n 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,