The Complete Project Gutenberg Works of Galsworthy

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


There was no reason why Irene should not be happy, yet they said she'd
been asking for a separate room. He knew where that ended. It wasn't as
if Soames drank.

James looked at his daughter-in-law. That unseen glance of his was cold
and dubious. Appeal and fear were in it, and a sense of personal
grievance. Why should he be worried like this? It was very likely all
nonsense; women were funny things! They exaggerated so, you didn't know
what to believe; and then, nobody told him anything, he had to find out
everything for himself. Again he looked furtively at Irene, and across
from her to Soames. The latter, listening to Aunt Juley, was looking up,
under his brows in the direction of Bosinney.

'He's fond of her, I know,' thought James. 'Look at the way he's always
giving her things.'

And the extraordinary unreasonableness of her disaffection struck him
with increased force.

It was a pity, too, she was a taking little thing, and he, James, would
be really quite fond of her if she'd only let him. She had taken up
lately with June; that was doing her no good, that was certainly doing
her no good. She was getting to have opinions of her own. He didn't
know what she wanted with anything of the sort. She'd a good home, and
everything she could wish for. He felt that her friends ought to be
chosen for her. To go on like this was dangerous.

June, indeed, with her habit of championing the unfortunate, had dragged
from Irene a confession, and, in return, had preached the necessity of
facing the evil, by separation, if need be. But in the face of these
exhortations, Irene had kept a brooding silence, as though she found
terrible the thought of this struggle carried through in cold blood. He
would never give her up, she had said to June.

"Who cares?" June cried; "let him do what he likes--you've only to stick
to it!" And she had not scrupled to say something of this sort at
Timothy's; James, when he heard of it, had felt a natural indignation and
horror.

What if Irene were to take it into her head to--he could hardly frame the
thought--to leave Soames? But he felt this thought so unbearable that he
at once put it away; the shady visions it conjured up, the sound of
family tongues buzzing in his ears, the horror of the conspicuous
happening so close to him, to one of his own children! Luckily, she had
no money--a beggarly fifty pound a year! And he thought of the deceased
Heron, who had had nothing to leave her, with contempt. Brooding over
his glass, his long legs twisted under the table, he quite omitted to
rise when the ladies left the room. He would have to speak to Soames
--would have to put him on his guard; they could not go on like this, now
that such a contingency had occurred to him. And he noticed with sour
disfavour that June had left her wine-glasses full of wine.

'That little, thing's at the bottom of it all,' he mused; 'Irene'd never
have thought of it herself.' James was a man of imagination.

The voice of Swithin roused him from his reverie.

"I gave four hundred pounds for it," he was saying. "Of course it's a
regular work of art."

"Four hundred! H'm! that's a lot of money!" chimed in Nicholas.

The object alluded to was an elaborate group of statuary in Italian
marble, which, placed upon a lofty stand (also of marble), diffused an
atmosphere of culture throughout the room. The subsidiary figures, of
which there were six, female, nude, and of highly ornate workmanship,
were all pointing towards the central figure, also nude, and female, who
was pointing at herself; and all this gave the observer a very pleasant
sense of her extreme value. Aunt Juley, nearly opposite, had had the
greatest difficulty in not looking at it all the evening.

Old Jolyon spoke; it was he who had started the discussion.

"Four hundred fiddlesticks! Don't tell me you gave four hundred for
that?"

Between the points of his collar Swithin's chin made the second painful
oscillatory movement of the evening.

"Four-hundred-pounds, of English money; not a farthing less. I don't
regret it. It's not common English--it's genuine modern Italian!"

Soames raised the corner of his lip in a smile, and looked across at
Bosinney. The architect was grinning behind the fumes of his cigarette.
Now, indeed, he looked more like a buccaneer.

"There's a lot of work about it," remarked James hastily, who was really
moved by the size of the group. "It'd sell well at Jobson's."

"The poor foreign dey-vil that made it," went on Swithin, "asked me five
hundred--I gave him four. It's worth eight. Looked half-starved, poor
dey-vil!"

"Ah!" chimed in Nicholas suddenly, "poor, seedy-lookin' chaps, these
artists; it's a wonder to me how they live. Now, there's young
Flageoletti, that Fanny and the girls are always hav'in' in, to play the
fiddle; if he makes a hundred a year it's as much as ever he does!"

James shook his head. "Ah!" he said, "I don't know how they live!"

Old Jolyon had risen, and, cigar in mouth, went to inspect the group at
close quarters.

"Wouldn't have given two for it!" he pronounced at last.

Soames saw his father and Nicholas glance at each other anxiously; and,
on the other side of Swithin, Bosinney, still shrouded in smoke.

'I wonder what he thinks of it?' thought Soames, who knew well enough
that this group was hopelessly vieux jeu; hopelessly of the last
generation. There was no longer any sale at Jobson's for such works of
art.

Swithin's answer came at last. "You never knew anything about a statue.
You've got your pictures, and that's all!"

Old Jolyon walked back to his seat, puffing his cigar. It was not likely
that he was going to be drawn into an argument with an obstinate beggar
like Swithin, pig-headed as a mule, who had never known a statue from
a---straw hat.

"Stucco!" was all he said.

It had long been physically impossible for Swithin to start; his fist
came down on the table.

"Stucco! I should like to see anything you've got in your house half as
good!"

And behind his speech seemed to sound again that rumbling violence of
primitive generations.

It was James who saved the situation.

"Now, what do you say, Mr. Bosinney? You're an architect; you ought to
know all about statues and things!"

Every eye was turned upon Bosinney; all waited with a strange, suspicious
look for his answer.

And Soames, speaking for the first time, asked:

"Yes, Bosinney, what do you say?"

Bosinney replied coolly:

"The work is a remarkable one."

His words were addressed to Swithin, his eyes smiled slyly at old Jolyon;
only Soames remained unsatisfied.

"Remarkable for what?"

"For its naivete"

The answer was followed by an impressive silence; Swithin alone was not
sure whether a compliment was intended.




CHAPTER IV

PROJECTION OF THE HOUSE

Soames Forsyte walked out of his green-painted front door three days
after the dinner at Swithin's, and looking back from across the Square,
confirmed his impression that the house wanted painting.

He had left his wife sitting on the sofa in the drawing-room, her hands
crossed in her lap, manifestly waiting for him to go out. This was not
unusual. It happened, in fact, every day.

He could not understand what she found wrong with him. It was not as if
he drank! Did he run into debt, or gamble, or swear; was he violent;
were his friends rackety; did he stay out at night? On the contrary.

The profound, subdued aversion which he felt in his wife was a mystery to
him, and a source of the most terrible irritation. That she had made a
mistake, and did not love him, had tried to love him and could not love
him, was obviously no reason.

He that could imagine so outlandish a cause for his wife's not getting on
with him was certainly no Forsyte.

Soames was forced, therefore, to set the blame entirely down to his wife.
He had never met a woman so capable of inspiring affection. They could
not go anywhere without his seeing how all the men were attracted by her;
their looks, manners, voices, betrayed it; her behaviour under this
attention had been beyond reproach. That she was one of those women--not
too common in the Anglo-Saxon race--born to be loved and to love, who
when not loving are not living, had certainly never even occurred to him.
Her power of attraction, he regarded as part of her value as his
property; but it made him, indeed, suspect that she could give as well as
receive; and she gave him nothing! 'Then why did she marry me?' was his
continual thought. He had, forgotten his courtship; that year and a half
when he had besieged and lain in wait for her, devising schemes for her
entertainment, giving her presents, proposing to her periodically, and
keeping her other admirers away with his perpetual presence. He had
forgotten the day when, adroitly taking advantage of an acute phase of
her dislike to her home surroundings, he crowned his labours with
success. If he remembered anything, it was the dainty capriciousness
with which the gold-haired, dark-eyed girl had treated him. He certainly
did not remember the look on her face--strange, passive, appealing--when
suddenly one day she had yielded, and said that she would marry him.

It had been one of those real devoted wooings which books and people
praise, when the lover is at length rewarded for hammering the iron till
it is malleable, and all must be happy ever after as the wedding bells.

Soames walked eastwards, mousing doggedly along on the shady side.

The house wanted doing, up, unless he decided to move into the country,
and build.

For the hundredth time that month he turned over this problem. There was
no use in rushing into things! He was very comfortably off, with an
increasing income getting on for three thousand a year; but his invested
capital was not perhaps so large as his father believed--James had a
tendency to expect that his children should be better off than they were.
'I can manage eight thousand easily enough,' he thought, 'without calling
in either Robertson's or Nicholl's.'

He had stopped to look in at a picture shop, for Soames was an 'amateur'
of pictures, and had a little-room in No. 62, Montpellier Square, full
of canvases, stacked against the wall, which he had no room to hang. He
brought them home with him on his way back from the City, generally after
dark, and would enter this room on Sunday afternoons, to spend hours
turning the pictures to the light, examining the marks on their backs,
and occasionally making notes.

They were nearly all landscapes with figures in the foreground, a sign of
some mysterious revolt against London, its tall houses, its interminable
streets, where his life and the lives of his breed and class were passed.
Every now and then he would take one or two pictures away with him in a
cab, and stop at Jobson's on his way into the City.

He rarely showed them to anyone; Irene, whose opinion he secretly
respected and perhaps for that reason never solicited, had only been into
the room on rare occasions, in discharge of some wifely duty. She was
not asked to look at the pictures, and she never did. To Soames this was
another grievance. He hated that pride of hers, and secretly dreaded it.

In the plate-glass window of the picture shop his image stood and looked
at him.

His sleek hair under the brim of the tall hat had a sheen like the hat
itself; his cheeks, pale and flat, the line of his clean-shaven lips, his
firm chin with its greyish shaven tinge, and the buttoned strictness of
his black cut-away coat, conveyed an appearance of reserve and secrecy,
of imperturbable, enforced composure; but his eyes, cold,--grey,
strained--looking, with a line in the brow between them, examined him
wistfully, as if they knew of a secret weakness.

He noted the subjects of the pictures, the names of the painters, made a
calculation of their values, but without the satisfaction he usually
derived from this inward appraisement, and walked on.

No. 62 would do well enough for another year, if he decided to build!
The times were good for building, money had not been so dear for years;
and the site he had seen at Robin Hill, when he had gone down there in
the spring to inspect the Nicholl mortgage--what could be better! Within
twelve miles of Hyde Park Corner, the value of the land certain to go up,
would always fetch more than he gave for it; so that a house, if built in
really good style, was a first-class investment.

The notion of being the one member of his family with a country house
weighed but little with him; for to a true Forsyte, sentiment, even the
sentiment of social position, was a luxury only to be indulged in after
his appetite for more material pleasure had been satisfied.

To get Irene out of London, away from opportunities of going about and
seeing people, away from her friends and those who put ideas into her
head! That was the thing! She was too thick with June! June disliked
him. He returned the sentiment. They were of the same blood.

It would be everything to get Irene out of town. The house would please
her she would enjoy messing about with the decoration, she was very
artistic!

The house must be in good style, something that would always be certain
to command a price, something unique, like that last house of Parkes,
which had a tower; but Parkes had himself said that his architect was
ruinous. You never knew where you were with those fellows; if they had a
name they ran you into no end of expense and were conceited into the
bargain.

And a common architect was no good--the memory of Parkes' tower precluded
the employment of a common architect:

This was why he had thought of Bosinney. Since the dinner at Swithin's
he had made enquiries, the result of which had been meagre, but
encouraging: "One of the new school."

"Clever?"

"As clever as you like--a bit--a bit up in the air!"

He had not been able to discover what houses Bosinney had built, nor what
his charges were. The impression he gathered was that he would be able
to make his own terms. The more he reflected on the idea, the more he
liked it. It would be keeping the thing in the family, with Forsytes
almost an instinct; and he would be able to get 'favoured-nation,' if not
nominal terms--only fair, considering the chance to Bosinney of
displaying his talents, for this house must be no common edifice.

Soames reflected complacently on the work it would be sure to bring the
young man; for, like every Forsyte, he could be a thorough optimist when
there was anything to be had out of it.

Bosinney's office was in Sloane Street, close at, hand, so that he would
be able to keep his eye continually on the plans.

Again, Irene would not be to likely to object to leave London if her
greatest friend's lover were given the job. June's marriage might depend
on it. Irene could not decently stand in the way of June's marriage; she
would never do that, he knew her too well. And June would be pleased; of
this he saw the advantage.

Bosinney looked clever, but he had also--and--it was one of his great
attractions--an air as if he did not quite know on which side his bread
were buttered; he should be easy to deal with in money matters. Soames
made this reflection in no defrauding spirit; it was the natural attitude
of his mind--of the mind of any good business man--of all those thousands
of good business men through whom he was threading his way up Ludgate
Hill.

Thus he fulfilled the inscrutable laws of his great class--of human
nature itself--when he reflected, with a sense of comfort, that Bosinney
would be easy to deal with in money matters.

While he elbowed his way on, his eyes, which he usually kept fixed on the
ground before his feet, were attracted upwards by the dome of St.
Paul's. It had a peculiar fascination for him, that old dome, and not
once, but twice or three times a week, would he halt in his daily
pilgrimage to enter beneath and stop in the side aisles for five or ten
minutes, scrutinizing the names and epitaphs on the monuments. The
attraction for him of this great church was inexplicable, unless it
enabled him to concentrate his thoughts on the business of the day. If
any affair of particular moment, or demanding peculiar acuteness, was
weighing on his mind, he invariably went in, to wander with mouse-like
attention from epitaph to epitaph. Then retiring in the same noiseless
way, he would hold steadily on up Cheapside, a thought more of dogged
purpose in his gait, as though he had seen something which he had made up
his mind to buy.

He went in this morning, but, instead of stealing from monument to
monument, turned his eyes upwards to the columns and spacings of the
walls, and remained motionless.

His uplifted face, with the awed and wistful look which faces take on
themselves in church, was whitened to a chalky hue in the vast building.
His gloved hands were clasped in front over the handle of his umbrella.
He lifted them. Some sacred inspiration perhaps had come to him.

'Yes,' he thought, 'I must have room to hang my pictures.

That evening, on his return from the City, he called at Bosinney's
office. He found the architect in his shirt-sleeves, smoking a pipe, and
ruling off lines on a plan. Soames refused a drink, and came at once to
the point.

"If you've nothing better to do on Sunday, come down with me to Robin
Hill, and give me your opinion on a building site."

"Are you going to build?"

"Perhaps," said Soames; "but don't speak of it. I just want your
opinion."

"Quite so," said the architect.

Soames peered about the room.

"You're rather high up here," he remarked.

Any information he could gather about the nature and scope of Bosinney's
business would be all to the good.

"It does well enough for me so far," answered the architect. "You're
accustomed to the swells."

He knocked out his pipe, but replaced it empty between his teeth; it
assisted him perhaps to carry on the conversation. Soames noted a hollow
in each cheek, made as it were by suction.

"What do you pay for an office like this?" said he.

"Fifty too much," replied Bosinney.

This answer impressed Soames favourably.

"I suppose it is dear," he said. "I'll call for you--on Sunday about
eleven."

The following Sunday therefore he called for Bosinney in a hansom, and
drove him to the station. On arriving at Robin Hill, they found no cab,
and started to walk the mile and a half to the site.

It was the 1st of August--a perfect day, with a burning sun and cloudless
sky--and in the straight, narrow road leading up the hill their feet
kicked up a yellow dust.

"Gravel soil," remarked Soames, and sideways he glanced at the coat
Bosinney wore. Into the side-pockets of this coat were thrust bundles of
papers, and under one arm was carried a queer-looking stick. Soames
noted these and other peculiarities.

No one but a clever man, or, indeed, a buccaneer, would have taken such
liberties with his appearance; and though these eccentricities were
revolting to Soames, he derived a certain satisfaction from them, as
evidence of qualities by which he must inevitably profit. If the fellow
could build houses, what did his clothes matter?

"I told you," he said, "that I want this house to be a surprise, so don't
say anything about it. I never talk of my affairs until they're carried
through."

Bosinney nodded.

"Let women into your plans," pursued Soames, "and you never know where
it'll end."

"Ah!" Said Bosinney, "women are the devil!"

This feeling had long been at the--bottom of Soames's heart; he had
never, however, put it into words.

"Oh!" he Muttered, "so you're beginning to...." He stopped, but added,
with an uncontrollable burst of spite: "June's got a temper of her
own--always had."

"A temper's not a bad thing in an angel."

Soames had never called Irene an angel. He could not so have violated
his best instincts, letting other people into the secret of her value,
and giving himself away. He made no reply.

They had struck into a half-made road across a warren. A cart-track led
at right-angles to a gravel pit, beyond which the chimneys of a cottage
rose amongst a clump of trees at the border of a thick wood. Tussocks of
feathery grass covered the rough surface of the ground, and out of these
the larks soared into the hate of sunshine. On the far horizon, over a
countless succession of fields and hedges, rose a line of downs.

Soames led till they had crossed to the far side, and there he stopped.
It was the chosen site; but now that he was about to divulge the spot to
another he had become uneasy.

"The agent lives in that cottage," he said; "he'll give us some
lunch--we'd better have lunch before we go into this matter."

He again took the lead to the cottage, where the agent, a tall man named
Oliver, with a heavy face and grizzled beard, welcomed them. During
lunch, which Soames hardly touched, he kept looking at Bosinney, and once
or twice passed his silk handkerchief stealthily over his forehead. The
meal came to an end at last, and Bosinney rose.

"I dare say you've got business to talk over," he said; "I'll just go and
nose about a bit." Without waiting for a reply he strolled out.

Soames was solicitor to this estate, and he spent nearly an hour in the
agent's company, looking at ground-plans and discussing the Nicholl and
other mortgages; it was as it were by an afterthought that he brought up
the question of the building site.

"Your people," he said, "ought to come down in their price to me,
considering that I shall be the first to build."

Oliver shook his head.

The site you've fixed on, Sir, he said, "is the cheapest we've got.
Sites at the top of the slope are dearer by a good bit."

"Mind," said Soames, "I've not decided; it's quite possible I shan't
build at all. The ground rent's very high."

"Well, Mr. Forsyte, I shall be sorry if you go off, and I think you'll
make a mistake, Sir. There's not a bit of land near London with such a
view as this, nor one that's cheaper, all things considered; we've only
to advertise, to get a mob of people after it."

They looked at each other. Their faces said very plainly: 'I respect you
as a man of business; and you can't expect me to believe a word you
say.'

Well, repeated Soames, "I haven't made up my mind; the thing will very
likely go off!" With these words, taking up his umbrella, he put his
chilly hand into the agent's, withdrew it without the faintest pressure,
and went out into the sun.

He walked slowly back towards the site in deep thought. His instinct
told him that what the agent had said was true. A cheap site. And the
beauty of it was, that he knew the agent did not really think it cheap;
so that his own intuitive knowledge was a victory over the agent's.

'Cheap or not, I mean to have it,' he thought.

The larks sprang up in front of his feet, the air was full of
butterflies, a sweet fragrance rose from the wild grasses. The sappy
scent of the bracken stole forth from the wood, where, hidden in the
depths, pigeons were cooing, and from afar on the warm breeze, came the
rhythmic chiming of church bells.

Soames walked with his eyes on the ground, his lips opening and closing
as though in anticipation of a delicious morsel. But when he arrived at
the site, Bosinney was nowhere to be seen. After waiting some little
time, he crossed the warren in the direction of the slope. He would have
shouted, but dreaded the sound of his voice.

The warren was as lonely as a prairie, its silence only broken by the
rustle of rabbits bolting to their holes, and the song of the larks.

Soames, the pioneer-leader of the great Forsyte army advancing to the
civilization of this wilderness, felt his spirit daunted by the
loneliness, by the invisible singing, and the hot, sweet air. He had
begun to retrace his steps when he at last caught sight of Bosinney.

The architect was sprawling under a large oak tree, whose trunk, with a
huge spread of bough and foliage, ragged with age, stood on the verge of
the rise.

Soames had to touch him on the shoulder before he looked up.

"Hallo! Forsyte," he said, "I've found the very place for your house!
Look here!"

Soames stood and looked, then he said, coldly:

"You may be very clever, but this site will cost me half as much again."

"Hang the cost, man. Look at the view!"

Almost from their feet stretched ripe corn, dipping to a small dark copse
beyond. A plain of fields and hedges spread to the distant
grey-bluedowns. In a silver streak to the right could be seen the line
of the river.

The sky was so blue, and the sun so bright, that an eternal summer seemed
to reign over this prospect. Thistledown floated round them, enraptured
by the serenity, of the ether. The heat danced over the corn, and,
pervading all, was a soft, insensible hum, like the murmur of bright
minutes holding revel between earth and heaven.

Soames looked. In spite of himself, something swelled in his breast. To
live here in sight of all this, to be able to point it out to his
friends, to talk of it, to possess it! His cheeks flushed. The warmth,
the radiance, the glow, were sinking into his senses as, four years
before, Irene's beauty had sunk into his senses and made him long for
her. He stole a glance at Bosinney, whose eyes, the eyes of the
coachman's 'half-tame leopard,' seemed running wild over the landscape.
The sunlight had caught the promontories of the fellow's face, the bumpy
cheekbones, the point of his chin, the vertical ridges above his brow;
and Soames watched this rugged, enthusiastic, careless face with an
unpleasant feeling.