The Forsyte saga - Complete
“Well, Smither, I want to see him, if I can; in case he has
anything to say to me.”
Smither coloured up above her corsets.
“It will be an occasion!” she said. “Shall I take you round the
house, sir, while I send Cook to break it to him?”
“No, you go to him,” said Soames. “I can go round the house by
myself.”
One could not confess to sentiment before another, and Soames
felt that he was going to be sentimental nosing round those rooms
so saturated with the past. When Smither, creaking with
excitement, had left him, Soames entered the dining-room and
sniffed. In his opinion it wasn't mice, but incipient wood-rot,
and he examined the panelling. Whether it was worth a coat of
paint, at Timothy's age, he was not sure. The room had always
been the most modern in the house; and only a faint smile curled
Soames' lips and nostrils. Walls of a rich green surmounted the
oak dado; a heavy metal chandelier hung by a chain from a ceiling
divided by imitation beams. The pictures had been bought by
Timothy, a bargain, one day at Jobson's sixty years ago—three
Snyder “still lifes,” two faintly coloured drawings of a boy and
a girl, rather charming, which bore the initials “J. R.”—Timothy
had always believed they might turn out to be Joshua Reynolds,
but Soames, who admired them, had discovered that they were only
John Robinson; and a doubtful Morland of a white pony being shod.
Deep-red plush curtains, ten high-backed dark mahogany chairs
with deep-red plush seats, a Turkey carpet, and a mahogany
dining-table as large as the room was small, such was an
apartment which Soames could remember unchanged in soul or body
since he was four years old. He looked especially at the two
drawings, and thought: 'I shall buy those at the sale.'
From the dining-room he passed into Timothy's study. He did not
remember ever having been in that room. It was lined from floor
to ceiling with volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity.
One wall seemed devoted to educational books, which Timothy's
firm had published two generations back-sometimes as many as
twenty copies of one book. Soames read their titles and
shuddered. The middle wall had precisely the same books as used
to be in the library at his own father's in Park Lane, from which
he deduced the fancy that James and his youngest brother had gone
out together one day and bought a brace of small libraries. The
third wall he approached with more excitement. Here, surely,
Timothy's own taste would be found. It was. The books were
dummies. The fourth wall was all heavily curtained window. And
turned toward it was a large chair with a mahogany reading-stand
attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy of The Times,
dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to come down, as
if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him still. In a
corner stood a large globe of that world never visited by
Timothy, deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but
England, and permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been
very sick one Sunday afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat
off the pier at Brighton, with Juley and Hester, Swithin and
Hatty Chessman; all due to Swithin, who was always taking things
into his head, and who, thank goodness, had been sick too. Soames
knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty times at least
from one or other of them. He went up to the globe, and gave it a
spin; it emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch, bringing
into his purview a daddy-long-legs which had died on it in
latitude 44.
'Mausoleum!' he thought. 'George was right!' And he went out and
up the stairs. On the half-landing he stopped before the case of
stuffed humming-birds which had delighted his childhood. They
looked not a day older, suspended on wires above pampas-grass. If
the case were opened the birds would not begin to hum, but the
whole thing would crumble, he suspected. It wouldn't be worth
putting that into the sale! And suddenly he was caught by a
memory of Aunt Ann—dear old Aunt Ann—holding him by the hand in
front of that case and saying: “Look, Soamey! Aren't they bright
and pretty, dear little humming-birds!” Soames remembered his own
answer: “They don't hum, Auntie.” He must have been six, in a
black velveteen suit with a light-blue collar-he remembered that
suit well! Aunt Ann with her ringlets, and her spidery kind
hands, and her grave old aquiline smile—a fine old lady, Aunt
Ann! He moved on up to the drawing-room door. There on each side
of it were the groups of miniatures. Those he would certainly buy
in! The miniatures of his four aunts, one of his Uncle Swithin
adolescent, and one of his Uncle Nicholas as a boy. They had all
been painted by a young lady friend of the family at a time,
1830, about, when miniatures were considered very genteel, and
lasting too, painted as they were on ivory. Many a time had he
heard the tale of that young lady: “Very talented, my dear; she
had quite a weakness for Swithin, and very soon after she went
into a consumption and died: so like Keats—we often spoke of it.”
Well, there they were! Ann, Juley, Hester, Susan—quite a small
child; Swithin, with sky-blue eyes, pink cheeks, yellow curls,
white waistcoat-large as life; and Nicholas, like Cupid with an
eye on heaven. Now he came to think of it, Uncle Nick had always
been rather like that—a wonderful man to the last. Yes, she must
have had talent, and miniatures always had a certain back-watered
cachet of their own, little subject to the currents of
competition on aesthetic Change. Soames opened the drawing-room
door. The room was dusted, the furniture uncovered, the curtains
drawn back, precisely as if his aunts still dwelt there patiently
waiting. And a thought came to him: When Timothy died—why not?
Would it not be almost a duty to preserve this house—like
Carlyle's—and put up a tablet, and show it? “Specimen of
mid-Victorian abode—entrance, one shilling, with catalogue.”
After all, it was the completest thing, and perhaps the deadest
in the London of to-day. Perfect in its special taste and
culture, if, that is, he took down and carried over to his own
collection the four Barbizon pictures he had given them. The
still sky-blue walls, tile green curtains patterned with red
flowers and ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen before the
cast-iron grate; the mahogany cupboard with glass windows, full
of little knickknacks; the beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley,
Southey, Cowper, Coleridge, Byron's Corsair (but nothing else),
and the Victorian poets in a bookshelf row; the marqueterie
cabinet lined with dim red plush, full of family relics: Hester's
first fan; the buckles of their mother's father's shoes; three
bottled scorpions; and one very yellow elephant's tusk, sent home
from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte, who had been in jute; a
yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery writing on it,
recording God knew what! And the pictures crowding on the
walls—all water-colours save those four Barbizons looking like
the foreigners they were, and doubtful customers at that—pictures
bright and illustrative, “Telling the Bees,” “Hey for the Ferry!”
and two in the style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines,
given them by Swithin. Oh! many, many pictures at which Soames
had gazed a thousand times in supercilious fascination; a
marvellous collection of bright, smooth gilt frames.
And the boudoir-grand piano, beautifully dusted, hermetically
sealed as ever; and Aunt Juley's album of pressed seaweed on it.
And the gilt-legged chairs, stronger than they looked. And on one
side of the fireplace the sofa of crimson silk, where Aunt Ann,
and after her Aunt Juley, had been wont to sit, facing the light
and bolt upright. And on the other side of the fire the one
really easy chair, back to the light, for Aunt Hester. Soames
screwed up his eyes; he seemed to see them sitting there. Ah! and
the atmosphere—even now, of too many stuffs and washed lace
curtains, lavender in bags, and dried bees' wings. 'No,' he
thought, 'there's nothing like it left; it ought to be
preserved.' And, by George, they might laugh at it, but for a
standard of gentle life never departed from, for fastidiousness
of skin and eye and nose and feeling, it beat to-day
hollow—to-day with its Tubes and cars, its perpetual smoking, its
cross-legged, bare-necked girls visible up to the knees and down
to the waist if you took the trouble (agreeable to the satyr
within each Forsyte but hardly his idea of a lady), with their
feet, too, screwed round the legs of their chairs while they ate,
and their “So longs,” and their “Old Beans,” and their
laughter—girls who gave him the shudders whenever he thought of
Fleur in contact with them; and the hard-eyed, capable, older
women who managed life and gave him the shudders too. No! his old
aunts, if they never opened their minds, their eyes, or very much
their windows, at least had manners, and a standard, and
reverence for past and future.
With rather a choky feeling he closed the door and went tiptoeing
upstairs. He looked in at a place on the way: H'm! in perfect
order of the eighties, with a sort of yellow oilskin paper on the
walls. At the top of the stairs he hesitated between four doors.
Which of them was Timothy's? And he listened. A sound, as of a
child slowly dragging a hobby-horse about, came to his ears. That
must be Timothy! He tapped, and a door was opened by Smither,
very red in the face.
Mr. Timothy was taking his walk, and she had not been able to get
him to attend. If Mr. Soames would come into the back-room, he
could see him through the door.
Soames went into the back-room and stood watching.
The last of the old Forsytes was on his feet, moving with the
most impressive slowness, and an air of perfect concentration on
his own affairs, backward and forward between the foot of his bed
and the window, a distance of some twelve feet. The lower part of
his square face, no longer clean-shaven, was covered with snowy
beard clipped as short as it could be, and his chin looked as
broad as his brow where the hair was also quite white, while nose
and cheeks and brow were a good yellow. One hand held a stout
stick, and the other grasped the skirt of his Jaeger
dressing-gown, from under which could be seen his bed-socked
ankles and feet thrust into Jaeger slippers. The expression on
his face was that of a crossed child, intent on something that he
has not got. Each time he turned he stumped the stick, and then
dragged it, as if to show that he could do without it:
“He still looks strong,” said Soames under his breath.
“Oh! yes, sir. You should see him take his bath—it's wonderful;
he does enjoy it so.”
Those quite loud words gave Soames an insight. Timothy had
resumed his babyhood.