“My word, Mr. Soames!” he said, and it was clear that the lawyer in him had utterly wiped out the man: “My word! Why, there are two babies now, and some quite young children — if one of them lives to be eighty — it’s not a great age — and add twenty-one — that’s a hundred years; and Mr. Timothy worth a hundred and fifty thousand pound if he’s worth a penny. Compound interest at five per cent doubles you in fourteen years. In fourteen years three hundred thousand — six hundred thousand in twenty-eight — twelve hundred thousand in forty-two — twenty-four hundred thousand in fifty-six — four million eight hundred thousand in seventy — nine million six hundred thousand in eighty-four — Why, in a hundred years it’ll be twenty million! And we shan’t live to see it! It IS a Will!”
Soames said dryly: “Anything may happen. The State might take the lot; they’re capable of anything in these days.”
“And carry five,” said Gradman to himself. “I forgot — Mr. Timothy’s in Consols; we shan’t get more than two per cent with this income tax. To be on the safe side, say seven million. Still, that’s a pretty penny.”
Soames rose and handed him the Will. “You’re going into the City. Take care of that, and do what’s necessary. Advertise; but there are no debts. When’s the sale?”
“Tuesday week,” said Gradman. “Life or lives in bein’ and twenty-one years afterwards — it’s a long way off. But I’m glad he’s left it in the family.” ...
The sale — not at Jobson’s, in view of the Victorian nature of the effects — was far more freely attended than the funeral, though not by Cook and Smither, for Soames had taken it on himself to give them their hearts’ desires. Winifred was present, Euphemia, and Francie, and Eustace had come in his car. The miniatures, Barbizons, and J. R. drawings had been bought in by Soames; and relics of no marketable value were set aside in an off-room for members of the family who cared to have mementos. These were the only restrictions upon bidding characterised by an almost tragic langour. Not one piece of furniture, no picture or porcelain figure appealed to modern taste. The humming-birds had fallen like autumn leaves when taken from where they had not hummed for sixty years. It was painful to Soames to see the chairs his aunts had sat on, the little grand piano they had practically never played, the books whose outsides they had gazed at, the china they had dusted, the curtains they had drawn, the hearth-rug which had warmed their feet; above all, the beds they had lain and died in — sold to little dealers, and the housewives of Fulham. And yet — what could one do? Buy them and stick them in a lumber-room? No; they had to go the way of all flesh and furniture, and be worn out. But when they put up Aunt Ann’s sofa and were going to knock it down for thirty shillings, he cried out, suddenly: “Five pounds!” The sensation was considerable, and the sofa his.
When that little sale was over in the fusty saleroom, and those Victorian ashes scattered, he went out into the misty October sunshine feeling as if cosiness had died out of the world, and the board “To Let” was up, indeed. Revolutions on the horizon; Fleur in Spain; no comfort in Annette; no Timothy’s on the Bayswater Road. In the irritable desolation of his soul he went into the Goupenor Gallery. That chap Jolyon’s water-colours were on view there. He went in to look down his nose at them — it might give him some faint satisfaction. The news had trickled through from June to Val’s wife, from her to Val, from Val to his mother, from her to Soames, that the house — the fatal house at Robin Hill — was for sale, and Irene going to join her boy out in British Columbia, or some such place. For one wild moment the thought had come to Soames: ‘Why shouldn’t I buy it back? I meant it for my —!’ No sooner come than gone. Too lugubrious a triumph; with two many humiliating memories for himself and Fleur. She would never live there after what had happened. No, the place must go its way to some peer or profiteer. It had been a bone of contention from the first, the shell of the feud and with the woman gone, it was an empty shell. “For Sale or To Let.” With his mind’s eye he could see that board raised high above the ivied wall which he had built.
He passed through the first of the two rooms in the Gallery. There was certainly a body of work! And now that the fellow was dead it did not seem so trivial. The drawings were pleasing enough, with quite a sense of atmosphere, and something individual in the brush work. ‘His father and my father; he and I; his child and mine!’ thought Soames. So it had gone on! And all about that woman! Softened by the events of the past week, affected by the melancholy beauty of the autumn day, Soames came nearer than he had ever been to realisation of that truth — passing the understanding of a Forsyte pure — that the body of Beauty has a spiritual essence, uncapturable save by a devotion which thinks not of self. After all, he was near that truth in his devotion to his daughter; perhaps that made him understand a little how he had missed the prize. And there, among the drawings of his kinsman, who had attained to that which he had found beyond his reach, he thought of him and her with a tolerance which surprised him. But he did not buy a drawing.
Just as he passed the seat of custom on his return to the outer air he met with a contingency which had not been entirely absent from his mind when he went into the Gallery — Irene, herself, coming in. So she had not gone yet, and was still paying farewell visits to that fellow’s remains! He subdued the little involuntary leap of his subconsciousness, the mechanical reaction of his senses to the charm of this once-owned woman, and passed her with averted eyes. But when he had gone by he could not for the life of him help looking back. This, then, was finality — the heat and stress of his life, the madness and the longing thereof, the long, the only defeat he had known, would be over when she faded from his view this time; even such memories had their own queer aching value. She, too, was looking back. Suddenly she lifted her gloved hand, her lips smiled faintly, her dark eyes seemed to speak. It was the turn of Soames to make no answer to that smile and that little farewell wave; he went out into the fashionable street quivering from head to foot. He knew what she had meant to say: “Now that I am going for ever out of the reach of you and yours — forgive me; I wish you well.” That was the meaning; last sign of that terrible reality — passing morality, duty, common sense — her aversion from him who had owned her body but had never touched her spirit or her heart. It hurt; yes — more than if she had kept her mask unmoved, her hand unlifted.
Three days later, in that fast-yellowing October, Soames took a taxi-cab to Highgate Cemetery and mounted through its white forest to the Forsyte vault. Close to the cedar, above catacombs and columbaria, tall, ugly, and individual, it looked like an apex of the competitive system. He could remember a discussion wherein Swithin had advocated the addition to its face of the pheasant proper. The proposal had been rejected in favour of a wreath in stone, above the stark words: “The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte: 1850.” It was in good order. All trace of the recent interment had been removed, and its sober grey gloomed reposefully in the sunshine. The whole family lay there now, except old Jolyon’s wife, who had gone back under a contract to her own family vault in Suffolk; old Jolyon himself lying at Robin Hill; and Susan Hayman, cremated so that none knew where she might be. Soames gazed at it with satisfaction — massive, needing little attention; and this was important, for he was well aware that no one would attend to it when he himself was gone, and he would have to be looking out for lodgings soon. He might have twenty years before him, but one never knew. Twenty years without an aunt or uncle, with a wife of whom one had better not know anything, with a daughter gone from home. His mood inclined to melancholy and retrospection. This cemetery was quite full now — of people with extraordinary names, buried in extraordinary taste. Still, they had a fine view up here, right over London. Annette had once given him a story to read by that Frenchman, Maupassant — a most lugubrious concern, where all the skeletons emerged from their graves one night, and all the pious inscriptions on the stones were altered to descriptions of their sins. Not a true story at all. He didn’t know about the French, but there was not much real harm in English people except their teeth and their taste, which were certainly deplorable. “The family vault of Jolyon Forsyte, 1850.” A lot of people had been buried here since then — a lot of English life crumbled to mould and dust! The boom of an airplane passing under the gold-tinted clouds caused him to lift his eyes. The deuce of a lot of expansion had gone on. But it all came back to a cemetery — to a name and a date on a tomb. And he thought with a curious pride that he and his family had done little or nothing to help this feverish expansion. Good solid middlemen, they had gone to work with dignity to manage and possess. “Superior Dosset,” indeed, had built, in a dreadful, and Jolyon painted, in a doubtful period, but so far as he remembered not another of them all had soiled his hands by creating anything — unless you counted Val Dartie and his horse-breeding. Collectors, solicitors, barristers, merchants, publishers, accountants, directors, land agents, even soldiers — there they had been! The country had expanded, as it were, in spite of them. They had checked, controlled, defended, and taken advantage of the process — and when you considered how “Superior Dosset” had begun life with next to nothing, and his lineal descendants already owned what old Gradman estimated at between a million and a million and a half, it was not so bad! And yet he sometimes felt as if the family bolt was shot, their possessive instinct dying out. They seemed unable to make money — this fourth generation; they were going into art, literature, farming, or the army; or just living on what was left them — they had no push and no tenacity. They would die out if they didn’t take care.