The Forsyte saga - Complete
secretly on the underneath and hurried away.
Old Jolyon turned the key softly in the lock, pushed open the
door, and beckoned. His son saw him gravely hanging up his coat,
with an expression on his face like that of a boy who intends to
steal cherries.
The door of the dining-room was open, the gas turned low; a
spirit-urn hissed on a tea-tray, and close to it a cynical
looking cat had fallen asleep on the dining-table. Old Jolyon
“shoo’d” her off at once. The incident was a relief to his
feelings; he rattled his opera hat behind the animal.
“She’s got fleas,” he said, following her out of the room.
Through the door in the hall leading to the basement he called
“Hssst!” several times, as though assisting the cat’s departure,
till by some strange coincidence the butler appeared below.
“You can go to bed, Parfitt,” said old Jolyon. “I will lock up
and put out.”
When he again entered the dining-room the cat unfortunately
preceded him, with her tail in the air, proclaiming that she had
seen through this manouevre for suppressing the butler from the
first....
A fatality had dogged old Jolyon’s domestic stratagems all his
life.
Young Jolyon could not help smiling. He was very well versed in
irony, and everything that evening seemed to him ironical. The
episode of the cat; the announcement of his own daughter’s
engagement. So he had no more part or parcel in her than he had
in the Puss! And the poetical justice of this appealed to him.
“What is June like now?” he asked.
“She’s a little thing,” returned old Jolyon; “they say she’s like
me, but that’s their folly. She’s more like your mother—the same
eyes and hair.”
“Ah! and she is pretty?”
Old Jolyon was too much of a Forsyte to praise anything freely;
especially anything for which he had a genuine admiration.
“Not bad looking—a regular Forsyte chin. It’ll be lonely here
when she’s gone, Jo.”
The look on his face again gave young Jolyon the shock he had
felt on first seeing his father.
“What will you do with yourself, Dad? I suppose she’s wrapped up
in him?”
“Do with myself?” repeated old Jolyon with an angry break in his
voice. “It’ll be miserable work living here alone. I don’t know
how it’s to end. I wish to goodness....” He checked himself, and
added: “The question is, what had I better do with this house?”
Young Jolyon looked round the room. It was peculiarly vast and
dreary, decorated with the enormous pictures of still life that
he remembered as a boy—sleeping dogs with their noses resting on
bunches of carrots, together with onions and grapes lying side by
side in mild surprise. The house was a white elephant, but he
could not conceive of his father living in a smaller place; and
all the more did it all seem ironical.
In his great chair with the book-rest sat old Jolyon, the
figurehead of his family and class and creed, with his white head
and dome-like forehead, the representative of moderation, and
order, and love of property. As lonely an old man as there was in
London.
There he sat in the gloomy comfort of the room, a puppet in the
power of great forces that cared nothing for family or class or
creed, but moved, machine-like, with dread processes to
inscrutable ends. This was how it struck young Jolyon, who had
the impersonal eye.
The poor old Dad! So this was the end, the purpose to which he
had lived with such magnificent moderation! To be lonely, and
grow older and older, yearning for a soul to speak to!
In his turn old Jolyon looked back at his son. He wanted to talk
about many things that he had been unable to talk about all these
years. It had been impossible to seriously confide in June his
conviction that property in the Soho quarter would go up in
value; his uneasiness about that tremendous silence of Pippin,
the superintendent of the New Colliery Company, of which he had
so long been chairman; his disgust at the steady fall in American
Golgothas, or even to discuss how, by some sort of settlement, he
could best avoid the payment of those death duties which would
follow his decease. Under the influence, however, of a cup of
tea, which he seemed to stir indefinitely, he began to speak at
last. A new vista of life was thus opened up, a promised land of
talk, where he could find a harbour against the waves of
anticipation and regret; where he could soothe his soul with the
opium of devising how to round off his property and make eternal
the only part of him that was to remain alive.
Young Jolyon was a good listener; it was his great quality. He
kept his eyes fixed on his father’s face, putting a question now
and then.
The clock struck one before old Jolyon had finished, and at the
sound of its striking his principles came back. He took out his
watch with a look of surprise:
“I must go to bed, Jo,” he said.
Young Jolyon rose and held out his hand to help his father up.
The old face looked worn and hollow again; the eyes were steadily
averted.
“Good-bye, my boy; take care of yourself.”
A moment passed, and young Jolyon, turning on his heel, marched
out at the door. He could hardly see; his smile quavered. Never
in all the fifteen years since he had first found out that life
was no simple business, had he found it so singularly
complicated.
CHAPTER III DINNER AT SWITHIN’S
In Swithin’s orange and light-blue dining-room, facing the Park,
the round table was laid for twelve.
A cut-glass chandelier filled with lighted candles hung like a
giant stalactite above its centre, radiating over large
gilt-framed mirrors, slabs of marble on the tops of side-tables,
and heavy gold chairs with crewel worked seats. Everything
betokened that love of beauty so deeply implanted in each family
which has had its own way to make into Society, out of the more
vulgar heart of Nature. Swithin had indeed an impatience of
simplicity, a love of ormolu, which had always stamped him
amongst his associates as a man of great, if somewhat luxurious
taste; and out of the knowledge that no one could possibly enter
his rooms without perceiving him to be a man of wealth, he had
derived a solid and prolonged happiness such as perhaps no other
circumstance in life had afforded him.
Since his retirement from land agency, a profession deplorable in
his estimation, especially as to its auctioneering department, he
had abandoned himself to naturally aristocratic tastes.
The perfect luxury of his latter days had embedded him like a fly
in sugar; and his mind, where very little took place from morning
till night, was the junction of two curiously opposite emotions,
a lingering and sturdy satisfaction that he had made his own way
and his own fortune, and a sense that a man of his distinction
should never have been allowed to soil his mind with work.
He stood at the sideboard in a white waistcoat with large gold
and onyx buttons, watching his valet screw the necks of three
champagne bottles deeper into ice-pails. Between the points of
his stand-up collar, which—though it hurt him to move—he would on
no account have had altered, the pale flesh of his under chin
remained immovable. His eyes roved from bottle to bottle. He was
debating, and he argued like this: Jolyon drinks a glass, perhaps
two, he’s so careful of himself. James, he can’t take his wine
nowadays. Nicholas—Fanny and he would swill water he shouldn’t
wonder! Soames didn’t count; these young nephews—Soames was
thirty-one—couldn’t drink! But Bosinney?
Encountering in the name of this stranger something outside the
range of his philosophy, Swithin paused. A misgiving arose within
him! It was impossible to tell! June was only a girl, in love
too! Emily (Mrs. James) liked a good glass of champagne. It was
too dry for Juley, poor old soul, she had no palate. As to Hatty
Chessman! The thought of this old friend caused a cloud of
thought to obscure the perfect glassiness of his eyes: He
shouldn’t wonder if she drank half a bottle!
But in thinking of his remaining guest, an expression like that
of a cat who is just going to purr stole over his old face: Mrs.
Soames! She mightn’t take much, but she would appreciate what she
drank; it was a pleasure to give her good wine! A pretty
woman—and sympathetic to him!
The thought of her was like champagne itself! A pleasure to give
a good wine to a young woman who looked so well, who knew how to
dress, with charming manners, quite distinguished—a pleasure to
entertain her. Between the points of his collar he gave his head
the first small, painful oscillation of the evening.
“Adolf!” he said. “Put in another bottle.”
He himself might drink a good deal, for, thanks to that
prescription of Blight’s, he found himself extremely well, and he
had been careful to take no lunch. He had not felt so well for
weeks. Puffing out his lower lip, he gave his last instructions:
“Adolf, the least touch of the West India when you come to the
ham.”
Passing into the anteroom, he sat down on the edge of a chair,
with his knees apart; and his tall, bulky form was wrapped at
once in an expectant, strange, primeval immobility. He was ready
to rise at a moment’s notice. He had not given a dinner-party for
months. This dinner in honour of Jun’s engagement had seemed a
bore at first (among Forsytes the custom of solemnizing
engagements by feasts was religiously observed), but the labours
of sending invitations and ordering the repast over, he felt
pleasantly stimulated.
And thus sitting, a watch in his hand, fat, and smooth, and
golden, like a flattened globe of butter, he thought of nothing.
A long man, with side whiskers, who had once been in Swithin’s
service, but was now a greengrocer, entered and proclaimed:
“Mrs. Chessman, Mrs. Septimus Small!”
Two ladies advanced. The one in front, habited entirely in red,
had large, settled patches of the same colour in her cheeks, and
a hard, dashing eye. She walked at Swithin, holding out a hand
cased in a long, primrose-coloured glove:
“Well! Swithin,” she said, “I haven’t seen you for ages. How are
you? Why, my dear boy, how stout you’re getting!”
The fixity of Swithin’s eye alone betrayed emotion. A dumb and
grumbling anger swelled his bosom. It was vulgar to be stout, to
talk of being stout; he had a chest, nothing more. Turning to his
sister, he grasped her hand, and said in a tone of command:
“Well, Juley.”
Mrs. Septimus Small was the tallest of the four sisters; her
good, round old face had gone a little sour; an innumerable pout
clung all over it, as if it had been encased in an iron wire mask
up to that evening, which, being suddenly removed, left little
rolls of mutinous flesh all over her countenance. Even her eyes