The Forsyte saga - Complete
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,