The Forsyte saga - Complete
Soames shook his head. He did know, but wished to show no
interest. Young Jolyon and he had not met since the day of
Bosinney’s death.
“He must be quite middle-aged by now,” went on Aunt Juley
dreamily. “Let me see, he was born when your dear uncle lived in
Mount Street; long before they went to Stanhope Gate in December.
Just before that dreadful Commune. Over fifty! Fancy that! Such a
pretty baby, and we were all so proud of him; the very first of
you all.” Aunt Juley sighed, and a lock of not quite her own hair
came loose and straggled, so that Aunt Hester gave a little
shiver. Soames rose, he was experiencing a curious piece of
self-discovery. That old wound to his pride and self-esteem was
not yet closed. He had come thinking he could talk of it, even
wanting to talk of his fettered condition, and—behold! he was
shrinking away from this reminder by Aunt Juley, renowned for her
Malapropisms.
Oh, Soames was not going already!
Soames smiled a little vindictively, and said:
“Yes. Good-bye. Remember me to Uncle Timothy!” And, leaving a
cold kiss on each forehead, whose wrinkles seemed to try and
cling to his lips as if longing to be kissed away, he left them
looking brightly after him—dear Soames, it had been so good of
him to come to-day, when they were not feeling very...!
With compunction tweaking at his chest Soames descended the
stairs, where was always that rather pleasant smell of camphor
and port wine, and house where draughts are not permitted. The
poor old things—he had not meant to be unkind! And in the street
he instantly forgot them, repossessed by the image of Annette and
the thought of the cursed coil around him. Why had he not pushed
the thing through and obtained divorce when that wretched
Bosinney was run over, and there was evidence galore for the
asking! And he turned towards his sister Winifred Dartie’s
residence in Green Street, Mayfair.
CHAPTER II EXIT A MAN OF THE WORLD
That a man of the world so subject to the vicissitudes of
fortunes as Montague Dartie should still be living in a house he
had inhabited twenty years at least would have been more
noticeable if the rent, rates, taxes, and repairs of that house
had not been defrayed by his father-in-law. By that simple if
wholesale device James Forsyte had secured a certain stability in
the lives of his daughter and his grandchildren. After all, there
is something invaluable about a safe roof over the head of a
sportsman so dashing as Dartie. Until the events of the last few
days he had been almost-supernaturally steady all this year. The
fact was he had acquired a half share in a filly of George
Forsyte’s, who had gone irreparably on the turf, to the horror of
Roger, now stilled by the grave. Sleeve-links, by Martyr, out of
Shirt-on-fire, by Suspender, was a bay filly, three years old,
who for a variety of reasons had never shown her true form. With
half ownership of this hopeful animal, all the idealism latent
somewhere in Dartie, as in every other man, had put up its head,
and kept him quietly ardent for months past. When a man has some
thing good to live for it is astonishing how sober he becomes;
and what Dartie had was really good—a three to one chance for an
autumn handicap, publicly assessed at twenty-five to one. The
old-fashioned heaven was a poor thing beside it, and his shirt
was on the daughter of Shirt-on-fire. But how much more than his
shirt depended on this granddaughter of Suspender! At that roving
age of forty-five, trying to Forsytes—and, though perhaps less
distinguishable from any other age, trying even to
Darties—Montague had fixed his current fancy on a dancer. It was
no mean passion, but without money, and a good deal of it, likely
to remain a love as airy as her skirts; and Dartie never had any
money, subsisting miserably on what he could beg or borrow from
Winifred—a woman of character, who kept him because he was the
father of her children, and from a lingering admiration for those
now-dying Wardour Street good looks which in their youth had
fascinated her. She, together with anyone else who would lend him
anything, and his losses at cards and on the turf (extraordinary
how some men make a good thing out of losses!) were his whole
means of subsistence; for James was now too old and nervous to
approach, and Soames too formidably adamant. It is not too much
to say that Dartie had been living on hope for months. He had
never been fond of money for itself, had always despised the
Forsytes with their investing habits, though careful to make such
use of them as he could. What he liked about money was what it
bought—personal sensation.
“No real sportsman cares for money,” he would say, borrowing a
“pony” if it was no use trying for a “monkey.” There was
something delicious about Montague Dartie. He was, as George
Forsyte said, a “daisy.”
The morning of the Handicap dawned clear and bright, the last day
of September, and Dartie who had travelled to Newmarket the night
before, arrayed himself in spotless checks and walked to an
eminence to see his half of the filly take her final canter: If
she won he would be a cool three thou. in pocket—a poor enough
recompense for the sobriety and patience of these weeks of hope,
while they had been nursing her for this race. But he had not
been able to afford more. Should he “lay it off” at the eight to
one to which she had advanced? This was his single thought while
the larks sang above him, and the grassy downs smelled sweet, and
the pretty filly passed, tossing her head and glowing like satin.
After all, if he lost it would not be he who paid, and to “lay it
off” would reduce his winnings to some fifteen hundred—hardly
enough to purchase a dancer out and out. Even more potent was the
itch in the blood of all the Darties for a real flutter. And
turning to George he said: “She’s a clipper. She’ll win hands
down; I shall go the whole hog.” George, who had laid off every
penny, and a few besides, and stood to win, however it came out,
grinned down on him from his bulky height, with the words: “So
ho, my wild one!” for after a chequered apprenticeship weathered
with the money of a deeply complaining Roger, his Forsyte blood
was beginning to stand him in good stead in the profession of
owner.
There are moments of disillusionment in the lives of men from
which the sensitive recorder shrinks. Suffice it to say that the
good thing fell down. Sleeve-links finished in the ruck. Dartie’s
shirt was lost.
Between the passing of these things and the day when Soames
turned his face towards Green Street, what had not happened!
When a man with the constitution of Montague Dartie has exercised
self-control for months from religious motives, and remains
unrewarded, he does not curse God and die, he curses God and
lives, to the distress of his family.
Winifred—a plucky woman, if a little too fashionable—who had
borne the brunt of him for exactly twenty-one years, had never
really believed that he would do what he now did. Like so many
wives, she thought she knew the worst, but she had not yet known
him in his forty-fifth year, when he, like other men, felt that
it was now or never. Paying on the 2nd of October a visit of
inspection to her jewel case, she was horrified to observe that
her woman’s crown and glory was gone—the pearls which Montague
had given her in ’86, when Benedict was born, and which James had
been compelled to pay for in the spring of ’87, to save scandal.
She consulted her husband at once. He “pooh-poohed” the matter.
They would turn up! Nor till she said sharply: “Very well, then,
Monty, I shall go down to Scotland Yard _myself_,” did he consent
to take the matter in hand. Alas! that the steady and resolved
continuity of design necessary to the accomplishment of sweeping
operations should be liable to interruption by drink. That night
Dartie returned home without a care in the world or a particle of
reticence. Under normal conditions Winifred would merely have
locked her door and let him sleep it off, but torturing suspense
about her pearls had caused her to wait up for him. Taking a
small revolver from his pocket and holding on to the dining
table, he told her at once that he did not care a cursh whether
she lived s’long as she was quiet; but he himself wash tired
orsdquo; life. Winifred, holding onto the other side of the
dining table, answered:
“Don’t be a clown, Monty. Have you been to Scotland Yard?”
Placing the revolver against his chest, Dartie had pulled the
trigger several times. It was not loaded. Dropping it with an
imprecation, he had muttered: “For shake o’ the children,” and
sank into a chair. Winifred, having picked up the revolver, gave
him some soda water. The liquor had a magical effect. Life had
illused him; Winifred had never “unshtood’m.” If he hadn’t the
right to take the pearls he had given her himself, who had? That
Spanish filly had got’m. If Winifred had any ’jection he w’d
cut—her—throat. What was the matter with that? (Probably the
first use of that celebrated phrase—so obscure are the origins of
even the most classical language!)
Winifred, who had learned self-containment in a hard school,
looked up at him, and said: “Spanish filly! Do you mean that girl
we saw dancing in the Pandemonium Ballet? Well, you are a thief
and a blackguard.” It had been the last straw on a sorely loaded
consciousness; reaching up from his chair Dartie seized his
wife’s arm, and recalling the achievements of his boyhood,
twisted it. Winifred endured the agony with tears in her eyes,
but no murmur. Watching for a moment of weakness, she wrenched it
free; then placing the dining table between them, said between
her teeth: “You are the limit, Monty.” (Undoubtedly the inception
of that phrase—so is English formed under the stress of
circumstances.) Leaving Dartie with foam on his dark moustache
she went upstairs, and, after locking her door and bathing her
arm in hot water, lay awake all night, thinking of her pearls
adorning the neck of another, and of the consideration her
husband had presumably received therefor.
The man of the world awoke with a sense of being lost to that
world, and a dim recollection of having been called a “limit.” He
sat for half an hour in the dawn and the armchair where he had
slept—perhaps the unhappiest half-hour he had ever spent, for
even to a Dartie there is something tragic about an end. And he
knew that he had reached it. Never again would he sleep in his
dining-room and wake with the light filtering through those
curtains bought by Winifred at Nickens and Jarveys with the money
of James. Never again eat a devilled kidney at that rose-wood
table, after a roll in the sheets and a hot bath. He took his