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 absentmindedness, 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’ 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.”