“Sheer idleness!”
“What’s the fruit?”
Fleur laughed.
“Exactly! But this is the soul of a fruit-tree, Michael–not its body!”
“I might have known,” said Michael, ruefully. “Anyway, may I have it for my study when it’s done? It’s got real feeling.”
Fleur felt a queer gratitude. “Shall I label it ‘The Uneatable Fruit’?”
“Certainly not–it looks highly luscious; you’d have to eat it over a basin, like a mango.”
Fleur laughed again.
“Steward!” she said. And, to Michael bending down to kiss her, she inclined her cheek. At least he should guess nothing of her feelings. And, indeed, the French blood in her never ran cold at one of whom she was fond but did not love; the bitter spice which tinctured the blood of most of the Forsytes preserved the jest of her position. She was still the not unhappy wife of a good comrade and best of fellows, who, whatever she did herself, would never do anything ungenerous or mean. Fastidious recoilings from unloved husbands of which she read in old-fashioned novels, and of which she knew her father’s first wife had been so guilty, seemed to her rather ludicrous. Promiscuity was in the air; a fidelity of the spirit so logical that it extended to the motions of the body, was paleolithic, or at least Victorian and ‘middle-class.’ Fulness of life could never be reached on those lines. And yet the frank paganism, advocated by certain masters of French and English literature, was also debarred from Fleur, by its austerely logical habit of going the whole hog. There wasn’t enough necessary virus in her blood, no sex mania about Fleur; indeed, hereunto, that obsession had hardly come her way at all. But now–new was the feeling, as well as old, that she had for Jon; and the days went by in scheming how, when she was free again, she could see him and hear his voice and touch him as she had touched him by the enclosure rails while the horses went flashing by.
Chapter VI.
FORMING A COMMITTEE
In the meantime Michael was not so unconscious as she thought, for when two people live together, and one of them is still in love, he senses change as a springbok will scent drought. Memories of that lunch, and of his visit to June, were still unpleasantly green. In his public life–that excellent anodyne for its private counterpart–he sought distraction, and made up his mind to go ‘all out’ for his Uncle Hilary’s slum-conversion scheme. Having amassed the needed literature, he began considering to whom he should go first, well aware that public bodies are centrifugal. Round what fine figure of a public man should he form his committee? Sir Timothy Fanfield and the Marquess of Shropshire would come in usefully enough later, but, though well known for their hobbies, they ‘cut no ice’ with the general public. A certain magnetism was needed. There was none in any banker he could think of, less in any lawyer or cleric, and no reforming soldier could be otherwise than discredited, until he had carried his reforms, by which time he would be dead. He would have liked an admiral, but they were all out of reach. Retired Prime Ministers were in too lively request, besides being tarred with the brush of Party; and literary idols would be too old, too busy with themselves, too lazy, or too erratic. There remained doctors, business men, governor generals, dukes, and newspaper proprietors. It was at this point that he consulted his father.
Sir Lawrence, who had also been coming to South Square almost daily during Kit’s illness, focussed the problem with his eyeglass, and said nothing for quite two minutes.
“What do you mean by magnetism, Michael? The rays of a setting or of a rising sun?”
“Both, if possible, Dad.”
“Difficult,” said his progenitor, “difficult. One thing’s certain–you can’t afford cleverness.”
“How?”
“The public have suffered from it too much. Besides, we don’t really like it in this country, Michael. Character, my dear, character!”
Michael groaned.
“Yes, I know,” said Sir Lawrence, “awfully out of date with you young folk.” Then, raising his loose eyebrow abruptly so that his eyeglass fell on to the problem, he added: “Eureka! Wilfred Bentworth! The very man–last of the squires–reforming the slums. It’s what you’d call a stunt.”
“Old Bentworth?” repeated Michael, dubiously.
“He’s only my age–sixty-eight, and got nothing to do with politics.”
“But isn’t he stupid?”
“There speaks your modern! Rather broad in the beam, and looking a little like a butler with a moustache, but–stupid? No. Refused a peerage three times. Think of the effect of that on the public!”
“Wilfred Bentworth? I should never have thought of him–always looked on him as the professional honest man,” murmured Michael.
“But he IS honest!”
“Yes, but when he speaks, he always alludes to it.”
“That’s true,” said Sir Lawerence, “but one must have a defect. He’s got twenty thousand acres, and knows all about fatting stock. He’s on a railway board; he’s the figurehead of his county’s cricket, and chairman of a big hospital. Everybody knows him. He has Royalty to shoot; goes back to Saxon times; and is the nearest thing to John Bull left. In any other country he’d frighten the life out of any scheme, but in England–well, if you can get him, Michael, your job’s half done.”
Michael looked quizzically at his parent. Did Bart quite understand the England of today? His mind roved hurriedly over the fields of public life. By George! He did!
“How shall I approach him, Dad? Will you come on the committee yourself? You know him; and we could go together.”
“If you’d really like to have me,” said Sir Lawrence, almost wistfully, “I will. It’s time I did some work again.”
“Splendid! I think I see your point about Bentworth. Beyond suspicion–has too much already to have anything to gain, and isn’t clever enough to take in anyone if he wanted to.”
Sir Lawrence nodded. “Add his appearance; that counts tremendously in a people that have given up the land as a bad job. We still love to think of beef. It accounts for a good many of our modern leaderships. A people that’s got away from its base, and is drifting after it knows not what, wants beam, beef, beer–or at least port–in its leaders. There’s something pathetic about that, Michael. What’s today–Thursday? This’ll be Bentworth’s board day. Shall we strike while the iron’s hot? We’ll very likely catch him at Burton’s.”
“Good!” said Michael, and they set forth.
“This club,” murmured Sir Lawrence, as they were going up the steps of Burton’s Club, “is confined to travellers, and I don’t suppose Bentworth’s ever travelled a yard. That shows how respected he is. No, I’m wronging him. I remember he commanded his yeomanry in the Boer War. ‘The Squire’ in the Club, Smileman?”
“Yes, Sir Lawrence; just come in.”
The “last of the squires” was, indeed, in front of the tape. His rosy face, with clipped white moustache, and hard, little, white whiskers, was held as if the news had come to him, not he to the news. Banks might inflate and Governments fall, wars break out and strikes collapse, but there would be no bending of that considerable waist, no flickering in the steady blue stare from under eyebrows a little raised at their outer ends. Rather bald, and clipped in what hair was left, never did man look more perfectly shaved; and the moustache ending exactly where the lips ended, gave an extreme firmness to the general good humour of an open-air face.
Looking from him to his own father–thin, quick, twisting, dark, as full of whims as a bog is of snipe–Michael was impressed. A whim, to Wilfred Bentworth, would be strange fowl indeed! ‘However he’s managed to keep out of politics,’ thought Michael, ‘I can’t conceive.’
“‘Squire’–my son–a sucking statesman. We’ve come to ask you to lead a forlorn hope. Don’t smile! You’re ‘for it,’ as they say in this Bonzoid age. We propose to shelter ourselves behind you in the breach.”
“Eh! What? Sit down! What’s all this?”
“It’s a matter of the slums, ‘if you know what I mean,’ as the lady said. But go ahead, Michael!”
Michael went ahead. Having developed his uncle’s thesis and cited certain figures, he embroidered them with as much picturesque detail as he could remember, feeling rather like a fly attacking the flanks of an ox and watching his tail.
“When you drive a nail into the walls, sir,” he ended, “things come out.”
“Good God!” said the squire suddenly. “Good God!”
“One doubts the good, there,” put in Sir Lawrence.
The squire stared.
“Irreverent beggar,” he said. “I don’t know Charwell; they say he’s cracked.”
“Hardly that,” murmured Sir Lawrence; “merely unusual, like most members of really old families.”
The early English specimen in the chair before him twinkled.
“The Charwells, you know,” went on Sir Lawrence, “were hoary when that rascally lawyer, the first Mont, founded us under James the First.”
“Oh!” said the squire. “Are you one of HIS precious creations? I didn’t know.”
“You’re not familiar with the slums, sir?” said Michael, feeling that they must not wander in the mazes of descent.
“What! No. Ought to be, I suppose. Poor devils!”
“It’s not so much,” said Michael, cunningly, “the humanitarian side, as the deterioration of stock, which is so serious.”
“M’m?” said the squire. “Do you know anything about stock-breeding?”
Michael shook his head.
“Well, you can take it from me that it’s nearly all heredity. You could fat a slum population, but you can’t change their character!”
“I don’t think there’s anything very wrong with their character,” said Michael.
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