“Tired, my child?”
Her face came round—queer, creased, not like her face; and Soames spoke the phrase of her childhood:
“See what I’ve brought you!”
He raised the Chardin; she gave it just a glance, and he felt hurt. After all, it was worth some hundreds of pounds! Very pale, she had crossed her arms on her chest, as if shutting herself up. He recognised the symptom. A spiritual crisis! The sort of thing his whole life had been passed in regarding as extravagant; like a case of appendicitis that will not wait decently.
“Michael,” he said, “tells me you want him to take you round the world.”
“Well, he can’t; so that ends it.”
“If she had said: ‘Yes, and why can’t he?’ Soames would have joined the opposition automatically. But her words roused his natural perversity. Here she was, and here was her heart’s desire—and she wasn’t getting it! He put the Chardin down, and took a walk over the soft carpet.
“Tell me,” he said, coming to a halt, “where do you feel it exactly?”
Fleur laughed: “In my head, and my eyes, and my ears, and my heart.”
“What business,” muttered Soames, “have they to look down their confounded noses!” And he set off again across the room. All the modern jackanapes whom from time to time he had been unable to avoid in her house, seemed to have come sniggering round him with lifted eyebrows, like a set of ghosts. The longing to put them in their places—a shallow lot—possessed him at that moment to the exclusion of a greater sanity.
“I—I don’t see how I can take you,” he said, and stopped short.
What was that he was saying? Who had asked him to take her? Her eyes, widely open, were fixed on him.
“But of course not, Dad!”
Of course not! He didn’t know about that!
“I shall get used to being laughed at, in time.” Soames growled.
“I don’t see why you should,” he said. “I suppose people do go round the world.”
Fleur’s pallor had gone, now.
“But not you, dear; why, it would bore you stiff! It’s very sweet of you, even to think of it; but of course I couldn’t let you—at your age!”
“At my age?” said Soames. “I’m not so very old.”
“No, no, Dad; I’ll just dree my weird.”
Soames took another walk, without a sound. Dree her weird, indeed!
“I won’t have it,” he ejaculated; “if people can’t behave to you, I—I’ll show them!”
She had got up, and was breathing deeply, with her lips parted, and her cheeks very flushed. So she had stood, before her first party, holding out her frock for him to see.
“We’ll go,” he said, gruffly. “Don’t make a fuss! That’s settled.”
Her arms were round his neck; his nose felt wet. What nonsense! as if—!…
He stood unbuttoning his braces that night in the most peculiar state of mind. Going round the world—was he? Preposterous! It had knocked that young fellow over anyway—he was to join them in August wherever they were by that time! Good Lord! It might be China! The thing was fantastic; and Fleur behaving like a kitten! The words of a comic ditty, sung by a clergyman, in his boyhood, kept up a tattoo within him:
Yes! Indeed! His affairs were in apple-pie order, luckily! There was nothing to do, in Timothy’s or Winifred’s Trusts—the only two he had on his hands now; but how things would get on without him, he couldn’t tell! As to Annette! She wouldn’t be sorry, he supposed. There was no one else to care, except Winifred, a little. It was, rather, an intangible presence that troubled his thoughts, about to forsake it for months on end! Still, the cliffs of Dover would be standing, he supposed, and the river still running past his lawn, when he came back, if he ever came back! You picked up all sorts of things out there—microbes, insects, snakes—never knew what you’d run into! Pretty business, steering Fleur clear of all that. And the sightseeing he would have to do! For SHE wouldn’t miss anything! Trust her! Going round among a lot of people with their mouths open—he couldn’t stand that; but he would have to! H’m! A relief when that young fellow could join them. And yet—to have her to himself; he hadn’t, for a long time now. But she would pick up with everybody, of course. He would have to make himself agreable to Tom, Dick, and Harry. A look at Egypt, then to India, and across to China and Japan, and back through that great sprawling America—God’s own country, didn’t they call it! She had it all mapped out. Thank goodness, no question of Russia! She hadn’t even proposed that—it was all to pieces now, they said! Communism! Who knew what would happen at home before they got back? It seemed to Soames as if England, too, must all go to pieces, if he left it. Well, he’d said he would take her! And she had cried over it. Phew! He threw the window up, and in the Jaeger dressing-gown kept there for stray occasions, leaned into the mild air. No Westminster Square did he seem to see out there, but his own river and its poplars, with the full moon behind them, a bright witness—the quiet beauty he had never put into words, the green tranquility he had felt for thirty years, and only permitted to seep into the back of his being. He would miss it—the scents, the sighs of the river under the wind, the chuckle down at the weir, the stars. They had stars out there, of course, but not English stars. And the grass—those great places had no grass, he believed! The blossom, too, was late this year—no blossom before they left! Well, the milk was spilled! And that reminded him: The dairyman would be certain to let the cows go out of milk—he was a ‘natural,’ that chap! He would have to warn Annette. Women never seemed to understand that a cow didn’t go on giving milk for ever, without being attended to. If he only had a man to rely on in the country, like old Gradman in Town! H’m! Old Gradman’s eyes would drop out when he heard this news! Bit of old England there; and wouldn’t be left long, now! It would be queer to come back and find old Gradman gone. One—Two—Three—Eleven! That clock! It had kept him awake before now; still—it was a fine old clock! That young fellow was to go on sitting under it. And was there anything in the notions that kept him sitting there, or were they just talk? Well, he was right to stick to his guns, anyway. But five months away from his young wife—great risk in that! ‘Youth’s a stuff’—Old Shakespeare knew the world. Well! Risk, or no risk, there it was! After all, Fleur had a good head; and young Michael had a good heart. Fleur had a good heart, too; he wouldn’t have it said that she hadn’t! She would feel leaving the baby when it came to the point. She didn’t realise, yet. And Soames felt within him the stir of a curious conflict, between hope that, after all, she might give it up, and apprehension lest she should. Funny—that! His habits, his comfort, his possessions… and here he was, flinging them all over the windmill! Absurd! And yet—!
Chapter XII.
ENVOI
Away from Fleur five months at least!
Soames’ astounding conduct had indeed knocked Michael over. And yet, after all, they had come to a crisis in their life together, the more serious because concerned with workaday feelings. Perhaps out there she would become afflicted, like himself, with an enlarged prospect; lose her idea that the world consisted of some five thousand people of advanced tastes, of whom she knew at the outside five hundred. It was she who had pushed him into Parliament, and until he was hoofed therefrom as a failure, their path was surely conjoined along the crest of a large view. In the fortnight before her departure he suffered and kept smiling; wryly thankful that she was behaving ‘like a kitten,’ as her father called it. Her nerves had been on edge ever since the autumn over that wretched case—what more natural than this reaction? At least she felt for him sufficiently to be prodigal of kisses—great consolation to Michael while it lasted. Once or twice he caught her hanging with wet eyes over the eleventh baronet; once found her with a wet face when he awoke in the morning. These indications were a priceless assurance to him that she meant to come back. For there were moments when possibilities balled into a nightmare. Absurd! She was going with her father, that embodiment of care and prudence! Who would have thought Old Forsyte could uproot himself like this? He, too, was leaving a wife, though Michael saw no signs of it. One didn’t know much about Old Forsyte’s feelings, except that they centred round his daughter, and that he was continually asking questions about labels and insects. He had bought himself, too, a life-saving waistcoat and one for Fleur. Michael held with him only one important conversation.