Chapter Five
A FORSYTE MÉNAGE
LIKE the enlightened thousands of his class and generation in this great city of London, who no longer believe in red velvet chairs, and know that groups of modern Italian marble are vieux jeu, Soames Forsyte inhabited a house which did what it could. It owned a copper door knocker of individual design, windows which had been altered to open outwards, hanging flower-boxes filled with fuchsias, and at the back (a great feature) a little court tiled with jade-green tiles, and surrounded by pink hydrangeas in peacock-blue tubs. Here, under a parchment-coloured Japanese sunshade covering the whole end, inhabitants or visitors could be screened from the eyes of the curious while they drank tea and examined at their leisure the latest of Soames’s little silver boxes.
The inner decoration favoured the First Empire and William Morris. For its size, the house was commodious; there were countless nooks resembling birds’ nests, and little things made of silver were deposited like eggs.
In this general perfection two kinds of fastidiousness were at war. There lived here a mistress who would have dwelt daintily on a desert island; a master whose daintiness was, as it were, an investment, cultivated by the owner for his advancement, in accordance with the laws of competition. This competitive daintiness had caused Soames in his Marlborough days to be the first boy into white waistcoats in summer, and corduroy waistcoats in winter, had prevented him from ever appearing in public with his tie climbing up his collar, and induced him to dust his patent-leather boots before a great multitude assembled on Speech Day to hear him recite Molière.
Skin-like immaculateness had grown over Soames, as over many Londoners: impossible to conceive of him with a hair out of place, a tie deviating one-eighth of an inch from the perpendicular, a collar unglossed! He would not have gone without a bath for worlds – it was the fashion to take baths; and how bitter was his scorn of people who omitted them!
But Irene could be imagined, like some nymph, bathing in wayside streams, for the joy of the freshness and of seeing her own fair body.
In this conflict throughout the house the woman had gone to the wall. As in the struggle between Saxon and Celt still going on within the nation, the more impressionable and receptive temperament had had forced on it a conventional superstructure.
Thus the house had acquired a close resemblance to hundreds of other houses with the same high aspirations, having become: ‘That very charming little house of the Soames Forsytes, quite individual, my dear – really elegant!’
For Soames Forsyte – read James Peabody, Thomas Atkins, or Emmanuel Spagnoletti, the name in fact of any upper-middleclass Englishman in London with any pretensions to taste; and though the decoration be different, the phrase is just.
On the evening of August 8, a week after the expedition to Robin Hill, in the dining-room of this house – ‘quite individual, my dear – really elegant!’ – Soames and Irene were seated at dinner. A hot dinner on Sundays was a little distinguishing elegance common to this house and many others. Early in married life Soames had laid down the rule: ‘The servants must give us hot dinner on Sundays – they’ve nothing to do but play the concertina.’
The custom had produced no revolution. For – to Soames a rather deplorable sign – servants were devoted to Irene, who, in defiance of all safe tradition, appeared to recognize their right to a share in the weaknesses of human nature.
The happy pair were seated, not opposite each other, but rectangularly, at a handsome rosewood table; they dined without a cloth – a distinguishing elegance – and so far had not spoken a word.
Soames liked to talk during dinner about business, or what he had been buying, and so long as he talked Irene’s silence did not distress him. This evening he had found it impossible to talk. The decision to build had been weighing on his mind all the week, and he had made up his mind to tell her.
His nervousness about this disclosure irritated him profoundly; she had no business to make him feel like that – a wife and a husband being one person. She had not looked at him once since they sat down; and he wondered what on earth she had been thinking about all the time. It was hard, when a man worked as he did, making money for her – yes, and with an ache in his heart – that she should sit there, looking – looking as if she saw the walls of the room closing in. It was enough to make a man get up and leave the table.
The light from the rose-shaded lamp fell on her neck and arms – Soames liked her to dine in a low dress, it gave him an inexpressible feeling of superiority to the majority of his acquaintance, whose wives were contented with their best high frocks or with tea-gowns, when they dined at home. Under that rosy light her amber-coloured hair and fair skin made strange contrast with her dark brown eyes.