of seeing his name in the papers. When in the train, going up and down, or at lunch time in his City Club, he listened to elderly wiseacres discussing the conduct of the war, the nature of Germans, politicians, Americans, and other reprehensible characters, he would look exactly as if he were going to sniff.
‘What do they know about it,’ he would think, ‘talking through their hats like that–it’s unEnglish.’ There was so much in those days that was hysterical and ‘unEnglish’; the papers encouraged it with their “intern-the-Hun” and other “stunts,” as they called it nowadays. If ever there were a time when mouths required shutting, it was now; and there they were, spluttering and bawling all over the place.
In these ways, then, nearly two years passed before in his paper that June morning he read the first official account of the battle of Jutland. Taking the journal in his hand so that no one else should see it till he himself had recovered, he passed out of the drawing-room window on to the dewy lawn, and walked blindly towards the river. There was a sinking sensation in the pit of his stomach. Standing there bareheaded in the sunshine and the peace of leaves and water, with birds all round as if nothing had happened, he tried to get hold of himself. Almost a sense of panic he had. A real battle at last, and all those losses! Under a poplar tree he read the account again. The sting was in the head of it; the tail was all right! Why couldn’t they have reversed the order and begun with the fact that the Germans had run for home? What had possessed them to make him feel so bad? It was a victory even if we HAD lost all those ships. A blundering lot–making the worst of it like that! It was like being shot by your own side. Tell the truth–yes; but not so as to give you a stomach-ache, where there was no need for it. He went back to breakfast with his jaw set.
“There’s been a big battle at sea,” he said to Annette; “we lost a lot of ships, but the Germans cut and ran for it. I shouldn’t be surprised if they never come out again.” Thus out of instinctive perversity did he foretell the future.
The rest of the day and the day after, further reports confirmed his resentment with the authorities for making him suffer like that. What on earth had they been about! They kept all sorts of things from you, and then when they had what really amounted to good news, blurted it out as if it were a disaster.
The death of Kitchener a few days later, though lowering to his temperature, had not the same staggering effect. He had done a lot for the country, and looked like a lion in a Zoo, but in the ebb and flow of world events even his great figure seemed small.
Towards the end of 1916 he had a curious little personal experience which affected him more than he would have admitted, so that he never mentioned it. This was in the train going up to London. From patriotic motives he was at that time travelling third, but on this particular morning, the train being full, he got into a first-class compartment, occupied by a young officer in uniform with his military kit in the rack above, and a pretty young woman whose eyes were red. From behind his paper Soames felt that if they were not married, they ought to be, for they were mutually occupied with each other’s eyes and hands and lips. At stations where their occupation had to cease he observed them round his nose. The pallid desperation of the young man’s face and the look in the girl’s reddened eyes gave him definite discomfort. Here was a case of impending separation, with all the tragic foreboding, and utter grief of war-time partings such as were taking place millionfold all over the world. It was the first Soames had seen, close up, and far more painful than he had realised. They were locked in a desperate embrace when the train ran in to Westbourne Park. The girl was evidently to get out here, and seemed incapable of doing so. She stood swaying with the tears running down her face. The young officer wrenched the door open and almost pushed her out. Her face, looking up from the platform, was so intensely wretched that it made Soames sore. The train moved on, the young officer flung himself back into his corner with a groan. Soames looked out of the opposite window. For a whole minute even after the train had reached Paddington, he continued to gaze in at a deserted carriage alongside. At last, grasping his umbrella, he evacuated the now empty compartment and getting into a taxi, uttered the word “Poultry” in a gruff voice. He was gruff all day. All over the world it was like that–a shocking business! And yet, by now, people seemed more concerned about their sugar and butter rations than about the war itself. Air-raids, ships being sunk, and what they could get to eat, were all people thought about–except, of course, dancing in night clubs and making up their faces. In all his life he had never seen so many made-up faces as he saw now. In coming from the office late and passing down the Strand, every woman he met seemed like the street women he used to see in his younger days. Paint and powder, with khaki alongside!
And so 1917 went by, and Fleur was getting a big girl. He had good reports of her–she was quick at lessons and games; it was some comfort. At her school down in the west, he gathered, they heard and saw very little of the war; and in the holidays he kept her at home as much as he could. There were few signs of war at Mapledurham, though of course khaki was everywhere. When conscription came in, Soames had shaken his head. He didn’t know what the newspapers were about. The thing was unEnglish. Once it was introduced, however, he supposed it was the only thing. All the same, he never approved of the way they bullied those conscientious objectors. He had no sympathy with the fellows’ consciences, of course, but the idea of harassing your fellow-countrymen at a time like this, repelled him; all his native individualism, too, remained in secret revolt against the slave-driving which had become the everyday procedure of abominable times. He had lost two gardeners in the opening year, and now they took the other two and left him with an old man and a boy, so that he often took a spud and dug up weeds himself, while Annette killed slugs with a French mixture. In the house he had never had anything but maids, so that they couldn’t take the butler he hadn’t got, which was some consolation. But if he’d had a car, they’d have taken his chauffeur. He felt he could have lost the lot with composure, if they’d gone of their own free will, but he would not have urged their going. Some reticent, secret belief in the sanctity of private feelings, even feelings about the country, would have prevented him. They had a right, he supposed, to their own ideas about things. If he, himself, had been under forty, he supposed he would have gone–though the mere notion gave him a pain below the ribs, so crude, so brutal, and so empty did all this military business appear to him; but he was not prepared to tell anybody else to go. His retention of this kind of delicacy made him lonelier than ever in the City, in the Club, and in trains, where most people seemed prepared to tell anybody to do anything. Soames himself was almost ashamed of his delicacy; you couldn’t carry on a war without ordering people about. And he tried to conduct himself so that people shouldn’t suspect him of this weakness. But on one occasion it led him into a serious tiff with his cousin George Forsyte at the “Iseeum” Club. George, just a year younger than himself, had, it appeared, gone in for recruiting down in Hampshire; while spending the week-ends in town “to enjoy the air-raids,” as he put it. Soames suspected him of enjoying something else, besides. Catching sight of George, then, one Saturday afternoon, sitting in the bow window of the “Iseeum,” Soames had inadvertently returned his greeting and was beckoned up.
“Have a drink?” said George: “No? Some tea, then; you can have my sugar.”
His japing, heavy-lidded eyes took Soames in from top to toe.
“You’re thin as a lathe,” he said: “What are you doing–breeding for the country?”
Soames drew up the corner of his lip.
“That’s not funny,” he said tartly. “What are you doing?”
“Getting chaps killed. You’d better take to it, too. The blighters want driving, now.”
“Thank you,” said Soames; “not in my line.”
George grinned.
“Too squeamish?”
“If you like.”
“What’s your general game, then?”
“Minding my own business,” said Soames.
“Making the wills, eh?”
Soames put his cup down, and took his hat up. He had never disliked George more than at that moment.
“Don’t get your shirt out,” said George; “somebody must make the wills. You might make mine, by the way–equal shares to Roger, Eustace and Francie. Executors yourself and Eustace. Come and do an air-raid with me one night. Did you see St. John Hayman’s boy was killed? They say the Huns are preparing a big push for the spring.”
Soames shrugged.
“Good-bye,” he said; “I’ll send you a draft of your will.”
“Pitch it short,” said George, “and have me roasted. No bones by request.”
Soames nodded, and went out.
A big push! Would they never tire of making mincemeat of the world? He had often been tempted towards the Lansdowne attitude; but some essential bulldog within him had always stirred and growled. An end that was no end–after all this, it wouldn’t do! Hold on–until! For never, even at the worst moments, had he believed that England could be beaten.
In March 1918 he had been laid up at Mapledurham with a chill and was only just out again, when the big German “push” began. It came with a suddenness that shook him to the marrow, and induced the usual longing to get away somewhere by himself. He went up rather slowly on to a bit of commonland, and sat down on his overcoat among gorse bushes. It was peaceful and smelled of spring; a lark was singing. And out there the Germans were breaking through! A sort of prayer went up from him while he sat in the utter peace of the mild day. He had heard so many times that we were ready for it; and now we weren’t, it seemed. Always the way! Too cocksure! He sat listening, as if–as if one could hear the guns all that way off. The man down at the lock was reported to have heard them once. All me eye! You couldn’t! Couldn’t you? Wasn’t that–? Nonsense! He lay back and put his ear to the ground, but only the whisper of a very gentle wind came to him, and the hum of a wild bee wending to some blossom of the gorse. A better sound than that of guns. And then the first chime of the village church bell tingled his ears. There they would soon be sitting and kneeling and thinking about the break-through, and the parson would offer up a special prayer for the destruction of Germans–he shouldn’t wonder. Well, it was destroy or be destroyed–it all came back to that. Funny thing, life–living on life, or rather on death! According to the latest information, all matter was alive, and every shape lived on some other shape, or at least on the elements of shape. The earth was nothing but disintegrated shape, out of which came more shapes and you ate them, and then you disintegrated and gave rise to shapes, and somebody ate them, and so it went on. In spite of the break-through, he could not help being glad to be alive after a fortnight cooped up in the house. His sense of smell, too, so long confined to eau-de-Cologne, was very keen this morning; he could smell the gorse–a scent more delicate than most, ‘the scent of gorse far-blown from distant hill,’ he’d read somewhere. And to think that out there his countrymen were struggling and dying and being blown to smithereens–young fellows, from his office, from his garden, from every English office and garden to save England–to save the world, they said–but that was flim-flam! And, perhaps, after all these horrible four years they wouldn’t save England! Drawing his thin legs under him, he sat staring down towards the river where his home lay. Yes, they would save her, if it meant putting another ten years on to the conscription age, or taking the age limit off altogether. England under a foreigner? Not for Joe! He scrabbled with his hand, brought up a fistful of earth, and mechanically put it to his nose. It smelled exactly as it should smell–of earth, and gave him ever so queer and special a sensation. English earth! H’m! Earth was earth, whether in England or in Timbuctoo! Funny to give your life for what smelled exactly like his mushroom house. You put a name to a thing and you died for it! There was a lark singing–very English bird, cheery and absent-minded, singing away without knowing a thing about anything and caring less, he supposed. The bell had ceased to toll for service. If people thought God was particularly interested in England, they were mistaken. He wouldn’t do a thing about it! People had to do things for themselves, and if they didn’t, that was the end. Take those submarines. Leave them to God and see what happened–one would be eating one’s fantails before one could say Jack Robinson!
The mild air and a slant of March sunlight gently warmed his cheek pale from too much contact with a pillow. And–out there! If ever this thing ended, he would come up here again and see what it was like without an ache under his fifth rib. A nice spot–open and high. And now he would have to get back to the house and they would give him chicken broth, and he would have to listen to Annette saying that the English never saw an inch before their noses–which as a matter of fact they didn’t–and tell her that they did. A weary business when you felt as he felt about this news. He rose. Twelve o’clock! They’d have finished praying now and got to the sermon. He pitied that parson–preaching about the Philistines, he shouldn’t wonder! There were the jawbones of asses about, plenty, but not a Samson among the lot of them. The gorse–it was early–looked pretty blooming round him–when the gorse was out of bloom, kissing was out of fashion. He wondered idly what had to go out of bloom before killing was out of fashion. There was a hawk! He stood and watched it hover and swoop sideways, and the red glint of it, till again it rested hovering on the air; then slowly in the pale sunlight he wended his way down towards the river.
4
July came. The break-through had long been checked, the fronts repaired, the Americans had come over in great numbers, Foch was in supreme command. Soames didn’t know–perhaps it was necessary, but Annette’s undisguised relief was unpleasant to him, and so far as he could see, things were going on as interminably as before. It was to Winifred that he spoke the words which definitely changed the fortunes of the world.
“We shall never win,” he said, “I despair of it. The men are all right, but leaders! There isn’t one among the lot–I despair of it.” No one had ever heard him talk like that before, or use such a final word. The morning papers on the following day were buoyant with the news that the German offensive against the French had been stopped and that the French and Americans had broken through. From that day on the Allies, as Soames still called them, never looked back.
Those interested in such questions will pause, perhaps to consider whether Soames–like so many other people–really won the war, or whether it was that in him some hidden sensibility received in advance of the newspapers the impact of events and put up the instantaneous contradiction natural from one so individualistic. Whichever is true, the relief he felt at having his dictum contradicted was extraordinary. For the first time in three years he spent the following Sunday afternoon in his picture gallery. The French were advancing, the English were waiting to advance; the Americans were doing well; the air-raids had ceased; the submarines were beaten. And it all seemed to have happened in two days. While he stood looking at his Goya and turning over photographs of pictures in the Prado, a notion came to him. In that painting of Goya’s called “La Vendimia,” the girl with the basket on her head reminded him of Fleur. There was really quite a resemblance. If the war ever stopped, he would commission an artist to make him a copy of that Goya girl–the colouring, if he remembered rightly, was very agreeable. It would remind him of pleasant things–his daughter and his visit to the Prado before he bought Lord Burlingford’s ‘Goya’ in 1910. A notion so utterly unconnected with the war had not occurred to him for years–it was almost like a blessing, with its suggestion of life apart from battle and murder, and once more connected with Dumetrius. And ringing the bell, he ordered a jug of claret cup. He drank very little of it, but it gave him a feeling that was almost Victorian. What had that fellow Jolyon, and Irene, done with themselves all these war years? Had they sweated in their shoes and lost weight as he had done–he hoped so! Their boy, if he remembered, would be of military age next year; for the thousandth time he was glad that Fleur had disappointed him and been a girl.
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