The Forsyte Saga Page 5

  Young Jolyon, on the point of leaving the club, had put on his hat, and was in the act of crossing the hall, as the porter met him. He was no longer young, with hair going grey, and face—a narrower replica of his father’s, with the same large drooping moustache—decidedly worn. He turned pale. This meeting was terrible after all those years, for nothing in the world was so terrible as a scene. They met and crossed hands without a word. Then, with a quaver in his voice, the father said:

  “How are you, my boy?”

  The son answered:

  “How are you, Dad?”

  Old Jolyon’s hand trembled in its thin lavender glove.

  “If you’re going my way,” he said, “I can give you a lift.”

  And as though in the habit of taking each other home every night they went out and stepped into the cab.

  To old Jolyon it seemed that his son had grown. “More of a man altogether,” was his comment. Over the natural amiability of that son’s face had come a rather sardonic mask, as though he had found in the circumstances of his life the necessity for armour. The features were certainly those of a Forsyte, but the expression was more the introspective look of a student or philosopher. He had no doubt been obliged to look into himself a good deal in the course of those fifteen years.

  To young Jolyon the first sight of his father was undoubtedly a shock—he looked so worn and old. But in the cab he seemed hardly to have changed, still having the calm look so well remembered, still being upright and keen-eyed.

  “You look well, Dad.”

  “Middling,” old Jolyon answered.

  He was the prey of an anxiety that he found he must put into words. Having got his son back like this, he felt he must know what was his financial position.

  “Jo,” he said, “I should like to hear what sort of water you’re in. I suppose you’re in debt?”

  He put it this way that his son might find it easier to confess.

  Young Jolyon answered in his ironical voice:

  “No! I’m not in debt!”

  Old Jolyon saw that he was angry, and touched his hand. He had run a risk. It was worth it, however, and Jo had never been sulky with him. They drove on, without speaking again, to Stanhope Gate. Old Jolyon invited him in, but young Jolyon shook his head.

  “June’s not here,” said his father hastily: “went off today on a visit. I suppose you know that she’s engaged to be married?”

  “Already?” murmured young Jolyon.

  Old Jolyon stepped out, and, in paying the cab fare, for the first time in his life gave the driver a sovereign in mistake for a shilling.

  Placing the coin in his mouth, the cabman whipped his horse secretly on the underneath and hurried away.

  Old Jolyon turned the key softly in the lock, pushed open the door, and beckoned. His son saw him gravely hanging up his coat, with an expression on his face like that of a boy who intends to steal cherries.

  The door of the dining room was open, the gas turned low; a spirit-urn hissed on a tea tray, and close to it a cynical looking cat had fallen asleep on the dining table. Old Jolyon shoo’d her off at once. The incident was a relief to his feelings; he rattled his opera hat behind the animal.

  “She’s got fleas,” he said, following her out of the room. Through the door in the hall leading to the basement he called “Hssst!” several times, as though assisting the cat’s departure, till by some strange coincidence the butler appeared below.

  “You can go to bed, Parfitt,” said old Jolyon. “I will lock up and put out.”

  When he again entered the dining room the cat unfortunately preceded him, with her tail in the air, proclaiming that she had seen through this manouevre for suppressing the butler from the first. . . .

  A fatality had dogged old Jolyon’s domestic stratagems all his life.

  Young Jolyon could not help smiling. He was very well versed in irony, and everything that evening seemed to him ironical. The episode of the cat; the announcement of his own daughter’s engagement. So he had no more part or parcel in her than he had in the Puss! And the poetical justice of this appealed to him.

  “What is June like now?” he asked.

  “She’s a little thing,” returned old Jolyon; “they say she’s like me, but that’s their folly. She’s more like your mother—the same eyes and hair.”

  “Ah! and she is pretty?”

  Old Jolyon was too much of a Forsyte to praise anything freely; especially anything for which he had a genuine admiration.

  “Not bad looking—a regular Forsyte chin. It’ll be lonely here when she’s gone, Jo.”

  The look on his face again gave young Jolyon the shock he had felt on first seeing his father.

  “What will you do with yourself, Dad? I suppose she’s wrapped up in him?”

  “Do with myself?” repeated old Jolyon with an angry break in his voice. “It’ll be miserable work living here alone. I don’t know how it’s to end. I wish to goodness. . . .” He checked himself, and added: “The question is, what had I better do with this house?”

  Young Jolyon looked round the room. It was peculiarly vast and dreary, decorated with the enormous pictures of still life that he remembered as a boy—sleeping dogs with their noses resting on bunches of carrots, together with onions and grapes lying side by side in mild surprise. The house was a white elephant, but he could not conceive of his father living in a smaller place; and all the more did it all seem ironical.

  In his great chair with the book-rest sat old Jolyon, the figurehead of his family and class and creed, with his white head and dome-like forehead, the representative of moderation, and order, and love of property. As lonely an old man as there was in London.

  There he sat in the gloomy comfort of the room, a puppet in the power of great forces that cared nothing for family or class or creed, but moved, machine-like, with dread processes to inscrutable ends. This was how it struck young Jolyon, who had the impersonal eye.

  The poor old dad! So this was the end, the purpose to which he had lived with such magnificent moderation! To be lonely, and grow older and older, yearning for a soul to speak to!

  In his turn old Jolyon looked back at his son. He wanted to talk about many things that he had been unable to talk about all these years. It had been impossible to seriously confide in June his conviction that property in the Soho quarter would go up in value; his uneasiness about that tremendous silence of Pippin, the superintendent of the New Colliery Company, of which he had so long been chairman; his disgust at the steady fall in American Golgothas, or even to discuss how, by some sort of settlement, he could best avoid the payment of those death duties which would follow his decease. Under the influence, however, of a cup of tea, which he seemed to stir indefinitely, he began to speak at last. A new vista of life was thus opened up, a promised land of talk, where he could find a harbour against the waves of anticipation and regret; where he could soothe his soul with the opium of devising how to round off his property and make eternal the only part of him that was to remain alive.

  Young Jolyon was a good listener; it was his great quality. He kept his eyes fixed on his father’s face, putting a question now and then.

  The clock struck one before old Jolyon had finished, and at the sound of its striking his principles came back. He took out his watch with a look of surprise:

  “I must go to bed, Jo,” he said.

  Young Jolyon rose and held out his hand to help his father up. The old face looked worn and hollow again; the eyes were steadily averted.

  “Goodbye, my boy; take care of yourself.”

  A moment passed, and young Jolyon, turning on his, heel, marched out at the door. He could hardly see; his smile quavered. Never in all the fifteen years since he had first found out that life was no simple business, had he found it so singularly complicated.

  Chapter III

  Din
ner at Swithin’s

  In Swithin’s orange and light-blue dining room, facing the park, the round table was laid for twelve.

  A cut-glass chandelier filled with lighted candles hung like a giant stalactite above its centre, radiating over large gilt-framed mirrors, slabs of marble on the tops of side tables, and heavy gold chairs with crewel worked seats. Everything betokened that love of beauty so deeply implanted in each family which has had its own way to make into society, out of the more vulgar heart of nature. Swithin had indeed an impatience of simplicity, a love of ormolu, which had always stamped him amongst his associates as a man of great, if somewhat luxurious taste; and out of the knowledge that no one could possibly enter his rooms without perceiving him to be a man of wealth, he had derived a solid and prolonged happiness such as perhaps no other circumstance in life had afforded him.

  Since his retirement from land agency, a profession deplorable in his estimation, especially as to its auctioneering department, he had abandoned himself to naturally aristocratic tastes.

  The perfect luxury of his latter days had embedded him like a fly in sugar; and his mind, where very little took place from morning till night, was the junction of two curiously opposite emotions, a lingering and sturdy satisfaction that he had made his own way and his own fortune, and a sense that a man of his distinction should never have been allowed to soil his mind with work.

  He stood at the sideboard in a white waistcoat with large gold and onyx buttons, watching his valet screw the necks of three champagne bottles deeper into ice pails. Between the points of his stand-up collar, which—though it hurt him to move—he would on no account have had altered, the pale flesh of his under chin remained immovable. His eyes roved from bottle to bottle. He was debating, and he argued like this: Jolyon drinks a glass, perhaps two, he’s so careful of himself. James, he can’t take his wine nowadays. Nicholas—Fanny and he would swill water he shouldn’t wonder! Soames didn’t count; these young nephews—Soames was thirty-one—couldn’t drink! But Bosinney?

  Encountering in the name of this stranger something outside the range of his philosophy, Swithin paused. A misgiving arose within him! It was impossible to tell! June was only a girl, in love too! Emily (Mrs. James) liked a good glass of champagne. It was too dry for Juley, poor old soul, she had no palate. As to Hatty Chessman! The thought of this old friend caused a cloud of thought to obscure the perfect glassiness of his eyes: He shouldn’t wonder if she drank half a bottle!

  But in thinking of his remaining guest, an expression like that of a cat who is just going to purr stole over his old face: Mrs. Soames! She mightn’t take much, but she would appreciate what she drank; it was a pleasure to give her good wine! A pretty woman—and sympathetic to him!

  The thought of her was like champagne itself! A pleasure to give a good wine to a young woman who looked so well, who knew how to dress, with charming manners, quite distinguished—a pleasure to entertain her. Between the points of his collar he gave his head the first small, painful oscillation of the evening.

  “Adolf!” he said. “Put in another bottle.”

  He himself might drink a good deal, for, thanks to that prescription of Blight’s, he found himself extremely well, and he had been careful to take no lunch. He had not felt so well for weeks. Puffing out his lower lip, he gave his last instructions:

  “Adolf, the least touch of the West India when you come to the ham.”

  Passing into the anteroom, he sat down on the edge of a chair, with his knees apart; and his tall, bulky form was wrapped at once in an expectant, strange, primeval immobility. He was ready to rise at a moment’s notice. He had not given a dinner party for months. This dinner in honour of June’s engagement had seemed a bore at first (among Forsytes the custom of solemnizing engagements by feasts was religiously observed), but the labours of sending invitations and ordering the repast over, he felt pleasantly stimulated.

  And thus sitting, a watch in his hand, fat, and smooth, and golden, like a flattened globe of butter, he thought of nothing.

  A long man, with side whiskers, who had once been in Swithin’s service, but was now a greengrocer, entered and proclaimed:

  “Mrs. Chessman, Mrs. Septimus Small!”

  Two ladies advanced. The one in front, habited entirely in red, had large, settled patches of the same colour in her cheeks, and a hard, dashing eye. She walked at Swithin, holding out a hand cased in a long, primrose-coloured glove:

  “Well! Swithin,” she said, “I haven’t seen you for ages. How are you? Why, my dear boy, how stout you’re getting!”

  The fixity of Swithin’s eye alone betrayed emotion. A dumb and grumbling anger swelled his bosom. It was vulgar to be stout, to talk of being stout; he had a chest, nothing more. Turning to his sister, he grasped her hand, and said in a tone of command:

  “Well, Juley.”

  Mrs. Septimus Small was the tallest of the four sisters; her good, round old face had gone a little sour; an innumerable pout clung all over it, as if it had been encased in an iron wire mask up to that evening, which, being suddenly removed, left little rolls of mutinous flesh all over her countenance. Even her eyes 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 somberly 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 goldmines 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 co
untry, 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 dinnertime—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!”