The Forsyte Saga, Volume 1 Page 6

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘I thought it would be such a splendid place for – you or – someone to build a country house!’

  James looked at her sideways, and placed a second piece of ham in his mouth

  ‘Land ought to be very dear about there,’ he said.

  What June had taken for personal interest was only the impersonal excitement of every Forsyte who hears of something eligible in danger of passing into other hands. But she refused to see the disappearance of her chance, and continued to press her point.

  ‘You ought to go into the country, Uncle James. I wish I had a lot of money, I wouldn’t live another day in London.’

  James was stirred to the depths of his long thin figure; he had no idea his niece held such downright views.

  ‘Why don’t you go into the country?’ repeated June: ‘it would do you a lot of good!’

  ‘Why?’ began James in a fluster. ‘Buying land – what good d’you suppose I can do buying land, building houses? – I couldn’t get four per cent for my money!’

  ‘What does that matter! You’d get fresh air.’

  ‘Fresh air!’ exclaimed James; ‘what should I do with fresh air –’

  ‘I should have thought anybody liked to have fresh air,’ said June scornfully.

  James wiped his napkin all over his mouth.

  ‘You don’t know the value of money,’ he said, avoiding her eye.

  ‘No! and I hope I never shall!’ and, biting her lip with inexpressible mortification, poor June was silent.

  Why were her own relations so rich, and Phil never knew where the money was coming from for tomorrow’s tobacco? Why couldn’t they do something for him? But they were so selfish. Why couldn’t they build country houses? She had all that naïve dogmatism which is so pathetic, and sometimes achieves such great results. Bosinney, to whom she turned in her discomfiture, was talking to Irene, and a chill fell on June’s spirit Her eyes grew steady with anger, like old Jolyon’s when his will was crossed.

  James, too, was much disturbed. He felt as though someone had threatened his right to invest his money at five per cent. Jolyon had spoiled her. None of his girls would have said such a thing. James had always been exceedingly liberal to his children, and the consciousness of this made him feel it all the more deeply. He trifled moodily with his strawberries, then, deluging them with cream, he ate them quickly; they, at all events, should not escape him.

  No wonder he was upset Engaged for fifty-four years (he had been admitted a solicitor on the earliest day sanctioned by the law) in arranging mortgages, preserving investments at a dead level of high and safe interest, conducting negotiations on the principle of securing the utmost possible out of other people compatible with safety to his clients and himself, in calculations as to the exact pecuniary possibilities of all the relations of life, he had come at last to think purely in terms of money. Money was now his light, his medium for seeing, that without which he was really unable to see, really not cognizant of phenomena; and to have this thing, ‘I hope I shall never know the value of money!’ said to his face, saddened and exasperated him. He knew it to be nonsense, or it would have frightened him. What was the world coming to? Suddenly recollecting the story of young Jolyon, however, he felt a little comforted, for what could you expect with a father like that! This turned his thoughts into a channel still less pleasant. What was all this talk about Soames and Irene?

  As in all self-respecting families, an emporium had been established where family secrets were bartered, and family stock priced. It was known on Forsyte ‘Change that Irene regretted her marriage. Her regret was disapproved of. She ought to have known her own mind; no dependable woman made these mistakes.

  James reflected sourly that they had a nice house (rather small) in an excellent position, no children, and no money troubles. Soames was reserved about his affairs, but he must be getting a very warm man. He had a capital income from the business – for Soames, like his father, was a member of that well-known firm of solicitors, Forsyte, Bustard, and Forsyte – and had always been very careful. He had done quite unusually well with some mortgages he had taken up, too – a little timely foreclosure – most lucky hits!

  There was no reason why Irene should not be happy, yet they said she’d been asking for a separate room. He knew where that ended. It wasn’t as if Soames drank.

  James looked at his daughter-in-law. That unseen glance of his was cold and dubious. Appeal and fear were in it, and a sense of personal grievance. Why should he be worried like this? It was very likely all nonsense; women were funny things! They exaggerated so, you didn’t know what to believe; and then, nobody told him anything, he had to find out everything for himself. Again he looked furtively at Irene, and across from her to Soames. The latter, listening to Aunt Juley, was looking up under his brows in the direction of Bosinney.

  ‘He’s fond of her, I know,’ thought James. ‘Look at the way he’s always giving her things.’

  And the extraordinary unreasonableness of her disaffection struck him with increased force. It was a pity, too, she was a taking little thing, and he, James, would be really quite fond of her if she’d only let him. She had taken up lately with June; that was doing her no good, that was certainly doing her no good. She was getting to have opinions of her own. He didn’t know what she wanted with anything of the sort. She’d a good home, and everything she could wish for. He felt that her friends ought to be chosen for her. To go on like this was dangerous.

  June, indeed, with her habit of championing the unfortunate, had dragged from Irene a confession, and, in return, had preached the necessity of facing the evil, by separation, if need be. But in the face of these exhortations, Irene had kept a brooding silence, as though she found terrible the thought of this struggle carried through in cold blood. He would never give her up, she had said to June.

  ‘Who cares?’ June cried; ‘let him do what he likes – you’ve only to stick to it!’ And she had not scrupled to say something of this sort at Timothy’s; James, when he heard of it, had felt a natural indignation and horror.

  What if Irene were to take it into her head to – he could hardly frame the thought – to leave Soames? But he felt this thought so unbearable that he at once put it away; the shady visions it conjured up, the sound of family tongues buzzing in his ears, the horror of the conspicuous happening so close to him, to one of his own children! Luckily, she had no money – a beggarly fifty pound a year! And he thought of the deceased Heron, who had had nothing to leave her, with contempt. Brooding over his glass, his long legs twisted under the table, he quite omitted to rise when the ladies left the room. He would have to speak to Soames – would have to put him on his guard; they could not go on like this, now that such a contingency had occurred to him. And he noticed with sour disfavour that June had left her wine-glass full of wine.

  ‘That little thing’s at the bottom of it all,’ he mused; ‘Irene’d never have thought of it herself.’ James was a man of imagination.

  The voice of Swithin roused him from his reverie.

  ‘I gave four hundred pounds for it,’ he was saying. ‘Of course it’s a regular work of art.’

  ‘Four hundred! H’m! that’s a lot of money!’ chimed in Nicholas.

  The object alluded to was an elaborate group of statuary in Italian marble, which, placed upon a lofty stand (also of marble), diffused an atmosphere of culture throughout the room. The subsidiary figures, of which there were six, female, nude, and of highly ornate workmanship, were all pointing towards the central figure, also nude, and female, who was pointing at herself; and all this gave the observer a very pleasant sense of her extreme value. Aunt Juley, nearly opposite, had had the greatest difficulty in not looking at it all the evening.

  Old Jolyon spoke; it was he who had started the discussion.

  ‘Four hundred fiddlesticks! Don’t tell me you gave four hundred for that?’

  Between the points of his collar Swithin’s chin made the second painful o
scillatory movement of the evening. ‘Four – hundred – pounds, of English money; not a farthing less. I don’t regret it. It’s not common English – it’s genuine modern Italian!’

  Soames raised the corner of his lip in a smile, and looked across at Bosinney. The architect was grinning behind the fumes of his cigarette. Now, indeed, he looked more like a buccaneer.

  ‘There’s a lot of work about it,’ remarked James hastily, who was really moved by the size of the group. ‘It’d sell well at Jobson’s.’

  ‘The poor foreign dey-vil that made it,’ went on Swithin, ‘asked me five hundred – I gave him four. It’s worth eight Looked half-starved, poor dey-vil!’

  ‘Ah!’ chimed in Nicholas suddenly, ‘poor, seedy-lookin’ chaps, these artists; it’s a wonder to me how they live. Now, there’s young Flageoletti, that Fanny and the girls are always havin’ in, to play the fiddle; if he makes a hundred a year it’s as much as ever he does!’

  James shook his head. ‘Ah!’ he said, ‘I don’t know how they live!’

  Old Jolyon had risen, and, cigar in mouth, went to inspect the group at close quarters.

  ‘Wouldn’t have given two for it!’ he pronounced at last.

  Soames saw his father and Nicholas glance at each other anxiously; and, on the other side of Swithin, Bosinney, still shrouded in smoke.

  ‘I wonder what he thinks of it?’ thought Soames, who knew well enough that this group was hopelessly vieux jeu; hopelessly of the last generation. There was no longer any sale at Jobson’s for such works of art.

  Swithin’s answer came at last. ‘You never knew anything about a statue. You’ve got your pictures, and that’s all!’

  Old Jolyon walked back to his seat, puffing his cigar. It was not likely that he was going to be drawn into an argument with an obstinate beggar like Swithin, pig-headed as a mule, who had never known a statue from – a straw hat.

  ‘Stucco!’ was all he said.

  It had long been physically impossible for Swithin to start; his fist came down on the table.

  ‘Stucco! I should like to see anything you’ve got in your house half as good!’

  And behind his speech seemed to sound again that rumbling violence of primitive generations.

  It was James who saved the situation.

  ‘Now, what do you say, Mr Bosinney? You’re an architect; you ought to know all about statues and things!’

  Every eye was turned upon Bosinney; all waited with a strange, suspicious look for his answer.

  And Soames, speaking for the first time, asked:

  ‘Yes, Bosinney, what do you say?’

  Bosinney replied coolly:

  ‘The work is a remarkable one.’

  His words were addressed to Swithin, his eyes smiled slyly at old Jolyon; only Soames remained unsatisfied.

  ‘Remarkable for what?’

  ‘For its naïveté.’

  The answer was followed by an impressive silence; Swithin alone was not sure whether a compliment was intended.

  Chapter Four

  PROJECTION OF THE HOUSE

  SOAMES FORSYTE walked out of his greenpainted front door three days after the dinner at Swithin’s, and looking back from across the Square, confirmed his impression that the house wanted painting.

  He had left his wife sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room, her hands crossed in her lap, manifestly waiting for him to go out. This was not unusual. It happened, in fact, every day.

  He could not understand what she found wrong with him. It was not as if he drank! Did he run into debt, or gamble, or swear; was he violent; were his friends rackety; did he stay out at night? On the contrary.

  The profound, subdued aversion which he felt in his wife was a mystery to him, and a source of the most terrible irritation. That she had made a mistake, and did not love him, had tried to love him and could not love him, was obviously no reason.

  He that could imagine so outlandish a cause for his wife’s not getting on with him was certainly no Forsyte.

  Soames was forced, therefore, to set the blame entirely down to his wife. He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They could not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her; their looks, manners, voices, betrayed it; her behaviour under this attention had been beyond reproach. That she was one of those women – not too common in the Anglo-Saxon race – born to be loved and to love, who when not loving are not living, had certainly never even occurred to him. Her power of attraction he regarded as part of her value as his property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as receive; and she gave him nothing! ‘Then why did she marry me?’ was his continual thought. He had forgotten his courtship; that year and a half when he had besieged and lain in wait for her, devising schemes for her entertainment, giving her gifts, proposing to her periodically, and keeping her other admirers away with his perpetual presence. He had forgotten the day when, adroitly taking advantage of an acute phase of her dislike to her home surroundings, he crowned his labours with success. If he remembered anything, it was the dainty capriciousness with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl had treated him. He certainly did not remember the look on her face – strange, passive, appealing – when suddenly one day she had yielded, and said that she would marry him.

  It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and people praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering the iron till it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after as the wedding bells.

  Soames walked eastwards, mousing doggedly along on the shady side.

  The house wanted doing up, unless he decided to move into the country, and build.

  For the hundredth time that month he turned over this problem. There was no use in rushing into things! He was very comfortably off, with an increasing income getting on for three thousand a year; but his invested capital was not perhaps so large as his father believed – James had a tendency to expect that his children should be better off than they were. ‘I can manage eight thousand easily enough,’ he thought, ‘without calling in either Robertson’s or Nicholl’s.’

  He had stopped to look in at a picture shop, for Soames was an ‘amateur’ of pictures, and had a little room in No. 62 Montpelier Square, full of canvases, stacked against the wall, which he had no room to hang. He brought them home with him on his way back from the City, generally after dark, and would enter this room on Sunday afternoons, to spend hours turning the pictures to the light, examining the marks on their backs, and occasionally making notes.

  They were nearly all landscapes with figures in the foreground, a sign of some mysterious revolt against London, its tall houses, its interminable streets, where his life and the lives of his breed and class were passed. Every now and then he would take one or two pictures away with him in a cab, and stop at Jobson’s on his way into the City.

  He rarely showed them to anyone; Irene, whose opinion he secretly respected and perhaps for that reason never solicited, had only been into the room on rare occasions, in discharge of some wifely duty. She was not asked to look at the pictures, and she never did. To Soames this was another grievance. He hated that pride of hers, and secretly dreaded it.

  In the plate-glass window of the picture shop his image stood and looked at him.

  His sleek hair under the brim of the tall hat had a sheen like the hat itself; his cheeks, pale and flat, the line of his clean-shaven lips, his firm chin with its greyish shaven tinge, and the buttoned strictness of his black cut-away coat, conveyed an appearance of reserve and secrecy, of imperturbable, enforced composure; but his eyes, cold, grey, strained-looking with a line in the brow between them, examined him wistfully, as if they knew of a secret weakness.

  He noted the subjects of the pictures, the names of the painters, made a calculation of their values, but without the satisfaction he usually derived from this inward appraisement, and walked on.

  No. 62 would do well enough for another year, if he decided to build! The tim
es were good for building, money had not been so dear for years; and the site he had seen at Robin Hill, when he had gone down there in the spring to inspect the Nicholl mortgage – what could be better! Within twelve miles of Hyde Park Corner, the value of the land certain to go up, would always fetch more than he gave for it; so that a house, if built in really good style, was a first-class investment.

  The notion of being the one member of his family with a country house weighed but little with him; for to a true Forsyte, sentiment, even the sentiment of social position, was a luxury only to be indulged in after his appetite for more material pleasure had been satisfied.

  To get Irene out of London, away from opportunities of going about and seeing people, away from her friends and those who put ideas into her head! That was the thing! She was too thick with June! June disliked him. He returned the sentiment. They were of the same blood.

  It would be everything to get Irene out of town. The house would please her, she would enjoy messing about with the decoration, she was very artistic!

  The house must be in good style, something that would always be certain to command a price, something unique, like that last house of Parkes, which had a tower; but Parkes had himself said that his architect was ruinous. You never knew where you were with those fellows; if they had a name they ran you into no end of expense and were conceited into the bargain.

  And a common architect was no good – the memory of Parkes’ tower precluded the employment of a common architect.

  This was why he had thought of Bosinney. Since the dinner at Swithin’s he had made inquiries, the result of which had been meagre, but encouraging: ‘One of the new school.’

  ‘Clever?’

  ‘As clever as you like, – a bit – a bit up in the air!’

  He had not been able to discover what houses Bosinney had built, nor what his charges were. The impression he gathered was that he would be able to make his own terms. The more he reflected the idea, the more he liked it. It would be keeping the thing in the family, with Forsytes almost an instinct; and he would be able to get ‘favoured-nation’, if not nominal terms – only fair, considering the chance to Bosinney of displaying his talents, for this house must be no common edifice.