The Forsyte saga - Complete
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