He was still so wide-awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept down-stairs and out through the study window. It was just light; there was a smell of grass. ‘Fleur!’ he thought; ‘Fleur!’ It was mysteriously white out-of-doors, with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to chirp. ‘I’ll go down into the coppice,’ he thought. He ran down through the fields, reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed into the coppice. Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the larch-trees there was mystery — the air, as it were, composed of that romantic quality. Jon sniffed its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the sharpening light. Fleur! It rhymed with her! And she lived at Mapledurham — a jolly name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find it in the atlas presently. He would write to her. But would she answer? Oh! She must. She had said “Au revoir!” Not good-bye! What luck that she had dropped her handkerchief. He would never have known her but for that. And the more he thought of that handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed. Fleur! It certainly rhymed with her! Rhythm thronged his head; words jostled to be joined together; he was on the verge of a poem.
Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then returned to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his bedroom window out of sheer exhilaration. Then, remembering that the study window was open, he went down and shut it, first removing the ladder, so as to obliterate all traces of his feeling. The thing was too deep to be revealed to mortal soul — even to his mother.
Last updated on Wed Jan 12 09:33:24 2011 for eBooks@Adelaide.
To Let, by John Galsworthy
IV The Mausoleum
There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the condition of “Timothy’s” on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy’s soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte’s body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.
To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese pill-box, a series of layers in the last of which was Timothy. One did not reach him, or so it was reported by members of the family who, out of old-time habit or absent-mindedness, would drive up once in a blue moon and ask after their surviving uncle. Such were Francie, now quite emancipated from God (she frankly avowed atheism), Euphemia, emancipated from old Nicholas, and Winifred Dartie from her “man of the world.” But, after all, everybody was emancipated now, or said they were — perhaps not quite the same thing!
When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station on the morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the expectation of seeing Timothy in the flesh. His heart made a faint demonstration within him while he stood in full south sunlight on the newly whitened doorstep of that little house where four Forsytes had once lived, and now but one dwelt on like a winter fly; the house into which Soames had come and out of which he had gone times without number, divested of, or burdened with, fardels of family gossip; the house of the “old people” of another century, another age.
The sight of Smither — still corseted up to the armpits because the new fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had never been considered “nice” by Aunts Juley and Hester — brought a pale friendliness to Soames’s lips; Smither, still faithfully arranged to old pattern in every detail, an invaluable servant — none such left — smiling back at him, with the words: “Why! it’s Mr. Soames, after all this time! And how are YOU, sir? Mr. Timothy will be so pleased to know you’ve been.”
“How is he?”
“Oh! he keeps fairly bobbish for his age, sir; but of course he’s a wonderful man. As I said to Mrs. Dartie when she was here last: It WOULD please Miss Forsyte and Mrs. Juley and Miss Hester to see how he relishes a baked apple still. But he’s quite deaf. And a mercy, I always think. For what we should have done with him in the air-raids, I don’t know.”
“Ah!” said Soames. “What DID you do with him?”
“We just left him in his bed, and had the bell run down into the cellar, so that Cook and I could hear him if he rang. It would never have done to let him know there was a war on. As I said to Cook, ‘If Mr. Timothy rings, they may do what they like — I’m going up. My dear mistresses would have a fit if they could see him ringing and nobody going to him.’ But he slept through them all beautiful. And the one in the daytime he was having his bath. It WAS a mercy, because he might have noticed the people in the street all looking up — he often looks out of the window.”
“Quite!” murmured Soames. Smither was getting garrulous! “I just want to look round and see if there’s anything to be done.”
“Yes, sir. I don’t think there’s anything except a smell of mice in the dining-room that we don’t know how to get rid of. It’s funny they should be there, and not a crumb, since Mr. Timothy took to not coming down, just before the war. But they’re nasty little things; you never know where they’ll take you next.”
“Does he leave his bed?”
“Oh! yes, sir; he takes nice exercise between his bed and the window in the morning, not to risk a change of air. And he’s quite comfortable in himself; has his Will out every day regular. It’s a great consolation to him — that.”
“Well, Smither, I want to see him, if I can; in case he has anything to say to me.”
Smither coloured up above her corsets.
“It WILL be an occasion!” she said. “Shall I take you round the house, sir, while I send Cook to break it to him?”
“No, you go to him,” said Soames. “I can go round the house by myself.”
One could not confess to sentiment before another, and Soames felt that he was going to be sentimental nosing round those rooms so saturated with the past. When Smither, creaking with excitement, had left him, Soames entered the dining-room and sniffed. In his opinion it wasn’t mice, but incipient wood-rot, and he examined the panelling. Whether it was worth a coat of paint, at Timothy’s age, he was not sure. The room had always been the most modern in the house; and only a faint smile curled Soames’s lips and nostrils. Walls of a rich green surmounted the oak dado; a heavy metal chandelier hung by a chain from a ceiling divided by imitation beams. The pictures had been bought by Timothy, a bargain, one day at Jobson’s sixty years ago — three Snyder “still lifes,” two faintly coloured drawings of a boy and a girl, rather charming, which bore the initials “J.R.”— Timothy had always believed they might turn out to be Joshua Reynolds, but Soames, who admired them, had discovered that they were only John Robinson; and a doubtful Morland of a white pony being shod. Deep-red plush curtains, ten high-backed dark mahogany chairs with deep-red plush seats, a Turkey carpet, and a mahogany dining-table as large as the room was small, such was an apartment which Soames could remember unchanged in soul or body since he was four years old. He looked especially at the two drawings, and thought: ‘I shall buy those at the sale.’
From the dining-room he passed into Timothy’s study. He did not remember ever having been in that room. It was lined from floor to ceiling with volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity. One wall seemed devoted to educational books, which Timothy’s firm had published two generations back — sometimes as many as twenty copies of one book. Soames read their titles and shuddered. The middle wall had precisely the same books as used to be in the library at his own father’s in Park Lane, from which he deduced the fancy that James and his youngest brother had gone out together one day and bought a brace of small libraries. The third wall he approached with more excitement. Here, surely, Timothy’s own taste would be found. It was. The books were dummies. The fourth wall was all heavily curtained window. And turned towards it was a large chair with a mahogany reading-stand attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy of The Times, dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to come down, as if in preparation for the war, seemed waiting for him still. In a corner stood a large globe of that world never visited by Timothy, deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but England, and permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been very sick one Sunday afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat off the pier at Brighton, with Juley and Hester, Swithin and Hatty Chessman; all due to Swithin, who was always taking things into his head, and who, thank goodness, had been sick too. Soames knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty times at least from one or other of them. He went up to the globe, and gave it a spin; it emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch, bringing into his purview a daddy-long-legs which had died on it in latitude 44.