Title: The Forsyte Saga, Volume I.
 - The Man Of Property
Author: Galsworthy, John
Language: English
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 - The Man Of Property" ***


FORSYTE SAGA

THE MAN OF PROPERTY


By John Galsworthy



THE MAN OF PROPERTY



     TO MY WIFE:

     I DEDICATE THE FORSYTE SAGA IN ITS ENTIRETY,
     BELIEVING IT TO BE OF ALL MY WORKS THE LEAST
     UNWORTHY OF ONE WITHOUT WHOSE ENCOURAGEMENT,
     SYMPATHY AND CRITICISM I COULD NEVER HAVE
     BECOME EVEN SUCH A WRITER AS I AM.



PREFACE:

_“The Forsyte Saga” was the title originally destined for that part of it
which is called “The Man of Property”; and to adopt it for the collected
chronicles of the Forsyte family has indulged the Forsytean tenacity
that is in all of us. The word Saga might be objected to on the ground
that it connotes the heroic and that there is little heroism in these
pages. But it is used with a suitable irony; and, after all, this long
tale, though it may deal with folk in frock coats, furbelows, and a
gilt-edged period, is not devoid of the essential heat of conflict.
Discounting for the gigantic stature and blood-thirstiness of old days,
as they have come down to us in fairy-tale and legend, the folk of the
old Sagas were Forsytes, assuredly, in their possessive instincts, and
as little proof against the inroads of beauty and passion as Swithin,
Soames, or even Young Jolyon. And if heroic figures, in days that never
were, seem to startle out from their surroundings in fashion unbecoming
to a Forsyte of the Victorian era, we may be sure that tribal instinct
was even then the prime force, and that “family” and the sense of home
and property counted as they do to this day, for all the recent efforts
to “talk them out.”

So many people have written and claimed that their families were the
originals of the Forsytes that one has been almost encouraged to believe
in the typicality of an imagined species. Manners change and modes
evolve, and “Timothy’s on the Bayswater Road” becomes a nest of the
unbelievable in all except essentials; we shall not look upon its like
again, nor perhaps on such a one as James or Old Jolyon. And yet the
figures of Insurance Societies and the utterances of Judges reassure us
daily that our earthly paradise is still a rich preserve, where the wild
raiders, Beauty and Passion, come stealing in, filching security from
beneath our noses. As surely as a dog will bark at a brass band, so will
the essential Soames in human nature ever rise up uneasily against the
dissolution which hovers round the folds of ownership.

“Let the dead Past bury its dead” would be a better saying if the Past
ever died. The persistence of the Past is one of those tragi-comic
blessings which each new age denies, coming cocksure on to the stage to
mouth its claim to a perfect novelty.

But no Age is so new as that! Human Nature, under its changing
pretensions and clothes, is and ever will be very much of a Forsyte, and
might, after all, be a much worse animal.

Looking back on the Victorian era, whose ripeness, decline, and
’.all-of’ is in some sort pictured in “The Forsyte Saga,” we see now
that we have but jumped out of a frying-pan into a fire. It would be
difficult to substantiate a claim that the case of England was better in
1913 than it was in 1886, when the Forsytes assembled at Old Jolyon’s to
celebrate the engagement of June to Philip Bosinney. And in 1920, when
again the clan gathered to bless the marriage of Fleur with Michael
Mont, the state of England is as surely too molten and bankrupt as in
the eighties it was too congealed and low-percented. If these chronicles
had been a really scientific study of transition one would have dwelt
probably on such factors as the invention of bicycle, motor-car, and
flying-machine; the arrival of a cheap Press; the decline of country
life and increase of the towns; the birth of the Cinema. Men are, in
fact, quite unable to control their own inventions; they at best develop
adaptability to the new conditions those inventions create.

But this long tale is no scientific study of a period; it is rather an
intimate incarnation of the disturbance that Beauty effects in the lives
of men.

The figure of Irene, never, as the reader may possibly have observed,
present, except through the senses of other characters, is a concretion
of disturbing Beauty impinging on a possessive world.

One has noticed that readers, as they wade on through the salt waters of
the Saga, are inclined more and more to pity Soames, and to think that
in doing so they are in revolt against the mood of his creator. Far
from it! He, too, pities Soames, the tragedy of whose life is the very
simple, uncontrollable tragedy of being unlovable, without quite a thick
enough skin to be thoroughly unconscious of the fact. Not even Fleur
loves Soames as he feels he ought to be loved. But in pitying Soames,
readers incline, perhaps, to animus against Irene: After all, they
think, he wasn’t a bad fellow, it wasn’t his fault; she ought to have
forgiven him, and so on!

And, taking sides, they lose perception of the simple truth, which
underlies the whole story, that where sex attraction is utterly and
definitely lacking in one partner to a union, no amount of pity, or
reason, or duty, or what not, can overcome a repulsion implicit in
Nature. Whether it ought to, or no, is beside the point; because in fact
it never does. And where Irene seems hard and cruel, as in the Bois de
Boulogne, or the Goupenor Gallery, she is but wisely realistic--knowing
that the least concession is the inch which precedes the impossible, the
repulsive ell.

A criticism one might pass on the last phase of the Saga is the
complaint that Irene and Jolyon those rebels against property--claim
spiritual property in their son Jon. But it would be hypercriticism,
as the tale is told. No father and mother could have let the boy marry
Fleur without knowledge of the facts; and the facts determine Jon, not
the persuasion of his parents. Moreover, Jolyon’s persuasion is not
on his own account, but on Irene’s, and Irene’s persuasion becomes a
reiterated: “Don’t think of me, think of yourself!” That Jon, knowing
the facts, can realise his mother’s feelings, will hardly with justice
be held proof that she is, after all, a Forsyte.

But though the impingement of Beauty and the claims of Freedom on a
possessive world are the main prepossessions of the Forsyte Saga, it
cannot be absolved from the charge of embalming the upper-middle class.
As the old Egyptians placed around their mummies the necessaries of a
future existence, so I have endeavoured to lay beside the figures of
Aunts Ann and Juley and Hester, of Timothy and Swithin, of Old Jolyon
and James, and of their sons, that which shall guarantee them a little
life here-after, a little balm in the hurried Gilead of a dissolving
“Progress.”

If the upper-middle class, with other classes, is destined to “move on”
 into amorphism, here, pickled in these pages, it lies under glass for
strollers in the wide and ill-arranged museum of Letters. Here it rests,
preserved in its own juice: The Sense of Property. 1922._



THE MAN OF PROPERTY

by JOHN GALSWORTHY



     “........You will answer
     The slaves are ours.....”

     --Merchant of Venice.



     TO EDWARD GARNETT



PART I



CHAPTER I--’AT HOME’ AT OLD JOLYON’S

Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have
seen that charming and instructive sight--an upper middle-class family
in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed
the gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value and
properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only
delightful in itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In
plainer words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family--no branch
of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of whom
existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy--evidence of that
mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit
of society, so clear a reproduction of society in miniature. He has been
admitted to a vision of the dim roads of social progress, has understood
something of patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the
rise and fall of nations. He is like one who, having watched a tree
grow from its planting--a paragon of tenacity, insulation, and success,
amidst the deaths of a hundred other plants less fibrous, sappy, and
persistent--one day will see it flourishing with bland, full foliage, in
an almost repugnant prosperity, at the summit of its efflorescence.

On June 15, eighteen eighty-six, about four of the afternoon, the
observer who chanced to be present at the house of old Jolyon Forsyte
in Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest efflorescence of the
Forsytes.

This was the occasion of an ‘at home’ to celebrate the engagement of
Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyon’s granddaughter, to Mr. Philip Bosinney.
In the bravery of light gloves, buff waistcoats, feathers and frocks,
the family were present, even Aunt Ann, who now but seldom left the
corner of her brother Timothy’s green drawing-room, where, under the
aegis of a plume of dyed pampas grass in a light blue vase, she sat
all day reading and knitting, surrounded by the effigies of three
generations of Forsytes. Even Aunt Ann was there; her inflexible
back, and the dignity of her calm old face personifying the rigid
possessiveness of the family idea.

When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present;
when a Forsyte died--but no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die;
death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against
it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalized persons who resent
encroachments on their property.

About the Forsytes mingling that day with the crowd of other guests,
there was a more than ordinarily groomed look, an alert, inquisitive
assurance, a brilliant respectability, as though they were attired in
defiance of something. The habitual sniff on the face of Soames Forsyte
had spread through their ranks; they were on their guard.

The subconscious offensiveness of their attitude has constituted old
Jolyon’s ‘home’ the psychological moment of the family history, made it
the prelude of their drama.

The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as
a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of
raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family
importance, and--the sniff. Danger--so indispensable in bringing out the
fundamental quality of any society, group, or individual--was what
the Forsytes scented; the premonition of danger put a burnish on their
armour. For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an
instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.

Over against the piano a man of bulk and stature was wearing two
waistcoats on his wide chest, two waistcoats and a ruby pin, instead of
the single satin waistcoat and diamond pin of more usual occasions,
and his shaven, square, old face, the colour of pale leather, with
pale eyes, had its most dignified look, above his satin stock. This was
Swithin Forsyte. Close to the window, where he could get more than his
fair share of fresh air, the other twin, James--the fat and the lean of
it, old Jolyon called these brothers--like the bulky Swithin, over six
feet in height, but very lean, as though destined from his birth to
strike a balance and maintain an average, brooded over the scene with
his permanent stoop; his grey eyes had an air of fixed absorption in
some secret worry, broken at intervals by a rapid, shifting scrutiny
of surrounding facts; his cheeks, thinned by two parallel folds, and a
long, clean-shaven upper lip, were framed within Dundreary whiskers. In
his hands he turned and turned a piece of china. Not far off, listening
to a lady in brown, his only son Soames, pale and well-shaved,
dark-haired, rather bald, had poked his chin up sideways, carrying his
nose with that aforesaid appearance of ‘sniff,’ as though despising an
egg which he knew he could not digest. Behind him his cousin, the tall
George, son of the fifth Forsyte, Roger, had a Quilpish look on his
fleshy face, pondering one of his sardonic jests. Something inherent to
the occasion had affected them all.

Seated in a row close to one another were three ladies--Aunts Ann,
Hester (the two Forsyte maids), and Juley (short for Julia), who not in
first youth had so far forgotten herself as to marry Septimus Small, a
man of poor constitution. She had survived him for many years. With
her elder and younger sister she lived now in the house of Timothy, her
sixth and youngest brother, on the Bayswater Road. Each of these ladies
held fans in their hands, and each with some touch of colour,
some emphatic feather or brooch, testified to the solemnity of the
opportunity.

In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, as became a host, stood
the head of the family, old Jolyon himself. Eighty years of age, with
his fine, white hair, his dome-like forehead, his little, dark grey
eyes, and an immense white moustache, which drooped and spread below the
level of his strong jaw, he had a patriarchal look, and in spite of lean
cheeks and hollows at his temples, seemed master of perennial youth.
He held himself extremely upright, and his shrewd, steady eyes had lost
none of their clear shining. Thus he gave an impression of superiority
to the doubts and dislikes of smaller men. Having had his own way for
innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it. It would
never have occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look
of doubt or of defiance.

Between him and the four other brothers who were present, James,
Swithin, Nicholas, and Roger, there was much difference, much
similarity. In turn, each of these four brothers was very different from
the other, yet they, too, were alike.

Through the varying features and expression of those five faces could be
marked a certain steadfastness of chin, underlying surface distinctions,
marking a racial stamp, too prehistoric to trace, too remote and
permanent to discuss--the very hall-mark and guarantee of the family
fortunes.

Among the younger generation, in the tall, bull-like George, in pallid
strenuous Archibald, in young Nicholas with his sweet and tentative
obstinacy, in the grave and foppishly determined Eustace, there was
this same stamp--less meaningful perhaps, but unmistakable--a sign of
something ineradicable in the family soul. At one time or another during
the afternoon, all these faces, so dissimilar and so alike, had worn
an expression of distrust, the object of which was undoubtedly the man
whose acquaintance they were thus assembled to make. Philip Bosinney was
known to be a young man without fortune, but Forsyte girls had become
engaged to such before, and had actually married them. It was not
altogether for this reason, therefore, that the minds of the Forsytes
misgave them. They could not have explained the origin of a misgiving
obscured by the mist of family gossip. A story was undoubtedly told that
he had paid his duty call to Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester, in a soft
grey hat--a soft grey hat, not even a new one--a dusty thing with a
shapeless crown. “So, extraordinary, my dear--so odd,” Aunt Hester,
passing through the little, dark hall (she was rather short-sighted),
had tried to ‘shoo’ it off a chair, taking it for a strange,
disreputable cat--Tommy had such disgraceful friends! She was disturbed
when it did not move.

Like an artist for ever seeking to discover the significant trifle which
embodies the whole character of a scene, or place, or person, so those
unconscious artists--the Forsytes had fastened by intuition on this hat;
it was their significant trifle, the detail in which was embedded the
meaning of the whole matter; for each had asked himself: “Come, now,
should I have paid that visit in that hat?” and each had answered “No!”
 and some, with more imagination than others, had added: “It would never
have come into my head!”

George, on hearing the story, grinned. The hat had obviously been
worn as a practical joke! He himself was a connoisseur of such. “Very
haughty!” he said, “the wild Buccaneer.”

And this mot, the ‘Buccaneer,’ was bandied from mouth to mouth, till it
became the favourite mode of alluding to Bosinney.

Her aunts reproached June afterwards about the hat.

“We don’t think you ought to let him, dear!” they had said.

June had answered in her imperious brisk way, like the little embodiment
of will she was: “Oh! what does it matter? Phil never knows what he’s
got on!”

No one had credited an answer so outrageous. A man not to know what he
had on? No, no! What indeed was this young man, who, in becoming
engaged to June, old Jolyon’s acknowledged heiress, had done so well
for himself? He was an architect, not in itself a sufficient reason for
wearing such a hat. None of the Forsytes happened to be architects, but
one of them knew two architects who would never have worn such a hat
upon a call of ceremony in the London season.

Dangerous--ah, dangerous! June, of course, had not seen this, but,
though not yet nineteen, she was notorious. Had she not said to Mrs.
Soames--who was always so beautifully dressed--that feathers were
vulgar? Mrs. Soames had actually given up wearing feathers, so
dreadfully downright was dear June!

These misgivings, this disapproval, and perfectly genuine distrust, did
not prevent the Forsytes from gathering to old Jolyon’s invitation. An
’.t Home’ at Stanhope Gate was a great rarity; none had been held for
twelve years, not indeed, since old Mrs. Jolyon had died.

Never had there been so full an assembly, for, mysteriously united in
spite of all their differences, they had taken arms against a common
peril. Like cattle when a dog comes into the field, they stood head
to head and shoulder to shoulder, prepared to run upon and trample the
invader to death. They had come, too, no doubt, to get some notion of
what sort of presents they would ultimately be expected to give; for
though the question of wedding gifts was usually graduated in this way:
’.hat are you givin’. Nicholas is givin’ spoons!’--so very much depended
on the bridegroom. If he were sleek, well-brushed, prosperous-looking,
it was more necessary to give him nice things; he would expect them.
In the end each gave exactly what was right and proper, by a species
of family adjustment arrived at as prices are arrived at on the Stock
Exchange--the exact niceties being regulated at Timothy’s commodious,
red-brick residence in Bayswater, overlooking the Park, where dwelt
Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester.

The uneasiness of the Forsyte family has been justified by the simple
mention of the hat. How impossible and wrong would it have been for any
family, with the regard for appearances which should ever characterize
the great upper middle-class, to feel otherwise than uneasy!

The author of the uneasiness stood talking to June by the further door;
his curly hair had a rumpled appearance, as though he found what was
going on around him unusual. He had an air, too, of having a joke all to
himself. George, speaking aside to his brother, Eustace, said:

“Looks as if he might make a bolt of it--the dashing Buccaneer!”

This ‘very singular-looking man,’ as Mrs. Small afterwards called
him, was of medium height and strong build, with a pale, brown face, a
dust-coloured moustache, very prominent cheek-bones, and hollow checks.
His forehead sloped back towards the crown of his head, and bulged out
in bumps over the eyes, like foreheads seen in the Lion-house at the
Zoo. He had sherry-coloured eyes, disconcertingly inattentive at times.
Old Jolyon’s coachman, after driving June and Bosinney to the theatre,
had remarked to the butler:

“I dunno what to make of ‘im. Looks to me for all the world like a
tame leopard.” And every now and then a Forsyte would come up,
sidle round, and take a look at him.

June stood in front, fending off this idle curiosity--a little bit of a
thing, as somebody once said, ‘all hair and spirit,’ with fearless blue
eyes, a firm jaw, and a bright colour, whose face and body seemed too
slender for her crown of red-gold hair.

A tall woman, with a beautiful figure, which some member of the family
had once compared to a heathen goddess, stood looking at these two with
a shadowy smile.

Her hands, gloved in French grey, were crossed one over the other, her
grave, charming face held to one side, and the eyes of all men near were
fastened on it. Her figure swayed, so balanced that the very air seemed
to set it moving. There was warmth, but little colour, in her cheeks;
her large, dark eyes were soft.

But it was at her lips--asking a question, giving an answer, with that
shadowy smile--that men looked; they were sensitive lips, sensuous
and sweet, and through them seemed to come warmth and perfume like the
warmth and perfume of a flower.

The engaged couple thus scrutinized were unconscious of this passive
goddess. It was Bosinney who first noticed her, and asked her name.

June took her lover up to the woman with the beautiful figure.

“Irene is my greatest chum,” she said: “Please be good friends, you
two!”

At the little lady’s command they all three smiled; and while they were
smiling, Soames Forsyte, silently appearing from behind the woman with
the beautiful figure, who was his wife, said:

“Ah! introduce me too!”

He was seldom, indeed, far from Irene’s side at public functions, and
even when separated by the exigencies of social intercourse, could
be seen following her about with his eyes, in which were strange
expressions of watchfulness and longing.

At the window his father, James, was still scrutinizing the marks on the
piece of china.

“I wonder at Jolyon’s allowing this engagement,” he said to Aunt Ann.
“They tell me there’s no chance of their getting married for years.
This young Bosinney” (he made the word a dactyl in opposition to general
usage of a short o) “has got nothing. When Winifred married Dartie, I
made him bring every penny into settlement--lucky thing, too--they’d ha’
had nothing by this time!”

Aunt Ann looked up from her velvet chair. Grey curls banded her
forehead, curls that, unchanged for decades, had extinguished in the
family all sense of time. She made no reply, for she rarely spoke,
husbanding her aged voice; but to James, uneasy of conscience, her look
was as good as an answer.

“Well,” he said, “I couldn’t help Irene’s having no money. Soames was in
such a hurry; he got quite thin dancing attendance on her.”

Putting the bowl pettishly down on the piano, he let his eyes wander to
the group by the door.

“It’s my opinion,” he said unexpectedly, “that it’s just as well as it
is.”

Aunt Ann did not ask him to explain this strange utterance. She knew
what he was thinking. If Irene had no money she would not be so foolish
as to do anything wrong; for they said--they said--she had been asking
for a separate room; but, of course, Soames had not....

James interrupted her reverie:

“But where,” he asked, “was Timothy? Hadn’t he come with them?”

Through Aunt Ann’s compressed lips a tender smile forced its way:

“No, he didn’t think it wise, with so much of this diphtheria about; and
he so liable to take things.”

James answered:

“Well, HE takes good care of himself. I can’t afford to take the care of
myself that he does.”

Nor was it easy to say which, of admiration, envy, or contempt, was
dominant in that remark.

Timothy, indeed, was seldom seen. The baby of the family, a publisher
by profession, he had some years before, when business was at full tide,
scented out the stagnation which, indeed, had not yet come, but which
ultimately, as all agreed, was bound to set in, and, selling his share
in a firm engaged mainly in the production of religious books, had
invested the quite conspicuous proceeds in three per cent. consols. By
this act he had at once assumed an isolated position, no other Forsyte
being content with less than four per cent. for his money; and this
isolation had slowly and surely undermined a spirit perhaps better than
commonly endowed with caution. He had become almost a myth--a kind of
incarnation of security haunting the background of the Forsyte universe.
He had never committed the imprudence of marrying, or encumbering
himself in any way with children.

James resumed, tapping the piece of china:

“This isn’t real old Worcester. I s’pose Jolyon’s told you something
about the young man. From all I can learn, he’s got no business,
no income, and no connection worth speaking of; but then, I know
nothing--nobody tells me anything.”

Aunt Ann shook her head. Over her square-chinned, aquiline old face a
trembling passed; the spidery fingers of her hands pressed against each
other and interlaced, as though she were subtly recharging her will.

The eldest by some years of all the Forsytes, she held a peculiar
position amongst them. Opportunists and egotists one and all--though
not, indeed, more so than their neighbours--they quailed before her
incorruptible figure, and, when opportunities were too strong, what
could they do but avoid her!

Twisting his long, thin legs, James went on:

“Jolyon, he will have his own way. He’s got no children”--and stopped,
recollecting the continued existence of old Jolyon’s son, young Jolyon,
June’s father, who had made such a mess of it, and done for himself
by deserting his wife and child and running away with that foreign
governess. “Well,” he resumed hastily, “if he likes to do these things,
I s’pose he can afford to. Now, what’s he going to give her? I s’pose
he’ll give her a thousand a year; he’s got nobody else to leave his
money to.”

He stretched out his hand to meet that of a dapper, clean-shaven man,
with hardly a hair on his head, a long, broken nose, full lips, and cold
grey eyes under rectangular brows.

“Well, Nick,” he muttered, “how are you?”

Nicholas Forsyte, with his bird-like rapidity and the look of a
preternaturally sage schoolboy (he had made a large fortune, quite
legitimately, out of the companies of which he was a director), placed
within that cold palm the tips of his still colder fingers and hastily
withdrew them.

“I’m bad,” he said, pouting--“been bad all the week; don’t sleep at
night. The doctor can’t tell why. He’s a clever fellow, or I shouldn’t
have him, but I get nothing out of him but bills.”

“Doctors!” said James, coming down sharp on his words: “I’ve had all the
doctors in London for one or another of us. There’s no satisfaction to
be got out of them; they’ll tell you anything. There’s Swithin, now.
What good have they done him? There he is; he’s bigger than ever; he’s
enormous; they can’t get his weight down. Look at him!”

Swithin Forsyte, tall, square, and broad, with a chest like a pouter
pigeon’s in its plumage of bright waistcoats, came strutting towards
them.

“Er--how are you?” he said in his dandified way, aspirating the ‘h’
strongly (this difficult letter was almost absolutely safe in his
keeping)--“how are you?”

Each brother wore an air of aggravation as he looked at the other two,
knowing by experience that they would try to eclipse his ailments.

“We were just saying,” said James, “that you don’t get any thinner.”

Swithin protruded his pale round eyes with the effort of hearing.

“Thinner? I’m in good case,” he said, leaning a little forward, “not one
of your thread-papers like you!”

But, afraid of losing the expansion of his chest, he leaned back
again into a state of immobility, for he prized nothing so highly as a
distinguished appearance.

Aunt Ann turned her old eyes from one to the other. Indulgent and severe
was her look. In turn the three brothers looked at Ann. She was getting
shaky. Wonderful woman! Eighty-six if a day; might live another ten
years, and had never been strong. Swithin and James, the twins, were
only seventy-five, Nicholas a mere baby of seventy or so. All were
strong, and the inference was comforting. Of all forms of property their
respective healths naturally concerned them most.

“I’m very well in myself,” proceeded James, “but my nerves are out of
order. The least thing worries me to death. I shall have to go to Bath.”

“Bath!” said Nicholas. “I’ve tried Harrogate. That’s no good. What I
want is sea air. There’s nothing like Yarmouth. Now, when I go there I
sleep....”

“My liver’s very bad,” interrupted Swithin slowly. “Dreadful pain here;”
 and he placed his hand on his right side.

“Want of exercise,” muttered James, his eyes on the china. He quickly
added: “I get a pain there, too.”

Swithin reddened, a resemblance to a turkey-cock coming upon his old
face.

“Exercise!” he said. “I take plenty: I never use the lift at the Club.”

“I didn’t know,” James hurried out. “I know nothing about anybody;
nobody tells me anything....”

Swithin fixed him with a stare:

“What do you do for a pain there?”

James brightened.

“I take a compound....”

“How are you, uncle?”

June stood before him, her resolute small face raised from her little
height to his great height, and her hand outheld.

The brightness faded from James’s visage.

“How are you?” he said, brooding over her. “So you’re going to Wales
to-morrow to visit your young man’s aunts? You’ll have a lot of rain
there. This isn’t real old Worcester.” He tapped the bowl. “Now, that
set I gave your mother when she married was the genuine thing.”

June shook hands one by one with her three great-uncles, and turned
to Aunt Ann. A very sweet look had come into the old lady’s face, she
kissed the girl’s check with trembling fervour.

“Well, my dear,” she said, “and so you’re going for a whole month!”

The girl passed on, and Aunt Ann looked after her slim little figure.
The old lady’s round, steel grey eyes, over which a film like a bird’s
was beginning to come, followed her wistfully amongst the bustling
crowd, for people were beginning to say good-bye; and her finger-tips,
pressing and pressing against each other, were busy again with the
recharging of her will against that inevitable ultimate departure of her
own.

’.es,’ she thought, ‘everybody’s been most kind; quite a lot of people
come to congratulate her. She ought to be very happy.’ Amongst the
throng of people by the door, the well-dressed throng drawn from the
families of lawyers and doctors, from the Stock Exchange, and all the
innumerable avocations of the upper-middle class--there were only
some twenty percent of Forsytes; but to Aunt Ann they seemed all
Forsytes--and certainly there was not much difference--she saw only
her own flesh and blood. It was her world, this family, and she knew
no other, had never perhaps known any other. All their little secrets,
illnesses, engagements, and marriages, how they were getting on, and
whether they were making money--all this was her property, her delight,
her life; beyond this only a vague, shadowy mist of facts and persons of
no real significance. This it was that she would have to lay down when
it came to her turn to die; this which gave to her that importance, that
secret self-importance, without which none of us can bear to live; and
to this she clung wistfully, with a greed that grew each day! If life
were slipping away from her, this she would retain to the end.

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.

’.uperior 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 3 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!”

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. Good-bye! 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
’.unar,’ 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 figures 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:

’.lways a stubborn beggar, Nick!’

And as Nicholas expressed it to himself:

’.antankerous 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 after life 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
cheek-bones 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 harumscarum, unpractical chap, who would
get himself into no end of difficulties.

She had come to him one day in her slap-dash 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 little 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!

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 out-living 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.

’.eastly 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 made 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 good-bye.

That good-bye 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 new-fangled 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.

’.he 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 war-horse 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 opera-goer 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 L500. The cheque had been returned in a letter from the
’.otch Potch,’ couched in these words.

’.Y DEAREST FATHER,

’.our 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.

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

’.our loving son,

’.o.’

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


’.Y DEAR JO,

’.he sum (L500) stands in my books for the benefit of your boy, under
the name of Jolyon Forsyte, and will be duly-credited with interest at
5 per cent. I hope that you are doing well. My health remains good at
present.

’.ith love, I am,

’.our affectionate Father,

’.OLYON FORSYTE.’


And every year on the 1st 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--water-colours. 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.

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 of to-day 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.

“Good-bye, 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--DINNER 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 sombrely 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 gold-mines 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 country,
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 dinner-time--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!”

And behind this outburst the inarticulate violence of primitive
generations seemed to mutter and grumble.

“Tell me what you think of my new star, Uncle Swithin,” said Irene
softly.

Among the lace in the bosom of her dress was shining a five-pointed
star, made of eleven diamonds. Swithin looked at the star. He had a
pretty taste in stones; no question could have been more sympathetically
devised to distract his attention.

“Who gave you that?” he asked.

“Soames.”

There was no change in her face, but Swithin’s pale eyes bulged as
though he might suddenly have been afflicted with insight.

“I dare say you’re dull at home,” he said. “Any day you like to come and
dine with me, I’ll give you as good a bottle of wine as you’ll get in
London.”

“Miss June Forsyte--Mr. Jolyon Forsyte!... Mr. Boswainey!...”

Swithin moved his arm, and said in a rumbling voice:

“Dinner, now--dinner!”

He took in Irene, on the ground that he had not entertained her since
she was a bride. June was the portion of Bosinney, who was placed
between Irene and his fiancee. On the other side of June was James with
Mrs. Nicholas, then old Jolyon with Mrs. James, Nicholas with Hatty
Chessman, Soames with Mrs. Small, completing, the circle to Swithin
again.

Family dinners of the Forsytes observe certain traditions. There are,
for instance, no hors d’oeuvre. The reason for this is unknown. Theory
among the younger members traces it to the disgraceful price of oysters;
it is more probably due to a desire to come to the point, to a good
practical sense deciding at once that hors d’oeuvre are but poor things.
The Jameses alone, unable to withstand a custom almost universal in Park
Lane, are now and then unfaithful.

A silent, almost morose, inattention to each other succeeds to the
subsidence into their seats, lasting till well into the first entree,
but interspersed with remarks such as, “Tom’s bad again; I can’t tell
what’s the matter with him!” “I suppose Ann doesn’t come down in the
mornings?”--“What’s the name of your doctor, Fanny?” “Stubbs?” “He’s a
quack!”--“Winifred? She’s got too many children. Four, isn’t it? She’s
as thin as a lath!”--“What d’you give for this sherry, Swithin? Too dry
for me!”

With the second glass of champagne, a kind of hum makes itself heard,
which, when divested of casual accessories and resolved into its primal
element, is found to be James telling a story, and this goes on for
a long time, encroaching sometimes even upon what must universally be
recognised as the crowning point of a Forsyte feast--’the saddle of
mutton.’

No Forsyte has given a dinner without providing a saddle of mutton.
There is something in its succulent solidity which makes it suitable to
people ‘of a certain position.’ It is nourishing and tasty; the sort of
thing a man remembers eating. It has a past and a future, like a deposit
paid into a bank; and it is something that can be argued about.

Each branch of the family tenaciously held to a particular locality--old
Jolyon swearing by Dartmoor, James by Welsh, Swithin by Southdown,
Nicholas maintaining that people might sneer, but there was nothing like
New Zealand! As for Roger, the ‘original’ of the brothers, he had been
obliged to invent a locality of his own, and with an ingenuity worthy of
a man who had devised a new profession for his sons, he had discovered
a shop where they sold German; on being remonstrated with, he had proved
his point by producing a butcher’s bill, which showed that he paid more
than any of the others. It was on this occasion that old Jolyon, turning
to June, had said in one of his bursts of philosophy:

“You may depend upon it, they’re a cranky lot, the Forsytes--and you’ll
find it out, as you grow older!”

Timothy alone held apart, for though he ate saddle of mutton heartily,
he was, he said, afraid of it.

To anyone interested psychologically in Forsytes, this great
saddle-of-mutton trait is of prime importance; not only does it
illustrate their tenacity, both collectively and as individuals, but it
marks them as belonging in fibre and instincts to that great class
which believes in nourishment and flavour, and yields to no sentimental
craving for beauty.

Younger members of the family indeed would have done without a joint
altogether, preferring guinea-fowl, or lobster salad--something which
appealed to the imagination, and had less nourishment--but these were
females; or, if not, had been corrupted by their wives, or by mothers,
who having been forced to eat saddle of mutton throughout their married
lives, had passed a secret hostility towards it into the fibre of their
sons.

The great saddle-of-mutton controversy at an end, a Tewkesbury ham
commenced, together with the least touch of West Indian--Swithin was
so long over this course that he caused a block in the progress of the
dinner. To devote himself to it with better heart, he paused in his
conversation.

From his seat by Mrs. Septimus Small Soames was watching. He had a
reason of his own connected with a pet building scheme, for observing
Bosinney. The architect might do for his purpose; he looked clever, as
he sat leaning back in his chair, moodily making little ramparts with
bread-crumbs. Soames noted his dress clothes to be well cut, but too
small, as though made many years ago.

He saw him turn to Irene and say something and her face sparkle as he
often saw it sparkle at other people--never at himself. He tried to
catch what they were saying, but Aunt Juley was speaking.

Hadn’t that always seemed very extraordinary to Soames? Only last Sunday
dear Mr. Scole, had been so witty in his sermon, so sarcastic, “For
what,” he had said, “shall it profit a man if he gain his own soul,
but lose all his property?” That, he had said, was the motto of the
middle-class; now, what had he meant by that? Of course, it might be
what middle-class people believed--she didn’t know; what did Soames
think?

He answered abstractedly: “How should I know? Scoles is a humbug,
though, isn’t he?” For Bosinney was looking round the table, as if
pointing out the peculiarities of the guests, and Soames wondered
what he was saying. By her smile Irene was evidently agreeing with his
remarks. She seemed always to agree with other people.

Her eyes were turned on himself; Soames dropped his glance at once. The
smile had died off her lips.

A humbug? But what did Soames mean? If Mr. Scoles was a humbug, a
clergyman--then anybody might be--it was frightful!

“Well, and so they are!” said Soames.

During Aunt Juley’s momentary and horrified silence he caught some words
of Irene’s that sounded like: ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!’

But Swithin had finished his ham.

“Where do you go for your mushrooms?” he was saying to Irene in a voice
like a courtier’s; “you ought to go to Smileybob’s--he’ll give ‘em you
fresh. These little men, they won’t take the trouble!”

Irene turned to answer him, and Soames saw Bosinney watching her and
smiling to himself. A curious smile the fellow had. A half-simple
arrangement, like a child who smiles when he is pleased. As for George’s
nickname--’The Buccaneer’--he did not think much of that. And, seeing
Bosinney turn to June, Soames smiled too, but sardonically--he did not
like June, who was not looking too pleased.

This was not surprising, for she had just held the following
conversation with James:

“I stayed on the river on my way home, Uncle James, and saw a beautiful
site for a house.”

James, a slow and thorough eater, stopped the process of mastication.

“Eh?” he said. “Now, where was that?”

“Close to Pangbourne.”

James placed a piece of ham in his mouth, and June waited.

“I suppose you wouldn’t know whether the land about there was freehold?”
 he asked at last. “You wouldn’t know anything about the price of land
about there?”

“Yes,” said June; “I made inquiries.” Her little resolute face under its
copper crown was suspiciously eager and aglow.

James regarded her with the air of an inquisitor.

“What? You’re not thinking of buying land!” he ejaculated, dropping his
fork.

June was greatly encouraged by his interest. It had long been her pet
plan that her uncles should benefit themselves and Bosinney by building
country-houses.

“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 to-morrow’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 naive 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
cognisant 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.

’.e’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-glasses full of wine.

’.hat 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
oscillatory 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 hav’in’ 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.

’. 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 naivete”

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



CHAPTER IV--PROJECTION OF THE HOUSE

Soames Forsyte walked out of his green-painted 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 presents, 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, Montpellier 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 times 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 enquiries, 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 on 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.

Soames reflected complacently on the work it would be sure to bring the
young man; for, like every Forsyte, he could be a thorough optimist when
there was anything to be had out of it.

Bosinney’s office was in Sloane Street, close at, hand, so that he would
be able to keep his eye continually on the plans.

Again, Irene would not be to likely to object to leave London if her
greatest friend’s lover were given the job. June’s marriage might depend
on it. Irene could not decently stand in the way of June’s marriage; she
would never do that, he knew her too well. And June would be pleased; of
this he saw the advantage.

Bosinney looked clever, but he had also--and--it was one of his great
attractions--an air as if he did not quite know on which side his bread
were buttered; he should be easy to deal with in money matters. Soames
made this reflection in no defrauding spirit; it was the natural
attitude of his mind--of the mind of any good business man--of all those
thousands of good business men through whom he was threading his way up
Ludgate Hill.

Thus he fulfilled the inscrutable laws of his great class--of human
nature itself--when he reflected, with a sense of comfort, that Bosinney
would be easy to deal with in money matters.

While he elbowed his way on, his eyes, which he usually kept fixed on
the ground before his feet, were attracted upwards by the dome of St.
Paul’s. It had a peculiar fascination for him, that old dome, and
not once, but twice or three times a week, would he halt in his daily
pilgrimage to enter beneath and stop in the side aisles for five or
ten minutes, scrutinizing the names and epitaphs on the monuments. The
attraction for him of this great church was inexplicable, unless it
enabled him to concentrate his thoughts on the business of the day. If
any affair of particular moment, or demanding peculiar acuteness, was
weighing on his mind, he invariably went in, to wander with mouse-like
attention from epitaph to epitaph. Then retiring in the same noiseless
way, he would hold steadily on up Cheapside, a thought more of dogged
purpose in his gait, as though he had seen something which he had made
up his mind to buy.

He went in this morning, but, instead of stealing from monument to
monument, turned his eyes upwards to the columns and spacings of the
walls, and remained motionless.

His uplifted face, with the awed and wistful look which faces take on
themselves in church, was whitened to a chalky hue in the vast building.
His gloved hands were clasped in front over the handle of his umbrella.
He lifted them. Some sacred inspiration perhaps had come to him.

’.es,’ he thought, ‘I must have room to hang my pictures.

That evening, on his return from the City, he called at Bosinney’s
office. He found the architect in his shirt-sleeves, smoking a pipe, and
ruling off lines on a plan. Soames refused a drink, and came at once to
the point.

“If you’ve nothing better to do on Sunday, come down with me to Robin
Hill, and give me your opinion on a building site.”

“Are you going to build?”

“Perhaps,” said Soames; “but don’t speak of it. I just want your
opinion.”

“Quite so,” said the architect.

Soames peered about the room.

“You’re rather high up here,” he remarked.

Any information he could gather about the nature and scope of Bosinney’s
business would be all to the good.

“It does well enough for me so far,” answered the architect. “You’re
accustomed to the swells.”

He knocked out his pipe, but replaced it empty between his teeth; it
assisted him perhaps to carry on the conversation. Soames noted a hollow
in each cheek, made as it were by suction.

“What do you pay for an office like this?” said he.

“Fifty too much,” replied Bosinney.

This answer impressed Soames favourably.

“I suppose it is dear,” he said. “I’ll call for you--on Sunday about
eleven.”

The following Sunday therefore he called for Bosinney in a hansom, and
drove him to the station. On arriving at Robin Hill, they found no cab,
and started to walk the mile and a half to the site.

It was the 1st of August--a perfect day, with a burning sun and
cloudless sky--and in the straight, narrow road leading up the hill
their feet kicked up a yellow dust.

“Gravel soil,” remarked Soames, and sideways he glanced at the coat
Bosinney wore. Into the side-pockets of this coat were thrust bundles
of papers, and under one arm was carried a queer-looking stick. Soames
noted these and other peculiarities.

No one but a clever man, or, indeed, a buccaneer, would have taken such
liberties with his appearance; and though these eccentricities were
revolting to Soames, he derived a certain satisfaction from them, as
evidence of qualities by which he must inevitably profit. If the fellow
could build houses, what did his clothes matter?

“I told you,” he said, “that I want this house to be a surprise, so
don’t say anything about it. I never talk of my affairs until they’re
carried through.”

Bosinney nodded.

“Let women into your plans,” pursued Soames, “and you never know where
it’ll end.”

“Ah!” Said Bosinney, “women are the devil!”

This feeling had long been at the--bottom of Soames’s heart; he had
never, however, put it into words.

“Oh!” he Muttered, “so you’re beginning to....” He stopped, but added,
with an uncontrollable burst of spite: “June’s got a temper of her
own--always had.”

“A temper’s not a bad thing in an angel.”

Soames had never called Irene an angel. He could not so have violated
his best instincts, letting other people into the secret of her value,
and giving himself away. He made no reply.

They had struck into a half-made road across a warren. A cart-track led
at right-angles to a gravel pit, beyond which the chimneys of a cottage
rose amongst a clump of trees at the border of a thick wood. Tussocks of
feathery grass covered the rough surface of the ground, and out of these
the larks soared into the haze of sunshine. On the far horizon, over a
countless succession of fields and hedges, rose a line of downs.

Soames led till they had crossed to the far side, and there he stopped.
It was the chosen site; but now that he was about to divulge the spot to
another he had become uneasy.

“The agent lives in that cottage,” he said; “he’ll give us some
lunch--we’d better have lunch before we go into this matter.”

He again took the lead to the cottage, where the agent, a tall man named
Oliver, with a heavy face and grizzled beard, welcomed them. During
lunch, which Soames hardly touched, he kept looking at Bosinney, and
once or twice passed his silk handkerchief stealthily over his forehead.
The meal came to an end at last, and Bosinney rose.

“I dare say you’ve got business to talk over,” he said; “I’ll just go
and nose about a bit.” Without waiting for a reply he strolled out.

Soames was solicitor to this estate, and he spent nearly an hour in the
agent’s company, looking at ground-plans and discussing the Nicholl and
other mortgages; it was as it were by an afterthought that he brought up
the question of the building site.

“Your people,” he said, “ought to come down in their price to me,
considering that I shall be the first to build.”

Oliver shook his head.

The site you’ve fixed on, Sir, he said, “is the cheapest we’ve got.
Sites at the top of the slope are dearer by a good bit.”

“Mind,” said Soames, “I’ve not decided; it’s quite possible I shan’t
build at all. The ground rent’s very high.”

“Well, Mr. Forsyte, I shall be sorry if you go off, and I think you’ll
make a mistake, Sir. There’s not a bit of land near London with such a
view as this, nor one that’s cheaper, all things considered; we’ve only
to advertise, to get a mob of people after it.”

They looked at each other. Their faces said very plainly: ‘I respect
you as a man of business; and you can’t expect me to believe a word you
say.’

Well, repeated Soames, “I haven’t made up my mind; the thing will very
likely go off!” With these words, taking up his umbrella, he put his
chilly hand into the agent’s, withdrew it without the faintest pressure,
and went out into the sun.

He walked slowly back towards the site in deep thought. His instinct
told him that what the agent had said was true. A cheap site. And the
beauty of it was, that he knew the agent did not really think it cheap;
so that his own intuitive knowledge was a victory over the agent’s.

’.heap or not, I mean to have it,’ he thought.

The larks sprang up in front of his feet, the air was full of
butterflies, a sweet fragrance rose from the wild grasses. The sappy
scent of the bracken stole forth from the wood, where, hidden in the
depths, pigeons were cooing, and from afar on the warm breeze, came the
rhythmic chiming of church bells.

Soames walked with his eyes on the ground, his lips opening and closing
as though in anticipation of a delicious morsel. But when he arrived
at the site, Bosinney was nowhere to be seen. After waiting some little
time, he crossed the warren in the direction of the slope. He would have
shouted, but dreaded the sound of his voice.

The warren was as lonely as a prairie, its silence only broken by the
rustle of rabbits bolting to their holes, and the song of the larks.

Soames, the pioneer-leader of the great Forsyte army advancing to
the civilization of this wilderness, felt his spirit daunted by the
loneliness, by the invisible singing, and the hot, sweet air. He had
begun to retrace his steps when he at last caught sight of Bosinney.

The architect was sprawling under a large oak tree, whose trunk, with a
huge spread of bough and foliage, ragged with age, stood on the verge of
the rise.

Soames had to touch him on the shoulder before he looked up.

“Hallo! Forsyte,” he said, “I’ve found the very place for your house!
Look here!”

Soames stood and looked, then he said, coldly:

“You may be very clever, but this site will cost me half as much again.”

“Hang the cost, man. Look at the view!”

Almost from their feet stretched ripe corn, dipping to a small dark
copse beyond. A plain of fields and hedges spread to the distant
grey-bluedowns. In a silver streak to the right could be seen the line
of the river.

The sky was so blue, and the sun so bright, that an eternal summer
seemed to reign over this prospect. Thistledown floated round them,
enraptured by the serenity, of the ether. The heat danced over the
corn, and, pervading all, was a soft, insensible hum, like the murmur of
bright minutes holding revel between earth and heaven.

Soames looked. In spite of himself, something swelled in his breast.
To live here in sight of all this, to be able to point it out to his
friends, to talk of it, to possess it! His cheeks flushed. The warmth,
the radiance, the glow, were sinking into his senses as, four years
before, Irene’s beauty had sunk into his senses and made him long
for her. He stole a glance at Bosinney, whose eyes, the eyes of the
coachman’s ‘half-tame leopard,’ seemed running wild over the landscape.
The sunlight had caught the promontories of the fellow’s face, the bumpy
cheekbones, the point of his chin, the vertical ridges above his brow;
and Soames watched this rugged, enthusiastic, careless face with an
unpleasant feeling.

A long, soft ripple of wind flowed over the corn, and brought a puff of
warm air into their faces.

“I could build you a teaser here,” said Bosinney, breaking the silence
at last.

“I dare say,” replied Soames, drily. “You haven’t got to pay for it.”

“For about eight thousand I could build you a palace.”

Soames had become very pale--a struggle was going on within him. He
dropped his eyes, and said stubbornly:

“I can’t afford it.”

And slowly, with his mousing walk, he led the way back to the first
site.

They spent some time there going into particulars of the projected
house, and then Soames returned to the agent’s cottage.

He came out in about half an hour, and, joining Bosinney, started for
the station.

“Well,” he said, hardly opening his lips, “I’ve taken that site of
yours, after all.”

And again he was silent, confusedly debating how it was that this
fellow, whom by habit he despised, should have overborne his own
decision.



CHAPTER V--A FORSYTE MENAGE

Like the enlightened thousands of his class and generation in this great
city of London, who no longer believe in red velvet chairs, and know
that groups of modern Italian marble are ‘vieux jeu,’ Soames Forsyte
inhabited a house which did what it could. It owned a copper door
knocker of individual design, windows which had been altered to open
outwards, hanging flower boxes filled with fuchsias, and at the back
(a great feature) a little court tiled with jade-green tiles, and
surrounded by pink hydrangeas in peacock-blue tubs. Here, under a
parchment-coloured Japanese sunshade covering the whole end, inhabitants
or visitors could be screened from the eyes of the curious while they
drank tea and examined at their leisure the latest of Soames’s little
silver boxes.

The inner decoration favoured the First Empire and William Morris.
For its size, the house was commodious; there were countless nooks
resembling birds’ nests, and little things made of silver were deposited
like eggs.

In this general perfection two kinds of fastidiousness were at war.
There lived here a mistress who would have dwelt daintily on a desert
island; a master whose daintiness was, as it were, an investment,
cultivated by the owner for his advancement, in accordance with the laws
of competition. This competitive daintiness had caused Soames in his
Marlborough days to be the first boy into white waistcoats in summer,
and corduroy waistcoats in winter, had prevented him from ever appearing
in public with his tie climbing up his collar, and induced him to dust
his patent leather boots before a great multitude assembled on Speech
Day to hear him recite Moliere.

Skin-like immaculateness had grown over Soames, as over many Londoners;
impossible to conceive of him with a hair out of place, a tie deviating
one-eighth of an inch from the perpendicular, a collar unglossed! He
would not have gone without a bath for worlds--it was the fashion to
take baths; and how bitter was his scorn of people who omitted them!

But Irene could be imagined, like some nymph, bathing in wayside
streams, for the joy of the freshness and of seeing her own fair body.

In this conflict throughout the house the woman had gone to the wall. As
in the struggle between Saxon and Celt still going on within the nation,
the more impressionable and receptive temperament had had forced on it a
conventional superstructure.

Thus the house had acquired a close resemblance to hundreds of other
houses with the same high aspirations, having become: ‘That very
charming little house of the Soames Forsytes, quite individual, my
dear--really elegant.’

For Soames Forsyte--read James Peabody, Thomas Atkins, or Emmanuel
Spagnoletti, the name in fact of any upper-middle class Englishman
in London with any pretensions to taste; and though the decoration be
different, the phrase is just.

On the evening of August 8, a week after the expedition to Robin Hill,
in the dining-room of this house--’quite individual, my dear--really
elegant’--Soames and Irene were seated at dinner. A hot dinner on
Sundays was a little distinguishing elegance common to this house and
many others. Early in married life Soames had laid down the rule: ‘The
servants must give us hot dinner on Sundays--they’ve nothing to do but
play the concertina.’

The custom had produced no revolution. For--to Soames a rather
deplorable sign--servants were devoted to Irene, who, in defiance of
all safe tradition, appeared to recognise their right to a share in the
weaknesses of human nature.

The happy pair were seated, not opposite each other, but rectangularly,
at the handsome rosewood table; they dined without a cloth--a
distinguishing elegance--and so far had not spoken a word.

Soames liked to talk during dinner about business, or what he had been
buying, and so long as he talked Irene’s silence did not distress him.
This evening he had found it impossible to talk. The decision to build
had been weighing on his mind all the week, and he had made up his mind
to tell her.

His nervousness about this disclosure irritated him profoundly; she had
no business to make him feel like that--a wife and a husband being
one person. She had not looked at him once since they sat down; and he
wondered what on earth she had been thinking about all the time. It was
hard, when a man worked as he did, making money for her--yes, and with
an ache in his heart--that she should sit there, looking--looking as if
she saw the walls of the room closing in. It was enough to make a man
get up and leave the table.

The light from the rose-shaded lamp fell on her neck and arms--Soames
liked her to dine in a low dress, it gave him an inexpressible feeling
of superiority to the majority of his acquaintance, whose wives were
contented with their best high frocks or with tea-gowns, when they dined
at home. Under that rosy light her amber-coloured hair and fair skin
made strange contrast with her dark brown eyes.

Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep
tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and
quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the
woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who,
competitive, and full of common-sense, had no occasion for it; and
Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that
he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not,
as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very
secrets of her heart.

Out of his other property, out of all the things he had collected, his
silver, his pictures, his houses, his investments, he got a secret and
intimate feeling; out of her he got none.

In this house of his there was writing on every wall. His business-like
temperament protested against a mysterious warning that she was not made
for him. He had married this woman, conquered her, made her his own, and
it seemed to him contrary to the most fundamental of all laws, the law
of possession, that he could do no more than own her body--if indeed he
could do that, which he was beginning to doubt. If any one had asked him
if he wanted to own her soul, the question would have seemed to him both
ridiculous and sentimental. But he did so want, and the writing said he
never would.

She was ever silent, passive, gracefully averse; as though terrified
lest by word, motion, or sign she might lead him to believe that she was
fond of him; and he asked himself: Must I always go on like this?

Like most novel readers of his generation (and Soames was a great novel
reader), literature coloured his view of life; and he had imbibed the
belief that it was only a question of time.

In the end the husband always gained the affection of his wife. Even
in those cases--a class of book he was not very fond of--which ended in
tragedy, the wife always died with poignant regrets on her lips, or if
it were the husband who died--unpleasant thought--threw herself on his
body in an agony of remorse.

He often took Irene to the theatre, instinctively choosing the modern
Society Plays with the modern Society conjugal problem, so fortunately
different from any conjugal problem in real life. He found that they too
always ended in the same way, even when there was a lover in the case.
While he was watching the play Soames often sympathized with the lover;
but before he reached home again, driving with Irene in a hansom, he saw
that this would not do, and he was glad the play had ended as it had.
There was one class of husband that had just then come into fashion,
the strong, rather rough, but extremely sound man, who was peculiarly
successful at the end of the play; with this person Soames was really
not in sympathy, and had it not been for his own position, would have
expressed his disgust with the fellow. But he was so conscious of
how vital to himself was the necessity for being a successful, even a
’.trong,’ husband, that he never spoke of a distaste born perhaps by
the perverse processes of Nature out of a secret fund of brutality in
himself.

But Irene’s silence this evening was exceptional. He had never before
seen such an expression on her face. And since it is always the unusual
which alarms, Soames was alarmed. He ate his savoury, and hurried the
maid as she swept off the crumbs with the silver sweeper. When she had
left the room, he filled his glass with wine and said:

“Anybody been here this afternoon?”

“June.”

“What did she want?” It was an axiom with the Forsytes that people did
not go anywhere unless they wanted something. “Came to talk about her
lover, I suppose?”

Irene made no reply.

“It looks to me,” continued Soames, “as if she were sweeter on him than
he is on her. She’s always following him about.”

Irene’s eyes made him feel uncomfortable.

“You’ve no business to say such a thing!” she exclaimed.

“Why not? Anybody can see it.”

“They cannot. And if they could, it’s disgraceful to say so.”

Soames’s composure gave way.

“You’re a pretty wife!” he said. But secretly he wondered at the heat of
her reply; it was unlike her. “You’re cracked about June! I can tell
you one thing: now that she has the Buccaneer in tow, she doesn’t care
twopence about you, and, you’ll find it out. But you won’t see so much
of her in future; we’re going to live in the country.”

He had been glad to get his news out under cover of this burst of
irritation. He had expected a cry of dismay; the silence with which his
pronouncement was received alarmed him.

“You don’t seem interested,” he was obliged to add.

“I knew it already.”

He looked at her sharply.

“Who told you?”

“June.”

“How did she know?”

Irene did not answer. Baffled and uncomfortable, he said:

“It’s a fine thing for Bosinney, it’ll be the making of him. I suppose
she’s told you all about it?”

“Yes.”

There was another pause, and then Soames said:

“I suppose you don’t want to, go?”

Irene made no reply.

“Well, I can’t tell what you want. You never seem contented here.”

“Have my wishes anything to do with it?”

She took the vase of roses and left the room. Soames remained seated.
Was it for this that he had signed that contract? Was it for this that
he was going to spend some ten thousand pounds? Bosinney’s phrase came
back to him: “Women are the devil!”

But presently he grew calmer. It might have, been worse. She might have
flared up. He had expected something more than this. It was lucky, after
all, that June had broken the ice for him. She must have wormed it out
of Bosinney; he might have known she would.

He lighted his cigarette. After all, Irene had not made a scene! She
would come round--that was the best of her; she was cold, but not sulky.
And, puffing the cigarette smoke at a lady-bird on the shining table,
he plunged into a reverie about the house. It was no good worrying; he
would go and make it up presently. She would be sitting out there in the
dark, under the Japanese sunshade, knitting. A beautiful, warm night....

In truth, June had come in that afternoon with shining eyes, and the
words: “Soames is a brick! It’s splendid for Phil--the very thing for
him!”

Irene’s face remaining dark and puzzled, she went on:

“Your new house at Robin Hill, of course. What? Don’t you know?”

Irene did not know.

“Oh! then, I suppose I oughtn’t to have told you!” Looking impatiently
at her friend, she cried: “You look as if you didn’t care. Don’t you
see, it’s what I’ve’ been praying for--the very chance he’s been wanting
all this time. Now you’ll see what he can do;” and thereupon she poured
out the whole story.

Since her own engagement she had not seemed much interested in her
friend’s position; the hours she spent with Irene were given to
confidences of her own; and at times, for all her affectionate pity,
it was impossible to keep out of her smile a trace of compassionate
contempt for the woman who had made such a mistake in her life--such a
vast, ridiculous mistake.

“He’s to have all the decorations as well--a free hand. It’s perfect--”
 June broke into laughter, her little figure quivered gleefully; she
raised her hand, and struck a blow at a muslin curtain. “Do you, know
I even asked Uncle James....” But, with a sudden dislike to mentioning
that incident, she stopped; and presently, finding her friend so
unresponsive, went away. She looked back from the pavement, and Irene
was still standing in the doorway. In response to her farewell wave,
Irene put her hand to her brow, and, turning slowly, shut the door....

Soames went to the drawing-room presently, and peered at her through the
window.

Out in the shadow of the Japanese sunshade she was sitting very still,
the lace on her white shoulders stirring with the soft rise and fall of
her bosom.

But about this silent creature sitting there so motionless, in the dark,
there seemed a warmth, a hidden fervour of feeling, as if the whole of
her being had been stirred, and some change were taking place in its
very depths.

He stole back to the dining-room unnoticed.



CHAPTER VI--JAMES AT LARGE

It was not long before Soames’s determination to build went the round
of the family, and created the flutter that any decision connected with
property should make among Forsytes.

It was not his fault, for he had been determined that no one should
know. June, in the fulness of her heart, had told Mrs. Small, giving her
leave only to tell Aunt Ann--she thought it would cheer her, the poor
old sweet! for Aunt Ann had kept her room now for many days.

Mrs. Small told Aunt Ann at once, who, smiling as she lay back on her
pillows, said in her distinct, trembling old voice:

“It’s very nice for dear June; but I hope they will be careful--it’s
rather dangerous!”

When she was left alone again, a frown, like a cloud presaging a rainy
morrow, crossed her face.

While she was lying there so many days the process of recharging her
will went on all the time; it spread to her face, too, and tightening
movements were always in action at the corners of her lips.

The maid Smither, who had been in her service since girlhood, and was
spoken of as “Smither--a good girl--but so slow!”--the maid Smither
performed every morning with extreme punctiliousness the crowning
ceremony of that ancient toilet. Taking from the recesses of their pure
white band-box those flat, grey curls, the insignia of personal dignity,
she placed them securely in her mistress’s hands, and turned her back.

And every day Aunts Juley and Hester were required to come and report
on Timothy; what news there was of Nicholas; whether dear June had
succeeded in getting Jolyon to shorten the engagement, now that Mr.
Bosinney was building Soames a house; whether young Roger’s wife was
really--expecting; how the operation on Archie had succeeded; and what
Swithin had done about that empty house in Wigmore Street, where the
tenant had lost all his money and treated him so badly; above all, about
Soames; was Irene still--still asking for a separate room? And every
morning Smither was told: “I shall be coming down this afternoon,
Smither, about two o’clock. I shall want your arm, after all these days
in bed!”

After telling Aunt Ann, Mrs. Small had spoken of the house in the
strictest confidence to Mrs. Nicholas, who in her turn had asked
Winifred Dartie for confirmation, supposing, of course, that, being
Soames’s sister, she would know all about it. Through her it had in
due course come round to the ears of James. He had been a good deal
agitated.

“Nobody,” he said, “told him anything.” And, rather than go direct to
Soames himself, of whose taciturnity he was afraid, he took his umbrella
and went round to Timothy’s.

He found Mrs. Septimus and Hester (who had been told--she was so safe,
she found it tiring to talk) ready, and indeed eager, to discuss the
news. It was very good of dear Soames, they thought, to employ Mr.
Bosinney, but rather risky. What had George named him? ‘The Buccaneer’
How droll! But George was always droll! However, it would be all in
the family they supposed they must really look upon Mr. Bosinney as
belonging to the family, though it seemed strange.

James here broke in:

“Nobody knows anything about him. I don’t see what Soames wants with a
young man like that. I shouldn’t be surprised if Irene had put her oar
in. I shall speak to....”

“Soames,” interposed Aunt Juley, “told Mr. Bosinney that he didn’t wish
it mentioned. He wouldn’t like it to be talked about, I’m sure, and if
Timothy knew he would be very vexed, I....”

James put his hand behind his ear:

“What?” he said. “I’m getting very deaf. I suppose I don’t hear people.
Emily’s got a bad toe. We shan’t be able to start for Wales till the
end of the month. There’s always something!” And, having got what he
wanted, he took his hat and went away.

It was a fine afternoon, and he walked across the Park towards Soames’s,
where he intended to dine, for Emily’s toe kept her in bed, and Rachel
and Cicely were on a visit to the country. He took the slanting path
from the Bayswater side of the Row to the Knightsbridge Gate, across a
pasture of short, burnt grass, dotted with blackened sheep, strewn
with seated couples and strange waifs; lying prone on their faces, like
corpses on a field over which the wave of battle has rolled.

He walked rapidly, his head bent, looking neither to right nor, left.
The appearance of this park, the centre of his own battle-field, where
he had all his life been fighting, excited no thought or speculation
in his mind. These corpses flung down, there, from out the press and
turmoil of the struggle, these pairs of lovers sitting cheek by jowl for
an hour of idle Elysium snatched from the monotony of their treadmill,
awakened no fancies in his mind; he had outlived that kind of
imagination; his nose, like the nose of a sheep, was fastened to the
pastures on which he browsed.

One of his tenants had lately shown a disposition to be behind-hand in
his rent, and it had become a grave question whether he had not better
turn him out at once, and so run the risk of not re-letting before
Christmas. Swithin had just been let in very badly, but it had served
him right--he had held on too long.

He pondered this as he walked steadily, holding his umbrella carefully
by the wood, just below the crook of the handle, so as to keep the
ferule off the ground, and not fray the silk in the middle. And, with
his thin, high shoulders stooped, his long legs moving with swift
mechanical precision, this passage through the Park, where the sun shone
with a clear flame on so much idleness--on so many human evidences of
the remorseless battle of Property, raging beyond its ring--was like the
flight of some land bird across the sea.

He felt a touch on the arm as he came out at Albert Gate.

It was Soames, who, crossing from the shady side of Piccadilly, where he
had been walking home from the office, had suddenly appeared alongside.

“Your mother’s in bed,” said James; “I was, just coming to you, but I
suppose I shall be in the way.”

The outward relations between James and his son were marked by a lack
of sentiment peculiarly Forsytean, but for all that the two were by no
means unattached. Perhaps they regarded one another as an investment;
certainly they were solicitous of each other’s welfare, glad of each
other’s company. They had never exchanged two words upon the more
intimate problems of life, or revealed in each other’s presence the
existence of any deep feeling.

Something beyond the power of word-analysis bound them together,
something hidden deep in the fibre of nations and families--for blood,
they say, is thicker than water--and neither of them was a cold-blooded
man. Indeed, in James love of his children was now the prime motive of
his existence. To have creatures who were parts of himself, to whom he
might transmit the money he saved, was at the root of his saving;
and, at seventy-five, what was left that could give him pleasure,
but--saving? The kernel of life was in this saving for his children.

Than James Forsyte, notwithstanding all his ‘Jonah-isms,’ there was
no saner man (if the leading symptom of sanity, as we are told, is
self-preservation, though without doubt Timothy went too far) in all
this London, of which he owned so much, and loved with such a dumb love,
as the centre of his opportunities. He had the marvellous instinctive
sanity of the middle class. In him--more than in Jolyon, with his
masterful will and his moments of tenderness and philosophy--more
than in Swithin, the martyr to crankiness--Nicholas, the sufferer from
ability--and Roger, the victim of enterprise--beat the true pulse of
compromise; of all the brothers he was least remarkable in mind and
person, and for that reason more likely to live for ever.

To James, more than to any of the others, was “the family” significant
and dear. There had always been something primitive and cosy in his
attitude towards life; he loved the family hearth, he loved gossip, and
he loved grumbling. All his decisions were formed of a cream which he
skimmed off the family mind; and, through that family, off the minds
of thousands of other families of similar fibre. Year after year,
week after week, he went to Timothy’s, and in his brother’s front
drawing-room--his legs twisted, his long white whiskers framing his
clean-shaven mouth--would sit watching the family pot simmer, the cream
rising to the top; and he would go away sheltered, refreshed, comforted,
with an indefinable sense of comfort.

Beneath the adamant of his self-preserving instinct there was much real
softness in James; a visit to Timothy’s was like an hour spent in the
lap of a mother; and the deep craving he himself had for the protection
of the family wing reacted in turn on his feelings towards his own
children; it was a nightmare to him to think of them exposed to the
treatment of the world, in money, health, or reputation. When his old
friend John Street’s son volunteered for special service, he shook his
head querulously, and wondered what John Street was about to allow it;
and when young Street was assagaied, he took it so much to heart that he
made a point of calling everywhere with the special object of saying: He
knew how it would be--he’d no patience with them!

When his son-in-law Dartie had that financial crisis, due to speculation
in Oil Shares, James made himself ill worrying over it; the knell of all
prosperity seemed to have sounded. It took him three months and a visit
to Baden-Baden to get better; there was something terrible in the idea
that but for his, James’s, money, Dartie’s name might have appeared in
the Bankruptcy List.

Composed of a physiological mixture so sound that if he had an earache
he thought he was dying, he regarded the occasional ailments of his
wife and children as in the nature of personal grievances, special
interventions of Providence for the purpose of destroying his peace of
mind; but he did not believe at all in the ailments of people outside
his own immediate family, affirming them in every case to be due to
neglected liver.

His universal comment was: “What can they expect? I have it myself, if
I’m not careful!”

When he went to Soames’s that evening he felt that life was hard on him:
There was Emily with a bad toe, and Rachel gadding about in the country;
he got no sympathy from anybody; and Ann, she was ill--he did not
believe she would last through the summer; he had called there three
times now without her being able to see him! And this idea of Soames’s,
building a house, that would have to be looked into. As to the trouble
with Irene, he didn’t know what was to come of that--anything might come
of it!

He entered 62, Montpellier Square with the fullest intentions of being
miserable. It was already half-past seven, and Irene, dressed
for dinner, was seated in the drawing-room. She was wearing her
gold-coloured frock--for, having been displayed at a dinner-party, a
soiree, and a dance, it was now to be worn at home--and she had
adorned the bosom with a cascade of lace, on which James’s eyes riveted
themselves at once.

“Where do you get your things?” he said in an aggravated voice. “I never
see Rachel and Cicely looking half so well. That rose-point, now--that’s
not real!”

Irene came close, to prove to him that he was in error.

And, in spite of himself, James felt the influence of her deference,
of the faint seductive perfume exhaling from her. No self-respecting
Forsyte surrendered at a blow; so he merely said: He didn’t know--he
expected she was spending a pretty penny on dress.

The gong sounded, and, putting her white arm within his, Irene took him
into the dining-room. She seated him in Soames’s usual place, round the
corner on her left. The light fell softly there, so that he would not
be worried by the gradual dying of the day; and she began to talk to him
about himself.

Presently, over James came a change, like the mellowing that steals upon
a fruit in the sun; a sense of being caressed, and praised, and petted,
and all without the bestowal of a single caress or word of praise. He
felt that what he was eating was agreeing with him; he could not get
that feeling at home; he did not know when he had enjoyed a glass of
champagne so much, and, on inquiring the brand and price, was surprised
to find that it was one of which he had a large stock himself, but could
never drink; he instantly formed the resolution to let his wine merchant
know that he had been swindled.

Looking up from his food, he remarked:

“You’ve a lot of nice things about the place. Now, what did you give for
that sugar-sifter? Shouldn’t wonder if it was worth money!”

He was particularly pleased with the appearance of a picture, on the
wall opposite, which he himself had given them:

“I’d no idea it was so good!” he said.

They rose to go into the drawing-room, and James followed Irene closely.

“That’s what I call a capital little dinner,” he murmured, breathing
pleasantly down on her shoulder; “nothing heavy--and not too
Frenchified. But I can’t get it at home. I pay my cook sixty pounds a
year, but she can’t give me a dinner like that!”

He had as yet made no allusion to the building of the house, nor did he
when Soames, pleading the excuse of business, betook himself to the room
at the top, where he kept his pictures.

James was left alone with his daughter-in-law. The glow of the wine,
and of an excellent liqueur, was still within him. He felt quite warm
towards her. She was really a taking little thing; she listened to you,
and seemed to understand what you were saying; and, while talking, he
kept examining her figure, from her bronze-coloured shoes to the waved
gold of her hair. She was leaning back in an Empire chair, her shoulders
poised against the top--her body, flexibly straight and unsupported
from the hips, swaying when she moved, as though giving to the arms of a
lover. Her lips were smiling, her eyes half-closed.

It may have been a recognition of danger in the very charm of her
attitude, or a twang of digestion, that caused a sudden dumbness to fall
on James. He did not remember ever having been quite alone with Irene
before. And, as he looked at her, an odd feeling crept over him, as
though he had come across something strange and foreign.

Now what was she thinking about--sitting back like that?

Thus when he spoke it was in a sharper voice, as if he had been awakened
from a pleasant dream.

“What d’you do with yourself all day?” he said. “You never come round to
Park Lane!”

She seemed to be making very lame excuses, and James did not look at
her. He did not want to believe that she was really avoiding them--it
would mean too much.

“I expect the fact is, you haven’t time,” he said; “You’re always
about with June. I expect you’re useful to her with her young man,
chaperoning, and one thing and another. They tell me she’s never at home
now; your Uncle Jolyon he doesn’t like it, I fancy, being left so much
alone as he is. They tell me she’s always hanging about for this young
Bosinney; I suppose he comes here every day. Now, what do you think of
him? D’you think he knows his own mind? He seems to me a poor thing. I
should say the grey mare was the better horse!”

The colour deepened in Irene’s face; and James watched her suspiciously.

“Perhaps you don’t quite understand Mr. Bosinney,” she said.

“Don’t understand him!” James hummed out: “Why not?--you can see he’s
one of these artistic chaps. They say he’s clever--they all think
they’re clever. You know more about him than I do,” he added; and again
his suspicious glance rested on her.

“He is designing a house for Soames,” she said softly, evidently trying
to smooth things over.

“That brings me to what I was going to say,” continued James; “I don’t
know what Soames wants with a young man like that; why doesn’t he go to
a first-rate man?”

“Perhaps Mr. Bosinney is first-rate!”

James rose, and took a turn with bent head.

“That’s it’,” he said, “you young people, you all stick together; you
all think you know best!”

Halting his tall, lank figure before her, he raised a finger, and
levelled it at her bosom, as though bringing an indictment against her
beauty:

“All I can say is, these artistic people, or whatever they call
themselves, they’re as unreliable as they can be; and my advice to you
is, don’t you have too much to do with him!”

Irene smiled; and in the curve of her lips was a strange provocation.
She seemed to have lost her deference. Her breast rose and fell as
though with secret anger; she drew her hands inwards from their rest on
the arms of her chair until the tips of her fingers met, and her dark
eyes looked unfathomably at James.

The latter gloomily scrutinized the floor.

“I tell you my opinion,” he said, “it’s a pity you haven’t got a child
to think about, and occupy you!”

A brooding look came instantly on Irene’s face, and even James became
conscious of the rigidity that took possession of her whole figure
beneath the softness of its silk and lace clothing.

He was frightened by the effect he had produced, and like most men with
but little courage, he sought at once to justify himself by bullying.

“You don’t seem to care about going about. Why don’t you drive down to
Hurlingham with us? And go to the theatre now and then. At your time of
life you ought to take an interest in things. You’re a young woman!”

The brooding look darkened on her face; he grew nervous.

“Well, I know nothing about it,” he said; “nobody tells me anything.
Soames ought to be able to take care of himself. If he can’t take care
of himself he mustn’t look to me--that’s all.”

Biting the corner of his forefinger he stole a cold, sharp look at his
daughter-in-law.

He encountered her eyes fixed on his own, so dark and deep, that he
stopped, and broke into a gentle perspiration.

“Well, I must be going,” he said after a short pause, and a minute later
rose, with a slight appearance of surprise, as though he had expected
to be asked to stop. Giving his hand to Irene, he allowed himself to be
conducted to the door, and let out into the street. He would not have a
cab, he would walk, Irene was to say good-night to Soames for him, and
if she wanted a little gaiety, well, he would drive her down to Richmond
any day.

He walked home, and going upstairs, woke Emily out of the first sleep
she had had for four and twenty hours, to tell her that it was his
impression things were in a bad way at Soames’s; on this theme he
descanted for half an hour, until at last, saying that he would not
sleep a wink, he turned on his side and instantly began to snore.

In Montpellier Square Soames, who had come from the picture room, stood
invisible at the top of the stairs, watching Irene sort the letters
brought by the last post. She turned back into the drawing-room; but in
a minute came out, and stood as if listening. Then she came stealing up
the stairs, with a kitten in her arms. He could see her face bent over
the little beast, which was purring against her neck. Why couldn’t she
look at him like that?

Suddenly she saw him, and her face changed.

“Any letters for me?” he said.

“Three.”

He stood aside, and without another word she passed on into the bedroom.



CHAPTER VII--OLD JOLYON’S PECCADILLO

Old Jolyon came out of Lord’s cricket ground that same afternoon with
the intention of going home. He had not reached Hamilton Terrace before
he changed his mind, and hailing a cab, gave the driver an address in
Wistaria Avenue. He had taken a resolution.

June had hardly been at home at all that week; she had given him nothing
of her company for a long time past, not, in fact, since she had become
engaged to Bosinney. He never asked her for her company. It was not his
habit to ask people for things! She had just that one idea now--Bosinney
and his affairs--and she left him stranded in his great house, with a
parcel of servants, and not a soul to speak to from morning to night.
His Club was closed for cleaning; his Boards in recess; there was
nothing, therefore, to take him into the City. June had wanted him to go
away; she would not go herself, because Bosinney was in London.

But where was he to go by himself? He could not go abroad alone; the sea
upset his liver; he hated hotels. Roger went to a hydropathic--he was
not going to begin that at his time of life, those new-fangled places
we’re all humbug!

With such formulas he clothed to himself the desolation of his spirit;
the lines down his face deepening, his eyes day by day looking forth
with the melancholy which sat so strangely on a face wont to be strong
and serene.

And so that afternoon he took this journey through St. John’s Wood, in
the golden-light that sprinkled the rounded green bushes of the acacia’s
before the little houses, in the summer sunshine that seemed holding a
revel over the little gardens; and he looked about him with interest;
for this was a district which no Forsyte entered without open
disapproval and secret curiosity.

His cab stopped in front of a small house of that peculiar buff colour
which implies a long immunity from paint. It had an outer gate, and a
rustic approach.

He stepped out, his bearing extremely composed; his massive head, with
its drooping moustache and wings of white hair, very upright, under an
excessively large top hat; his glance firm, a little angry. He had been
driven into this!

“Mrs. Jolyon Forsyte at home?”

“Oh, yes sir!--what name shall I say, if you please, sir?”

Old Jolyon could not help twinkling at the little maid as he gave his
name. She seemed to him such a funny little toad!

And he followed her through the dark hall, into a small double,
drawing-room, where the furniture was covered in chintz, and the little
maid placed him in a chair.

“They’re all in the garden, sir; if you’ll kindly take a seat, I’ll tell
them.”

Old Jolyon sat down in the chintz-covered chair, and looked around him.
The whole place seemed to him, as he would have expressed it, pokey;
there was a certain--he could not tell exactly what--air of shabbiness,
or rather of making two ends meet, about everything. As far as he could
see, not a single piece of furniture was worth a five-pound note.
The walls, distempered rather a long time ago, were decorated with
water-colour sketches; across the ceiling meandered a long crack.

These little houses were all old, second-rate concerns; he should hope
the rent was under a hundred a year; it hurt him more than he could have
said, to think of a Forsyte--his own son living in such a place.

The little maid came back. Would he please to go down into the garden?

Old Jolyon marched out through the French windows. In descending the
steps he noticed that they wanted painting.

Young Jolyon, his wife, his two children, and his dog Balthasar, were
all out there under a pear-tree.

This walk towards them was the most courageous act of old Jolyon’s life;
but no muscle of his face moved, no nervous gesture betrayed him. He
kept his deep-set eyes steadily on the enemy.

In those two minutes he demonstrated to perfection all that unconscious
soundness, balance, and vitality of fibre that made, of him and so
many others of his class the core of the nation. In the unostentatious
conduct of their own affairs, to the neglect of everything else, they
typified the essential individualism, born in the Briton from the
natural isolation of his country’s life.

The dog Balthasar sniffed round the edges of his trousers; this friendly
and cynical mongrel--offspring of a liaison between a Russian poodle and
a fox-terrier--had a nose for the unusual.

The strange greetings over, old Jolyon seated himself in a wicker chair,
and his two grandchildren, one on each side of his knees, looked at him
silently, never having seen so old a man.

They were unlike, as though recognising the difference set between
them by the circumstances of their births. Jolly, the child of sin,
pudgy-faced, with his tow-coloured hair brushed off his forehead, and a
dimple in his chin, had an air of stubborn amiability, and the eyes of a
Forsyte; little Holly, the child of wedlock, was a dark-skinned, solemn
soul, with her mother’s, grey and wistful eyes.

The dog Balthasar, having walked round the three small flower-beds, to
show his extreme contempt for things at large, had also taken a seat in
front of old Jolyon, and, oscillating a tail curled by Nature tightly
over his back, was staring up with eyes that did not blink.

Even in the garden, that sense of things being pokey haunted old Jolyon;
the wicker chair creaked under his weight; the garden-beds looked
’.averdy’. on the far side, under the smut-stained wall, cats had made a
path.

While he and his grandchildren thus regarded each other with the
peculiar scrutiny, curious yet trustful, that passes between the very
young and the very old, young Jolyon watched his wife.

The colour had deepened in her thin, oval face, with its straight brows,
and large, grey eyes. Her hair, brushed in fine, high curves back from
her forehead, was going grey, like his own, and this greyness made the
sudden vivid colour in her cheeks painfully pathetic.

The look on her face, such as he had never seen there before, such as
she had always hidden from him, was full of secret resentments, and
longings, and fears. Her eyes, under their twitching brows, stared
painfully. And she was silent.

Jolly alone sustained the conversation; he had many possessions, and
was anxious that his unknown friend with extremely large moustaches, and
hands all covered with blue veins, who sat with legs crossed like his
own father (a habit he was himself trying to acquire), should know it;
but being a Forsyte, though not yet quite eight years old, he made
no mention of the thing at the moment dearest to his heart--a camp of
soldiers in a shop-window, which his father had promised to buy. No
doubt it seemed to him too precious; a tempting of Providence to mention
it yet.

And the sunlight played through the leaves on that little party of the
three generations grouped tranquilly under the pear-tree, which had long
borne no fruit.

Old Jolyon’s furrowed face was reddening patchily, as old men’s faces
redden in the sun. He took one of Jolly’s hands in his own; the boy
climbed on to his knee; and little Holly, mesmerized by this sight,
crept up to them; the sound of the dog Balthasar’s scratching arose
rhythmically.

Suddenly young Mrs. Jolyon got up and hurried indoors. A minute later
her husband muttered an excuse, and followed. Old Jolyon was left alone
with his grandchildren.

And Nature with her quaint irony began working in him one of her strange
revolutions, following her cyclic laws into the depths of his heart. And
that tenderness for little children, that passion for the beginnings of
life which had once made him forsake his son and follow June, now worked
in him to forsake June and follow these littler things. Youth, like a
flame, burned ever in his breast, and to youth he turned, to the round
little limbs, so reckless, that wanted care, to the small round faces
so unreasonably solemn or bright, to the treble tongues, and the shrill,
chuckling laughter, to the insistent tugging hands, and the feel of
small bodies against his legs, to all that was young and young, and once
more young. And his eyes grew soft, his voice, and thin-veined hands
soft, and soft his heart within him. And to those small creatures he
became at once a place of pleasure, a place where they were secure, and
could talk and laugh and play; till, like sunshine, there radiated from
old Jolyon’s wicker chair the perfect gaiety of three hearts.

But with young Jolyon following to his wife’s room it was different.

He found her seated on a chair before her dressing-glass, with her hands
before her face.

Her shoulders were shaking with sobs. This passion of hers for suffering
was mysterious to him. He had been through a hundred of these moods; how
he had survived them he never knew, for he could never believe they were
moods, and that the last hour of his partnership had not struck.

In the night she would be sure to throw her arms round his neck and say:
“Oh! Jo, how I make you suffer!” as she had done a hundred times before.

He reached out his hand, and, unseen, slipped his razor-case into his
pocket. ‘I cannot stay here,’ he thought, ‘I must go down!’ Without a
word he left the room, and went back to the lawn.

Old Jolyon had little Holly on his knee; she had taken possession of
his watch; Jolly, very red in the face, was trying to show that he could
stand on his head. The dog Balthasar, as close as he might be to the
tea-table, had fixed his eyes on the cake.

Young Jolyon felt a malicious desire to cut their enjoyment short.

What business had his father to come and upset his wife like this? It
was a shock, after all these years! He ought to have known; he ought to
have given them warning; but when did a Forsyte ever imagine that his
conduct could upset anybody! And in his thoughts he did old Jolyon
wrong.

He spoke sharply to the children, and told them to go in to their tea.
Greatly surprised, for they had never heard their father speak sharply
before, they went off, hand in hand, little Holly looking back over her
shoulder.

Young Jolyon poured out the tea.

“My wife’s not the thing today,” he said, but he knew well enough that
his father had penetrated the cause of that sudden withdrawal, and
almost hated the old man for sitting there so calmly.

“You’ve got a nice little house here,” said old Jolyon with a shrewd
look; “I suppose you’ve taken a lease of it!”

Young Jolyon nodded.

“I don’t like the neighbourhood,” said old Jolyon; “a ramshackle lot.”

Young Jolyon replied: “Yes, we’re a ramshackle lot.”

The silence was now only broken by the sound of the dog Balthasar’s
scratching.

Old Jolyon said simply: “I suppose I oughtn’t to have come here, Jo; but
I get so lonely!”

At these words young Jolyon got up and put his hand on his father’s
shoulder.

In the next house someone was playing over and over again: ‘La Donna
mobile’ on an untuned piano; and the little garden had fallen into
shade, the sun now only reached the wall at the end, whereon basked
a crouching cat, her yellow eyes turned sleepily down on the dog
Balthasar. There was a drowsy hum of very distant traffic; the creepered
trellis round the garden shut out everything but sky, and house, and
pear-tree, with its top branches still gilded by the sun.

For some time they sat there, talking but little. Then old Jolyon rose
to go, and not a word was said about his coming again.

He walked away very sadly. What a poor miserable place; and he thought
of the great, empty house in Stanhope Gate, fit residence for a Forsyte,
with its huge billiard-room and drawing-room that no one entered from
one week’s end to another.

That woman, whose face he had rather liked, was too thin-skinned by
half; she gave Jo a bad time he knew! And those sweet children! Ah! what
a piece of awful folly!

He walked towards the Edgware Road, between rows of little houses, all
suggesting to him (erroneously no doubt, but the prejudices of a Forsyte
are sacred) shady histories of some sort or kind.

Society, forsooth, the chattering hags and jackanapes--had set
themselves up to pass judgment on his flesh and blood! A parcel of old
women! He stumped his umbrella on the ground, as though to drive it into
the heart of that unfortunate body, which had dared to ostracize his son
and his son’s son, in whom he could have lived again!

He stumped his umbrella fiercely; yet he himself had followed Society’s
behaviour for fifteen years--had only today been false to it!

He thought of June, and her dead mother, and the whole story, with all
his old bitterness. A wretched business!

He was a long time reaching Stanhope Gate, for, with native perversity,
being extremely tired, he walked the whole way.

After washing his hands in the lavatory downstairs, he went to the
dining-room to wait for dinner, the only room he used when June was
out--it was less lonely so. The evening paper had not yet come; he had
finished the Times, there was therefore nothing to do.

The room faced the backwater of traffic, and was very silent. He
disliked dogs, but a dog even would have been company. His gaze,
travelling round the walls, rested on a picture entitled: ‘Group of
Dutch fishing boats at sunset’. the chef d’oeuvre of his collection. It
gave him no pleasure. He closed his eyes. He was lonely! He oughtn’t
to complain, he knew, but he couldn’t help it: He was a poor thing--had
always been a poor thing--no pluck! Such was his thought.

The butler came to lay the table for dinner, and seeing his master
apparently asleep, exercised extreme caution in his movements. This
bearded man also wore a moustache, which had given rise to grave doubts
in the minds of many members--of the family--, especially those who,
like Soames, had been to public schools, and were accustomed to niceness
in such matters. Could he really be considered a butler? Playful
spirits alluded to him as: ‘Uncle Jolyon’s Nonconformist’. George, the
acknowledged wag, had named him: ‘Sankey.’

He moved to and fro between the great polished sideboard and the great
polished table inimitably sleek and soft.

Old Jolyon watched him, feigning sleep. The fellow was a sneak--he had
always thought so--who cared about nothing but rattling through his
work, and getting out to his betting or his woman or goodness knew what!
A slug! Fat too! And didn’t care a pin about his master!

But then against his will, came one of those moments of philosophy which
made old Jolyon different from other Forsytes:

After all why should the man care? He wasn’t paid to care, and why
expect it? In this world people couldn’t look for affection unless they
paid for it. It might be different in the next--he didn’t know--couldn’t
tell! And again he shut his eyes.

Relentless and stealthy, the butler pursued his labours, taking things
from the various compartments of the sideboard. His back seemed always
turned to old Jolyon; thus, he robbed his operations of the unseemliness
of being carried on in his master’s presence; now and then he furtively
breathed on the silver, and wiped it with a piece of chamois leather. He
appeared to pore over the quantities of wine in the decanters, which
he carried carefully and rather high, letting his head droop over them
protectingly. When he had finished, he stood for over a minute watching
his master, and in his greenish eyes there was a look of contempt:

After all, this master of his was an old buffer, who hadn’t much left in
him!

Soft as a tom-cat, he crossed the room to press the bell. His orders
were ‘dinner at seven.’ What if his master were asleep; he would soon
have him out of that; there was the night to sleep in! He had himself to
think of, for he was due at his Club at half-past eight!

In answer to the ring, appeared a page boy with a silver soup tureen.
The butler took it from his hands and placed it on the table, then,
standing by the open door, as though about to usher company into the
room, he said in a solemn voice:

“Dinner is on the table, sir!”

Slowly old Jolyon got up out of his chair, and sat down at the table to
eat his dinner.



CHAPTER VIII--PLANS OF THE HOUSE

Forsytes, as is generally admitted, have shells, like that extremely
useful little animal which is made into Turkish delight, in other
words, they are never seen, or if seen would not be recognised, without
habitats, composed of circumstance, property, acquaintances, and wives,
which seem to move along with them in their passage through a world
composed of thousands of other Forsytes with their habitats. Without a
habitat a Forsyte is inconceivable--he would be like a novel without a
plot, which is well-known to be an anomaly.

To Forsyte eyes Bosinney appeared to have no habitat, he seemed one
of those rare and unfortunate men who go through life surrounded by
circumstance, property, acquaintances, and wives that do not belong to
them.

His rooms in Sloane Street, on the top floor, outside which, on a plate,
was his name, ‘Philip Baynes Bosinney, Architect,’ were not those of
a Forsyte.--He had no sitting-room apart from his office, but a large
recess had been screened off to conceal the necessaries of life--a
couch, an easy chair, his pipes, spirit case, novels and slippers. The
business part of the room had the usual furniture; an open cupboard with
pigeon-holes, a round oak table, a folding wash-stand, some hard chairs,
a standing desk of large dimensions covered with drawings and designs.
June had twice been to tea there under the chaperonage of his aunt.

He was believed to have a bedroom at the back.

As far as the family had been able to ascertain his income, it consisted
of two consulting appointments at twenty pounds a year, together with
an odd fee once in a way, and--more worthy item--a private annuity under
his father’s will of one hundred and fifty pounds a year.

What had transpired concerning that father was not so reassuring. It
appeared that he had been a Lincolnshire country doctor of Cornish
extraction, striking appearance, and Byronic tendencies--a well-known
figure, in fact, in his county. Bosinney’s uncle by marriage, Baynes,
of Baynes and Bildeboy, a Forsyte in instincts if not in name, had but
little that was worthy to relate of his brother-in-law.

“An odd fellow!’ he would say: ‘always spoke of his three eldest boys as
’.ood creatures, but so dull’. they’re all doing capitally in the Indian
Civil! Philip was the only one he liked. I’ve heard him talk in the
queerest way; he once said to me: ‘My dear fellow, never let your poor
wife know what you’re thinking of! But I didn’t follow his advice; not
I! An eccentric man! He would say to Phil: ‘Whether you live like a
gentleman or not, my boy, be sure you die like one! and he had himself
embalmed in a frock coat suit, with a satin cravat and a diamond pin.
Oh, quite an original, I can assure you!”

Of Bosinney himself Baynes would speak warmly, with a certain
compassion: “He’s got a streak of his father’s Byronism. Why, look at
the way he threw up his chances when he left my office; going off like
that for six months with a knapsack, and all for what?--to study foreign
architecture--foreign! What could he expect? And there he is--a clever
young fellow--doesn’t make his hundred a year! Now this engagement is
the best thing that could have happened--keep him steady; he’s one
of those that go to bed all day and stay up all night, simply because
they’ve no method; but no vice about him--not an ounce of vice. Old
Forsyte’s a rich man!”

Mr. Baynes made himself extremely pleasant to June, who frequently
visited his house in Lowndes Square at this period.

“This house of your cousin’s--what a capital man of business--is the
very thing for Philip,” he would say to her; “you mustn’t expect to see
too much of him just now, my dear young lady. The good cause--the good
cause! The young man must make his way. When I was his age I was at work
day and night. My dear wife used to say to me, ‘Bobby, don’t work too
hard, think of your health’. but I never spared myself!”

June had complained that her lover found no time to come to Stanhope
Gate.

The first time he came again they had not been together a quarter of an
hour before, by one of those coincidences of which she was a mistress,
Mrs. Septimus Small arrived. Thereon Bosinney rose and hid himself,
according to previous arrangement, in the little study, to wait for her
departure.

“My dear,” said Aunt Juley, “how thin he is! I’ve often noticed it
with engaged people; but you mustn’t let it get worse. There’s Barlow’s
extract of veal; it did your Uncle Swithin a lot of good.”

June, her little figure erect before the hearth, her small face
quivering grimly, for she regarded her aunt’s untimely visit in the
light of a personal injury, replied with scorn:

“It’s because he’s busy; people who can do anything worth doing are
never fat!”

Aunt Juley pouted; she herself had always been thin, but the only
pleasure she derived from the fact was the opportunity of longing to be
stouter.

“I don’t think,” she said mournfully, “that you ought to let them call
him ‘The Buccaneer’. people might think it odd, now that he’s going
to build a house for Soames. I do hope he will be careful; it’s so
important for him. Soames has such good taste!”

“Taste!” cried June, flaring up at once; “wouldn’t give that for his
taste, or any of the family’s!”

Mrs. Small was taken aback.

“Your Uncle Swithin,” she said, “always had beautiful taste! And
Soames’s little house is lovely; you don’t mean to say you don’t think
so!”

“H’mph!” said June, “that’s only because Irene’s there!”

Aunt Juley tried to say something pleasant:

“And how will dear Irene like living in the country?”

June gazed at her intently, with a look in her eyes as if her conscience
had suddenly leaped up into them; it passed; and an even more intent
look took its place, as if she had stared that conscience out of
countenance. She replied imperiously:

“Of course she’ll like it; why shouldn’t she?”

Mrs. Small grew nervous.

“I didn’t know,” she said; “I thought she mightn’t like to leave her
friends. Your Uncle James says she doesn’t take enough interest in life.
We think--I mean Timothy thinks--she ought to go out more. I expect
you’ll miss her very much!”

June clasped her hands behind her neck.

“I do wish,” she cried, “Uncle Timothy wouldn’t talk about what doesn’t
concern him!”

Aunt Juley rose to the full height of her tall figure.

“He never talks about what doesn’t concern him,” she said.

June was instantly compunctious; she ran to her aunt and kissed her.

“I’m very sorry, auntie; but I wish they’d let Irene alone.”

Aunt Juley, unable to think of anything further on the subject that
would be suitable, was silent; she prepared for departure, hooking her
black silk cape across her chest, and, taking up her green reticule:

“And how is your dear grandfather?” she asked in the hall, “I expect
he’s very lonely now that all your time is taken up with Mr. Bosinney.”

She bent and kissed her niece hungrily, and with little, mincing steps
passed away.

The tears sprang up in June’s eyes; running into the little study,
where Bosinney was sitting at the table drawing birds on the back of an
envelope, she sank down by his side and cried:

“Oh, Phil! it’s all so horrid!” Her heart was as warm as the colour of
her hair.

On the following Sunday morning, while Soames was shaving, a message was
brought him to the effect that Mr. Bosinney was below, and would be glad
to see him. Opening the door into his wife’s room, he said:

“Bosinney’s downstairs. Just go and entertain him while I finish
shaving. I’ll be down in a minute. It’s about the plans, I expect.”

Irene looked at him, without reply, put the finishing touch to her dress
and went downstairs. He could not make her out about this house. She had
said nothing against it, and, as far as Bosinney was concerned, seemed
friendly enough.

From the window of his dressing-room he could see them talking together
in the little court below. He hurried on with his shaving, cutting his
chin twice. He heard them laugh, and thought to himself: “Well, they get
on all right, anyway!”

As he expected, Bosinney had come round to fetch him to look at the
plans.

He took his hat and went over.

The plans were spread on the oak table in the architect’s room; and
pale, imperturbable, inquiring, Soames bent over them for a long time
without speaking.

He said at last in a puzzled voice:

“It’s an odd sort of house!”

A rectangular house of two stories was designed in a quadrangle round a
covered-in court. This court, encircled by a gallery on the upper floor,
was roofed with a glass roof, supported by eight columns running up from
the ground.

It was indeed, to Forsyte eyes, an odd house.

“There’s a lot of room cut to waste,” pursued Soames.

Bosinney began to walk about, and Soames did not like the expression on
his face.

“The principle of this house,” said the architect, “was that you should
have room to breathe--like a gentleman!”

Soames extended his finger and thumb, as if measuring the extent of the
distinction he should acquire; and replied:

“Oh! yes; I see.”

The peculiar look came into Bosinney’s face which marked all his
enthusiasms.

“I’ve tried to plan you a house here with some self-respect of its own.
If you don’t like it, you’d better say so. It’s certainly the last
thing to be considered--who wants self-respect in a house, when you can
squeeze in an extra lavatory?” He put his finger suddenly down on the
left division of the centre oblong: “You can swing a cat here. This is
for your pictures, divided from this court by curtains; draw them
back and you’ll have a space of fifty-one by twenty-three six. This
double-faced stove in the centre, here, looks one way towards the court,
one way towards the picture room; this end wall is all window; You’ve
a southeast light from that, a north light from the court. The rest of
your pictures you can hang round the gallery upstairs, or in the other
rooms.” “In architecture,” he went on--and though looking at Soames he
did not seem to see him, which gave Soames an unpleasant feeling--“as
in life, you’ll get no self-respect without regularity. Fellows tell you
that’s old fashioned. It appears to be peculiar any way; it never occurs
to us to embody the main principle of life in our buildings; we load
our houses with decoration, gimcracks, corners, anything to distract the
eye. On the contrary the eye should rest; get your effects with a few
strong lines. The whole thing is regularity there’s no self-respect
without it.”

Soames, the unconscious ironist, fixed his gaze on Bosinney’s tie, which
was far from being in the perpendicular; he was unshaven too, and his
dress not remarkable for order. Architecture appeared to have exhausted
his regularity.

“Won’t it look like a barrack?” he inquired.

He did not at once receive a reply.

“I can see what it is,” said Bosinney, “you want one of Littlemaster’s
houses--one of the pretty and commodious sort, where the servants will
live in garrets, and the front door be sunk so that you may come up
again. By all means try Littlemaster, you’ll find him a capital fellow,
I’ve known him all my life!”

Soames was alarmed. He had really been struck by the plans, and the
concealment of his satisfaction had been merely instinctive. It was
difficult for him to pay a compliment. He despised people who were
lavish with their praises.

He found himself now in the embarrassing position of one who must pay a
compliment or run the risk of losing a good thing. Bosinney was just the
fellow who might tear up the plans and refuse to act for him; a kind of
grown-up child!

This grown-up childishness, to which he felt so superior, exercised a
peculiar and almost mesmeric effect on Soames, for he had never felt
anything like it in himself.

“Well,” he stammered at last, “it’s--it’s, certainly original.”

He had such a private distrust and even dislike of the word ‘original’
that he felt he had not really given himself away by this remark.

Bosinney seemed pleased. It was the sort of thing that would please a
fellow like that! And his success encouraged Soames.

“It’s--a big place,” he said.

“Space, air, light,” he heard Bosinney murmur, “you can’t live like a
gentleman in one of Littlemaster’s--he builds for manufacturers.”

Soames made a deprecating movement; he had been identified with a
gentleman; not for a good deal of money now would he be classed with
manufacturers. But his innate distrust of general principles
revived. What the deuce was the good of talking about regularity and
self-respect? It looked to him as if the house would be cold.

“Irene can’t stand the cold!” he said.

“Ah!” said Bosinney sarcastically. “Your wife? She doesn’t like the
cold? I’ll see to that; she shan’t be cold. Look here!” he pointed, to
four marks at regular intervals on the walls of the court. “I’ve given
you hot-water pipes in aluminium casings; you can get them with very
good designs.”

Soames looked suspiciously at these marks.

“It’s all very well, all this,” he said, “but what’s it going to cost?”

The architect took a sheet of paper from his pocket:

“The house, of course, should be built entirely of stone, but, as I
thought you wouldn’t stand that, I’ve compromised for a facing. It ought
to have a copper roof, but I’ve made it green slate. As it is, including
metal work, it’ll cost you eight thousand five hundred.”

“Eight thousand five hundred?” said Soames. “Why, I gave you an outside
limit of eight!”

“Can’t be done for a penny less,” replied Bosinney coolly.

“You must take it or leave it!”

It was the only way, probably, that such a proposition could have been
made to Soames. He was nonplussed. Conscience told him to throw the
whole thing up. But the design was good, and he knew it--there was
completeness about it, and dignity; the servants’ apartments were
excellent too. He would gain credit by living in a house like that--with
such individual features, yet perfectly well-arranged.

He continued poring over the plans, while Bosinney went into his bedroom
to shave and dress.

The two walked back to Montpellier Square in silence, Soames watching
him out of the corner of his eye.

The Buccaneer was rather a good-looking fellow--so he thought--when he
was properly got up.

Irene was bending over her flowers when the two men came in.

She spoke of sending across the Park to fetch June.

“No, no,” said Soames, “we’ve still got business to talk over!”

At lunch he was almost cordial, and kept pressing Bosinney to eat. He
was pleased to see the architect in such high spirits, and left him
to spend the afternoon with Irene, while he stole off to his pictures,
after his Sunday habit. At tea-time he came down to the drawing-room,
and found them talking, as he expressed it, nineteen to the dozen.

Unobserved in the doorway, he congratulated himself that things were
taking the right turn. It was lucky she and Bosinney got on; she seemed
to be falling into line with the idea of the new house.

Quiet meditation among his pictures had decided him to spring the
five hundred if necessary; but he hoped that the afternoon might have
softened Bosinney’s estimates. It was so purely a matter which Bosinney
could remedy if he liked; there must be a dozen ways in which he could
cheapen the production of a house without spoiling the effect.

He awaited, therefore, his opportunity till Irene was handing the
architect his first cup of tea. A chink of sunshine through the lace of
the blinds warmed her cheek, shone in the gold of her hair, and in her
soft eyes. Possibly the same gleam deepened Bosinney’s colour, gave the
rather startled look to his face.

Soames hated sunshine, and he at once got up, to draw the blind. Then he
took his own cup of tea from his wife, and said, more coldly than he had
intended:

“Can’t you see your way to do it for eight thousand after all? There
must be a lot of little things you could alter.”

Bosinney drank off his tea at a gulp, put down his cup, and answered:

“Not one!”

Soames saw that his suggestion had touched some unintelligible point of
personal vanity.

“Well,” he agreed, with sulky resignation; “you must have it your own
way, I suppose.”

A few minutes later Bosinney rose to go, and Soames rose too, to see him
off the premises. The architect seemed in absurdly high spirits. After
watching him walk away at a swinging pace, Soames returned moodily to
the drawing-room, where Irene was putting away the music, and, moved by
an uncontrollable spasm of curiosity, he asked:

“Well, what do you think of ‘The Buccaneer’.”

He looked at the carpet while waiting for her answer, and he had to wait
some time.

“I don’t know,” she said at last.

“Do you think he’s good-looking?”

Irene smiled. And it seemed to Soames that she was mocking him.

“Yes,” she answered; “very.”



CHAPTER IX--DEATH OF AUNT ANN

There came a morning at the end of September when Aunt Ann was unable
to take from Smither’s hands the insignia of personal dignity. After
one look at the old face, the doctor, hurriedly sent for, announced that
Miss Forsyte had passed away in her sleep.

Aunts Juley and Hester were overwhelmed by the shock. They had never
imagined such an ending. Indeed, it is doubtful whether they had
ever realized that an ending was bound to come. Secretly they felt it
unreasonable of Ann to have left them like this without a word, without
even a struggle. It was unlike her.

Perhaps what really affected them so profoundly was the thought that a
Forsyte should have let go her grasp on life. If one, then why not all!

It was a full hour before they could make up their minds to tell
Timothy. If only it could be kept from him! If only it could be broken
to him by degrees!

And long they stood outside his door whispering together. And when it
was over they whispered together again.

He would feel it more, they were afraid, as time went on. Still, he had
taken it better than could have been expected. He would keep his bed, of
course!

They separated, crying quietly.

Aunt Juley stayed in her room, prostrated by the blow. Her face,
discoloured by tears, was divided into compartments by the little ridges
of pouting flesh which had swollen with emotion. It was impossible to
conceive of life without Ann, who had lived with her for seventy-three
years, broken only by the short interregnum of her married life, which
seemed now so unreal. At fixed intervals she went to her drawer, and
took from beneath the lavender bags a fresh pocket-handkerchief. Her
warm heart could not bear the thought that Ann was lying there so cold.

Aunt Hester, the silent, the patient, that backwater of the family
energy, sat in the drawing-room, where the blinds were drawn; and she,
too, had wept at first, but quietly, without visible effect. Her guiding
principle, the conservation of energy, did not abandon her in sorrow.
She sat, slim, motionless, studying the grate, her hands idle in the
lap of her black silk dress. They would want to rouse her into doing
something, no doubt. As if there were any good in that! Doing something
would not bring back Ann! Why worry her?

Five o’clock brought three of the brothers, Jolyon and James and
Swithin; Nicholas was at Yarmouth, and Roger had a bad attack of gout.
Mrs. Hayman had been by herself earlier in the day, and, after seeing
Ann, had gone away, leaving a message for Timothy--which was kept from
him--that she ought to have been told sooner. In fact, there was a
feeling amongst them all that they ought to have been told sooner, as
though they had missed something; and James said:

“I knew how it’d be; I told you she wouldn’t last through the summer.”

Aunt Hester made no reply; it was nearly October, but what was the good
of arguing; some people were never satisfied.

She sent up to tell her sister that the brothers were there. Mrs. Small
came down at once. She had bathed her face, which was still swollen, and
though she looked severely at Swithin’s trousers, for they were of light
blue--he had come straight from the club, where the news had reached
him--she wore a more cheerful expression than usual, the instinct for
doing the wrong thing being even now too strong for her.

Presently all five went up to look at the body. Under the pure white
sheet a quilted counter-pane had been placed, for now, more than ever,
Aunt Ann had need of warmth; and, the pillows removed, her spine and
head rested flat, with the semblance of their life-long inflexibility;
the coif banding the top of her brow was drawn on either side to the
level of the ears, and between it and the sheet her face, almost as
white, was turned with closed eyes to the faces of her brothers and
sisters. In its extraordinary peace the face was stronger than ever,
nearly all bone now under the scarce-wrinkled parchment of skin--square
jaw and chin, cheekbones, forehead with hollow temples, chiselled
nose--the fortress of an unconquerable spirit that had yielded to death,
and in its upward sightlessness seemed trying to regain that spirit, to
regain the guardianship it had just laid down.

Swithin took but one look at the face, and left the room; the sight,
he said afterwards, made him very queer. He went downstairs shaking the
whole house, and, seizing his hat, clambered into his brougham, without
giving any directions to the coachman. He was driven home, and all the
evening sat in his chair without moving.

He could take nothing for dinner but a partridge, with an imperial pint
of champagne....

Old Jolyon stood at the bottom of the bed, his hands folded in front of
him. He alone of those in the room remembered the death of his mother,
and though he looked at Ann, it was of that he was thinking. Ann was
an old woman, but death had come to her at last--death came to all! His
face did not move, his gaze seemed travelling from very far.

Aunt Hester stood beside him. She did not cry now, tears were
exhausted--her nature refused to permit a further escape of force; she
twisted her hands, looking not at Ann, but from side to side, seeking
some way of escaping the effort of realization.

Of all the brothers and sisters James manifested the most emotion. Tears
rolled down the parallel furrows of his thin face; where he should go
now to tell his troubles he did not know; Juley was no good, Hester
worse than useless! He felt Ann’s death more than he had ever thought he
should; this would upset him for weeks!

Presently Aunt Hester stole out, and Aunt Juley began moving about,
doing ‘what was necessary,’ so that twice she knocked against something.
Old Jolyon, roused from his reverie, that reverie of the long, long
past, looked sternly at her, and went away. James alone was left by the
bedside; glancing stealthily round, to see that he was not observed, he
twisted his long body down, placed a kiss on the dead forehead, then he,
too, hastily left the room. Encountering Smither in the hall, he began
to ask her about the funeral, and, finding that she knew nothing,
complained bitterly that, if they didn’t take care, everything would go
wrong. She had better send for Mr. Soames--he knew all about that sort
of thing; her master was very much upset, he supposed--he would want
looking after; as for her mistresses, they were no good--they had no
gumption! They would be ill too, he shouldn’t wonder. She had better
send for the doctor; it was best to take things in time. He didn’t think
his sister Ann had had the best opinion; if she’d had Blank she would
have been alive now. Smither might send to Park Lane any time she wanted
advice. Of course, his carriage was at their service for the funeral. He
supposed she hadn’t such a thing as a glass of claret and a biscuit--he
had had no lunch!

The days before the funeral passed quietly. It had long been known, of
course, that Aunt Ann had left her little property to Timothy. There
was, therefore, no reason for the slightest agitation. Soames, who was
sole executor, took charge of all arrangements, and in due course sent
out the following invitation to every male member of the family:

To...........

Your presence is requested at the funeral of Miss Ann Forsyte, in
Highgate Cemetery, at noon of Oct. 1st. Carriages will meet at “The
Bower,” Bayswater Road, at 10.45. No flowers by request. ‘R.S.V.P.’

The morning came, cold, with a high, grey, London sky, and at half-past
ten the first carriage, that of James, drove up. It contained James and
his son-in-law Dartie, a fine man, with a square chest, buttoned very
tightly into a frock coat, and a sallow, fattish face adorned with dark,
well-curled moustaches, and that incorrigible commencement of whisker
which, eluding the strictest attempts at shaving, seems the mark of
something deeply ingrained in the personality of the shaver, being
especially noticeable in men who speculate.

Soames, in his capacity of executor, received the guests, for Timothy
still kept his bed; he would get up after the funeral; and Aunts Juley
and Hester would not be coming down till all was over, when it was
understood there would be lunch for anyone who cared to come back. The
next to arrive was Roger, still limping from the gout, and encircled
by three of his sons--young Roger, Eustace, and Thomas. George, the
remaining son, arrived almost immediately afterwards in a hansom, and
paused in the hall to ask Soames how he found undertaking pay.

They disliked each other.

Then came two Haymans--Giles and Jesse perfectly silent, and very well
dressed, with special creases down their evening trousers. Then old
Jolyon alone. Next, Nicholas, with a healthy colour in his face, and a
carefully veiled sprightliness in every movement of his head and body.
One of his sons followed him, meek and subdued. Swithin Forsyte, and
Bosinney arrived at the same moment,--and stood--bowing precedence to
each other,--but on the door opening they tried to enter together; they
renewed their apologies in the hall, and, Swithin, settling his stock,
which had become disarranged in the struggle, very slowly mounted the
stairs. The other Hayman; two married sons of Nicholas, together with
Tweetyman, Spender, and Warry, the husbands of married Forsyte and
Hayman daughters. The company was then complete, twenty-one in all, not
a male member of the family being absent but Timothy and young Jolyon.

Entering the scarlet and green drawing-room, whose apparel made so vivid
a setting for their unaccustomed costumes, each tried nervously to find
a seat, desirous of hiding the emphatic blackness of his trousers. There
seemed a sort of indecency in that blackness and in the colour of their
gloves--a sort of exaggeration of the feelings; and many cast shocked
looks of secret envy at ‘the Buccaneer,’ who had no gloves, and was
wearing grey trousers. A subdued hum of conversation rose, no one
speaking of the departed, but each asking after the other, as though
thereby casting an indirect libation to this event, which they had come
to honour.

And presently James said:

“Well, I think we ought to be starting.”

They went downstairs, and, two and two, as they had been told off in
strict precedence, mounted the carriages.

The hearse started at a foot’s pace; the carriages moved slowly after.
In the first went old Jolyon with Nicholas; in the second, the twins,
Swithin and James; in the third, Roger and young Roger; Soames, young
Nicholas, George, and Bosinney followed in the fourth. Each of the other
carriages, eight in all, held three or four of the family; behind them
came the doctor’s brougham; then, at a decent interval, cabs containing
family clerks and servants; and at the very end, one containing nobody
at all, but bringing the total cortege up to the number of thirteen.

So long as the procession kept to the highway of the Bayswater Road,
it retained the foot’s-pace, but, turning into less important
thorough-fares, it soon broke into a trot, and so proceeded, with
intervals of walking in the more fashionable streets, until it arrived.
In the first carriage old Jolyon and Nicholas were talking of their
wills. In the second the twins, after a single attempt, had lapsed into
complete silence; both were rather deaf, and the exertion of making
themselves heard was too great. Only once James broke this silence:

“I shall have to be looking about for some ground somewhere. What
arrangements have you made, Swithin?”

And Swithin, fixing him with a dreadful stare, answered:

“Don’t talk to me about such things!”

In the third carriage a disjointed conversation was carried on in the
intervals of looking out to see how far they had got, George remarking,
“Well, it was really time that the poor old lady went.” He didn’t
believe in people living beyond seventy, Young Nicholas replied mildly
that the rule didn’t seem to apply to the Forsytes. George said he
himself intended to commit suicide at sixty. Young Nicholas, smiling and
stroking a long chin, didn’t think his father would like that theory;
he had made a lot of money since he was sixty. Well, seventy was the
outside limit; it was then time, George said, for them to go and leave
their money to their children. Soames, hitherto silent, here joined in;
he had not forgotten the remark about the ‘undertaking,’ and, lifting
his eyelids almost imperceptibly, said it was all very well for people
who never made money to talk. He himself intended to live as long as he
could. This was a hit at George, who was notoriously hard up.
Bosinney muttered abstractedly “Hear, hear!” and, George yawning, the
conversation dropped.

Upon arriving, the coffin was borne into the chapel, and, two by two,
the mourners filed in behind it. This guard of men, all attached to the
dead by the bond of kinship, was an impressive and singular sight in
the great city of London, with its overwhelming diversity of life, its
innumerable vocations, pleasures, duties, its terrible hardness, its
terrible call to individualism.

The family had gathered to triumph over all this, to give a show
of tenacious unity, to illustrate gloriously that law of property
underlying the growth of their tree, by which it had thriven and spread,
trunk and branches, the sap flowing through all, the full growth reached
at the appointed time. The spirit of the old woman lying in her last
sleep had called them to this demonstration. It was her final appeal to
that unity which had been their strength--it was her final triumph that
she had died while the tree was yet whole.

She was spared the watching of the branches jut out beyond the point of
balance. She could not look into the hearts of her followers. The same
law that had worked in her, bringing her up from a tall, straight-backed
slip of a girl to a woman strong and grown, from a woman grown to a
woman old, angular, feeble, almost witchlike, with individuality all
sharpened and sharpened, as all rounding from the world’s contact fell
off from her--that same law would work, was working, in the family she
had watched like a mother.

She had seen it young, and growing, she had seen it strong and grown,
and before her old eyes had time or strength to see any more, she died.
She would have tried, and who knows but she might have kept it young
and strong, with her old fingers, her trembling kisses--a little longer;
alas! not even Aunt Ann could fight with Nature.

’.ride comes before a fall!’ In accordance with this, the greatest
of Nature’s ironies, the Forsyte family had gathered for a last proud
pageant before they fell. Their faces to right and left, in single
lines, were turned for the most part impassively toward the ground,
guardians of their thoughts; but here and there, one looking upward,
with a line between his brows, searched to see some sight on the chapel
walls too much for him, to be listening to something that appalled. And
the responses, low-muttered, in voices through which rose the same tone,
the same unseizable family ring, sounded weird, as though murmured in
hurried duplication by a single person.

The service in the chapel over, the mourners filed up again to guard the
body to the tomb. The vault stood open, and, round it, men in black were
waiting.

From that high and sacred field, where thousands of the upper middle
class lay in their last sleep, the eyes of the Forsytes travelled down
across the flocks of graves. There--spreading to the distance, lay
London, with no sun over it, mourning the loss of its daughter, mourning
with this family, so dear, the loss of her who was mother and guardian.
A hundred thousand spires and houses, blurred in the great grey web of
property, lay there like prostrate worshippers before the grave of this,
the oldest Forsyte of them all.

A few words, a sprinkle of earth, the thrusting of the coffin home, and
Aunt Ann had passed to her last rest.

Round the vault, trustees of that passing, the five brothers stood, with
white heads bowed; they would see that Ann was comfortable where she
was going. Her little property must stay behind, but otherwise, all that
could be should be done....

Then severally, each stood aside, and putting on his hat, turned back to
inspect the new inscription on the marble of the family vault:

     SACRED TO THE MEMORY OF ANN FORSYTE,
     THE DAUGHTER OF THE ABOVE JOLYON AND ANN FORSYTE,
     WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE THE 27TH DAY OF SEPTEMBER, 1886,
     AGED EIGHTY-SEVEN YEARS AND FOUR DAYS

Soon perhaps, someone else would be wanting an inscription. It was
strange and intolerable, for they had not thought somehow, that Forsytes
could die. And one and all they had a longing to get away from this
painfulness, this ceremony which had reminded them of things they could
not bear to think about--to get away quickly and go about their business
and forget.

It was cold, too; the wind, like some slow, disintegrating force,
blowing up the hill over the graves, struck them with its chilly breath;
they began to split into groups, and as quickly as possible to fill the
waiting carriages.

Swithin said he should go back to lunch at Timothy’s, and he offered
to take anybody with him in his brougham. It was considered a doubtful
privilege to drive with Swithin in his brougham, which was not a large
one; nobody accepted, and he went off alone. James and Roger followed
immediately after; they also would drop in to lunch. The others
gradually melted away, Old Jolyon taking three nephews to fill up his
carriage; he had a want of those young faces.

Soames, who had to arrange some details in the cemetery office, walked
away with Bosinney. He had much to talk over with him, and, having
finished his business, they strolled to Hampstead, lunched together
at the Spaniard’s Inn, and spent a long time in going into practical
details connected with the building of the house; they then proceeded to
the tram-line, and came as far as the Marble Arch, where Bosinney went
off to Stanhope Gate to see June.

Soames felt in excellent spirits when he arrived home, and confided to
Irene at dinner that he had had a good talk with Bosinney, who really
seemed a sensible fellow; they had had a capital walk too, which had
done his liver good--he had been short of exercise for a long time--and
altogether a very satisfactory day. If only it hadn’t been for poor Aunt
Ann, he would have taken her to the theatre; as it was, they must make
the best of an evening at home.

“The Buccaneer asked after you more than once,” he said suddenly. And
moved by some inexplicable desire to assert his proprietorship, he rose
from his chair and planted a kiss on his wife’s shoulder.





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 - The Man Of Property" ***

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