The Forsyte saga - Complete
Mrs. MacAnder to her cab.
When Mrs. MacAnder dined at Timothy’s, the conversation (although
Timothy himself could never be induced to be present) took that
wider, man-of-the-world tone current among Forsytes at large, and
this, no doubt, was what put her at a premium there.
Mrs. Small and Aunt Hester found it an exhilarating change. “If
only,” they said, “Timothy would meet her!” It was felt that she
would do him good. She could tell you, for instance, the latest
story of Sir Charles Fiste’s son at Monte Carlo; who was the real
heroine of Tynemouth Eddy’s fashionable novel that everyone was
holding up their hands over, and what they were doing in Paris
about wearing bloomers. She was so sensible, too, knowing all
about that vexed question, whether to send young Nicholas’ eldest
into the navy as his mother wished, or make him an accountant as
his father thought would be safer. She strongly deprecated the
navy. If you were not exceptionally brilliant or exceptionally
well connected, they passed you over so disgracefully, and what
was it after all to look forward to, even if you became an
admiral—a pittance! An accountant had many more chances, but let
him be put with a good firm, where there was no risk at starting!
Sometimes she would give them a tip on the Stock Exchange; not
that Mrs. Small or Aunt Hester ever took it. They had indeed no
money to invest; but it seemed to bring them into such exciting
touch with the realities of life. It was an event. They would ask
Timothy, they said. But they never did, knowing in advance that
it would upset him. Surreptitiously, however, for weeks after
they would look in that paper, which they took with respect on
account of its really fashionable proclivities, to see whether
“Bright’s Rubies” or “The Woollen Mackintosh Company” were up or
down. Sometimes they could not find the name of the company at
all; and they would wait until James or Roger or even Swithin
came in, and ask them in voices trembling with curiosity how that
“Bolivia Lime and Speltrate” was doing—they could not find it in
the paper.
And Roger would answer: “What do you want to know for? Some
trash! You’ll go burning your fingers—investing your money in
lime, and things you know nothing about! Who told you?” and
ascertaining what they had been told, he would go away, and,
making inquiries in the City, would perhaps invest some of his
own money in the concern.
It was about the middle of dinner, just in fact as the saddle of
mutton had been brought in by Smither, that Mrs. MacAnder,
looking airily round, said: “Oh! and whom do you think I passed
to-day in Richmond Park? You’ll never guess—Mrs. Soames and—Mr.
Bosinney. They must have been down to look at the house!”
Winifred Dartie coughed, and no one said a word. It was the piece
of evidence they had all unconsciously been waiting for.
To do Mrs. MacAnder justice, she had been to Switzerland and the
Italian lakes with a party of three, and had not heard of
Soames’s rupture with his architect. She could not tell,
therefore, the profound impression her words would make.
Upright and a little flushed, she moved her small, shrewd eyes
from face to face, trying to gauge the effect of her words. On
either side of her a Hayman boy, his lean, taciturn, hungry face
turned towards his plate, ate his mutton steadily.
These two, Giles and Jesse, were so alike and so inseparable that
they were known as the Dromios. They never talked, and seemed
always completely occupied in doing nothing. It was popularly
supposed that they were cramming for an important examination.
They walked without hats for long hours in the Gardens attached
to their house, books in their hands, a fox-terrier at their
heels, never saying a word, and smoking all the time. Every
morning, about fifty yards apart, they trotted down Campden Hill
on two lean hacks, with legs as long as their own, and every
morning about an hour later, still fifty yards apart, they
cantered up again. Every evening, wherever they had dined, they
might be observed about half-past ten, leaning over the
balustrade of the Alhambra promenade.
They were never seen otherwise than together; in this way passing
their lives, apparently perfectly content.
Inspired by some dumb stirring within them of the feelings of
gentlemen, they turned at this painful moment to Mrs. MacAnder,
and said in precisely the same voice: “Have you seen the...?”
Such was her surprise at being thus addressed that she put down
her fork; and Smither, who was passing, promptly removed her
plate. Mrs. MacAnder, however, with presence of mind, said
instantly: “I must have a little more of that nice mutton.”
But afterwards in the drawing—room she sat down by Mrs. Small,
determined to get to the bottom of the matter. And she began:
“What a charming woman, Mrs. Soames; such a sympathetic
temperament! Soames is a really lucky man!”
Her anxiety for information had not made sufficient allowance for
that inner Forsyte skin which refuses to share its troubles with
outsiders.
Mrs. Septimus Small, drawing herself up with a creak and rustle
of her whole person, said, shivering in her dignity:
“My dear, it is a subject we do not talk about!”
CHAPTER II NIGHT IN THE PARK
Although with her infallible instinct Mrs. Small had said the
very thing to make her guest “more intriguee than ever,” it is
difficult to see how else she could truthfully have spoken.
It was not a subject which the Forsytes could talk about even
among themselves—to use the word Soames had invented to
characterize to himself the situation, it was “subterranean.”
Yet, within a week of Mrs. MacAnder’s encounter in Richmond Park,
to all of them—save Timothy, from whom it was carefully kept—to
James on his domestic beat from the Poultry to Park Lane, to
George the wild one, on his daily adventure from the bow window
at the Haversnake to the billiard room at the “Red Pottle,” was
it known that “those two” had gone to extremes.
George (it was he who invented many of those striking expressions
still current in fashionable circles) voiced the sentiment more
accurately than any one when he said to his brother Eustace that
“the Buccaneer” was “going it”. he expected Soames was about “fed
up.”
It was felt that he must be, and yet, what could be done? He
ought perhaps to take steps; but to take steps would be
deplorable.
Without an open scandal which they could not see their way to
recommending, it was difficult to see what steps could be taken.
In this impasse, the only thing was to say nothing to Soames, and
nothing to each other; in fact, to pass it over.
By displaying towards Irene a dignified coldness, some impression
might be made upon her; but she was seldom now to be seen, and
there seemed a slight difficulty in seeking her out on purpose to
show her coldness. Sometimes in the privacy of his bedroom James
would reveal to Emily the real suffering that his son’s
misfortune caused him.
“_I_ can’t tell,” he would say; “it worries me out of my life.
There’ll be a scandal, and that’ll do him no good. I shan’t say
anything to him. There might be nothing in it. What do you think?
She’s very artistic, they tell me. What? Oh, you’re a ‘regular
Juley’! Well, I don’t know; I expect the worst. This is what
comes of having no children. I knew how it would be from the
first. They never told me they didn’t mean to have any
children—nobody tells me anything!”
On his knees by the side of the bed, his eyes open and fixed with
worry, he would breathe into the counterpane. Clad in his
nightshirt, his neck poked forward, his back rounded, he
resembled some long white bird.
“Our Father—,” he repeated, turning over and over again the
thought of this possible scandal.
Like old Jolyon, he, too, at the bottom of his heart set the
blame of the tragedy down to family interference. What business
had that lot—he began to think of the Stanhope Gate branch,
including young Jolyon and his daughter, as “that lot”—to
introduce a person like this Bosinney into the family? (He had
heard George’s soubriquet, “The Buccaneer,” but he could make
nothing of that—the young man was an architect.)
He began to feel that his brother Jolyon, to whom he had always
looked up and on whose opinion he had relied, was not quite what
he had expected.
Not having his eldest brother’s force of character, he was more
sad than angry. His great comfort was to go to Winifred’s, and
take the little Darties in his carriage over to Kensington
Gardens, and there, by the Round Pond, he could often be seen
walking with his eyes fixed anxiously on little Publius Dartie’s
sailing-boat, which he had himself freighted with a penny, as
though convinced that it would never again come to shore; while
little Publius—who, James delighted to say, was not a bit like
his father skipping along under his lee, would try to get him to
bet another that it never would, having found that it always did.
And James would make the bet; he always paid—sometimes as many as
three or four pennies in the afternoon, for the game seemed never
to pall on little Publius—and always in paying he said: “Now,
that’s for your money-box. Why, you’re getting quite a rich man!”
The thought of his little grandson’s growing wealth was a real
pleasure to him. But little Publius knew a sweet-shop, and a
trick worth two of that.
And they would walk home across the Park, James’ figure, with
high shoulders and absorbed and worried face, exercising its
tall, lean protectorship, pathetically unregarded, over the
robust child-figures of Imogen and little Publius.
But those Gardens and that Park were not sacred to James.
Forsytes and tramps, children and lovers, rested and wandered day
after day, night after night, seeking one and all some freedom
from labour, from the reek and turmoil of the streets.
The leaves browned slowly, lingering with the sun and summer-like
warmth of the nights.
On Saturday, October 5, the sky that had been blue all day
deepened after sunset to the bloom of purple grapes. There was no
moon, and a clear dark, like some velvety garment, was wrapped
around the trees, whose thinned branches, resembling plumes,
stirred not in the still, warm air. All London had poured into
the Park, draining the cup of summer to its dregs.
Couple after couple, from every gate, they streamed along the
paths and over the burnt grass, and one after another, silently
out of the lighted spaces, stole into the shelter of the feathery
trees, where, blotted against some trunk, or under the shadow of
shrubs, they were lost to all but themselves in the heart of the
soft darkness.
To fresh-comers along the paths, these forerunners formed but