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

But he dared not ask what was in her mind; and, since that one little talk in the billiard-room, she said nothing to him.

In this taciturn condition of affairs it chanced that Winifred invited them to lunch and to go afterward to “a most amusing little play, The Beggar’s Opera” and would they bring a man to make four? Soames, whose attitude toward theatres was to go to nothing, accepted, because Fleur’s attitude was to go to everything. They motored up, taking Michael Mont, who, being in his seventh heaven, was found by Winifred “very amusing.” The Beggar’s Opera puzzled Soames. The people were very unpleasant, the whole thing very cynical. Winifred was “intrigued”⁠—by the dresses. The music, too, did not displease her. At the Opera, the night before, she had arrived too early for the Russian Ballet, and found the stage occupied by singers, for a whole hour pale or apoplectic from terror lest by some dreadful inadvertence they might drop into a tune. Michael Mont was enraptured with the whole thing. And all three wondered what Fleur was thinking of it. But Fleur was not thinking of it. Her fixed idea stood on the stage and sang with Polly Peachum, mimed with Filch, danced with Jenny Diver, postured with Lucy Lockit, kissed, trolled, and cuddled with Macheath. Her lips might smile, her hands applaud, but the comic old masterpiece made no more impression on her than if it had been pathetic, like a modern “Revue.” When they embarked in the car to return, she ached because Jon was not sitting next her instead of Michael Mont. When, at some jolt, the young man’s arm touched hers as if by accident, she only thought: “If that were Jon’s arm!” When his cheerful voice, tempered by her proximity, murmured above the sound of the car’s progress, she smiled and answered, thinking: “If that were Jon’s voice!” and when once he said, “Fleur, you look a perfect angel in that dress!” she answered, “Oh, do you like it?” thinking, “If only Jon could see it!”

During this drive she took a resolution. She would go to Robin Hill and see him⁠—alone; she would take the car, without word beforehand to him or to her father. It was nine days since his letter, and she could wait no longer. On Monday she would go! The decision made her well disposed toward young Mont. With something to look forward to she could afford to tolerate and respond. He might stay to dinner; propose to her as usual; dance with her, press her hand, sigh⁠—do what he liked. He was only a nuisance when he interfered with her fixed idea. She was even sorry for him so far as it was possible to be sorry for anybody but herself just now. At dinner he seemed to talk more wildly than usual about what he called “the death of the close borough”⁠—she paid little attention, but her father seemed paying a good deal, with the smile on his face which meant opposition, if not anger.

“The younger generation doesn’t think as you do, sir; does it, Fleur?”

Fleur shrugged her shoulders⁠—the younger generation was just Jon, and she did not know what he was thinking.

“Young people will think as I do when they’re my age, Mr. Mont. Human nature doesn’t change.”

“I admit that, sir; but the forms of thought change with the times. The pursuit of self-interest is a form of thought that’s going out.”

“Indeed! To mind one’s own business is not a form of thought, Mr. Mont, it’s an instinct.”

Yes, when Jon was the business!

“But what is one’s business, sir? That’s the point. Everybody’s business is going to be one’s business. Isn’t it, Fleur?”

Fleur only smiled.

“If not,” added young Mont, “there’ll be blood.”

“People have talked like that from time immemorial.”

“But you’ll admit, sir, that the sense of property is dying out?”

“I should say increasing among those who have none.”

“Well, look at me! I’m heir to an entailed estate. I don’t want the thing; I’d cut the entail tomorrow.”

“You’re not married, and you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Fleur saw the young man’s eyes turn rather piteously upon her.

“Do you really mean that marriage⁠—?” he began.

“Society is built on marriage,” came from between her father’s close lips; “marriage and its consequences. Do you want to do away with it?”

Young Mont made a distracted gesture. Silence brooded over the dinner table, covered with spoons bearing the Forsyte crest⁠—a pheasant proper⁠—under the electric light in an alabaster globe. And outside, the river evening darkened, charged with heavy moisture and sweet scents.

“Monday,” thought Fleur; “Monday!”

VI Desperate

The weeks which followed the death of his father were sad and empty to the only Jolyon Forsyte left. The necessary forms and ceremonies⁠—the reading of the will, valuation of the estate, distribution of the legacies⁠—were enacted over the head, as it were, of one not yet of age. Jolyon was cremated. By his special wish no one attended that ceremony, or wore black for him. The succession of his property, controlled to some extent by old Jolyon’s will, left his widow in possession of Robin Hill, with two thousand five hundred pounds a year for life. Apart from this the two wills worked together in some complicated way to insure that each of Jolyon’s three children should have an equal share in their grandfather’s and father’s property in the future as in the present, save only that Jon, by virtue of his sex, would have control of his capital when he was twenty-one, while June and Holly would only have the spirit of theirs, in order that their children might have the body after them. If they had no children, it would all come to Jon if he outlived them; and since June was fifty, and Holly nearly forty, it was considered in Lincoln’s Inn Fields that but for the cruelty of income tax, young Jon would be as warm a man as his grandfather when he died. All this was