The Forsyte Saga

by John Galsworthy

  “To the Hammam,” said Soames.

  Curious that on so warm a summer day, heat should be so comforting! Crossing into the hot room he met George Forsyte coming out, red and glistening.

  “Hallo!” said George; “what are you training for? You’ve not got much superfluous.”

  Buffoon! Soames passed him with his sideway smile. Lying back, rubbing his skin uneasily for the first signs of perspiration, he thought: “Let them laugh! I won’t feel anything! I can’t stand violence! It’s not good for me!”

  Chapter VII

  A Summer Night

  Soames left dead silence in the little study. “Thank you for that good lie,” said Jolyon suddenly. “Come out—the air in here is not what it was!”

  In front of a long high southerly wall on which were trained peach trees the two walked up and down in silence. Old Jolyon had planted some Cypress trees, at intervals, between this grassy terrace and the dipping meadow full of buttercups and ox-eyed daisies; for twelve years they had flourished, till their dark spiral shapes had quite a look of Italy. Birds fluttered softly in the wet shrubbery; the swallows swooped past, with a steel-blue sheen on their swift little bodies; the grass felt springy beneath the feet, its green refreshed; butterflies chased each other. After that painful scene the quiet of nature was wonderfully poignant. Under the sun-soaked wall ran a narrow strip of garden-bed full of mignonette and pansies, and from the bees came a low hum in which all other sounds were set—the mooing of a cow deprived of her calf, the calling of a cuckoo from an elm tree at the bottom of the meadow. Who would have thought that behind them, within ten miles, London began—that London of the Forsytes, with its wealth, its misery; its dirt and noise; its jumbled stone isles of beauty, its grey sea of hideous brick and stucco? That London which had seen Irene’s early tragedy, and Jolyon’s own hard days; that web; that princely workhouse of the possessive instinct!

  And while they walked Jolyon pondered those words: “I hope you’ll treat him as you treated me.” That would depend on himself. Could he trust himself? Did nature permit a Forsyte not to make a slave of what he adored? Could beauty be confided to him? Or should she not be just a visitor, coming when she would, possessed for moments which passed, to return only at her own choosing? “We are a breed of spoilers!” thought Jolyon, “close and greedy; the bloom of life is not safe with us. Let her come to me as she will, when she will, not at all if she will not. Let me be just her stand-by, her perching-place; never—never her cage!”

  She was the chink of beauty in his dream. Was he to pass through the curtains now and reach her? Was the rich stuff of many possessions, the close encircling fabric of the possessive instinct walling in that little black figure of himself, and Soames—was it to be rent so that he could pass through into his vision, find there something not of the senses only? “Let me,” he thought, “ah! let me only know how not to grasp and destroy!”

  But at dinner there were plans to be made. Tonight she would go back to the hotel, but tomorrow he would take her up to London. He must instruct his solicitor—Jack Herring. Not a finger must be raised to hinder the process of the law. Damages exemplary, judicial strictures, costs, what they liked—let it go through at the first moment, so that her neck might be out of Chancery at last! Tomorrow he would see Herring—they would go and see him together. And then—abroad, leaving no doubt, no difficulty about evidence, making the lie she had told into the truth. He looked round at her; and it seemed to his adoring eyes that more than a woman was sitting there. The spirit of universal beauty, deep, mysterious, which the old painters, Titian, Giorgione, Botticelli, had known how to capture and transfer to the faces of their women—this flying beauty seemed to him imprinted on her brow, her hair, her lips, and in her eyes.

  “And this is to be mine!” he thought. “It frightens me!”

  After dinner they went out on to the terrace to have coffee. They sat there long, the evening was so lovely, watching the summer night come very slowly on. It was still warm and the air smelled of lime blossom—early this summer. Two bats were flighting with the faint mysterious little noise they make. He had placed the chairs in front of the study window, and moths flew past to visit the discreet light in there. There was no wind, and not a whisper in the old oak tree twenty yards away! The moon rose from behind the copse, nearly full; and the two lights struggled, till moonlight conquered, changing the colour and quality of all the garden, stealing along the flagstones, reaching their feet, climbing up, changing their faces.

  “Well,” said Jolyon at last, “you’ll be tired, dear; we’d better start. The maid will show you Holly’s room,” and he rang the study bell. The maid who came handed him a telegram. Watching her take Irene away, he thought: “This must have come an hour or more ago, and she didn’t bring it out to us! That shows! Well, we’ll be hung for a sheep soon!” And, opening the telegram, he read:

  JOLYON FORSYTE, Robin Hill.—Your son passed painlessly away on June 20th. Deep sympathy—some name unknown to him.

  He dropped it, spun round, stood motionless. The moon shone in on him; a moth flew in his face. The first day of all that he had not thought almost ceaselessly of Jolly. He went blindly towards the window, struck against the old armchair—his father’s—and sank down on to the arm of it. He sat there huddled forward, staring into the night. Gone out like a candle flame; far from home, from love, all by himself, in the dark! His boy! From a little chap always so good to him—so friendly! Twenty years old, and cut down like grass—to have no life at all! “I didn’t really know him,” he thought, “and he didn’t know me; but we loved each other. It’s only love that matters.”

  To die out there—lonely—wanting them—wanting home! This seemed to his Forsyte heart more painful, more pitiful than death itself. No shelter, no protection, no love at the last! And all the deeply rooted clanship in him, the family feeling and essential clinging to his own flesh and blood which had been so strong in old Jolyon was so strong in all the Forsytes—felt outraged, cut, and torn by his boy’s lonely passing. Better far if he had died in battle, without time to long for them to come to him, to call out for them, perhaps, in his delirium!

  The moon had passed behind the oak tree now, endowing it with uncanny life, so that it seemed watching him—the oak tree his boy had been so fond of climbing, out of which he had once fallen and hurt himself, and hadn’t cried!

  The door creaked. He saw Irene come in, pick up the telegram and read it. He heard the faint rustle of her dress. She sank on her knees close to him, and he forced himself to smile at her. She stretched up her arms and drew his head down on her shoulder. The perfume and warmth of her encircled him; her presence gained slowly his whole being.

  Chapter VIII

  James in Waiting

  Sweated to serenity, Soames dined at the Remove and turned his face toward Park Lane. His father had been unwell lately. This would have to be kept from him! Never till that moment had he realised how much the dread of bringing James’s grey hairs down with sorrow to the grave had counted with him; how intimately it was bound up with his own shrinking from scandal. His affection for his father, always deep, had increased of late years with the knowledge that James looked on him as the real prop of his decline. It seemed pitiful that one who had been so careful all his life and done so much for the family name—so that it was almost a byword for solid, wealthy respectability—should at his last gasp have to see it in all the newspapers. This was like lending a hand to death, that final enemy of Forsytes. “I must tell mother,” he thought, “and when it comes on, we must keep the papers from him somehow. He sees hardly anyone.” Letting himself in with his latchkey, he was beginning to ascend he stairs when he became conscious of commotion on the second-floor landing. His mother’s voice was saying:

  “Now, James, you’ll catch cold. Why can’t you wait quietly?”

  His father’s answering

  “Wait? I’m always waiting. Wh
y doesn’t he come in?”

  “You can speak to him tomorrow morning, instead of making a guy of yourself on the landing.”

  “He’ll go up to bed, I shouldn’t wonder. I shan’t sleep.”

  “Now come back to bed, James.”

  “Um! I might die before tomorrow morning for all you can tell.”

  “You shan’t have to wait till tomorrow morning; I’ll go down and bring him up. Don’t fuss!”

  “There you go—always so cock-a-hoop. He mayn’t come in at all.”

  “Well, if he doesn’t come in you won’t catch him by standing out here in your dressing gown.”

  Soames rounded the last bend and came in sight of his father’s tall figure wrapped in a brown silk quilted gown, stooping over the balustrade above. Light fell on his silvery hair and whiskers, investing his head with, a sort of halo.

  “Here he is!” he heard him say in a voice which sounded injured, and his mother’s comfortable answer from the bedroom door:

  “That’s all right. Come in, and I’ll brush your hair.” James extended a thin, crooked finger, oddly like the beckoning of a skeleton, and passed through the doorway of his bedroom.

  “What is it?” thought Soames. “What has he got hold of now?”

  His father was sitting before the dressing table sideways to the mirror, while Emily slowly passed two silver-backed brushes through and through his hair. She would do this several times a day, for it had on him something of the effect produced on a cat by scratching between its ears.

  “There you are!” he said. “I’ve been waiting.”

  Soames stroked his shoulder, and, taking up a silver buttonhook, examined the mark on it.

  “Well,” he said, “you’re looking better.”

  James shook his head.

  “I want to say something. Your mother hasn’t heard.” He announced Emily’s ignorance of what he hadn’t told her, as if it were a grievance.

  “Your father’s been in a great state all the evening. I’m sure I don’t know what about.”

  The faint whish-whish of the brushes continued the soothing of her voice.

  “No! you know nothing,” said James. “Soames can tell me.” And, fixing his grey eyes, in which there was a look of strain, uncomfortable to watch, on his son, he muttered:

  “I’m getting on, Soames. At my age I can’t tell. I might die any time. There’ll be a lot of money. There’s Rachel and Cicely got no children; and Val’s out there—that chap his father will get hold of all he can. And somebody’ll pick up Imogen, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  Soames listened vaguely—he had heard all this before. Whish-whish! went the brushes.

  “If that’s all!” said Emily.

  “All!” cried James; “it’s nothing. I’m coming to that.” And again his eyes strained pitifully at Soames.

  “It’s you, my boy,” he said suddenly; “you ought to get a divorce.”

  That word, from those of all lips, was almost too much for Soames’s composure. His eyes reconcentrated themselves quickly on the buttonhook, and as if in apology James hurried on:

  “I don’t know what’s become of her—they say she’s abroad. Your Uncle Swithin used to admire her—he was a funny fellow.” (So he always alluded to his dead twin—“The Stout and the Lean of it,” they had been called.) “She wouldn’t be alone, I should say.” And with that summing-up of the effect of beauty on human nature, he was silent, watching his son with eyes doubting as a bird’s. Soames, too, was silent. Whish-whish went the brushes.

  “Come, James! Soames knows best. It’s his business.”

  “Ah!” said James, and the word came from deep down; “but there’s all my money, and there’s his—who’s it to go to? And when he dies the name goes out.”

  Soames replaced the buttonhook on the lace and pink silk of the dressing table coverlet.

  “The name?” said Emily, “there are all the other Forsytes.”

  “As if that helped me,” muttered James. “I shall be in my grave, and there’ll be nobody, unless he marries again.”

  “You’re quite right,” said Soames quietly; “I’m getting a divorce.”

  James’s eyes almost started from his head.

  “What?” he cried. “There! nobody tells me anything.”

  “Well,” said Emily, “who would have imagined you wanted it? My dear boy, that is a surprise, after all these years.”

  “It’ll be a scandal,” muttered James, as if to himself; “but I can’t help that. Don’t brush so hard. When’ll it come on?”

  “Before the long vacation; it’s not defended.”

  James’s lips moved in secret calculation. “I shan’t live to see my grandson,” he muttered.

  Emily ceased brushing. “Of course you will, James. Soames will be as quick as he can.”

  There was a long silence, till James reached out his arm.

  “Here! let’s have the eau de cologne,” and, putting it to his nose, he moved his forehead in the direction of his son. Soames bent over and kissed that brow just where the hair began. A relaxing quiver passed over James’s face, as though the wheels of anxiety within were running down.

  “I’ll get to bed,” he said; “I shan’t want to see the papers when that comes. They’re a morbid lot; I can’t pay attention to them, I’m too old.”

  Queerly affected, Soames went to the door; he heard his father say:

  “Here, I’m tired. I’ll say a prayer in bed.”

  And his mother answering

  “That’s right, James; it’ll be ever so much more comfy.”

  Chapter IX

  Out of the Web

  On Forsyte ’Change the announcement of Jolly’s death, among a batch of troopers, caused mixed sensation. Strange to read that Jolyon Forsyte (fifth of the name in direct descent) had died of disease in the service of his country, and not be able to feel it personally. It revived the old grudge against his father for having estranged himself. For such was still the prestige of old Jolyon that the other Forsytes could never quite feel, as might have been expected, that it was they who had cut off his descendants for irregularity. The news increased, of course, the interest and anxiety about Val; but then Val’s name was Dartie, and even if he were killed in battle or got the Victoria Cross, it would not be at all the same as if his name were Forsyte. Not even casualty or glory to the Haymans would be really satisfactory. Family pride felt defrauded.

  How the rumour arose, then, that “something very dreadful, my dear,” was pending, no one, least of all Soames, could tell, secret as he kept everything. Possibly some eye had seen Forsyte v. Forsyte and Forsyte, in the cause list; and had added it to “Irene in Paris with a fair beard.” Possibly some wall at Park Lane had ears. The fact remained that it was known—whispered among the old, discussed among the young—that family pride must soon receive a blow.

  Soames, paying one, of his Sunday visits to Timothy’s—paying it with the feeling that after the suit came on he would be paying no more—felt knowledge in the air as he came in. Nobody, of course, dared speak of it before him, but each of the four other Forsytes present held their breath, aware that nothing could prevent Aunt Juley from making them all uncomfortable. She looked so piteously at Soames, she checked herself on the point of speech so often, that Aunt Hester excused herself and said she must go and bathe Timothy’s eye—he had a sty coming. Soames, impassive, slightly supercilious, did not stay long. He went out with a curse stifled behind his pale, just smiling lips.

  Fortunately for the peace of his mind, cruelly tortured by the coming scandal, he was kept busy day and night with plans for his retirement—for he had come to that grim conclusion. To go on seeing all those people who had known him as a long-headed chap, an astute adviser—after that—no! The fastidiousness and pride which was so strangely, so inextricably blended in him with possessive obtusen
ess, revolted against the thought. He would retire, live privately, go on buying pictures, make a great name as a collector—after all, his heart was more in that than it had ever been in law. In pursuance of this now fixed resolve, he had to get ready to amalgamate his business with another firm without letting people know, for that would excite curiosity and make humiliation cast its shadow before. He had pitched on the firm of Cuthcott, Holliday and Kingson, two of whom were dead. The full name after the amalgamation would therefore be Cuthcott, Holliday, Kingson, Forsyte, Bustard and Forsyte. But after debate as to which of the dead still had any influence with the living, it was decided to reduce the title to Cuthcott, Kingson and Forsyte, of whom Kingson would be the active and Soames the sleeping partner. For leaving his name, prestige, and clients behind him, Soames would receive considerable value.

  One night, as befitted a man who had arrived at so important a stage of his career, he made a calculation of what he was worth, and after writing off liberally for depreciation by the war, found his value to be some hundred and thirty thousand pounds. At his father’s death, which could not, alas, be delayed much longer, he must come into at least another fifty thousand, and his yearly expenditure at present just reached two. Standing among his pictures, he saw before him a future full of bargains earned by the trained faculty of knowing better than other people. Selling what was about to decline, keeping what was still going up, and exercising judicious insight into future taste, he would make a unique collection, which at his death would pass to the nation under the title “Forsyte Bequest.”