The swans had turned their heads, and were looking past him into some distance of their own. One of them uttered a little hiss, wagged its tail, turned as if answering to a rudder, and swam away. The other followed. Their white bodies, their stately necks, passed out of his sight, and he went towards the house.
Annette was in the drawing-room, dressed for dinner, and he thought as he went up-stairs: ‘Handsome is as handsome does.’ Handsome! Except for remarks about the curtains in the drawing-room, and the storm, there was practically no conversation during a meal distinguished by exactitude of quantity and perfection of quality. Soames drank nothing. He followed her into the drawing-room afterwards, and found her smoking a cigarette on the sofa between the two French windows. She was leaning back, almost upright, in a low black frock, with her knees crossed and her blue eyes half closed; grey-blue smoke issued from her red, rather full lips, a fillet bound her chestnut hair, she wore the thinnest silk stockings, and shoes with very high heels showing off her instep. A fine piece in any room! Soames, who held that torn letter in a hand thrust deep into the side-pocket of his dinner-jacket, said:
“I’m going to shut the window; the damp’s lifting in.”
He did so, and stood looking at a David Cox adorning the cream-panelled wall close by.
What was she thinking of? He had never understood a woman in his life — except Fleur — and Fleur not always! His heart beat fast. But if he meant to do it, now was the moment. Turning from the David Cox, he took out the torn letter.
“I’ve had this.”
Her eyes widened, stared at him, and hardened.
Soames handed her the letter.
“It’s torn, but you can read it.” And he turned back to the David Cox — a seapiece, of good tone but without movement enough. ‘I wonder what that chap’s doing at this moment?’ he thought. ‘I’ll astonish him yet.’ Out of the corner of his eye he saw Annette holding the letter rigidly; her eyes moved from side to side under her darkened lashes and frowning darkened eyebrows. She dropped the letter, gave a little shiver, smiled, and said:
“Dirrty!”
“I quite agree,” said Soames; “degrading. Is it true?”
A tooth fastened on her red lower lip. “And what if it were?”
She was brazen!
“Is that all you have to say?”
“No.”
“Well, speak out!”
“What is the good of talking?”
Soames said icily: “So you admit it?”
“I admit nothing. You are a fool to ask. A man like you should not ask. It is dangerous.”
Soames made a tour of the room, to subdue his rising anger.
“Do you remember,” he said, halting in front of her, “what you were when I married you? Working at accounts in a restaurant.”
“Do you remember that I was not half your age?”
Soames broke off the hard encounter of their eyes, and went back to the David Cox.
“I am not going to bandy words. I require you to give up this — friendship. I think of the matter entirely as it affects Fleur.”
“Ah!— Fleur!”
“Yes,” said Soames stubbornly; “Fleur. She is your child as well as mine.”
“It is kind to admit that!”
“Are you going to do what I say?”
“I refuse to tell you.”
“Then I must make you.”
Annette smiled.
“No, Soames,” she said. “You are helpless. Do not say things that you will regret.”
Anger swelled the veins on his forehead. He opened his mouth to vent that emotion, and — could not. Annette went on:
“There shall be no more such letters, I promise you. That is enough.”
Soames writhed. He had a sense of being treated like a child by this woman who had deserved he did not know what.
“When two people have married, and lived like us, Soames, they had better be quiet about each other. There are things one does not drag up into the light for people to laugh at. You will be quiet, then; not for my sake — for your own. You are getting old; I am not, yet. You have made me ver-ry practical.” Soames, who had passed through all the sensations of being choked, repeated dully:
“I require you to give up this friendship.”
“And if I do not?”
“Then — then I will cut you out of my Will.”
Somehow it did not seem to meet the case. Annette laughed.
“You will live a long time, Soames.”
“You — you are a bad woman,” said Soames suddenly.
Annette shrugged her shoulders.
“I do not think so. Living with you has killed things in me, it is true; but I am not a bad woman. I am sensible — that is all. And so will you be when you have thought it over.”
“I shall see this man,” said Soames sullenly, “and warn him off.”
“Mon cher, you are funny. You do not want me, you have as much of me as you want; and you wish the rest of me to be dead. I admit nothing, but I am not going to be dead, Soames, at my age; so you had better be quiet, I tell you. I myself will make no scandal; none. Now, I am not saying any more, whatever you do.”
She reached out, took a French novel off a little table, and opened it. Soames watched her, silenced by the tumult of his feelings. The thought of that man was almost making him want her, and this was a revelation of their relationship, startling to one little given to introspective philosophy. Without saying another word he went out and up to the picture-gallery. This came of marrying a Frenchwoman! And yet, without her there would have been no Fleur! She had served her purpose.
‘She’s right,’ he thought; ‘I can do nothing. I don’t even KNOW that there’s anything in it.’ The instinct of self-preservation warned him to batten down his hatches, to smother the fire with want of air. Unless one believed there was something in a thing, there wasn’t.
That night he went into her room. She received him in the most matter-of-fact way, as if there had been no scene between them. And he returned to his own room with a curious sense of peace. If one didn’t choose to see, one needn’t. And he did not choose — in future he did not choose. There was nothing to be gained by it — nothing! Opening the drawer he took from the sachet a handkerchief, and the framed photograph of Fleur. When he had looked at it a little he slipped it down, and there was that other one — that old one of Irene. An owl hooted while he stood in his window gazing at it. The owl hooted, the red climbing roses seemed to deepen in colour, there came a scent of lime-blossom. God! That had been a different thing! Passion — Memory! Dust!
Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:33:24 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.
To Let, by John Galsworthy
VII June Takes a Hand
One who was a sculptor, a Slav, a sometime resident in New York, an egoist, and impecunious, was to be found of an evening in June Forsyte’s studio on the bank of the Thames at Chiswick. On the evening of July 6, Boris Strumolowski — several of whose works were on show there because they were as yet too advanced to be on show anywhere else — had begun well, with that aloof and rather Christlike silence which admirably suited his youthful, round, broad-cheekboned countenance framed in bright hair banged like a girl’s. June had known him three weeks, and he still seemed to her the principal embodiment of genius, and hope of the future; a sort of Star of the East which had strayed into an unappreciative West. Until that evening he had conversationally confined himself to recording his impressions of the United States, whose dust he had just shaken from off his feet — a country, in his opinion, so barbarous in every way that he had sold practically nothing there, and become an object of suspicion to the police; a country, as he said, without a race of its own, without liberty, equality, or fraternity, without principles, traditions, taste, without — in a word — a soul. He had left it for his own good, and come to the only other country where he could live well. June had dwelt unhappily on him in her lonely moments, standing before his creations — frightening, but powerful and symbolic once they had been explained! That he, haloed by bright hair like an early Italian painting, and absorbed in his genius to the exclusion of all else — the only sign of course by which real genius could be told — should still be a “lame duck” agitated her warm heart almost to the exclusion of Paul Post. And she had begun to take steps to clear her Gallery, in order to fill it with Strumolowski masterpieces. She had at once encountered trouble. Paul Post had kicked; Vospovitch had stung. With all the emphasis of a genius which she did not as yet deny them, they had demanded another six weeks at least of her Gallery. The American stream, still flowing in, would soon be flowing out. The American stream was their right, their only hope, their salvation — since nobody in this “beastly” country cared for Art. June had yielded to the demonstration. After all Boris would not mind their having the full benefit of an American stream, which he himself so violently despised.