The Forsyte Saga Read online

  She thought of June’s father, young Jolyon, who had run away with that foreign girl. And what a sad blow to his father and to them all. Such a promising young fellow! A sad blow, though there had been no public scandal, most fortunately, Jo’s wife seeking for no divorce! A long time ago! And when June’s mother died, six years ago, Jo had married that woman, and they had two children now, so she had heard. Still, he had forfeited his right to be there, had cheated her of the complete fulfilment of her family pride, deprived her of the rightful pleasure of seeing and kissing him of whom she had been so proud, such a promising young fellow! The thought rankled with the bitterness of a long-inflicted injury in her tenacious old heart. A little water stood in her eyes. With a handkerchief of the finest lawn she wiped them stealthily.

  “Well, Aunt Ann?” said a voice behind.

  Soames Forsyte, flat-shouldered, clean-shaven, flat-cheeked, flat-waisted, yet with something round and secret about his whole appearance, looked downwards and aslant at Aunt Ann, as though trying to see through the side of his own nose.

  “And what do you think of the engagement?” he asked.

  Aunt Ann’s eyes rested on him proudly; of all the nephews since young Jolyon’s departure from the family nest, he was now her favourite, for she recognised in him a sure trustee of the family soul that must so soon slip beyond her keeping.

  “Very nice for the young man,” she said; “and he’s a good-looking young fellow; but I doubt if he’s quite the right lover for dear June.”

  Soames touched the edge of a gold-lacquered lustre.

  “She’ll tame him,” he said, stealthily wetting his finger and rubbing it on the knobby bulbs. “That’s genuine old lacquer; you can’t get it nowadays. It’d do well in a sale at Jobson’s.” He spoke with relish, as though he felt that he was cheering up his old aunt. It was seldom he was so confidential. “I wouldn’t mind having it myself,” he added; “you can always get your price for old lacquer.”

  “You’re so clever with all those things,” said Aunt Ann. “And how is dear Irene?”

  Soames’s smile died.

  “Pretty well,” he said. “Complains she can’t sleep; she sleeps a great deal better than I do,” and he looked at his wife, who was talking to Bosinney by the door.

  Aunt Ann sighed.

  “Perhaps,” she said, “it will be just as well for her not to see so much of June. She’s such a decided character, dear June!”

  Soames flushed; his flushes passed rapidly over his flat cheeks and centered between his eyes, where they remained, the stamp of disturbing thoughts.

  “I don’t know what she sees in that little flibbertigibbet,” he burst out, but noticing that they were no longer alone, he turned and again began examining the lustre.

  “They tell me Jolyon’s bought another house,” said his father’s voice close by; “he must have a lot of money—he must have more money than he knows what to do with! Montpellier Square, they say; close to Soames! They never told me, Irene never tells me anything!”

  “Capital position, not two minutes from me,” said the voice of Swithin, “and from my rooms I can drive to the club in eight.”

  The position of their houses was of vital importance to the Forsytes, nor was this remarkable, since the whole spirit of their success was embodied therein.

  Their father, of farming stock, had come from Dorsetshire near the beginning of the century.

  “Superior Dosset Forsyte,” as he was called by his intimates, had been a stonemason by trade, and risen to the position of a master-builder.

  Towards the end of his life he moved to London, where, building on until he died, he was buried at Highgate. He left over thirty thousand pounds between his ten children. Old Jolyon alluded to him, if at all, as “A hard, thick sort of man; not much refinement about him.” The second generation of Forsytes felt indeed that he was not greatly to their credit. The only aristocratic trait they could find in his character was a habit of drinking Madeira.

  Aunt Hester, an authority on family history, described him thus:

  “I don’t recollect that he ever did anything; at least, not in my time. He was er—an owner of houses, my dear. His hair about your Uncle Swithin’s colour; rather a square build. Tall? No—not very tall” (he had been five feet five, with a mottled face); “a fresh-coloured man. I remember he used to drink Madeira; but ask your Aunt Ann. What was his father? He—er—had to do with the land down in Dorsetshire, by the sea.”

  James once went down to see for himself what sort of place this was that they had come from. He found two old farms, with a cart track rutted into the pink earth, leading down to a mill by the beach; a little grey church with a buttressed outer wall, and a smaller and greyer chapel. The stream which worked the mill came bubbling down in a dozen rivulets, and pigs were hunting round that estuary. A haze hovered over the prospect. Down this hollow, with their feet deep in the mud and their faces towards the sea, it appeared that the primeval Forsytes had been content to walk Sunday after Sunday for hundreds of years.

  Whether or no James had cherished hopes of an inheritance, or of something rather distinguished to be found down there, he came back to town in a poor way, and went about with a pathetic attempt at making the best of a bad job.

  “There’s very little to be had out of that,” he said; “regular country little place, old as the hills. . . .”

  Its age was felt to be a comfort. Old Jolyon, in whom a desperate honesty welled up at times, would allude to his ancestors as: “Yeomen—I suppose very small beer.” Yet he would repeat the word “yeomen” as if it afforded him consolation.

  They had all done so well for themselves, these Forsytes, that they were all what is called “of a certain position.” They had shares in all sorts of things, not as yet—with the exception of Timothy—in consols, for they had no dread in life like that of three per cent for their money. They collected pictures, too, and were supporters of such charitable institutions as might be beneficial to their sick domestics. From their father, the builder, they inherited a talent for bricks and mortar. Originally, perhaps, members of some primitive sect, they were now in the natural course of things members of the Church of England, and caused their wives and children to attend with some regularity the more fashionable churches of the metropolis. To have doubted their Christianity would have caused them both pain and surprise. Some of them paid for pews, thus expressing in the most practical form their sympathy with the teachings of Christ.

  Their residences, placed at stated intervals round the park, watched like sentinels, lest the fair heart of this London, where their desires were fixed, should slip from their clutches, and leave them lower in their own estimations.

  There was old Jolyon in Stanhope Place; the Jameses in Park Lane; Swithin in the lonely glory of orange and blue chambers in Hyde Park Mansions—he had never married, not he—the Soamses in their nest off Knightsbridge; the Rogers in Prince’s Gardens (Roger was that remarkable Forsyte who had conceived and carried out the notion of bringing up his four sons to a new profession. “Collect house property, nothing like it,” he would say; “I never did anything else”).

  The Haymans again—Mrs. Hayman was the one married Forsyte sister—in a house high up on Campden Hill, shaped like a giraffe, and so tall that it gave the observer a crick in the neck; the Nicholases in Ladbroke Grove, a spacious abode and a great bargain; and last, but not least, Timothy’s on the Bayswater Road, where Ann, and Juley, and Hester, lived under his protection.

  But all this time James was musing, and now he inquired of his host and brother what he had given for that house in Montpellier Square. He himself had had his eye on a house there for the last two years, but they wanted such a price.

  Old Jolyon recounted the details of his purchase.

  “Twenty-two years to run?” repeated James; “The very house I was after—you’ve given too much for it!”r />
  Old Jolyon frowned.

  “It’s not that I want it,” said James hastily; “it wouldn’t suit my purpose at that price. Soames knows the house, well—he’ll tell you it’s too dear—his opinion’s worth having.”

  “I don’t,” said old Jolyon, “care a fig for his opinion.”

  “Well,” murmured James, “you will have your own way—it’s a good opinion. Goodbye! We’re going to drive down to Hurlingham. They tell me June’s going to Wales. You’ll be lonely tomorrow. What’ll you do with yourself? You’d better come and dine with us!”

  Old Jolyon refused. He went down to the front door and saw them into their barouche, and twinkled at them, having already forgotten his spleen—Mrs. James facing the horses, tall and majestic with auburn hair; on her left, Irene—the two husbands, father and son, sitting forward, as though they expected something, opposite their wives. Bobbing and bounding upon the spring cushions, silent, swaying to each motion of their chariot, old Jolyon watched them drive away under the sunlight.

  During the drive the silence was broken by Mrs. James.

  “Did you ever see such a collection of rumty-too people?”

  Soames, glancing at her beneath his eyelids, nodded, and he saw Irene steal at him one of her unfathomable looks. It is likely enough that each branch of the Forsyte family made that remark as they drove away from old Jolyon’s “At Home!”

  Amongst the last of the departing guests the fourth and fifth brothers, Nicholas and Roger, walked away together, directing their steps alongside Hyde Park towards the Praed Street station of the Underground. Like all other Forsytes of a certain age they kept carriages of their own, and never took cabs if by any means they could avoid it.

  The day was bright, the trees of the park in the full beauty of mid-June foliage; the brothers did not seem to notice phenomena, which contributed, nevertheless, to the jauntiness of promenade and conversation.

  “Yes,” said Roger, “she’s a good-lookin’ woman, that wife of Soames’s. I’m told they don’t get on.”

  This brother had a high forehead, and the freshest colour of any of the Forsytes; his light grey eyes measured the street frontage of the houses by the way, and now and then he would level his, umbrella and take a “lunar,” as he expressed it, of the varying heights.

  “She’d no money,” replied Nicholas.

  He himself had married a good deal of money, of which, it being then the golden age before the Married Women’s Property Act, he had mercifully been enabled to make a successful use.

  “What was her father?”

  “Heron was his name, a professor, so they tell me.”

  Roger shook his head.

  “There’s no money in that,” he said.

  “They say her mother’s father was cement.”

  Roger’s face brightened.

  “But he went bankrupt,” went on Nicholas.

  “Ah!” exclaimed Roger, “Soames will have trouble with her; you mark my words, he’ll have trouble—she’s got a foreign look.”

  Nicholas licked his lips.

  “She’s a pretty woman,” and he waved aside a crossing-sweeper.

  “How did he get hold of her?” asked Roger presently. “She must cost him a pretty penny in dress!”

  “Ann tells me,” replied Nicholas, “he was half-cracked about her. She refused him five times. James, he’s nervous about it, I can see.”

  “Ah!” said Roger again; “I’m sorry for James; he had trouble with Dartie.” His pleasant colour was heightened by exercise, he swung his umbrella to the level of his eye more frequently than ever. Nicholas’s face also wore a pleasant look.

  “Too pale for me,” he said, “but her figure’s capital!”

  Roger made no reply.

  “I call her distinguished-looking,” he said at last—it was the highest praise in the Forsyte vocabulary. “That young Bosinney will never do any good for himself. They say at Burkitt’s he’s one of these artistic chaps—got an idea of improving English architecture; there’s no money in that! I should like to hear what Timothy would say to it.”

  They entered the station.

  “What class are you going? I go second.”

  “No second for me,” said Nicholas;—“you never know what you may catch.”

  He took a first-class ticket to Notting Hill Gate; Roger a second to South Kensington. The train coming in a minute later, the two brothers parted and entered their respective compartments. Each felt aggrieved that the other had not modified his habits to secure his society a little longer; but as Roger voiced it in his thoughts:

  “Always a stubborn beggar, Nick!”

  And as Nicholas expressed it to himself:

  “Cantankerous chap Roger—always was!”

  There was little sentimentality about the Forsytes. In that great London, which they had conquered and become merged in, what time had they to be sentimental?

  Chapter II

  Old Jolyon Goes to the Opera

  At five o’clock the following day old Jolyon sat alone, a cigar between his lips, and on a table by his side a cup of tea. He was tired, and before he had finished his cigar he fell asleep. A fly settled on his hair, his breathing sounded heavy in the drowsy silence, his upper lip under the white moustache puffed in and out. From between the fingers of his veined and wrinkled hand the cigar, dropping on the empty hearth, burned itself out.

  The gloomy little study, with windows of stained glass to exclude the view, was full of dark green velvet and heavily-carved mahogany—a suite of which old Jolyon was wont to say: “Shouldn’t wonder if it made a big price some day!”

  It was pleasant to think that in the afterlife he could get more for things than he had given.

  In the rich brown atmosphere peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte, the Rembrandtesque effect of his great head, with its white hair, against the cushion of his high-backed seat, was spoiled by the moustache, which imparted a somewhat military look to his face. An old clock that had been with him since before his marriage forty years ago kept with its ticking a jealous record of the seconds slipping away forever from its old master.

  He had never cared for this room, hardly going into it from one year’s end to another, except to take cigars from the Japanese cabinet in the corner, and the room now had its revenge.

  His temples, curving like thatches over the hollows beneath, his cheekbones and chin, all were sharpened in his sleep, and there had come upon his face the confession that he was an old man.

  He woke. June had gone! James had said he would be lonely. James had always been a poor thing. He recollected with satisfaction that he had bought that house over James’s head.

  Serve him right for sticking at the price; the only thing the fellow thought of was money. Had he given too much, though? It wanted a lot of doing to—He dared say he would want all his money before he had done with this affair of June’s. He ought never to have allowed the engagement. She had met this Bosinney at the house of Baynes, Baynes and Bildeboy, the architects. He believed that Baynes, whom he knew—a bit of an old woman—was the young man’s uncle by marriage. After that she’d been always running after him; and when she took a thing into her head there was no stopping her. She was continually taking up with lame ducks of one sort or another. This fellow had no money, but she must needs become engaged to him—a harum-scarum, unpractical chap, who would get himself into no end of difficulties.

  She had come to him one day in her slapdash way and told him; and, as if it were any consolation, she had added:

  “He’s so splendid; he’s often lived on cocoa for a week!”

  “And he wants you to live on cocoa too?”

  “Oh no; he is getting into the swim now.”

  Old Jolyon had taken his cigar from under his white moustaches, stained by coffee at the edge, and looked at her, that l
ittle slip of a thing who had got such a grip of his heart. He knew more about swims than his granddaughter. But she, having clasped her hands on his knees, rubbed her chin against him, making a sound like a purring cat. And, knocking the ash off his cigar, he had exploded in nervous desperation:

  “You’re all alike: you won’t be satisfied till you’ve got what you want. If you must come to grief, you must; I wash my hands of it.”

  So, he had washed his hands of it, making the condition that they should not marry until Bosinney had at least four hundred a year.

  “I shan’t be able to give you very much,” he had said, a formula to which June was not unaccustomed. “Perhaps this what’s-his-name will provide the cocoa.”

  He had hardly seen anything of her since it began. A bad business! He had no notion of giving her a lot of money to enable a fellow he knew nothing about to live on in idleness. He had seen that sort of thing before; no good ever came of it. Worst of all, he had no hope of shaking her resolution; she was as obstinate as a mule, always had been from a child. He didn’t see where it was to end. They must cut their coat according to their cloth. He would not give way till he saw young Bosinney with an income of his own. That June would have trouble with the fellow was as plain as a pikestaff; he had no more idea of money than a cow. As to this rushing down to Wales to visit the young man’s aunts, he fully expected they were old cats.

  And, motionless, old Jolyon stared at the wall; but for his open eyes, he might have been asleep. . . . The idea of supposing that young cub Soames could give him advice! He had always been a cub, with his nose in the air! He would be setting up as a man of property next, with a place in the country! A man of property! H’mph! Like his father, he was always nosing out bargains, a cold-blooded young beggar!