The Forsyte Saga(274)

From the dining-room he passed into Timothy’s study. He did not remember ever having been in that room. It was lined from floor to ceiling with volumes, and he looked at them with curiosity. One wall seemed devoted to educational books, which Timothy’s firm had published two generations back – sometimes as many as twenty copies of one book. Soames read their titles and shuddered. The middle wall had precisely the same books as used to be in the library at his own father’s in Park Lane, from which he deduced the fancy that James and his youngest brother had gone out together one day and bought a brace of small libraries. The third wall he approached with more excitement. Here, surely, Timothy’s own taste would be found. It was. The books were dummies. The fourth wall was all heavily curtained window. And turned toward it was a large chair with a mahogany reading-stand attached, on which a yellowish and folded copy of The Times, dated July 6, 1914, the day Timothy first failed to come down, as if in preparation for the War, seemed waiting for him still. In a corner stood a large globe of that world never visited by Timothy, deeply convinced of the unreality of everything but England, and permanently upset by the sea, on which he had been very sick one Sunday afternoon in 1836, out of a pleasure boat off the pier at Brighton, with Juley and Hester, Swithin and Hatty Chessman; all due to Swithin, who was always taking things into his head, and who, thank goodness, had been sick too. Soames knew all about it, having heard the tale fifty times at least from one or other of them. He went up to the globe, and gave it a spin; it emitted a faint creak and moved about an inch, bringing into his purview a daddy-long-legs which had died on it in latitude 44.

‘Mausoleum!’ he thought. ‘George was right!’ And he went out and up the stairs. On the half landing he stopped before the case of stuffed humming-birds which had delighted his childhood. They looked not a day older suspended on wires above pampas-grass. If the case were opened the birds would not begin to hum, but the whole thing would crumble, he suspected. It wouldn’t be worth putting that into the sale! And suddenly he was caught by a memory of Aunt Ann – dear old Aunt Ann – holding nim by the hand in front of that case and saying: ‘Look, Soamey! Aren’t they bright and pretty, dear little hummingbirds!’ Soames remembered his own answer: ‘They don’t hum, Auntie.’ He must have been six, in a black velveteen suit with a light-blue collar – he remembered that suit well! Aunt Ann with her ringlets, and her spidery kind hands, and her grave old aquiline smile – a fine old lady, Aunt Ann! He moved on up to the drawing-room door. There on each side of it were the groups of miniatures. Those he would certainly buy in! The miniatures of his four aunts, one of his Uncle Swithin adolescent, and one of his Uncle Nicholas as a boy. They had all been painted by a young lady friend of the family at a time, 1830, about, when miniatures were considered very genteel, and lasting too, painted as they were on ivory. Many a time had he heard the tale of that young lady: ‘Very talented, my dear; she had quite a weakness for Swithin, and very soon after she went into a consumption and died: so like Keats – we often spoke of it.’

Well, there they were! Ann, Juley, Hester, Susan – quite a small child; Swithin, with sky-blue eyes, pink cheeks, yellow curls, white waistcoat – large as life; and Nicholas, like Cupid with an eye on heaven. Now he came to think of it, Uncle Nick had always been rather like that – a wonderful man to the last. Yes, she must have had talent, and miniatures always had a certain back-watered cachet of their own, little subject to the currents of competition on aesthetic Change. Soames opened the drawing-room door. The room was dusted, the furniture uncovered, , the curtains drawn back, precisely as if his aunts still dwelt there patiently waiting. And a thought came to him: When Timothy died – why not? Would it not be almost a duty to preserve this house – like Carlyle’s – and put up a tablet, and show it? ‘Specimen of mid-Victorian abode – entrance, one shilling, with catalogue.’ After all, it was the completest thing, and perhaps the deadest in the London of today. Perfect in its special taste and culture, if, that is, he took down and carried over to his own collection the four Barbizon pictures he had given them. The still sky-blue walls, the green curtains patterned with red flowers and ferns; the crewel-worked fire-screen before the cast-iron grate; the mahogany cupboard with glass windows, full of little knick-knacks; the beaded footstools; Keats, Shelley, Southey, Cowper, Coleridge, Byron’s Corsair (but nothing else), and the Victorian poets in a bookshelf row; the marqueterie cabinet lined with dim red plush, full of family relics; Hester’s first fan; the buckles of their mother’s father’s shoes; three bottled scorpions; and one very yellow elephant’s tusk, sent home from India by Great-uncle Edgar Forsyte, who had been in jute; a yellow bit of paper propped up, with spidery writing on it, recording God knew what I And the pictures crowding on the walls – all water-colours save those four Barbizons looking like the foreigners they were, and doubtful customers at that – pictures bright and illustrative, Telling the Bees, Hey for the Ferry! and two in the style of Frith, all thimblerig and crinolines, given them by Swithin. Oh! many, many pictures at which Soames had gazed a thousand times in supercilious fascination; a marvellous collection of bright, smooth gilt frames.