The Forsyte saga - Complete
their desires were fixed, should slip from their clutches, and
leave them lower in their own estimations.
There was old Jolyon in Stanhope Place; the Jameses in Park Lane;
Swithin in the lonely glory of orange and blue chambers in Hyde
Park Mansions—he had never married, not he—the Soamses in their
nest off Knightsbridge; the Rogers in Prince’s Gardens (Roger was
that remarkable Forsyte who had conceived and carried out the
notion of bringing up his four sons to a new profession. “Collect
house property, nothing like it,” he would say; “_I_ never did
anything else”).
The Haymans again—Mrs. Hayman was the one married Forsyte
sister—in a house high up on Campden Hill, shaped like a giraffe,
and so tall that it gave the observer a crick in the neck; the
Nicholases in Ladbroke Grove, a spacious abode and a great
bargain; and last, but not least, Timothy’s on the Bayswater
Road, where Ann, and Juley, and Hester, lived under his
protection.
But all this time James was musing, and now he inquired of his
host and brother what he had given for that house in Montpellier
Square. He himself had had his eye on a house there for the last
two years, but they wanted such a price.
Old Jolyon recounted the details of his purchase.
“Twenty-two years to run?” repeated James; “The very house I was
after—you’ve given too much for it!”
Old Jolyon frowned.
“It’s not that I want it,” said James hastily; “it wouldn’t suit
my purpose at that price. Soames knows the house, well—he’ll tell
you it’s too dear—his opinion’s worth having.”
“I don’t,” said old Jolyon, “care a fig for his opinion.”
“Well,” murmured James, “you _will_ have your own way—it’s a good
opinion. Good-bye! We’re going to drive down to Hurlingham. They
tell me Jun’s going to Wales. You’ll be lonely tomorrow. What’ll
you do with yourself? You’d better come and dine with us!”
Old Jolyon refused. He went down to the front door and saw them
into their barouche, and twinkled at them, having already
forgotten his spleen—Mrs. James facing the horses, tall and
majestic with auburn hair; on her left, Irene—the two husbands,
father and son, sitting forward, as though they expected
something, opposite their wives. Bobbing and bounding upon the
spring cushions, silent, swaying to each motion of their chariot,
old Jolyon watched them drive away under the sunlight.
During the drive the silence was broken by Mrs. James.
“Did you ever see such a collection of rumty-too people?”
Soames, glancing at her beneath his eyelids, nodded, and he saw
Irene steal at him one of her unfathomable looks. It is likely
enough that each branch of the Forsyte family made that remark as
they drove away from old Jolyon’s “At Home!”
Amongst the last of the departing guests the fourth and fifth
brothers, Nicholas and Roger, walked away together, directing
their steps alongside Hyde Park towards the Praed Street Station
of the Underground. Like all other Forsytes of a certain age they
kept carriages of their own, and never took cabs if by any means
they could avoid it.
The day was bright, the trees of the Park in the full beauty of
mid-June foliage; the brothers did not seem to notice phenomena,
which contributed, nevertheless, to the jauntiness of promenade
and conversation.
“Yes,” said Roger, “she’s a good-lookin’ woman, that wife of
Soames’. I’m told they don’t get on.”
This brother had a high forehead, and the freshest colour of any
of the Forsytes; his light grey eyes measured the street frontage
of the houses by the way, and now and then he would level his,
umbrella and take a “lunar,” as he expressed it, of the varying
heights.
“She’d no money,” replied Nicholas.
He himself had married a good deal of money, of which, it being
then the golden age before the Married Women’s Property Act, he
had mercifully been enabled to make a successful use.
“What was her father?”
“Heron was his name, a Professor, so they tell me.”
Roger shook his head.
“There’s no money in that,” he said.
“They say her mother’s father was cement.”
Roger’s face brightened.
“But he went bankrupt,” went on Nicholas.
“Ah!” exclaimed Roger, “Soames will have trouble with her; you
mark my words, he’ll have trouble—she’s got a foreign look.”
Nicholas licked his lips.
“She’s a pretty woman,” and he waved aside a crossing-sweeper.
“How did he get hold of her?” asked Roger presently. “She must
cost him a pretty penny in dress!”
“Ann tells me,” replied Nicholas, “he was half-cracked about her.
She refused him five times. James, he’s nervous about it, I can
see.”
“Ah!” said Roger again; “I’m sorry for James; he had trouble with
Dartie.” His pleasant colour was heightened by exercise, he swung
his umbrella to the level of his eye more frequently than ever.
Nicholas’s face also wore a pleasant look.
“Too pale for me,” he said, “but her figures capital!”
Roger made no reply.
“I call her distinguished-looking,” he said at last—it was the
highest praise in the Forsyte vocabulary. “That young Bosinney
will never do any good for himself. They say at Burkitt’s he’s
one of these artistic chaps—got an idea of improving English
architecture; there’s no money in that! I should like to hear
what Timothy would say to it.”
They entered the station.
“What class are you going? I go second.”
“No second for me,” said Nicholas;—“you never know what you may
catch.”
He took a first-class ticket to Notting Hill Gate; Roger a second
to South Kensington. The train coming in a minute later, the two
brothers parted and entered their respective compartments. Each
felt aggrieved that the other had not modified his habits to
secure his society a little longer; but as Roger voiced it in his
thoughts:
“Always a stubborn beggar, Nick!”
And as Nicholas expressed it to himself:
“Cantankerous chap Roger—always was!”
There was little sentimentality about the Forsytes. In that great
London, which they had conquered and become merged in, what time
had they to be sentimental?
CHAPTER II OLD JOLYON GOES TO THE OPERA
At five o’clock the following day old Jolyon sat alone, a cigar
between his lips, and on a table by his side a cup of tea. He was
tired, and before he had finished his cigar he fell asleep. A fly
settled on his hair, his breathing sounded heavy in the drowsy
silence, his upper lip under the white moustache puffed in and
out. From between the fingers of his veined and wrinkled hand the
cigar, dropping on the empty hearth, burned itself out.
The gloomy little study, with windows of stained glass to exclude
the view, was full of dark green velvet and heavily-carved
mahogany—a suite of which old Jolyon was wont to say: “Shouldn’t
wonder if it made a big price some day!”
It was pleasant to think that in the after life he could get more
for things than he had given.
In the rich brown atmosphere peculiar to back rooms in the
mansion of a Forsyte, the Rembrandtesque effect of his great
head, with its white hair, against the cushion of his high-backed
seat, was spoiled by the moustache, which imparted a somewhat
military look to his face. An old clock that had been with him
since before his marriage forty years ago kept with its ticking a
jealous record of the seconds slipping away forever from its old
master.
He had never cared for this room, hardly going into it from one
year’s end to another, except to take cigars from the Japanese
cabinet in the corner, and the room now had its revenge.
His temples, curving like thatches over the hollows beneath, his
cheek-bones and chin, all were sharpened in his sleep, and there
had come upon his face the confession that he was an old man.
He woke. June had gone! James had said he would be lonely. James
had always been a poor thing. He recollected with satisfaction
that he had bought that house over James’s head.
Serve him right for sticking at the price; the only thing the
fellow thought of was money. Had he given too much, though? It
wanted a lot of doing to—He dared say he would want all his money
before he had done with this affair of Jun’s. He ought never to
have allowed the engagement. She had met this Bosinney at the
house of Baynes, Baynes and Bildeboy, the architects. He believed
that Baynes, whom he knew—a bit of an old woman—was the young
man’s uncle by marriage. After that she’d been always running
after him; and when she took a thing into her head there was no
stopping her. She was continually taking up with “lame ducks” of
one sort or another. This fellow had no money, but she must needs
become engaged to him—a harumscarum, unpractical chap, who would
get himself into no end of difficulties.
She had come to him one day in her slap-dash way and told him;
and, as if it were any consolation, she had added:
“He’s so splendid; he’s often lived on cocoa for a week!”
“And he wants you to live on cocoa too?”
“Oh no; he is getting into the swim now.”
Old Jolyon had taken his cigar from under his white moustaches,
stained by coffee at the edge, and looked at her, that little
slip of a thing who had got such a grip of his heart. He knew
more about “swims” than his granddaughter. But she, having
clasped her hands on his knees, rubbed her chin against him,
making a sound like a purring cat. And, knocking the ash off his
cigar, he had exploded in nervous desperation:
“You’re all alike: you won’t be satisfied till you’ve got what
you want. If you must come to grief, you must; _I_ wash my hands
of it.”
So, he had washed his hands of it, making the condition that they
should not marry until Bosinney had at least four hundred a year.
“_I_ shan’t be able to give you very much,” he had said, a
formula to which June was not unaccustomed. “Perhaps this
What’s-his-name will provide the cocoa.”
He had hardly seen anything of her since it began. A bad
business! He had no notion of giving her a lot of money to enable
a fellow he knew nothing about to live on in idleness. He had
seen that sort of thing before; no good ever came of it. Worst of
all, he had no hope of shaking her resolution; she was as
obstinate as a mule, always had been from a child. He didn’t see
where it was to end. They must cut their coat according to their
cloth. He would not give way till he saw young Bosinney with an
income of his own. That June would have trouble with the fellow
was as plain as a pikestaff; he had no more idea of money than a
cow. As to this rushing down to Wales to visit the young man’s
aunts, he fully expected they were old cats.
And, motionless, old Jolyon stared at the wall; but for his open
eyes, he might have been asleep.... The idea of supposing that