It is in the nature of a Forsyte to be ignorant that he is a
Forsyte; but young Jolyon was well aware of being one. He had not
known it till after the decisive step which had made him an
outcast; since then the knowledge had been with him continually.
He felt it throughout his alliance, throughout all his dealings
with his second wife, who was emphatically not a Forsyte.
He knew that if he had not possessed in great measure the eye for
what he wanted, the tenacity to hold on to it, the sense of the
folly of wasting that for which he had given so big a price—in
other words, the “sense of property” he could never have retained
her (perhaps never would have desired to retain her) with him
through all the financial troubles, slights, and misconstructions
of those fifteen years; never have induced her to marry him on
the death of his first wife; never have lived it all through, and
come up, as it were, thin, but smiling.
He was one of those men who, seated cross-legged like miniature
Chinese idols in the cages of their own hearts, are ever smiling
at themselves a doubting smile. Not that this smile, so intimate
and eternal, interfered with his actions, which, like his chin
and his temperament, were quite a peculiar blend of softness and
determination.
He was conscious, too, of being a Forsyte in his work, that
painting of water-colours to which he devoted so much energy,
always with an eye on himself, as though he could not take so
unpractical a pursuit quite seriously, and always with a certain
queer uneasiness that he did not make more money at it.
It was, then, this consciousness of what it meant to be a
Forsyte, that made him receive the following letter from old
Jolyon, with a mixture of sympathy and disgust:
“SHELDRAKE HOUSE,
“BROADSTAIRS,
“_July_ 1.
“MY DEAR JO,”
(The Dad’s handwriting had altered very little in the thirty
odd years that he remembered it.)
“We have been here now a fortnight, and have had good weather
on the whole. The air is bracing, but my liver is out of
order, and I shall be glad enough to get back to town. I
cannot say much for June, her health and spirits are very
indifferent, and I don’t see what is to come of it. She says
nothing, but it is clear that she is harping on this
engagement, which is an engagement and no engagement,
and—goodness knows what. I have grave doubts whether she
ought to be allowed to return to London in the present state
of affairs, but she is so self-willed that she might take it
into her head to come up at any moment. The fact is someone
ought to speak to Bosinney and ascertain what he means. I’m
afraid of this myself, for I should certainly rap him over
the knuckles, but I thought that you, knowing him at the
Club, might put in a word, and get to ascertain what the
fellow is about. You will of course in no way commit June. I
shall be glad to hear from you in the course of a few days
whether you have succeeded in gaining any information. The
situation is very distressing to me, I worry about it at
night. With my love to Jolly and Holly.
“I am,
“Your affect. father,
“JOLYON FORSYTE.”
Young Jolyon pondered this letter so long and seriously that his
wife noticed his preoccupation, and asked him what was the
matter. He replied: “Nothing.”
It was a fixed principle with him never to allude to June. She
might take alarm, he did not know what she might think; he
hastened, therefore, to banish from his manner all traces of
absorption, but in this he was about as successful as his father
would have been, for he had inherited all old Jolyon’s
transparency in matters of domestic finesse; and young Mrs.
Jolyon, busying herself over the affairs of the house, went about
with tightened lips, stealing at him unfathomable looks.
He started for the Club in the afternoon with the letter in his
pocket, and without having made up his mind.
To sound a man as to “his intentions” was peculiarly unpleasant
to him; nor did his own anomalous position diminish this
unpleasantness. It was so like his family, so like all the people
they knew and mixed with, to enforce what they called their
rights over a man, to bring him up to the mark; so like them to
carry their business principles into their private relations.
And how that phrase in the letter—“You will, of course, in no way
commit June”—gave the whole thing away.
Yet the letter, with the personal grievance, the concern for
June, the “rap over the knuckles,” was all so natural. No wonder
his father wanted to know what Bosinney meant, no wonder he was
angry.
It was difficult to refuse! But why give the thing to him to do?
That was surely quite unbecoming; but so long as a Forsyte got
what he was after, he was not too particular about the means,
provided appearances were saved.
How should he set about it, or how refuse? Both seemed
impossible. So, young Jolyon!
He arrived at the Club at three o’clock, and the first person he
saw was Bosinney himself, seated in a corner, staring out of the
window.
Young Jolyon sat down not far off, and began nervously to
reconsider his position. He looked covertly at Bosinney sitting
there unconscious. He did not know him very well, and studied him
attentively for perhaps the first time; an unusual looking man,
unlike in dress, face, and manner to most of the other members of
the Club—young Jolyon himself, however different he had become in
mood and temper, had always retained the neat reticence of
Forsyte appearance. He alone among Forsytes was ignorant of
Bosinney’s nickname. The man was unusual, not eccentric, but
unusual; he looked worn, too, haggard, hollow in the cheeks
beneath those broad, high cheekbones, though without any
appearance of ill-health, for he was strongly built, with curly
hair that seemed to show all the vitality of a fine constitution.
Something in his face and attitude touched young Jolyon. He knew
what suffering was like, and this man looked as if he were
suffering.
He got up and touched his arm.
Bosinney started, but exhibited no sign of embarrassment on
seeing who it was.
Young Jolyon sat down.
“I haven’t seen you for a long time,” he said. “How are you
getting on with my cousin’s house?”
“It’ll be finished in about a week.”
“I congratulate you!”
“Thanks—I don’t know that it’s much of a subject for
congratulation.”
“No?” queried young Jolyon; “I should have thought you’d be glad
to get a long job like that off your hands; but I suppose you
feel it much as I do when I part with a picture—a sort of child?”
He looked kindly at Bosinney.
“Yes,” said the latter more cordially, “it goes out from you and
there’s an end of it. I didn’t know you painted.”
“Only water-colours; I can’t say I believe in my work.”
“Don’t believe in it? There—how can you do it? Work’s no use
unless you believe in it!”
“Good,” said young Jolyon; “it’s exactly what I’ve always said.
By-the-bye, have you noticed that whenever one says ‘Good,’ one
always adds ‘it’s exactly what I’ve always said’. But if you ask
me how I do it, I answer, because I’m a Forsyte.”
“A Forsyte! I never thought of you as one!”
“A Forsyte,” replied young Jolyon, “is not an uncommon animal.
There are hundreds among the members of this Club. Hundreds out
there in the streets; you meet them wherever you go!”
“And how do you tell them, may I ask?” said Bosinney.
“By their sense of property. A Forsyte takes a practical—one
might say a commonsense—view of things, and a practical view of
things is based fundamentally on a sense of property. A Forsyte,
you will notice, never gives himself away.”
“Joking?”
Young Jolyon’s eye twinkled.
“Not much. As a Forsyte myself, I have no business to talk. But
I’m a kind of thoroughbred mongrel; now, there’s no mistaking
you: You’re as different from me as I am from my Uncle James, who
is the perfect specimen of a Forsyte. His sense of property is
extreme, while you have practically none. Without me in between,
you would seem like a different species. I’m the missing link. We
are, of course, all of us the slaves of property, and I admit
that it’s a question of degree, but what I call a ‘Forsyte’ is a
man who is decidedly more than less a slave of property. He knows
a good thing, he knows a safe thing, and his grip on property—it
doesn’t matter whether it be wives, houses, money, or
reputation—is his hall-mark.”
“Ah!” murmured Bosinney. “You should patent the word.”
“I should like,” said young Jolyon, “to lecture on it:
“Properties and quality of a Forsyte: This little animal,
disturbed by the ridicule of his own sort, is unaffected in his
motions by the laughter of strange creatures (you or I).
Hereditarily disposed to myopia, he recognises only the persons
of his own species, amongst which he passes an existence of
competitive tranquillity.”
“You talk of them,” said Bosinney, “as if they were half
England.”
“They are,” repeated young Jolyon, “half England, and the better
half, too, the safe half, the three per cent. half, the half that
counts. It’s their wealth and security that makes everything
possible; makes your art possible, makes literature, science,
even religion, possible. Without Forsytes, who believe in none of
these things, and habitats but turn them all to use, where should
we be? My dear sir, the Forsytes are the middlemen, the
commercials, the pillars of society, the cornerstones of
convention; everything that is admirable!”
“I don’t know whether I catch your drift,” said Bosinney, “but I
fancy there are plenty of Forsytes, as you call them, in my
profession.”
“Certainly,” replied young Jolyon. “The great majority of
architects, painters, or writers have no principles, like any
other Forsytes. Art, literature, religion, survive by virtue of
the few cranks who really believe in such things, and the many
Forsytes who make a commercial use of them. At a low estimate,
three-fourths of our Royal Academicians are Forsytes,
seven-eighths of our novelists, a large proportion of the press.
Of science I can’t speak; they are magnificently represented in
religion; in the House of Commons perhaps more numerous than
anywhere; the aristocracy speaks for itself. But I’m not
laughing. It is dangerous to go against the majority and what a
majority!” He fixed his eyes on Bosinney: “It’s dangerous to let
anything carry you away—a house, a picture, a—woman!”
They looked at each other.—And, as though he had done that which
no Forsyte did—given himself away, young Jolyon drew into his
shell. Bosinney broke the silence.
“Why do you take your own people as the type?” said he.
“My people,” replied young Jolyon, “are not very extreme, and
they have their own private peculiarities, like every other
family, but they possess in a remarkable degree those two
qualities which are the real tests of a Forsyte—the power of
never being able to give yourself up to anything soul and body,
and the ‘sense of property’.”
Bosinney smiled: “How about the big one, for instance?”
“Do you mean Swithin?” asked young Jolyon. “Ah! in Swithin
there’s something primeval still. The town and middle-class life
haven’t digested him yet. All the old centuries of farm work and
brute force have settled in him, and there they’ve stuck, for all
he’s so distinguished.”
Bosinney seemed to ponder. “Well, you’ve hit your cousin Soames
off to the life,” he said suddenly. “_He’ll_ never blow his
brains out.”
Young Jolyon shot at him a penetrating glance.
“No,” he said; “he won’t. That’s why he’s to be reckoned with.
Look out for their grip! It’s easy to laugh, but don’t mistake
me. It doesn’t do to despise a Forsyte; it doesn’t do to
disregard them!”
“Yet you’ve done it yourself!”
Young Jolyon acknowledged the hit by losing his smile.
“You forget,” he said with a queer pride, “I can hold on, too—I’m
a Forsyte myself. We’re all in the path of great forces. The man
who leaves the shelter of the wall—well—you know what I mean. I
don’t,” he ended very low, as though uttering a threat,
“recommend every man to-go-my-way. It depends.”
The colour rushed into Bosinney’s face, but soon receded, leaving
it sallow-brown as before. He gave a short laugh, that left his
lips fixed in a queer, fierce smile; his eyes mocked young
Jolyon.
“Thanks,” he said. “It’s deuced kind of you. But you’re not the
only chaps that can hold on.” He rose.
Young Jolyon looked after him as he walked away, and, resting his
head on his hand, sighed.
In the drowsy, almost empty room the only sounds were the rustle
of newspapers, the scraping of matches being struck. He stayed a
long time without moving, living over again those days when he,
too, had sat long hours watching the clock, waiting for the
minutes to pass—long hours full of the torments of uncertainty,
and of a fierce, sweet aching; and the slow, delicious agony of
that season came back to him with its old poignancy. The sight of
Bosinney, with his haggard face, and his restless eyes always
wandering to the clock, had roused in him a pity, with which was
mingled strange, irresistible envy.
He knew the signs so well. Whither was he going—to what sort of
fate? What kind of woman was it who was drawing him to her by
that magnetic force which no consideration of honour, no
principle, no interest could withstand; from which the only
escape was flight.
Flight! But why should Bosinney fly? A man fled when he was in
danger of destroying hearth and home, when there were children,
when he felt himself trampling down ideals, breaking something.
But here, so he had heard, it was all broken to his hand.
He himself had not fled, nor would he fly if it were all to come
over again. Yet he had gone further than Bosinney, had broken up
his own unhappy home, not someone else’s: And the old saying came
back to him: “A man’s fate lies in his own heart.”
In his own heart! The proof of the pudding was in the
eating—Bosinney had still to eat his pudding.
His thoughts passed to the woman, the woman whom he did not know,
but the outline of whose story he had heard.
An unhappy marriage! No ill-treatment—only that indefinable
malaise, that terrible blight which killed all sweetness under
Heaven; and so from day to day, from night to night, from week to
week, from year to year, till death should end it.
But young Jolyon, the bitterness of whose own feelings time had
assuaged, saw Soames’s side of the question too. Whence should a
man like his cousin, saturated with all the prejudices and
beliefs of his class, draw the insight or inspiration necessary
to break up this life? It was a question of imagination, of
projecting himself into the future beyond the unpleasant gossip,
sneers, and tattle that followed on such separations, beyond the
passing pangs that the lack of the sight of her would cause,
beyond the grave disapproval of the worthy. But few men, and
especially few men of Soames’s class, had imagination enough for
that. A deal of mortals in this world, and not enough imagination
to go round! And sweet Heaven, what a difference between theory
and practice; many a man, perhaps even Soames, held chivalrous
views on such matters, who when the shoe pinched found a
distinguishing factor that made of himself an exception.
Then, too, he distrusted his judgment. He had been through the
experience himself, had tasted to the dregs the bitterness of an
unhappy marriage, and how could he take the wide and
dispassionate view of those who had never been within sound of
the battle? His evidence was too first-hand—like the evidence on
military matters of a soldier who has been through much active
service, against that of civilians who have not suffered the
disadvantage of seeing things too close. Most people would
consider such a marriage as that of Soames and Irene quite fairly
successful; he had money, she had beauty; it was a case for
compromise. There was no reason why they should not jog along,
even if they hated each other. It would not matter if they went
their own ways a little so long as the decencies were
observed—the sanctity of the marriage tie, of the common home,
respected. Half the marriages of the upper classes were conducted
on these lines: Do not offend the susceptibilities of Society; do
not offend the susceptibilities of the Church. To avoid offending
these is worth the sacrifice of any private feelings. The
advantages of the stable home are visible, tangible, so many
pieces of property; there is no risk in the _statu quo_. To break
up a home is at the best a dangerous experiment, and selfish into
the bargain.
This was the case for the defence, and young Jolyon sighed.
“The core of it all,” he thought, “is property, but there are
many people who would not like it put that way. To them it is
‘the sanctity of the marriage tie’; but the sanctity of the
marriage tie is dependent on the sanctity of the family, and the
sanctity of the family is dependent on the sanctity of property.
And yet I imagine all these people are followers of One who never
owned anything. It is curious!”
And again young Jolyon sighed.
“Am I going on my way home to ask any poor devils I meet to share
my dinner, which will then be too little for myself, or, at all
events, for my wife, who is necessary to my health and happiness?
It may be that after all Soames does well to exercise his rights
and support by his practice the sacred principle of property
which benefits us all, with the exception of those who suffer by
the process.”
And so he left his chair, threaded his way through the maze of
seats, took his hat, and languidly up the hot streets crowded
with carriages, reeking with dusty odours, wended his way home.
Before reaching Wistaria Avenue he removed old Jolyon’s letter
from his pocket, and tearing it carefully into tiny pieces,
scattered them in the dust of the road.
He let himself in with his key, and called his wife’s name. But
she had gone out, taking Jolly and Holly, and the house was
empty; alone in the garden the dog Balthasar lay in the shade
snapping at flies.
Young Jolyon took his seat there, too, under the pear-tree that
bore no fruit.