The Forsyte saga - Complete
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