第127章

HIS

He had much to see to,that night and all next day.A telegram at breakfast reassured him about Annette,and he only caught the last train back to Reading,with Emily's kiss on his forehead and in his ears her words:

"I don't know what I should have done without you,my dear boy."He reached his house at midnight.The weather had changed,was mild again,as though,having finished its work and sent a Forsyte to his last account,it could relax.A second telegram,received at dinner-time,had confirmed the good news of Annette,and,instead of going in,Soames passed down through the garden in the moonlight to his houseboat.He could sleep there quite well.

Bitterly tired,he lay down on the sofa in his fur coat and fell asleep.He woke soon after dawn and went on deck.He stood against the rail,looking west where the river swept round in a wide curve under the woods.In Soames,appreciation of natural beauty was curiously like that of his farmer ancestors,a sense of grievance if it wasn't there,sharpened,no doubt,and civilised,by his researches among landscape painting.But dawn has power to fertilise the most matter-of-fact vision,and he was stirred.It was another world from the river he knew,under that remote cool light;a world into which man had not entered,an unreal world,like some strange shore sighted by discovery.Its colour was not the colour of convention,was hardly colour at all;its shapes were brooding yet distinct;its silence stunning;it had no scent.Why it should move him he could not tell,unless it were that he felt so alone in it,bare of all relationship and all possessions.Into such a world his father might be voyaging,for all resemblance it had to the world he had left.And Soames took refuge from it in wondering what painter could have done it justice.The white-grey water was like--like the belly of a fish!Was it possible that this world on which he looked was all private property,except the water--and even that was tapped!No tree,no shrub,not a blade of grass,not a bird or beast,not even a fish that was not owned.

And once on a time all this was jungle and marsh and water,and weird creatures roamed and sported without human cognizance to give them names;rotting luxuriance had rioted where those tall,care-fully planted woods came down to the water,and marsh-misted reeds on that far side had covered all the pasture.Well!they had got it under,kennelled it all up,labelled it,and stowed it in lawyers'offices.And a good thing too!But once in a way,as now,the ghost of the past came out to haunt and brood and whisper to any human who chanced to be awake:'Out of my unowned loneliness you all came,into it some day you will all return.'

And Soames,who felt the chill and the eeriness of that world-new to him and so very old:the world,unowned,visiting the scene of its past--went down and made himself tea on a spirit-lamp.When he had drunk it,he took out writing materials and wrote two paragraphs:

"On the 20th instant at his residence in Park Lane,James Forsyte,in his ninety-first year.Funeral at noon on the 24th at Highgate.

No flowers by request."