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 full, they said--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, 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 was
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.