The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (acx book reading txt) 📕

the fourth Jolyon, worn by waiting, gave him quite a shock⁠—it looked so wan and old. His father’s mask had been forced awry by the emotion of the meeting, so that the boy suddenly realised how much he must have felt their absence. He summoned to his aid the thought: “Well, I didn’t want to go!” It was out of date for Youth to defer to Age. But Jon was by no means typically modern. His father had always been “so jolly” to him, and to feel that one meant to begin again at once the conduct which his father had suffered six weeks’ loneliness to cure was not agreeable.

At the question, “Well, old man, how did the great Goya strike you?” his conscience pricked him badly. The great Goya only existed because he had created a face which resembled Fleur’s.

On the night of their return, he went to bed full of compunction; but awoke full of anticipation. It was only the fifth of July, and no meeting was fixed with Fleur until the ninth. He was to have three days at home before going back to farm. Somehow he must contrive to see her!

In the lives of men an inexorable rhythm, caused by the need for trousers, not even the fondest parents can deny. On the second day, therefore, Jon went to Town, and having satisfied his conscience by ordering what was indispensable in Conduit Street, turned his face toward Piccadilly. Stratton Street, where her Club was, adjoined Devonshire House. It would be the merest chance that she should be at her Club. But he dawdled down Bond Street with a beating heart, noticing the superiority of all other young men to himself. They wore their clothes with such an air; they had assurance; they were old. He was suddenly overwhelmed by the conviction that Fleur must have forgotten him. Absorbed in his own feeling for her all these weeks, he had mislaid that possibility. The corners of his mouth drooped, his hands felt clammy. Fleur with the pick of youth at the beck of her smile⁠—Fleur incomparable! It was an evil moment. Jon, however, had a great idea that one must be able to face anything. And he braced himself with that dour reflection in front of a bric-a-brac shop. At this high-water mark of what was once the London season, there was nothing to mark it out from any other except a grey top hat or two, and the sun. Jon moved on, and turning the corner into Piccadilly, ran into Val Dartie moving toward the Iseeum Club, to which he had just been elected.

“Hallo! Young man! Where are you off to?”

Jon gushed. “I’ve just been to my tailor’s.”

Val looked him up and down. “That’s good! I’m going in here to order some cigarettes; then come and have some lunch.”

Jon thanked him. He might get news of her from Val!

The condition of England, that nightmare of its Press and Public men, was seen in different perspective within the tobacconist’s which they now entered.

“Yes, sir; precisely the cigarette I used to supply your father with. Bless me! Mr. Montague Dartie was a customer here from⁠—let me see⁠—the year Melton won the Derby. One of my very best customers he was.” A faint smile illumined the tobacconist’s face. “Many’s the tip he’s given me, to be sure! I suppose he took a couple of hundred of these every week, year in, year out, and never changed his cigarette. Very affable gentleman, brought me a lot of custom. I was sorry he met with that accident. One misses an old customer like him.”

Val smiled. His father’s decease had closed an account which had been running longer, probably, than any other; and in a ring of smoke puffed out from that time-honoured cigarette he seemed to see again his father’s face, dark, good-looking, moustachioed, a little puffy, in the only halo it had earned. His father had his fame here, anyway⁠—a man who smoked two hundred cigarettes a week, who could give tips, and run accounts forever! To his tobacconist a hero! Even that was some distinction to inherit!

“I pay cash,” he said; “how much?”

“To his son, sir, and cash⁠—ten and six. I shall never forget Mr. Montague Dartie. I’ve known him stand talkin’ to me half an hour. We don’t get many like him now, with everybody in such a hurry. The War was bad for manners, sir⁠—it was bad for manners. You were in it, I see.”

“No,” said Val, tapping his knee, “I got this in the war before. Saved my life, I expect. Do you want any cigarettes, Jon?”

Rather ashamed, Jon murmured, “I don’t smoke, you know,” and saw the tobacconist’s lips twisted, as if uncertain whether to say “Good God!” or “Now’s your chance, sir!”

“That’s right,” said Val; “keep off it while you can. You’ll want it when you take a knock. This is really the same tobacco, then?”

“Identical, sir; a little dearer, that’s all. Wonderful staying power⁠—the British Empire, I always say.”

“Send me down a hundred a week to this address, and invoice it monthly. Come on, Jon.”

Jon entered the Iseeum with curiosity. Except to lunch now and then at the Hotch-Potch with his father, he had never been in a London Club. The Iseeum, comfortable and unpretentious, did not move, could not, so long as George Forsyte sat on its Committee, where his culinary acumen was almost the controlling force. The Club had made a stand against the newly rich, and it had taken all George Forsyte’s prestige, and praise of him as a “good sportsman,” to bring in Prosper Profond.

The two were lunching together when the half-brothers-in-law entered the dining-room, and attracted by George’s forefinger, sat down at their table, Val with his shrewd eyes and charming smile, Jon with solemn lips and an attractive shyness in his glance. There was an air of privilege around that corner table, as though past masters were eating there. Jon was fascinated by the hypnotic atmosphere. The waiter, lean