The Forsyte saga - Complete
“Yes; it was a crime to marry you. I have paid for it. You will
find some way perhaps. You needn’t mind my name, I have none to
lose. Now I think you had better go.”
A sense of defeat—of being defrauded of his self-justification,
and of something else beyond power of explanation to himself,
beset Soames like the breath of a cold fog. Mechanically he
reached up, took from the mantel-shelf a little china bowl,
reversed it, and said:
“Lowestoft. Where did you get this? I bought its fellow at
Jobson’s.” And, visited by the sudden memory of how, those many
years ago, he and she had bought china together, he remained
staring at the little bowl, as if it contained all the past. Her
voice roused him.
“Take it. I don’t want it.”
Soames put it back on the shelf.
“Will you shake hands?” he said.
A faint smile curved her lips. She held out her hand. It was cold
to his rather feverish touch. “She’s made of ice,” he
thought—“she was always made of ice!” But even as that thought
darted through him, his senses were assailed by the perfume of
her dress and body, as though the warmth within her, which had
never been for him, were struggling to show its presence. And he
turned on his heel. He walked out and away, as if someone with a
whip were after him, not even looking for a cab, glad of the
empty Embankment and the cold river, and the thick-strewn shadows
of the plane-tree leaves—confused, flurried, sore at heart, and
vaguely disturbed, as though he had made some deep mistake whose
consequences he could not foresee. And the fantastic thought
suddenly assailed him if instead of, “I think you had better go,”
she had said, “I think you had better stay!” What should he have
felt, what would he have done? That cursed attraction of her was
there for him even now, after all these years of estrangement and
bitter thoughts. It was there, ready to mount to his head at a
sign, a touch. “I was a fool to go!” he muttered. “I’ve advanced
nothing. Who could imagine? I never thought!” Memory, flown back
to the first years of his marriage, played him torturing tricks.
She had not deserved to keep her beauty—the beauty he had owned
and known so well. And a kind of bitterness at the tenacity of
his own admiration welled up in him. Most men would have hated
the sight of her, as she had deserved. She had spoiled his life,
wounded his pride to death, defrauded him of a son. And yet the
mere sight of her, cold and resisting as ever, had this power to
upset him utterly! It was some damned magnetism she had! And no
wonder if, as she asserted; she had lived untouched these last
twelve years. So Bosinney—cursed be his memory!—had lived on all
this time with her! Soames could not tell whether he was glad of
that knowledge or no.
Nearing his Club at last he stopped to buy a paper. A headline
ran: “Boers reported to repudiate suzerainty!” Suzerainty! “Just
like her!” he thought: “she always did. Suzerainty! I still have
it by rights. She must be awfully lonely in that wretched little
flat!”
CHAPTER XII ON FORSYTE ’CHANGE
Soames belonged to two clubs, “The Connoisseurs,” which he put on
his cards and seldom visited, and “The Remove,” which he did not
put on his cards and frequented. He had joined this Liberal
institution five years ago, having made sure that its members
were now nearly all sound Conservatives in heart and pocket, if
not in principle. Uncle Nicholas had put him up. The fine
reading-room was decorated in the Adam style.
On entering that evening he glanced at the tape for any news
about the Transvaal, and noted that Consols were down
seven-sixteenths since the morning. He was turning away to seek
the reading-room when a voice behind him said:
“Well, Soames, that went off all right.”
It was Uncle Nicholas, in a frock-coat and his special cut-away
collar, with a black tie passed through a ring. Heavens! How
young and dapper he looked at eighty-two!
“I think Roger’d have been pleased,” his uncle went on. “The
thing was very well done. Blackley’s? I’ll make a note of them.
Buxton’s done me no good. These Boers are upsetting me—that
fellow Chamberlain’s driving the country into war. What do you
think?”
“Bound to come,” murmured Soames.
Nicholas passed his hand over his thin, clean-shaven cheeks, very
rosy after his summer cure; a slight pout had gathered on his
lips. This business had revived all his Liberal principles.
“I mistrust that chap; he’s a stormy petrel. House-property will
go down if there’s war. You’ll have trouble with Roger’s estate.
I often told him he ought to get out of some of his houses. He
was an opinionated beggar.”
“There was a pair of you!” thought Soames. But he never argued
with an uncle, in that way preserving their opinion of him as “a
long-headed chap,” and the legal care of their property.
“They tell me at Timothy’s,” said Nicholas, lowering his voice,
“that Dartie has gone off at last. That’ll be a relief to your
father. He was a rotten egg.”
Again Soames nodded. If there was a subject on which the Forsytes
really agreed, it was the character of Montague Dartie.
“You take care,” said Nicholas, “or he’ll turn up again. Winifred
had better have the tooth out, I should say. No use preserving
what’s gone bad.”
Soames looked at him sideways. His nerves, exacerbated by the
interview he had just come through, disposed him to see a
personal allusion in those words.
“I’m advising her,” he said shortly.
“Well,” said Nicholas, “the brougham’s waiting; I must get home.
I’m very poorly. Remember me to your father.”
And having thus reconsecrated the ties of blood, he passed down
the steps at his youthful gait and was wrapped into his fur coat
by the junior porter.
“I’ve never known Uncle Nicholas other than ‘very poorly,’” mused
Soames, “or seen him look other than everlasting. What a family!
Judging by him, I’ve got thirty-eight years of health before me.
Well, I’m not going to waste them.” And going over to a mirror he
stood looking at his face. Except for a line or two, and three or
four grey hairs in his little dark moustache, had he aged any
more than Irene? The prime of life—he and she in the very prime
of life! And a fantastic thought shot into his mind. Absurd!
Idiotic! But again it came. And genuinely alarmed by the
recurrence, as one is by the second fit of shivering which
presages a feverish cold, he sat down on the weighing machine.
Eleven stone! He had not varied two pounds in twenty years. What
age was she? Nearly thirty-seven—not too old to have a child—not
at all! Thirty-seven on the ninth of next month. He remembered
her birthday well—he had always observed it religiously, even
that last birthday so soon before she left him, when he was
almost certain she was faithless. Four birthdays in his house. He
had looked forward to them, because his gifts had meant a
semblance of gratitude, a certain attempt at warmth. Except,
indeed, that last birthday—which had tempted him to be too
religious! And he shied away in thought. Memory heaps dead leaves
on corpse-like deeds, from under which they do but vaguely offend
the sense. And then he thought suddenly: “I could send her a
present for her birthday. After all, we’re Christians!
Couldn’t!—couldn’t we join up again!” And he uttered a deep sigh
sitting there. Annette! Ah! but between him and Annette was the
need for that wretched divorce suit! And how?
“A man can always work these things, if he’ll take it on
himself,” Jolyon had said.
But why should he take the scandal on himself with his whole
career as a pillar of the law at stake? It was not fair! It was
quixotic! Twelve years’ separation in which he had taken no steps
to free himself put out of court the possibility of using her
conduct with Bosinney as a ground for divorcing her. By doing
nothing to secure relief he had acquiesced, even if the evidence
could now be gathered, which was more than doubtful. Besides, his
own pride would never let him use that old incident, he had
suffered from it too much. No! Nothing but fresh misconduct on
her part—but she had denied it; and—almost—he had believed her.
Hung up! Utterly hung up!
He rose from the scooped-out red velvet seat with a feeling of
constriction about his vitals. He would never sleep with this
going on in him! And, taking coat and hat again, he went out,
moving eastward. In Trafalgar Square he became aware of some
special commotion travelling towards him out of the mouth of the
Strand. It materialised in newspaper men calling out so loudly
that no words whatever could be heard. He stopped to listen, and
one came by.
“Payper! Special! Ultimatium by Krooger! Declaration of war!”
Soames bought the paper. There it was in the stop press...! His
first thought was: “The Boers are committing suicide.” His
second: “Is there anything still I ought to sell?” If so he had
missed the chance—there would certainly be a slump in the city
to-morrow. He swallowed this thought with a nod of defiance. That
ultimatum was insolent—sooner than let it pass he was prepared to
lose money. They wanted a lesson, and they would get it; but it
would take three months at least to bring them to heel. There
weren’t the troops out there; always behind time, the Government!
Confound those newspaper rats! What was the use of waking
everybody up? Breakfast to-morrow was quite soon enough. And he
thought with alarm of his father. They would cry it down Park
Lane. Hailing a hansom, he got in and told the man to drive
there.
James and Emily had just gone up to bed, and after communicating
the news to Warmson, Soames prepared to follow. He paused by
after-thought to say:
“What do you think of it, Warmson?”
The butler ceased passing a hat brush over the silk hat Soames
had taken off, and, inclining his face a little forward, said in
a low voice: “Well, sir, they ’aven’t a chance, of course; but
I’m told they’re very good shots. I’ve got a son in the
Inniskillings.”
“You, Warmson? Why, I didn’t know you were married.”
“No, sir. I don’t talk of it. I expect he’ll be going out.”
The slighter shock Soames had felt on discovering that he knew so
little of one whom he thought he knew so well was lost in the
slight shock of discovering that the war might touch one
personally. Born in the year of the Crimean War, he had only come
to consciousness by the time the Indian Mutiny was over; since
then the many little wars of the British Empire had been entirely
professional, quite unconnected with the Forsytes and all they
stood for in the body politic. This war would surely be no
exception. But his mind ran hastily over his family. Two of the
Haymans, he had heard, were in some Yeomanry or other—it had