The Forsyte saga - Complete
said, without looking up:
“I am not going till you’ve answered me. I am offering what few
men would bring themselves to offer, I want a—a reasonable
answer.”
And almost with surprise he heard her say:
“You can’t have a reasonable answer. Reason has nothing to do
with it. You can only have the brutal truth: I would rather die.”
Soames stared at her.
“Oh!” he said. And there intervened in him a sort of paralysis of
speech and movement, the kind of quivering which comes when a man
has received a deadly insult, and does not yet know how he is
going to take it, or rather what it is going to do with him.
“Oh!” he said again, “as bad as that? Indeed! You would rather
die. That’s pretty!”
“I am sorry. You wanted me to answer. I can’t help the truth, can
I?”
At that queer spiritual appeal Soames turned for relief to
actuality. He snapped the brooch back into its case and put it in
his pocket.
“The truth!” he said; “there’s no such thing with women. It’s
nerves—nerves.”
He heard the whisper:
“Yes; nerves don’t lie. Haven’t you discovered that?” He was
silent, obsessed by the thought: “I _will_ hate this woman. I
_will_ hate her.” That was the trouble! If only he could! He shot
a glance at her who stood unmoving against the wall with her head
up and her hands clasped, for all the world as if she were going
to be shot. And he said quickly:
“I don’t believe a word of it. You have a lover. If you hadn’t,
you wouldn’t be such a—such a little idiot.” He was conscious,
before the expression in her eyes, that he had uttered something
of a non-sequitur, and dropped back too abruptly into the verbal
freedom of his connubial days. He turned away to the door. But he
could not go out. Something within him—that most deep and secret
Forsyte quality, the impossibility of letting go, the
impossibility of seeing the fantastic and forlorn nature of his
own tenacity—prevented him. He turned about again, and there
stood, with his back against the door, as hers was against the
wall opposite, quite unconscious of anything ridiculous in this
separation by the whole width of the room.
“Do you ever think of anybody but yourself?” he said.
Irene’s lips quivered; then she answered slowly:
“Do you ever think that I found out my mistake—my hopeless,
terrible mistake—the very first week of our marriage; that I went
on trying three years—you know I went on trying? Was it for
myself?”
Soames gritted his teeth. “God knows what it was. I’ve never
understood you; I shall never understand you. You had everything
you wanted; and you can have it again, and more. What’s the
matter with me? I ask you a plain question: What is it?”
Unconscious of the pathos in that enquiry, he went on
passionately: “I’m not lame, I’m not loathsome, I’m not a boor,
I’m not a fool. What is it? What’s the mystery about me?”
Her answer was a long sigh.
He clasped his hands with a gesture that for him was strangely
full of expression. “When I came here to-night I was—I hoped—I
meant everything that I could to do away with the past, and start
fair again. And you meet me with ‘nerves,’ and silence, and
sighs. There’s nothing tangible. It’s like—it’s like a spider’s
web.”
“Yes.”
That whisper from across the room maddened Soames afresh.
“Well, I don’t choose to be in a spider’s web. I’ll cut it.” He
walked straight up to her. “Now!” What he had gone up to her to
do he really did not know. But when he was close, the old
familiar scent of her clothes suddenly affected him. He put his
hands on her shoulders and bent forward to kiss her. He kissed
not her lips, but a little hard line where the lips had been
drawn in; then his face was pressed away by her hands; he heard
her say: “Oh! No!” Shame, compunction, sense of futility flooded
his whole being, he turned on his heel and went straight out.
CHAPTER III VISIT TO IRENE
Jolyon found June waiting on the platform at Paddington. She had
received his telegram while at breakfast. Her abode—a studio and
two bedrooms in a St. John’s Wood garden—had been selected by her
for the complete independence which it guaranteed. Unwatched by
Mrs. Grundy, unhindered by permanent domestics, she could receive
lame ducks at any hour of day or night, and not seldom had a duck
without studio of its own made use of June’s. She enjoyed her
freedom, and possessed herself with a sort of virginal passion;
the warmth which she would have lavished on Bosinney, and of
which—given her Forsyte tenacity—he must surely have tired, she
now expended in championship of the underdogs and budding
“geniuses” of the artistic world. She lived, in fact, to turn
ducks into the swans she believed they were. The very fervour of
her protection warped her judgments. But she was loyal and
liberal; her small eager hand was ever against the oppressions of
academic and commercial opinion, and though her income was
considerable, her bank balance was often a minus quantity.
She had come to Paddington Station heated in her soul by a visit
to Eric Cobbley. A miserable Gallery had refused to let that
straight-haired genius have his one-man show after all. Its
impudent manager, after visiting his studio, had expressed the
opinion that it would only be a “one-horse show from the selling
point of view.” This crowning example of commercial cowardice
towards her favourite lame duck—and he so hard up, with a wife
and two children, that he had caused her account to be
overdrawn—was still making the blood glow in her small, resolute
face, and her red-gold hair to shine more than ever. She gave her
father a hug, and got into a cab with him, having as many fish to
fry with him as he with her. It became at once a question which
would fry them first.
Jolyon had reached the words: “My dear, I want you to come with
me,” when, glancing at her face, he perceived by her blue eyes
moving from side to side—like the tail of a preoccupied cat—that
she was not attending. “Dad, is it true that I absolutely can’t
get at any of my money?”
“Only the income, fortunately, my love.”
“How perfectly beastly! Can’t it be done somehow? There must be a
way. I know I could buy a small Gallery for ten thousand pounds.”
“A small Gallery,” murmured Jolyon, “seems a modest desire. But
your grandfather foresaw it.”
“I think,” cried June vigorously, “that all this care about money
is awful, when there’s so much genius in the world simply crushed
out for want of a little. I shall never marry and have children;
why shouldn’t I be able to do some good instead of having it all
tied up in case of things which will never come off?”
“Our name is Forsyte, my dear,” replied Jolyon in the ironical
voice to which his impetuous daughter had never quite grown
accustomed; “and Forsytes, you know, are people who so settle
their property that their grandchildren, in case they should die
before their parents, have to make wills leaving the property
that will only come to themselves when their parents die. Do you
follow that? Nor do I, but it’s a fact, anyway; we live by the
principle that so long as there is a possibility of keeping
wealth in the family it must not go out; if you die unmarried,
your money goes to Jolly and Holly and their children if they
marry. Isn’t it pleasant to know that whatever you do you can
none of you be destitute?”
“But can’t I borrow the money?”
Jolyon shook his head. “You could rent a Gallery, no doubt, if
you could manage it out of your income.”
June uttered a contemptuous sound.
“Yes; and have no income left to help anybody with.”
“My dear child,” murmured Jolyon, “wouldn’t it come to the same
thing?”
“No,” said June shrewdly, “I could buy for ten thousand; that
would only be four hundred a year. But I should have to pay a
thousand a year rent, and that would only leave me five hundred.
If I had the Gallery, Dad, think what I could do. I could make
Eric Cobbley’s name in no time, and ever so many others.”
“Names worth making make themselves in time.”
“When they’re dead.”
“Did you ever know anybody living, my dear, improved by having
his name made?”
“Yes, you,” said June, pressing his arm.
Jolyon started. “I?” he thought. “Oh! Ah! Now she’s going to ask
me to do something. We take it out, we Forsytes, each in our
different ways.”
June came closer to him in the cab.
“Darling,” she said, “you buy the Gallery, and I’ll pay you four
hundred a year for it. Then neither of us will be any the worse
off. Besides, it’s a splendid investment.”
Jolyon wriggled. “Don’t you think,” he said, “that for an artist
to buy a Gallery is a bit dubious? Besides, ten thousand pounds
is a lump, and I’m not a commercial character.”
June looked at him with admiring appraisement.
“Of course you’re not, but you’re awfully businesslike. And I’m
sure we could make it pay. It’ll be a perfect way of scoring off
those wretched dealers and people.” And again she squeezed her
father’s arm.
Jolyon’s face expressed quizzical despair.
“Where is this desirable Gallery? Splendidly situated, I
suppose?”
“Just off Cork Street.”
“Ah!” thought Jolyon, “I knew it was just off somewhere. Now for
what I want out of _her!_”
“Well, I’ll think of it, but not just now. You remember Irene? I
want you to come with me and see her. Soames is after her again.
She might be safer if we could give her asylum somewhere.”
The word asylum, which he had used by chance, was of all most
calculated to rouse June’s interest.
“Irene! I haven’t seen her since! Of course! I’d love to help
her.”
It was Jolyon’s turn to squeeze her arm, in warm admiration for
this spirited, generous-hearted little creature of his begetting.
“Irene is proud,” he said, with a sidelong glance, in sudden
doubt of June’s discretion; “she’s difficult to help. We must
tread gently. This is the place. I wired her to expect us. Let’s
send up our cards.”
“I can’t bear Soames,” said June as she got out; “he sneers at
everything that isn’t successful.”
Irene was in what was called the “Ladies’ drawing-room” of the
Piedmont Hotel.
Nothing if not morally courageous, June walked straight up to her
former friend, kissed her cheek, and the two settled down on a
sofa never sat on since the hotel’s foundation. Jolyon could see
that Irene was deeply affected by this simple forgiveness.
“So Soames has been worrying you?” he said.
“I had a visit from him last night; he wants me to go back to
him.”
“You’re not going, of course?” cried June.
Irene smiled faintly and shook her head. “But his position is
horrible,” she murmured.
“It’s his own fault; he ought to have divorced you when he
could.”