William Shakespeare - "The Tragedy of Macbeth"

Robert Herrick - "The Web of Life"

William Shakespeare - "The Taming of the Shrew"

Ida Coe and Alice J. Christie - "Story Hour Readers Book Three"

To Let

J >> John Galsworthy >> To Let




"Not a bit like Holly or me, is he?"

"Not a bit."

'She's cool,' thought June.

And suddenly the girl said: "I wish you'd tell me why our families
don't get on?"

Confronted with the question she had advised her father to answer,
June was silent; either because this girl was trying to get
something out of her, or simply because what one would do
theoretically is not always what one will do when it comes to the
point.

"You know," said the girl, "the surest way to make people find out
the worst is to keep them ignorant. My father's told me it was a
quarrel about property. But I don't believe it; we've both got
heaps. They wouldn't have been so bourgeois as all that."

June flushed. The word applied to her grandfather and father
offended her.

"My grandfather," she said, "was very generous, and my father is,
too; neither of them was in the least bourgeois."

"Well, what was it then?" repeated the girl. Conscious that this
young Forsyte meant having what she wanted, June at once
determined to prevent her, and to get something for herself
instead.

"Why do you want to know?"

The girl smelled at her roses. "I only want to know because they
won't tell me."

"Well, it WAS about property, but there's more than one kind."

"That makes it worse. Now I really MUST know."

June's small and resolute face quivered. She was wearing a round
cap, and her hair had fluffed out under it. She looked quite young
at that moment, rejuvenated by encounter.

"You know," she said, "I saw you drop your handkerchief. Is there
anything between you and Jon? Because, if so, you'd better drop
that too."

The girl grew paler, but she smiled.

"If there were, that isn't the way to make me."

At the gallantry of that reply June held out her hand.

"I like you; but I don't like your father; I never have. We may as
well be frank."

"Did you come down to tell him that?"

June laughed. "No; I came down to see YOU."

"How delightful of you!"

This girl could fence.

"I'm two-and-a-half times your age," said June, "but I quite
sympathise. It's horrid not to have one's own way."

The girl smiled again. "I really think you MIGHT tell me."

How the child stuck to her point!

"It's not my secret. But I'll see what I can do, because I think
both you and Jon OUGHT to be told. And now I'll say good-bye."

"Won't you wait and see Father?"

June shook her head. "How can I get over to the other side?"

"I'll row you across."

"Look!" said June impulsively, "next time you're in London, come
and see me. This is where I live. I generally have young people in
the evening. But I shouldn't tell your father that you're coming."

The girl nodded.

Watching her scull the skiff across, June thought: 'She's awfully
pretty and well made. I never thought Soames would have a daughter
as pretty as this. She and Jon would make a lovely couple.'

The instinct to couple, starved within herself, was always at work
in June. She stood watching Fleur row back; the girl took her hand
off a scull to wave farewell; and June walked languidly on between
the meadows and the river, with an ache in her heart. Youth to
youth, like the dragon-flies chasing each other, and love like the
sun warming them through and through. Her youth! So long ago--when
Phil and she--! And since? Nothing--no one had been quite what
she had wanted. And so she had missed it all. But what a coil was
round those two young things, if they really were in love, as
Holly would have it--as her father, and Irene, and Soames himself
seemed to dread. What a coil, and what a barrier! And the itch for
the future, the contempt, as it were, for what was overpast, which
forms the active principle, moved in the heart of one who ever
believed that what one wanted was more important than what other
people did not want. From the bank, awhile, in the warm summer
stillness, she watched the water-lily plants and willow leaves,
the fishes rising; sniffed the scent of grass and meadow-sweet,
wondering how she could force everybody to be happy. Jon and
Fleur! Two little lame ducks--charming callow yellow little ducks!
A great pity! Surely something could be done! One must not take
such situations lying down. She walked on, and reached a station,
hot and cross.

That evening, faithful to the impulse towards direct action, which
made many people avoid her, she said to her father:

"Dad, I've been down to see young Fleur. I think she's very
attractive. It's no good hiding our heads under our wings, is it?"

The startled Jolyon set down his barley water, and began crumbling
his bread.

"It's what you appear to be doing," he said: "Do you realise whose
daughter she is?"

"Can't the dead past bury its dead?"

Jolyon rose.

"Certain things can never be buried."

"I disagree," said June. "It's that which stands in the way of all
happiness and progress. You don't understand the Age, Dad. It's
got no use for outgrown things. Why do you think it matters so
terribly that Jon should know about his mother? Who pays any
attention to that sort of thing now? The marriage laws are just as
they were when Soames and Irene couldn't get a divorce, and you
had to come in. We've moved, and they haven't. So nobody cares.
Marriage without a decent chance of relief is only a sort of
slave-owning; people oughtn't to own each other. Everybody sees
that now. If Irene broke such laws, what does it matter?"

"It's not for me to disagree there," said Jolyon; "but that's all
quite beside the mark. This is a matter of human feeling."

"Of course, it is," cried June, "the human feeling of those two
young things."

"My dear," said Jolyon with gentle exasperation, "you're talking
nonsense."

"I'm not. If they prove to be really fond of each other, why
should they be made unhappy because of the past?"

"YOU haven't lived that past. I have--through the feelings of my
wife; through my own nerves and my imagination, as only one who is
devoted can."

June, too, rose, and began to wander restlessly.

"If," she said suddenly, "she were the daughter of Phil Bosinney,
I could understand you better. Irene loved him, she never loved
Soames."

Jolyon uttered a deep sound--the sort of noise an Italian peasant
woman utters to her mule. His heart had begun beating furiously,
but he paid no attention to it, quite carried away by his
feelings.

"That shows how little you understand. Neither I nor Jon, if I
know him, would mind a love-past. It's the brutality of a union
without love. This girl is the daughter of the man who once owned
Jon's mother as a negro-slave was owned. You can't lay that ghost;
don't try to, June! It's asking us to see Jon joined to the flesh
and blood of the man who possessed Jon's mother against her will.
It's no good mincing words; I want it clear once for all. And now
I mustn't talk any more, or I shall have to sit up with this all
night." And, putting his hand over his heart, Jolyon turned his
back on his daughter and stood looking at the river Thames.

June, who by nature never saw a hornets' nest until she had put
her head into it, was seriously alarmed. She came and slipped her
arm through his. Not convinced that he was right, and she herself
wrong, because that was not natural to her, she was yet profoundly
impressed by the obvious fact that the subject was very bad for
him. She rubbed her cheek against his shoulder, and said nothing.

After taking her elderly cousin across, Fleur did not land at
once, but pulled in among the reeds, into the sunshine. The
peaceful beauty of the afternoon seduced for a little one not much
given to the vague and poetic. In the field beyond the bank where
her skiff lay up, a machine drawn by a grey horse was turning an
early field of hay. She watched the grass cascading over and
behind the light wheels with fascination--it looked so green and
fresh. The click and swish blended with the rustle of the willows
and the poplars, and the cooing of a wood-pigeon, in a true river
song. Alongside, in the grey-green water, weeds like yellow snakes
were writhing and nosing with the current; pied cattle on the
farther side stood in the shade lazily swishing their tails. It
was an afternoon to dream. And she took out Jon's letters--not
flowery effusions, but haunted in their recital of things seen and
done by a longing very agreeable to her, and all ending "Your
devoted J." Fleur was not sentimental, her desires were ever
concrete and concentrated, but what poetry there was in the
daughter of Soames and Annette had certainly in those weeks of
waiting gathered round her memories of Jon. They all belonged to
grass and blossom, flowers and running water. She enjoyed him in
the scents absorbed by her crinkling nose. The stars could
persuade her that she was standing beside him in the centre of the
map of Spain; and of an early morning the dewy cobwebs, the hazy
sparkle and promise of the day down in the garden, were Jon
personified to her.

Two white swans came majestically by, while she was reading his
letters, followed by their brood of six young swans in a line,
with just so much space between each tail and head, a flotilla of
grey destroyers. Fleur thrust her letters back, got out her
sculls, and pulled up to the landing-stage. Crossing the lawn, she
wondered whether she should tell her father of June's visit. If he
learned of it from the butler, he might think it odd if she did
not. It gave her, too, another chance to startle out of him the
reason of the feud. She went, therefore, up the road to meet him.

Soames had gone to look at a patch of ground on which the Local
Authorities were proposing to erect a Sanatorium for people with
weak lungs. Faithful to his native individualism, he took no part
in local affairs, content to pay the rates which were always going
up. He could not, however, remain indifferent to this new and
dangerous scheme. The site was not half a mile from his own house.
He was quite of opinion that the country should stamp out
tuberculosis; but this was not the place. It should be done
farther away. He took, indeed, an attitude common to all true
Forsytes, that disability of any sort in other people was not his
affair, and the State should do its business without prejudicing
in any way the natural advantages which he had acquired or
inherited. Francie, the most free-spirited Forsyte of his
generation (except perhaps that fellow Jolyon) had once asked him
in her malicious way: "Did you ever see the name Forsyte in a
subscription list, Soames?" That was as it might be, but a
Sanatorium would depreciate the neighbourhood, and he should
certainly sign the petition which was being got up against it.
Returning with this decision fresh within him, he saw Fleur
coming.

She was showing him more affection of late, and the quiet time
down here with her in this summer weather had been making him feel
quite young; Annette was always running up to Town for one thing
or another, so that he had Fleur to himself almost as much as he
could wish. To be sure, young Mont had formed a habit of appearing
on his motor-cycle almost every other day. Thank goodness, the
young fellow had shaved off his half-toothbrushes, and no longer
looked like a mountebank! With a girl friend of Fleur's who was
staying in the house, and a neighbouring youth or so, they made
two couples after dinner, in the hall, to the music of the
electric pianola which performed Fox-trots unassisted, with a
surprised shine on its expressive surface. Annette, even, now and
then passed gracefully up and down in the arms of one or other of
the young men. And Soames, coming to the drawing-room door, would
lift his nose a little sideways, and watch them, waiting to catch
a smile from Fleur; then move back to his chair by the drawing-
room hearth, to peruse The Times or some other collector's price-
list. To his ever-anxious eyes Fleur showed no sign of remembering
that caprice of hers.

When she reached him on the dusty road, he slipped his hand within
her arm.

"Who, do you think, has been to see you, Dad? She couldn't wait!
Guess!"

"I never guess," said Soames uneasily. "Who?"

"Your cousin, June Forsyte."

Quite unconsciously Soames gripped her arm. "What did SHE want?"

"I don't know. But it was rather breaking through the feud, wasn't
it?"

"Feud? What feud?"

"The one that exists in your imagination, dear."

Soames dropped her arm. Was she mocking, or trying to draw him on?

"I suppose she wanted me to buy a picture," he said at last.

"I don't think so. Perhaps it was just family affection."

"She's only a first cousin once removed," muttered Soames.

"And the daughter of your enemy."

"What d'you mean by that?"

"I beg your pardon, dear; I thought he was."

"Enemy!" repeated Soames. "It's ancient history. I don't know
where you get your notions."

"From June Forsyte."

It had come to her as an inspiration that if he thought she knew,
or were on the edge of knowledge, he would tell her.

Soames was startled, but she had underrated his caution and
tenacity.

"If you know," he said coldly, "why do you plague me?"

Fleur saw that she had overreached herself.

"I don't want to plague you, darling. As you say, why want to know
more? Why want to know anything of that 'small' mystery--Je m'en
fiche, as Profond says."

"That chap!" said Soames profoundly.

That chap, indeed, played a considerable, if invisible, part this
summer--for he had not turned up again. Ever since the Sunday when
Fleur had drawn attention to him prowling on the lawn, Soames had
thought of him a good deal, and always in connection with Annette,
for no reason, except that she was looking handsomer than for some
time past. His possessive instinct, subtler, less formal, more
elastic since the war, kept all misgiving underground. As one
looks on some American river, quiet and pleasant, knowing that an
alligator perhaps is lying in the mud with his snout just raised
and indistinguishable from a snag of wood--so Soames looked on the
river of his own existence, subconscious of Monsieur Profond,
refusing to see more than the suspicion of his snout. He had at
this epoch in his life practically all he wanted, and was as
nearly happy as his nature would permit. His senses were at rest;
his affections found all the vent they needed in his daughter; his
collection was well known, his money well invested; his health
excellent, save for a touch of liver now and again; he had not yet
begun to worry seriously about what would happen after death,
inclining to think that nothing would happen. He resembled one of
his own gilt-edged securities, and to knock the gilt off by seeing
anything he could avoid seeing, would be, he felt instinctively,
perverse and retrogressive. Those two crumpled rose-leaves,
Fleur's caprice and Monsieur Profond's snout, would level away if
he lay on them industriously.

That evening Chance, which visits the lives of even the best-
invested Forsytes, put a clue into Fleur's hands. Her father came
down to dinner without a handkerchief, and had occasion to blow
his nose.

"I'll get you one, dear," she had said, and run upstairs. In the
sachet where she sought for it--an old sachet of very faded silk--
there were two compartments: one held handkerchiefs; the other was
buttoned, and contained something flat and hard. By some childish
impulse Fleur unbuttoned it. There was a frame and in it a
photograph of herself as a little girl. She gazed at it,
fascinated, as one is by one's own presentment. It slipped under
her fidgeting thumb, and she saw that another photograph was
behind. She pressed her own down further, and perceived a face,
which she seemed to know, of a young woman, very good-looking, in
a very old style of evening dress. Slipping her own photograph up
over it again, she took out a handkerchief and went down. Only on
the stairs did she identify that face. Surely--surely Jon's
mother! The conviction came as a shock. And she stood still in a
flurry of thought. Why, of course! Jon's father had married the
woman her father had wanted to marry, had cheated him out of her,
perhaps. Then, afraid of showing by her manner that she had
lighted on his secret, she refused to think further, and, shaking
out the silk handkerchief, entered the dining-room.

"I chose the softest, Father."

"H'm!" said Soames; "I only use those after a cold. Never mind!"

That evening passed for Fleur in putting two and two together;
recalling the look on her father's face in the confectioner's
shop--a look strange, and coldly intimate, a queer look. He must
have loved that woman very much to have kept her photograph all
this time, in spite of having lost her. Unsparing and matter-of-
fact, her mind darted to his relations with her own mother. Had he
ever really loved HER? She thought not. Jon was the son of the
woman he had really loved. Surely, then, he ought not to mind his
daughter loving him; it only wanted getting used to. And a sigh of
sheer relief was caught in the folds of her nightgown slipping
over her head.





III

MEETINGS


Youth only recognises Age by fits and starts. Jon, for one, had
never really seen his father's age till he came back from Spain.
The face of 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 towards 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 towards the Iseeum Club, to
which he had just been elected.

"Hallo! young man! Where are you off to?"

Jon flushed. "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." And 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 for ever! 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 in the chaps, pervaded with such
freemasonical deference. He seemed to hang on George Forsyte's
lips, to watch the gloat in his eye with a kind of sympathy, to
follow the movements of the heavy club-marked silver fondly. His
liveried arm and confidential voice alarmed Jon, they came so
secretly over one's shoulder.

Except for George's: "Your grandfather tipped me once; he was a
deuced good judge of a cigar!" neither he nor the other past
master took any notice of him, and he was grateful for this. The
talk was all about the breeding, points, and prices of horses, and
he listened to it vaguely at first, wondering how it was possible
to retain so much knowledge in a head. He could not take his eyes
off the dark past master--what he said was so deliberate and
discouraging--such heavy, queer, smiled-out words. Jon was
thinking of butterflies, when he heard him say:

"I want to see Mr. Soames Forsyde take an interest in 'orses."

"Old Soames! He's too dry a file!"

With all his might Jon tried not to grow red, while the dark past
master went on.

"His daughter's an attractive small girl. Mr. Soames Forsyde is a
bit old-fashioned. I want to see him have a pleasure some day."

George Forsyte grinned. "Don't you worry; he's not so miserable as
he looks. He'll never show he's enjoying anything--they might try
and take it from him. Old Soames! Once bit, twice shy!"

"Well, Jon," said Val hastily, "if you've finished, we'll go and
have coffee."

"Who were those?" Jon asked on the stairs: "I didn't quite--"

"Old George Forsyte is a first cousin of your father's, and of my
uncle Soames. He's always been here. The other chap, Profond, is a
queer fish. I think he's hanging round Soames' wife, if you ask
me!"

Jon looked at him, startled. "But that's awful," he said: "I mean
--for Fleur."

"Don't suppose Fleur cares very much; she's very up-to-date."

"Her mother!"

"You're very green, Jon."

Jon grew red. "Mothers," he stammered angrily, "are different."

"You're right," said Val suddenly; "but things aren't what they
were when I was your age. There's a 'Tomorrow we die' feeling.
That's what old George meant about my uncle Soames. HE doesn't
mean to die tomorrow."

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