The Forsyte Saga(5)

Swithin Forsyte, tall, square, and broad, with a chest like a pouter pigeon’s in its plumage of bright waistcoats, came strutting towards them.

‘Er – how are you?’ he said in his dandified way, aspirating the ‘h’ strongly (this difficult letter was almost absolutely safe in his keeping) – ‘how are you?’

Each brother wore an air of aggravation as he looked at the other two, knowing by experience that they would try to eclipse his ailments.

‘We were just saying,’ said James, ‘that you don’t get any thinner.’

Swithin protruded his pale round eyes with the effort of hearing.

‘Thinner? I’m in good case,’ he said, leaning a little forward, ‘not one of your thread-papers like you!’

But, afraid of losing the expansion of his chest, he leaned back again into a state of immobility, for he prized nothing so highly as a distinguished appearance.

Aunt Ann turned her old eyes from one to the other. Indulgent and severe was her look. In turn the three brothers looked at Ann. She was getting shaky. Wonderful woman! Eighty-six if a day; might live another ten years, and had never been strong. Swithin and James, the twins, were only seventy-five, Nicholas a mere baby of seventy or so. All were strong, and the inference was comforting; Of all forms of property their respective healths naturally concerned them most.

‘I’m very well in myself,’ proceeded James, ‘but my nerves are out of order. The least thing worries me to death. I shall have to go to Bath.’

‘Bath!’ said Nicholas. ‘I’ve tried Harrogate. That’s no good. What I want is sea air. There’s nothing like Yarmouth. Now, when I go there I sleep –’

‘My liver’s very bad,’ interrupted Swithin slowly. ‘Dreadful pain here’; and he placed his hand on his right side.

‘Want of exercise,’ muttered James, his eyes on the china. He quickly added: ‘I get a pain there, too.’

Swithin reddened, a resemblance to a turkey-cock coming upon his old face.

‘Exercise!’ he said. ‘I take plenty: I never use the lift at the Club.’

‘I didn’t know,’ James hurried out. ‘I know nothing about anybody; nobody tells me anything.’

Swithin fixed him with a stare, and asked:

‘What do you do for a pain there?’

James brightened.

‘I,’ he began, ‘take a compound –’

‘How are you, uncle?’

And June stood before him, her resolute small face raised from her little height to his great height, and her hand outheld.

The brightness faded from James’s visage.

‘How are you?’ he said, brooding over her. ‘So you’re going to Wales tomorrow to visit your young man’s aunts? You’ll have a lot of rain there. This isn’t real old Worcester.’ He tapped the bowl. ‘Now, that set I gave your mother when she married was the genuine thing.’

June shook hands one by one with her three great-uncles, and turned to Aunt Ann. A very sweet look had come into the old lady’s face; she kissed the girl’s cheek with trembling fervour.

‘Well, my dear,’ she said, ‘and so you’re going for a whole month!’

The girl passed on, and Aunt Ann looked after her slim little figure. The old lady’s round, steel-grey eyes, over which a film like a bird’s was beginning to come, followed her wistfully amongst the bustling crowd, for people were beginning to say good-bye; and her finger-tips, pressing and pressing against each other, were busy again with the recharging of her will against that inevitable ultimate departure of her own.

‘Yes,’ she thought, ‘everybody’s been most kind; quite a lot of people came to congratulate her. She ought to be very happy.’

Amongst the throng of people by the door – the well-dressed throng drawn from the families of lawyers and doctors, from the Stock Exchange, and all the innumerable avocations of the upper middle class – there were only some twenty per cent of Forsytes; but to Aunt Ann they seemed all Forsytes – and certainly there was not much difference – she saw only her own flesh and blood. It was her world, this family, and she knew no other, had never perhaps known any other. All their little secrets, illnesses, engagements, and marriages, how they were getting on, and whether they were making money – all this was her property, her delight, her life; beyond this only a vague, shadowy mist of facts and persons of no real significance. This it was that she would have to lay down when it came to her turn to die; this which gave to her that importance, that secret self-importance, without which none of us can bear to live; and to this she clung wistfully, with a greed that grew each day. If life were slipping away from her, this she would retain to the end.