The Forsyte Saga(8)

The day was bright, the trees of the Park in the full beauty of mid-June foliage; the brothers did not seem to notice phenomena, which contributed, nevertheless, to the jauntiness of promenade and conversation.

‘Yes,’ said Roger, ‘she’s a good-lookin’ woman, that wife of Soames’s. I’m told they don’t get on.’

This brother had a high forehead, and the freshest colour of any of the Forsytes; his light grey eyes measured the street frontage of the houses by the way, and now and then he would level his umbrella and take a ‘lunar’, as he expressed it, of the varying heights.

‘She’d no money,’ replied Nicholas.

He himself had married a good deal of money, of which, it being then the golden age before the Married Women’s Property Act, he had mercifully been enabled to make a successful use.

‘What was her father?’

‘Heron was his name, a Professor, so they tell me.’

Roger shook his head.

‘There’s no money in that,’ he said.

‘They say her mother’s father was cement.’

Roger’s face brightened.

‘But he went bankrupt,’ went on Nicholas.

‘Ah!’ exclaimed Roger, ‘Soames will have trouble with her; you mark my words, he’ll have trouble – she’s got a foreign look.’

Nicholas licked his lips.

‘She’s a pretty woman,’ and he waved aside a crossing-sweeper.

‘How did he get hold of her?’ asked Roger presently. ‘She must cost him a pretty penny in dress!’

‘Ann tells me,’ replied Nicholas, ‘he was half-cracked about her. She refused him five times. James, he’s nervous about it, I can see.’

‘Ah!’ said Roger again; ‘I’m sorry for James; he had trouble with Dartie.’ His pleasant colour was heightened by exercise, he swung his umbrella to the level of his eye more frequently than ever. Nicholas’s face also wore a pleasant look.

‘Too pale for me,’ he said, ‘but her figure’s capital!’

Roger made no reply.

‘I call her distinguished-looking,’ he said at last – it was the highest praise in the Forsyte vocabulary. ‘That young Bosinney will never do any good for himself. They say at Burkitt’s he’s one of these artistic chaps – got an idea of improving English architecture; there’s no money in that! I should like to hear what Timothy would say to it.’

They entered the station.

‘What class are you going? I go second.’

‘No second for me,’ said Nicholas; ‘you never know what you may catch.’

He took a first-class ticket to Notting Hill Gate; Roger a second to South Kensington. The train coming in a minute later, the two brothers parted and entered their respective compartments. Each felt aggrieved that the other had not modified his habits to secure his society a little longer; but as Roger voiced it in his thoughts:

‘Always a stubborn beggar, Nick!’

And as Nicholas expressed it to himself:

‘Cantankerous chap Roger always was!’

There was little sentimentality about the Forsytes. In that great London, which they had conquered and become merged in, what time had they to be sentimental?





Chapter Two



OLD JOLYON GOES TO THE OPERA





AT five o’clock the following day old Jolyon sat alone, a cigar between his lips, and on a table by his side a cup of tea. He was tired, and before he had finished his cigar he fell asleep. A fly settled on his hair, his breathing sounded heavy in the drowsy silence, his upper lip under the white moustache puffed in and out. From between the fingers of his veined and wrinkled hand the cigar, dropping on the empty hearth, burned itself out.

The gloomy little study, with windows of stained glass to exclude the view, was full of dark green velvet and heavily-carved mahogany – a suite of which old Jolyon was wont to say: ‘Shouldn’t wonder if it made a big price some day!’

It was pleasant to think that in the after life he could get more for things than he had given.

In the rich brown atmosphere peculiar to back rooms in the mansion of a Forsyte, the Rembrandtesque effect of his great head, with its white hair, against the cushion of his high-backed seat, was spoiled by the moustache, which imparted a somewhat military look to his face. An old clock that had been with him since before his marriage fifty years ago kept with its ticking a jealous record of the seconds slipping away for ever from its old master.

He had never cared for this room, hardly going into it from one year’s end to another, except to take cigars from the Japanese cabinet in the corner, and the room now had its revenge.

His temples, curving like thatches over the hollows beneath, his cheekbones and chin, all were sharpened in his sleep, and there had come upon his face the confession that he was an old man.