The Forsyte Saga

by John Galsworthy

  Late that evening he wrote to the Chelsea flat, asking if Irene would see him.

  The old century which had seen the plant of individualism flower so wonderfully was setting in a sky orange with coming storms. Rumours of war added to the briskness of a London turbulent at the close of the summer holidays. And the streets to Jolyon, who was not often up in town, had a feverish look, due to these new motorcars and cabs, of which he disapproved aesthetically. He counted these vehicles from his hansom, and made the proportion of them one in twenty. “They were one in thirty about a year ago,” he thought; “they’ve come to stay. Just so much more rattling round of wheels and general stink”—for he was one of those rather rare Liberals who object to anything new when it takes a material form; and he instructed his driver to get down to the river quickly, out of the traffic, desiring to look at the water through the mellowing screen of plane trees. At the little block of flats which stood back some fifty yards from the embankment, he told the cabman to wait, and went up to the first floor.

  Yes, Mrs. Heron was at home!

  The effect of a settled if very modest income was at once apparent to him remembering the threadbare refinement in that tiny flat eight years ago when he announced her good fortune. Everything was now fresh, dainty, and smelled of flowers. The general effect was silvery with touches of black, hydrangea colour, and gold. “A woman of great taste,” he thought. Time had dealt gently with Jolyon, for he was a Forsyte. But with Irene time hardly seemed to deal at all, or such was his impression. She appeared to him not a day older, standing there in mole-coloured velvet corduroy, with soft dark eyes and dark gold hair, with outstretched hand and a little smile.

  “Won’t you sit down?”

  He had probably never occupied a chair with a fuller sense of embarrassment.

  “You look absolutely unchanged,” he said.

  “And you look younger, Cousin Jolyon.”

  Jolyon ran his hands through his hair, whose thickness was still a comfort to him.

  “I’m ancient, but I don’t feel it. That’s one thing about painting, it keeps you young. Titian lived to ninety-nine, and had to have plague to kill him off. Do you know, the first time I ever saw you I thought of a picture by him?”

  “When did you see me for the first time?”

  “In the botanical gardens.”

  “How did you know me, if you’d never seen me before?”

  “By someone who came up to you.” He was looking at her hardily, but her face did not change; and she said quietly:

  “Yes; many lives ago.”

  “What is your recipe for youth, Irene?”

  “People who don’t live are wonderfully preserved.”

  H’m! a bitter little saying! People who don’t live! But an opening, and he took it. “You remember my Cousin Soames?”

  He saw her smile faintly at that whimsicality, and at once went on:

  “He came to see me the day before yesterday! He wants a divorce. Do you?”

  “I?” The word seemed startled out of her. “After twelve years? It’s rather late. Won’t it be difficult?”

  Jolyon looked hard into her face. “Unless. . . .” he said.

  “Unless I have a lover now. But I have never had one since.”

  What did he feel at the simplicity and candour of those words? Relief, surprise, pity! Venus for twelve years without a lover!

  “And yet,” he said, “I suppose you would give a good deal to be free, too?”

  “I don’t know. What does it matter, now?”

  “But if you were to love again?”

  “I should love.” In that simple answer she seemed to sum up the whole philosophy of one on whom the world had turned its back.

  “Well! Is there anything you would like me to say to him?”

  “Only that I’m sorry he’s not free. He had his chance once. I don’t know why he didn’t take it.”

  “Because he was a Forsyte; we never part with things, you know, unless we want something in their place; and not always then.”

  Irene smiled. “Don’t you, Cousin Jolyon?—I think you do.”

  “Of course, I’m a bit of a mongrel—not quite a pure Forsyte. I never take the halfpennies off my cheques, I put them on,” said Jolyon uneasily.

  “Well, what does Soames want in place of me now?”

  “I don’t know; perhaps children.”

  She was silent for a little, looking down.

  “Yes,” she murmured; “it’s hard. I would help him to be free if I could.”

  Jolyon gazed into his hat, his embarrassment was increasing fast; so was his admiration, his wonder, and his pity. She was so lovely, and so lonely; and altogether it was such a coil!

  “Well,” he said, “I shall have to see Soames. If there’s anything I can do for you I’m always at your service. You must think of me as a wretched substitute for my father. At all events I’ll let you know what happens when I speak to Soames. He may supply the material himself.”

  She shook her head.

  “You see, he has a lot to lose; and I have nothing. I should like him to be free; but I don’t see what I can do.”

  “Nor I at the moment,” said Jolyon, and soon after took his leave. He went down to his hansom. Half past three! Soames would be at his office still.

  “To the Poultry,” he called through the trap. In front of the Houses of Parliament and in Whitehall, newsvendors were calling, “Grave situation in the Transvaal!” but the cries hardly roused him, absorbed in recollection of that very beautiful figure, of her soft dark glance, and the words: “I have never had one since.” What on earth did such a woman do with her life, backwatered like this? Solitary, unprotected, with every man’s hand against her or rather—reaching out to grasp her at the least sign. And year after year she went on like that!

  The word “Poultry” above the passing citizens brought him back to reality.

  “Forsyte, Bustard and Forsyte,” in black letters on a ground the colour of pea soup, spurred him to a sort of vigour, and he went up the stone stairs muttering: “Fusty musty ownerships! Well, we couldn’t do without them!”

  “I want Mr. Soames Forsyte,” he said to the boy who opened the door.

  “What name?”

  “Mr. Jolyon Forsyte.”

  The youth looked at him curiously, never having seen a Forsyte with a beard, and vanished.

  The offices of Forsyte, Bustard and Forsyte had slowly absorbed the offices of Tooting and Bowles, and occupied the whole of the first floor.

  The firm consisted now of nothing but Soames and a number of managing and articled clerks. The complete retirement of James some six years ago had accelerated business, to which the final touch of speed had been imparted when Bustard dropped off, worn out, as many believed, by the suit of Fryer versus Forsyte, more in Chancery than ever and less likely to benefit its beneficiaries. Soames, with his saner grasp of actualities, had never permitted it to worry him; on the contrary, he had long perceived that Providence had presented him therein with £200 a year net in perpetuity, and—why not?

  When Jolyon entered, his cousin was drawing out a list of holdings in Consols, which in view of the rumours of war he was going to advise his companies to put on the market at once, before other companies did the same. He looked round, sidelong, and said:

  “How are you? Just one minute. Sit down, won’t you?” And having entered three amounts, and set a ruler to keep his place, he turned towards Jolyon, biting the side of his flat forefinger. . . .

  “Yes?” he said.

  “I have seen her.”

  Soames frowned.

  “Well?”

  “She has remained faithful to memory.”

  Having said that, Jolyon was ashamed. His cousin had flushed a dusky yellowish red. What had made him tease the poor brute!

 
“I was to tell you she is sorry you are not free. Twelve years is a long time. You know your law, and what chance it gives you.” Soames uttered a curious little grunt, and the two remained a full minute without speaking. “Like wax!” thought Jolyon, watching that close face, where the flush was fast subsiding. “He’ll never give me a sign of what he’s thinking, or going to do. Like wax!” And he transferred his gaze to a plan of that flourishing town, “By-Street on Sea,” the future existence of which lay exposed on the wall to the possessive instincts of the firm’s clients. The whimsical thought flashed through him: “I wonder if I shall get a bill of costs for this—‘To attending Mr. Jolyon Forsyte in the matter of my divorce, to receiving his account of his visit to my wife, and to advising him to go and see her again, sixteen and eightpence.’”

  Suddenly Soames said: “I can’t go on like this. I tell you, I can’t go on like this.” His eyes were shifting from side to side, like an animal’s when it looks for way of escape. “He really suffers,” thought Jolyon; “I’ve no business to forget that, just because I don’t like him.”

  “Surely,” he said gently, “it lies with yourself. A man can always put these things through if he’ll take it on himself.”

  Soames turned square to him, with a sound which seemed to come from somewhere very deep.

  “Why should I suffer more than I’ve suffered already? Why should I?”

  Jolyon could only shrug his shoulders. His reason agreed, his instinct rebelled; he could not have said why.

  “Your father,” went on Soames, “took an interest in her—why, goodness knows! And I suppose you do too?” he gave Jolyon a sharp look. “It seems to me that one only has to do another person a wrong to get all the sympathy. I don’t know in what way I was to blame—I’ve never known. I always treated her well. I gave her everything she could wish for. I wanted her.”

  Again Jolyon’s reason nodded; again his instinct shook its head. “What is it?” he thought; “there must be something wrong in me. Yet if there is, I’d rather be wrong than right.”

  “After all,” said Soames with a sort of glum fierceness, “she was my wife.”

  In a flash the thought went through his listener: “There it is! Ownerships! Well, we all own things. But—human beings! Pah!”

  “You have to look at facts,” he said drily, “or rather the want of them.”

  Soames gave him another quick suspicious look.

  “The want of them?” he said. “Yes, but I am not so sure.”

  “I beg your pardon,” replied Jolyon; “I’ve told you what she said. It was explicit.”

  “My experience has not been one to promote blind confidence in her word. We shall see.”

  Jolyon got up.

  “Goodbye,” he said curtly.

  “Goodbye,” returned Soames; and Jolyon went out trying to understand the look, half-startled, half-menacing, on his cousin’s face. He sought Waterloo station in a disturbed frame of mind, as though the skin of his moral being had been scraped; and all the way down in the train he thought of Irene in her lonely flat, and of Soames in his lonely office, and of the strange paralysis of life that lay on them both. “In Chancery!” he thought. “Both their necks in Chancery—and her’s so pretty!”

  Chapter IX

  Val Hears the News

  The keeping of engagements had not as yet been a conspicuous feature in the life of young Val Dartie, so that when he broke two and kept one, it was the latter event which caused him, if anything, the greater surprise, while jogging back to town from Robin Hill after his ride with Holly. She had been even prettier than he had thought her yesterday, on her silver-roan, long-tailed palfrey; and it seemed to him, self-critical in the brumous October gloaming and the outskirts of London, that only his boots had shone throughout their two-hour companionship. He took out his new gold hunter—present from James—and looked not at the time, but at sections of his face in the glittering back of its opened case. He had a temporary spot over one eyebrow, and it displeased him, for it must have displeased her. Crum never had any spots. Together with Crum rose the scene in the promenade of the Pandemonium. Today he had not had the faintest desire to unbosom himself to Holly about his father. His father lacked poetry, the stirrings of which he was feeling for the first time in his nineteen years. The Liberty, with Cynthia Dark, that almost mythical embodiment of rapture; the Pandemonium, with the woman of uncertain age—both seemed to Val completely off, fresh from communion with this new, shy, dark-haired young cousin of his. She rode jolly well, too, so that it had been all the more flattering that she had let him lead her where he would in the long gallops of Richmond Park, though she knew them so much better than he did. Looking back on it all, he was mystified by the barrenness of his speech; he felt that he could say “an awful lot of fetching things” if he had but the chance again, and the thought that he must go back to Littlehampton on the morrow, and to Oxford on the twelfth—“to that beastly exam,” too—without the faintest chance of first seeing her again, caused darkness to settle on his spirit even more quickly than on the evening. He should write to her, however, and she had promised to answer. Perhaps, too, she would come up to Oxford to see her brother. That thought was like the first star, which came out as he rode into Padwick’s livery stables in the purlieus of Sloane Square. He got off and stretched himself luxuriously, for he had ridden some twenty-five good miles. The Dartie within him made him chaffer for five minutes with young Padwick concerning the favourite for the Cambridgeshire; then with the words, “Put the gee down to my account,” he walked away, a little wide at the knees, and flipping his boots with his knotty little cane. “I don’t feel a bit inclined to go out,” he thought. “I wonder if mother will stand fizz for my last night!” With fizz and recollection, he could well pass a domestic evening.

  When he came down, speckless after his bath, he found his mother scrupulous in a low evening dress, and, to his annoyance, his Uncle Soames. They stopped talking when he came in; then his uncle said:

  “He’d better be told.”

  At those words, which meant something about his father, of course, Val’s first thought was of Holly. Was it anything beastly? His mother began speaking.

  “Your father,” she said in her fashionably appointed voice, while her fingers plucked rather pitifully at sea-green brocade, “your father, my dear boy, has—is not at Newmarket; he’s on his way to South America. He—he’s left us.”

  Val looked from her to Soames. Left them! Was he sorry? Was he fond of his father? It seemed to him that he did not know. Then, suddenly—as at a whiff of gardenias and cigars—his heart twitched within him, and he was sorry. One’s father belonged to one, could not go off in this fashion—it was not done! Nor had he always been the bounder of the Pandemonium promenade. There were precious memories of tailors’ shops and horses, tips at school, and general lavish kindness, when in luck.

  “But why?” he said. Then, as a sportsman himself, was sorry he had asked. The mask of his mother’s face was all disturbed; and he burst out:

  “All right, Mother, don’t tell me! Only, what does it mean?”

  “A divorce, Val, I’m afraid.”

  Val uttered a queer little grunt, and looked quickly at his uncle—that uncle whom he had been taught to look on as a guarantee against the consequences of having a father, even against the Dartie blood in his own veins. The flat-checked visage seemed to wince, and this upset him.

  “It won’t be public, will it?”

  So vividly before him had come recollection of his own eyes glued to the unsavoury details of many a divorce suit in the Public Press.

  “Can’t it be done quietly somehow? It’s so disgusting for—for mother, and—and everybody.”

  “Everything will be done as quietly as it can, you may be sure.”

  “Yes—but, why is it necessary at all? Mother doesn’t want to marry again.”

  Himse
lf, the girls, their name tarnished in the sight of his schoolfellows and of Crum, of the men at Oxford, of—Holly! Unbearable! What was to be gained by it?

  “Do you, Mother?” he said sharply.

  Thus brought face to face with so much of her own feeling by the one she loved best in the world, Winifred rose from the empire chair in which she had been sitting. She saw that her son would be against her unless he was told everything; and, yet, how could she tell him? Thus, still plucking at the green brocade, she stared at Soames. Val, too, stared at Soames. Surely this embodiment of respectability and the sense of property could not wish to bring such a slur on his own sister!

  Soames slowly passed a little inlaid paperknife over the smooth surface of a marquetry table; then, without looking at his nephew, he began:

  “You don’t understand what your mother has had to put up with these twenty years. This is only the last straw, Val.” And glancing up sideways at Winifred, he added:

  “Shall I tell him?”

  Winifred was silent. If he were not told, he would be against her! Yet, how dreadful to be told such things of his own father! Clenching her lips, she nodded.

  Soames spoke in a rapid, even voice:

  “He has always been a burden round your mother’s neck. She has paid his debts over and over again; he has often been drunk, abused and threatened her; and now he is gone to Buenos Aires with a dancer.” And, as if distrusting the efficacy of those words on the boy, he went on quickly:

  “He took your mother’s pearls to give to her.”