The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy

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It was Aunt Hester who replied: Oh, yes, they were in town, they had not
been away at all. There was some little difficulty about the house, she
believed. June had heard, no doubt! She had better ask her Aunt Juley!

June turned to Mrs. Small, who sat upright in her chair, her hands
clasped, her face covered with innumerable pouts. In answer to the
girl's look she maintained a strange silence, and when she spoke it was
to ask June whether she had worn night-socks up in those high hotels
where it must be so cold of a night.

June answered that she had not, she hated the stuffy things; and rose to
leave.

Mrs. Small's infallibly chosen silence was far more ominous to her than
anything that could have been said.

Before half an hour was over she had dragged the truth from Mrs. Baynes
in Lowndes Square, that Soames was bringing an action against Bosinney
over the decoration of the house.

Instead of disturbing her, the news had a strangely calming effect; as
though she saw in the prospect of this struggle new hope for herself.
She learnt that the case was expected to come on in about a month, and
there seemed little or no prospect of Bosinney's success.

"And whatever he'll do I can't think," said Mrs. Baynes; "it's very
dreadful for him, you know--he's got no money--he's very hard up. And we
can't help him, I'm sure. I'm told the money-lenders won't lend if you
have no security, and he has none--none at all."

Her embonpoint had increased of late; she was in the full swing of autumn
organization, her writing-table literally strewn with the menus of
charity functions. She looked meaningly at June, with her round eyes of
parrot-grey.

The sudden flush that rose on the girl's intent young face--she must have
seen spring up before her a great hope--the sudden sweetness of her
smile, often came back to Lady Baynes in after years (Baynes was knighted
when he built that public Museum of Art which has given so much
employment to officials, and so little pleasure to those working classes
for whom it was designed).

The memory of that change, vivid and touching, like the breaking open of
a flower, or the first sun after long winter, the memory, too, of all
that came after, often intruded itself, unaccountably, inopportunely on
Lady Baynes, when her mind was set upon the most important things.

This was the very afternoon of the day that young Jolyon witnessed the
meeting in the Botanical Gardens, and on this day, too, old Jolyon paid a
visit to his solicitors, Forsyte, Bustard, and Forsyte, in the Poultry.
Soames was not in, he had gone down to Somerset House; Bustard was buried
up to the hilt in papers and that inaccessible apartment, where he was
judiciously placed, in order that he might do as much work as possible;
but James was in the front office, biting a finger, and lugubriously
turning over the pleadings in Forsyte v. Bosinney.

This sound lawyer had only a sort of luxurious dread of the 'nice point,'
enough to set up a pleasurable feeling of fuss; for his good practical
sense told him that if he himself were on the Bench he would not pay much
attention to it. But he was afraid that this Bosinney would go bankrupt
and Soames would have to find the money after all, and costs into the
bargain. And behind this tangible dread there was always that intangible
trouble, lurking in the background, intricate, dim, scandalous, like a
bad dream, and of which this action was but an outward and visible sign.

He raised his head as old Jolyon came in, and muttered: "How are you,
Jolyon? Haven't seen you for an age. You've been to Switzerland, they
tell me. This young Bosinney, he's got himself into a mess. I knew how
it would be!" He held out the papers, regarding his elder brother with
nervous gloom.

Old Jolyon read them in silence, and while he read them James looked at
the floor, biting his fingers the while.

Old Jolyon pitched them down at last, and they fell with a thump amongst
a mass of affidavits in 're Buncombe, deceased,' one of the many branches
of that parent and profitable tree, 'Fryer v. Forsyte.'

"I don't know what Soames is about," he said, "to make a fuss over a few
hundred pounds. I thought he was a man of property."

James' long upper lip twitched angrily; he could not bear his son to be
attacked in such a spot.

"It's not the money," he began, but meeting his brother's glance, direct,
shrewd, judicial, he stopped.

There was a silence.

"I've come in for my Will," said old Jolyon at last, tugging at his
moustache.

James' curiosity was roused at once. Perhaps nothing in this life was
more stimulating to him than a Will; it was the supreme deal with
property, the final inventory of a man's belongings, the last word on
what he was worth. He sounded the bell.

"Bring in Mr. Jolyon's Will," he said to an anxious, dark-haired clerk.

"You going to make some alterations?" And through his mind there flashed
the thought: 'Now, am I worth as much as he?'

Old Jolyon put the Will in his breast pocket, and James twisted his long
legs regretfully.

"You've made some nice purchases lately, they tell me," he said.

"I don't know where you get your information from," answered old Jolyon
sharply. "When's this action coming on? Next month? I can't tell what
you've got in your minds. You must manage your own affairs; but if you
take my advice, you'll settle it out of Court. Good-bye!" With a cold
handshake he was gone.

James, his fixed grey-blue eye corkscrewing round some secret anxious
image, began again to bite his finger.

Old Jolyon took his Will to the offices of the New Colliery Company, and
sat down in the empty Board Room to read it through. He answered
'Down-by-the-starn' Hemmings so tartly when the latter, seeing his
Chairman seated there, entered with the new Superintendent's first
report, that the Secretary withdrew with regretful dignity; and sending
for the transfer clerk, blew him up till the poor youth knew not where to
look.

It was not--by George--as he (Down-by-the-starn) would have him know, for
a whippersnapper of a young fellow like him, to come down to that office,
and think that he was God Almighty. He (Down-by-the-starn) had been head
of that office for more years than a boy like him could count, and if he
thought that when he had finished all his work, he could sit there doing
nothing, he did not know him, Hemmings (Down-by-the-starn), and so forth.

On the other side of the green baize door old Jolyon sat at the long,
mahogany-and-leather board table, his thick, loose-jointed, tortoiseshell
eye-glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, his gold pencil moving
down the clauses of his Will.

It was a simple affair, for there were none of those vexatious little
legacies and donations to charities, which fritter away a man's
possessions, and damage the majestic effect of that little paragraph in
the morning papers accorded to Forsytes who die with a hundred thousand
pounds.

A simple affair. Just a bequest to his son of twenty thousand, and 'as
to the residue of my property of whatsoever kind whether realty or
personalty, or partaking of the nature of either--upon trust to pay the
proceeds rents annual produce dividends or interest thereof and thereon
to my said grand-daughter June Forsyte or her assigns during her life to
be for her sole use and benefit and without, etc... and from and after
her death or decease upon trust to convey assign transfer or make over
the said last-mentioned lands hereditaments premises trust moneys stocks
funds investments and securities or such as shall then stand for and
represent the same unto such person or persons whether one or more for
such intents purposes and uses and generally in such manner way and form
in all respects as the said June Forsyte notwithstanding coverture shall
by her last Will and Testament or any writing or writings in the nature
of a Will testament or testamentary disposition to be by her duly made
signed and published direct appoint or make over give and dispose of the
same And in default etc.... Provided always...' and so on, in seven
folios of brief and simple phraseology.

The Will had been drawn by James in his palmy days. He had foreseen
almost every contingency.

Old Jolyon sat a long time reading this Will; at last he took half a
sheet of paper from the rack, and made a prolonged pencil note; then
buttoning up the Will, he caused a cab to be called and drove to the
offices of Paramor and Herring, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. Jack Herring
was dead, but his nephew was still in the firm, and old Jolyon was
closeted with him for half an hour.

He had kept the hansom, and on coming out, gave the driver the
address--3, Wistaria Avenue.

He felt a strange, slow satisfaction, as though he had scored a victory
over James and the man of property. They should not poke their noses
into his affairs any more; he had just cancelled their trusteeships of
his Will; he would take the whole of his business out of their hands, and
put it into the hands of young Herring, and he would move the business of
his Companies too. If that young Soames were such a man of property, he
would never miss a thousand a year or so; and under his great white
moustache old Jolyon grimly smiled. He felt that what he was doing was
in the nature of retributive justice, richly deserved.

Slowly, surely, with the secret inner process that works the destruction
of an old tree, the poison of the wounds to his happiness, his will, his
pride, had corroded the comely edifice of his philosophy. Life had worn
him down on one side, till, like that family of which he was the head, he
had lost balance.

To him, borne northwards towards his son's house, the thought of the new
disposition of property, which he had just set in motion, appeared
vaguely in the light of a stroke of punishment, levelled at that family
and that Society, of which James and his son seemed to him the
representatives. He had made a restitution to young Jolyon, and
restitution to young Jolyon satisfied his secret craving for
revenge-revenge against Time, sorrow, and interference, against all that
incalculable sum of disapproval that had been bestowed by the world for
fifteen years on his only son. It presented itself as the one possible
way of asserting once more the domination of his will; of forcing James,
and Soames, and the family, and all those hidden masses of Forsytes--a
great stream rolling against the single dam of his obstinacy--to
recognise once and for all that he would be master. It was sweet to
think that at last he was going to make the boy a richer man by far than
that son of James, that 'man of property.' And it was sweet to give to
Jo, for he loved his son.

Neither young Jolyon nor his wife were in (young Jolyon indeed was not
back from the Botanical), but the little maid told him that she expected
the master at any moment:

"He's always at 'ome to tea, sir, to play with the children."

Old Jolyon said he would wait; and sat down patiently enough in the
faded, shabby drawing room, where, now that the summer chintzes were
removed, the old chairs and sofas revealed all their threadbare
deficiencies. He longed to send for the children; to have them there
beside him, their supple bodies against his knees; to hear Jolly's:
"Hallo, Gran!" and see his rush; and feel Holly's soft little hand
stealing up against his cheek. But he would not. There was solemnity in
what he had come to do, and until it was over he would not play. He
amused himself by thinking how with two strokes of his pen he was going
to restore the look of caste so conspicuously absent from everything in
that little house; how he could fill these rooms, or others in some
larger mansion, with triumphs of art from Baple and Pullbred's; how he
could send little Jolly to Harrow and Oxford (he no longer had faith in
Eton and Cambridge, for his son had been there); how he could procure
little Holly the best musical instruction, the child had a remarkable
aptitude.

As these visions crowded before him, causing emotion to swell his heart,
he rose, and stood at the window, looking down into the little walled
strip of garden, where the pear-tree, bare of leaves before its time,
stood with gaunt branches in the slow-gathering mist of the autumn
afternoon. The dog Balthasar, his tail curled tightly over a piebald,
furry back, was walking at the farther end, sniffing at the plants, and
at intervals placing his leg for support against the wall.

And old Jolyon mused.

What pleasure was there left but to give? It was pleasant to give, when
you could find one who would be thankful for what you gave--one of your
own flesh and blood! There was no such satisfaction to be had out of
giving to those who did not belong to you, to those who had no claim on
you! Such giving as that was a betrayal of the individualistic
convictions and actions of his life, of all his enterprise, his labour,
and his moderation, of the great and proud fact that, like tens of
thousands of Forsytes before him, tens of thousands in the present, tens
of thousands in the future, he had always made his own, and held his own,
in the world.

And, while he stood there looking down on the smut-covered foliage of the
laurels, the black-stained grass-plot, the progress of the dog Balthasar,
all the suffering of the fifteen years during which he had been baulked
of legitimate enjoyment mingled its gall with the sweetness of the
approaching moment.

Young Jolyon came at last, pleased with his work, and fresh from long
hours in the open air. On hearing that his father was in the drawing
room, he inquired hurriedly whether Mrs. Forsyte was at home, and being
informed that she was not, heaved a sigh of relief. Then putting his
painting materials carefully in the little coat-closet out of sight, he
went in.

With characteristic decision old Jolyon came at once to the point. "I've
been altering my arrangements, Jo," he said. "You can cut your coat a
bit longer in the future--I'm settling a thousand a year on you at once.
June will have fifty thousand at my death; and you the rest. That dog of
yours is spoiling the garden. I shouldn't keep a dog, if I were you!"

The dog Balthasar, seated in the centre of the lawn, was examining his
tail.

Young Jolyon looked at the animal, but saw him dimly, for his eyes were
misty.

"Yours won't come short of a hundred thousand, my boy," said old Jolyon;
"I thought you'd better know. I haven't much longer to live at my age.
I shan't allude to it again. How's your wife? And--give her my love."

Young Jolyon put his hand on his father's shoulder, and, as neither
spoke, the episode closed.

Having seen his father into a hansom, young Jolyon came back to the
drawing-room and stood, where old Jolyon had stood, looking down on the
little garden. He tried to realize all that this meant to him, and,
Forsyte that he was, vistas of property were opened out in his brain; the
years of half rations through which he had passed had not sapped his
natural instincts. In extremely practical form, he thought of travel, of
his wife's costume, the children's education, a pony for Jolly, a
thousand things; but in the midst of all he thought, too, of Bosinney and
his mistress, and the broken song of the thrush. Joy--tragedy! Which?
Which?

The old past--the poignant, suffering, passionate, wonderful past, that
no money could buy, that nothing could restore in all its burning
sweetness--had come back before him.

When his wife came in he went straight up to her and took her in his
arms; and for a long time he stood without speaking, his eyes closed,
pressing her to him, while she looked at him with a wondering, adoring,
doubting look in her eyes.




CHAPTER IV

VOYAGE INTO THE INFERNO

The morning after a certain night on which Soames at last asserted his
rights and acted like a man, he breakfasted alone.

He breakfasted by gaslight, the fog of late November wrapping the town as
in some monstrous blanket till the trees of the Square even were barely
visible from the dining-room window.

He ate steadily, but at times a sensation as though he could not swallow
attacked him. Had he been right to yield to his overmastering hunger of
the night before, and break down the resistance which he had suffered now
too long from this woman who was his lawful and solemnly constituted
helpmate?

He was strangely haunted by the recollection of her face, from before
which, to soothe her, he had tried to pull her hands--of her terrible
smothered sobbing, the like of which he had never heard, and still seemed
to hear; and he was still haunted by the odd, intolerable feeling of
remorse and shame he had felt, as he stood looking at her by the flame of
the single candle, before silently slinking away.

And somehow, now that he had acted like this, he was surprised at
himself.

Two nights before, at Winifred Dartie's, he had taken Mrs. MacAnder into
dinner. She had said to him, looking in his face with her sharp,
greenish eyes: "And so your wife is a great friend of that Mr.
Bosinney's?"

Not deigning to ask what she meant, he had brooded over her words.

They had roused in him a fierce jealousy, which, with the peculiar
perversion of this instinct, had turned to fiercer desire.

Without the incentive of Mrs. MacAnder's words he might never have done
what he had done. Without their incentive and the accident of finding
his wife's door for once unlocked, which had enabled him to steal upon
her asleep.

Slumber had removed his doubts, but the morning brought them again. One
thought comforted him: No one would know--it was not the sort of thing
that she would speak about.

And, indeed, when the vehicle of his daily business life, which needed so
imperatively the grease of clear and practical thought, started rolling
once more with the reading of his letters, those nightmare-like doubts
began to assume less extravagant importance at the back of his mind. The
incident was really not of great moment; women made a fuss about it in
books; but in the cool judgment of right-thinking men, of men of the
world, of such as he recollected often received praise in the Divorce
Court, he had but done his best to sustain the sanctity of marriage, to
prevent her from abandoning her duty, possibly, if she were still seeing
Bosinney, from....

No, he did not regret it.

Now that the first step towards reconciliation had been taken, the rest
would be comparatively--comparatively....

He, rose and walked to the window. His nerve had been shaken. The sound
of smothered sobbing was in his ears again. He could not get rid of it.

He put on his fur coat, and went out into the fog; having to go into the
City, he took the underground railway from Sloane Square station.

In his corner of the first-class compartment filled with City men the
smothered sobbing still haunted him, so he opened the Times with the rich
crackle that drowns all lesser sounds, and, barricaded behind it, set
himself steadily to con the news.

He read that a Recorder had charged a grand jury on the previous day with
a more than usually long list of offences. He read of three murders,
five manslaughters, seven arsons, and as many as eleven rapes--a
surprisingly high number--in addition to many less conspicuous crimes, to
be tried during a coming Sessions; and from one piece of news he went on
to another, keeping the paper well before his face.

And still, inseparable from his reading, was the memory of Irene's
tear-stained face, and the sounds from her broken heart.

The day was a busy one, including, in addition to the ordinary affairs of
his practice, a visit to his brokers, Messrs. Grin and Grinning, to give
them instructions to sell his shares in the New Colliery Co., Ltd., whose
business he suspected, rather than knew, was stagnating (this enterprise
afterwards slowly declined, and was ultimately sold for a song to an
American syndicate); and a long conference at Waterbuck, Q.C.'s chambers,
attended by Boulter, by Fiske, the junior counsel, and Waterbuck, Q.C.,
himself.

The case of Forsyte v. Bosinney was expected to be reached on the morrow,
before Mr. Justice Bentham.

Mr. Justice Bentham, a man of common-sense rather than too great legal
knowledge, was considered to be about the best man they could have to try
the action. He was a 'strong' Judge.

Waterbuck, Q.C., in pleasing conjunction with an almost rude neglect of
Boulter and Fiske paid to Soames a good deal of attention, by instinct or
the sounder evidence of rumour, feeling him to be a man of property.

He held with remarkable consistency to the opinion he had already
expressed in writing, that the issue would depend to a great extent on
the evidence given at the trial, and in a few well directed remarks he
advised Soames not to be too careful in giving that evidence. "A little
bluffness, Mr. Forsyte," he said, "a little bluffness," and after he had
spoken he laughed firmly, closed his lips tight, and scratched his head
just below where he had pushed his wig back, for all the world like the
gentleman-farmer for whom he loved to be taken. He was considered
perhaps the leading man in breach of promise cases.

Soames used the underground again in going home.

The fog was worse than ever at Sloane Square station. Through the still,
thick blur, men groped in and out; women, very few, grasped their
reticules to their bosoms and handkerchiefs to their mouths; crowned with
the weird excrescence of the driver, haloed by a vague glow of lamp-light
that seemed to drown in vapour before it reached the pavement, cabs
loomed dim-shaped ever and again, and discharged citizens, bolting like
rabbits to their burrows.

And these shadowy figures, wrapped each in his own little shroud of fog,
took no notice of each other. In the great warren, each rabbit for
himself, especially those clothed in the more expensive fur, who, afraid
of carriages on foggy days, are driven underground.

One figure, however, not far from Soames, waited at the station door.

Some buccaneer or lover, of whom each Forsyte thought: 'Poor devil! looks
as if he were having a bad time!' Their kind hearts beat a stroke faster
for that poor, waiting, anxious lover in the fog; but they hurried by,
well knowing that they had neither time nor money to spare for any
suffering but their own.

Only a policeman, patrolling slowly and at intervals, took an interest in
that waiting figure, the brim of whose slouch hat half hid a face
reddened by the cold, all thin, and haggard, over which a hand stole now
and again to smooth away anxiety, or renew the resolution that kept him
waiting there. But the waiting lover (if lover he were) was used to
policemen's scrutiny, or too absorbed in his anxiety, for he never
flinched. A hardened case, accustomed to long trysts, to anxiety, and
fog, and cold, if only his mistress came at last. Foolish lover! Fogs
last until the spring; there is also snow and rain, no comfort anywhere;
gnawing fear if you bring her out, gnawing fear if you bid her stay at
home!

"Serve him right; he should arrange his affairs better!"

So any respectable Forsyte. Yet, if that sounder citizen could have
listened at the waiting lover's heart, out there in the fog and the cold,
he would have said again: "Yes, poor devil he's having a bad time!"

Soames got into his cab, and, with the glass down, crept along Sloane
Street, and so along the Brompton Road, and home. He reached his house
at five.

His wife was not in. She had gone out a quarter of an hour before. Out
at such a time of night, into this terrible fog! What was the meaning of
that?

He sat by the dining-room fire, with the door open, disturbed to the
soul, trying to read the evening paper. A book was no good--in daily
papers alone was any narcotic to such worry as his. From the customary
events recorded in the journal he drew some comfort. 'Suicide of an
actress'--'Grave indisposition of a Statesman' (that chronic
sufferer)--'Divorce of an army officer'--'Fire in a colliery'--he read
them all. They helped him a little--prescribed by the greatest of all
doctors, our natural taste.

It was nearly seven when he heard her come in.

The incident of the night before had long lost its importance under
stress of anxiety at her strange sortie into the fog. But now that Irene
was home, the memory of her broken-hearted sobbing came back to him, and
he felt nervous at the thought of facing her.

She was already on the stairs; her grey fur coat hung to her knees, its
high collar almost hid her face, she wore a thick veil.

She neither turned to look at him nor spoke. No ghost or stranger could
have passed more silently.

Bilson came to lay dinner, and told him that Mrs. Forsyte was not coming
down; she was having the soup in her room.

For once Soames did not 'change'; it was, perhaps, the first time in his
life that he had sat down to dinner with soiled cuffs, and, not even
noticing them, he brooded long over his wine. He sent Bilson to light a
fire in his picture-room, and presently went up there himself.