The Forsyte Saga Read online

  He rose, and, going to the cabinet, began methodically stocking his cigar case from a bundle fresh in. They were not bad at the price, but you couldn’t get a good cigar, nowadays, nothing to hold a candle to those old Superfinos of Hanson and Bridger’s. That was a cigar!

  The thought, like some stealing perfume, carried him back to those wonderful nights at Richmond when after dinner he sat smoking on the terrace of the Crown and Sceptre with Nicholas Treffry and Traquair and Jack Herring and Anthony Thornworthy. How good his cigars were then! Poor old Nick!—dead, and Jack Herring—dead, and Traquair—dead of that wife of his, and Thornworthy—awfully shaky (no wonder, with his appetite).

  Of all the company of those days he himself alone seemed left, except Swithin, of course, and he so outrageously big there was no doing anything with him.

  Difficult to believe it was so long ago; he felt young still! Of all his thoughts, as he stood there counting his cigars, this was the most poignant, the most bitter. With his white head and his loneliness he had remained young and green at heart. And those Sunday afternoons on Hampstead Heath, when young Jolyon and he went for a stretch along the Spaniard’s Road to Highgate, to Child’s Hill, and back over the heath again to dine at Jack Straw’s Castle—how delicious his cigars were then! And such weather! There was no weather now.

  When June was a toddler of five, and every other Sunday he took her to the zoo, away from the society of those two good women, her mother and her grandmother, and at the top of the bear den baited his umbrella with buns for her favourite bears, how sweet his cigars were then!

  Cigars! He had not even succeeded in outliving his palate—the famous palate that in the fifties men swore by, and speaking of him, said: “Forsyte’s the best palate in London!” The palate that in a sense had made his fortune—the fortune of the celebrated tea men, Forsyte and Treffry, whose tea, like no other man’s tea, had a romantic aroma, the charm of a quite singular genuineness. About the house of Forsyte and Treffry in the city had clung an air of enterprise and mystery, of special dealings in special ships, at special ports, with special Orientals.

  He had worked at that business! Men did work in those days! these young pups hardly knew the meaning of the word. He had gone into every detail, known everything that went on, sometimes sat up all night over it. And he had always chosen his agents himself, prided himself on it. His eye for men, he used to say, had been the secret of his success, and the exercise of this masterful power of selection had been the only part of it all that he had really liked. Not a career for a man of his ability. Even now, when the business had been turned into a limited liability company, and was declining (he had got out of his shares long ago), he felt a sharp chagrin in thinking of that time. How much better he might have done! He would have succeeded splendidly at the bar! He had even thought of standing for Parliament. How often had not Nicholas Treffry said to him: “You could do anything, Jo, if you weren’t so d-damned careful of yourself!” Dear old Nick! Such a good fellow, but a racketty chap! The notorious Treffry! He had never taken any care of himself. So he was dead. Old Jolyon counted his cigars with a steady hand, and it came into his mind to wonder if perhaps he had been too careful of himself.

  He put the cigar case in the breast of his coat, buttoned it in, and walked up the long flights to his bedroom, leaning on one foot and the other, and helping himself by the bannister. The house was too big. After June was married, if she ever did marry this fellow, as he supposed she would, he would let it and go into rooms. What was the use of keeping half a dozen servants eating their heads off?

  The butler came to the ring of his bell—a large man with a beard, a soft tread, and a peculiar capacity for silence. Old Jolyon told him to put his dress clothes out; he was going to dine at the club.

  How long had the carriage been back from taking Miss June to the station? Since two? Then let him come round at half past six!

  The club which old Jolyon entered on the stroke of seven was one of those political institutions of the upper middle class which have seen better days. In spite of being talked about, perhaps in consequence of being talked about, it betrayed a disappointing vitality. People had grown tired of saying that the Disunion was on its last legs. Old Jolyon would say it, too, yet disregarded the fact in a manner truly irritating to well-constituted clubmen.

  “Why do you keep your name on?” Swithin often asked him with profound vexation. “Why don’t you join the Polyglot? You can’t get a wine like our Heidsieck under twenty shillin’ a bottle anywhere in London;” and, dropping his voice, he added: “There’s only five hundred dozen left. I drink it every night of my life.”

  “I’ll think of it,” old Jolyon would answer; but when he did think of it there was always the question of fifty guineas entrance fee, and it would take him four or five years to get in. He continued to think of it.

  He was too old to be a Liberal, had long ceased to believe in the political doctrines of his club, had even been known to allude to them as “wretched stuff,” and it afforded him pleasure to continue a member in the teeth of principles so opposed to his own. He had always had a contempt for the place, having joined it many years ago when they refused to have him at the Hotch Potch owing to his being “in trade.” As if he were not as good as any of them! He naturally despised the club that did take him. The members were a poor lot, many of them in the city—stockbrokers, solicitors, auctioneers—what not! Like most men of strong character but not too much originality, old Jolyon set small store by the class to which he belonged. Faithfully he followed their customs, social and otherwise, and secretly he thought them “a common lot.”

  Years and philosophy, of which he had his share, had dimmed the recollection of his defeat at the Hotch Potch; and now in his thoughts it was enshrined as the queen of clubs. He would have been a member all these years himself, but, owing to the slipshod way his proposer, Jack Herring, had gone to work, they had not known what they were doing in keeping him out. Why! they had taken his son Jo at once, and he believed the boy was still a member; he had received a letter dated from there eight years ago.

  He had not been near the Disunion for months, and the house had undergone the piebald decoration which people bestow on old houses and old ships when anxious to sell them.

  “Beastly colour, the smoking room!” he thought. “The dining room is good!”

  Its gloomy chocolate, picked out with light green, took his fancy.

  He ordered dinner, and sat down in the very corner, at the very table perhaps! (things did not progress much at the Disunion, a club of almost radical principles) at which he and young Jolyon used to sit twenty-five years ago, when he was taking the latter to Drury Lane, during his holidays.

  The boy had loved the theatre, and old Jolyon recalled how he used to sit opposite, concealing his excitement under a careful but transparent nonchalance.

  He ordered himself, too, the very dinner the boy had always chosen-soup, whitebait, cutlets, and a tart. Ah! if he were only opposite now!

  The two had not met for fourteen years. And not for the first time during those fourteen years old Jolyon wondered whether he had been a little to blame in the matter of his son. An unfortunate love affair with that precious flirt Danae Thornworthy (now Danae Pellew), Anthony Thornworthy’s daughter, had thrown him on the rebound into the arms of June’s mother. He ought perhaps to have put a spoke in the wheel of their marriage; they were too young; but after that experience of Jo’s susceptibility he had been only too anxious to see him married. And in four years the crash had come! To have approved his son’s conduct in that crash was, of course, impossible; reason and training—that combination of potent factors which stood for his principles—told him of this impossibility, and his heart cried out. The grim remorselessness of that business had no pity for hearts. There was June, the atom with flaming hair, who had climbed all over him, twined and twisted herself about him—about his heart that was mad
e to be the plaything and beloved resort of tiny, helpless things. With characteristic insight he saw he must part with one or with the other; no half measures could serve in such a situation. In that lay its tragedy. And the tiny, helpless thing prevailed. He would not run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and so to his son he said goodbye.

  That goodbye had lasted until now.

  He had proposed to continue a reduced allowance to young Jolyon, but this had been refused, and perhaps that refusal had hurt him more than anything, for with it had gone the last outlet of his penned-in affection; and there had come such tangible and solid proof of rupture as only a transaction in property, a bestowal or refusal of such, could supply.

  His dinner tasted flat. His pint of champagne was dry and bitter stuff, not like the Veuve Clicquots of old days.

  Over his cup of coffee, he bethought him that he would go to the opera. In The Times, therefore—he had a distrust of other papers—he read the announcement for the evening. It was Fidelio.

  Mercifully not one of those newfangled German pantomimes by that fellow Wagner.

  Putting on his ancient opera hat, which, with its brim flattened by use, and huge capacity, looked like an emblem of greater days, and, pulling out an old pair of very thin lavender kid gloves smelling strongly of Russia leather, from habitual proximity to the cigar case in the pocket of his overcoat, he stepped into a hansom.

  The cab rattled gaily along the streets, and old Jolyon was struck by their unwonted animation.

  “The hotels must be doing a tremendous business,” he thought. A few years ago there had been none of these big hotels. He made a satisfactory reflection on some property he had in the neighbourhood. It must be going up in value by leaps and bounds! What traffic!

  But from that he began indulging in one of those strange impersonal speculations, so uncharacteristic of a Forsyte, wherein lay, in part, the secret of his supremacy amongst them. What atoms men were, and what a lot of them! And what would become of them all?

  He stumbled as he got out of the cab, gave the man his exact fare, walked up to the ticket office to take his stall, and stood there with his purse in his hand—he always carried his money in a purse, never having approved of that habit of carrying it loosely in the pockets, as so many young men did nowadays. The official leaned out, like an old dog from a kennel.

  “Why,” he said in a surprised voice, “it’s Mr. Jolyon Forsyte! So it is! Haven’t seen you, sir, for years. Dear me! Times aren’t what they were. Why! you and your brother, and that auctioneer—Mr. Traquair, and Mr. Nicholas Treffry—you used to have six or seven stalls here regular every season. And how are you, sir? We don’t get younger!”

  The colour in old Jolyon’s eyes deepened; he paid his guinea. They had not forgotten him. He marched in, to the sounds of the overture, like an old warhorse to battle.

  Folding his opera hat, he sat down, drew out his lavender gloves in the old way, and took up his glasses for a long look round the house. Dropping them at last on his folded hat, he fixed his eyes on the curtain. More poignantly than ever he felt that it was all over and done with him. Where were all the women, the pretty women, the house used to be so full of? Where was that old feeling in the heart as he waited for one of those great singers? Where that sensation of the intoxication of life and of his own power to enjoy it all?

  The greatest operagoer of his day! There was no opera now! That fellow Wagner had ruined everything; no melody left, nor any voices to sing it. Ah! the wonderful singers! Gone! He sat watching the old scenes acted, a numb feeling at his heart.

  From the curl of silver over his ear to the pose of his foot in its elastic-sided patent boot, there was nothing clumsy or weak about old Jolyon. He was as upright—very nearly—as in those old times when he came every night; his sight was as good—almost as good. But what a feeling of weariness and disillusion!

  He had been in the habit all his life of enjoying things, even imperfect things—and there had been many imperfect things—he had enjoyed them all with moderation, so as to keep himself young. But now he was deserted by his power of enjoyment, by his philosophy, and left with this dreadful feeling that it was all done with. Not even the “Prisoners’ Chorus,” nor “Florian’s Song,” had the power to dispel the gloom of his loneliness.

  If Jo were only with him! The boy must be forty by now. He had wasted fourteen years out of the life of his only son. And Jo was no longer a social pariah. He was married. Old Jolyon had been unable to refrain from marking his appreciation of the action by enclosing his son a cheque for £500. The cheque had been returned in a letter from the Hotch Potch, couched in these words.

  MY DEAREST FATHER,

  Your generous gift was welcome as a sign that you might think worse of me. I return it, but should you think fit to invest it for the benefit of the little chap (we call him Jolly), who bears our Christian and, by courtesy, our surname, I shall be very glad.

  I hope with all my heart that your health is as good as ever.

  Your loving son,

  Jo

  The letter was like the boy. He had always been an amiable chap. Old Jolyon had sent this reply:

  MY DEAR JO,

  The sum (£500) stands in my books for the benefit of your boy, under the name of Jolyon Forsyte, and will be duly credited with interest at five per cent. I hope that you are doing well. My health remains good at present.

  With love, I am,

  Your affectionate father,

  JOLYON FORSYTE

  And every year on the first of January he had added a hundred and the interest. The sum was mounting up—next New Year’s Day it would be fifteen hundred and odd pounds! And it is difficult to say how much satisfaction he had got out of that yearly transaction. But the correspondence had ended.

  In spite of his love for his son, in spite of an instinct, partly constitutional, partly the result, as in thousands of his class, of the continual handling and watching of affairs, prompting him to judge conduct by results rather than by principle, there was at the bottom of his heart a sort of uneasiness. His son ought, under the circumstances, to have gone to the dogs; that law was laid down in all the novels, sermons, and plays he had ever read, heard, or witnessed.

  After receiving the cheque back there seemed to him to be something wrong somewhere. Why had his son not gone to the dogs? But, then, who could tell?

  He had heard, of course—in fact, he had made it his business to find out—that Jo lived in St. John’s Wood, that he had a little house in Wistaria Avenue with a garden, and took his wife about with him into society—a queer sort of society, no doubt—and that they had two children—the little chap they called Jolly (considering the circumstances the name struck him as cynical, and old Jolyon both feared and disliked cynicism), and a girl called Holly, born since the marriage. Who could tell what his son’s circumstances really were? He had capitalized the income he had inherited from his mother’s father and joined Lloyd’s as an underwriter; he painted pictures, too—watercolours. Old Jolyon knew this, for he had surreptitiously bought them from time to time, after chancing to see his son’s name signed at the bottom of a representation of the river Thames in a dealer’s window. He thought them bad, and did not hang them because of the signature; he kept them locked up in a drawer.

  In the great opera house a terrible yearning came on him to see his son. He remembered the days when he had been wont to slide him, in a brown holland suit, to and fro under the arch of his legs; the times when he ran beside the boy’s pony, teaching him to ride; the day he first took him to school. He had been a loving, lovable little chap! After he went to Eton he had acquired, perhaps, a little too much of that desirable manner which old Jolyon knew was only to be obtained at such places and at great expense; but he had always been companionable. Always a companion, even after Cambridge—a little far off, perhaps, owing to the advantages he had received. Old Jolyon’s
feeling towards our public schools and ’Varsities never wavered, and he retained touchingly his attitude of admiration and mistrust towards a system appropriate to the highest in the land, of which he had not himself been privileged to partake. . . . Now that June had gone and left, or as good as left him, it would have been a comfort to see his son again. Guilty of this treason to his family, his principles, his class, old Jolyon fixed his eyes on the singer. A poor thing—a wretched poor thing! And the Florian a perfect stick!

  It was over. They were easily pleased nowadays!

  In the crowded street he snapped up a cab under the very nose of a stout and much younger gentleman, who had already assumed it to be his own. His route lay through Pall Mall, and at the corner, instead of going through the Green Park, the cabman turned to drive up St. James’s Street. Old Jolyon put his hand through the trap (he could not bear being taken out of his way); in turning, however, he found himself opposite the Hotch Potch, and the yearning that had been secretly with him the whole evening prevailed. He called to the driver to stop. He would go in and ask if Jo still belonged there.

  He went in. The hall looked exactly as it did when he used to dine there with Jack Herring, and they had the best cook in London; and he looked round with the shrewd, straight glance that had caused him all his life to be better served than most men.

  “Mr. Jolyon Forsyte still a member here?”

  “Yes, sir; in the club now, sir. What name?”

  Old Jolyon was taken aback.

  “His father,” he said.

  And having spoken, he took his stand, back to the fireplace.