The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy

J >> John Galsworthy >> The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy


"Good-bye, dear Uncle Jolyon, you have been so sweet to me."

"To-morrow then," he said. "Good-night. Sleep well." She echoed
softly: "Sleep well" and from the cab window, already moving away, he saw
her face screwed round towards him, and her hand put out in a gesture
which seemed to linger.

He sought his room slowly. They never gave him the same, and he could
not get used to these 'spick-and-spandy' bedrooms with new furniture and
grey-green carpets sprinkled all over with pink roses. He was wakeful
and that wretched Habanera kept throbbing in his head.

His French had never been equal to its words, but its sense he knew, if
it had any sense, a gipsy thing--wild and unaccountable. Well, there was
in life something which upset all your care and plans--something which
made men and women dance to its pipes. And he lay staring from deep-sunk
eyes into the darkness where the unaccountable held sway. You thought
you had hold of life, but it slipped away behind you, took you by the
scruff of the neck, forced you here and forced you there, and then,
likely as not, squeezed life out of you! It took the very stars like
that, he shouldn't wonder, rubbed their noses together and flung them
apart; it had never done playing its pranks. Five million people in this
great blunderbuss of a town, and all of them at the mercy of that
Life-Force, like a lot of little dried peas hopping about on a board when
you struck your fist on it. Ah, well! Himself would not hop much
longer--a good long sleep would do him good!

How hot it was up here!--how noisy! His forehead burned; she had kissed
it just where he always worried; just there--as if she had known the very
place and wanted to kiss it all away for him. But, instead, her lips
left a patch of grievous uneasiness. She had never spoken in quite that
voice, had never before made that lingering gesture or looked back at him
as she drove away.

He got out of bed and pulled the curtains aside; his room faced down over
the river. There was little air, but the sight of that breadth of water
flowing by, calm, eternal, soothed him. 'The great thing,' he thought
'is not to make myself a nuisance. I'll think of my little sweet, and go
to sleep.' But it was long before the heat and throbbing of the London
night died out into the short slumber of the summer morning. And old
Jolyon had but forty winks.

When he reached home next day he went out to the flower garden, and with
the help of Holly, who was very delicate with flowers, gathered a great
bunch of carnations. They were, he told her, for 'the lady in grey'--a
name still bandied between them; and he put them in a bowl in his study
where he meant to tackle Irene the moment she came, on the subject of
June and future lessons. Their fragrance and colour would help. After
lunch he lay down, for he felt very tired, and the carriage would not
bring her from the station till four o'clock. But as the hour approached
he grew restless, and sought the schoolroom, which overlooked the drive.
The sun-blinds were down, and Holly was there with Mademoiselle Beauce,
sheltered from the heat of a stifling July day, attending to their
silkworms. Old Jolyon had a natural antipathy to these methodical
creatures, whose heads and colour reminded him of elephants; who nibbled
such quantities of holes in nice green leaves; and smelled, as he
thought, horrid. He sat down on a chintz-covered windowseat whence he
could see the drive, and get what air there was; and the dog Balthasar
who appreciated chintz on hot days, jumped up beside him. Over the
cottage piano a violet dust-sheet, faded almost to grey, was spread, and
on it the first lavender, whose scent filled the room. In spite of the
coolness here, perhaps because of that coolness the beat of life
vehemently impressed his ebbed-down senses. Each sunbeam which came
through the chinks had annoying brilliance; that dog smelled very strong;
the lavender perfume was overpowering; those silkworms heaving up their
grey-green backs seemed horribly alive; and Holly's dark head bent over
them had a wonderfully silky sheen. A marvellous cruelly strong thing
was life when you were old and weak; it seemed to mock you with its
multitude of forms and its beating vitality. He had never, till those
last few weeks, had this curious feeling of being with one half of him
eagerly borne along in the stream of life, and with the other half left
on the bank, watching that helpless progress. Only when Irene was with
him did he lose this double consciousness.

Holly turned her head, pointed with her little brown fist to the
piano--for to point with a finger was not 'well-brrred'--and said slyly:

"Look at the 'lady in grey,' Gran; isn't she pretty to-day?"

Old Jolyon's heart gave a flutter, and for a second the room was clouded;
then it cleared, and he said with a twinkle:

"Who's been dressing her up?"

"Mam'zelle."

"Hollee! Don't be foolish!"

That prim little Frenchwoman! She hadn't yet got over the music lessons
being taken away from her. That wouldn't help. His little sweet was the
only friend they had. Well, they were her lessons. And he shouldn't
budge shouldn't budge for anything. He stroked the warm wool on
Balthasar's head, and heard Holly say: "When mother's home, there won't
be any changes, will there? She doesn't like strangers, you know."

The child's words seemed to bring the chilly atmosphere of opposition
about old Jolyon, and disclose all the menace to his new-found freedom.
Ah! He would have to resign himself to being an old man at the mercy of
care and love, or fight to keep this new and prized companionship; and to
fight tired him to death. But his thin, worn face hardened into
resolution till it appeared all Jaw. This was his house, and his affair;
he should not budge! He looked at his watch, old and thin like himself;
he had owned it fifty years. Past four already! And kissing the top of
Holly's head in passing, he went down to the hall. He wanted to get hold
of her before she went up to give her lesson. At the first sound of
wheels he stepped out into the porch, and saw at once that the victoria
was empty.

"The train's in, sir; but the lady 'asn't come."

Old Jolyon gave him a sharp upward look, his eyes seemed to push away
that fat chap's curiosity, and defy him to see the bitter disappointment
he was feeling.

"Very well," he said, and turned back into the house. He went to his
study and sat down, quivering like a leaf. What did this mean? She might
have lost her train, but he knew well enough she hadn't. 'Good-bye, dear
Uncle Jolyon.' Why 'Good-bye' and not 'Good-night'? And that hand of
hers lingering in the air. And her kiss. What did it mean? Vehement
alarm and irritation took possession of him. He got up and began to pace
the Turkey carpet, between window and wall. She was going to give him
up! He felt it for certain--and he defenceless. An old man wanting to
look on beauty! It was ridiculous! Age closed his mouth, paralysed his
power to fight. He had no right to what was warm and living, no right to
anything but memories and sorrow. He could not plead with her; even an
old man has his dignity. Defenceless! For an hour, lost to bodily
fatigue, he paced up and down, past the bowl of carnations he had
plucked, which mocked him with its scent. Of all things hard to bear,
the prostration of will-power is hardest, for one who has always had his
way. Nature had got him in its net, and like an unhappy fish he turned
and swam at the meshes, here and there, found no hole, no breaking point.
They brought him tea at five o'clock, and a letter. For a moment hope
beat up in him. He cut the envelope with the butter knife, and read:

"DEAREST UNCLE JOLYON,--I can't bear to write anything that may
disappoint you, but I was too cowardly to tell you last night. I feel I
can't come down and give Holly any more lessons, now that June is coming
back. Some things go too deep to be forgotten. It has been such a joy
to see you and Holly. Perhaps I shall still see you sometimes when you
come up, though I'm sure it's not good for you; I can see you are tiring
yourself too much. I believe you ought to rest quite quietly all this
hot weather, and now you have your son and June coming back you will be
so happy. Thank you a million times for all your sweetness to me.

"Lovingly your IRENE."

So, there it was! Not good for him to have pleasure and what he chiefly
cared about; to try and put off feeling the inevitable end of all things,
the approach of death with its stealthy, rustling footsteps. Not good
for him! Not even she could see how she was his new lease of interest in
life, the incarnation of all the beauty he felt slipping from him.

His tea grew cold, his cigar remained unlit; and up and down he paced,
torn between his dignity and his hold on life. Intolerable to be
squeezed out slowly, without a say of your own, to live on when your will
was in the hands of others bent on weighing you to the ground with care
and love. Intolerable! He would see what telling her the truth would
do--the truth that he wanted the sight of her more than just a lingering
on. He sat down at his old bureau and took a pen. But he could not
write. There was something revolting in having to plead like this; plead
that she should warm his eyes with her beauty. It was tantamount to
confessing dotage. He simply could not. And instead, he wrote:

"I had hoped that the memory of old sores would not be allowed to stand
in the way of what is a pleasure and a profit to me and my little
grand-daughter. But old men learn to forego their whims; they are
obliged to, even the whim to live must be foregone sooner or later; and
perhaps the sooner the better.
"My love to you,
"JOLYON FORSYTE."

'Bitter,' he thought, 'but I can't help it. I'm tired.' He sealed and
dropped it into the box for the evening post, and hearing it fall to the
bottom, thought: 'There goes all I've looked forward to!'

That evening after dinner which he scarcely touched, after his cigar
which he left half-smoked for it made him feel faint, he went very slowly
upstairs and stole into the night-nursery. He sat down on the
window-seat. A night-light was burning, and he could just see Holly's
face, with one hand underneath the cheek. An early cockchafer buzzed in
the Japanese paper with which they had filled the grate, and one of the
horses in the stable stamped restlessly. To sleep like that child! He
pressed apart two rungs of the venetian blind and looked out. The moon
was rising, blood-red. He had never seen so red a moon. The woods and
fields out there were dropping to sleep too, in the last glimmer of the
summer light. And beauty, like a spirit, walked. 'I've had a long life,'
he thought, 'the best of nearly everything. I'm an ungrateful chap; I've
seen a lot of beauty in my time. Poor young Bosinney said I had a sense
of beauty. There's a man in the moon to-night!' A moth went by,
another, another. 'Ladies in grey!' He closed his eyes. A feeling that
he would never open them again beset him; he let it grow, let himself
sink; then, with a shiver, dragged the lids up. There was something
wrong with him, no doubt, deeply wrong; he would have to have the doctor
after all. It didn't much matter now! Into that coppice the moon-light
would have crept; there would be shadows, and those shadows would be the
only things awake. No birds, beasts, flowers, insects; Just the shadows
--moving; 'Ladies in grey!' Over that log they would climb; would
whisper together. She and Bosinney! Funny thought! And the frogs and
little things would whisper too! How the clock ticked, in here! It was
all eerie--out there in the light of that red moon; in here with the
little steady night-light and, the ticking clock and the nurse's
dressing-gown hanging from the edge of the screen, tall, like a woman's
figure. 'Lady in grey!' And a very odd thought beset him: Did she
exist? Had she ever come at all? Or was she but the emanation of all
the beauty he had loved and must leave so soon? The violet-grey spirit
with the dark eyes and the crown of amber hair, who walks the dawn and
the moonlight, and at blue-bell time? What was she, who was she, did she
exist? He rose and stood a moment clutching the window-sill, to give him
a sense of reality again; then began tiptoeing towards the door. He
stopped at the foot of the bed; and Holly, as if conscious of his eyes
fixed on her, stirred, sighed, and curled up closer in defence. He
tiptoed on and passed out into the dark passage; reached his room,
undressed at once, and stood before a mirror in his night-shirt. What a
scarecrow--with temples fallen in, and thin legs! His eyes resisted his
own image, and a look of pride came on his face. All was in league to
pull him down, even his reflection in the glass, but he was not
down--yet! He got into bed, and lay a long time without sleeping, trying
to reach resignation, only too well aware that fretting and
disappointment were very bad for him.

He woke in the morning so unrefreshed and strengthless that he sent for
the doctor. After sounding him, the fellow pulled a face as long as your
arm, and ordered him to stay in bed and give up smoking. That was no
hardship; there was nothing to get up for, and when he felt ill, tobacco
always lost its savour. He spent the morning languidly with the
sun-blinds down, turning and re-turning The Times, not reading much, the
dog Balthasar lying beside his bed. With his lunch they brought him a
telegram, running thus:

'Your letter received coming down this afternoon will be with you at
four-thirty. Irene.'

Coming down! After all! Then she did exist--and he was not deserted.
Coming down! A glow ran through his limbs; his cheeks and forehead felt
hot. He drank his soup, and pushed the tray-table away, lying very quiet
until they had removed lunch and left him alone; but every now and then
his eyes twinkled. Coming down! His heart beat fast, and then did not
seem to beat at all. At three o'clock he got up and dressed
deliberately, noiselessly. Holly and Mam'zelle would be in the
schoolroom, and the servants asleep after their dinner, he shouldn't
wonder. He opened his door cautiously, and went downstairs. In the hall
the dog Balthasar lay solitary, and, followed by him, old Jolyon passed
into his study and out into the burning afternoon. He meant to go down
and meet her in the coppice, but felt at once he could not manage that in
this heat. He sat down instead under the oak tree by the swing, and the
dog Balthasar, who also felt the heat, lay down beside him. He sat there
smiling. What a revel of bright minutes! What a hum of insects, and
cooing of pigeons! It was the quintessence of a summer day. Lovely!
And he was happy--happy as a sand-boy, whatever that might be. She was
coming; she had not given him up! He had everything in life he
wanted--except a little more breath, and less weight--just here! He
would see her when she emerged from the fernery, come swaying just a
little, a violet-grey figure passing over the daisies and dandelions and
'soldiers' on the lawn--the soldiers with their flowery crowns. He would
not move, but she would come up to him and say: 'Dear Uncle Jolyon, I am
sorry!' and sit in the swing and let him look at her and tell her that he
had not been very well but was all right now; and that dog would lick her
hand. That dog knew his master was fond of her; that dog was a good dog.

It was quite shady under the tree; the sun could not get at him, only
make the rest of the world bright so that he could see the Grand Stand at
Epsom away out there, very far, and the cows cropping the clover in the
field and swishing at the flies with their tails. He smelled the scent
of limes, and lavender. Ah! that was why there was such a racket of
bees. They were excited--busy, as his heart was busy and excited.
Drowsy, too, drowsy and drugged on honey and happiness; as his heart was
drugged and drowsy. Summer--summer--they seemed saying; great bees and
little bees, and the flies too!

The stable clock struck four; in half an hour she would be here. He would
have just one tiny nap, because he had had so little sleep of late; and
then he would be fresh for her, fresh for youth and beauty, coming
towards him across the sunlit lawn--lady in grey! And settling back in
his chair he closed his eyes. Some thistle-down came on what little air
there was, and pitched on his moustache more white than itself. He did
not know; but his breathing stirred it, caught there. A ray of sunlight
struck through and lodged on his boot. A bumble-bee alighted and
strolled on the crown of his Panama hat. And the delicious surge of
slumber reached the brain beneath that hat, and the head swayed forward
and rested on his breast. Summer--summer! So went the hum.

The stable clock struck the quarter past. The dog Balthasar stretched
and looked up at his master. The thistledown no longer moved. The dog
placed his chin over the sunlit foot. It did not stir. The dog withdrew
his chin quickly, rose, and leaped on old Jolyon's lap, looked in his
face, whined; then, leaping down, sat on his haunches, gazing up. And
suddenly he uttered a long, long howl.

But the thistledown was still as death, and the face of his old master.

Summer--summer--summer! The soundless footsteps on the grass!
1917




IN CHANCERY

Two households both alike in dignity, From ancient grudge, break into new
mutiny.

--Romeo and Juliet
TO JESSIE AND JOSEPH CONRAD




PART 1




CHAPTER I

AT TIMOTHY'S

The possessive instinct never stands still. Through florescence and
feud, frosts and fires, it followed the laws of progression even in the
Forsyte family which had believed it fixed for ever. Nor can it be
dissociated from environment any more than the quality of potato from the
soil.

The historian of the English eighties and nineties will, in his good
time, depict the somewhat rapid progression from self-contented and
contained provincialism to still more self-contented if less contained
imperialism--in other words, the 'possessive' instinct of the nation on
the move. And so, as if in conformity, was it with the Forsyte family.
They were spreading not merely on the surface, but within.

When, in 1895, Susan Hayman, the married Forsyte sister, followed her
husband at the ludicrously low age of seventy-four, and was cremated, it
made strangely little stir among the six old Forsytes left. For this
apathy there were three causes. First: the almost surreptitious burial
of old Jolyon in 1892 down at Robin Hill--first of the Forsytes to
desert the family grave at Highgate. That burial, coming a year after
Swithin's entirely proper funeral, had occasioned a great deal of talk on
Forsyte 'Change, the abode of Timothy Forsyte on the Bayswater Road,
London, which still collected and radiated family gossip. Opinions
ranged from the lamentation of Aunt Juley to the outspoken assertion of
Francie that it was 'a jolly good thing to stop all that stuffy Highgate
business.' Uncle Jolyon in his later years--indeed, ever since the
strange and lamentable affair between his granddaughter June's lover,
young Bosinney, and Irene, his nephew Soames Forsyte's wife--had
noticeably rapped the family's knuckles; and that way of his own which he
had always taken had begun to seem to them a little wayward. The
philosophic vein in him, of course, had always been too liable to crop
out of the strata of pure Forsyteism, so they were in a way prepared for
his interment in a strange spot. But the whole thing was an odd
business, and when the contents of his Will became current coin on
Forsyte 'Change, a shiver had gone round the clan. Out of his estate
(L145,304 gross, with liabilities L35 7s. 4d.) he had actually left
L15,000 to "whomever do you think, my dear? To Irene!" that runaway wife
of his nephew Soames; Irene, a woman who had almost disgraced the family,
and--still more amazing was to him no blood relation. Not out and out,
of course; only a life interest--only the income from it! Still, there
it was; and old Jolyon's claim to be the perfect Forsyte was ended once
for all. That, then, was the first reason why the burial of Susan
Hayman--at Woking--made little stir.

The second reason was altogether more expansive and imperial. Besides the
house on Campden Hill, Susan had a place (left her by Hayman when he
died) just over the border in Hants, where the Hayman boys had learned to
be such good shots and riders, as it was believed, which was of course
nice for them, and creditable to everybody; and the fact of owning
something really countrified seemed somehow to excuse the dispersion of
her remains--though what could have put cremation into her head they
could not think! The usual invitations, however, had been issued, and
Soames had gone down and young Nicholas, and the Will had been quite
satisfactory so far as it went, for she had only had a life interest; and
everything had gone quite smoothly to the children in equal shares.

The third reason why Susan's burial made little stir was the most
expansive of all. It was summed up daringly by Euphemia, the pale, the
thin: "Well, I think people have a right to their own bodies, even when
they're dead." Coming from a daughter of Nicholas, a Liberal of the old
school and most tyrannical, it was a startling remark--showing in a flash
what a lot of water had run under bridges since the death of Aunt Ann in
'86, just when the proprietorship of Soames over his wife's body was
acquiring the uncertainty which had led to such disaster. Euphemia, of
course, spoke like a child, and had no experience; for though well over
thirty by now, her name was still Forsyte. But, making all allowances,
her remark did undoubtedly show expansion of the principle of liberty,
decentralisation and shift in the central point of possession from others
to oneself. When Nicholas heard his daughter's remark from Aunt Hester
he had rapped out: "Wives and daughters! There's no end to their liberty
in these days. I knew that 'Jackson' case would lead to things--lugging
in Habeas Corpus like that!" He had, of course, never really forgiven
the Married Woman's Property Act, which would so have interfered with him
if he had not mercifully married before it was passed. But, in truth,
there was no denying the revolt among the younger Forsytes against being
owned by others; that, as it were, Colonial disposition to own oneself,
which is the paradoxical forerunner of Imperialism, was making progress
all the time. They were all now married, except George, confirmed to the
Turf and the Iseeum Club; Francie, pursuing her musical career in a
studio off the King's Road, Chelsea, and still taking 'lovers' to dances;
Euphemia, living at home and complaining of Nicholas; and those two
Dromios, Giles and Jesse Hayman. Of the third generation there were not
very many--young Jolyon had three, Winifred Dartie four, young Nicholas
six already, young Roger had one, Marian Tweetyman one; St. John Hayman
two. But the rest of the sixteen married--Soames, Rachel and Cicely of
James' family; Eustace and Thomas of Roger's; Ernest, Archibald and
Florence of Nicholas'; Augustus and Annabel Spender of the Hayman's--were
going down the years unreproduced.

Thus, of the ten old Forsytes twenty-one young Forsytes had been born;
but of the twenty-one young Forsytes there were as yet only seventeen
descendants; and it already seemed unlikely that there would be more than
a further unconsidered trifle or so. A student of statistics must have
noticed that the birth rate had varied in accordance with the rate of
interest for your money. Grandfather 'Superior Dosset' Forsyte in the
early nineteenth century had been getting ten per cent. for his, hence
ten children. Those ten, leaving out the four who had not married, and
Juley, whose husband Septimus Small had, of course, died almost at once,
had averaged from four to five per cent. for theirs, and produced
accordingly. The twenty-one whom they produced were now getting barely
three per cent. in the Consols to which their father had mostly tied the
Settlements they made to avoid death duties, and the six of them who had
been reproduced had seventeen children, or just the proper two and
five-sixths per stem.

There were other reasons, too, for this mild reproduction. A distrust of
their earning powers, natural where a sufficiency is guaranteed, together
with the knowledge that their fathers did not die, kept them cautious.
If one had children and not much income, the standard of taste and
comfort must of necessity go down; what was enough for two was not enough
for four, and so on--it would be better to wait and see what Father did.
Besides, it was nice to be able to take holidays unhampered. Sooner in
fact than own children, they preferred to concentrate on the ownership of
themselves, conforming to the growing tendency fin de siecle, as it was
called. In this way, little risk was run, and one would be able to have
a motor-car. Indeed, Eustace already had one, but it had shaken him
horribly, and broken one of his eye teeth; so that it would be better to
wait till they were a little safer. In the meantime, no more children!
Even young Nicholas was drawing in his horns, and had made no addition to
his six for quite three years.