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?"