The Forsyte saga - Complete
with a serene white head, a little figure, strenuous and eager,
with a red-gold head—they would sit through every kind of play,
and on the way home old Jolyon would say of the principal actor:
“Oh, he’s a poor stick! You should have seen little Bobson!”
She had looked forward to this evening with keen delight; it was
stolen, chaperone-less, undreamed of at Stanhope Gate, where she
was supposed to be at Soames’s. She had expected reward for her
subterfuge, planned for her lover’s sake; she had expected it to
break up the thick, chilly cloud, and make the relations between
them which of late had been so puzzling, so tormenting—sunny and
simple again as they had been before the winter. She had come
with the intention of saying something definite; and she looked
at the stage with a furrow between her brows, seeing nothing, her
hands squeezed together in her lap. A swarm of jealous suspicions
stung and stung her.
If Bosinney was conscious of her trouble he made no sign.
The curtain dropped. The first act had come to an end.
“It’s awfully hot here!” said the girl; “I should like to go
out.”
She was very white, and she knew—for with her nerves thus
sharpened she saw everything—that he was both uneasy and
compunctious.
At the back of the theatre an open balcony hung over the street;
she took possession of this, and stood leaning there without a
word, waiting for him to begin.
At last she could bear it no longer.
“I want to say something to you, Phil,” she said.
“Yes?”
The defensive tone of his voice brought the colour flying to her
cheek, the words flying to her lips: “You don’t give me a chance
to be nice to you; you haven’t for ages now!”
Bosinney stared down at the street. He made no answer....
June cried passionately: “You know I want to do everything for
you—that I want to be everything to you....”
A hum rose from the street, and, piercing it with a sharp “ping,”
the bell sounded for the raising of the curtain. June did not
stir. A desperate struggle was going on within her. Should she
put everything to the proof? Should she challenge directly that
influence, that attraction which was driving him away from her?
It was her nature to challenge, and she said: “Phil, take me to
see the house on Sunday!”
With a smile quivering and breaking on her lips, and trying, how
hard, not to show that she was watching, she searched his face,
saw it waver and hesitate, saw a troubled line come between his
brows, the blood rush into his face. He answered: “Not Sunday,
dear; some other day!”
“Why not Sunday? I shouldn’t be in the way on Sunday.”
He made an evident effort, and said: “I have an engagement.”
“You are going to take....”
His eyes grew angry; he shrugged his shoulders, and answered: “An
engagement that will prevent my taking you to see the house!”
June bit her lip till the blood came, and walked back to her seat
without another word, but she could not help the tears of rage
rolling down her face. The house had been mercifully darkened for
a crisis, and no one could see her trouble.
Yet in this world of Forsytes let no man think himself immune
from observation.
In the third row behind, Euphemia, Nicholas’s youngest daughter,
with her married-sister, Mrs. Tweetyman, were watching.
They reported at Timothy’s, how they had seen June and her fiancé
at the theatre.
“In the stalls?” “No, not in the....” “Oh! in the dress circle,
of course. That seemed to be quite fashionable nowadays with
young people!”
Well—not exactly. In the.... Anyway, _that_ engagement wouldn’t
last long. They had never seen anyone look so thunder and
lightningy as that little June! With tears of enjoyment in their
eyes, they related how she had kicked a man’s hat as she returned
to her seat in the middle of an act, and how the man had looked.
Euphemia had a noted, silent laugh, terminating most
disappointingly in squeaks; and when Mrs. Small, holding up her
hands, said: “My dear! Kicked a ha-at?” she let out such a number
of these that she had to be recovered with smelling-salts. As she
went away she said to Mrs. Tweetyman:
“Kicked a—ha-at! Oh! I shall die.”
For “that little June” this evening, that was to have been “her
treat,” was the most miserable she had ever spent. God knows she
tried to stifle her pride, her suspicion, her jealousy!
She parted from Bosinney at old Jolyon’s door without breaking
down; the feeling that her lover must be conquered was strong
enough to sustain her till his retiring footsteps brought home
the true extent of her wretchedness.
The noiseless “Sankey” let her in. She would have slipped up to
her own room, but old Jolyon, who had heard her entrance, was in
the dining-room doorway.
“Come in and have your milk,” he said. “It’s been kept hot for
you. You’re very late. Where have you been?”
June stood at the fireplace, with a foot on the fender and an arm
on the mantelpiece, as her grandfather had done when he came in
that night of the opera. She was too near a breakdown to care
what she told him.
“We dined at Soames’s.”
“H’m! the man of property! His wife there and Bosinney?”
“Yes.”
Old Jolyon’s glance was fixed on her with the penetrating gaze
from which it was difficult to hide; but she was not looking at
him, and when she turned her face, he dropped his scrutiny at
once. He had seen enough, and too much. He bent down to lift the
cup of milk for her from the hearth, and, turning away, grumbled:
“You oughtn’t to stay out so late; it makes you fit for nothing.”
He was invisible now behind his paper, which he turned with a
vicious crackle; but when June came up to kiss him, he said:
“Good-night, my darling,” in a tone so tremulous and unexpected,
that it was all the girl could do to get out of the room without
breaking into the fit of sobbing which lasted her well on into
the night.
When the door was closed, old Jolyon dropped his paper, and
stared long and anxiously in front of him.
“The beggar!” he thought. “I always knew she’d have trouble with
him!”
Uneasy doubts and suspicions, the more poignant that he felt
himself powerless to check or control the march of events, came
crowding upon him.
Was the fellow going to jilt her? He longed to go and say to him:
“Look here, you sir! Are you going to jilt my grand-daughter?”
But how could he? Knowing little or nothing, he was yet certain,
with his unerring astuteness, that there was something going on.
He suspected Bosinney of being too much at Montpellier Square.
“This fellow,” he thought, “may not be a scamp; his face is not a
bad one, but he’s a queer fish. I don’t know what to make of him.
I shall never know what to make of him! They tell me he works
like a nigger, but I see no good coming of it. He’s unpractical,
he has no method. When he comes here, he sits as glum as a
monkey. If I ask him what wine he’ll have, he says: ‘Thanks, any
wine.’ If I offer him a cigar, he smokes it as if it were a
twopenny German thing. I never see him looking at June as he
ought to look at her; and yet, he’s not after her money. If she
were to make a sign, he’d be off his bargain to-morrow. But she
won’t—not she! She’ll stick to him! She’s as obstinate as
fate—she’ll never let go!”
Sighing deeply, he turned the paper; in its columns, perchance he
might find consolation.
And upstairs in her room June sat at her open window, where the
spring wind came, after its revel across the Park, to cool her
hot cheeks and burn her heart.
CHAPTER III DRIVE WITH SWITHIN
Two lines of a certain song in a certain famous old school’s
songbook run as follows:
“How the buttons on his blue frock shone, tra-la-la!
How he carolled and he sang, like a bird!...”
Swithin did not exactly carol and sing like a bird, but he felt
almost like endeavouring to hum a tune, as he stepped out of Hyde
Park Mansions, and contemplated his horses drawn up before the
door.
The afternoon was as balmy as a day in June, and to complete the
simile of the old song, he had put on a blue frock-coat,
dispensing with an overcoat, after sending Adolf down three times
to make sure that there was not the least suspicion of east in
the wind; and the frock-coat was buttoned so tightly around his
personable form, that, if the buttons did not shine, they might
pardonably have done so. Majestic on the pavement he fitted on a
pair of dog-skin gloves; with his large bell-shaped top hat, and
his great stature and bulk he looked too primeval for a Forsyte.
His thick white hair, on which Adolf had bestowed a touch of
pomatum, exhaled the fragrance of opoponax and cigars—the
celebrated Swithin brand, for which he paid one hundred and forty
shillings the hundred, and of which old Jolyon had unkindly said,
he wouldn’t smoke them as a gift; they wanted the stomach of a
horse!
“Adolf!”
“Sare!”
“The new plaid rug!”
He would never teach that fellow to look smart; and Mrs. Soames
he felt sure, had an eye!
“The phaeton hood down; I am going—to—drive—a—lady!”
A pretty woman would want to show off her frock; and well—he was
going to drive a lady! It was like a new beginning to the good
old days.
Ages since he had driven a woman! The last time, if he
remembered, it had been Juley; the poor old soul had been as
nervous as a cat the whole time, and so put him out of patience
that, as he dropped her in the Bayswater Road, he had said: “Well
I’m d——d if I ever drive you again!” And he never had, not he!
Going up to his horses’ heads, he examined their bits; not that
he knew anything about bits—he didn’t pay his coachman sixty
pounds a year to do his work for him, that had never been his
principle. Indeed, his reputation as a horsey man rested mainly
on the fact that once, on Derby Day, he had been welshed by some
thimble-riggers. But someone at the Club, after seeing him drive
his greys up to the door—he always drove grey horses, you got
more style for the money, some thought—had called him
“Four-in-hand Forsyte.” The name having reached his ears through
that fellow Nicholas Treffry, old Jolyon’s dead partner, the
great driving man notorious for more carriage accidents than any
man in the kingdom—Swithin had ever after conceived it right to
act up to it. The name had taken his fancy, not because he had
ever driven four-in-hand, or was ever likely to, but because of
something distinguished in the sound. Four-in-hand Forsyte! Not
bad! Born too soon, Swithin had missed his vocation. Coming upon
London twenty years later, he could not have failed to have
become a stockbroker, but at the time when he was obliged to
select, this great profession had not as yet become the chief