The Forsyte saga - Complete
he wished! Why not go up to town and make that codicil at his
solicitor’s instead of writing about it; she might like to go to
the opera! But, by train, for he would not have that fat chap
Beacon grinning behind his back. Servants were such fools; and,
as likely as not, they had known all the past history of Irene
and young Bosinney—servants knew everything, and suspected the
rest. He wrote to her that morning:
“MY DEAR IRENE,—I have to be up in town to-morrow. If you would
like to have a look in at the opera, come and dine with me
quietly ....”
But where? It was decades since he had dined anywhere in
London save at his Club or at a private house. Ah! that
new-fangled place close to Covent Garden....
“Let me have a line to-morrow morning to the Piedmont Hotel
whether to expect you there at 7 o’clock.
“Yours affectionately,
“JOLYON FORSYTE.”
She would understand that he just wanted to give her a little
pleasure; for the idea that she should guess he had this itch to
see her was instinctively unpleasant to him; it was not seemly
that one so old should go out of his way to see beauty,
especially in a woman.
The journey next day, short though it was, and the visit to his
lawyer’s, tired him. It was hot too, and after dressing for
dinner he lay down on the sofa in his bedroom to rest a little.
He must have had a sort of fainting fit, for he came to himself
feeling very queer; and with some difficulty rose and rang the
bell. Why! it was past seven! And there he was and she would be
waiting. But suddenly the dizziness came on again, and he was
obliged to relapse on the sofa. He heard the maid’s voice say:
“Did you ring, sir?”
“Yes, come here”; he could not see her clearly, for the cloud in
front of his eyes. “I’m not well, I want some sal volatile.”
“Yes, sir.” Her voice sounded frightened.
Old Jolyon made an effort.
“Don’t go. Take this message to my niece—a lady waiting in the
hall—a lady in grey. Say Mr. Forsyte is not well—the heat. He is
very sorry; if he is not down directly, she is not to wait
dinner.”
When she was gone, he thought feebly: “Why did I say a lady in
grey—she may be in anything. Sal volatile!” He did not go off
again, yet was not conscious of how Irene came to be standing
beside him, holding smelling salts to his nose, and pushing a
pillow up behind his head. He heard her say anxiously: “Dear
Uncle Jolyon, what is it?” was dimly conscious of the soft
pressure of her lips on his hand; then drew a long breath of
smelling salts, suddenly discovered strength in them, and
sneezed.
“Ha!” he said, “it’s nothing. How did you get here? Go down and
dine—the tickets are on the dressing-table. I shall be all right
in a minute.”
He felt her cool hand on his forehead, smelled violets, and sat
divided between a sort of pleasure and a determination to be all
right.
“Why! You _are_ in grey!” he said. “Help me up.” Once on his feet
he gave himself a shake.
“What business had I to go off like that!” And he moved very
slowly to the glass. What a cadaverous chap! Her voice, behind
him, murmured:
“You mustn’t come down, Uncle; you must rest.”
“Fiddlesticks! A glass of champagne’ll soon set me to rights. I
can’t have you missing the opera.”
But the journey down the corridor was troublesome. What carpets
they had in these newfangled places, so thick that you tripped up
in them at every step! In the lift he noticed how concerned she
looked, and said with the ghost of a twinkle:
“I’m a pretty host.”
When the lift stopped he had to hold firmly to the seat to
prevent its slipping under him; but after soup and a glass of
champagne he felt much better, and began to enjoy an infirmity
which had brought such solicitude into her manner towards him.
“I should have liked you for a daughter,” he said suddenly; and
watching the smile in her eyes, went on:
“You mustn’t get wrapped up in the past at your time of life;
plenty of that when you get to my age. That’s a nice dress—I like
the style.”
“I made it myself.”
Ah! A woman who could make herself a pretty frock had not lost
her interest in life.
“Make hay while the sun shines,” he said; “and drink that up. I
want to see some colour in your cheeks. We mustn’t waste life; it
doesn’t do. There’s a new Marguerite to-night; let’s hope she
won’t be fat. And Mephisto—anything more dreadful than a fat chap
playing the Devil I can’t imagine.”
But they did not go to the opera after all, for in getting up
from dinner the dizziness came over him again, and she insisted
on his staying quiet and going to bed early. When he parted from
her at the door of the hotel, having paid the cabman to drive her
to Chelsea, he sat down again for a moment to enjoy the memory of
her words: “You _are_ such a darling to me, Uncle Jolyon!” Why!
Who wouldn’t be! He would have liked to stay up another day and
take her to the Zoo, but two days running of him would bore her
to death. No, he must wait till next Sunday; she had promised to
come then. They would settle those lessons for Holly, if only for
a month. It would be something. That little Mam’zelle Beauce
wouldn’t like it, but she would have to lump it. And crushing his
old opera hat against his chest he sought the lift.
He drove to Waterloo next morning, struggling with a desire to
say: “Drive me to Chelsea.” But his sense of proportion was too
strong. Besides, he still felt shaky, and did not want to risk
another aberration like that of last night, away from home.
Holly, too, was expecting him, and what he had in his bag for
her. Not that there was any cupboard love in his little sweet—she
was a bundle of affection. Then, with the rather bitter cynicism
of the old, he wondered for a second whether it was not cupboard
love which made Irene put up with him. No, she was not that sort
either. She had, if anything, too little notion of how to butter
her bread, no sense of property, poor thing! Besides, he had not
breathed a word about that codicil, nor should he—sufficient unto
the day was the good thereof.
In the victoria which met him at the station Holly was
restraining the dog Balthasar, and their caresses made “jubey”
his drive home. All the rest of that fine hot day and most of the
next he was content and peaceful, reposing in the shade, while
the long lingering sunshine showered gold on the lawns and the
flowers. But on Thursday evening at his lonely dinner he began to
count the hours; sixty-five till he would go down to meet her
again in the little coppice, and walk up through the fields at
her side. He had intended to consult the doctor about his
fainting fit, but the fellow would be sure to insist on quiet, no
excitement and all that; and he did not mean to be tied by the
leg, did not want to be told of an infirmity—if there were one,
could not afford to hear of it at his time of life, now that this
new interest had come. And he carefully avoided making any
mention of it in a letter to his son. It would only bring them
back with a run! How far this silence was due to consideration
for their pleasure, how far to regard for his own, he did not
pause to consider.
That night in his study he had just finished his cigar and was
dozing off, when he heard the rustle of a gown, and was conscious
of a scent of violets. Opening his eyes he saw her, dressed in
grey, standing by the fireplace, holding out her arms. The odd
thing was that, though those arms seemed to hold nothing, they
were curved as if round someone’s neck, and her own neck was bent
back, her lips open, her eyes closed. She vanished at once, and
there were the mantelpiece and his bronzes. But those bronzes and
the mantelpiece had not been there when she was, only the
fireplace and the wall! Shaken and troubled, he got up. “I must
take medicine,” he thought; “I can’t be well.” His heart beat too
fast, he had an asthmatic feeling in the chest; and going to the
window, he opened it to get some air. A dog was barking far away,
one of the dogs at Gage’s farm no doubt, beyond the coppice. A
beautiful still night, but dark. “I dropped off,” he mused,
“that’s it! And yet I’ll swear my eyes were open!” A sound like a
sigh seemed to answer.
“What’s that?” he said sharply, “who’s there?”
Putting his hand to his side to still the beating of his heart,
he stepped out on the terrace. Something soft scurried by in the
dark. “Shoo!” It was that great grey cat. “Young Bosinney was
like a great cat!” he thought. “It was him in there, that
she—that she was—He’s got her still!” He walked to the edge of
the terrace, and looked down into the darkness; he could just see
the powdering of the daisies on the unmown lawn. Here to-day and
gone to-morrow! And there came the moon, who saw all, young and
old, alive and dead, and didn’t care a dump! His own turn soon.
For a single day of youth he would give what was left! And he
turned again towards the house. He could see the windows of the
night nursery up there. His little sweet would be asleep. “Hope
that dog won’t wake her!” he thought. “What is it makes us love,
and makes us die! I must go to bed.”
And across the terrace stones, growing grey in the moonlight, he
passed back within.
V
How should an old man live his days if not in dreaming of his
well-spent past? In that, at all events, there is no agitating
warmth, only pale winter sunshine. The shell can withstand the
gentle beating of the dynamos of memory. The present he should
distrust; the future shun. From beneath thick shade he should
watch the sunlight creeping at his toes. If there be sun of
summer, let him not go out into it, mistaking it for the
Indian-summer sun! Thus peradventure he shall decline softly,
slowly, imperceptibly, until impatient Nature clutches his
wind-pipe and he gasps away to death some early morning before
the world is aired, and they put on his tombstone: “In the
fulness of years!” Yea! If he preserve his principles in perfect
order, a Forsyte may live on long after he is dead.
Old Jolyon was conscious of all this, and yet there was in him
that which transcended Forsyteism. For it is written that a
Forsyte shall not love beauty more than reason; nor his own way
more than his own health. And something beat within him in these
days that with each throb fretted at the thinning shell. His
sagacity knew this, but it knew too that he could not stop that
beating, nor would if he could. And yet, if you had told him he
was living on his capital, he would have stared you down. No, no;
a man did not live on his capital; it was not done! The
shibboleths of the past are ever more real than the actualities
of the present. And he, to whom living on one’s capital had