The Forsyte saga - Complete
But, afraid of losing the expansion of his chest, he leaned back
again into a state of immobility, for he prized nothing so highly
as a distinguished appearance.
Aunt Ann turned her old eyes from one to the other. Indulgent and
severe was her look. In turn the three brothers looked at Ann.
She was getting shaky. Wonderful woman! Eighty-six if a day;
might live another ten years, and had never been strong. Swithin
and James, the twins, were only seventy-five, Nicholas a mere
baby of seventy or so. All were strong, and the inference was
comforting. Of all forms of property their respective healths
naturally concerned them most.
“I’m very well in myself,” proceeded James, “but my nerves are
out of order. The least thing worries me to death. I shall have
to go to Bath.”
“Bath!” said Nicholas. “I’ve tried Harrogate. _That’s_ no good.
What I want is sea air. There’s nothing like Yarmouth. Now, when
I go there I sleep....”
“My liver’s very bad,” interrupted Swithin slowly. “Dreadful pain
here;” and he placed his hand on his right side.
“Want of exercise,” muttered James, his eyes on the china. He
quickly added: “I get a pain there, too.”
Swithin reddened, a resemblance to a turkey-cock coming upon his
old face.
“Exercise!” he said. “I take plenty: I never use the lift at the
Club.”
“I didn’t know,” James hurried out. “I know nothing about
anybody; nobody tells me anything....”
Swithin fixed him with a stare:
“What do you do for a pain there?”
James brightened.
“I take a compound....”
“How are you, uncle?”
June stood before him, her resolute small face raised from her
little height to his great height, and her hand outheld.
The brightness faded from James’s visage.
“How are you?” he said, brooding over her. “So you’re going to
Wales to-morrow to visit your young man’s aunts? You’ll have a
lot of rain there. This isn’t real old Worcester.” He tapped the
bowl. “Now, that set I gave your mother when she married was the
genuine thing.”
June shook hands one by one with her three great-uncles, and
turned to Aunt Ann. A very sweet look had come into the old
lady’s face, she kissed the girl’s check with trembling fervour.
“Well, my dear,” she said, “and so you’re going for a whole
month!”
The girl passed on, and Aunt Ann looked after her slim little
figure. The old lady’s round, steel grey eyes, over which a film
like a bird’s was beginning to come, followed her wistfully
amongst the bustling crowd, for people were beginning to say
good-bye; and her finger-tips, pressing and pressing against each
other, were busy again with the recharging of her will against
that inevitable ultimate departure of her own.
“Yes,” she thought, “everybody’s been most kind; quite a lot of
people come to congratulate her. She ought to be very happy.”
Amongst the throng of people by the door, the well-dressed throng
drawn from the families of lawyers and doctors, from the Stock
Exchange, and all the innumerable avocations of the upper-middle
class—there were only some twenty percent of Forsytes; but to
Aunt Ann they seemed all Forsytes—and certainly there was not
much difference—she saw only her own flesh and blood. It was her
world, this family, and she knew no other, had never perhaps
known any other. All their little secrets, illnesses,
engagements, and marriages, how they were getting on, and whether
they were making money—all this was her property, her delight,
her life; beyond this only a vague, shadowy mist of facts and
persons of no real significance. This it was that she would have
to lay down when it came to her turn to die; this which gave to
her that importance, that secret self-importance, without which
none of us can bear to live; and to this she clung wistfully,
with a greed that grew each day! If life were slipping away from
her, _this_ she would retain to the end.
She thought of Jun’s father, young Jolyon, who had run away with
that foreign girl. And what a sad blow to his father and to them
all. Such a promising young fellow! A sad blow, though there had
been no public scandal, most fortunately, Jo’s wife seeking for
no divorce! A long time ago! And when Jun’s mother died, six
years ago, Jo had married that woman, and they had two children
now, so she had heard. Still, he had forfeited his right to be
there, had cheated her of the complete fulfilment of her family
pride, deprived her of the rightful pleasure of seeing and
kissing him of whom she had been so proud, such a promising young
fellow! The thought rankled with the bitterness of a
long-inflicted injury in her tenacious old heart. A little water
stood in her eyes. With a handkerchief of the finest lawn she
wiped them stealthily.
“Well, Aunt Ann?” said a voice behind.
Soames Forsyte, flat-shouldered, clean-shaven, flat-cheeked,
flat-waisted, yet with something round and secret about his whole
appearance, looked downwards and aslant at Aunt Ann, as though
trying to see through the side of his own nose.
“And what do you think of the engagement?” he asked.
Aunt Ann’s eyes rested on him proudly; of all the nephews since
young Jolyon’s departure from the family nest, he was now her
favourite, for she recognised in him a sure trustee of the family
soul that must so soon slip beyond her keeping.
“Very nice for the young man,” she said; “and he’s a good-looking
young fellow; but I doubt if he’s quite the right lover for dear
June.”
Soames touched the edge of a gold-lacquered lustre.
“She’ll tame him,” he said, stealthily wetting his finger and
rubbing it on the knobby bulbs. “That’s genuine old lacquer; you
can’t get it nowadays. It’d do well in a sale at Jobson’s.” He
spoke with relish, as though he felt that he was cheering up his
old aunt. It was seldom he was so confidential. “I wouldn’t mind
having it myself,” he added; “you can always get your price for
old lacquer.”
“You’re so clever with all those things,” said Aunt Ann. “And how
is dear Irene?”
Soames’s smile died.
“Pretty well,” he said. “Complains she can’t sleep; she sleeps a
great deal better than I do,” and he looked at his wife, who was
talking to Bosinney by the door.
Aunt Ann sighed.
“Perhaps,” she said, “it will be just as well for her not to see
so much of June. She’s such a decided character, dear June!”
Soames flushed; his flushes passed rapidly over his flat cheeks
and centered between his eyes, where they remained, the stamp of
disturbing thoughts.
“I don’t know what she sees in that little flibbertigibbet,” he
burst out, but noticing that they were no longer alone, he turned
and again began examining the lustre.
“They tell me Jolyon’s bought another house,” said his father’s
voice close by; “he must have a lot of money—he must have more
money than he knows what to do with! Montpellier Square, they
say; close to Soames! They never told me, Irene never tells me
anything!”
“Capital position, not two minutes from me,” said the voice of
Swithin, “and from my rooms I can drive to the Club in eight.”
The position of their houses was of vital importance to the
Forsytes, nor was this remarkable, since the whole spirit of
their success was embodied therein.
Their father, of farming stock, had come from Dorsetshire near
the beginning of the century.
“Superior Dosset Forsyte,” as he was called by his intimates, had
been a stonemason by trade, and risen to the position of a
master-builder.
Towards the end of his life he moved to London, where, building
on until he died, he was buried at Highgate. He left over thirty
thousand pounds between his ten children. Old Jolyon alluded to
him, if at all, as “A hard, thick sort of man; not much
refinement about him.” The second generation of Forsytes felt
indeed that he was not greatly to their credit. The only
aristocratic trait they could find in his character was a habit
of drinking Madeira.
Aunt Hester, an authority on family history, described him thus:
“I don’t recollect that he ever did anything; at least, not in my
time. He was er—an owner of houses, my dear. His hair about your
Uncle Swithin’s colour; rather a square build. Tall? No—not very
tall” (he had been five feet five, with a mottled face); “a
fresh-coloured man. I remember he used to drink Madeira; but ask
your Aunt Ann. What was _his_ father? He—er—had to do with the
land down in Dorsetshire, by the sea.”
James once went down to see for himself what sort of place this
was that they had come from. He found two old farms, with a cart
track rutted into the pink earth, leading down to a mill by the
beach; a little grey church with a buttressed outer wall, and a
smaller and greyer chapel. The stream which worked the mill came
bubbling down in a dozen rivulets, and pigs were hunting round
that estuary. A haze hovered over the prospect. Down this hollow,
with their feet deep in the mud and their faces towards the sea,
it appeared that the primeval Forsytes had been content to walk
Sunday after Sunday for hundreds of years.
Whether or no James had cherished hopes of an inheritance, or of
something rather distinguished to be found down there, he came
back to town in a poor way, and went about with a pathetic
attempt at making the best of a bad job.
“There’s very little to be had out of that,” he said; “regular
country little place, old as the hills....”
Its age was felt to be a comfort. Old Jolyon, in whom a desperate
honesty welled up at times, would allude to his ancestors as:
“Yeomen—I suppose very small beer.” Yet he would repeat the word
“yeomen” as if it afforded him consolation.
They had all done so well for themselves, these Forsytes, that
they were all what is called “of a certain position.” They had
shares in all sorts of things, not as yet—with the exception of
Timothy—in consols, for they had no dread in life like that of 3
per cent. for their money. They collected pictures, too, and were
supporters of such charitable institutions as might be beneficial
to their sick domestics. From their father, the builder, they
inherited a talent for bricks and mortar. Originally, perhaps,
members of some primitive sect, they were now in the natural
course of things members of the Church of England, and caused
their wives and children to attend with some regularity the more
fashionable churches of the Metropolis. To have doubted their
Christianity would have caused them both pain and surprise. Some
of them paid for pews, thus expressing in the most practical form
their sympathy with the teachings of Christ.
Their residences, placed at stated intervals round the park,
watched like sentinels, lest the fair heart of this London, where