“You think that would be honourable?” he said grimly.
“Sorry, sir!” said Michael, sobered. “Can I help at all?”
“Yes; by dropping your levity, and taking care to keep wind of this matter away from Fleur.”
“I will,” said Michael, earnestly: “I promise you. I’ll Dutch-oyster the whole thing. What’s your line going to be?”
“We shall have to call the shareholders together and explain this dicky-dealing. They’ll very likely take it in bad part.”
“I can’t see why they should. How could you have helped it?”
Soames sniffed.
“There’s no connection in life between reward and your deserts. If the war hasn’t taught you that, nothing will.”
“Well,” said Michael, “Fleur will be down directly. If you’ll excuse me a minute; we’ll continue it in our next.”
Their next did not occur till Fleur had gone to bed.
“Now, sir,” said Michael, “I expect my governor’s at the Aeroplane. He goes there and meditates on the end of the world. Would you like me to ring him up, if your Board meeting’s tomorrow?”
Soames nodded. He himself would not sleep a wink—why should ‘Old Mont’?
Michael went to the Chinese tea chest.
“Bart? This is Michael. Old For—my father-inlaw is here; he’s had a pill… No; Elderson. Could you blow in by any chance and hear?… He’s coming, sir. Shall we stay down, or go up to my study?”
“Down,” muttered Soames, whose eyes were fixed on the white monkey. “I don’t know what we’re all coming to,” he added, suddenly.
“If we did, sir, we should die of boredom.”
“Speak for yourself. All this unreliability! I can’t tell where it’s leading.”
“Perhaps there’s somewhere, sir, that’s neither heaven nor hell.”
“A man of HIS age!”
“Same age as my dad; it was a bad vintage, I expect. If you’d been in the war, sir, it would have cheered you up no end.”
“Indeed!” said Soames.
“It took the linch-pins out of the cart—admitted; but, my Lord! it did give you an idea of the grit there is about, when it comes to being up against it.”
Soames stared. Was this young fellow reading him a lesson against pessimism?
“Look at young Butterfield, the other day,” Michael went on, “going over the top, to Elderson! Look at the girl who sat for ‘the altogether’ in that picture you bought us! She’s the wife of a packer we had, who got hoofed for snooping books. She made quite a lot of money by standing for the nude, and never lost her wicket. They’re going to Australia on it. Yes, and look at that little snooper himself; he snooped to keep her alive after pneumonia, and came down to selling balloons.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said Soames.
“Only grit, sir. You said you didn’t know what we were coming to. Well, look at the unemployed! Is there a country in the world where they stick it as they do here? I get awfully bucked at being English every now and then. Don’t you?”
The words stirred something deep in Soames; but, far from giving it away, he continued to gaze at the white monkey. The restless, inhuman, and yet so human, angry sadness of the creature’s eyes! ‘No whites to them!’ thought Soames: ‘that’s what does it, I expect!’ And George had liked that picture to hang opposite his bed! Well, George had grit—joked with his last breath: very English, George! Very English, all the Forsytes! Old Uncle Jolyon, and his way with shareholders; Swithin, upright, puffy, huge in a too little arm-chair at Timothy’s: ‘All these small fry!’ he seemed to hear the words again; and Uncle Nicholas, whom that chap Elderson reproduced as it were unworthily, spry and all-there, and pretty sensual, but quite above suspicion of dishonesty. And old Roger, with his crankiness, and German mutton! And his own father, James—how he had hung on, long and frail as a reed, hung on and on! And Timothy, preserved in Consols, dying at a hundred! Grit and body in those old English boys, in spite of their funny ways. And there stirred in Soames a sort of atavistic will-power. He would see, and they would see—and that was all about it!
The grinding of a taxi’s wheels brought him back from reverie. Here came ‘Old Mont,’ tittuppy, and light in the head as ever, no doubt. And, instead of his hand, Soames held out Elderson’s letter.
“Your precious schoolfellow’s levanted,” he said.
Sir Lawrence read it through, and whistled.
“What do you think, Forsyte—Constantinople?”
“More likely Monte Carlo,” said Soames gloomily. “Secret commission—it’s not an extraditable offence.”
The odd contortions of that baronet’s face were giving him some pleasure—the fellow seemed to be feeling it, after all.
“I should think he’s really gone to escape his women, Forsyte.”
The chap was incorrigible! Soames shrugged his shoulders almost violently.
“You’d better realise,” he said, “that the fat is in the fire.”
“But surely, my dear Forsyte, it’s been there ever since the French occupied the Ruhr. Elderson has cut his lucky; we appoint some one else. What more is there to it?”
Soames had the peculiar feeling of having overdone his own honesty. If an honourable man, a ninth baronet, couldn’t see the implications of Elderson’s confession, were they really there? Was any fuss and scandal necessary? Goodness knew, HE didn’t want it! He said heavily:
“We now have conclusive evidence of a fraud; we KNOW Elderson was illegally paid for putting through business by which the shareholders have suffered a dead loss. How can we keep this knowledge from them?”
“But the mischief’s done, Forsyte. How will the knowledge help them?”
Soames frowned.
“We’re in a fiduciary position. I’m not prepared to run the risks of concealment. If we conceal, we’re accessory after the fact. The thing might come out at any time.” If that was caution, not honesty, he couldn’t help it.
“I should be glad to spare Elderson’s name. We were at—”
“I’m aware of that,” said Soames, drily.
“But what risk is there of its coming out, Forsyte? Elderson won’t mention it; nor young Butterfield, if you tell him not to. Those who paid the commission certainly won’t. And beyond us three here, no one else knows. It’s not as if we profited in any way.”
Soames was silent. The argument was specious. Entirely unjust, of course, that he should be penalised for what Elderson had done!
“No,” he said, suddenly, “it won’t do. Depart from the law, and you can’t tell where it’ll end. The shareholders have suffered this loss, and they have the right to all the facts within the directors’ knowledge. There might be some means of restitution they could avail themselves of. We can’t judge. It may be they’ve a remedy against ourselves.”
“If that’s so, Forsyte, I’m with you.”
Soames felt disgust. Mont had no business to put it with a sort of gallantry that didn’t count the cost; when the cost, if cost there were, would fall, not on Mont, whose land was heavily mortgaged, but on himself, whose property was singularly realisable.
“Well,” he said, coldly, “remember that tomorrow. I’m going to bed.”
At his open window upstairs he felt no sense of virtue, but he enjoyed a sort of peace. He had taken his line, and there it was!
Chapter IX.
SOAMES DOESN’T GIVE A DAMN
During the month following the receipt of Elderson’s letter, Soames aged more than thirty days. He had forced his policy of disclosure on a doubting Board, the special meeting had been called, and, just as, twenty-three years ago, pursuing divorce from Irene, he had to face the public eye, so now he suffered day and night in dread of that undiscriminating optic. The French had a proverb: “Les absents ont toujours tort!” but Soames had grave doubts about it. Elderson would be absent from that meeting of the shareholders, but—unless he was much mistaken—he himself, who would be present, would come in for the blame. The French were not to be relied on. What with his anxiety about Fleur, and his misgiving about the public eye, he was sleeping badly, eating little, and feeling below par. Annette had recommended him to see a doctor. That was probably why he did not. Soames had faith in doctors for other people; but they had never—he would say—done anything for HIM, possibly because, so far, there had not been anything to do.