The Forsyte saga - Complete
were pouting. It was thus that she recorded her permanent
resentment at the loss of Septimus Small.
She had quite a reputation for saying the wrong thing, and,
tenacious like all her breed, she would hold to it when she had
said it, and add to it another wrong thing, and so on. With the
decease of her husband the family tenacity, the family
matter-of-factness, had gone sterile within her. A great talker,
when allowed, she would converse without the faintest animation
for hours together, relating, with epic monotony, the innumerable
occasions on which Fortune had misused her; nor did she ever
perceive that her hearers sympathized with Fortune, for her heart
was kind.
Having sat, poor soul, long by the bedside of Small (a man of
poor constitution), she had acquired the habit, and there were
countless subsequent occasions when she had sat immense periods
of time to amuse sick people, children, and other helpless
persons, and she could never divest herself of the feeling that
the world was the most ungrateful place anybody could live in.
Sunday after Sunday she sat at the feet of that extremely witty
preacher, the Rev. Thomas Scoles, who exercised a great influence
over her; but she succeeded in convincing everybody that even
this was a misfortune. She had passed into a proverb in the
family, and when anybody was observed to be peculiarly
distressing, he was known as a regular “Juley.” The habit of her
mind would have killed anybody but a Forsyte at forty; but she
was seventy-two, and had never looked better. And one felt that
there were capacities for enjoyment about her which might yet
come out. She owned three canaries, the cat Tommy, and half a
parrot—in common with her sister Hester;—and these poor creatures
(kept carefully out of Timothy’s way—he was nervous about
animals), unlike human beings, recognising that she could not
help being blighted, attached themselves to her passionately.
She was sombrely magnificent this evening in black bombazine,
with a mauve front cut in a shy triangle, and crowned with a
black velvet ribbon round the base of her thin throat; black and
mauve for evening wear was esteemed very chaste by nearly every
Forsyte.
Pouting at Swithin, she said:
“Ann has been asking for you. You haven’t been near us for an
age!”
Swithin put his thumbs within the armholes of his waistcoat, and
replied:
“Ann’s getting very shaky; she ought to have a doctor!”
“Mr. and Mrs. Nicholas Forsyte!”
Nicholas Forsyte, cocking his rectangular eyebrows, wore a smile.
He had succeeded during the day in bringing to fruition a scheme
for the employment of a tribe from Upper India in the gold-mines
of Ceylon. A pet plan, carried at last in the teeth of great
difficulties—he was justly pleased. It would double the output of
his mines, and, as he had often forcibly argued, all experience
tended to show that a man must die; and whether he died of a
miserable old age in his own country, or prematurely of damp in
the bottom of a foreign mine, was surely of little consequence,
provided that by a change in his mode of life he benefited the
British Empire.
His ability was undoubted. Raising his broken nose towards his
listener, he would add:
“For want of a few hundred of these fellows we haven’t paid a
dividend for years, and look at the price of the shares. I can’t
get ten shillings for them.”
He had been at Yarmouth, too, and had come back feeling that he
had added at least ten years to his own life. He grasped
Swithin’s hand, exclaiming in a jocular voice:
“Well, so here we are again!”
Mrs. Nicholas, an effete woman, smiled a smile of frightened
jollity behind his back.
“Mr. and Mrs. James Forsyte! Mr. and Mrs. Soames Forsyte!”
Swithin drew his heels together, his deportment ever admirable.
“Well, James, well Emily! How are you, Soames? How do you _do?_”
His hand enclosed Irene’s, and his eyes swelled. She was a pretty
woman—a little too pale, but her figure, her eyes, her teeth! Too
good for that chap Soames!
The gods had given Irene dark brown eyes and golden hair, that
strange combination, provocative of men’s glances, which is said
to be the mark of a weak character. And the full, soft pallor of
her neck and shoulders, above a gold-coloured frock, gave to her
personality an alluring strangeness.
Soames stood behind, his eyes fastened on his wife’s neck. The
hands of Swithin’s watch, which he still held open in his hand,
had left eight behind; it was half an hour beyond his
dinner-time—he had had no lunch—and a strange primeval impatience
surged up within him.
“It’s not like Jolyon to be late!” he said to Irene, with
uncontrollable vexation. “I suppose it’ll be June keeping him!”
“People in love are always late,” she answered.
Swithin stared at her; a dusky orange dyed his cheeks.
“They’ve no business to be. Some fashionable nonsense!”
And behind this outburst the inarticulate violence of primitive
generations seemed to mutter and grumble.
“Tell me what you think of my new star, Uncle Swithin,” said
Irene softly.
Among the lace in the bosom of her dress was shining a
five-pointed star, made of eleven diamonds. Swithin looked at the
star. He had a pretty taste in stones; no question could have
been more sympathetically devised to distract his attention.
“Who gave you that?” he asked.
“Soames.”
There was no change in her face, but Swithin’s pale eyes bulged
as though he might suddenly have been afflicted with insight.
“I dare say you’re dull at home,” he said. “Any day you like to
come and dine with me, I’ll give you as good a bottle of wine as
you’ll get in London.”
“Miss June Forsyte—Mr. Jolyon Forsyte!... Mr. Boswainey!...”
Swithin moved his arm, and said in a rumbling voice:
“Dinner, now—dinner!”
He took in Irene, on the ground that he had not entertained her
since she was a bride. June was the portion of Bosinney, who was
placed between Irene and his fiancée. On the other side of June
was James with Mrs. Nicholas, then old Jolyon with Mrs. James,
Nicholas with Hatty Chessman, Soames with Mrs. Small, completing,
the circle to Swithin again.
Family dinners of the Forsytes observe certain traditions. There
are, for instance, no _hors d’œuvres_. The reason for this is
unknown. Theory among the younger members traces it to the
disgraceful price of oysters; it is more probably due to a desire
to come to the point, to a good practical sense deciding at once
that _hors d’œuvres_ are but poor things. The Jameses alone,
unable to withstand a custom almost universal in Park Lane, are
now and then unfaithful.
A silent, almost morose, inattention to each other succeeds to
the subsidence into their seats, lasting till well into the first
entree, but interspersed with remarks such as, “Tom’s bad again;
I can’t tell what’s the matter with him!” “I suppose Ann doesn’t
come down in the mornings?”—“What’s the name of your doctor,
Fanny?” “Stubbs?” “He’s a quack!”—“Winifred? She’s got too many
children. Four, isn’t it? She’s as thin as a lath!”—“What d’you
give for this sherry, Swithin? Too dry for me!”
With the second glass of champagne, a kind of hum makes itself
heard, which, when divested of casual accessories and resolved
into its primal element, is found to be James telling a story,
and this goes on for a long time, encroaching sometimes even upon
what must universally be recognised as the crowning point of a
Forsyte feast—“the saddle of mutton.”
No Forsyte has given a dinner without providing a saddle of
mutton. There is something in its succulent solidity which makes
it suitable to people “of a certain position.” It is nourishing
and tasty; the sort of thing a man remembers eating. It has a
past and a future, like a deposit paid into a bank; and it is
something that can be argued about.
Each branch of the family tenaciously held to a particular
locality—old Jolyon swearing by Dartmoor, James by Welsh, Swithin
by Southdown, Nicholas maintaining that people might sneer, but
there was nothing like New Zealand! As for Roger, the “original”
of the brothers, he had been obliged to invent a locality of his
own, and with an ingenuity worthy of a man who had devised a new
profession for his sons, he had discovered a shop where they sold
German; on being remonstrated with, he had proved his point by
producing a butcher’s bill, which showed that he paid more than
any of the others. It was on this occasion that old Jolyon,
turning to June, had said in one of his bursts of philosophy:
“You may depend upon it, they’re a cranky lot, the Forsytes—and
you’ll find it out, as you grow older!”
Timothy alone held apart, for though he ate saddle of mutton
heartily, he was, he said, afraid of it.
To anyone interested psychologically in Forsytes, this great
saddle-of-mutton trait is of prime importance; not only does it
illustrate their tenacity, both collectively and as individuals,
but it marks them as belonging in fibre and instincts to that
great class which believes in nourishment and flavour, and yields
to no sentimental craving for beauty.
Younger members of the family indeed would have done without a
joint altogether, preferring guinea-fowl, or lobster
salad—something which appealed to the imagination, and had less
nourishment—but these were females; or, if not, had been
corrupted by their wives, or by mothers, who having been forced
to eat saddle of mutton throughout their married lives, had
passed a secret hostility towards it into the fibre of their
sons.
The great saddle-of-mutton controversy at an end, a Tewkesbury
ham commenced, together with the least touch of West
Indian—Swithin was so long over this course that he caused a
block in the progress of the dinner. To devote himself to it with
better heart, he paused in his conversation.
From his seat by Mrs. Septimus Small Soames was watching. He had
a reason of his own connected with a pet building scheme, for
observing Bosinney. The architect might do for his purpose; he
looked clever, as he sat leaning back in his chair, moodily
making little ramparts with bread-crumbs. Soames noted his dress
clothes to be well cut, but too small, as though made many years
ago.
He saw him turn to Irene and say something and her face sparkle
as he often saw it sparkle at other people—never at himself. He
tried to catch what they were saying, but Aunt Juley was
speaking.
Hadn’t that always seemed very extraordinary to Soames? Only last
Sunday dear Mr. Scoles, had been so witty in his sermon, so
sarcastic, “For what,” he had said, “shall it profit a man if he
gain his own soul, but lose all his property?” That, he had said,