The Forsyte saga - Complete
part of that passionate dusk, whence only a strange murmur, like
the confused beating of hearts, came forth. But when that murmur
reached each couple in the lamp-light their voices wavered, and
ceased; their arms enlaced, their eyes began seeking, searching,
probing the blackness. Suddenly, as though drawn by invisible
hands, they, too, stepped over the railing, and, silent as
shadows, were gone from the light.
The stillness, enclosed in the far, inexorable roar of the town,
was alive with the myriad passions, hopes, and loves of
multitudes of struggling human atoms; for in spite of the
disapproval of that great body of Forsytes, the Municipal
Council—to whom Love had long been considered, next to the Sewage
Question, the gravest danger to the community—a process was going
on that night in the Park, and in a hundred other parks, without
which the thousand factories, churches, shops, taxes, and drains,
of which they were custodians, were as arteries without blood, a
man without a heart.
The instincts of self-forgetfulness, of passion, and of love,
hiding under the trees, away from the trustees of their
remorseless enemy, the “sense of property,” were holding a
stealthy revel, and Soames, returning from Bayswater—for he had
been alone to dine at Timothy’s walking home along the water,
with his mind upon that coming lawsuit, had the blood driven from
his heart by a low laugh and the sound of kisses. He thought of
writing to _The Times_ the next morning, to draw the attention of
the Editor to the condition of our parks. He did not, however,
for he had a horror of seeing his name in print.
But starved as he was, the whispered sounds in the stillness, the
half-seen forms in the dark, acted on him like some morbid
stimulant. He left the path along the water and stole under the
trees, along the deep shadow of little plantations, where the
boughs of chestnut trees hung their great leaves low, and there
was blacker refuge, shaping his course in circles which had for
their object a stealthy inspection of chairs side by side,
against tree-trunks, of enlaced lovers, who stirred at his
approach.
Now he stood still on the rise overlooking the Serpentine, where,
in full lamp-light, black against the silver water, sat a couple
who never moved, the woman’s face buried on the man’s neck—a
single form, like a carved emblem of passion, silent and
unashamed.
And, stung by the sight, Soames hurried on deeper into the shadow
of the trees.
In this search, who knows what he thought and what he sought?
Bread for hunger—light in darkness? Who knows what he expected to
find—impersonal knowledge of the human heart—the end of his
private subterranean tragedy—for, again, who knew, but that each
dark couple, unnamed, unnameable, might not be he and she?
But it could not be such knowledge as this that he was
seeking—the wife of Soames Forsyte sitting in the Park like a
common wench! Such thoughts were inconceivable; and from tree to
tree, with his noiseless step, he passed.
Once he was sworn at; once the whisper, “If only it could always
be like this!” sent the blood flying again from his heart, and he
waited there, patient and dogged, for the two to move. But it was
only a poor thin slip of a shop-girl in her draggled blouse who
passed him, clinging to her lover’s arm.
A hundred other lovers too whispered that hope in the stillness
of the trees, a hundred other lovers clung to each other.
But shaking himself with sudden disgust, Soames returned to the
path, and left that seeking for he knew not what.
CHAPTER III MEETING AT THE BOTANICAL
Young Jolyon, whose circumstances were not those of a Forsyte,
found at times a difficulty in sparing the money needful for
those country jaunts and researches into Nature, without having
prosecuted which no watercolour artist ever puts brush to paper.
He was frequently, in fact, obliged to take his colour-box into
the Botanical Gardens, and there, on his stool, in the shade of a
monkey-puzzler or in the lee of some India-rubber plant, he would
spend long hours sketching.
An Art critic who had recently been looking at his work had
delivered himself as follows:
“In a way your drawings are very good; tone and colour, in some
of them certainly quite a feeling for Nature. But, you see,
they’re so scattered; you’ll never get the public to look at
them. Now, if you’d taken a definite subject, such as ‘London by
Night,’ or ‘The Crystal Palace in the Spring,’ and made a regular
series, the public would have known at once what they were
looking at. I can’t lay too much stress upon that. All the men
who are making great names in Art, like Crum Stone or Bleeder,
are making them by avoiding the unexpected; by specializing and
putting their works all in the same pigeon-hole, so that the
public know at once where to go. And this stands to reason, for
if a man’s a collector he doesn’t want people to smell at the
canvas to find out whom his pictures are by; he wants them to be
able to say at once, ‘A capital Forsyte!’ It is all the more
important for you to be careful to choose a subject that they can
lay hold of on the spot, since there’s no very marked originality
in your style.”
Young Jolyon, standing by the little piano, where a bowl of dried
rose leaves, the only produce of the garden, was deposited on a
bit of faded damask, listened with his dim smile.
Turning to his wife, who was looking at the speaker with an angry
expression on her thin face, he said:
“You see, dear?”
“I do _not_,” she answered in her staccato voice, that still had
a little foreign accent; “your style _has_ originality.”
The critic looked at her, smiled’ deferentially, and said no
more. Like everyone else, he knew their history.
The words bore good fruit with young Jolyon; they were contrary
to all that he believed in, to all that he theoretically held
good in his Art, but some strange, deep instinct moved him
against his will to turn them to profit.
He discovered therefore one morning that an idea had come to him
for making a series of watercolour drawings of London. How the
idea had arisen he could not tell; and it was not till the
following year, when he had completed and sold them at a very
fair price, that in one of his impersonal moods, he found himself
able to recollect the Art critic, and to discover in his own
achievement another proof that he was a Forsyte.
He decided to commence with the Botanical Gardens, where he had
already made so many studies, and chose the little artificial
pond, sprinkled now with an autumn shower of red and yellow
leaves, for though the gardeners longed to sweep them off, they
could not reach them with their brooms. The rest of the gardens
they swept bare enough, removing every morning Nature’s rain of
leaves; piling them in heaps, whence from slow fires rose the
sweet, acrid smoke that, like the cuckoo’s note for spring, the
scent of lime trees for the summer, is the true emblem of the
fall. The gardeners’ tidy souls could not abide the gold and
green and russet pattern on the grass. The gravel paths must lie
unstained, ordered, methodical, without knowledge of the
realities of life, nor of that slow and beautiful decay which
flings crowns underfoot to star the earth with fallen glories,
whence, as the cycle rolls, will leap again wild spring.
Thus each leaf that fell was marked from the moment when it
fluttered a good-bye and dropped, slow turning, from its twig.
But on that little pond the leaves floated in peace, and praised
Heaven with their hues, the sunlight haunting over them.
And so young Jolyon found them.
Coming there one morning in the middle of October, he was
disconcerted to find a bench about twenty paces from his stand
occupied, for he had a proper horror of anyone seeing him at
work.
A lady in a velvet jacket was sitting there, with her eyes fixed
on the ground. A flowering laurel, however, stood between, and,
taking shelter behind this, young Jolyon prepared his easel.
His preparations were leisurely; he caught, as every true artist
should, at anything that might delay for a moment the effort of
his work, and he found himself looking furtively at this unknown
dame.
Like his father before him, he had an eye for a face. This face
was charming!
He saw a rounded chin nestling in a cream ruffle, a delicate face
with large dark eyes and soft lips. A black “picture” hat
concealed the hair; her figure was lightly poised against the
back of the bench, her knees were crossed; the tip of a
patent-leather shoe emerged beneath her skirt. There was
something, indeed, inexpressibly dainty about the person of this
lady, but young Jolyon’s attention was chiefly riveted by the
look on her face, which reminded him of his wife. It was as
though its owner had come into contact with forces too strong for
her. It troubled him, arousing vague feelings of attraction and
chivalry. Who was she? And what doing there, alone?
Two young gentlemen of that peculiar breed, at once forward and
shy, found in the Regent’s Park, came by on their way to lawn
tennis, and he noted with disapproval their furtive stares of
admiration. A loitering gardener halted to do something
unnecessary to a clump of pampas grass; he, too, wanted an excuse
for peeping. A gentleman, old, and, by his hat, a professor of
horticulture, passed three times to scrutinize her long and
stealthily, a queer expression about his lips.
With all these men young Jolyon felt the same vague irritation.
She looked at none of them, yet was he certain that every man who
passed would look at her like that.
Her face was not the face of a sorceress, who in every look holds
out to men the offer of pleasure; it had none of the “devil’s
beauty” so highly prized among the first Forsytes of the land;
neither was it of that type, no less adorable, associated with
the box of chocolate; it was not of the spiritually passionate,
or passionately spiritual order, peculiar to house-decoration and
modern poetry; nor did it seem to promise to the playwright
material for the production of the interesting and neurasthenic
figure, who commits suicide in the last act.
In shape and colouring, in its soft persuasive passivity, its
sensuous purity, this woman’s face reminded him of Titian’s
“Heavenly Love,” a reproduction of which hung over the sideboard
in his dining-room. And her attraction seemed to be in this soft
passivity, in the feeling she gave that to pressure she must
yield.
For what or whom was she waiting, in the silence, with the trees
dropping here and there a leaf, and the thrushes strutting close
on grass, touched with the sparkle of the autumn rime? Then her