And superstitious dread came to the unsuperstitious Soames; he turned his eyes away lest he should stare the little house into real unreality. He walked on, past the barracks to the Park rails, still moving west, afraid of turning homewards till he was tired out. Past four o’clock, and still an empty town, empty of all that made it a living hive, and yet this very emptiness gave it intense meaning. He felt that he would always remember a town so different from that he saw every day; and himself he would remember—walking thus, unseen and solitary with his desire.
He went past Prince’s Gate and turned. After all he had his work—ten-thirty at the office! Road and Park and houses stared at him now in the full light of earliest morning. He turned from them into the Park and crossed to the Row side. Funny to see the Row with no horses tearing up and down, or trapesing past like cats on hot bricks, no stream of carriages, no rows of sitting people, nothing but trees and the tan track. The trees and grass, though no dew had fallen, breathed on him; and he stretched himself at full length along a bench, his hands behind his head, his hat crushed on his chest, his eyes fixed on the leaves patterned against the still brightening sky. The air stole faint and fresh about his cheeks and lips, and the backs of his hands. The first sunlight came stealing flat from trunk to trunk, birds did not sing but talked, a wood pigeon back among the trees was cooing. Soames closed his eyes, and instantly imagination began to paint, for the eyes deep down within him, pictures of her. Picture of her—standing passive in her frock flounced to the gleaming floor, while he wrote his initials on her card. Picture of her adjusting with long gloved fingers a camellia come loose in her corsage; turning for him to put her cloak on—pictures, countless pictures, and ever strange, of her face sparkling for moments, or brooding, or averse; of her cheek inclined for his kiss, of her lips turned from his lips, of her eyes looking at him with a question that seemed to have no answer; of her eyes, dark and soft over a grey cat purring in her arms; picture of her auburn hair flowing as he had not seen it yet. Ah! but soon—but soon! And as if answering the call of his imagination a cry—long, not shrill, not harsh exactly, but so poignant—jerked the blood to his heart. From back over there it came trailing, again and again, passionate—the lost soul’s cry of peacock in early morning; and with it there uprose from the spaces of his inner being the vision that was for ever haunting there, of her with hair unbound, of her all white and lost, yielding to his arms. It seared him with delight, swooned in him, and was gone. He opened his eyes; an early water-cart was nearing down the Row. Soames rose and walking fast beneath the trees sought sanity.
FRANCIE’S FOURPENNY FOREIGNER, 1888
In the latest ‘eighties there was that still in the appearance of Francie Forsyte which made people refer to her on Forsyte ‘Change as ‘Keltic’ looking. The expression had not long been discovered, and, though no one had any knowledge of what a Kelt looked like, it was felt to be good.
If she did not precisely suggest the Keltic twilight, she had dark hair and large grey eyes, composed music, wrote stories and poems, and played on the violin. For all these reasons she was allowed a certain license by the family, who did not take her too seriously, and the limit of the license granted is here recorded.
Thin, rather tall, intense and expressive, Francie had a certain charm, together with the power, engrained in a daughter of Roger, of marketing her wares, and at the age of thirty she had secured a measure of independence. She still slept at Prince’s Gate, but had a studio in the purlieus of Chelsea. For the period she was advanced, even to the point of inviting to tea there her editors, fellow writers, musicians, and even those young men with whom she danced in Kensington, generically christened ‘Francie’s lovers’ by her brother George.
At Timothy’s in the Bayswater Road, they would say to her at times:
“Do you think it’s quite nice, dear, to have young men to tea with you?”
And Francie would answer:
“Why not?” which always stopped further enquiry, for the aunts felt that it would be even less nice to put a finer point on it, and, after all, dear Francie was musical. It was believed in the family, rather than known, that she was always in love with someone, but that seemed natural in one of her appearance and was taken to be spiritual rather than bodily. And this diagnosis was perfectly correct, such was the essential shrewdness underlying the verbal niceties on Forsyte ‘Change.
It was shortly after she had at last succeeded in getting her violin sonata—so much the most serious item of her music—published, that she met the individual soon to be known as “Francie’s Fourpenny Foreigner.” The word ‘Dago’ not having then come to the surface, the antipathetic contempt felt by Anglo–Saxons for everything male, on two legs, deriving from below the latitude of Geneva, had no verbal outlet. From above the latitude of Geneva a foreigner was, if not respected, at least human, but a foreigner from below was undoubtedly ‘fourpenny,’ if not less.
This young man, whose surname, Racazy, had a catch in it which caught every Forsyte, but whose Christian name was Guido, had come, if Francie was to be believed, from a place called Ragusa to conquer London with his violin. He had been introduced to her by the publisher who had brought forth her sonata, as essentially the right interpreter of that considerable production; partly, no doubt, because at this stage of his career he would interpret anything for nothing, and partly because Francie, free at the moment from any spiritual entanglement, had noticed his hair, like that of Rafael’s best young men, and asked for the introduction.
Within a week he was playing the sonata in her studio for the first and last time. The fact that he never even offered to play it again ought to have warned Francie, but with a strange mixture of loyalty to what she admired at the moment and a Forsytean perception that the more famous he became the more famous would she become, she installed him the ‘lover’ of the year, and proceeded to make his name. No one can deny that her psychology was at fault from the first; she gauged wrongly Guido, her family, and herself; but such misconceptions are slow to make themselves felt, and the license she enjoyed had invested Francie with a kind of bravura. She had the habit of her own way, and no tactical sense of the dividing line between major and minor operations. After trying him out at the Studio on an editor, two girl friends, and a ‘lover’ so out of date that he could be relied on, she began serious work by inviting the young man to dinner at Prince’s Gate. He came in his hair, undressed, with a large bow tie ‘flopping about on his chest,’ as Eustace put it in his remonstrance after the event. It was a somewhat gruesome evening, complicated by the arrival of George, while the men were still at wine, to ‘touch his father for a monkey.’ His Ascot had been lamentable, and he sat, silently staring at the violinist as though he were the monkey.
Roger, in his capacity of host, alone attempted to put the young man at his ease.
“I hear you play the fiddle,” he said. “Can you make your living at that?”
“But yes, I maka ver’ good living.”
“What do you call good?” said Roger, ever practical.
“I maka quite a ‘undred pound a year.”
“H’m!” said Roger: “Do you like the climate here?”
The young man shook his hair.
“No! Rain he rain; no sun to shina.”
“Ha!” said Roger. “What’s your own part of the world?”
“Ragusa.”
“Eh! In the Balkans, um?”
“I am ze ‘alf Italiano.”
At this moment Eustace, obeying a wink from George’s brooding eyes, rose, and said:
“Shall we go up and have some—er—music?”
Roger and George were left; nor was either of them seen again that evening.
In the drawing-room Mrs. Roger, placid by now to the point of torpor, had said to Francie:
“Of course, my dear, he is striking in a way, but he doesn’t look very clean, does he?”
“That’s only his skin, Mother.”
“But how do you know, dear?�
��
“Oh! Well, he comes from Ragusa.”
“I wonder,” said Mrs. Roger, “if that is where ‘ragouts’ originally came from. I felt that he didn’t care very much for the dinner to-night.”
“He’s all spirit,” said Francie. “Everybody here thinks so much about food.”
“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Roger, “if it weren’t for your father, I shouldn’t think nearly as much about food as I have to. I sometimes wish I could go where sheep and oxen are unknown, and there are no seasons.”
“Food is a terrible bore,” said Francie.
Her mother looked at her intently.
“I’m sure you had nothing but a bun for lunch.”
“A bath bun, dear.”
“It’s not enough, Francie.”
“I never have more if I can help it.”
“Your independence will ruin you one of these days. I’m certain your father won’t like you seeing much of THAT young man.”
“Father’s hopeless,” said Francie. “He ought to be stuffed.”
A faint smile appeared on Mrs. Roger’s face, as if she were thinking: ‘Perhaps he is,’ but she said:
“Don’t be disrespectful, dear.”
At this moment they came, Eustace exceptionally dandified as though to counterbalance his associate. Francie seated her ‘foreigner’ on the sofa, dark and sulky, and herself beside him. Eustace and his mother played piquet. The sound of George leaving (without his monkey) and soon thereafter of Roger going up to bed, brought a somewhat painful evening to its end.
In their bedroom, after holding forth on a son like George, Roger said abruptly:
“And as to Francie, what does she want to pick up with a fourpenny foreigner for! That girl will get herself into a mess.”
Mrs. Roger having exhausted her powers of palliation over George, did not reply.
“A fiddler, too,” added Roger.
“She can’t help being musical, dear,” said Mrs. Roger.
“No good ever came of music,” said Roger. “Wake me if I snore; it gives me a sore throat…”
Undeterred by the wintry nature of that evening, Francie continued to promote the fortunes of her ‘lover.’ She even took him to Timothy’s. It was at a period when the whole family was still slightly in mourning, over that “dreadful business of Soames, Irene and young Bosinney, my dear,” which had so nearly got into the papers. Extraordinary sensitiveness prevailed, and anything manifestly unForsytean was scrutinised as with the eyes of parrots.
What Francie was doing with a young man whose hair stood out round him like a tea-tray, whose complexion was olive and whose eyes were almost black, was an insoluble problem which all did their utmost to solve, shaking the head and wagging the tongue. Aunt Juley alone ventured the opinion that he was romantic-looking, and was stigmatised by Swithin as a ‘sentimental old fool.’
“The fellow ought to be jumping about on a barrel organ in a red cap,” he added: “Romantic!”
It was, indeed, the damning of faint praise among a family who felt that romance was the last thing they wanted to hear of for a very long time to come. The visit to Aunts Hester and Juley, at which only Swithin and Euphemia were present, lasted but twenty minutes and was ‘carried off’ by Francie’s bravura. She took her foreigner away in a bus and soothed him with broken Italian all the way home to her studio. Her protective feeling and something slightly rapturous had been roused in her by the sight of Swithin, block-like and portentous above his waistcoats, in a light blue chair. Guido was so delightfully unlike that! Her main energies were now concentrated on securing a concert for him. There was little she did not dare to this end. It took place just as the season closed in a small hall newly opened by a firm of piano-makers.
Among many others, the whole Forsyte family were sent cards of invitation written by Francie. Even Swithin received one at his Club. This was probably the first time he had ever been invited to a concert and he announced his intention of going and seeing what it was all about. In his opinion the girl was spending a pretty penny on this fourpenny foreigner (Roger’s phrase having become current). From uneasy curiosity, in fact, rather than from love of music, a considerable number of the clan attended. Swithin found himself situated between his niece Winifred Dartie, whom he always found personable, and his niece Euphemia, who was too thin and squeaked. He slept heavily during the second number and woke just in time, with a snore so loud that it elicited from Euphemia one of the most outstanding squeaks that even she had ever let escape. During the applause which followed, he turned to her, so far, indeed, as he was able, and enquired: ‘What on earth she had made that noise for?’ To which Euphemia replied:
“Oh! Uncle Swithin, you’ll kill me!” She had a great, if inconvenient, sense of humour.
During the third number Swithin remained awake, staring, pop-eyed, at the young man’s agility and wishing he had remembered to put cotton-wool in his ears. In the interval which followed he manoeuvred himself out of his seat, and not waiting for his carriage, took a four-wheeled cab to his Club, where he lit a cigar and instantly fell asleep. It was his opinion, afterwards recorded, that the fellow had made a lot of noise—a capering chap!
The concert, which produced the sum of thirteen pounds, three shillings and sixpence, cost Francie practically all her savings. Far more serious, however, was its spiritual effect. The notices were bad. Francie was furious. Guido, who had borne one bad notice beautifully with a curl of his lip, broke into imprecations at the second, tore at his hair after the third, and dissolved into tears with the fourth. Greatly moved, Francie took his head between her hands and kissed him above the tears. And with that kiss was born in her a serious feeling, not exactly bodily, but as if he belonged to her, and must be sustained through thick and thin. A fortnight later—a fortnight spent in storm and shine, during which she gave him a pair of silver-backed brushes, some special hair shampoo, some new ties, and an umbrella—she announced to her mother by note that she and Guido were engaged. She added that she was going to sleep at the Studio till father had got over the fit he would certainly have.
There again she went wrong in her psychology, incapable, like all the young Forsytes, of appreciating exactly the quality which had made the fortunes of all the old Forsytes. In a word, they had fits over small matters, but never over large. When stark reality stared them in the face they met it with the stare of a still starker reality.
Beyond the words: “The girl’s mad,” Roger, to the infinite relief of Mrs. Roger, said absolutely nothing. His face acquired a sudden dusky-red rigidity, and he left the dining-room. He went into his sanctum—the room where he had thought out the future of countless pieces of house property—took up a paper-knife and sat down in an armchair. He sat there for fully half an hour without a sound except the dull click of the paper-knife against his lower teeth still firm as rocks. Francie was his only daughter, and in his peculiar way (not for nothing was Roger considered eccentric in the family) he was fond of her; fonder than of his mere sons Roger, George, Eustace, and Thomas; and he sat, not fuming—the matter was too serious. Presently he arose and returned to the dining-room where Mrs. Roger was in distraction over the composition of a letter to her daughter.
“Do you know where that young fellow lives?” he said.
“Yes, Roger, at 5, Glendower Mews, Kensington.”
“Write a note asking him to lunch here with Francie today week. Do the same to Francie. Where’s The Times?”
Mrs. Roger produced The Times, and faltered out:
“What are you going to do, Roger?”
“Ask no questions and you’ll be told no lies; don’t get into a fantod, leave it to me!”
On Forsyte ‘Change Page 14