The Forsyte saga - Complete
“Well, I know nothing about it,” he said; “nobody tells me
anything. Soames ought to be able to take care of himself. If he
can’t take care of himself he mustn’t look to me—that’s all.”
Biting the corner of his forefinger he stole a cold, sharp look
at his daughter-in-law.
He encountered her eyes fixed on his own, so dark and deep, that
he stopped, and broke into a gentle perspiration.
“Well, I must be going,” he said after a short pause, and a
minute later rose, with a slight appearance of surprise, as
though he had expected to be asked to stop. Giving his hand to
Irene, he allowed himself to be conducted to the door, and let
out into the street. He would not have a cab, he would walk,
Irene was to say good-night to Soames for him, and if she wanted
a little gaiety, well, he would drive her down to Richmond any
day.
He walked home, and going upstairs, woke Emily out of the first
sleep she had had for four and twenty hours, to tell her that it
was his impression things were in a bad way at Soames’s; on this
theme he descanted for half an hour, until at last, saying that
he would not sleep a wink, he turned on his side and instantly
began to snore.
In Montpellier Square Soames, who had come from the picture room,
stood invisible at the top of the stairs, watching Irene sort the
letters brought by the last post. She turned back into the
drawing-room; but in a minute came out, and stood as if
listening. Then she came stealing up the stairs, with a kitten in
her arms. He could see her face bent over the little beast, which
was purring against her neck. Why couldn’t she look at him like
that?
Suddenly she saw him, and her face changed.
“Any letters for me?” he said.
“Three.”
He stood aside, and without another word she passed on into the
bedroom.
CHAPTER VII OLD JOLYON’S PECCADILLO
Old Jolyon came out of Lord’s cricket ground that same afternoon
with the intention of going home. He had not reached Hamilton
Terrace before he changed his mind, and hailing a cab, gave the
driver an address in Wistaria Avenue. He had taken a resolution.
June had hardly been at home at all that week; she had given him
nothing of her company for a long time past, not, in fact, since
she had become engaged to Bosinney. He never asked her for her
company. It was not his habit to ask people for things! She had
just that one idea now—Bosinney and his affairs—and she left him
stranded in his great house, with a parcel of servants, and not a
soul to speak to from morning to night. His Club was closed for
cleaning; his Boards in recess; there was nothing, therefore, to
take him into the City. June had wanted him to go away; she would
not go herself, because Bosinney was in London.
But where was he to go by himself? He could not go abroad alone;
the sea upset his liver; he hated hotels. Roger went to a
hydropathic—he was not going to begin that at his time of life,
those new-fangled places were all humbug!
With such formulas he clothed to himself the desolation of his
spirit; the lines down his face deepening, his eyes day by day
looking forth with the melancholy which sat so strangely on a
face wont to be strong and serene.
And so that afternoon he took this journey through St. John’s
Wood, in the golden-light that sprinkled the rounded green bushes
of the acacia’s before the little houses, in the summer sunshine
that seemed holding a revel over the little gardens; and he
looked about him with interest; for this was a district which no
Forsyte entered without open disapproval and secret curiosity.
His cab stopped in front of a small house of that peculiar buff
colour which implies a long immunity from paint. It had an outer
gate, and a rustic approach.
He stepped out, his bearing extremely composed; his massive head,
with its drooping moustache and wings of white hair, very
upright, under an excessively large top hat; his glance firm, a
little angry. He had been driven into this!
“Mrs. Jolyon Forsyte at home?”
“Oh, yes sir!—what name shall I say, if you please, sir?”
Old Jolyon could not help twinkling at the little maid as he gave
his name. She seemed to him such a funny little toad!
And he followed her through the dark hall, into a small double,
drawing-room, where the furniture was covered in chintz, and the
little maid placed him in a chair.
“They’re all in the garden, sir; if you’ll kindly take a seat,
I’ll tell them.”
Old Jolyon sat down in the chintz-covered chair, and looked
around him. The whole place seemed to him, as he would have
expressed it, pokey; there was a certain—he could not tell
exactly what—air of shabbiness, or rather of making two ends
meet, about everything. As far as he could see, not a single
piece of furniture was worth a five-pound note. The walls,
distempered rather a long time ago, were decorated with
water-colour sketches; across the ceiling meandered a long crack.
These little houses were all old, second-rate concerns; he should
hope the rent was under a hundred a year; it hurt him more than
he could have said, to think of a Forsyte—his own son living in
such a place.
The little maid came back. Would he please to go down into the
garden?
Old Jolyon marched out through the French windows. In descending
the steps he noticed that they wanted painting.
Young Jolyon, his wife, his two children, and his dog Balthasar,
were all out there under a pear-tree.
This walk towards them was the most courageous act of old
Jolyon’s life; but no muscle of his face moved, no nervous
gesture betrayed him. He kept his deep-set eyes steadily on the
enemy.
In those two minutes he demonstrated to perfection all that
unconscious soundness, balance, and vitality of fibre that made,
of him and so many others of his class the core of the nation. In
the unostentatious conduct of their own affairs, to the neglect
of everything else, they typified the essential individualism,
born in the Briton from the natural isolation of his country’s
life.
The dog Balthasar sniffed round the edges of his trousers; this
friendly and cynical mongrel—offspring of a liaison between a
Russian poodle and a fox-terrier—had a nose for the unusual.
The strange greetings over, old Jolyon seated himself in a wicker
chair, and his two grandchildren, one on each side of his knees,
looked at him silently, never having seen so old a man.
They were unlike, as though recognising the difference set
between them by the circumstances of their births. Jolly, the
child of sin, pudgy-faced, with his tow-coloured hair brushed off
his forehead, and a dimple in his chin, had an air of stubborn
amiability, and the eyes of a Forsyte; little Holly, the child of
wedlock, was a dark-skinned, solemn soul, with her mother’s grey
and wistful eyes.
The dog Balthasar, having walked round the three small
flower-beds, to show his extreme contempt for things at large,
had also taken a seat in front of old Jolyon, and, oscillating a
tail curled by Nature tightly over his back, was staring up with
eyes that did not blink.
Even in the garden, that sense of things being pokey haunted old
Jolyon; the wicker chair creaked under his weight; the
garden-beds looked “daverdy”. On the far side, under the
smut-stained wall, cats had made a path.
While he and his grandchildren thus regarded each other with the
peculiar scrutiny, curious yet trustful, that passes between the
very young and the very old, young Jolyon watched his wife.
The colour had deepened in her thin, oval face, with its straight
brows, and large, grey eyes. Her hair, brushed in fine, high
curves back from her forehead, was going grey, like his own, and
this greyness made the sudden vivid colour in her cheeks
painfully pathetic.
The look on her face, such as he had never seen there before,
such as she had always hidden from him, was full of secret
resentments, and longings, and fears. Her eyes, under their
twitching brows, stared painfully. And she was silent.
Jolly alone sustained the conversation; he had many possessions,
and was anxious that his unknown friend with extremely large
moustaches, and hands all covered with blue veins, who sat with
legs crossed like his own father (a habit he was himself trying
to acquire), should know it; but being a Forsyte, though not yet
quite eight years old, he made no mention of the thing at the
moment dearest to his heart—a camp of soldiers in a shop-window,
which his father had promised to buy. No doubt it seemed to him
too precious; a tempting of Providence to mention it yet.
And the sunlight played through the leaves on that little party
of the three generations grouped tranquilly under the pear-tree,
which had long borne no fruit.
Old Jolyon’s furrowed face was reddening patchily, as old men’s
faces redden in the sun. He took one of Jolly’s hands in his own;
the boy climbed on to his knee; and little Holly, mesmerized by
this sight, crept up to them; the sound of the dog Balthasar’s
scratching arose rhythmically.
Suddenly young Mrs. Jolyon got up and hurried indoors. A minute
later her husband muttered an excuse, and followed. Old Jolyon
was left alone with his grandchildren.
And Nature with her quaint irony began working in him one of her
strange revolutions, following her cyclic laws into the depths of
his heart. And that tenderness for little children, that passion
for the beginnings of life which had once made him forsake his
son and follow June, now worked in him to forsake June and follow
these littler things. Youth, like a flame, burned ever in his
breast, and to youth he turned, to the round little limbs, so
reckless, that wanted care, to the small round faces so
unreasonably solemn or bright, to the treble tongues, and the
shrill, chuckling laughter, to the insistent tugging hands, and
the feel of small bodies against his legs, to all that was young
and young, and once more young. And his eyes grew soft, his
voice, and thin-veined hands soft, and soft his heart within him.
And to those small creatures he became at once a place of
pleasure, a place where they were secure, and could talk and
laugh and play; till, like sunshine, there radiated from old
Jolyon’s wicker chair the perfect gaiety of three hearts.
But with young Jolyon following to his wife’s room it was
different.
He found her seated on a chair before her dressing-glass, with
her hands before her face.
Her shoulders were shaking with sobs. This passion of hers for
suffering was mysterious to him. He had been through a hundred of
these moods; how he had survived them he never knew, for he could
never believe they _were_ moods, and that the last hour of his
partnership had not struck.