He put his lips to the hand held out.
“It’s wonderful,” he said. “I was feeling kind of homesick; I miss the sun over here.”
In going out, he looked back. Fleur had put her baby back in its nest, and was staring straight before her.
Chapter II.
CHANGE
But more than the death of a dog had caused the regarnishing of Fleur’s Chinese room. On the evening of her twenty-second birth-day Michael had come home saying:
“Well, my child, I’ve chucked publishing. With old Danby always in the right—it isn’t a career.”
“Oh! Michael, you’ll be bored to death.”
“I’ll go into Parliament. It’s quite usual, and about the same screw.”
He had spoken in jest. Six days later it became apparent that she had listened in earnest.
“You were absolutely right, Michael. It’s the very thing for you. You’ve got ideas.”
“Other people’s.”
“And the gift of the gab. We’re frightfully handy for the House, here.”
“It costs money, Fleur.”
“Yes; I’ve spoken to father. It was rather funny—there’s never been a Forsyte, you know, anywhere near Parliament. But he thinks it’ll be good for me; and that it’s all baronets are fit for.”
“One has to have a Seat, unfortunately.”
“Well, I’ve sounded your father, too. He’ll speak to people. They want young men.”
“Ah! And what are my politics?”
“My dear boy, you must know—at thirty.”
“I’m not a Liberal. But am I Labour or Tory?”
“You can think it out before the next election!”
Next day, while he was shaving, and she was in her bath, he cut himself slightly and said:
“The land and this unemployment is what I really care about. I’m a Foggartist.”
“What?”
“Old Sir James Foggart’s book, that he published after all. You read it.”
“No.”
“Well, you said so.”
“So did others.”
“Never mind—his eyes are fixed on 1944, and his policy’s according. Safety in the Air, the Land, and Child Emigration; adjustment of Supply and Demand within the Empire; cut our losses in Europe; and endure a worse Present for the sake of a better Future. Everything, in fact, that’s unpopular, and said to be impossible.”
“Well, you could keep all that to yourself till you get in. You’ll have to stand as a Tory.”
“How lovely you look!”
“If you get in, you can disagree with everybody. That’ll give you a position from the start.”
“Some scheme!” murmured Michael.
“You can initiate this—this Foggartism. He isn’t mad, is he?”
“No, only too sane, which is much the same thing, of course. You see we’ve got a higher wage-scale than any other country except America and the Dominions; and it isn’t coming down again; we really group in with the new countries. He’s for growing as much of our food as we can, and pumping British town children, before they’re spoiled, into the Colonies, till Colonial demand for goods equals our supply. It’s no earthly, of course, without whole-hearted co-operation between the Governments within the Empire.”
“It sounds very sensible.”
“We published him, you know, but at his own expense. It’s a ‘faith and the mountain’ stunt. He’s got the faith all right, but the mountain shows no signs of moving up to now.”
Fleur stood up. “Well,” she said, “that’s settled. Your father says he can get you a nomination as a Tory, and you can keep your own views to yourself. You’ll get in on the human touch, Michael.”
“Thank you, ducky. Can I help dry you?”
Before redecorating her Chinese room, however, Fleur had waited till after Michael was comfortably seated for a division which professed to be interested in agriculture. She chose a blend between Adam and Louis Quinze. Michael called it the ‘bimetallic parlour’; and carried off “The White Monkey” to his study. The creature’s pessimism was not, he felt, suited to political life.
Fleur had initiated her ‘salon’ with a gathering in February. The soul of society had passed away since the Liberal debacle and Lady Alison’s politico-legal coterie no longer counted. Plainer people were in the ascendant. Her Wednesday evenings were youthful, with age represented by her father-inlaw, two minor ambassadors, and Pevensey Blythe, editor of The Outpost. So unlike his literary style that he was usually mistaken for a Colonial Prime Minister, Blythe was a tall man with a beard, and grey bloodshot eyes, who expressed knowledge in paragraphs that few could really understand. “What Blythe thinks today, the Conservative Party will not think tomorrow,” was said of him. He spoke in a small voice, and constantly used the impersonal pronoun.
“One is walking in one’s sleep,” he would say of the political situation, “and will wake up without any clothes on.”
A warm supporter of Sir James Foggart’s book, characterising it as “the masterpiece of a blind archangel,” he had a passion for listening to the clavichord, and was invaluable in Fleur’s ‘salon.’
Freed from poetry and modern music, from Sibley Swan, Walter Nazing and Hugo Solstis, Fleur was finding time for her son—the eleventh baronet. He represented for her the reality of things. Michael might have posthumous theories, and Labour predatory hopes, but for her the year 1944 would see the eleventh baronet come of age. That Kit should inherit an England worth living in was of more intrinsic importance than anything they proposed in the Commons and were unable to perform. All those houses they were going to build, for instance—very proper, but a little unnecessary if Kit still had Lippinghall Manor and South Square, Westminster, to dwell in. Not that Fleur voiced such cynical convictions, or admitted them even to herself. She did orthodox lip-service to the great god Progress.
The Peace of the World, Hygiene, Trade, and the End of Unemployment, preoccupied all, irrespective of Party, and Fleur was in the fashion; but instinct, rather than Michael and Sir James Foggart, told her that the time-honoured motto: ‘Eat your cake and have it,’ which underlay the platforms of all Parties, was not ‘too frightfully’ sound. So long as Kit had cake, it was no good bothering too deeply about the rest; though, of course, one must seem to. Fluttering about her ‘salon’—this to that person, and that to the other, and to all so pretty, she charmed by her grace, her common-sense, her pliancy. Not infrequently she attended at the House, and sat, not listening too much to the speeches, yet picking up, as it were, by a sort of seventh sense (if women in Society all had six, surely Fleur had seven) what was necessary to the conduct of that ‘salon’—the rise and fall of the Governmental barometer, the catchwords and cliches of policy; and, more valuable, impressions of personality, of the residuary man within the Member. She watched Michael’s career, with the fostering eye of a godmother who has given her godchild a blue morocco prayer-book, in the hope that some day he may remember its existence. Although a sedulous attendant at the House all through the Spring and summer, Michael had not yet opened his mouth, and so far she had approved of his silence, while nurturing his desire to know his own mind by listening to his wanderings in Foggartism. If it were indeed the only permanent cure for Unemployment, as he said, she too was a Foggartist; common-sense assuring her that the only real danger to Kit’s future lay in that national malady. Eliminate Unemployment, and nobody would have time to make a fuss. But her criticisms were often pertinent:
“My dear boy, does a country ever sacrifice the present for the sake of the future?” or: “Do you really think country life is better than town life?” or: “Can you imagine sending Kit out of England at fourteen to some Godforsaken end of the world?” or: “Do you suppose the towns will have it?” And they roused Michael to such persistence and fluency that she felt he would really catch on in time—like old Sir Giles Snoreham, whom they would soon be making a peer, because he had always worn low-crowned hats and advocated a return to hansom cabs. Hats, buttonholes, an eyeglass—she turned over in her mind all such little realities as help a political career.