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FORSYTE SAGA
Complete
By John Galsworthy
Contents
PREFACE:
THE MAN OF PROPERTY
PART I
CHAPTER I—“AT HOME” AT OLD JOLYON’S
CHAPTER II—OLD JOLYON GOES TO THE OPERA
CHAPTER III—DINNER AT SWITHIN’S
CHAPTER IV—PROJECTION OF THE HOUSE
CHAPTER V—A FORSYTE MÉNAGE
CHAPTER VI—JAMES AT LARGE
CHAPTER VII—OLD JOLYON’S PECCADILLO
CHAPTER VIII—PLANS OF THE HOUSE
CHAPTER IX—DEATH OF AUNT ANN
PART II
CHAPTER I—PROGRESS OF THE HOUSE
CHAPTER II—JUNE’S TREAT
CHAPTER III—DRIVE WITH SWITHIN
CHAPTER IV—JAMES GOES TO SEE FOR HIMSELF
CHAPTER V—SOAMES AND BOSINNEY CORRESPOND
CHAPTER VI—OLD JOLYON AT THE ZOO
CHAPTER VII—AFTERNOON AT TIMOTHY’S
CHAPTER VIII—DANCE AT ROGER'S
CHAPTER IX—EVENING AT RICHMOND
CHAPTER X—DIAGNOSIS OF A FORSYTE
CHAPTER XI—BOSINNEY ON PAROLE
CHAPTER XII—JUNE PAYS SOME CALLS
CHAPTER XIII—PERFECTION OF THE HOUSE
CHAPTER XIV—SOAMES SITS ON THE STAIRS
PART III
CHAPTER I—MRS. MACANDER’S EVIDENCE
CHAPTER II—NIGHT IN THE PARK
CHAPTER III—MEETING AT THE BOTANICAL
CHAPTER IV—VOYAGE INTO THE INFERNO
CHAPTER V—THE TRIAL
CHAPTER VI—SOAMES BREAKS THE NEWS
CHAPTER VII—JUNE’S VICTORY
CHAPTER VIII—BOSINNEY’S DEPARTURE
CHAPTER IX—IRENE’S RETURN
THE FORSYTE SAGA—VOLUME II
INDIAN SUMMER OF A FORSYTE
I
II
III
IV
V
IN CHANCERY
PART 1
CHAPTER I—AT TIMOTHY’S
CHAPTER II—EXIT A MAN OF THE WORLD
CHAPTER III—SOAMES PREPARES TO TAKE STEPS
CHAPTER IV—SOHO
CHAPTER V—JAMES SEES VISIONS
CHAPTER VI—NO-LONGER-YOUNG JOLYON AT HOME
CHAPTER VII—THE COLT AND THE FILLY
CHAPTER VIII—JOLYON PROSECUTES TRUSTEESHIP
CHAPTER IX—VAL HEARS THE NEWS
CHAPTER X—SOAMES ENTERTAINS THE FUTURE
CHAPTER XI—AND VISITS THE PAST
CHAPTER XII—ON FORSYTE ’CHANGE
CHAPTER XIII—JOLYON FINDS OUT WHERE HE IS
CHAPTER XIV—SOAMES DISCOVERS WHAT HE WANTS
PART II
CHAPTER I—THE THIRD GENERATION
CHAPTER II—SOAMES PUTS IT TO THE TOUCH
CHAPTER III—VISIT TO IRENE
CHAPTER IV—WHERE FORSYTES FEAR TO TREAD
CHAPTER V—JOLLY SITS IN JUDGMENT
CHAPTER VI—JOLYON IN TWO MINDS
CHAPTER VII—DARTIE VERSUS DARTIE
CHAPTER VIII—THE CHALLENGE
CHAPTER IX—DINNER AT JAMES’
CHAPTER X—DEATH OF THE DOG BALTHASAR
CHAPTER XI—TIMOTHY STAYS THE ROT
CHAPTER XII—PROGRESS OF THE CHASE
CHAPTER XIII—“HERE WE ARE AGAIN!”
CHAPTER XIV—OUTLANDISH NIGHT
PART III
CHAPTER I—SOAMES IN PARIS
CHAPTER II—IN THE WEB
CHAPTER III—RICHMOND PARK
CHAPTER IV—OVER THE RIVER
CHAPTER V—SOAMES ACTS
CHAPTER VI—A SUMMER DAY
CHAPTER VII—A SUMMER NIGHT
CHAPTER VIII—JAMES IN WAITING
CHAPTER IX—OUT OF THE WEB
CHAPTER X—PASSING OF AN AGE
CHAPTER XI—SUSPENDED ANIMATION
CHAPTER XII—BIRTH OF A FORSYTE
CHAPTER XIII—JAMES IS TOLD
CHAPTER XIV—HIS
AWAKENING
TO LET
PART I
I.—ENCOUNTER
II.—FINE FLEUR FORSYTE
III.—AT ROBIN HILL
IV.—THE MAUSOLEUM
V.—THE NATIVE HEATH
VI.—JON
VII.—FLEUR
VIII.—IDYLL ON GRASS
IX. GOYA
X.—TRIO
XI.—DUET
XII.—CAPRICE
PART II
I.—MOTHER AND SON
II.—FATHERS AND DAUGHTERS
III.—MEETINGS
IV.—IN GREEN STREET
V.—PURELY FORSYTE AFFAIRS
VI.—SOAMES’ PRIVATE LIFE
VII.—JUNE TAKES A HAND
VIII.—THE BIT BETWEEN THE TEETH
IX.—THE FAT IN THE FIRE
X.—DECISION
XI.—TIMOTHY PROPHESIES
PART III
I.—OLD JOLYON WALKS
II.—CONFESSION
III.—IRENE
IV.—SOAMES COGITATES
V.—THE FIXED IDEA
VI.—DESPERATE
VII.—EMBASSY
VIII.—THE DARK TUNE
IX.—UNDER THE OAK-TREE
X.—FLEUR’S WEDDING
XI.—THE LAST OF THE OLD FORSYTES
Volumes
Volume 1. The Man of Property
Volume 2. Indian Summer of a Forsyte, and In Chancery
Volume 3. Awakening, and To Let
THE MAN OF PROPERTY
TO MY WIFE:
I DEDICATE THE FORSYTE SAGA IN ITS ENTIRETY,
BELIEVING IT TO BE OF ALL MY WORKS THE LEAST UNWORTHY OF ONE WITHOUT
WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT, SYMPATHY AND CRITICISM I COULD NEVER HAVE BECOME
EVEN SUCH A WRITER AS I AM.
PREFACE:
“The Forsyte Saga” was the title originally destined for that
part of it which is called “The Man of Property”; and to adopt it
for the collected chronicles of the Forsyte family has indulged
the Forsytean tenacity that is in all of us. The word Saga might
be objected to on the ground that it connotes the heroic and that
there is little heroism in these pages. But it is used with a
suitable irony; and, after all, this long tale, though it may
deal with folk in frock coats, furbelows, and a gilt-edged
period, is not devoid of the essential heat of conflict.
Discounting for the gigantic stature and blood-thirstiness of old
days, as they have come down to us in fairy-tale and legend, the
folk of the old Sagas were Forsytes, assuredly, in their
possessive instincts, and as little proof against the inroads of
beauty and passion as Swithin, Soames, or even Young Jolyon. And
if heroic figures, in days that never were, seem to startle out
from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming to a Forsyte of the
Victorian era, we may be sure that tribal instinct was even then
the prime force, and that “family” and the sense of home and
property counted as they do to this day, for all the recent
efforts to “talk them out.”
So many people have written and claimed that their families were
the originals of the Forsytes that one has been almost encouraged
to believe in the typicality of an imagined species. Manners
change and modes evolve, and “Timothy’s on the Bayswater Road”
becomes a nest of the unbelievable in all except essentials; we
shall not look upon its like again, nor perhaps on such a one as
James or Old Jolyon. And yet the figures of Insurance Societies
and the utterances of Judges reassure us daily that our earthly
paradise is still a rich preserve, where the wild raiders, Beauty
and Passion, come stealing in, filching security from beneath our
noses. As surely as a dog will bark at a brass band, so will the
essential Soames in human nature ever rise up uneasily against
the dissolution which hovers round the folds of ownership.
“Let the dead Past bury its dead” would be a better saying if the
Past ever died. The persistence of the Past is one of those
tragi-comic blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure
on to the stage to mouth its claim to a perfect novelty.
But no Age is so new as that! Human Nature, under its changing
pretensions and clothes, is and ever will be very much of a
Forsyte, and might, after all, be a much worse animal.
Looking back on the Victorian era, whose ripeness, decline, and
“fall-of” is in some sort pictured in “The Forsyte Saga,” we see
now that we have but jumped out of a frying-pan into a fire. It
would be difficult to substantiate a claim that the case of
England was better in 1913 than it was in 1886, when the Forsytes
assembled at Old Jolyon’s to celebrate the engagement of June to
Philip Bosinney. And in 1920, when again the clan gathered to
bless the marriage of Fleur with Michael Mont, the state of
England is as surely too molten and bankrupt as in the eighties
it was too congealed and low-percented. If these chronicles had
been a really scientific study of transition one would have dwelt
probably on such factors as the invention of bicycle, motor-car,
and flying-machine; the arrival of a cheap Press; the decline of
country life and increase of the towns; the birth of the Cinema.
Men are, in fact, quite unable to control their own inventions;
they at best develop adaptability to the new conditions those
inventions create.
But this long tale is no scientific study of a period; it is
rather an intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty
effects in the lives of men.
The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have
observed, present, except through the senses of other characters,
is a concretion of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive
world.
One has noticed that readers, as they wade on through the salt
waters of the Saga, are inclined more and more to pity Soames,
and to think that in doing so they are in revolt against the mood
of his creator. Far from it! He, too, pities Soames, the tragedy
of whose life is the very simple, uncontrollable tragedy of being
unlovable, without quite a thick enough skin to be thoroughly
unconscious of the fact. Not even Fleur loves Soames as he feels
he ought to be loved. But in pitying Soames, readers incline,
perhaps, to animus against Irene: After all, they think, he
wasn’t a bad fellow, it wasn’t his fault; she ought to have
forgiven him, and so on!
And, taking sides, they lose perception of the simple truth,
which underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is
utterly and definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no
amount of pity, or reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a
repulsion implicit in Nature. Whether it ought to, or no, is
beside the point; because in fact it never does. And where Irene
seems hard and cruel, as in the Bois de Boulogne, or the Goupenor
Gallery, she is but wisely realistic—knowing that the least
concession is the inch which precedes the impossible, the
repulsive ell.
A criticism one might pass on the last phase of the Saga is the
complaint that Irene and Jolyon those rebels against
property—claim spiritual property in their son Jon. But it would
be hypercriticism, as the tale is told. No father and mother
could have let the boy marry Fleur without knowledge of the
facts; and the facts determine Jon, not the persuasion of his
parents. Moreover, Jolyon’s persuasion is not on his own account,
but on Irene’s, and Irene’s persuasion becomes a reiterated:
“Don’t think of me, think of yourself!” That Jon, knowing the
facts, can realise his mother’s feelings, will hardly with
justice be held proof that she is, after all, a Forsyte.
But though the impingement of Beauty and the claims of Freedom on
a possessive world are the main prepossessions of the Forsyte
Saga, it cannot be absolved from the charge of embalming the
upper-middle class. As the old Egyptians placed around their
mummies the necessaries of a future existence, so I have
endeavoured to lay beside the figures of Aunts Ann and Juley and
Hester, of Timothy and Swithin, of Old Jolyon and James, and of
their sons, that which shall guarantee them a little life
here-after, a little balm in the hurried Gilead of a dissolving
“Progress.”
If the upper-middle class, with other classes, is destined to
“move on” into amorphism, here, pickled in these pages, it lies
under glass for strollers in the wide and ill-arranged museum of
Letters. Here it rests, preserved in its own juice: The Sense of
Property. 1922.
THE MAN OF PROPERTY
by JOHN GALSWORTHY
“........You will answer The slaves are
ours.....”
—Merchant of Venice.
TO EDWARD GARNETT
PART I
CHAPTER I “AT HOME” AT OLD JOLYON’S
Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the
Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper
middle-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of these
favoured persons has possessed the gift of psychological analysis
(a talent without monetary value and properly ignored by the
Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only delightful in
itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In plainer
words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family—no branch
of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of
whom existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy—evidence of
that mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so
formidable a unit of society, so clear a reproduction of society
in miniature. He has been admitted to a vision of the dim roads
of social progress, has understood something of patriarchal life,
of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the rise and fall of
nations. He is like one who, having watched a tree grow from its
planting—a paragon of tenacity, insulation, and success, amidst
the deaths of a hundred other plants less fibrous, sappy, and
persistent—one day will see it flourishing with bland, full
foliage, in an almost repugnant prosperity, at the summit of its
efflorescence.
On June 15, eighteen eighty-six, about four of the afternoon, the
observer who chanced to be present at the house of old Jolyon
Forsyte in Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest
efflorescence of the Forsytes.
This was the occasion of an “at home” to celebrate the engagement
of Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyon’s granddaughter, to Mr. Philip
Bosinney. In the bravery of light gloves, buff waistcoats,
feathers and frocks, the family were present, even Aunt Ann, who
now but seldom left the corner of her brother Timothy’s green
drawing-room, where, under the aegis of a plume of dyed pampas
grass in a light blue vase, she sat all day reading and knitting,
surrounded by the effigies of three generations of Forsytes. Even
Aunt Ann was there; her inflexible back, and the dignity of her
calm old face personifying the rigid possessiveness of the family
idea.
When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were
present; when a Forsyte died—but no Forsyte had as yet died; they
did not die; death being contrary to their principles, they took
precautions against it, the instinctive precautions of highly
vitalized persons who resent encroachments on their property.
About the Forsytes mingling that day with the crowd of other
guests, there was a more than ordinarily groomed look, an alert,
inquisitive assurance, a brilliant respectability, as though they
were attired in defiance of something. The habitual sniff on the
face of Soames Forsyte had spread through their ranks; they were
on their guard.
The subconscious offensiveness of their attitude has constituted
old Jolyon’s “home” the psychological moment of the family
history, made it the prelude of their drama.
The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but
as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added
perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an
exaggeration of family importance, and—the sniff. Danger—so
indispensable in bringing out the fundamental quality of any
society, group, or individual—was what the Forsytes scented; the
premonition of danger put a burnish on their armour. For the
first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of
being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.
Over against the piano a man of bulk and stature was wearing two
waistcoats on his wide chest, two waistcoats and a ruby pin,
instead of the single satin waistcoat and diamond pin of more
usual occasions, and his shaven, square, old face, the colour of
pale leather, with pale eyes, had its most dignified look, above
his satin stock. This was Swithin Forsyte. Close to the window,
where he could get more than his fair share of fresh air, the
other twin, James—the fat and the lean of it, old Jolyon called
these brothers—like the bulky Swithin, over six feet in height,
but very lean, as though destined from his birth to strike a
balance and maintain an average, brooded over the scene with his
permanent stoop; his grey eyes had an air of fixed absorption in
some secret worry, broken at intervals by a rapid, shifting
scrutiny of surrounding facts; his cheeks, thinned by two
parallel folds, and a long, clean-shaven upper lip, were framed
within Dundreary whiskers. In his hands he turned and turned a
piece of china. Not far off, listening to a lady in brown, his
only son Soames, pale and well-shaved, dark-haired, rather bald,
had poked his chin up sideways, carrying his nose with that
aforesaid appearance of “sniff,” as though despising an egg which
he knew he could not digest. Behind him his cousin, the tall
George, son of the fifth Forsyte, Roger, had a Quilpish look on
his fleshy face, pondering one of his sardonic jests. Something
inherent to the occasion had affected them all.
Seated in a row close to one another were three ladies—Aunts Ann,
Hester (the two Forsyte maids), and Juley (short for Julia), who
not in first youth had so far forgotten herself as to marry
Septimus Small, a man of poor constitution. She had survived him
for many years. With her elder and younger sister she lived now
in the house of Timothy, her sixth and youngest brother, on the
Bayswater Road. Each of these ladies held fans in their hands,
and each with some touch of colour, some emphatic feather or
brooch, testified to the solemnity of the opportunity.
In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, as became a
host, stood the head of the family, old Jolyon himself. Eighty
years of age, with his fine, white hair, his dome-like forehead,
his little, dark grey eyes, and an immense white moustache, which
drooped and spread below the level of his strong jaw, he had a
patriarchal look, and in spite of lean cheeks and hollows at his
temples, seemed master of perennial youth. He held himself
extremely upright, and his shrewd, steady eyes had lost none of
their clear shining. Thus he gave an impression of superiority to
the doubts and dislikes of smaller men. Having had his own way
for innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it.
It would never have occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary
to wear a look of doubt or of defiance.
Between him and the four other brothers who were present, James,
Swithin, Nicholas, and Roger, there was much difference, much
similarity. In turn, each of these four brothers was very
different from the other, yet they, too, were alike.
Through the varying features and expression of those five faces
could be marked a certain steadfastness of chin, underlying
surface distinctions, marking a racial stamp, too prehistoric to
trace, too remote and permanent to discuss—the very hall-mark and
guarantee of the family fortunes.
Among the younger generation, in the tall, bull-like George, in
pallid strenuous Archibald, in young Nicholas with his sweet and
tentative obstinacy, in the grave and foppishly determined
Eustace, there was this same stamp—less meaningful perhaps, but
unmistakable—a sign of something ineradicable in the family soul.
At one time or another during the afternoon, all these faces, so
dissimilar and so alike, had worn an expression of distrust, the
object of which was undoubtedly the man whose acquaintance they
were thus assembled to make. Philip Bosinney was known to be a
young man without fortune, but Forsyte girls had become engaged
to such before, and had actually married them. It was not
altogether for this reason, therefore, that the minds of the
Forsytes misgave them. They could not have explained the origin
of a misgiving obscured by the mist of family gossip. A story was
undoubtedly told that he had paid his duty call to Aunts Ann,
Juley, and Hester, in a soft grey hat—a soft grey hat, not even a
new one—a dusty thing with a shapeless crown. “So, extraordinary,
my dear—so odd,” Aunt Hester, passing through the little, dark
hall (she was rather short-sighted), had tried to “shoo” it off a
chair, taking it for a strange, disreputable cat—Tommy had such
disgraceful friends! She was disturbed when it did not move.
Like an artist for ever seeking to discover the significant
trifle which embodies the whole character of a scene, or place,
or person, so those unconscious artists—the Forsytes had fastened
by intuition on this hat; it was their significant trifle, the
detail in which was embedded the meaning of the whole matter; for
each had asked himself: “Come, now, should _I_ have paid that
visit in that hat?” and each had answered “No!” and some, with
more imagination than others, had added: “It would never have
come into my head!”
George, on hearing the story, grinned. The hat had obviously been
worn as a practical joke! He himself was a connoisseur of such.
“Very haughty!” he said, “the wild Buccaneer.”
And this mot, the “Buccaneer,” was bandied from mouth to mouth,
till it became the favourite mode of alluding to Bosinney.
Her aunts reproached June afterwards about the hat.
“We don’t think you ought to let him, dear!” they had said.
June had answered in her imperious brisk way, like the little
embodiment of will she was: “Oh! what does it matter? Phil never
knows what he’s got on!”
No one had credited an answer so outrageous. A man not to know
what he had on? No, no! What indeed was this young man, who, in
becoming engaged to June, old Jolyon’s acknowledged heiress, had
done so well for himself? He was an architect, not in itself a
sufficient reason for wearing such a hat. None of the Forsytes
happened to be architects, but one of them knew two architects
who would never have worn such a hat upon a call of ceremony in
the London season.
Dangerous—ah, dangerous! June, of course, had not seen this, but,
though not yet nineteen, she was notorious. Had she not said to
Mrs. Soames—who was always so beautifully dressed—that feathers
were vulgar? Mrs. Soames had actually given up wearing feathers,
so dreadfully downright was dear June!
These misgivings, this disapproval, and perfectly genuine
distrust, did not prevent the Forsytes from gathering to old
Jolyon’s invitation. An “At Home” at Stanhope Gate was a great
rarity; none had been held for twelve years, not indeed, since
old Mrs. Jolyon had died.
Never had there been so full an assembly, for, mysteriously
united in spite of all their differences, they had taken arms
against a common peril. Like cattle when a dog comes into the
field, they stood head to head and shoulder to shoulder, prepared
to run upon and trample the invader to death. They had come, too,
no doubt, to get some notion of what sort of presents they would
ultimately be expected to give; for though the question of
wedding gifts was usually graduated in this way: “What are _you_
givin’. Nicholas is givin’ spoons!”—so very much depended on the
bridegroom. If he were sleek, well-brushed, prosperous-looking,
it was more necessary to give him nice things; he would expect
them. In the end each gave exactly what was right and proper, by
a species of family adjustment arrived at as prices are arrived
at on the Stock Exchange—the exact niceties being regulated at
Timothy’s commodious, red-brick residence in Bayswater,
overlooking the Park, where dwelt Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester.
The uneasiness of the Forsyte family has been justified by the
simple mention of the hat. How impossible and wrong would it have
been for any family, with the regard for appearances which should
ever characterize the great upper middle-class, to feel otherwise
than uneasy!
The author of the uneasiness stood talking to June by the further
door; his curly hair had a rumpled appearance, as though he found
what was going on around him unusual. He had an air, too, of
having a joke all to himself. George, speaking aside to his
brother, Eustace, said:
“Looks as if he might make a bolt of it—the dashing Buccaneer!”
This “very singular-looking man,” as Mrs. Small afterwards called
him, was of medium height and strong build, with a pale, brown
face, a dust-coloured moustache, very prominent cheek-bones, and
hollow checks. His forehead sloped back towards the crown of his
head, and bulged out in bumps over the eyes, like foreheads seen
in the Lion-house at the Zoo. He had sherry-coloured eyes,
disconcertingly inattentive at times. Old Jolyon’s coachman,
after driving June and Bosinney to the theatre, had remarked to
the butler:
“I dunno what to make of ’im. Looks to me for all the world like
an ’alf-tame leopard.” And every now and then a Forsyte would
come up, sidle round, and take a look at him.
June stood in front, fending off this idle curiosity—a little bit
of a thing, as somebody once said, “all hair and spirit,” with
fearless blue eyes, a firm jaw, and a bright colour, whose face
and body seemed too slender for her crown of red-gold hair.
A tall woman, with a beautiful figure, which some member of the
family had once compared to a heathen goddess, stood looking at
these two with a shadowy smile.
Her hands, gloved in French grey, were crossed one over the
other, her grave, charming face held to one side, and the eyes of
all men near were fastened on it. Her figure swayed, so balanced
that the very air seemed to set it moving. There was warmth, but
little colour, in her cheeks; her large, dark eyes were soft.
But it was at her lips—asking a question, giving an answer, with
that shadowy smile—that men looked; they were sensitive lips,
sensuous and sweet, and through them seemed to come warmth and
perfume like the warmth and perfume of a flower.
The engaged couple thus scrutinized were unconscious of this
passive goddess. It was Bosinney who first noticed her, and asked
her name.
June took her lover up to the woman with the beautiful figure.
“Irene is my greatest chum,” she said: “Please be good friends,
you two!”
At the little lady’s command they all three smiled; and while
they were smiling, Soames Forsyte, silently appearing from behind
the woman with the beautiful figure, who was his wife, said:
“Ah! introduce me too!”
He was seldom, indeed, far from Irene’s side at public functions,
and even when separated by the exigencies of social intercourse,
could be seen following her about with his eyes, in which were
strange expressions of watchfulness and longing.
At the window his father, James, was still scrutinizing the marks
on the piece of china.
“I wonder at Jolyon’s allowing this engagement,” he said to Aunt
Ann. “They tell me there’s no chance of their getting married for
years. This young Bosinney” (he made the word a dactyl in
opposition to general usage of a short o) “has got nothing. When
Winifred married Dartie, I made him bring every penny into
settlement—lucky thing, too—they’d ha’ had nothing by this time!”
Aunt Ann looked up from her velvet chair. Grey curls banded her
forehead, curls that, unchanged for decades, had extinguished in
the family all sense of time. She made no reply, for she rarely
spoke, husbanding her aged voice; but to James, uneasy of
conscience, her look was as good as an answer.
“Well,” he said, “I couldn’t help Irene’s having no money. Soames
was in such a hurry; he got quite thin dancing attendance on
her.”
Putting the bowl pettishly down on the piano, he let his eyes
wander to the group by the door.
“It’s my opinion,” he said unexpectedly, “that it’s just as well
as it is.”
Aunt Ann did not ask him to explain this strange utterance. She
knew what he was thinking. If Irene had no money she would not be
so foolish as to do anything wrong; for they said—they said—she
had been asking for a separate room; but, of course, Soames had
not....
James interrupted her reverie:
“But where,” he asked, “was Timothy? Hadn’t he come with them?”
Through Aunt Ann’s compressed lips a tender smile forced its way:
“No, he didn’t think it wise, with so much of this diphtheria
about; and he so liable to take things.”
James answered:
“Well, _he_ takes good care of himself. I can’t afford to take
the care of myself that he does.”
Nor was it easy to say which, of admiration, envy, or contempt,
was dominant in that remark.
Timothy, indeed, was seldom seen. The baby of the family, a
publisher by profession, he had some years before, when business
was at full tide, scented out the stagnation which, indeed, had
not yet come, but which ultimately, as all agreed, was bound to
set in, and, selling his share in a firm engaged mainly in the
production of religious books, had invested the quite conspicuous
proceeds in three per cent. consols. By this act he had at once
assumed an isolated position, no other Forsyte being content with
less than four per cent. for his money; and this isolation had
slowly and surely undermined a spirit perhaps better than
commonly endowed with caution. He had become almost a myth—a kind
of incarnation of security haunting the background of the Forsyte
universe. He had never committed the imprudence of marrying, or
encumbering himself in any way with children.
James resumed, tapping the piece of china:
“This isn’t real old Worcester. I s’pose Jolyon’s told you
something about the young man. From all _I_ can learn, he’s got
no business, no income, and no connection worth speaking of; but
then, I know nothing—nobody tells me anything.”
Aunt Ann shook her head. Over her square-chinned, aquiline old
face a trembling passed; the spidery fingers of her hands pressed
against each other and interlaced, as though she were subtly
recharging her will.
The eldest by some years of all the Forsytes, she held a peculiar
position amongst them. Opportunists and egotists one and
all—though not, indeed, more so than their neighbours—they
quailed before her incorruptible figure, and, when opportunities
were too strong, what could they do but avoid her!
Twisting his long, thin legs, James went on:
“Jolyon, he will have his own way. He’s got no children”—and
stopped, recollecting the continued existence of old Jolyon’s
son, young Jolyon, Jun’s father, who had made such a mess of it,
and done for himself by deserting his wife and child and running
away with that foreign governess. “Well,” he resumed hastily, “if
he likes to do these things, I s’pose he can afford to. Now,
what’s he going to give her? I s’pose he’ll give her a thousand a
year; he’s got nobody else to leave his money to.”
He stretched out his hand to meet that of a dapper, clean-shaven
man, with hardly a hair on his head, a long, broken nose, full
lips, and cold grey eyes under rectangular brows.
“Well, Nick,” he muttered, “how are you?”
Nicholas Forsyte, with his bird-like rapidity and the look of a
preternaturally sage schoolboy (he had made a large fortune,
quite legitimately, out of the companies of which he was a
director), placed within that cold palm the tips of his still
colder fingers and hastily withdrew them.
“I’m bad,” he said, pouting—“been bad all the week; don’t sleep
at night. The doctor can’t tell why. He’s a clever fellow, or I
shouldn’t have him, but I get nothing out of him but bills.”
“Doctors!” said James, coming down sharp on his words: “_I’ve_
had all the doctors in London for one or another of us. There’s
no satisfaction to be got out of _them;_ they’ll tell you
anything. There’s Swithin, now. What good have they done him?
There he is; he’s bigger than ever; he’s enormous; they can’t get
his weight down. Look at him!”
Swithin Forsyte, tall, square, and broad, with a chest like a
pouter pigeon’s in its plumage of bright waistcoats, came
strutting towards them.
“Er—how are you?” he said in his dandified way, aspirating the
“h” strongly (this difficult letter was almost absolutely safe in
his keeping)—“how are you?”
Each brother wore an air of aggravation as he looked at the other
two, knowing by experience that they would try to eclipse his
ailments.
“We were just saying,” said James, “that you don’t get any
thinner.”
Swithin protruded his pale round eyes with the effort of hearing.
“Thinner? I’m in good case,” he said, leaning a little forward,
“not one of your thread-papers like you!”
But, afraid of losing the expansion of his chest, he leaned back
again into a state of immobility, for he prized nothing so highly
as a distinguished appearance.
Aunt Ann turned her old eyes from one to the other. Indulgent and
severe was her look. In turn the three brothers looked at Ann.
She was getting shaky. Wonderful woman! Eighty-six if a day;
might live another ten years, and had never been strong. Swithin
and James, the twins, were only seventy-five, Nicholas a mere
baby of seventy or so. All were strong, and the inference was
comforting. Of all forms of property their respective healths
naturally concerned them most.
“I’m very well in myself,” proceeded James, “but my nerves are
out of order. The least thing worries me to death. I shall have
to go to Bath.”
“Bath!” said Nicholas. “I’ve tried Harrogate. _That’s_ no good.
What I want is sea air. There’s nothing like Yarmouth. Now, when
I go there I sleep....”
“My liver’s very bad,” interrupted Swithin slowly. “Dreadful pain
here;” and he placed his hand on his right side.
“Want of exercise,” muttered James, his eyes on the china. He
quickly added: “I get a pain there, too.”
Swithin reddened, a resemblance to a turkey-cock coming upon his
old face.
“Exercise!” he said. “I take plenty: I never use the lift at the
Club.”
“I didn’t know,” James hurried out. “I know nothing about
anybody; nobody tells me anything....”
Swithin fixed him with a stare:
“What do you do for a pain there?”
James brightened.
“I take a compound....”
“How are you, uncle?”
June stood before him, her resolute small face raised from her
little height to his great height, and her hand outheld.
The brightness faded from James’s visage.
“How are you?” he said, brooding over her. “So you’re going to
Wales to-morrow to visit your young man’s aunts? You’ll have a
lot of rain there. This isn’t real old Worcester.” He tapped the
bowl. “Now, that set I gave your mother when she married was the
genuine thing.”
June shook hands one by one with her three great-uncles, and
turned to Aunt Ann. A very sweet look had come into the old
lady’s face, she kissed the girl’s check with trembling fervour.
“Well, my dear,” she said, “and so you’re going for a whole
month!”
The girl passed on, and Aunt Ann looked after her slim little
figure. The old lady’s round, steel grey eyes, over which a film
like a bird’s was beginning to come, followed her wistfully
amongst the bustling crowd, for people were beginning to say
good-bye; and her finger-tips, pressing and pressing against each
other, were busy again with the recharging of her will against
that inevitable ultimate departure of her own.
“Yes,” she thought, “everybody’s been most kind; quite a lot of
people come to congratulate her. She ought to be very happy.”
Amongst the throng of people by the door, the well-dressed throng
drawn from the families of lawyers and doctors, from the Stock
Exchange, and all the innumerable avocations of the upper-middle
class—there were only some twenty percent of Forsytes; but to
Aunt Ann they seemed all Forsytes—and certainly there was not
much difference—she saw only her own flesh and blood. It was her
world, this family, and she knew no other, had never perhaps
known any other. All their little secrets, illnesses,
engagements, and marriages, how they were getting on, and whether
they were making money—all this was her property, her delight,
her life; beyond this only a vague, shadowy mist of facts and
persons of no real significance. This it was that she would have
to lay down when it came to her turn to die; this which gave to
her that importance, that secret self-importance, without which
none of us can bear to live; and to this she clung wistfully,
with a greed that grew each day! If life were slipping away from
her, _this_ she would retain to the end.
She thought of Jun’s father, young Jolyon, who had run away with
that foreign girl. And what a sad blow to his father and to them
all. Such a promising young fellow! A sad blow, though there had
been no public scandal, most fortunately, Jo’s wife seeking for
no divorce! A long time ago! And when Jun’s mother died, six
years ago, Jo had married that woman, and they had two children
now, so she had heard. Still, he had forfeited his right to be
there, had cheated her of the complete fulfilment of her family
pride, deprived her of the rightful pleasure of seeing and
kissing him of whom she had been so proud, such a promising young
fellow! The thought rankled with the bitterness of a
long-inflicted injury in her tenacious old heart. A little water
stood in her eyes. With a handkerchief of the finest lawn she
wiped them stealthily.
“Well, Aunt Ann?” said a voice behind.
Soames Forsyte, flat-shouldered, clean-shaven, flat-cheeked,
flat-waisted, yet with something round and secret about his whole
appearance, looked downwards and aslant at Aunt Ann, as though
trying to see through the side of his own nose.
“And what do you think of the engagement?” he asked.
Aunt Ann’s eyes rested on him proudly; of all the nephews since
young Jolyon’s departure from the family nest, he was now her
favourite, for she recognised in him a sure trustee of the family
soul that must so soon slip beyond her keeping.
“Very nice for the young man,” she said; “and he’s a good-looking
young fellow; but I doubt if he’s quite the right lover for dear
June.”
Soames touched the edge of a gold-lacquered lustre.
“She’ll tame him,” he said, stealthily wetting his finger and
rubbing it on the knobby bulbs. “That’s genuine old lacquer; you
can’t get it nowadays. It’d do well in a sale at Jobson’s.” He
spoke with relish, as though he felt that he was cheering up his
old aunt. It was seldom he was so confidential. “I wouldn’t mind
having it myself,” he added; “you can always get your price for
old lacquer.”
“You’re so clever with all those things,” said Aunt Ann. “And how
is dear Irene?”
Soames’s smile died.
“Pretty well,” he said. “Complains she can’t sleep; she sleeps a
great deal better than I do,” and he looked at his wife, who was
talking to Bosinney by the door.
Aunt Ann sighed.
“Perhaps,” she said, “it will be just as well for her not to see
so much of June. She’s such a decided character, dear June!”
Soames flushed; his flushes passed rapidly over his flat cheeks
and centered between his eyes, where they remained, the stamp of
disturbing thoughts.
“I don’t know what she sees in that little flibbertigibbet,” he
burst out, but noticing that they were no longer alone, he turned
and again began examining the lustre.
“They tell me Jolyon’s bought another house,” said his father’s
voice close by; “he must have a lot of money—he must have more
money than he knows what to do with! Montpellier Square, they
say; close to Soames! They never told me, Irene never tells me
anything!”
“Capital position, not two minutes from me,” said the voice of
Swithin, “and from my rooms I can drive to the Club in eight.”
The position of their houses was of vital importance to the
Forsytes, nor was this remarkable, since the whole spirit of
their success was embodied therein.
Their father, of farming stock, had come from Dorsetshire near
the beginning of the century.
“Superior Dosset Forsyte,” as he was called by his intimates, had
been a stonemason by trade, and risen to the position of a
master-builder.
Towards the end of his life he moved to London, where, building
on until he died, he was buried at Highgate. He left over thirty
thousand pounds between his ten children. Old Jolyon alluded to
him, if at all, as “A hard, thick sort of man; not much
refinement about him.” The second generation of Forsytes felt
indeed that he was not greatly to their credit. The only
aristocratic trait they could find in his character was a habit
of drinking Madeira.
Aunt Hester, an authority on family history, described him thus:
“I don’t recollect that he ever did anything; at least, not in my
time. He was er—an owner of houses, my dear. His hair about your
Uncle Swithin’s colour; rather a square build. Tall? No—not very
tall” (he had been five feet five, with a mottled face); “a
fresh-coloured man. I remember he used to drink Madeira; but ask
your Aunt Ann. What was _his_ father? He—er—had to do with the
land down in Dorsetshire, by the sea.”
James once went down to see for himself what sort of place this
was that they had come from. He found two old farms, with a cart
track rutted into the pink earth, leading down to a mill by the
beach; a little grey church with a buttressed outer wall, and a
smaller and greyer chapel. The stream which worked the mill came
bubbling down in a dozen rivulets, and pigs were hunting round
that estuary. A haze hovered over the prospect. Down this hollow,
with their feet deep in the mud and their faces towards the sea,
it appeared that the primeval Forsytes had been content to walk
Sunday after Sunday for hundreds of years.
Whether or no James had cherished hopes of an inheritance, or of
something rather distinguished to be found down there, he came
back to town in a poor way, and went about with a pathetic
attempt at making the best of a bad job.
“There’s very little to be had out of that,” he said; “regular
country little place, old as the hills....”
Its age was felt to be a comfort. Old Jolyon, in whom a desperate
honesty welled up at times, would allude to his ancestors as:
“Yeomen—I suppose very small beer.” Yet he would repeat the word
“yeomen” as if it afforded him consolation.
They had all done so well for themselves, these Forsytes, that
they were all what is called “of a certain position.” They had
shares in all sorts of things, not as yet—with the exception of
Timothy—in consols, for they had no dread in life like that of 3
per cent. for their money. They collected pictures, too, and were
supporters of such charitable institutions as might be beneficial
to their sick domestics. From their father, the builder, they
inherited a talent for bricks and mortar. Originally, perhaps,
members of some primitive sect, they were now in the natural
course of things members of the Church of England, and caused
their wives and children to attend with some regularity the more
fashionable churches of the Metropolis. To have doubted their
Christianity would have caused them both pain and surprise. Some
of them paid for pews, thus expressing in the most practical form
their sympathy with the teachings of Christ.
Their residences, placed at stated intervals round the park,
watched like sentinels, lest the fair heart of this London, where
their desires were fixed, should slip from their clutches, and
leave them lower in their own estimations.
There was old Jolyon in Stanhope Place; the Jameses in Park Lane;
Swithin in the lonely glory of orange and blue chambers in Hyde
Park Mansions—he had never married, not he—the Soamses in their
nest off Knightsbridge; the Rogers in Prince’s Gardens (Roger was
that remarkable Forsyte who had conceived and carried out the
notion of bringing up his four sons to a new profession. “Collect
house property, nothing like it,” he would say; “_I_ never did
anything else”).
The Haymans again—Mrs. Hayman was the one married Forsyte
sister—in a house high up on Campden Hill, shaped like a giraffe,
and so tall that it gave the observer a crick in the neck; the
Nicholases in Ladbroke Grove, a spacious abode and a great
bargain; and last, but not least, Timothy’s on the Bayswater
Road, where Ann, and Juley, and Hester, lived under his
protection.
But all this time James was musing, and now he inquired of his
host and brother what he had given for that house in Montpellier
Square. He himself had had his eye on a house there for the last
two years, but they wanted such a price.
Old Jolyon recounted the details of his purchase.
“Twenty-two years to run?” repeated James; “The very house I was
after—you’ve given too much for it!”
Old Jolyon frowned.
“It’s not that I want it,” said James hastily; “it wouldn’t suit
my purpose at that price. Soames knows the house, well—he’ll tell
you it’s too dear—his opinion’s worth having.”
“I don’t,” said old Jolyon, “care a fig for his opinion.”
“Well,” murmured James, “you _will_ have your own way—it’s a good
opinion. Good-bye! We’re going to drive down to Hurlingham. They
tell me Jun’s going to Wales. You’ll be lonely tomorrow. What’ll
you do with yourself? You’d better come and dine with us!”
Old Jolyon refused. He went down to the front door and saw them
into their barouche, and twinkled at them, having already
forgotten his spleen—Mrs. James facing the horses, tall and
majestic with auburn hair; on her left, Irene—the two husbands,
father and son, sitting forward, as though they expected
something, opposite their wives. Bobbing and bounding upon the
spring cushions, silent, swaying to each motion of their chariot,
old Jolyon watched them drive away under the sunlight.
During the drive the silence was broken by Mrs. James.
“Did you ever see such a collection of rumty-too people?”
Soames, glancing at her beneath his eyelids, nodded, and he saw
Irene steal at him one of her unfathomable looks. It is likely
enough that each branch of the Forsyte family made that remark as
they drove away from old Jolyon’s “At Home!”
Amongst the last of the departing guests the fourth and fifth
brothers, Nicholas and Roger, walked away together, directing
their steps alongside Hyde Park towards the Praed Street Station
of the Underground. Like all other Forsytes of a certain age they
kept carriages of their own, and never took cabs if by any means
they could avoid it.
The day was bright, the trees of the Park in the full beauty of
mid-June foliage; the brothers did not seem to notice phenomena,
which contributed, nevertheless, to the jauntiness of promenade
and conversation.
“Yes,” said Roger, “she’s a good-lookin’ woman, that wife of
Soames’. I’m told they don’t get on.”
This brother had a high forehead, and the freshest colour of any
of the Forsytes; his light grey eyes measured the street frontage
of the houses by the way, and now and then he would level his,
umbrella and take a “lunar,” as he expressed it, of the varying
heights.
“She’d no money,” replied Nicholas.
He himself had married a good deal of money, of which, it being
then the golden age before the Married Women’s Property Act, he
had mercifully been enabled to make a successful use.
“What was her father?”
“Heron was his name, a Professor, so they tell me.”
Roger shook his head.
“There’s no money in that,” he said.
“They say her mother’s father was cement.”
Roger’s face brightened.
“But he went bankrupt,” went on Nicholas.
“Ah!” exclaimed Roger, “Soames will have trouble with her; you
mark my words, he’ll have trouble—she’s got a foreign look.”
Nicholas licked his lips.
“She’s a pretty woman,” and he waved aside a crossing-sweeper.
“How did he get hold of her?” asked Roger presently. “She must
cost him a pretty penny in dress!”
“Ann tells me,” replied Nicholas, “he was half-cracked about her.
She refused him five times. James, he’s nervous about it, I can
see.”
“Ah!” said Roger again; “I’m sorry for James; he had trouble with
Dartie.” His pleasant colour was heightened by exercise, he swung
his umbrella to the level of his eye more frequently than ever.
Nicholas’s face also wore a pleasant look.
“Too pale for me,” he said, “but her figures capital!”
Roger made no reply.
“I call her distinguished-looking,” he said at last—it was the
highest praise in the Forsyte vocabulary. “That young Bosinney
will never do any good for himself. They say at Burkitt’s he’s
one of these artistic chaps—got an idea of improving English
architecture; there’s no money in that! I should like to hear
what Timothy would say to it.”
They entered the station.
“What class are you going? I go second.”
“No second for me,” said Nicholas;—“you never know what you may
catch.”
He took a first-class ticket to Notting Hill Gate; Roger a second
to South Kensington. The train coming in a minute later, the two
brothers parted and entered their respective compartments. Each
felt aggrieved that the other had not modified his habits to
secure his society a little longer; but as Roger voiced it in his
thoughts:
“Always a stubborn beggar, Nick!”
And as Nicholas expressed it to himself:
“Cantankerous chap Roger—always was!”
There was little sentimentality about the Forsytes. In that great
London, which they had conquered and become merged in, what time
had they to be sentimental?
CHAPTER II OLD JOLYON GOES TO THE OPERA
At five o’clock the following day old Jolyon sat alone, a cigar
between his lips, and on a table by his side a cup of tea. He was
tired, and before he had finished his cigar he fell asleep. A fly
settled on his hair, his breathing sounded heavy in the drowsy
silence, his upper lip under the white moustache puffed in and
out. From between the fingers of his veined and wrinkled hand the
cigar, dropping on the empty hearth, burned itself out.
The gloomy little study, with windows of stained glass to exclude
the view, was full of dark green velvet and heavily-carved
mahogany—a suite of which old Jolyon was wont to say: “Shouldn’t
wonder if it made a big price some day!”
It was pleasant to think that in the after life he could get more
for things than he had given.
In the rich brown atmosphere peculiar to back rooms in the
mansion of a Forsyte, the Rembrandtesque effect of his great
head, with its white hair, against the cushion of his high-backed
seat, was spoiled by the moustache, which imparted a somewhat
military look to his face. An old clock that had been with him
since before his marriage forty years ago kept with its ticking a
jealous record of the seconds slipping away forever from its old
master.
He had never cared for this room, hardly going into it from one
year’s end to another, except to take cigars from the Japanese
cabinet in the corner, and the room now had its revenge.
His temples, curving like thatches over the hollows beneath, his
cheek-bones and chin, all were sharpened in his sleep, and there
had come upon his face the confession that he was an old man.
He woke. June had gone! James had said he would be lonely. James
had always been a poor thing. He recollected with satisfaction
that he had bought that house over James’s head.
Serve him right for sticking at the price; the only thing the
fellow thought of was money. Had he given too much, though? It
wanted a lot of doing to—He dared say he would want all his money
before he had done with this affair of Jun’s. He ought never to
have allowed the engagement. She had met this Bosinney at the
house of Baynes, Baynes and Bildeboy, the architects. He believed
that Baynes, whom he knew—a bit of an old woman—was the young
man’s uncle by marriage. After that she’d been always running
after him; and when she took a thing into her head there was no
stopping her. She was continually taking up with “lame ducks” of
one sort or another. This fellow had no money, but she must needs
become engaged to him—a harumscarum, unpractical chap, who would
get himself into no end of difficulties.
She had come to him one day in her slap-dash way and told him;
and, as if it were any consolation, she had added:
“He’s so splendid; he’s often lived on cocoa for a week!”
“And he wants you to live on cocoa too?”
“Oh no; he is getting into the swim now.”
Old Jolyon had taken his cigar from under his white moustaches,
stained by coffee at the edge, and looked at her, that little
slip of a thing who had got such a grip of his heart. He knew
more about “swims” than his granddaughter. But she, having
clasped her hands on his knees, rubbed her chin against him,
making a sound like a purring cat. And, knocking the ash off his
cigar, he had exploded in nervous desperation:
“You’re all alike: you won’t be satisfied till you’ve got what
you want. If you must come to grief, you must; _I_ wash my hands
of it.”
So, he had washed his hands of it, making the condition that they
should not marry until Bosinney had at least four hundred a year.
“_I_ shan’t be able to give you very much,” he had said, a
formula to which June was not unaccustomed. “Perhaps this
What’s-his-name will provide the cocoa.”
He had hardly seen anything of her since it began. A bad
business! He had no notion of giving her a lot of money to enable
a fellow he knew nothing about to live on in idleness. He had
seen that sort of thing before; no good ever came of it. Worst of
all, he had no hope of shaking her resolution; she was as
obstinate as a mule, always had been from a child. He didn’t see
where it was to end. They must cut their coat according to their
cloth. He would not give way till he saw young Bosinney with an
income of his own. That June would have trouble with the fellow
was as plain as a pikestaff; he had no more idea of money than a
cow. As to this rushing down to Wales to visit the young man’s
aunts, he fully expected they were old cats.
And, motionless, old Jolyon stared at the wall; but for his open
eyes, he might have been asleep.... The idea of supposing that
young cub Soames could give him advice! He had always been a cub,
with his nose in the air! He would be setting up as a man of
property next, with a place in the country! A man of property!
H’mph! Like his father, he was always nosing out bargains, a
cold-blooded young beggar!
He rose, and, going to the cabinet, began methodically stocking
his cigar-case from a bundle fresh in. They were not bad at the
price, but you couldn’t get a good cigar, nowadays, nothing to
hold a candle to those old Superfinos of Hanson and Bridger’s.
_That_ was a cigar!
The thought, like some stealing perfume, carried him back to
those wonderful nights at Richmond when after dinner he sat
smoking on the terrace of the Crown and Sceptre with Nicholas
Treffry and Traquair and Jack Herring and Anthony Thornworthy.
How good his cigars were then! Poor old Nick!—dead, and Jack
Herring—dead, and Traquair—dead of that wife of his, and
Thornworthy—awfully shaky (no wonder, with his appetite).
Of all the company of those days he himself alone seemed left,
except Swithin, of course, and he so outrageously big there was
no doing anything with him.
Difficult to believe it was so long ago; he felt young still! Of
all his thoughts, as he stood there counting his cigars, this was
the most poignant, the most bitter. With his white head and his
loneliness he had remained young and green at heart. And those
Sunday afternoons on Hampstead Heath, when young Jolyon and he
went for a stretch along the Spaniard’s Road to Highgate, to
Child’s Hill, and back over the Heath again to dine at Jack
Straw’s Castle—how delicious his cigars were then! And such
weather! There was no weather now.
When June was a toddler of five, and every other Sunday he took
her to the Zoo, away from the society of those two good women,
her mother and her grandmother, and at the top of the bear den
baited his umbrella with buns for her favourite bears, how sweet
his cigars were then!
Cigars! He had not even succeeded in out-living his palate—the
famous palate that in the fifties men swore by, and speaking of
him, said: “Forsyte’s the best palate in London!” The palate that
in a sense had made his fortune—the fortune of the celebrated tea
men, Forsyte and Treffry, whose tea, like no other man’s tea, had
a romantic aroma, the charm of a quite singular genuineness.
About the house of Forsyte and Treffry in the City had clung an
air of enterprise and mystery, of special dealings in special
ships, at special ports, with special Orientals.
He had worked at that business! Men did work in those days! these
young pups hardly knew the meaning of the word. He had gone into
every detail, known everything that went on, sometimes sat up all
night over it. And he had always chosen his agents himself,
prided himself on it. His eye for men, he used to say, had been
the secret of his success, and the exercise of this masterful
power of selection had been the only part of it all that he had
really liked. Not a career for a man of his ability. Even now,
when the business had been turned into a Limited Liability
Company, and was declining (he had got out of his shares long
ago), he felt a sharp chagrin in thinking of that time. How much
better he might have done! He would have succeeded splendidly at
the Bar! He had even thought of standing for Parliament. How
often had not Nicholas Treffry said to him:
“You could do anything, Jo, if you weren’t so d-damned careful of
yourself!” Dear old Nick! Such a good fellow, but a racketty
chap! The notorious Treffry! _He_ had never taken any care of
himself. So he was dead. Old Jolyon counted his cigars with a
steady hand, and it came into his mind to wonder if perhaps he
had been _too_ careful of himself.
He put the cigar-case in the breast of his coat, buttoned it in,
and walked up the long flights to his bedroom, leaning on one
foot and the other, and helping himself by the bannister. The
house was too big. After June was married, if she ever did marry
this fellow, as he supposed she would, he would let it and go
into rooms. What was the use of keeping half a dozen servants
eating their heads off?
The butler came to the ring of his bell—a large man with a beard,
a soft tread, and a peculiar capacity for silence. Old Jolyon
told him to put his dress clothes out; he was going to dine at
the Club.
How long had the carriage been back from taking Miss June to the
station? Since two? Then let him come round at half-past six!
The Club which old Jolyon entered on the stroke of seven was one
of those political institutions of the upper middle class which
have seen better days. In spite of being talked about, perhaps in
consequence of being talked about, it betrayed a disappointing
vitality. People had grown tired of saying that the “Disunion”
was on its last legs. Old Jolyon would say it, too, yet
disregarded the fact in a manner truly irritating to
well-constituted Clubmen.
“Why do you keep your name on?” Swithin often asked him with
profound vexation. “Why don’t you join the ‘Polyglot’. You can’t
get a wine like our Heidsieck under twenty shillin’ a bottle
anywhere in London;” and, dropping his voice, he added: “There’s
only five hundred dozen left. I drink it every night of my life.”
“I’ll think of it,” old Jolyon would answer; but when he did
think of it there was always the question of fifty guineas
entrance fee, and it would take him four or five years to get in.
He continued to think of it.
He was too old to be a Liberal, had long ceased to believe in the
political doctrines of his Club, had even been known to allude to
them as “wretched stuff,” and it afforded him pleasure to
continue a member in the teeth of principles so opposed to his
own. He had always had a contempt for the place, having joined it
many years ago when they refused to have him at the “Hotch Potch”
owing to his being “in trade.” As if he were not as good as any
of them! He naturally despised the Club that _did_ take him. The
members were a poor lot, many of them in the City—stockbrokers,
solicitors, auctioneers—what not! Like most men of strong
character but not too much originality, old Jolyon set small
store by the class to which he belonged. Faithfully he followed
their customs, social and otherwise, and secretly he thought them
“a common lot.”
Years and philosophy, of which he had his share, had dimmed the
recollection of his defeat at the “Hotch Potch”. and now in his
thoughts it was enshrined as the Queen of Clubs. He would have
been a member all these years himself, but, owing to the slipshod
way his proposer, Jack Herring, had gone to work, they had not
known what they were doing in keeping him out. Why! they had
taken his son Jo at once, and he believed the boy was still a
member; he had received a letter dated from there eight years
ago.
He had not been near the “Disunion” for months, and the house had
undergone the piebald decoration which people bestow on old
houses and old ships when anxious to sell them.
“Beastly colour, the smoking-room!” he thought. “The dining-room
is good!”
Its gloomy chocolate, picked out with light green, took his
fancy.
He ordered dinner, and sat down in the very corner, at the very
table perhaps! (things did not progress much at the “Disunion,” a
Club of almost Radical principles) at which he and young Jolyon
used to sit twenty-five years ago, when he was taking the latter
to Drury Lane, during his holidays.
The boy had loved the theatre, and old Jolyon recalled how he
used to sit opposite, concealing his excitement under a careful
but transparent nonchalance.
He ordered himself, too, the very dinner the boy had always
chosen—soup, whitebait, cutlets, and a tart. Ah! if he were only
opposite now!
The two had not met for fourteen years. And not for the first
time during those fourteen years old Jolyon wondered whether he
had been a little to blame in the matter of his son. An
unfortunate love-affair with that precious flirt Danae
Thornworthy (now Danae Pellew), Anthony Thornworthy’s daughter,
had thrown him on the rebound into the arms of Jun’s mother. He
ought perhaps to have put a spoke in the wheel of their marriage;
they were too young; but after that experience of Jo’s
susceptibility he had been only too anxious to see him married.
And in four years the crash had come! To have approved his son’s
conduct in that crash was, of course, impossible; reason and
training—that combination of potent factors which stood for his
principles—told him of this impossibility, and his heart cried
out. The grim remorselessness of that business had no pity for
hearts. There was June, the atom with flaming hair, who had
climbed all over him, twined and twisted herself about him—about
his heart that was made to be the plaything and beloved resort of
tiny, helpless things. With characteristic insight he saw he must
part with one or with the other; no half-measures could serve in
such a situation. In that lay its tragedy. And the tiny, helpless
thing prevailed. He would not run with the hare and hunt with the
hounds, and so to his son he said good-bye.
That good-bye had lasted until now.
He had proposed to continue a reduced allowance to young Jolyon,
but this had been refused, and perhaps that refusal had hurt him
more than anything, for with it had gone the last outlet of his
penned-in affection; and there had come such tangible and solid
proof of rupture as only a transaction in property, a bestowal or
refusal of such, could supply.
His dinner tasted flat. His pint of champagne was dry and bitter
stuff, not like the Veuve Clicquots of old days.
Over his cup of coffee, he bethought him that he would go to the
opera. In the _Times_, therefore—he had a distrust of other
papers—he read the announcement for the evening. It was
“Fidelio.”
Mercifully not one of those new-fangled German pantomimes by that
fellow Wagner.
Putting on his ancient opera hat, which, with its brim flattened
by use, and huge capacity, looked like an emblem of greater days,
and, pulling out an old pair of very thin lavender kid gloves
smelling strongly of Russia leather, from habitual proximity to
the cigar-case in the pocket of his overcoat, he stepped into a
hansom.
The cab rattled gaily along the streets, and old Jolyon was
struck by their unwonted animation.
“The hotels must be doing a tremendous business,” he thought. A
few years ago there had been none of these big hotels. He made a
satisfactory reflection on some property he had in the
neighbourhood. It must be going up in value by leaps and bounds!
What traffic!
But from that he began indulging in one of those strange
impersonal speculations, so uncharacteristic of a Forsyte,
wherein lay, in part, the secret of his supremacy amongst them.
What atoms men were, and what a lot of them! And what would
become of them all?
He stumbled as he got out of the cab, gave the man his exact
fare, walked up to the ticket office to take his stall, and stood
there with his purse in his hand—he always carried his money in a
purse, never having approved of that habit of carrying it loosely
in the pockets, as so many young men did nowadays. The official
leaned out, like an old dog from a kennel.
“Why,” he said in a surprised voice, “it’s Mr. Jolyon Forsyte! So
it is! Haven’t seen you, sir, for years. Dear me! Times aren’t
what they were. Why! you and your brother, and that
auctioneer—Mr. Traquair, and Mr. Nicholas Treffry—you used to
have six or seven stalls here regular every season. And how are
you, sir? We don’t get younger!”
The colour in old Jolyon’s eyes deepened; he paid his guinea.
They had not forgotten him. He marched in, to the sounds of the
overture, like an old war-horse to battle.
Folding his opera hat, he sat down, drew out his lavender gloves
in the old way, and took up his glasses for a long look round the
house. Dropping them at last on his folded hat, he fixed his eyes
on the curtain. More poignantly than ever he felt that it was all
over and done with him. Where were all the women, the pretty
women, the house used to be so full of? Where was that old
feeling in the heart as he waited for one of those great singers?
Where that sensation of the intoxication of life and of his own
power to enjoy it all?
The greatest opera-goer of his day! There was no opera now! That
fellow Wagner had ruined everything; no melody left, nor any
voices to sing it. Ah! the wonderful singers! Gone! He sat
watching the old scenes acted, a numb feeling at his heart.
From the curl of silver over his ear to the pose of his foot in
its elastic-sided patent boot, there was nothing clumsy or weak
about old Jolyon. He was as upright—very nearly—as in those old
times when he came every night; his sight was as good—almost as
good. But what a feeling of weariness and disillusion!
He had been in the habit all his life of enjoying things, even
imperfect things—and there had been many imperfect things—he had
enjoyed them all with moderation, so as to keep himself young.
But now he was deserted by his power of enjoyment, by his
philosophy, and left with this dreadful feeling that it was all
done with. Not even the Prisoners’ Chorus, nor Florian’s Song,
had the power to dispel the gloom of his loneliness.
If Jo were only with him! The boy must be forty by now. He had
wasted fourteen years out of the life of his only son. And Jo was
no longer a social pariah. He was married. Old Jolyon had been
unable to refrain from marking his appreciation of the action by
enclosing his son a cheque for £500. The cheque had been returned
in a letter from the “Hotch Potch,” couched in these words.
“MY DEAREST FATHER,
“Your generous gift was welcome as a sign that you might
think worse of me. I return it, but should you think fit to
invest it for the benefit of the little chap (we call him
Jolly), who bears our Christian and, by courtesy, our
surname, I shall be very glad.
“I hope with all my heart that your health is as good as
ever.
“Your loving son,
“JO.”
The letter was like the boy. He had always been an amiable chap.
Old Jolyon had sent this reply:
“MY DEAR JO,
“The sum (£500) stands in my books for the benefit of your
boy, under the name of Jolyon Forsyte, and will be
duly-credited with interest at 5 per cent. I hope that you
are doing well. My health remains good at present.
“With love, I am,
“Your affectionate Father,
“JOLYON FORSYTE.”
And every year on the 1st of January he had added a hundred and
the interest. The sum was mounting up—next New Year’s Day it
would be fifteen hundred and odd pounds! And it is difficult to
say how much satisfaction he had got out of that yearly
transaction. But the correspondence had ended.
In spite of his love for his son, in spite of an instinct, partly
constitutional, partly the result, as in thousands of his class,
of the continual handling and watching of affairs, prompting him
to judge conduct by results rather than by principle, there was
at the bottom of his heart a sort of uneasiness. His son ought,
under the circumstances, to have gone to the dogs; that law was
laid down in all the novels, sermons, and plays he had ever read,
heard, or witnessed.
After receiving the cheque back there seemed to him to be
something wrong somewhere. Why had his son not gone to the dogs?
But, then, who could tell?
He had heard, of course—in fact, he had made it his business to
find out—that Jo lived in St. John’s Wood, that he had a little
house in Wistaria Avenue with a garden, and took his wife about
with him into society—a queer sort of society, no doubt—and that
they had two children—the little chap they called Jolly
(considering the circumstances the name struck him as cynical,
and old Jolyon both feared and disliked cynicism), and a girl
called Holly, born since the marriage. Who could tell what his
son’s circumstances really were? He had capitalized the income he
had inherited from his mother’s father and joined Lloyd’s as an
underwriter; he painted pictures, too—water-colours. Old Jolyon
knew this, for he had surreptitiously bought them from time to
time, after chancing to see his son’s name signed at the bottom
of a representation of the river Thames in a dealer’s window. He
thought them bad, and did not hang them because of the signature;
he kept them locked up in a drawer.
In the great opera-house a terrible yearning came on him to see
his son. He remembered the days when he had been wont to slide
him, in a brown holland suit, to and fro under the arch of his
legs; the times when he ran beside the boy’s pony, teaching him
to ride; the day he first took him to school. He had been a
loving, lovable little chap! After he went to Eton he had
acquired, perhaps, a little too much of that desirable manner
which old Jolyon knew was only to be obtained at such places and
at great expense; but he had always been companionable. Always a
companion, even after Cambridge—a little far off, perhaps, owing
to the advantages he had received. Old Jolyon’s feeling towards
our public schools and ’Varsities never wavered, and he retained
touchingly his attitude of admiration and mistrust towards a
system appropriate to the highest in the land, of which he had
not himself been privileged to partake.... Now that June had gone
and left, or as good as left him, it would have been a comfort to
see his son again. Guilty of this treason to his family, his
principles, his class, old Jolyon fixed his eyes on the singer. A
poor thing—a wretched poor thing! And the Florian a perfect
stick!
It was over. They were easily pleased nowadays!
In the crowded street he snapped up a cab under the very nose of
a stout and much younger gentleman, who had already assumed it to
be his own. His route lay through Pall Mall, and at the corner,
instead of going through the Green Park, the cabman turned to
drive up St. James’s Street. Old Jolyon put his hand through the
trap (he could not bear being taken out of his way); in turning,
however, he found himself opposite the “Hotch Potch,” and the
yearning that had been secretly with him the whole evening
prevailed. He called to the driver to stop. He would go in and
ask if Jo still belonged there.
He went in. The hall looked exactly as it did when he used to
dine there with Jack Herring, and they had the best cook in
London; and he looked round with the shrewd, straight glance that
had caused him all his life to be better served than most men.
“Mr. Jolyon Forsyte still a member here?”
“Yes, sir; in the Club now, sir. What name?”
Old Jolyon was taken aback.
“His father,” he said.
And having spoken, he took his stand, back to the fireplace.
Young Jolyon, on the point of leaving the Club, had put on his
hat, and was in the act of crossing the hall, as the porter met
him. He was no longer young, with hair going grey, and face—a
narrower replica of his father’s, with the same large drooping
moustache—decidedly worn. He turned pale. This meeting was
terrible after all those years, for nothing in the world was so
terrible as a scene. They met and crossed hands without a word.
Then, with a quaver in his voice, the father said:
“How are you, my boy?”
The son answered:
“How are you, Dad?”
Old Jolyon’s hand trembled in its thin lavender glove.
“If you’re going my way,” he said, “I can give you a lift.”
And as though in the habit of taking each other home every night
they went out and stepped into the cab.
To old Jolyon it seemed that his son had grown. “More of a man
altogether,” was his comment. Over the natural amiability of that
son’s face had come a rather sardonic mask, as though he had
found in the circumstances of his life the necessity for armour.
The features were certainly those of a Forsyte, but the
expression was more the introspective look of a student or
philosopher. He had no doubt been obliged to look into himself a
good deal in the course of those fifteen years.
To young Jolyon the first sight of his father was undoubtedly a
shock—he looked so worn and old. But in the cab he seemed hardly
to have changed, still having the calm look so well remembered,
still being upright and keen-eyed.
“You look well, Dad.”
“Middling,” old Jolyon answered.
He was the prey of an anxiety that he found he must put into
words. Having got his son back like this, he felt he must know
what was his financial position.
“Jo,” he said, “I should like to hear what sort of water you’re
in. I suppose you’re in debt?”
He put it this way that his son might find it easier to confess.
Young Jolyon answered in his ironical voice:
“No! I’m not in debt!”
Old Jolyon saw that he was angry, and touched his hand. He had
run a risk. It was worth it, however, and Jo had never been sulky
with him. They drove on, without speaking again, to Stanhope
Gate. Old Jolyon invited him in, but young Jolyon shook his head.
“Jun’s not here,” said his father hastily: “went off to-day on a
visit. I suppose you know that she’s engaged to be married?”
“Already?” murmured young Jolyon’.
Old Jolyon stepped out, and, in paying the cab fare, for the
first time in his life gave the driver a sovereign in mistake for
a shilling.
Placing the coin in his mouth, the cabman whipped his horse
secretly on the underneath and hurried away.
Old Jolyon turned the key softly in the lock, pushed open the
door, and beckoned. His son saw him gravely hanging up his coat,
with an expression on his face like that of a boy who intends to
steal cherries.
The door of the dining-room was open, the gas turned low; a
spirit-urn hissed on a tea-tray, and close to it a cynical
looking cat had fallen asleep on the dining-table. Old Jolyon
“shoo’d” her off at once. The incident was a relief to his
feelings; he rattled his opera hat behind the animal.
“She’s got fleas,” he said, following her out of the room.
Through the door in the hall leading to the basement he called
“Hssst!” several times, as though assisting the cat’s departure,
till by some strange coincidence the butler appeared below.
“You can go to bed, Parfitt,” said old Jolyon. “I will lock up
and put out.”
When he again entered the dining-room the cat unfortunately
preceded him, with her tail in the air, proclaiming that she had
seen through this manouevre for suppressing the butler from the
first....
A fatality had dogged old Jolyon’s domestic stratagems all his
life.
Young Jolyon could not help smiling. He was very well versed in
irony, and everything that evening seemed to him ironical. The
episode of the cat; the announcement of his own daughter’s
engagement. So he had no more part or parcel in her than he had
in the Puss! And the poetical justice of this appealed to him.
“What is June like now?” he asked.
“She’s a little thing,” returned old Jolyon; “they say she’s like
me, but that’s their folly. She’s more like your mother—the same
eyes and hair.”
“Ah! and she is pretty?”
Old Jolyon was too much of a Forsyte to praise anything freely;
especially anything for which he had a genuine admiration.
“Not bad looking—a regular Forsyte chin. It’ll be lonely here
when she’s gone, Jo.”
The look on his face again gave young Jolyon the shock he had
felt on first seeing his father.
“What will you do with yourself, Dad? I suppose she’s wrapped up
in him?”
“Do with myself?” repeated old Jolyon with an angry break in his
voice. “It’ll be miserable work living here alone. I don’t know
how it’s to end. I wish to goodness....” He checked himself, and
added: “The question is, what had I better do with this house?”
Young Jolyon looked round the room. It was peculiarly vast and
dreary, decorated with the enormous pictures of still life that
he remembered as a boy—sleeping dogs with their noses resting on
bunches of carrots, together with onions and grapes lying side by
side in mild surprise. The house was a white elephant, but he
could not conceive of his father living in a smaller place; and
all the more did it all seem ironical.
In his great chair with the book-rest sat old Jolyon, the
figurehead of his family and class and creed, with his white head
and dome-like forehead, the representative of moderation, and
order, and love of property. As lonely an old man as there was in
London.
There he sat in the gloomy comfort of the room, a puppet in the
power of great forces that cared nothing for family or class or
creed, but moved, machine-like, with dread processes to
inscrutable ends. This was how it struck young Jolyon, who had
the impersonal eye.
The poor old Dad! So this was the end, the purpose to which he
had lived with such magnificent moderation! To be lonely, and
grow older and older, yearning for a soul to speak to!
In his turn old Jolyon looked back at his son. He wanted to talk
about many things that he had been unable to talk about all these
years. It had been impossible to seriously confide in June his
conviction that property in the Soho quarter would go up in
value; his uneasiness about that tremendous silence of Pippin,
the superintendent of the New Colliery Company, of which he had
so long been chairman; his disgust at the steady fall in American
Golgothas, or even to discuss how, by some sort of settlement, he
could best avoid the payment of those death duties which would
follow his decease. Under the influence, however, of a cup of
tea, which he seemed to stir indefinitely, he began to speak at
last. A new vista of life was thus opened up, a promised land of
talk, where he could find a harbour against the waves of
anticipation and regret; where he could soothe his soul with the
opium of devising how to round off his property and make eternal
the only part of him that was to remain alive.
Young Jolyon was a good listener; it was his great quality. He
kept his eyes fixed on his father’s face, putting a question now
and then.
The clock struck one before old Jolyon had finished, and at the
sound of its striking his principles came back. He took out his
watch with a look of surprise:
“I must go to bed, Jo,” he said.
Young Jolyon rose and held out his hand to help his father up.
The old face looked worn and hollow again; the eyes were steadily
averted.
“Good-bye, my boy; take care of yourself.”
A moment passed, and young Jolyon, turning on his heel, marched
out at the door. He could hardly see; his smile quavered. Never
in all the fifteen years since he had first found out that life
was no simple business, had he found it so singularly
complicated.
CHAPTER III DINNER AT SWITHIN’S
In Swithin’s orange and light-blue dining-room, facing the Park,
the round table was laid for twelve.
A cut-glass chandelier filled with lighted candles hung like a
giant stalactite above its centre, radiating over large
gilt-framed mirrors, slabs of marble on the tops of side-tables,
and heavy gold chairs with crewel worked seats. Everything
betokened that love of beauty so deeply implanted in each family
which has had its own way to make into Society, out of the more
vulgar heart of Nature. Swithin had indeed an impatience of
simplicity, a love of ormolu, which had always stamped him
amongst his associates as a man of great, if somewhat luxurious
taste; and out of the knowledge that no one could possibly enter
his rooms without perceiving him to be a man of wealth, he had
derived a solid and prolonged happiness such as perhaps no other
circumstance in life had afforded him.
Since his retirement from land agency, a profession deplorable in
his estimation, especially as to its auctioneering department, he
had abandoned himself to naturally aristocratic tastes.
The perfect luxury of his latter days had embedded him like a fly
in sugar; and his mind, where very little took place from morning
till night, was the junction of two curiously opposite emotions,
a lingering and sturdy satisfaction that he had made his own way
and his own fortune, and a sense that a man of his distinction
should never have been allowed to soil his mind with work.
He stood at the sideboard in a white waistcoat with large gold
and onyx buttons, watching his valet screw the necks of three
champagne bottles deeper into ice-pails. Between the points of
his stand-up collar, which—though it hurt him to move—he would on
no account have had altered, the pale flesh of his under chin
remained immovable. His eyes roved from bottle to bottle. He was
debating, and he argued like this: Jolyon drinks a glass, perhaps
two, he’s so careful of himself. James, he can’t take his wine
nowadays. Nicholas—Fanny and he would swill water he shouldn’t
wonder! Soames didn’t count; these young nephews—Soames was
thirty-one—couldn’t drink! But Bosinney?
Encountering in the name of this stranger something outside the
range of his philosophy, Swithin paused. A misgiving arose within
him! It was impossible to tell! June was only a girl, in love
too! Emily (Mrs. James) liked a good glass of champagne. It was
too dry for Juley, poor old soul, she had no palate. As to Hatty
Chessman! The thought of this old friend caused a cloud of
thought to obscure the perfect glassiness of his eyes: He
shouldn’t wonder if she drank half a bottle!
But in thinking of his remaining guest, an expression like that
of a cat who is just going to purr stole over his old face: Mrs.
Soames! She mightn’t take much, but she would appreciate what she
drank; it was a pleasure to give her good wine! A pretty
woman—and sympathetic to him!
The thought of her was like champagne itself! A pleasure to give
a good wine to a young woman who looked so well, who knew how to
dress, with charming manners, quite distinguished—a pleasure to
entertain her. Between the points of his collar he gave his head
the first small, painful oscillation of the evening.
“Adolf!” he said. “Put in another bottle.”
He himself might drink a good deal, for, thanks to that
prescription of Blight’s, he found himself extremely well, and he
had been careful to take no lunch. He had not felt so well for
weeks. Puffing out his lower lip, he gave his last instructions:
“Adolf, the least touch of the West India when you come to the
ham.”
Passing into the anteroom, he sat down on the edge of a chair,
with his knees apart; and his tall, bulky form was wrapped at
once in an expectant, strange, primeval immobility. He was ready
to rise at a moment’s notice. He had not given a dinner-party for
months. This dinner in honour of Jun’s engagement had seemed a
bore at first (among Forsytes the custom of solemnizing
engagements by feasts was religiously observed), but the labours
of sending invitations and ordering the repast over, he felt
pleasantly stimulated.
And thus sitting, a watch in his hand, fat, and smooth, and
golden, like a flattened globe of butter, he thought of nothing.
A long man, with side whiskers, who had once been in Swithin’s
service, but was now a greengrocer, entered and proclaimed:
“Mrs. Chessman, Mrs. Septimus Small!”
Two ladies advanced. The one in front, habited entirely in red,
had large, settled patches of the same colour in her cheeks, and
a hard, dashing eye. She walked at Swithin, holding out a hand
cased in a long, primrose-coloured glove:
“Well! Swithin,” she said, “I haven’t seen you for ages. How are
you? Why, my dear boy, how stout you’re getting!”
The fixity of Swithin’s eye alone betrayed emotion. A dumb and
grumbling anger swelled his bosom. It was vulgar to be stout, to
talk of being stout; he had a chest, nothing more. Turning to his
sister, he grasped her hand, and said in a tone of command:
“Well, Juley.”
Mrs. Septimus Small was the tallest of the four sisters; her
good, round old face had gone a little sour; an innumerable pout
clung all over it, as if it had been encased in an iron wire mask
up to that evening, which, being suddenly removed, left little
rolls of mutinous flesh all over her countenance. Even her eyes
were pouting. It was thus that she recorded her permanent
resentment at the loss of Septimus Small.
She had quite a reputation for saying the wrong thing, and,
tenacious like all her breed, she would hold to it when she had
said it, and add to it another wrong thing, and so on. With the
decease of her husband the family tenacity, the family
matter-of-factness, had gone sterile within her. A great talker,
when allowed, she would converse without the faintest animation
for hours together, relating, with epic monotony, the innumerable
occasions on which Fortune had misused her; nor did she ever
perceive that her hearers sympathized with Fortune, for her heart
was kind.
Having sat, poor soul, long by the bedside of Small (a man of
poor constitution), she had acquired the habit, and there were
countless subsequent occasions when she had sat immense periods
of time to amuse sick people, children, and other helpless
persons, and she could never divest herself of the feeling that
the world was the most ungrateful place anybody could live in.
Sunday after Sunday she sat at the feet of that extremely witty
preacher, the Rev. Thomas Scoles, who exercised a great influence
over her; but she succeeded in convincing everybody that even
this was a misfortune. She had passed into a proverb in the
family, and when anybody was observed to be peculiarly
distressing, he was known as a regular “Juley.” The habit of her
mind would have killed anybody but a Forsyte at forty; but she
was seventy-two, and had never looked better. And one felt that
there were capacities for enjoyment about her which might yet
come out. She owned three canaries, the cat Tommy, and half a
parrot—in common with her sister Hester;—and these poor creatures
(kept carefully out of Timothy’s way—he was nervous about
animals), unlike human beings, recognising that she could not
help being blighted, attached themselves to her passionately.
She was sombrely magnificent this evening in black bombazine,
with a mauve front cut in a shy triangle, and crowned with a
black velvet ribbon round the base of her thin throat; black and
mauve for evening wear was esteemed very chaste by nearly every
Forsyte.
Pouting at Swithin, she said:
“Ann has been asking for you. You haven’t been near us for an
age!”
Swithin put his thumbs within the armholes of his waistcoat, and
replied:
“Ann’s getting very shaky; she ought to have a doctor!”
“Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Forsyte!”
Nicholas Forsyte, cocking his rectangular eyebrows, wore a smile.
He had succeeded during the day in bringing to fruition a scheme
for the employment of a tribe from Upper India in the gold-mines
of Ceylon. A pet plan, carried at last in the teeth of great
difficulties—he was justly pleased. It would double the output of
his mines, and, as he had often forcibly argued, all experience
tended to show that a man must die; and whether he died of a
miserable old age in his own country, or prematurely of damp in
the bottom of a foreign mine, was surely of little consequence,
provided that by a change in his mode of life he benefited the
British Empire.
His ability was undoubted. Raising his broken nose towards his
listener, he would add:
“For want of a few hundred of these fellows we haven’t paid a
dividend for years, and look at the price of the shares. I can’t
get ten shillings for them.”
He had been at Yarmouth, too, and had come back feeling that he
had added at least ten years to his own life. He grasped
Swithin’s hand, exclaiming in a jocular voice:
“Well, so here we are again!”
Mrs. Nicholas, an effete woman, smiled a smile of frightened
jollity behind his back.
“Mr. and Mrs. James Forsyte! Mr. and Mrs. Soames Forsyte!”
Swithin drew his heels together, his deportment ever admirable.
“Well, James, well Emily! How are you, Soames? How do you _do?_”
His hand enclosed Irene’s, and his eyes swelled. She was a pretty
woman—a little too pale, but her figure, her eyes, her teeth! Too
good for that chap Soames!
The gods had given Irene dark brown eyes and golden hair, that
strange combination, provocative of men’s glances, which is said
to be the mark of a weak character. And the full, soft pallor of
her neck and shoulders, above a gold-coloured frock, gave to her
personality an alluring strangeness.
Soames stood behind, his eyes fastened on his wife’s neck. The
hands of Swithin’s watch, which he still held open in his hand,
had left eight behind; it was half an hour beyond his
dinner-time—he had had no lunch—and a strange primeval impatience
surged up within him.
“It’s not like Jolyon to be late!” he said to Irene, with
uncontrollable vexation. “I suppose it’ll be June keeping him!”
“People in love are always late,” she answered.
Swithin stared at her; a dusky orange dyed his cheeks.
“They’ve no business to be. Some fashionable nonsense!”
And behind this outburst the inarticulate violence of primitive
generations seemed to mutter and grumble.
“Tell me what you think of my new star, Uncle Swithin,” said
Irene softly.
Among the lace in the bosom of her dress was shining a
five-pointed star, made of eleven diamonds. Swithin looked at the
star. He had a pretty taste in stones; no question could have
been more sympathetically devised to distract his attention.
“Who gave you that?” he asked.
“Soames.”
There was no change in her face, but Swithin’s pale eyes bulged
as though he might suddenly have been afflicted with insight.
“I dare say you’re dull at home,” he said. “Any day you like to
come and dine with me, I’ll give you as good a bottle of wine as
you’ll get in London.”
“Miss June Forsyte—Mr. Jolyon Forsyte!... Mr. Boswainey!...”
Swithin moved his arm, and said in a rumbling voice:
“Dinner, now—dinner!”
He took in Irene, on the ground that he had not entertained her
since she was a bride. June was the portion of Bosinney, who was
placed between Irene and his fiancée. On the other side of June
was James with Mrs. Nicholas, then old Jolyon with Mrs. James,
Nicholas with Hatty Chessman, Soames with Mrs. Small, completing,
the circle to Swithin again.
Family dinners of the Forsytes observe certain traditions. There
are, for instance, no _hors d’œuvres_. The reason for this is
unknown. Theory among the younger members traces it to the
disgraceful price of oysters; it is more probably due to a desire
to come to the point, to a good practical sense deciding at once
that _hors d’œuvres_ are but poor things. The Jameses alone,
unable to withstand a custom almost universal in Park Lane, are
now and then unfaithful.
A silent, almost morose, inattention to each other succeeds to
the subsidence into their seats, lasting till well into the first
entree, but interspersed with remarks such as, “Tom’s bad again;
I can’t tell what’s the matter with him!” “I suppose Ann doesn’t
come down in the mornings?”—“What’s the name of your doctor,
Fanny?” “Stubbs?” “He’s a quack!”—“Winifred? She’s got too many
children. Four, isn’t it? She’s as thin as a lath!”—“What d’you
give for this sherry, Swithin? Too dry for me!”
With the second glass of champagne, a kind of hum makes itself
heard, which, when divested of casual accessories and resolved
into its primal element, is found to be James telling a story,
and this goes on for a long time, encroaching sometimes even upon
what must universally be recognised as the crowning point of a
Forsyte feast—“the saddle of mutton.”
No Forsyte has given a dinner without providing a saddle of
mutton. There is something in its succulent solidity which makes
it suitable to people “of a certain position.” It is nourishing
and tasty; the sort of thing a man remembers eating. It has a
past and a future, like a deposit paid into a bank; and it is
something that can be argued about.
Each branch of the family tenaciously held to a particular
locality—old Jolyon swearing by Dartmoor, James by Welsh, Swithin
by Southdown, Nicholas maintaining that people might sneer, but
there was nothing like New Zealand! As for Roger, the “original”
of the brothers, he had been obliged to invent a locality of his
own, and with an ingenuity worthy of a man who had devised a new
profession for his sons, he had discovered a shop where they sold
German; on being remonstrated with, he had proved his point by
producing a butcher’s bill, which showed that he paid more than
any of the others. It was on this occasion that old Jolyon,
turning to June, had said in one of his bursts of philosophy:
“You may depend upon it, they’re a cranky lot, the Forsytes—and
you’ll find it out, as you grow older!”
Timothy alone held apart, for though he ate saddle of mutton
heartily, he was, he said, afraid of it.
To anyone interested psychologically in Forsytes, this great
saddle-of-mutton trait is of prime importance; not only does it
illustrate their tenacity, both collectively and as individuals,
but it marks them as belonging in fibre and instincts to that
great class which believes in nourishment and flavour, and yields
to no sentimental craving for beauty.
Younger members of the family indeed would have done without a
joint altogether, preferring guinea-fowl, or lobster
salad—something which appealed to the imagination, and had less
nourishment—but these were females; or, if not, had been
corrupted by their wives, or by mothers, who having been forced
to eat saddle of mutton throughout their married lives, had
passed a secret hostility towards it into the fibre of their
sons.
The great saddle-of-mutton controversy at an end, a Tewkesbury
ham commenced, together with the least touch of West
Indian—Swithin was so long over this course that he caused a
block in the progress of the dinner. To devote himself to it with
better heart, he paused in his conversation.
From his seat by Mrs. Septimus Small Soames was watching. He had
a reason of his own connected with a pet building scheme, for
observing Bosinney. The architect might do for his purpose; he
looked clever, as he sat leaning back in his chair, moodily
making little ramparts with bread-crumbs. Soames noted his dress
clothes to be well cut, but too small, as though made many years
ago.
He saw him turn to Irene and say something and her face sparkle
as he often saw it sparkle at other people—never at himself. He
tried to catch what they were saying, but Aunt Juley was
speaking.
Hadn’t that always seemed very extraordinary to Soames? Only last
Sunday dear Mr. Scoles, had been so witty in his sermon, so
sarcastic, “For what,” he had said, “shall it profit a man if he
gain his own soul, but lose all his property?” That, he had said,
was the motto of the middle-class; now, what _had_ he meant by
that? Of course, it might be what middle-class people
believed—she didn’t know; what did Soames think?
He answered abstractedly: “How should I know? Scoles is a humbug,
though, isn’t he?” For Bosinney was looking round the table, as
if pointing out the peculiarities of the guests, and Soames
wondered what he was saying. By her smile Irene was evidently
agreeing with his remarks. She seemed always to agree with other
people.
Her eyes were turned on himself; Soames dropped his glance at
once. The smile had died off her lips.
A humbug? But what did Soames mean? If Mr. Scoles was a humbug, a
clergyman—then anybody might be—it was frightful!
“Well, and so they are!” said Soames.
During Aunt Juley’s momentary and horrified silence he caught
some words of Irene’s that sounded like: “Abandon hope, all ye
who enter here!”
But Swithin had finished his ham.
“Where do you go for your mushrooms?” he was saying to Irene in a
voice like a courtier’s; “you ought to go to Smileybob’s—he’ll
give ’em you fresh. These _little_ men, they won’t take the
trouble!”
Irene turned to answer him, and Soames saw Bosinney watching her
and smiling to himself. A curious smile the fellow had. A
half-simple arrangement, like a child who smiles when he is
pleased. As for George’s nickname—“The Buccaneer”—he did not
think much of that. And, seeing Bosinney turn to June, Soames
smiled too, but sardonically—he did not like June, who was not
looking too pleased.
This was not surprising, for she had just held the following
conversation with James:
“I stayed on the river on my way home, Uncle James, and saw a
beautiful site for a house.”
James, a slow and thorough eater, stopped the process of
mastication.
“Eh?” he said. “Now, where was that?”
“Close to Pangbourne.”
James placed a piece of ham in his mouth, and June waited.
“I suppose you wouldn’t know whether the land about there was
freehold?” he asked at last. “_You_ wouldn’t know anything about
the price of land about there?”
“Yes,” said June; “I made inquiries.” Her little resolute face
under its copper crown was suspiciously eager and aglow.
James regarded her with the air of an inquisitor.
“What? You’re not thinking of buying land!” he ejaculated,
dropping his fork.
June was greatly encouraged by his interest. It had long been her
pet plan that her uncles should benefit themselves and Bosinney
by building country-houses.
“Of course not,” she said. “I thought it would be such a splendid
place for—you or—someone to build a country-house!”
James looked at her sideways, and placed a second piece of ham in
his mouth....
“Land ought to be very dear about there,” he said.
What June had taken for personal interest was only the impersonal
excitement of every Forsyte who hears of something eligible in
danger of passing into other hands. But she refused to see the
disappearance of her chance, and continued to press her point.
“You ought to go into the country, Uncle James. I wish I had a
lot of money, I wouldn’t live another day in London.”
James was stirred to the depths of his long thin figure; he had
no idea his niece held such downright views.
“Why don’t you go into the country?” repeated June; “it would do
you a lot of good.”
“Why?” began James in a fluster. “Buying land—what good d’you
suppose I can do buying land, building houses?—I couldn’t get
four per cent. for my money!”
“What does that matter? You’d get fresh air.”
“Fresh air!” exclaimed James; “what should I do with fresh air,”
“I should have thought anybody liked to have fresh air,” said
June scornfully.
James wiped his napkin all over his mouth.
“You don’t know the value of money,” he said, avoiding her eye.
“No! and I hope I never shall!” and, biting her lip with
inexpressible mortification, poor June was silent.
Why were her own relations so rich, and Phil never knew where the
money was coming from for to-morrow’s tobacco. Why couldn’t they
do something for him? But they were so selfish. Why couldn’t they
build country-houses? She had all that naive dogmatism which is
so pathetic, and sometimes achieves such great results. Bosinney,
to whom she turned in her discomfiture, was talking to Irene, and
a chill fell on Jun’s spirit. Her eyes grew steady with anger,
like old Jolyon’s when his will was crossed.
James, too, was much disturbed. He felt as though someone had
threatened his right to invest his money at five per cent. Jolyon
had spoiled her. None of _his_ girls would have said such a
thing. James had always been exceedingly liberal to his children,
and the consciousness of this made him feel it all the more
deeply. He trifled moodily with his strawberries, then, deluging
them with cream, he ate them quickly; they, at all events, should
not escape him.
No wonder he was upset. Engaged for fifty-four years (he had been
admitted a solicitor on the earliest day sanctioned by the law)
in arranging mortgages, preserving investments at a dead level of
high and safe interest, conducting negotiations on the principle
of securing the utmost possible out of other people compatible
with safety to his clients and himself, in calculations as to the
exact pecuniary possibilities of all the relations of life, he
had come at last to think purely in terms of money. Money was now
his light, his medium for seeing, that without which he was
really unable to see, really not cognisant of phenomena; and to
have this thing, “I hope I shall never know the value of money!”
said to his face, saddened and exasperated him. He knew it to be
nonsense, or it would have frightened him. What was the world
coming to! Suddenly recollecting the story of young Jolyon,
however, he felt a little comforted, for what could you expect
with a father like that! This turned his thoughts into a channel
still less pleasant. What was all this talk about Soames and
Irene?
As in all self-respecting families, an emporium had been
established where family secrets were bartered, and family stock
priced. It was known on Forsyte ’Change that Irene regretted her
marriage. Her regret was disapproved of. She ought to have known
her own mind; no dependable woman made these mistakes.
James reflected sourly that they had a nice house (rather small)
in an excellent position, no children, and no money troubles.
Soames was reserved about his affairs, but he must be getting a
very warm man. He had a capital income from the business—for
Soames, like his father, was a member of that well-known firm of
solicitors, Forsyte, Bustard and Forsyte—and had always been very
careful. He had done quite unusually well with some mortgages he
had taken up, too—a little timely foreclosure—most lucky hits!
There was no reason why Irene should not be happy, yet they said
she’d been asking for a separate room. He knew where that ended.
It wasn’t as if Soames drank.
James looked at his daughter-in-law. That unseen glance of his
was cold and dubious. Appeal and fear were in it, and a sense of
personal grievance. Why should he be worried like this? It was
very likely all nonsense; women were funny things! They
exaggerated so, you didn’t know what to believe; and then, nobody
told him anything, he had to find out everything for himself.
Again he looked furtively at Irene, and across from her to
Soames. The latter, listening to Aunt Juley, was looking up,
under his brows in the direction of Bosinney.
“He’s fond of her, I know,” thought James. “Look at the way he’s
always giving her things.”
And the extraordinary unreasonableness of her disaffection struck
him with increased force. It was a pity, too, she was a taking
little thing, and he, James, would be really quite fond of her if
she’d only let him. She had taken up lately with June; _that_ was
doing her no good, that was certainly doing her no good. She was
getting to have opinions of her own. He didn’t know what she
wanted with anything of the sort. She’d a good home, and
everything she could wish for. He felt that her friends ought to
be chosen for her. To go on like this was dangerous.
June, indeed, with her habit of championing the unfortunate, had
dragged from Irene a confession, and, in return, had preached the
necessity of facing the evil, by separation, if need be. But in
the face of these exhortations, Irene had kept a brooding
silence, as though she found terrible the thought of this
struggle carried through in cold blood. He would never give her
up, she had said to June.
“Who cares?” June cried; “let him do what he likes—you’ve only to
stick to it!” And she had not scrupled to say something of this
sort at Timothy’s; James, when he heard of it, had felt a natural
indignation and horror.
What if Irene were to take it into her head to—he could hardly
frame the thought—to leave Soames? But he felt this thought so
unbearable that he at once put it away; the shady visions it
conjured up, the sound of family tongues buzzing in his ears, the
horror of the conspicuous happening so close to him, to one of
his own children! Luckily, she had no money—a beggarly fifty
pound a year! And he thought of the deceased Heron, who had had
nothing to leave her, with contempt. Brooding over his glass, his
long legs twisted under the table, he quite omitted to rise when
the ladies left the room. He would have to speak to Soames—would
have to put him on his guard; they could not go on like this, now
that such a contingency had occurred to him. And he noticed with
sour disfavour that June had left her wine-glasses full of wine.
“That little, thing’s at the bottom of it all,” he mused;
“Irene’d never have thought of it herself.” James was a man of
imagination.
The voice of Swithin roused him from his reverie.
“I gave four hundred pounds for it,” he was saying. “Of course
it’s a regular work of art.”
“Four hundred! H’m! that’s a lot of money!” chimed in Nicholas.
The object alluded to was an elaborate group of statuary in
Italian marble, which, placed upon a lofty stand (also of
marble), diffused an atmosphere of culture throughout the room.
The subsidiary figures, of which there were six, female, nude,
and of highly ornate workmanship, were all pointing towards the
central figure, also nude, and female, who was pointing at
herself; and all this gave the observer a very pleasant sense of
her extreme value. Aunt Juley, nearly opposite, had had the
greatest difficulty in not looking at it all the evening.
Old Jolyon spoke; it was he who had started the discussion.
“Four hundred fiddlesticks! Don’t tell me you gave four hundred
for _that?_”
Between the points of his collar Swithin’s chin made the second
painful oscillatory movement of the evening.
“Four-hundred-pounds, of English money; not a farthing less. I
don’t regret it. It’s not common English—it’s genuine modern
Italian!”
Soames raised the corner of his lip in a smile, and looked across
at Bosinney. The architect was grinning behind the fumes of his
cigarette. Now, indeed, he looked more like a buccaneer.
“There’s a lot of work about it,” remarked James hastily, who was
really moved by the size of the group. “It’d sell well at
Jobson’s.”
“The poor foreign dey-vil that made it,” went on Swithin, “asked
me five hundred—I gave him four. It’s worth eight. Looked
half-starved, poor dey-vil!”
“Ah!” chimed in Nicholas suddenly, “poor, seedy-lookin’ chaps,
these artists; it’s a wonder to me how they live. Now, there’s
young Flageoletti, that Fanny and the girls are always hav’in’
in, to play the fiddle; if he makes a hundred a year it’s as much
as ever he does!”
James shook his head. “Ah!” he said, “_I_ don’t know how they
live!”
Old Jolyon had risen, and, cigar in mouth, went to inspect the
group at close quarters.
“Wouldn’t have given two for it!” he pronounced at last.
Soames saw his father and Nicholas glance at each other
anxiously; and, on the other side of Swithin, Bosinney, still
shrouded in smoke.
“I wonder what _he_ thinks of it?” thought Soames, who knew well
enough that this group was hopelessly _vieux jeu;_ hopelessly of
the last generation. There was no longer any sale at Jobson’s for
such works of art.
Swithin’s answer came at last. “You never knew anything about a
statue. You’ve got your pictures, and that’s all!”
Old Jolyon walked back to his seat, puffing his cigar. It was not
likely that he was going to be drawn into an argument with an
obstinate beggar like Swithin, pig-headed as a mule, who had
never known a statue from a—-straw hat.
“Stucco!” was all he said.
It had long been physically impossible for Swithin to start; his
fist came down on the table.
“Stucco! I should like to see anything you’ve got in your house
half as good!”
And behind his speech seemed to sound again that rumbling
violence of primitive generations.
It was James who saved the situation.
“Now, what do you say, Mr. Bosinney? You’re an architect; you
ought to know all about statues and things!”
Every eye was turned upon Bosinney; all waited with a strange,
suspicious look for his answer.
And Soames, speaking for the first time, asked:
“Yes, Bosinney, what do you say?”
Bosinney replied coolly:
“The work is a remarkable one.”
His words were addressed to Swithin, his eyes smiled slyly at old
Jolyon; only Soames remained unsatisfied.
“Remarkable for what?”
“For its naiveté.”
The answer was followed by an impressive silence; Swithin alone
was not sure whether a compliment was intended.
CHAPTER IV PROJECTION OF THE HOUSE
Soames Forsyte walked out of his green-painted front door three
days after the dinner at Swithin’s, and looking back from across
the Square, confirmed his impression that the house wanted
painting.
He had left his wife sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room, her
hands crossed in her lap, manifestly waiting for him to go out.
This was not unusual. It happened, in fact, every day.
He could not understand what she found wrong with him. It was not
as if he drank! Did he run into debt, or gamble, or swear; was he
violent; were his friends rackety; did he stay out at night? On
the contrary.
The profound, subdued aversion which he felt in his wife was a
mystery to him, and a source of the most terrible irritation.
That she had made a mistake, and did not love him, had tried to
love him and could not love him, was obviously no reason.
He that could imagine so outlandish a cause for his wife’s not
getting on with him was certainly no Forsyte.
Soames was forced, therefore, to set the blame entirely down to
his wife. He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring
affection. They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all
the men were attracted by her; their looks, manners, voices,
betrayed it; her behaviour under this attention had been beyond
reproach. That she was one of those women—not too common in the
Anglo-Saxon race—born to be loved and to love, who when not
loving are not living, had certainly never even occurred to him.
Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his
property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as
well as receive; and she gave him nothing! “Then why did she
marry me?” was his continual thought. He had forgotten his
courtship; that year and a half when he had besieged and lain in
wait for her, devising schemes for her entertainment, giving her
presents, proposing to her periodically, and keeping her other
admirers away with his perpetual presence. He had forgotten the
day when, adroitly taking advantage of an acute phase of her
dislike to her home surroundings, he crowned his labours with
success. If he remembered anything, it was the dainty
capriciousness with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl had
treated him. He certainly did not remember the look on her
face—strange, passive, appealing—when suddenly one day she had
yielded, and said that she would marry him.
It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and
people praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering
the iron till it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after
as the wedding bells.
Soames walked eastwards, mousing doggedly along on the shady
side.
The house wanted doing, up, unless he decided to move into the
country, and build.
For the hundredth time that month he turned over this problem.
There was no use in rushing into things! He was very comfortably
off, with an increasing income getting on for three thousand a
year; but his invested capital was not perhaps so large as his
father believed—James had a tendency to expect that his children
should be better off than they were. “I can manage eight thousand
easily enough,” he thought, “without calling in either
Robertson’s or Nicholl’s.”
He had stopped to look in at a picture shop, for Soames was an
“amateur” of pictures, and had a little-room in No. 62,
Montpellier Square, full of canvases, stacked against the wall,
which he had no room to hang. He brought them home with him on
his way back from the City, generally after dark, and would enter
this room on Sunday afternoons, to spend hours turning the
pictures to the light, examining the marks on their backs, and
occasionally making notes.
They were nearly all landscapes with figures in the foreground, a
sign of some mysterious revolt against London, its tall houses,
its interminable streets, where his life and the lives of his
breed and class were passed. Every now and then he would take one
or two pictures away with him in a cab, and stop at Jobson’s on
his way into the City.
He rarely showed them to anyone; Irene, whose opinion he secretly
respected and perhaps for that reason never solicited, had only
been into the room on rare occasions, in discharge of some wifely
duty. She was not asked to look at the pictures, and she never
did. To Soames this was another grievance. He hated that pride of
hers, and secretly dreaded it.
In the plate-glass window of the picture shop his image stood and
looked at him.
His sleek hair under the brim of the tall hat had a sheen like
the hat itself; his cheeks, pale and flat, the line of his
clean-shaven lips, his firm chin with its greyish shaven tinge,
and the buttoned strictness of his black cut-away coat, conveyed
an appearance of reserve and secrecy, of imperturbable, enforced
composure; but his eyes, cold,—grey, strained—looking, with a
line in the brow between them, examined him wistfully, as if they
knew of a secret weakness.
He noted the subjects of the pictures, the names of the painters,
made a calculation of their values, but without the satisfaction
he usually derived from this inward appraisement, and walked on.
No. 62 would do well enough for another year, if he decided to
build! The times were good for building, money had not been so
dear for years; and the site he had seen at Robin Hill, when he
had gone down there in the spring to inspect the Nicholl
mortgage—what could be better! Within twelve miles of Hyde Park
Corner, the value of the land certain to go up, would always
fetch more than he gave for it; so that a house, if built in
really good style, was a first-class investment.
The notion of being the one member of his family with a country
house weighed but little with him; for to a true Forsyte,
sentiment, even the sentiment of social position, was a luxury
only to be indulged in after his appetite for more material
pleasure had been satisfied.
To get Irene out of London, away from opportunities of going
about and seeing people, away from her friends and those who put
ideas into her head! That was the thing! She was too thick with
June! June disliked him. He returned the sentiment. They were of
the same blood.
It would be everything to get Irene out of town. The house would
please her, she would enjoy messing about with the decoration,
she was very artistic!
The house must be in good style, something that would always be
certain to command a price, something unique, like that last
house of Parkes, which had a tower; but Parkes had himself said
that his architect was ruinous. You never knew where you were
with those fellows; if they had a name they ran you into no end
of expense and were conceited into the bargain.
And a common architect was no good—the memory of Parkes’ tower
precluded the employment of a common architect:
This was why he had thought of Bosinney. Since the dinner at
Swithin’s he had made enquiries, the result of which had been
meagre, but encouraging: “One of the new school.”
“Clever?”
“As clever as you like—a bit—a bit up in the air!”
He had not been able to discover what houses Bosinney had built,
nor what his charges were. The impression he gathered was that he
would be able to make his own terms. The more he reflected on the
idea, the more he liked it. It would be keeping the thing in the
family, with Forsytes almost an instinct; and he would be able to
get “favoured-nation,” if not nominal terms—only fair,
considering the chance to Bosinney of displaying his talents, for
this house must be no common edifice.
Soames reflected complacently on the work it would be sure to
bring the young man; for, like every Forsyte, he could be a
thorough optimist when there was anything to be had out of it.
Bosinney’s office was in Sloane Street, close at, hand, so that
he would be able to keep his eye continually on the plans.
Again, Irene would not be to likely to object to leave London if
her greatest friend’s lover were given the job. Jun’s marriage
might depend on it. Irene could not decently stand in the way of
Jun’s marriage; she would never do that, he knew her too well.
And June would be pleased; of this he saw the advantage.
Bosinney looked clever, but he had also—and—it was one of his
great attractions—an air as if he did not quite know on which
side his bread were buttered; he should be easy to deal with in
money matters. Soames made this reflection in no defrauding
spirit; it was the natural attitude of his mind—of the mind of
any good business man—of all those thousands of good business men
through whom he was threading his way up Ludgate Hill.
Thus he fulfilled the inscrutable laws of his great class—of
human nature itself—when he reflected, with a sense of comfort,
that Bosinney would be easy to deal with in money matters.
While he elbowed his way on, his eyes, which he usually kept
fixed on the ground before his feet, were attracted upwards by
the dome of St. Paul’s. It had a peculiar fascination for him,
that old dome, and not once, but twice or three times a week,
would he halt in his daily pilgrimage to enter beneath and stop
in the side aisles for five or ten minutes, scrutinizing the
names and epitaphs on the monuments. The attraction for him of
this great church was inexplicable, unless it enabled him to
concentrate his thoughts on the business of the day. If any
affair of particular moment, or demanding peculiar acuteness, was
weighing on his mind, he invariably went in, to wander with
mouse-like attention from epitaph to epitaph. Then retiring in
the same noiseless way, he would hold steadily on up Cheapside, a
thought more of dogged purpose in his gait, as though he had seen
something which he had made up his mind to buy.
He went in this morning, but, instead of stealing from monument
to monument, turned his eyes upwards to the columns and spacings
of the walls, and remained motionless.
His uplifted face, with the awed and wistful look which faces
take on themselves in church, was whitened to a chalky hue in the
vast building. His gloved hands were clasped in front over the
handle of his umbrella. He lifted them. Some sacred inspiration
perhaps had come to him.
“Yes,” he thought, “I must have room to hang my pictures.”
That evening, on his return from the City, he called at
Bosinney’s office. He found the architect in his shirt-sleeves,
smoking a pipe, and ruling off lines on a plan. Soames refused a
drink, and came at once to the point.
“If you’ve nothing better to do on Sunday, come down with me to
Robin Hill, and give me your opinion on a building site.”
“Are you going to build?”
“Perhaps,” said Soames; “but don’t speak of it. I just want your
opinion.”
“Quite so,” said the architect.
Soames peered about the room.
“You’re rather high up here,” he remarked.
Any information he could gather about the nature and scope of
Bosinney’s business would be all to the good.
“It does well enough for me so far,” answered the architect.
“You’re accustomed to the swells.”
He knocked out his pipe, but replaced it empty between his teeth;
it assisted him perhaps to carry on the conversation. Soames
noted a hollow in each cheek, made as it were by suction.
“What do you pay for an office like this?” said he.
“Fifty too much,” replied Bosinney.
This answer impressed Soames favourably.
“I suppose it _is_ dear,” he said. “I’ll call for you—on Sunday
about eleven.”
The following Sunday therefore he called for Bosinney in a
hansom, and drove him to the station. On arriving at Robin Hill,
they found no cab, and started to walk the mile and a half to the
site.
It was the 1st of August—a perfect day, with a burning sun and
cloudless sky—and in the straight, narrow road leading up the
hill their feet kicked up a yellow dust.
“Gravel soil,” remarked Soames, and sideways he glanced at the
coat Bosinney wore. Into the side-pockets of this coat were
thrust bundles of papers, and under one arm was carried a
queer-looking stick. Soames noted these and other peculiarities.
No one but a clever man, or, indeed, a buccaneer, would have
taken such liberties with his appearance; and though these
eccentricities were revolting to Soames, he derived a certain
satisfaction from them, as evidence of qualities by which he must
inevitably profit. If the fellow could build houses, what did his
clothes matter?
“I told you,” he said, “that I want this house to be a surprise,
so don’t say anything about it. I never talk of my affairs until
they’re carried through.”
Bosinney nodded.
“Let women into your plans,” pursued Soames, “and you never know
where it’ll end.”
“Ah!” Said Bosinney, “women are the devil!”
This feeling had long been at the bottom of Soames’s heart; he
had never, however, put it into words.
“Oh!” he muttered, “so you’re beginning to....” He stopped, but
added, with an uncontrollable burst of spite: “Jun’s got a temper
of her own—always had.”
“A temper’s not a bad thing in an angel.”
Soames had never called Irene an angel. He could not so have
violated his best instincts, letting other people into the secret
of her value, and giving himself away. He made no reply.
They had struck into a half-made road across a warren. A
cart-track led at right-angles to a gravel pit, beyond which the
chimneys of a cottage rose amongst a clump of trees at the border
of a thick wood. Tussocks of feathery grass covered the rough
surface of the ground, and out of these the larks soared into the
haze of sunshine. On the far horizon, over a countless succession
of fields and hedges, rose a line of downs.
Soames led till they had crossed to the far side, and there he
stopped. It was the chosen site; but now that he was about to
divulge the spot to another he had become uneasy.
“The agent lives in that cottage,” he said; “he’ll give us some
lunch—we’d better have lunch before we go into this matter.”
He again took the lead to the cottage, where the agent, a tall
man named Oliver, with a heavy face and grizzled beard, welcomed
them. During lunch, which Soames hardly touched, he kept looking
at Bosinney, and once or twice passed his silk handkerchief
stealthily over his forehead. The meal came to an end at last,
and Bosinney rose.
“I dare say you’ve got business to talk over,” he said; “I’ll
just go and nose about a bit.” Without waiting for a reply he
strolled out.
Soames was solicitor to this estate, and he spent nearly an hour
in the agent’s company, looking at ground-plans and discussing
the Nicholl and other mortgages; it was as it were by an
afterthought that he brought up the question of the building
site.
“Your people,” he said, “ought to come down in their price to me,
considering that I shall be the first to build.”
Oliver shook his head.
The site you’ve fixed on, Sir, he said, “is the cheapest we’ve
got. Sites at the top of the slope are dearer by a good bit.”
“Mind,” said Soames, “I’ve not decided; it’s quite possible I
shan’t build at all. The ground rent’s very high.”
“Well, Mr. Forsyte, I shall be sorry if you go off, and I think
you’ll make a mistake, Sir. There’s not a bit of land near London
with such a view as this, nor one that’s cheaper, all things
considered; we’ve only to advertise, to get a mob of people after
it.”
They looked at each other. Their faces said very plainly: “I
respect you as a man of business; and you can’t expect me to
believe a word you say.”
Well, repeated Soames, “I haven’t made up my mind; the thing will
very likely go off!” With these words, taking up his umbrella, he
put his chilly hand into the agent’s, withdrew it without the
faintest pressure, and went out into the sun.
He walked slowly back towards the site in deep thought. His
instinct told him that what the agent had said was true. A cheap
site. And the beauty of it was, that he knew the agent did not
really think it cheap; so that his own intuitive knowledge was a
victory over the agent’s.
“Cheap or not, I mean to have it,” he thought.
The larks sprang up in front of his feet, the air was full of
butterflies, a sweet fragrance rose from the wild grasses. The
sappy scent of the bracken stole forth from the wood, where,
hidden in the depths, pigeons were cooing, and from afar on the
warm breeze, came the rhythmic chiming of church bells.
Soames walked with his eyes on the ground, his lips opening and
closing as though in anticipation of a delicious morsel. But when
he arrived at the site, Bosinney was nowhere to be seen. After
waiting some little time, he crossed the warren in the direction
of the slope. He would have shouted, but dreaded the sound of his
voice.
The warren was as lonely as a prairie, its silence only broken by
the rustle of rabbits bolting to their holes, and the song of the
larks.
Soames, the pioneer-leader of the great Forsyte army advancing to
the civilization of this wilderness, felt his spirit daunted by
the loneliness, by the invisible singing, and the hot, sweet air.
He had begun to retrace his steps when he at last caught sight of
Bosinney.
The architect was sprawling under a large oak tree, whose trunk,
with a huge spread of bough and foliage, ragged with age, stood
on the verge of the rise.
Soames had to touch him on the shoulder before he looked up.
“Hallo! Forsyte,” he said, “I’ve found the very place for your
house! Look here!”
Soames stood and looked, then he said, coldly:
“You may be very clever, but this site will cost me half as much
again.”
“Hang the cost, man. Look at the view!”
Almost from their feet stretched ripe corn, dipping to a small
dark copse beyond. A plain of fields and hedges spread to the
distant grey-bluedowns. In a silver streak to the right could be
seen the line of the river.
The sky was so blue, and the sun so bright, that an eternal
summer seemed to reign over this prospect. Thistledown floated
round them, enraptured by the serenity, of the ether. The heat
danced over the corn, and, pervading all, was a soft, insensible
hum, like the murmur of bright minutes holding revel between
earth and heaven.
Soames looked. In spite of himself, something swelled in his
breast. To live here in sight of all this, to be able to point it
out to his friends, to talk of it, to possess it! His cheeks
flushed. The warmth, the radiance, the glow, were sinking into
his senses as, four years before, Irene’s beauty had sunk into
his senses and made him long for her. He stole a glance at
Bosinney, whose eyes, the eyes of the coachman’s “half-tame
leopard,” seemed running wild over the landscape. The sunlight
had caught the promontories of the fellow’s face, the bumpy
cheekbones, the point of his chin, the vertical ridges above his
brow; and Soames watched this rugged, enthusiastic, careless face
with an unpleasant feeling.
A long, soft ripple of wind flowed over the corn, and brought a
puff of warm air into their faces.
“I could build you a teaser here,” said Bosinney, breaking the
silence at last.
“I dare say,” replied Soames, drily. “You haven’t got to pay for
it.”
“For about eight thousand I could build you a palace.”
Soames had become very pale—a struggle was going on within him.
He dropped his eyes, and said stubbornly:
“I can’t afford it.”
And slowly, with his mousing walk, he led the way back to the
first site.
They spent some time there going into particulars of the
projected house, and then Soames returned to the agent’s cottage.
He came out in about half an hour, and, joining Bosinney, started
for the station.
“Well,” he said, hardly opening his lips, “I’ve taken that site
of yours, after all.”
And again he was silent, confusedly debating how it was that this
fellow, whom by habit he despised, should have overborne his own
decision.
CHAPTER V A FORSYTE MÉNAGE
Like the enlightened thousands of his class and generation in
this great city of London, who no longer believe in red velvet
chairs, and know that groups of modern Italian marble are “_vieux
jeu_,” Soames Forsyte inhabited a house which did what it could.
It owned a copper door knocker of individual design, windows
which had been altered to open outwards, hanging flower boxes
filled with fuchsias, and at the back (a great feature) a little
court tiled with jade-green tiles, and surrounded by pink
hydrangeas in peacock-blue tubs. Here, under a parchment-coloured
Japanese sunshade covering the whole end, inhabitants or visitors
could be screened from the eyes of the curious while they drank
tea and examined at their leisure the latest of Soames’s little
silver boxes.
The inner decoration favoured the First Empire and William
Morris. For its size, the house was commodious; there were
countless nooks resembling birds’ nests, and little things made
of silver were deposited like eggs.
In this general perfection two kinds of fastidiousness were at
war. There lived here a mistress who would have dwelt daintily on
a desert island; a master whose daintiness was, as it were, an
investment, cultivated by the owner for his advancement, in
accordance with the laws of competition. This competitive
daintiness had caused Soames in his Marlborough days to be the
first boy into white waistcoats in summer, and corduroy
waistcoats in winter, had prevented him from ever appearing in
public with his tie climbing up his collar, and induced him to
dust his patent leather boots before a great multitude assembled
on Speech Day to hear him recite Molière.
Skin-like immaculateness had grown over Soames, as over many
Londoners; impossible to conceive of him with a hair out of
place, a tie deviating one-eighth of an inch from the
perpendicular, a collar unglossed! He would not have gone without
a bath for worlds—it was the fashion to take baths; and how
bitter was his scorn of people who omitted them!
But Irene could be imagined, like some nymph, bathing in wayside
streams, for the joy of the freshness and of seeing her own fair
body.
In this conflict throughout the house the woman had gone to the
wall. As in the struggle between Saxon and Celt still going on
within the nation, the more impressionable and receptive
temperament had had forced on it a conventional superstructure.
Thus the house had acquired a close resemblance to hundreds of
other houses with the same high aspirations, having become: “That
very charming little house of the Soames Forsytes, quite
individual, my dear—really elegant.”
For Soames Forsyte—read James Peabody, Thomas Atkins, or Emmanuel
Spagnoletti, the name in fact of any upper-middle class
Englishman in London with any pretensions to taste; and though
the decoration be different, the phrase is just.
On the evening of August 8, a week after the expedition to Robin
Hill, in the dining-room of this house—“quite individual, my
dear—really elegant”—Soames and Irene were seated at dinner. A
hot dinner on Sundays was a little distinguishing elegance common
to this house and many others. Early in married life Soames had
laid down the rule: “The servants must give us hot dinner on
Sundays—they’ve nothing to do but play the concertina.”
The custom had produced no revolution. For—to Soames a rather
deplorable sign—servants were devoted to Irene, who, in defiance
of all safe tradition, appeared to recognise their right to a
share in the weaknesses of human nature.
The happy pair were seated, not opposite each other, but
rectangularly, at the handsome rosewood table; they dined without
a cloth—a distinguishing elegance—and so far had not spoken a
word.
Soames liked to talk during dinner about business, or what he had
been buying, and so long as he talked Irene’s silence did not
distress him. This evening he had found it impossible to talk.
The decision to build had been weighing on his mind all the week,
and he had made up his mind to tell her.
His nervousness about this disclosure irritated him profoundly;
she had no business to make him feel like that—a wife and a
husband being one person. She had not looked at him once since
they sat down; and he wondered what on earth she had been
thinking about all the time. It was hard, when a man worked as he
did, making money for her—yes, and with an ache in his heart—that
she should sit there, looking—looking as if she saw the walls of
the room closing in. It was enough to make a man get up and leave
the table.
The light from the rose-shaded lamp fell on her neck and
arms—Soames liked her to dine in a low dress, it gave him an
inexpressible feeling of superiority to the majority of his
acquaintance, whose wives were contented with their best high
frocks or with tea-gowns, when they dined at home. Under that
rosy light her amber-coloured hair and fair skin made strange
contrast with her dark brown eyes.
Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its
deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured
glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything
prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue
among Forsytes, who, competitive, and full of common-sense, had
no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of
exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was
his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his
hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her
heart.
Out of his other property, out of all the things he had
collected, his silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments,
he got a secret and intimate feeling; out of her he got none.
In this house of his there was writing on every wall. His
business-like temperament protested against a mysterious warning
that she was not made for him. He had married this woman,
conquered her, made her his own, and it seemed to him contrary to
the most fundamental of all laws, the law of possession, that he
could do no more than own her body—if indeed he could do that,
which he was beginning to doubt. If any one had asked him if he
wanted to own her soul, the question would have seemed to him
both ridiculous and sentimental. But he did so want, and the
writing said he never would.
She was ever silent, passive, gracefully averse; as though
terrified lest by word, motion, or sign she might lead him to
believe that she was fond of him; and he asked himself: Must I
always go on like this?
Like most novel readers of his generation (and Soames was a great
novel reader), literature coloured his view of life; and he had
imbibed the belief that it was only a question of time.
In the end the husband always gained the affection of his wife.
Even in those cases—a class of book he was not very fond of—which
ended in tragedy, the wife always died with poignant regrets on
her lips, or if it were the husband who died—unpleasant
thought—threw herself on his body in an agony of remorse.
He often took Irene to the theatre, instinctively choosing the
modern Society Plays with the modern Society conjugal problem, so
fortunately different from any conjugal problem in real life. He
found that they too always ended in the same way, even when there
was a lover in the case. While he was watching the play Soames
often sympathized with the lover; but before he reached home
again, driving with Irene in a hansom, he saw that this would not
do, and he was glad the play had ended as it had. There was one
class of husband that had just then come into fashion, the
strong, rather rough, but extremely sound man, who was peculiarly
successful at the end of the play; with this person Soames was
really not in sympathy, and had it not been for his own position,
would have expressed his disgust with the fellow. But he was so
conscious of how vital to himself was the necessity for being a
successful, even a “strong,” husband, that he never spoke of a
distaste born perhaps by the perverse processes of Nature out of
a secret fund of brutality in himself.
But Irene’s silence this evening was exceptional. He had never
before seen such an expression on her face. And since it is
always the unusual which alarms, Soames was alarmed. He ate his
savoury, and hurried the maid as she swept off the crumbs with
the silver sweeper. When she had left the room, he filled his
glass with wine and said:
“Anybody been here this afternoon?”
“June.”
“What did _she_ want?” It was an axiom with the Forsytes that
people did not go anywhere unless they wanted something. “Came to
talk about her lover, I suppose?”
Irene made no reply.
“It looks to me,” continued Soames, “as if she were sweeter on
him than he is on her. She’s always following him about.”
Irene’s eyes made him feel uncomfortable.
“You’ve no business to say such a thing!” she exclaimed.
“Why not? Anybody can see it.”
“They cannot. And if they could, it’s disgraceful to say so.”
Soames’s composure gave way.
“You’re a pretty wife!” he said. But secretly he wondered at the
heat of her reply; it was unlike her. “You’re cracked about June!
I can tell you one thing: now that she has the Buccaneer in tow,
she doesn’t care twopence about you, and, you’ll find it out. But
you won’t see so much of her in future; we’re going to live in
the country.”
He had been glad to get his news out under cover of this burst of
irritation. He had expected a cry of dismay; the silence with
which his pronouncement was received alarmed him.
“You don’t seem interested,” he was obliged to add.
“I knew it already.”
He looked at her sharply.
“Who told you?”
“June.”
“How did she know?”
Irene did not answer. Baffled and uncomfortable, he said:
“It’s a fine thing for Bosinney, it’ll be the making of him. I
suppose she’s told you all about it?”
“Yes.”
There was another pause, and then Soames said:
“I suppose you don’t want to, go?”
Irene made no reply.
“Well, I can’t tell what you want. You never seem contented
here.”
“Have my wishes anything to do with it?”
She took the vase of roses and left the room. Soames remained
seated. Was it for this that he had signed that contract? Was it
for this that he was going to spend some ten thousand pounds?
Bosinney’s phrase came back to him: “Women are the devil!”
But presently he grew calmer. It might have been worse. She might
have flared up. He had expected something more than this. It was
lucky, after all, that June had broken the ice for him. She must
have wormed it out of Bosinney; he might have known she would.
He lighted his cigarette. After all, Irene had not made a scene!
She would come round—that was the best of her; she was cold, but
not sulky. And, puffing the cigarette smoke at a lady-bird on the
shining table, he plunged into a reverie about the house. It was
no good worrying; he would go and make it up presently. She would
be sitting out there in the dark, under the Japanese sunshade,
knitting. A beautiful, warm night....
In truth, June had come in that afternoon with shining eyes, and
the words: “Soames is a brick! It’s splendid for Phil—the very
thing for him!”
Irene’s face remaining dark and puzzled, she went on:
“Your new house at Robin Hill, of course. What? Don’t you know?”
Irene did not know.
“Oh! then, I suppose I oughtn’t to have told you!” Looking
impatiently at her friend, she cried: “You look as if you didn’t
care. Don’t you see, it’s what I’ve been praying for—the very
chance he’s been wanting all this time. Now you’ll see what he
can do;” and thereupon she poured out the whole story.
Since her own engagement she had not seemed much interested in
her friend’s position; the hours she spent with Irene were given
to confidences of her own; and at times, for all her affectionate
pity, it was impossible to keep out of her smile a trace of
compassionate contempt for the woman who had made such a mistake
in her life—such a vast, ridiculous mistake.
“He’s to have all the decorations as well—a free hand. It’s
perfect—” June broke into laughter, her little figure quivered
gleefully; she raised her hand, and struck a blow at a muslin
curtain. “Do you, know I even asked Uncle James....” But, with a
sudden dislike to mentioning that incident, she stopped; and
presently, finding her friend so unresponsive, went away. She
looked back from the pavement, and Irene was still standing in
the doorway. In response to her farewell wave, Irene put her hand
to her brow, and, turning slowly, shut the door....
Soames went to the drawing-room presently, and peered at her
through the window.
Out in the shadow of the Japanese sunshade she was sitting very
still, the lace on her white shoulders stirring with the soft
rise and fall of her bosom.
But about this silent creature sitting there so motionless, in
the dark, there seemed a warmth, a hidden fervour of feeling, as
if the whole of her being had been stirred, and some change were
taking place in its very depths.
He stole back to the dining-room unnoticed.
CHAPTER VI JAMES AT LARGE
It was not long before Soames’s determination to build went the
round of the family, and created the flutter that any decision
connected with property should make among Forsytes.
It was not his fault, for he had been determined that no one
should know. June, in the fulness of her heart, had told Mrs.
Small, giving her leave only to tell Aunt Ann—she thought it
would cheer her, the poor old sweet! for Aunt Ann had kept her
room now for many days.
Mrs. Small told Aunt Ann at once, who, smiling as she lay back on
her pillows, said in her distinct, trembling old voice:
“It’s very nice for dear June; but I hope they will be
careful—it’s rather dangerous!”
When she was left alone again, a frown, like a cloud presaging a
rainy morrow, crossed her face.
While she was lying there so many days the process of recharging
her will went on all the time; it spread to her face, too, and
tightening movements were always in action at the corners of her
lips.
The maid Smither, who had been in her service since girlhood, and
was spoken of as “Smither—a good girl—but so slow!”—the maid
Smither performed every morning with extreme punctiliousness the
crowning ceremony of that ancient toilet. Taking from the
recesses of their pure white band-box those flat, grey curls, the
insignia of personal dignity, she placed them securely in her
mistress’s hands, and turned her back.
And every day Aunts Juley and Hester were required to come and
report on Timothy; what news there was of Nicholas; whether dear
June had succeeded in getting Jolyon to shorten the engagement,
now that Mr. Bosinney was building Soames a house; whether young
Roger’s wife was really—expecting; how the operation on Archie
had succeeded; and what Swithin had done about that empty house
in Wigmore Street, where the tenant had lost all his money and
treated him so badly; above all, about Soames; was Irene
still—still asking for a separate room? And every morning Smither
was told: “I shall be coming down this afternoon, Smither, about
two o’clock. I shall want your arm, after all these days in bed!”
After telling Aunt Ann, Mrs. Small had spoken of the house in the
strictest confidence to Mrs. Nicholas, who in her turn had asked
Winifred Dartie for confirmation, supposing, of course, that,
being Soames’s sister, she would know all about it. Through her
it had in due course come round to the ears of James. He had been
a good deal agitated.
“Nobody,” he said, “told him anything.” And, rather than go
direct to Soames himself, of whose taciturnity he was afraid, he
took his umbrella and went round to Timothy’s.
He found Mrs. Septimus and Hester (who had been told—she was so
safe, she found it tiring to talk) ready, and indeed eager, to
discuss the news. It was very good of dear Soames, they thought,
to employ Mr. Bosinney, but rather risky. What had George named
him? “The Buccaneer!” How droll! But George was always droll!
However, it would be all in the family they supposed they must
really look upon Mr. Bosinney as belonging to the family, though
it seemed strange.
James here broke in:
“Nobody knows anything about him. I don’t see what Soames wants
with a young man like that. I shouldn’t be surprised if Irene had
put her oar in. I shall speak to....”
“Soames,” interposed Aunt Juley, “told Mr. Bosinney that he
didn’t wish it mentioned. He wouldn’t like it to be talked about,
I’m sure, and if Timothy knew he would be very vexed, I....”
James put his hand behind his ear:
“What?” he said. “I’m getting very deaf. I suppose I don’t hear
people. Emily’s got a bad toe. We shan’t be able to start for
Wales till the end of the month. There’s always something!” And,
having got what he wanted, he took his hat and went away.
It was a fine afternoon, and he walked across the Park towards
Soames’s, where he intended to dine, for Emily’s toe kept her in
bed, and Rachel and Cicely were on a visit to the country. He
took the slanting path from the Bayswater side of the Row to the
Knightsbridge Gate, across a pasture of short, burnt grass,
dotted with blackened sheep, strewn with seated couples and
strange waifs; lying prone on their faces, like corpses on a
field over which the wave of battle has rolled.
He walked rapidly, his head bent, looking neither to right nor
left. The appearance of this park, the centre of his own
battle-field, where he had all his life been fighting, excited no
thought or speculation in his mind. These corpses flung down,
there, from out the press and turmoil of the struggle, these
pairs of lovers sitting cheek by jowl for an hour of idle Elysium
snatched from the monotony of their treadmill, awakened no
fancies in his mind; he had outlived that kind of imagination;
his nose, like the nose of a sheep, was fastened to the pastures
on which he browsed.
One of his tenants had lately shown a disposition to be
behind-hand in his rent, and it had become a grave question
whether he had not better turn him out at once, and so run the
risk of not re-letting before Christmas. Swithin had just been
let in very badly, but it had served him right—he had held on too
long.
He pondered this as he walked steadily, holding his umbrella
carefully by the wood, just below the crook of the handle, so as
to keep the ferule off the ground, and not fray the silk in the
middle. And, with his thin, high shoulders stooped, his long legs
moving with swift mechanical precision, this passage through the
Park, where the sun shone with a clear flame on so much
idleness—on so many human evidences of the remorseless battle of
Property, raging beyond its ring—was like the flight of some land
bird across the sea.
He felt a touch on the arm as he came out at Albert Gate.
It was Soames, who, crossing from the shady side of Piccadilly,
where he had been walking home from the office, had suddenly
appeared alongside.
“Your mother’s in bed,” said James; “I was just coming to you,
but I suppose I shall be in the way.”
The outward relations between James and his son were marked by a
lack of sentiment peculiarly Forsytean, but for all that the two
were by no means unattached. Perhaps they regarded one another as
an investment; certainly they were solicitous of each other’s
welfare, glad of each other’s company. They had never exchanged
two words upon the more intimate problems of life, or revealed in
each other’s presence the existence of any deep feeling.
Something beyond the power of word-analysis bound them together,
something hidden deep in the fibre of nations and families—for
blood, they say, is thicker than water—and neither of them was a
cold-blooded man. Indeed, in James love of his children was now
the prime motive of his existence. To have creatures who were
parts of himself, to whom he might transmit the money he saved,
was at the root of his saving; and, at seventy-five, what was
left that could give him pleasure, but—saving? The kernel of life
was in this saving for his children.
Than James Forsyte, notwithstanding all his “Jonah-isms,” there
was no saner man (if the leading symptom of sanity, as we are
told, is self-preservation, though without doubt Timothy went too
far) in all this London, of which he owned so much, and loved
with such a dumb love, as the centre of his opportunities. He had
the marvellous instinctive sanity of the middle class. In
him—more than in Jolyon, with his masterful will and his moments
of tenderness and philosophy—more than in Swithin, the martyr to
crankiness—Nicholas, the sufferer from ability—and Roger, the
victim of enterprise—beat the true pulse of compromise; of all
the brothers he was least remarkable in mind and person, and for
that reason more likely to live for ever.
To James, more than to any of the others, was “the family”
significant and dear. There had always been something primitive
and cosy in his attitude towards life; he loved the family
hearth, he loved gossip, and he loved grumbling. All his
decisions were formed of a cream which he skimmed off the family
mind; and, through that family, off the minds of thousands of
other families of similar fibre. Year after year, week after
week, he went to Timothy’s, and in his brother’s front
drawing-room—his legs twisted, his long white whiskers framing
his clean-shaven mouth—would sit watching the family pot simmer,
the cream rising to the top; and he would go away sheltered,
refreshed, comforted, with an indefinable sense of comfort.
Beneath the adamant of his self-preserving instinct there was
much real softness in James; a visit to Timothy’s was like an
hour spent in the lap of a mother; and the deep craving he
himself had for the protection of the family wing reacted in turn
on his feelings towards his own children; it was a nightmare to
him to think of them exposed to the treatment of the world, in
money, health, or reputation. When his old friend John Street’s
son volunteered for special service, he shook his head
querulously, and wondered what John Street was about to allow it;
and when young Street was assagaied, he took it so much to heart
that he made a point of calling everywhere with the special
object of saying: He knew how it would be—he’d no patience with
them!
When his son-in-law Dartie had that financial crisis, due to
speculation in Oil Shares, James made himself ill worrying over
it; the knell of all prosperity seemed to have sounded. It took
him three months and a visit to Baden-Baden to get better; there
was something terrible in the idea that but for his, James’s,
money, Dartie’s name might have appeared in the Bankruptcy List.
Composed of a physiological mixture so sound that if he had an
earache he thought he was dying, he regarded the occasional
ailments of his wife and children as in the nature of personal
grievances, special interventions of Providence for the purpose
of destroying his peace of mind; but he did not believe at all in
the ailments of people outside his own immediate family,
affirming them in every case to be due to neglected liver.
His universal comment was: “What can they expect? I have it
myself, if I’m not careful!”
When he went to Soames’s that evening he felt that life was hard
on him: There was Emily with a bad toe, and Rachel gadding about
in the country; he got no sympathy from anybody; and Ann, she was
ill—he did not believe she would last through the summer; he had
called there three times now without her being able to see him!
And this idea of Soames’s, building a house, _that_ would have to
be looked into. As to the trouble with Irene, he didn’t know what
was to come of that—anything might come of it!
He entered 62, Montpellier Square with the fullest intentions of
being miserable.
It was already half-past seven, and Irene, dressed for dinner,
was seated in the drawing-room. She was wearing her gold-coloured
frock—for, having been displayed at a dinner-party, a soirée, and
a dance, it was now to be worn at home—and she had adorned the
bosom with a cascade of lace, on which James’s eyes riveted
themselves at once.
“Where do you get your things?” he said in an aggravated voice.
“I never see Rachel and Cicely looking half so well. That
rose-point, now—that’s not real!”
Irene came close, to prove to him that he was in error.
And, in spite of himself, James felt the influence of her
deference, of the faint seductive perfume exhaling from her. No
self-respecting Forsyte surrendered at a blow; so he merely said:
He didn’t know—he expected she was spending a pretty penny on
dress.
The gong sounded, and, putting her white arm within his, Irene
took him into the dining-room. She seated him in Soames’s usual
place, round the corner on her left. The light fell softly there,
so that he would not be worried by the gradual dying of the day;
and she began to talk to him about himself.
Presently, over James came a change, like the mellowing that
steals upon a fruit in the sun; a sense of being caressed, and
praised, and petted, and all without the bestowal of a single
caress or word of praise. He felt that what he was eating was
agreeing with him; he could not get that feeling at home; he did
not know when he had enjoyed a glass of champagne so much, and,
on inquiring the brand and price, was surprised to find that it
was one of which he had a large stock himself, but could never
drink; he instantly formed the resolution to let his wine
merchant know that he had been swindled.
Looking up from his food, he remarked:
“You’ve a lot of nice things about the place. Now, what did you
give for that sugar-sifter? Shouldn’t wonder if it was worth
money!”
He was particularly pleased with the appearance of a picture, on
the wall opposite, which he himself had given them:
“I’d no idea it was so good!” he said.
They rose to go into the drawing-room, and James followed Irene
closely.
“That’s what I call a capital little dinner,” he murmured,
breathing pleasantly down on her shoulder; “nothing heavy—and not
too Frenchified. But _I_ can’t get it at home. I pay my cook
sixty pounds a year, but _she_ can’t give me a dinner like that!”
He had as yet made no allusion to the building of the house, nor
did he when Soames, pleading the excuse of business, betook
himself to the room at the top, where he kept his pictures.
James was left alone with his daughter-in-law. The glow of the
wine, and of an excellent liqueur, was still within him. He felt
quite warm towards her. She was really a taking little thing; she
listened to you, and seemed to understand what you were saying;
and, while talking, he kept examining her figure, from her
bronze-coloured shoes to the waved gold of her hair. She was
leaning back in an Empire chair, her shoulders poised against the
top—her body, flexibly straight and unsupported from the hips,
swaying when she moved, as though giving to the arms of a lover.
Her lips were smiling, her eyes half-closed.
It may have been a recognition of danger in the very charm of her
attitude, or a twang of digestion, that caused a sudden dumbness
to fall on James. He did not remember ever having been quite
alone with Irene before. And, as he looked at her, an odd feeling
crept over him, as though he had come across something strange
and foreign.
Now what was she thinking about—sitting back like that?
Thus when he spoke it was in a sharper voice, as if he had been
awakened from a pleasant dream.
“What d’you do with yourself all day?” he said. “You never come
round to Park Lane!”
She seemed to be making very lame excuses, and James did not look
at her. He did not want to believe that she was really avoiding
them—it would mean too much.
“I expect the fact is, you haven’t time,” he said; “You’re always
about with June. I expect you’re useful to her with her young
man, chaperoning, and one thing and another. They tell me she’s
never at home now; your Uncle Jolyon he doesn’t like it, I fancy,
being left so much alone as he is. They tell me she’s always
hanging about for this young Bosinney; I suppose he comes here
every day. Now, what do you think of him? D’you think he knows
his own mind? He seems to me a poor thing. I should say the grey
mare was the better horse!”
The colour deepened in Irene’s face; and James watched her
suspiciously.
“Perhaps you don’t quite understand Mr. Bosinney,” she said.
“Don’t understand him!” James hummed out: “Why not?—you can see
he’s one of these artistic chaps. They say he’s clever—they all
think they’re clever. You know more about him than I do,” he
added; and again his suspicious glance rested on her.
“He is designing a house for Soames,” she said softly, evidently
trying to smooth things over.
“That brings me to what I was going to say,” continued James; “I
don’t know what Soames wants with a young man like that; why
doesn’t he go to a first-rate man?”
“Perhaps Mr. Bosinney is first-rate!”
James rose, and took a turn with bent head.
“That’s it’,” he said, “you young people, you all stick together;
you all think you know best!”
Halting his tall, lank figure before her, he raised a finger, and
levelled it at her bosom, as though bringing an indictment
against her beauty:
“All I can say is, these artistic people, or whatever they call
themselves, they’re as unreliable as they can be; and my advice
to you is, don’t you have too much to do with him!”
Irene smiled; and in the curve of her lips was a strange
provocation. She seemed to have lost her deference. Her breast
rose and fell as though with secret anger; she drew her hands
inwards from their rest on the arms of her chair until the tips
of her fingers met, and her dark eyes looked unfathomably at
James.
The latter gloomily scrutinized the floor.
“I tell you my opinion,” he said, “it’s a pity you haven’t got a
child to think about, and occupy you!”
A brooding look came instantly on Irene’s face, and even James
became conscious of the rigidity that took possession of her
whole figure beneath the softness of its silk and lace clothing.
He was frightened by the effect he had produced, and like most
men with but little courage, he sought at once to justify himself
by bullying.
“You don’t seem to care about going about. Why don’t you drive
down to Hurlingham with us? And go to the theatre now and then.
At your time of life you ought to take an interest in things.
You’re a young woman!”
The brooding look darkened on her face; he grew nervous.
“Well, I know nothing about it,” he said; “nobody tells me
anything. Soames ought to be able to take care of himself. If he
can’t take care of himself he mustn’t look to me—that’s all.”
Biting the corner of his forefinger he stole a cold, sharp look
at his daughter-in-law.
He encountered her eyes fixed on his own, so dark and deep, that
he stopped, and broke into a gentle perspiration.
“Well, I must be going,” he said after a short pause, and a
minute later rose, with a slight appearance of surprise, as
though he had expected to be asked to stop. Giving his hand to
Irene, he allowed himself to be conducted to the door, and let
out into the street. He would not have a cab, he would walk,
Irene was to say good-night to Soames for him, and if she wanted
a little gaiety, well, he would drive her down to Richmond any
day.
He walked home, and going upstairs, woke Emily out of the first
sleep she had had for four and twenty hours, to tell her that it
was his impression things were in a bad way at Soames’s; on this
theme he descanted for half an hour, until at last, saying that
he would not sleep a wink, he turned on his side and instantly
began to snore.
In Montpellier Square Soames, who had come from the picture room,
stood invisible at the top of the stairs, watching Irene sort the
letters brought by the last post. She turned back into the
drawing-room; but in a minute came out, and stood as if
listening. Then she came stealing up the stairs, with a kitten in
her arms. He could see her face bent over the little beast, which
was purring against her neck. Why couldn’t she look at him like
that?
Suddenly she saw him, and her face changed.
“Any letters for me?” he said.
“Three.”
He stood aside, and without another word she passed on into the
bedroom.
CHAPTER VII OLD JOLYON’S PECCADILLO
Old Jolyon came out of Lord’s cricket ground that same afternoon
with the intention of going home. He had not reached Hamilton
Terrace before he changed his mind, and hailing a cab, gave the
driver an address in Wistaria Avenue. He had taken a resolution.
June had hardly been at home at all that week; she had given him
nothing of her company for a long time past, not, in fact, since
she had become engaged to Bosinney. He never asked her for her
company. It was not his habit to ask people for things! She had
just that one idea now—Bosinney and his affairs—and she left him
stranded in his great house, with a parcel of servants, and not a
soul to speak to from morning to night. His Club was closed for
cleaning; his Boards in recess; there was nothing, therefore, to
take him into the City. June had wanted him to go away; she would
not go herself, because Bosinney was in London.
But where was he to go by himself? He could not go abroad alone;
the sea upset his liver; he hated hotels. Roger went to a
hydropathic—he was not going to begin that at his time of life,
those new-fangled places were all humbug!
With such formulas he clothed to himself the desolation of his
spirit; the lines down his face deepening, his eyes day by day
looking forth with the melancholy which sat so strangely on a
face wont to be strong and serene.
And so that afternoon he took this journey through St. John’s
Wood, in the golden-light that sprinkled the rounded green bushes
of the acacia’s before the little houses, in the summer sunshine
that seemed holding a revel over the little gardens; and he
looked about him with interest; for this was a district which no
Forsyte entered without open disapproval and secret curiosity.
His cab stopped in front of a small house of that peculiar buff
colour which implies a long immunity from paint. It had an outer
gate, and a rustic approach.
He stepped out, his bearing extremely composed; his massive head,
with its drooping moustache and wings of white hair, very
upright, under an excessively large top hat; his glance firm, a
little angry. He had been driven into this!
“Mrs. Jolyon Forsyte at home?”
“Oh, yes sir!—what name shall I say, if you please, sir?”
Old Jolyon could not help twinkling at the little maid as he gave
his name. She seemed to him such a funny little toad!
And he followed her through the dark hall, into a small double,
drawing-room, where the furniture was covered in chintz, and the
little maid placed him in a chair.
“They’re all in the garden, sir; if you’ll kindly take a seat,
I’ll tell them.”
Old Jolyon sat down in the chintz-covered chair, and looked
around him. The whole place seemed to him, as he would have
expressed it, pokey; there was a certain—he could not tell
exactly what—air of shabbiness, or rather of making two ends
meet, about everything. As far as he could see, not a single
piece of furniture was worth a five-pound note. The walls,
distempered rather a long time ago, were decorated with
water-colour sketches; across the ceiling meandered a long crack.
These little houses were all old, second-rate concerns; he should
hope the rent was under a hundred a year; it hurt him more than
he could have said, to think of a Forsyte—his own son living in
such a place.
The little maid came back. Would he please to go down into the
garden?
Old Jolyon marched out through the French windows. In descending
the steps he noticed that they wanted painting.
Young Jolyon, his wife, his two children, and his dog Balthasar,
were all out there under a pear-tree.
This walk towards them was the most courageous act of old
Jolyon’s life; but no muscle of his face moved, no nervous
gesture betrayed him. He kept his deep-set eyes steadily on the
enemy.
In those two minutes he demonstrated to perfection all that
unconscious soundness, balance, and vitality of fibre that made,
of him and so many others of his class the core of the nation. In
the unostentatious conduct of their own affairs, to the neglect
of everything else, they typified the essential individualism,
born in the Briton from the natural isolation of his country’s
life.
The dog Balthasar sniffed round the edges of his trousers; this
friendly and cynical mongrel—offspring of a liaison between a
Russian poodle and a fox-terrier—had a nose for the unusual.
The strange greetings over, old Jolyon seated himself in a wicker
chair, and his two grandchildren, one on each side of his knees,
looked at him silently, never having seen so old a man.
They were unlike, as though recognising the difference set
between them by the circumstances of their births. Jolly, the
child of sin, pudgy-faced, with his tow-coloured hair brushed off
his forehead, and a dimple in his chin, had an air of stubborn
amiability, and the eyes of a Forsyte; little Holly, the child of
wedlock, was a dark-skinned, solemn soul, with her mother’s grey
and wistful eyes.
The dog Balthasar, having walked round the three small
flower-beds, to show his extreme contempt for things at large,
had also taken a seat in front of old Jolyon, and, oscillating a
tail curled by Nature tightly over his back, was staring up with
eyes that did not blink.
Even in the garden, that sense of things being pokey haunted old
Jolyon; the wicker chair creaked under his weight; the
garden-beds looked “daverdy”. On the far side, under the
smut-stained wall, cats had made a path.
While he and his grandchildren thus regarded each other with the
peculiar scrutiny, curious yet trustful, that passes between the
very young and the very old, young Jolyon watched his wife.
The colour had deepened in her thin, oval face, with its straight
brows, and large, grey eyes. Her hair, brushed in fine, high
curves back from her forehead, was going grey, like his own, and
this greyness made the sudden vivid colour in her cheeks
painfully pathetic.
The look on her face, such as he had never seen there before,
such as she had always hidden from him, was full of secret
resentments, and longings, and fears. Her eyes, under their
twitching brows, stared painfully. And she was silent.
Jolly alone sustained the conversation; he had many possessions,
and was anxious that his unknown friend with extremely large
moustaches, and hands all covered with blue veins, who sat with
legs crossed like his own father (a habit he was himself trying
to acquire), should know it; but being a Forsyte, though not yet
quite eight years old, he made no mention of the thing at the
moment dearest to his heart—a camp of soldiers in a shop-window,
which his father had promised to buy. No doubt it seemed to him
too precious; a tempting of Providence to mention it yet.
And the sunlight played through the leaves on that little party
of the three generations grouped tranquilly under the pear-tree,
which had long borne no fruit.
Old Jolyon’s furrowed face was reddening patchily, as old men’s
faces redden in the sun. He took one of Jolly’s hands in his own;
the boy climbed on to his knee; and little Holly, mesmerized by
this sight, crept up to them; the sound of the dog Balthasar’s
scratching arose rhythmically.
Suddenly young Mrs. Jolyon got up and hurried indoors. A minute
later her husband muttered an excuse, and followed. Old Jolyon
was left alone with his grandchildren.
And Nature with her quaint irony began working in him one of her
strange revolutions, following her cyclic laws into the depths of
his heart. And that tenderness for little children, that passion
for the beginnings of life which had once made him forsake his
son and follow June, now worked in him to forsake June and follow
these littler things. Youth, like a flame, burned ever in his
breast, and to youth he turned, to the round little limbs, so
reckless, that wanted care, to the small round faces so
unreasonably solemn or bright, to the treble tongues, and the
shrill, chuckling laughter, to the insistent tugging hands, and
the feel of small bodies against his legs, to all that was young
and young, and once more young. And his eyes grew soft, his
voice, and thin-veined hands soft, and soft his heart within him.
And to those small creatures he became at once a place of
pleasure, a place where they were secure, and could talk and
laugh and play; till, like sunshine, there radiated from old
Jolyon’s wicker chair the perfect gaiety of three hearts.
But with young Jolyon following to his wife’s room it was
different.
He found her seated on a chair before her dressing-glass, with
her hands before her face.
Her shoulders were shaking with sobs. This passion of hers for
suffering was mysterious to him. He had been through a hundred of
these moods; how he had survived them he never knew, for he could
never believe they _were_ moods, and that the last hour of his
partnership had not struck.
In the night she would be sure to throw her arms round his neck
and say: “Oh! Jo, how I make you suffer!” as she had done a
hundred times before.
He reached out his hand, and, unseen, slipped his razor-case into
his pocket. “I cannot stay here,” he thought, “I must go down!”
Without a word he left the room, and went back to the lawn.
Old Jolyon had little Holly on his knee; she had taken possession
of his watch; Jolly, very red in the face, was trying to show
that he could stand on his head. The dog Balthasar, as close as
he might be to the tea-table, had fixed his eyes on the cake.
Young Jolyon felt a malicious desire to cut their enjoyment
short.
What business had his father to come and upset his wife like
this? It was a shock, after all these years! He ought to have
known; he ought to have given them warning; but when did a
Forsyte ever imagine that his conduct could upset anybody! And in
his thoughts he did old Jolyon wrong.
He spoke sharply to the children, and told them to go in to their
tea. Greatly surprised, for they had never heard their father
speak sharply before, they went off, hand in hand, little Holly
looking back over her shoulder.
Young Jolyon poured out the tea.
“My wife’s not the thing today,” he said, but he knew well enough
that his father had penetrated the cause of that sudden
withdrawal, and almost hated the old man for sitting there so
calmly.
“You’ve got a nice little house here,” said old Jolyon with a
shrewd look; “I suppose you’ve taken a lease of it!”
Young Jolyon nodded.
“I don’t like the neighbourhood,” said old Jolyon; “a ramshackle
lot.”
Young Jolyon replied: “Yes, we’re a ramshackle lot.”
The silence was now only broken by the sound of the dog
Balthasar’s scratching.
Old Jolyon said simply: “I suppose I oughtn’t to have come here,
Jo; but I get so lonely!”
At these words young Jolyon got up and put his hand on his
father’s shoulder.
In the next house someone was playing over and over again: “La
Donna è mobile” on an untuned piano; and the little garden had
fallen into shade, the sun now only reached the wall at the end,
whereon basked a crouching cat, her yellow eyes turned sleepily
down on the dog Balthasar. There was a drowsy hum of very distant
traffic; the creepered trellis round the garden shut out
everything but sky, and house, and pear-tree, with its top
branches still gilded by the sun.
For some time they sat there, talking but little. Then old Jolyon
rose to go, and not a word was said about his coming again.
He walked away very sadly. What a poor miserable place; and he
thought of the great, empty house in Stanhope Gate, fit residence
for a Forsyte, with its huge billiard-room and drawing-room that
no one entered from one week’s end to another.
That woman, whose face he had rather liked, was too thin-skinned
by half; she gave Jo a bad time he knew! And those sweet
children! Ah! what a piece of awful folly!
He walked towards the Edgware Road, between rows of little
houses, all suggesting to him (erroneously no doubt, but the
prejudices of a Forsyte are sacred) shady histories of some sort
or kind.
Society, forsooth, the chattering hags and jackanapes—had set
themselves up to pass judgment on _his_ flesh and blood! A parcel
of old women! He stumped his umbrella on the ground, as though to
drive it into the heart of that unfortunate body, which had dared
to ostracize his son and his son’s son, in whom he could have
lived again!
He stumped his umbrella fiercely; yet he himself had followed
Society’s behaviour for fifteen years—had only today been false
to it!
He thought of June, and her dead mother, and the whole story,
with all his old bitterness. A wretched business!
He was a long time reaching Stanhope Gate, for, with native
perversity, being extremely tired, he walked the whole way.
After washing his hands in the lavatory downstairs, he went to
the dining-room to wait for dinner, the only room he used when
June was out—it was less lonely so. The evening paper had not yet
come; he had finished the Times, there was therefore nothing to
do.
The room faced the backwater of traffic, and was very silent. He
disliked dogs, but a dog even would have been company. His gaze,
travelling round the walls, rested on a picture entitled: “Group
of Dutch fishing boats at sunset”; the _chef d’œuvre_ of his
collection. It gave him no pleasure. He closed his eyes. He was
lonely! He oughtn’t to complain, he knew, but he couldn’t help
it: He was a poor thing—had always been a poor thing—no pluck!
Such was his thought.
The butler came to lay the table for dinner, and seeing his
master apparently asleep, exercised extreme caution in his
movements. This bearded man also wore a moustache, which had
given rise to grave doubts in the minds of many members—of the
family—, especially those who, like Soames, had been to public
schools, and were accustomed to niceness in such matters. Could
he really be considered a butler? Playful spirits alluded to him
as: “Uncle Jolyon’s Nonconformist”. George, the acknowledged wag,
had named him: “Sankey.”
He moved to and fro between the great polished sideboard and the
great polished table inimitably sleek and soft.
Old Jolyon watched him, feigning sleep. The fellow was a sneak—he
had always thought so—who cared about nothing but rattling
through his work, and getting out to his betting or his woman or
goodness knew what! A slug! Fat too! And didn’t care a pin about
his master!
But then against his will, came one of those moments of
philosophy which made old Jolyon different from other Forsytes:
After all why should the man care? He wasn’t paid to care, and
why expect it? In this world people couldn’t look for affection
unless they paid for it. It might be different in the next—he
didn’t know—couldn’t tell! And again he shut his eyes.
Relentless and stealthy, the butler pursued his labours, taking
things from the various compartments of the sideboard. His back
seemed always turned to old Jolyon; thus, he robbed his
operations of the unseemliness of being carried on in his
master’s presence; now and then he furtively breathed on the
silver, and wiped it with a piece of chamois leather. He appeared
to pore over the quantities of wine in the decanters, which he
carried carefully and rather high, letting his head droop over
them protectingly. When he had finished, he stood for over a
minute watching his master, and in his greenish eyes there was a
look of contempt:
After all, this master of his was an old buffer, who hadn’t much
left in him!
Soft as a tom-cat, he crossed the room to press the bell. His
orders were “dinner at seven.” What if his master were asleep; he
would soon have him out of that; there was the night to sleep in!
He had himself to think of, for he was due at his Club at
half-past eight!
In answer to the ring, appeared a page boy with a silver soup
tureen. The butler took it from his hands and placed it on the
table, then, standing by the open door, as though about to usher
company into the room, he said in a solemn voice:
“Dinner is on the table, sir!”
Slowly old Jolyon got up out of his chair, and sat down at the
table to eat his dinner.
CHAPTER VIII PLANS OF THE HOUSE
Forsytes, as is generally admitted, have shells, like that
extremely useful little animal which is made into Turkish
delight, in other words, they are never seen, or if seen would
not be recognised, without habitats, composed of circumstance,
property, acquaintances, and wives, which seem to move along with
them in their passage through a world composed of thousands of
other Forsytes with their habitats. Without a habitat a Forsyte
is inconceivable—he would be like a novel without a plot, which
is well-known to be an anomaly.
To Forsyte eyes Bosinney appeared to have no habitat, he seemed
one of those rare and unfortunate men who go through life
surrounded by circumstance, property, acquaintances, and wives
that do not belong to them.
His rooms in Sloane Street, on the top floor, outside which, on a
plate, was his name, “Philip Baynes Bosinney, Architect,” were
not those of a Forsyte. He had no sitting-room apart from his
office, but a large recess had been screened off to conceal the
necessaries of life—a couch, an easy chair, his pipes, spirit
case, novels and slippers. The business part of the room had the
usual furniture; an open cupboard with pigeon-holes, a round oak
table, a folding wash-stand, some hard chairs, a standing desk of
large dimensions covered with drawings and designs. June had
twice been to tea there under the chaperonage of his aunt.
He was believed to have a bedroom at the back.
As far as the family had been able to ascertain his income, it
consisted of two consulting appointments at twenty pounds a year,
together with an odd fee once in a way, and—more worthy item—a
private annuity under his father’s will of one hundred and fifty
pounds a year.
What had transpired concerning that father was not so reassuring.
It appeared that he had been a Lincolnshire country doctor of
Cornish extraction, striking appearance, and Byronic tendencies—a
well-known figure, in fact, in his county. Bosinney’s uncle by
marriage, Baynes, of Baynes and Bildeboy, a Forsyte in instincts
if not in name, had but little that was worthy to relate of his
brother-in-law.
“An odd fellow!” he would say: “always spoke of his three eldest
boys as ‘good creatures, but so dull’; they’re all doing
capitally in the Indian Civil! Philip was the only one _he_
liked. I’ve heard him talk in the queerest way; he once said to
me: ‘My dear fellow, never let your poor wife know what you’re
thinking of!’ But I didn’t follow his advice; not I! An eccentric
man! He would say to Phil: ‘Whether you live like a gentleman or
not, my boy, be sure you die like one!’ and he had himself
embalmed in a frock coat suit, with a satin cravat and a diamond
pin. Oh, quite an original, I can assure you!”
Of Bosinney himself Baynes would speak warmly, with a certain
compassion: “He’s got a streak of his father’s Byronism. Why,
look at the way he threw up his chances when he left my office;
going off like that for six months with a knapsack, and all for
what?—to study foreign architecture—foreign! What could he
expect? And there he is—a clever young fellow—doesn’t make his
hundred a year! Now this engagement is the best thing that could
have happened—keep him steady; he’s one of those that go to bed
all day and stay up all night, simply because they’ve no method;
but no vice about him—not an ounce of vice. Old Forsyte’s a rich
man!”
Mr. Baynes made himself extremely pleasant to June, who
frequently visited his house in Lowndes Square at this period.
“This house of your cousin’s—what a capital man of business—is
the very thing for Philip,” he would say to her; “you mustn’t
expect to see too much of him just now, my dear young lady. The
good cause—the good cause! The young man must make his way. When
I was his age I was at work day and night. My dear wife used to
say to me, ‘Bobby, don’t work too hard, think of your health’;
but I never spared myself!”
June had complained that her lover found no time to come to
Stanhope Gate.
The first time he came again they had not been together a quarter
of an hour before, by one of those coincidences of which she was
a mistress, Mrs. Septimus Small arrived. Thereon Bosinney rose
and hid himself, according to previous arrangement, in the little
study, to wait for her departure.
“My dear,” said Aunt Juley, “how thin he is! I’ve often noticed
it with engaged people; but you mustn’t let it get worse. There’s
Barlow’s extract of veal; it did your Uncle Swithin a lot of
good.”
June, her little figure erect before the hearth, her small face
quivering grimly, for she regarded her aunt’s untimely visit in
the light of a personal injury, replied with scorn:
“It’s because he’s busy; people who can do anything worth doing
are never fat!”
Aunt Juley pouted; she herself had always been thin, but the only
pleasure she derived from the fact was the opportunity of longing
to be stouter.
“I don’t think,” she said mournfully, “that you ought to let them
call him ‘The Buccaneer’; people might think it odd, now that
he’s going to build a house for Soames. I do hope he will be
careful; it’s so important for him. Soames has such good taste!”
“Taste!” cried June, flaring up at once; “wouldn’t give that for
his taste, or any of the family’s!”
Mrs. Small was taken aback.
“Your Uncle Swithin,” she said, “always had beautiful taste! And
Soames’s little house is lovely; you don’t mean to say you don’t
think so!”
“H’mph!” said June, “that’s only because Irene’s there!”
Aunt Juley tried to say something pleasant:
“And how will dear Irene like living in the country?”
June gazed at her intently, with a look in her eyes as if her
conscience had suddenly leaped up into them; it passed; and an
even more intent look took its place, as if she had stared that
conscience out of countenance. She replied imperiously:
“Of course she’ll like it; why shouldn’t she?”
Mrs. Small grew nervous.
“I didn’t know,” she said; “I thought she mightn’t like to leave
her friends. Your Uncle James says she doesn’t take enough
interest in life. _We_ think—I mean Timothy thinks—she ought to
go out more. I expect you’ll miss her very much!”
June clasped her hands behind her neck.
“I do wish,” she cried, “Uncle Timothy wouldn’t talk about what
doesn’t concern him!”
Aunt Juley rose to the full height of her tall figure.
“He never talks about what doesn’t concern him,” she said.
June was instantly compunctious; she ran to her aunt and kissed
her.
“I’m very sorry, auntie; but I wish they’d let Irene alone.”
Aunt Juley, unable to think of anything further on the subject
that would be suitable, was silent; she prepared for departure,
hooking her black silk cape across her chest, and, taking up her
green reticule:
“And how is your dear grandfather?” she asked in the hall, “I
expect he’s very lonely now that all your time is taken up with
Mr. Bosinney.”
She bent and kissed her niece hungrily, and with little, mincing
steps passed away.
The tears sprang up in Jun’s eyes; running into the little study,
where Bosinney was sitting at the table drawing birds on the back
of an envelope, she sank down by his side and cried:
“Oh, Phil! it’s all so horrid!” Her heart was as warm as the
colour of her hair.
On the following Sunday morning, while Soames was shaving, a
message was brought him to the effect that Mr. Bosinney was
below, and would be glad to see him. Opening the door into his
wife’s room, he said:
“Bosinney’s downstairs. Just go and entertain him while I finish
shaving. I’ll be down in a minute. It’s about the plans, I
expect.”
Irene looked at him, without reply, put the finishing touch to
her dress and went downstairs. He could not make her out about
this house. She had said nothing against it, and, as far as
Bosinney was concerned, seemed friendly enough.
From the window of his dressing-room he could see them talking
together in the little court below. He hurried on with his
shaving, cutting his chin twice. He heard them laugh, and thought
to himself: “Well, they get on all right, anyway!”
As he expected, Bosinney had come round to fetch him to look at
the plans.
He took his hat and went over.
The plans were spread on the oak table in the architect’s room;
and pale, imperturbable, inquiring, Soames bent over them for a
long time without speaking.
He said at last in a puzzled voice:
“It’s an odd sort of house!”
A rectangular house of two stories was designed in a quadrangle
round a covered-in court. This court, encircled by a gallery on
the upper floor, was roofed with a glass roof, supported by eight
columns running up from the ground.
It was indeed, to Forsyte eyes, an odd house.
“There’s a lot of room cut to waste,” pursued Soames.
Bosinney began to walk about, and Soames did not like the
expression on his face.
“The principle of this house,” said the architect, “was that you
should have room to breathe—like a gentleman!”
Soames extended his finger and thumb, as if measuring the extent
of the distinction he should acquire; and replied:
“Oh! yes; I see.”
The peculiar look came into Bosinney’s face which marked all his
enthusiasms.
“I’ve tried to plan you a house here with some self-respect of
its own. If you don’t like it, you’d better say so. It’s
certainly the last thing to be considered—who wants self-respect
in a house, when you can squeeze in an extra lavatory?” He put
his finger suddenly down on the left division of the centre
oblong: “You can swing a cat here. This is for your pictures,
divided from this court by curtains; draw them back and you’ll
have a space of fifty-one by twenty-three six. This double-faced
stove in the centre, here, looks one way towards the court, one
way towards the picture room; this end wall is all window; you’ve
a southeast light from that, a north light from the court. The
rest of your pictures you can hang round the gallery upstairs, or
in the other rooms.” “In architecture,” he went on—and though
looking at Soames he did not seem to see him, which gave Soames
an unpleasant feeling—“as in life, you’ll get no self-respect
without regularity. Fellows tell you that’s old fashioned. It
appears to be peculiar any way; it never occurs to us to embody
the main principle of life in our buildings; we load our houses
with decoration, gimcracks, corners, anything to distract the
eye. On the contrary the eye should rest; get your effects with a
few strong lines. The whole thing is regularity—there’s no
self-respect without it.”
Soames, the unconscious ironist, fixed his gaze on Bosinney’s
tie, which was far from being in the perpendicular; he was
unshaven too, and his dress not remarkable for order.
Architecture appeared to have exhausted his regularity.
“Won’t it look like a barrack?” he inquired.
He did not at once receive a reply.
“I can see what it is,” said Bosinney, “you want one of
Littlemaster’s houses—one of the pretty and commodious sort,
where the servants will live in garrets, and the front door be
sunk so that you may come up again. By all means try
Littlemaster, you’ll find him a capital fellow, I’ve known him
all my life!”
Soames was alarmed. He had really been struck by the plans, and
the concealment of his satisfaction had been merely instinctive.
It was difficult for him to pay a compliment. He despised people
who were lavish with their praises.
He found himself now in the embarrassing position of one who must
pay a compliment or run the risk of losing a good thing. Bosinney
was just the fellow who might tear up the plans and refuse to act
for him; a kind of grown-up child!
This grown-up childishness, to which he felt so superior,
exercised a peculiar and almost mesmeric effect on Soames, for he
had never felt anything like it in himself.
“Well,” he stammered at last, “it’s—it’s, certainly original.”
He had such a private distrust and even dislike of the word
“original” that he felt he had not really given himself away by
this remark.
Bosinney seemed pleased. It was the sort of thing that would
please a fellow like that! And his success encouraged Soames.
“It’s—a big place,” he said.
“Space, air, light,” he heard Bosinney murmur, “you can’t live
like a gentleman in one of Littlemaster’s—he builds for
manufacturers.”
Soames made a deprecating movement; he had been identified with a
gentleman; not for a good deal of money now would he be classed
with manufacturers. But his innate distrust of general principles
revived. What the deuce was the good of talking about regularity
and self-respect? It looked to him as if the house would be cold.
“Irene can’t stand the cold!” he said.
“Ah!” said Bosinney sarcastically. “Your wife? She doesn’t like
the cold? I’ll see to that; she shan’t be cold. Look here!” he
pointed, to four marks at regular intervals on the walls of the
court. “I’ve given you hot-water pipes in aluminium casings; you
can get them with very good designs.”
Soames looked suspiciously at these marks.
“It’s all very well, all this,” he said, “but what’s it going to
cost?”
The architect took a sheet of paper from his pocket:
“The house, of course, should be built entirely of stone, but, as
I thought you wouldn’t stand that, I’ve compromised for a facing.
It ought to have a copper roof, but I’ve made it green slate. As
it is, including metal work, it’ll cost you eight thousand five
hundred.”
“Eight thousand five hundred?” said Soames. “Why, I gave you an
outside limit of eight!”
“Can’t be done for a penny less,” replied Bosinney coolly.
“You must take it or leave it!”
It was the only way, probably, that such a proposition could have
been made to Soames. He was nonplussed. Conscience told him to
throw the whole thing up. But the design was good, and he knew
it—there was completeness about it, and dignity; the servants’
apartments were excellent too. He would gain credit by living in
a house like that—with such individual features, yet perfectly
well-arranged.
He continued poring over the plans, while Bosinney went into his
bedroom to shave and dress.
The two walked back to Montpellier Square in silence, Soames
watching him out of the corner of his eye.
The Buccaneer was rather a good-looking fellow—so he thought—when
he was properly got up.
Irene was bending over her flowers when the two men came in.
She spoke of sending across the Park to fetch June.
“No, no,” said Soames, “we’ve still got business to talk over!”
At lunch he was almost cordial, and kept pressing Bosinney to
eat. He was pleased to see the architect in such high spirits,
and left him to spend the afternoon with Irene, while he stole
off to his pictures, after his Sunday habit. At tea-time he came
down to the drawing-room, and found them talking, as he expressed
it, nineteen to the dozen.
Unobserved in the doorway, he congratulated himself that things
were taking the right turn. It was lucky she and Bosinney got on;
she seemed to be falling into line with the idea of the new
house.
Quiet meditation among his pictures had decided him to spring the
five hundred if necessary; but he hoped that the afternoon might
have softened Bosinney’s estimates. It was so purely a matter
which Bosinney could remedy if he liked; there must be a dozen
ways in which he could cheapen the production of a house without
spoiling the effect.
He awaited, therefore, his opportunity till Irene was handing the
architect his first cup of tea. A chink of sunshine through the
lace of the blinds warmed her cheek, shone in the gold of her
hair, and in her soft eyes. Possibly the same gleam deepened
Bosinney’s colour, gave the rather startled look to his face.
Soames hated sunshine, and he at once got up, to draw the blind.
Then he took his own cup of tea from his wife, and said, more
coldly than he had intended:
“Can’t you see your way to do it for eight thousand after all?
There must be a lot of little things you could alter.”
Bosinney drank off his tea at a gulp, put down his cup, and
answered:
“Not one!”
Soames saw that his suggestion had touched some unintelligible
point of personal vanity.
“Well,” he agreed, with sulky resignation; “you must have it your
own way, I suppose.”
A few minutes later Bosinney rose to go, and Soames rose too, to
see him off the premises. The architect seemed in absurdly high
spirits. After watching him walk away at a swinging pace, Soames
returned moodily to the drawing-room, where Irene was putting
away the music, and, moved by an uncontrollable spasm of
curiosity, he asked:
“Well, what do you think of ‘The Buccaneer’?”
He looked at the carpet while waiting for her answer, and he had
to wait some time.
“I don’t know,” she said at last.
“Do you think he’s good-looking?”
Irene smiled. And it seemed to Soames that she was mocking him.
“Yes,” she answered; “very.”
CHAPTER IX DEATH OF AUNT ANN
There came a morning at the end of September when Aunt Ann was
unable to take from Smither’s hands the insignia of personal
dignity. After one look at the old face, the doctor, hurriedly
sent for, announced that Miss Forsyte had passed away in her
sleep.
Aunts Juley and Hester were overwhelmed by the shock. They had
never imagined such an ending. Indeed, it is doubtful whether
they had ever realized that an ending was bound to come. Secretly
they felt it unreasonable of Ann to have left them like this
without a word, without even a struggle. It was unlike her.
Perhaps what really affected them so profoundly was the thought
that a Forsyte should have let go her grasp on life. If one, then
why not all!
It was a full hour before they could make up their minds to tell
Timothy. If only it could be kept from him! If only it could be
broken to him by degrees!
And long they stood outside his door whispering together. And
when it was over they whispered together again.
He would feel it more, they were afraid, as time went on. Still,
he had taken it better than could have been expected. He would
keep his bed, of course!
They separated, crying quietly.
Aunt Juley stayed in her room, prostrated by the blow. Her face,
discoloured by tears, was divided into compartments by the little
ridges of pouting flesh which had swollen with emotion. It was
impossible to conceive of life without Ann, who had lived with
her for seventy-three years, broken only by the short interregnum
of her married life, which seemed now so unreal. At fixed
intervals she went to her drawer, and took from beneath the
lavender bags a fresh pocket-handkerchief. Her warm heart could
not bear the thought that Ann was lying there so cold.
Aunt Hester, the silent, the patient, that backwater of the
family energy, sat in the drawing-room, where the blinds were
drawn; and she, too, had wept at first, but quietly, without
visible effect. Her guiding principle, the conservation of
energy, did not abandon her in sorrow. She sat, slim, motionless,
studying the grate, her hands idle in the lap of her black silk
dress. They would want to rouse her into doing something, no
doubt. As if there were any good in that! Doing something would
not bring back Ann! Why worry her?
Five o’clock brought three of the brothers, Jolyon and James and
Swithin; Nicholas was at Yarmouth, and Roger had a bad attack of
gout. Mrs. Hayman had been by herself earlier in the day, and,
after seeing Ann, had gone away, leaving a message for
Timothy—which was kept from him—that she ought to have been told
sooner. In fact, there was a feeling amongst them all that they
ought to have been told sooner, as though they had missed
something; and James said:
“I knew how it’d be; I told you she wouldn’t last through the
summer.”
Aunt Hester made no reply; it was nearly October, but what was
the good of arguing; some people were never satisfied.
She sent up to tell her sister that the brothers were there. Mrs.
Small came down at once. She had bathed her face, which was still
swollen, and though she looked severely at Swithin’s trousers,
for they were of light blue—he had come straight from the club,
where the news had reached him—she wore a more cheerful
expression than usual, the instinct for doing the wrong thing
being even now too strong for her.
Presently all five went up to look at the body. Under the pure
white sheet a quilted counter-pane had been placed, for now, more
than ever, Aunt Ann had need of warmth; and, the pillows removed,
her spine and head rested flat, with the semblance of their
life-long inflexibility; the coif banding the top of her brow was
drawn on either side to the level of the ears, and between it and
the sheet her face, almost as white, was turned with closed eyes
to the faces of her brothers and sisters. In its extraordinary
peace the face was stronger than ever, nearly all bone now under
the scarce-wrinkled parchment of skin—square jaw and chin,
cheekbones, forehead with hollow temples, chiselled nose—the
fortress of an unconquerable spirit that had yielded to death,
and in its upward sightlessness seemed trying to regain that
spirit, to regain the guardianship it had just laid down.
Swithin took but one look at the face, and left the room; the
sight, he said afterwards, made him very queer. He went
downstairs shaking the whole house, and, seizing his hat,
clambered into his brougham, without giving any directions to the
coachman. He was driven home, and all the evening sat in his
chair without moving.
He could take nothing for dinner but a partridge, with an
imperial pint of champagne....
Old Jolyon stood at the bottom of the bed, his hands folded in
front of him. He alone of those in the room remembered the death
of his mother, and though he looked at Ann, it was of that he was
thinking. Ann was an old woman, but death had come to her at
last—death came to all! His face did not move, his gaze seemed
travelling from very far.
Aunt Hester stood beside him. She did not cry now, tears were
exhausted—her nature refused to permit a further escape of force;
she twisted her hands, looking not at Ann, but from side to side,
seeking some way of escaping the effort of realization.
Of all the brothers and sisters James manifested the most
emotion. Tears rolled down the parallel furrows of his thin face;
where he should go now to tell his troubles he did not know;
Juley was no good, Hester worse than useless! He felt Ann’s death
more than he had ever thought he should; this would upset him for
weeks!
Presently Aunt Hester stole out, and Aunt Juley began moving
about, doing “what was necessary,” so that twice she knocked
against something. Old Jolyon, roused from his reverie, that
reverie of the long, long past, looked sternly at her, and went
away. James alone was left by the bedside; glancing stealthily
round, to see that he was not observed, he twisted his long body
down, placed a kiss on the dead forehead, then he, too, hastily
left the room. Encountering Smither in the hall, he began to ask
her about the funeral, and, finding that she knew nothing,
complained bitterly that, if they didn’t take care, everything
would go wrong. She had better send for Mr. Soames—he knew all
about that sort of thing; her master was very much upset, he
supposed—he would want looking after; as for her mistresses, they
were no good—they had no gumption! They would be ill too, he
shouldn’t wonder. She had better send for the doctor; it was best
to take things in time. He didn’t think his sister Ann had had
the best opinion; if she’d had Blank she would have been alive
now. Smither might send to Park Lane any time she wanted advice.
Of course, his carriage was at their service for the funeral. He
supposed she hadn’t such a thing as a glass of claret and a
biscuit—he had had no lunch!
The days before the funeral passed quietly. It had long been
known, of course, that Aunt Ann had left her little property to
Timothy. There was, therefore, no reason for the slightest
agitation. Soames, who was sole executor, took charge of all
arrangements, and in due course sent out the following invitation
to every male member of the family:
_“To——
“Your presence is requested at the funeral of Miss Ann
Forsyte, in Highgate Cemetery, at noon of Oct. 1st. Carriages
will meet at ‘The Bower,’ Bayswater Road, at 10.45. No
flowers by request.
“R.S.V.P.”_
The morning came, cold, with a high, grey, London sky, and at
half-past ten the first carriage, that of James, drove up. It
contained James and his son-in-law Dartie, a fine man, with a
square chest, buttoned very tightly into a frock coat, and a
sallow, fattish face adorned with dark, well-curled moustaches,
and that incorrigible commencement of whisker which, eluding the
strictest attempts at shaving, seems the mark of something deeply
ingrained in the personality of the shaver, being especially
noticeable in men who speculate.
Soames, in his capacity of executor, received the guests, for
Timothy still kept his bed; he would get up after the funeral;
and Aunts Juley and Hester would not be coming down till all was
over, when it was understood there would be lunch for anyone who
cared to come back. The next to arrive was Roger, still limping
from the gout, and encircled by three of his sons—young Roger,
Eustace, and Thomas. George, the remaining son, arrived almost
immediately afterwards in a hansom, and paused in the hall to ask
Soames how he found undertaking pay.
They disliked each other.
Then came two Haymans—Giles and Jesse perfectly silent, and very
well dressed, with special creases down their evening trousers.
Then old Jolyon alone. Next, Nicholas, with a healthy colour in
his face, and a carefully veiled sprightliness in every movement
of his head and body. One of his sons followed him, meek and
subdued. Swithin Forsyte, and Bosinney arrived at the same
moment,—and stood—bowing precedence to each other,—but on the
door opening they tried to enter together; they renewed their
apologies in the hall, and, Swithin, settling his stock, which
had become disarranged in the struggle, very slowly mounted the
stairs. The other Hayman; two married sons of Nicholas, together
with Tweetyman, Spender, and Warry, the husbands of married
Forsyte and Hayman daughters. The company was then complete,
twenty-one in all, not a male member of the family being absent
but Timothy and young Jolyon.
Entering the scarlet and green drawing-room, whose apparel made
so vivid a setting for their unaccustomed costumes, each tried
nervously to find a seat, desirous of hiding the emphatic
blackness of his trousers. There seemed a sort of indecency in
that blackness and in the colour of their gloves—a sort of
exaggeration of the feelings; and many cast shocked looks of
secret envy at “the Buccaneer,” who had no gloves, and was
wearing grey trousers. A subdued hum of conversation rose, no one
speaking of the departed, but each asking after the other, as
though thereby casting an indirect libation to this event, which
they had come to honour.
And presently James said:
“Well, I think we ought to be starting.”
They went downstairs, and, two and two, as they had been told off
in strict precedence, mounted the carriages.
The hearse started at a foot’s pace; the carriages moved slowly
after. In the first went old Jolyon with Nicholas; in the second,
the twins, Swithin and James; in the third, Roger and young
Roger; Soames, young Nicholas, George, and Bosinney followed in
the fourth. Each of the other carriages, eight in all, held three
or four of the family; behind them came the doctor’s brougham;
then, at a decent interval, cabs containing family clerks and
servants; and at the very end, one containing nobody at all, but
bringing the total cortege up to the number of thirteen.
So long as the procession kept to the highway of the Bayswater
Road, it retained the foot’s-pace, but, turning into less
important thorough-fares, it soon broke into a trot, and so
proceeded, with intervals of walking in the more fashionable
streets, until it arrived. In the first carriage old Jolyon and
Nicholas were talking of their wills. In the second the twins,
after a single attempt, had lapsed into complete silence; both
were rather deaf, and the exertion of making themselves heard was
too great. Only once James broke this silence:
“I shall have to be looking about for some ground somewhere. What
arrangements have you made, Swithin?”
And Swithin, fixing him with a dreadful stare, answered:
“Don’t talk to me about such things!”
In the third carriage a disjointed conversation was carried on in
the intervals of looking out to see how far they had got, George
remarking, “Well, it was really time that the poor old lady
went.” He didn’t believe in people living beyond seventy, Young
Nicholas replied mildly that the rule didn’t seem to apply to the
Forsytes. George said he himself intended to commit suicide at
sixty. Young Nicholas, smiling and stroking a long chin, didn’t
think _his_ father would like that theory; he had made a lot of
money since he was sixty. Well, seventy was the outside limit; it
was then time, George said, for them to go and leave their money
to their children. Soames, hitherto silent, here joined in; he
had not forgotten the remark about the “undertaking,” and,
lifting his eyelids almost imperceptibly, said it was all very
well for people who never made money to talk. He himself intended
to live as long as he could. This was a hit at George, who was
notoriously hard up. Bosinney muttered abstractedly “Hear, hear!”
and, George yawning, the conversation dropped.
Upon arriving, the coffin was borne into the chapel, and, two by
two, the mourners filed in behind it. This guard of men, all
attached to the dead by the bond of kinship, was an impressive
and singular sight in the great city of London, with its
overwhelming diversity of life, its innumerable vocations,
pleasures, duties, its terrible hardness, its terrible call to
individualism.
The family had gathered to triumph over all this, to give a show
of tenacious unity, to illustrate gloriously that law of property
underlying the growth of their tree, by which it had thriven and
spread, trunk and branches, the sap flowing through all, the full
growth reached at the appointed time. The spirit of the old woman
lying in her last sleep had called them to this demonstration. It
was her final appeal to that unity which had been their
strength—it was her final triumph that she had died while the
tree was yet whole.
She was spared the watching of the branches jut out beyond the
point of balance. She could not look into the hearts of her
followers. The same law that had worked in her, bringing her up
from a tall, straight-backed slip of a girl to a woman strong and
grown, from a woman grown to a woman old, angular, feeble, almost
witchlike, with individuality all sharpened and sharpened, as all
rounding from the world’s contact fell off from her—that same law
would work, was working, in the family she had watched like a
mother.
She had seen it young, and growing, she had seen it strong and
grown, and before her old eyes had time or strength to see any
more, she died. She would have tried, and who knows but she might
have kept it young and strong, with her old fingers, her
trembling kisses—a little longer; alas! not even Aunt Ann could
fight with Nature.
“Pride comes before a fall!” In accordance with this, the
greatest of Nature’s ironies, the Forsyte family had gathered for
a last proud pageant before they fell. Their faces to right and
left, in single lines, were turned for the most part impassively
toward the ground, guardians of their thoughts; but here and
there, one looking upward, with a line between his brows,
searched to see some sight on the chapel walls too much for him,
to be listening to something that appalled. And the responses,
low-muttered, in voices through which rose the same tone, the
same unseizable family ring, sounded weird, as though murmured in
hurried duplication by a single person.
The service in the chapel over, the mourners filed up again to
guard the body to the tomb. The vault stood open, and, round it,
men in black were waiting.
From that high and sacred field, where thousands of the upper
middle class lay in their last sleep, the eyes of the Forsytes
travelled down across the flocks of graves. There—spreading to
the distance, lay London, with no sun over it, mourning the loss
of its daughter, mourning with this family, so dear, the loss of
her who was mother and guardian. A hundred thousand spires and
houses, blurred in the great grey web of property, lay there like
prostrate worshippers before the grave of this, the oldest
Forsyte of them all.
A few words, a sprinkle of earth, the thrusting of the coffin
home, and Aunt Ann had passed to her last rest.
Round the vault, trustees of that passing, the five brothers
stood, with white heads bowed; they would see that Ann was
comfortable where she was going. Her little property must stay
behind, but otherwise, all that could be should be done....
Then severally, each stood aside, and putting on his hat, turned
back to inspect the new inscription on the marble of the family
vault:
SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF
ANN FORSYTE,
THE DAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE
JOLYON AND ANN FORSYTE,
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE THE 27TH DAY OF
SEPTEMBER, 1886,
AGED EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS AND FOUR DAYS.
Soon perhaps, someone else would be wanting an inscription. It
was strange and intolerable, for they had not thought somehow,
that Forsytes could die. And one and all they had a longing to
get away from this painfulness, this ceremony which had reminded
them of things they could not bear to think about—to get away
quickly and go about their business and forget.
It was cold, too; the wind, like some slow, disintegrating force,
blowing up the hill over the graves, struck them with its chilly
breath; they began to split into groups, and as quickly as
possible to fill the waiting carriages.
Swithin said he should go back to lunch at Timothy’s, and he
offered to take anybody with him in his brougham. It was
considered a doubtful privilege to drive with Swithin in his
brougham, which was not a large one; nobody accepted, and he went
off alone. James and Roger followed immediately after; they also
would drop in to lunch. The others gradually melted away, Old
Jolyon taking three nephews to fill up his carriage; he had a
want of those young faces.
Soames, who had to arrange some details in the cemetery office,
walked away with Bosinney. He had much to talk over with him,
and, having finished his business, they strolled to Hampstead,
lunched together at the Spaniard’s Inn, and spent a long time in
going into practical details connected with the building of the
house; they then proceeded to the tram-line, and came as far as
the Marble Arch, where Bosinney went off to Stanhope Gate to see
June.
Soames felt in excellent spirits when he arrived home, and
confided to Irene at dinner that he had had a good talk with
Bosinney, who really seemed a sensible fellow; they had had a
capital walk too, which had done his liver good—he had been short
of exercise for a long time—and altogether a very satisfactory
day. If only it hadn’t been for poor Aunt Ann, he would have
taken her to the theatre; as it was, they must make the best of
an evening at home.
“The Buccaneer asked after you more than once,” he said suddenly.
And moved by some inexplicable desire to assert his
proprietorship, he rose from his chair and planted a kiss on his
wife’s shoulder.
PART II
CHAPTER I PROGRESS OF THE HOUSE
The winter had been an open one. Things in the trade were slack;
and as Soames had reflected before making up his mind, it had
been a good time for building. The shell of the house at Robin
Hill was thus completed by the end of April.
Now that there was something to be seen for his money, he had
been coming down once, twice, even three times a week, and would
mouse about among the debris for hours, careful never to soil his
clothes, moving silently through the unfinished brickwork of
doorways, or circling round the columns in the central court.
And he would stand before them for minutes together, as though
peering into the real quality of their substance.
On April 30 he had an appointment with Bosinney to go over the
accounts, and five minutes before the proper time he entered the
tent which the architect had pitched for himself close to the old
oak tree.
The accounts were already prepared on a folding table, and with a
nod Soames sat down to study them. It was some time before he
raised his head.
“I can’t make them out,” he said at last; “they come to nearly
seven hundred more than they ought.”
After a glance at Bosinney’s face he went on quickly:
“If you only make a firm stand against these builder chaps you’ll
get them down. They stick you with everything if you don’t look
sharp.... Take ten per cent. off all round. I shan’t mind it’s
coming out a hundred or so over the mark!”
Bosinney shook his head:
“I’ve taken off every farthing I can!”
Soames pushed back the table with a movement of anger, which sent
the account sheets fluttering to the ground.
“Then all I can say is,” he flustered out, “you’ve made a pretty
mess of it!”
“I’ve told you a dozen times,” Bosinney answered sharply, “that
there’d be extras. I’ve pointed them out to you over and over
again!”
“I know that,” growled Soames: “I shouldn’t have objected to a
ten pound note here and there. How was I to know that by ‘extras’
you meant seven hundred pounds?”
The qualities of both men had contributed to this
not-inconsiderable discrepancy. On the one hand, the architect’s
devotion to his idea, to the image of a house which he had
created and believed in—had made him nervous of being stopped, or
forced to the use of makeshifts; on the other, Soames’s not less
true and wholehearted devotion to the very best article that
could be obtained for the money, had rendered him averse to
believing that things worth thirteen shillings could not be
bought with twelve.
“I wish I’d never undertaken your house,” said Bosinney suddenly.
“You come down here worrying me out of my life. You want double
the value for your money anybody else would, and now that you’ve
got a house that for its size is not to be beaten in the county,
you don’t want to pay for it. If you’re anxious to be off your
bargain, I daresay I can find the balance above the estimates
myself, but I’m d——d if I do another stroke of work for you!”
Soames regained his composure. Knowing that Bosinney had no
capital, he regarded this as a wild suggestion. He saw, too, that
he would be kept indefinitely out of this house on which he had
set his heart, and just at the crucial point when the architect’s
personal care made all the difference. In the meantime there was
Irene to be thought of! She had been very queer lately. He really
believed it was only because she had taken to Bosinney that she
tolerated the idea of the house at all. It would not do to make
an open breach with her.
“You needn’t get into a rage,” he said. “If I’m willing to put up
with it, I suppose you needn’t cry out. All I meant was that when
you tell me a thing is going to cost so much, I like to—well, in
fact, I—like to know where I am.”
“Look here!” said Bosinney, and Soames was both annoyed and
surprised by the shrewdness of his glance. “You’ve got my
services dirt cheap. For the kind of work I’ve put into this
house, and the amount of time I’ve given to it, you’d have had to
pay Littlemaster or some other fool four times as much. What you
want, in fact, is a first-rate man for a fourth-rate fee, and
that’s exactly what you’ve got!”
Soames saw that he really meant what he said, and, angry though
he was, the consequences of a row rose before him too vividly. He
saw his house unfinished, his wife rebellious, himself a
laughingstock.
“Let’s go over it,” he said sulkily, “and see how the money’s
gone.”
“Very well,” assented Bosinney. “But we’ll hurry up, if you don’t
mind. I have to get back in time to take June to the theatre.”
Soames cast a stealthy look at him, and said: “Coming to our
place, I suppose to meet her?” He was always coming to their
place!
There had been rain the night before—a spring rain, and the earth
smelt of sap and wild grasses. The warm, soft breeze swung the
leaves and the golden buds of the old oak tree, and in the
sunshine the blackbirds were whistling their hearts out.
It was such a spring day as breathes into a man an ineffable
yearning, a painful sweetness, a longing that makes him stand
motionless, looking at the leaves or grass, and fling out his
arms to embrace he knows not what. The earth gave forth a
fainting warmth, stealing up through the chilly garment in which
winter had wrapped her. It was her long caress of invitation, to
draw men down to lie within her arms, to roll their bodies on
her, and put their lips to her breast.
On just such a day as this Soames had got from Irene the promise
he had asked her for so often. Seated on the fallen trunk of a
tree, he had promised for the twentieth time that if their
marriage were not a success, she should be as free as if she had
never married him!
“Do you swear it?” she had said. A few days back she had reminded
him of that oath. He had answered: “Nonsense! I couldn’t have
sworn any such thing!” By some awkward fatality he remembered it
now. What queer things men would swear for the sake of women! He
would have sworn it at any time to gain her! He would swear it
now, if thereby he could touch her—but nobody could touch her,
she was cold-hearted!
And memories crowded on him with the fresh, sweet savour of the
spring wind—memories of his courtship.
In the spring of the year 1881 he was visiting his old
school-fellow and client, George Liversedge, of Branksome, who,
with the view of developing his pine-woods in the neighbourhood
of Bournemouth, had placed the formation of the company necessary
to the scheme in Soames’s hands. Mrs. Liversedge, with a sense of
the fitness of things, had given a musical tea in his honour.
Later in the course of this function, which Soames, no musician,
had regarded as an unmitigated bore, his eye had been caught by
the face of a girl dressed in mourning, standing by herself. The
lines of her tall, as yet rather thin figure, showed through the
wispy, clinging stuff of her black dress, her black-gloved hands
were crossed in front of her, her lips slightly parted, and her
large, dark eyes wandered from face to face. Her hair, done low
on her neck, seemed to gleam above her black collar like coils of
shining metal. And as Soames stood looking at her, the sensation
that most men have felt at one time or another went stealing
through him—a peculiar satisfaction of the senses, a peculiar
certainty, which novelists and old ladies call love at first
sight. Still stealthily watching her, he at once made his way to
his hostess, and stood doggedly waiting for the music to cease.
“Who is that girl with yellow hair and dark eyes?” he asked.
“That—oh! Irene Heron. Her father, Professor Heron, died this
year. She lives with her stepmother. She’s a nice girl, a pretty
girl, but no money!”
“Introduce me, please,” said Soames.
It was very little that he found to say, nor did he find her
responsive to that little. But he went away with the resolution
to see her again. He effected his object by chance, meeting her
on the pier with her stepmother, who had the habit of walking
there from twelve to one of a forenoon. Soames made this lady’s
acquaintance with alacrity, nor was it long before he perceived
in her the ally he was looking for. His keen scent for the
commercial side of family life soon told him that Irene cost her
stepmother more than the fifty pounds a year she brought her; it
also told him that Mrs. Heron, a woman yet in the prime of life,
desired to be married again. The strange ripening beauty of her
stepdaughter stood in the way of this desirable consummation. And
Soames, in his stealthy tenacity, laid his plans.
He left Bournemouth without having given himself away, but in a
month’s time came back, and this time he spoke, not to the girl,
but to her stepmother. He had made up his mind, he said; he would
wait any time. And he had long to wait, watching Irene bloom, the
lines of her young figure softening, the stronger blood deepening
the gleam of her eyes, and warming her face to a creamy glow; and
at each visit he proposed to her, and when that visit was at an
end, took her refusal away with him, back to London, sore at
heart, but steadfast and silent as the grave. He tried to come at
the secret springs of her resistance; only once had he a gleam of
light. It was at one of those assembly dances, which afford the
only outlet to the passions of the population of seaside
watering-places. He was sitting with her in an embrasure, his
senses tingling with the contact of the waltz. She had looked at
him over her slowly waving fan; and he had lost his head. Seizing
that moving wrist, he pressed his lips to the flesh of her arm.
And she had shuddered—to this day he had not forgotten that
shudder—nor the look so passionately averse she had given him.
A year after that she had yielded. What had made her yield he
could never make out; and from Mrs. Heron, a woman of some
diplomatic talent, he learnt nothing. Once after they were
married he asked her, “What made you refuse me so often?” She had
answered by a strange silence. An enigma to him from the day that
he first saw her, she was an enigma to him still....
Bosinney was waiting for him at the door; and on his rugged,
good-looking, face was a queer, yearning, yet happy look, as
though he too saw a promise of bliss in the spring sky, sniffed a
coming happiness in the spring air. Soames looked at him waiting
there. What was the matter with the fellow that he looked so
happy? What was he waiting for with that smile on his lips and in
his eyes? Soames could not see that for which Bosinney was
waiting as he stood there drinking in the flower-scented wind.
And once more he felt baffled in the presence of this man whom by
habit he despised. He hastened on to the house.
“The only colour for those tiles,” he heard Bosinney say, “is
ruby with a grey tint in the stuff, to give a transparent effect.
I should like Irene’s opinion. I’m ordering the purple leather
curtains for the doorway of this court; and if you distemper the
drawing-room ivory cream over paper, you’ll get an illusive look.
You want to aim all through the decorations at what I call
charm.”
Soames said: “You mean that my wife has charm!”
Bosinney evaded the question.
“You should have a clump of iris plants in the centre of that
court.”
Soames smiled superciliously.
“I’ll look into Beech’s some time,” he said, “and see what’s
appropriate!”
They found little else to say to each other, but on the way to
the Station Soames asked:
“I suppose you find Irene very artistic.”
“Yes.” The abrupt answer was as distinct a snub as saying: “If
you want to discuss her you can do it with someone else!”
And the slow, sulky anger Soames had felt all the afternoon
burned the brighter within him.
Neither spoke again till they were close to the Station, then
Soames asked:
“When do you expect to have finished?”
“By the end of June, if you really wish me to decorate as well.”
Soames nodded. “But you quite understand,” he said, “that the
house is costing me a lot beyond what I contemplated. I may as
well tell you that I should have thrown it up, only I’m not in
the habit of giving up what I’ve set my mind on.”
Bosinney made no reply. And Soames gave him askance a look of
dogged dislike—for in spite of his fastidious air and that
supercilious, dandified taciturnity, Soames, with his set lips
and squared chin, was not unlike a bulldog....
When, at seven o’clock that evening, June arrived at 62,
Montpellier Square, the maid Bilson told her that Mr. Bosinney
was in the drawing-room; the mistress—she said—was dressing, and
would be down in a minute. She would tell her that Miss June was
here.
June stopped her at once.
“All right, Bilson,” she said, “I’ll just go in. You, needn’t
hurry Mrs. Soames.”
She took off her cloak, and Bilson, with an understanding look,
did not even open the drawing-room door for her, but ran
downstairs.
June paused for a moment to look at herself in the little
old-fashioned silver mirror above the oaken rug chest—a slim,
imperious young figure, with a small resolute face, in a white
frock, cut moon-shaped at the base of a neck too slender for her
crown of twisted red-gold hair.
She opened the drawing-room door softly, meaning to take him by
surprise. The room was filled with a sweet hot scent of flowering
azaleas.
She took a long breath of the perfume, and heard Bosinney’s
voice, not in the room, but quite close, saying.
“Ah! there were such heaps of things I wanted to talk about, and
now we shan’t have time!”
Irene’s voice answered: “Why not at dinner?”
“How can one talk....”
Jun’s first thought was to go away, but instead she crossed to
the long window opening on the little court. It was from there
that the scent of the azaleas came, and, standing with their
backs to her, their faces buried in the golden-pink blossoms,
stood her lover and Irene.
Silent but unashamed, with flaming cheeks and angry eyes, the
girl watched.
“Come on Sunday by yourself—We can go over the house together.”
June saw Irene look up at him through her screen of blossoms. It
was not the look of a coquette, but—far worse to the watching
girl—of a woman fearful lest that look should say too much.
“I’ve promised to go for a drive with Uncle....”
“The big one! Make him bring you; it’s only ten miles—the very
thing for his horses.”
“Poor old Uncle Swithin!”
A wave of the azalea scent drifted into Jun’s face; she felt sick
and dizzy.
“Do! ah! do!”
“But why?”
“I must see you there—I thought you’d like to help me....”
The answer seemed to the girl to come softly with a tremble from
amongst the blossoms: “So I do!”
And she stepped into the open space of the window.
“How stuffy it is here!” she said; “I can’t bear this scent!”
Her eyes, so angry and direct, swept both their faces.
“Were you talking about the house? _I_ haven’t seen it yet, you
know—shall we all go on Sunday?”
From Irene’s face the colour had flown.
“I am going for a drive that day with Uncle Swithin,” she
answered.
“Uncle Swithin! What does he matter? You can throw him over!”
“I am not in the habit of throwing people over!”
There was a sound of footsteps and June saw Soames standing just
behind her.
“Well! if you are all ready,” said Irene, looking from one to the
other with a strange smile, “dinner is too!”