Alfred Henry Lewis - "Wolfville Days"

Henry Seton Merriman - "Tomaso's Fortune and Other Stories"

Hugo DeVries - "Species and Varieties, Their Origin by Mutation"

William Shakespeare - "The Tempest"

To Let

J >> John Galsworthy >> To Let




Soames turned from the vault and faced towards the breeze. The air
up here would be delicious if only he could rid his nerves of the
feeling that mortality was in it. He gazed restlessly at the
crosses and the urns, the angels, the "immortelles," the flowers,
gaudy or withering; and suddenly he noticed a spot which seemed so
different from anything else up there that he was obliged to walk
the few necessary yards and look at it. A sober corner, with a
massive queer-shaped cross of grey rough-hewn granite, guarded by
four dark yew-trees. The spot was free from the pressure of the
other graves, having a little box-hedged garden on the far side,
arid in front a goldening birch-tree. This oasis in the desert of
conventional graves appealed to the aesthetic sense of Soames, and
he sat down there in the sunshine. Through those trembling gold
birch leaves he gazed out at London, and yielded to the waves of
memory. He thought of Irene in Montpellier Square, when her hair
was rusty-golden and her white shoulders his--Irene, the prize of
his love--passion, resistant to his ownership. He saw Bosinney's
body lying in that white mortuary, and Irene sitting on the sofa
looking at her picture with the eyes of a dying bird. Again he
thought of her by the little green Niobe in the Bois de Boulogne,
once more rejecting him. His fancy took him on beside his drifting
river on the November day when Fleur was to be born, took him to
the dead leaves floating on the green-tinged water and the snake-
headed weed for ever swaying and nosing, sinuous, blind, tethered.
And on again to the window opened to the cold starry night above
Hyde Park, with his father lying dead. His fancy darted to that
picture of "The Future Town," to that boy's and Fleur's first
meeting; to the blueish trail of Prosper Profond's cigar, and
Fleur in the window pointing down to where the fellow prowled. To
the sight of Irene and that dead fellow sitting side by side in
the Stand at Lord's. To her and that boy at Robin Hill. To the
sofa, where Fleur lay crushed up in the corner; to her lips
pressed into his cheek, and her farewell "Daddy." And suddenly he
saw again Irene's grey-gloved hand waving its last gesture of
release.

He sat there a long time dreaming his career, faithful to the scut
of his possessive instinct, warming himself even with its
failures.

"To Let"--the Forsyte age and way of life, when a man owned his
soul, his investments, and his woman, without check or question.
And now the State had, or would have, his investments, his woman
had herself, and God knew who had his soul. "To Let"--that sane
and simple creed!

The waters of change were foaming in, carrying the promise of new
forms only when their destructive flood should have passed its
full. He sat there, subconscious of them, but with his thoughts
resolutely set on the past--as a man might ride into a wild night
with his face to the tail of his galloping horse. Athwart the
Victorian dykes the waters were rolling on property, manners, and
morals, on melody and the old forms of art--waters bringing to his
mouth a salt taste as of blood, lapping to the foot of this
Highgate Hill where Victorianism lay buried. And sitting there,
high up on its most individual spot, Soames--like a figure of
Investment--refused their restless sounds. Instinctively he would
not fight them--there was in him too much primeval wisdom, of Man
the possessive animal. They would quiet down when they had
fulfilled their tidal fever of dispossessing and destroying; when
the creations and the properties of others were sufficiently
broken and dejected--they would lapse and ebb, and fresh forms
would rise based on an instinct older than the fever of change--
the instinct of Home.

"Je m'en fiche," said Prosper Profond. Soames did not say "Je m'en
fiche"--it was French, and the fellow was a thorn in his side--but
deep down he knew that change was only the interval of death
between two forms of life, destruction necessary to make room for
fresher property. What though the board was up, and cosiness to
let?--some one would come along and take it again some day.

And only one thing really troubled him, sitting there--the
melancholy craving in his heart--because the sun was like
enchantment on his face and on the clouds and on the golden birch
leaves, and the wind's rustle was so gentle, and the yew-tree
green so dark, and the sickle of a moon pale in the sky.

Ah! He might wish and wish and never get it--the beauty and the
loving in the world!

THE END

Copyright (c) 2007. topbookz.net. All rights reserved.