then passing on to the stairs, he stood looking at the blank space. When the picture was hung, it wouldn’t be there. What would Soames say to it, though–the boy had begun to interest himself in pictures since his run abroad? Still, the price he had paid was not the market value; and, passing on up to the drawing-room, he drank his China tea, strong, with cream, and ate two muffins. If he didn’t feel better tomorrow, he should have Dash look at him.
The following morning, starting for the office, he said to Warmson:
“There’ll be a picture come today. You’d better get Hunt and Thomas to help you hang it. It’s to go in the middle of that space on the stairs. You’d better have it done when your mistress is out. Let ’em bring it in the back way–it’s eleven foot by six; and mind the paint.”
When he returned, rather late, the Hondekoeter was hung. It covered the space admirably, but the light being poor and the picture dark, it was not possible to see what it was about. It looked quite well. Emily was in the drawing-room when he went in.
“What on earth is that great picture on the stairs, James?”
“That?” said James. “A Hondekoeter; picked it up, a bargain, at Smelter’s sale. Jolyon’s got one at Stanhope Gate.”
“I never saw such a lumbering great thing.”
“What?” said James. “It covers up that space well. It’s not as if you could see anything on the stairs. There’s some good poultry in it.”
“It makes the stairs darker than they were before. I don’t know what Soames will say. Really, James, you oughtn’t to go about alone, buying things like that.”
“I can do what I like with my money, I suppose,” said James. “It’s a well-known name.”
“Well,” said Emily, “for a man of your age–Never mind! Don’t fuss! Sit down and drink your tea.”
James sat down, muttering. Women–always unjust, and no more sense of values than an old tom-cat!
Emily said no more, ever mistress of her suave and fashionable self.
Winifred, with Montague Dartie, came in later, so that all the family were assembled for dinner; Cicely having her hair down, Rachel her hair up–she had ‘come out’ this season; Soames, who had just parted with the little whiskers of the late ‘seventies, looking pale and flatter-cheeked than usual. Winifred, beginning to be ‘interesting,’ owing to the approach of a little Dartie, kept her eyes somewhat watchfully on ‘Monty,’ square and oiled, with a ‘handsome’ look on his sallow face, and a big diamond stud in his shining shirt-front.
It was she who broached the Hondekoeter.
“Pater dear, what made you buy that enormous picture?”
James looked up, and mumbled through his mutton:
“Enormous! It’s the right size for that space on the stairs.” It seemed to him at the moment that his family had very peculiar faces.
“It’s very fine and large!” Dartie was speaking! ‘Um!’ thought James: ‘What does HE want–money?’
“It’s so yellow,” said Rachel, plaintively.
“What do YOU know about a picture?”
“I know what I like, Pater.”
James stole a glance at his son, but Soames was looking down his nose.
“It’s very good value,” said James, suddenly. “There’s some first-rate feather painting in it.”
Nothing more was said at the moment, nobody wanting to hurt the Pater’s feelings, but, upstairs, in the drawing-room after Emily and her three daughters had again traversed the length of the Hondekoeter, a lively conversation broke out.
Really–the Pater! Rococo was not the word for pictures that size! And chickens–who wanted to look at chickens, even if you could see them? But, of course, Pater thought a bargain excused everything.
Emily said:
“Don’t be disrespectful, Cicely.”
“Well, Mater, he does, you know. All the old Forsytes do.”
Emily, who secretly agreed, said: “H’ssh!”
She was always loyal to James, in his absence. They all were, indeed, except among themselves.
“Soames thinks it dreadful,” said Rachel. “I hope he’ll tell the Pater so.”
“Soames will do nothing of the sort,” said Emily. “Really your father can do what he likes in his own house–you children are getting very uppish.”
“Well, Mater, you know jolly well it’s awfully out of date.”
“I wish you would not say ‘awfully’ and ‘jolly,’ Cicely.”
“Why not? Everybody does, at school.”
Winifred cut in:
“They really are the latest words, Mother.”
Emily was silent; nothing took the wind out of her sails like the word ‘latest,’ for, though a woman of much character, she could not bear to be behindhand.
“Listen!” said Rachel, who had opened the door.
A certain noise could be heard; it was James, extolling the Hondekoeter, on the stairs.
“That rooster,” he was saying, “is a fine bird; and look at those feathers floating. Think they could paint those nowadays? Your Uncle Jolyon gave a hundred an’ forty for his Hondekoeter, and I picked this up for twenty-five.”
“What did I say?” whispered Cicely. “A bargain. I hate bargains; they lumber up everything. That Turner was another!”
“Shh!” said Winifred, who was not so young, and wished that Monty had more sense of a bargain than he had as yet displayed. “I like a bargain myself; you know you’ve got something for your money.”
“I’d rather have my money,” said Cicely.
“Don’t be silly, Cicely,” said Emily; “go and play your piece. Your father likes it.”
James and Dartie now entered, Soames having passed on up to his room where he worked at night.
Cicely began her piece. She was at home owing to an outbreak of mumps at her school on Ham Common; and her piece, which contained a number of runs up and down the piano, was one which she was perfecting for the school concert at the end of term. James, who made a point of asking for it, partly because it was good for Cicely, and partly because it was good for his digestion, took his seat by the hearth between his whiskers, averting his eyes from animated objects. Unfortunately, he never could sleep after dinner, and thoughts buzzed in his head. Soames had said there was no demand now for large pictures, and very little for the Dutch school–he had admitted, however, that the Hondekoeter was a bargain as values went; the name alone was worth the money. Cicely commenced her ‘piece’; James brooded on. He really didn’t know whether he was glad he had bought the thing or not. Everyone of them had disapproved, except Dartie; the only one whose disapproval he would have welcomed. To say that James was conscious of a change in the mental outlook of his day would be to credit him with a philosophic sensibility unsuited to his breeding and his age; but he WAS uncomfortably conscious that a bargain was not what it had been. And while Cicely’s fingers ran up and down–he didn’t know, he couldn’t say.
“D’you mean to tell me,” he said, when Cicely shut the piano, “that you don’t like those Dresden vases?”
Nobody knew whom he was addressing or why, so no one replied.
“I bought ’em at Jobson’s in ‘67, and they’re worth three times what I gave for them.”
It was Rachel who responded.
“Well, Pater, do you like them yourself?”
“Like them? What’s that got to do with it? They’re genuine, and worth a lot of money.”
“I wish you’d sell them, then, James,” said Emily. “They’re not the fashion now.”
“Fashion! They’ll be worth a lot more before I die.”
“A bargain,” muttered Cicely, below her breath.
“What’s that?” said James, whose hearing was sometimes unexpectedly sharp.
“I said: ‘A bargain,’ Pater; weren’t they?”
“Of course they were”; and it could be heard from his tone that if they hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have bought them. “You young people know nothing about money, except how to spend it”; and he looked at his son-inlaw, who was sedulously concerned with his finger-nails.
Emily, partly to smooth James, whom she could see was ruffled, and partly because she had a passion for the game, told Cicely to get out the card table, and said with cheery composure:
“Come along, James, we’ll play Nap.”
They sat around the green board for a considerable time playing for farthings, with every now and then a little burst of laughter, when James said: “I’ll go Nap!” At this particular game, indeed, James was always visited by a sort of recklessness. At farthing points he could be a devil of a fellow for very little money. He had soon lost thirteen shillings, and was as dashing as ever.
He rose at last, in excellent humour, pretending to be bankrupt.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, “I always lose MY money.”
The Hondekoeter, and the misgivings it had given rise to, had faded from his mind.
Winifred and Dartie departing, without the latter having touched on finance, he went up to bed with Emily in an almost cheerful condition; and, having turned his back on her, was soon snoring lightly.
He was awakened by a crash and bumping rumble, as it might be thunder, on the right.
“What on earth’s that, James?” said Emily’s startled voice.
“What?” said James: “Where? Here, where are my slippers?”
“It must be a thunderbolt. Be careful, James.”
For James, in his nightgown, was already standing by the bedside–in the radiance of a night-light, long as a stork. He sniffed loudly.
“D’you smell burning?”
“No,” said Emily.
“Here, give me the candle.”
“Put on this shawl, James. It can’t be burglars; they wouldn’t make such a noise.”
“I don’t know,” muttered James, “I was asleep.” He took the candle from Emily, and shuffled to the door.
“What’s all this?” he said on the landing. By confused candle and night-light he could see a number of white-clothed figures–Rachel, Cicely, and the maid Fifine, in their nightgowns. Soames in his nightshirt, at the head of the stairs, and down below, that fellow Warmson.
The voice of Soames, flat and calm, said:
“It’s the Hondekoeter.”
There, in fact, enormous, at the bottom of the stairs, was the Hondekoeter, fallen on its face. James, holding up his candle, stalked down and stood gazing at it. No one spoke, except Fifine, who said: “La, la!”
Cicely, seized with a fit of giggles, vanished.
Then Soames spoke into the dark well below him, illumined faintly by James’ candle.
“It’s all right, Pater; it won’t be hurt; there was no glass.”
James did not answer, but holding his candle low, returned up the stairs, and without a word went back into his bedroom.
“What was it, James?” said Emily, who had not risen.
“That picture came down with a run–comes of not looking after things yourself. That fellow Warmson! Where’s the eau-de-Cologne?”
He anointed himself, got back into bed, and lay on his back, waiting for Emily to improve the occasion. But all she said was:
“I hope it hasn’t made your head ache, James.”
“No,” said James; and, for some time after she was asleep, he lay with his eyes on the night-light, as if waiting for the Hondekoeter to play him another trick–after he had bought the thing and given it a good home, too!
Next morning, going down to breakfast he passed the picture, which had been lifted, so that it stood slanting, with its back to the stair wall. The white rooster seemed just as much on the point of taking a bath as ever. The feathers floated on their backs, curved like shallops. He passed on into the dining-room.
They were all there, eating eggs and bacon, suspiciously silent.
James helped himself and sat down.
“What are you going to do with it now, James?” said Emily.
“Do with it? Hang it again, of course!”
“Not really, Pater!” said Rachel. “It gave me fits last night.”
“That wall won’t stand it,” said Soames.
“What! It’s a good wall!”
“It really is too big,” said Emily.
“And we none of us like it, Pater,” put in Cicely, “it’s such a monster, and so yellow!”
“Monster, indeed!” said James, and was silent, till suddenly he spluttered:
“What would you have me do with it, then?”
“Send it back; sell it again.”
“I shouldn’t get anything for it.”
“But you said it was a bargain, Pater,” said Cicely.
“So it was!”
There was another silence. James looked sidelong at his son; there was a certain pathos in that glance, as if it were seeking help, but Soames was concentrated above his plate.
“Have it put up in the lumber-room, James,” said Emily, quietly.
James reddened between his whiskers, and his mouth opened; he looked again at his son, but Soames ate on. James turned to his teacup. And there went on within him that which he could not express. It was as if they had asked him: “When is a bargain not a bargain?” and he didn’t know the answer, but they did. A change of epoch, something new-fangled in the air. A man could no longer buy a thing because it was worth more! It was–it was the end of everything. And, suddenly, he mumbled: “Well, have it your own way, then. Throwing money away, I call it!”
After he had gone to the office, the Hondekoeter was conducted to the lumber-room by Warmson, Hunt, and Thomas. There, covered by a dust-sheet to preserve the varnish, it rested twenty-one years, till the death of James in 1901, when it went forth and again came under the hammer. It fetched five pounds, and was bought by a designer of posters, working for a poultry-breeding firm.
CRY OF PEACOCK, 1883
The Ball was over. Soames decided to walk. In the cloak-room, whence he retrieved coat and opera hat, a mirror showed him a white-waistcoated figure still trim, but a half-melted collar, and a brown edging to the gardenia in his button-hole. Hot with a vengeance it had been! And taking a silk handkerchief from his cuff he passed it over his face before putting on his hat.
Down the broad red-carpeted steps where Chinese lanterns had burned out, he passed into the Inner Temple and the dawn. A faint air from the river freshened his face. Half-past three!
Perhaps he had never danced so often as that night–so often and so long. Six times with Irene! Six times with girls of whom he now remembered nothing. Had he danced well–dancing with HER he had been conscious only of her closeness and her scent; and, dancing with those others, only of her circling apart, out of his reach.
Only fourteen days and fourteen nights–until her closeness and her scent should be for ever his! She should be nearly home by now, with that stepmother of hers, in the hansom cab wherein he had placed them. How Irene detested that woman, and no wonder! For Soames knew well enough that to ‘that woman’s’ wish to get her stepdaughter married, so that she might marry again herself, he had owed his own chances these past eighteen months.
From the hall, bright with colour and dark gleaming wood, he moved slowly into half-lit stillness haunted by the drawl of a waltz fading as he went. And, inhaling long breaths of air grass-scented by the Temple Gardens, Soames stripped off his gloves, thin, black-stitched, of lavender hue.
Irene loved dancing! It would not be good form to dance with one’s wife! Would that prevent him? No, by Jove!
By a rambler rose-bush in a tub and a Chinese lantern still alight–last splash of colour in the grey of dawn–he turned, past one dim lamp at the corner of Middle Temple Lane, down to the Embankment, and Cleopatra’s Needle. Cleopatra! A bad lot! If she’d been alive now, they’d have cut her in Rotten Row, and run her in for suicide; and there was her needle and herself a great figure of romance–like those other bad lots, Helen of Troy, Semiramis, Mary Queen of Scots–because–because she had felt in her veins what he felt now! Grand passion, no grander than his own! Well, they would never make HIM a figure of romance! And Soames grinned.
He walked half-conscious, a sensation about his ribs, as though his soul were bathing in a scent of sweet briar. All was empty of sound–no footsteps, and no wheels–empty, foliaged, broad, the grey river coming to colour as the sun trembled to the horizon. All waiting for the one idea of the whole world–heat. And Soames, with his one idea, walked fast. Her window! Surely the light in that window would not yet be out! If, for a moment of fresh air, she drew aside the blind, he might still see her, unseen himself, behind some lamp-post, in some doorway–see her as he had never seen her yet, as soon he would see her every night and every morning. And with that thought racing through him he almost ran past each paling lamp, past Big Ben and the Abbey, slowly creeping to colossal life from its roof down, into Victoria Street, past his own rooms to the corner of the street where she was staying. There he stopped, his heart beating. He must take care! She mustn’t see him. She was strange, she was fitful–she mightn’t like it–she wouldn’t like it. He edged along the far side of the empty street. Dared he go further? Surely she could not mind if he walked swiftly past. Fourth house now–first window on the second floor! And by a lamp-post he halted peering up. Open–yes–and the curtains half drawn back to cool the room before she slept! Dared he? Suppose she saw him stealing by, stealing on her when she thought herself alone, unseen? Yet, if she saw him, would it not prove to her once more how that she was his one thought, one prize, and one desire? Could she mind that? In truth–he did not know, and he stood there, waiting. She must come to close the curtains against the brightening daylight. If only she had for him the feeling he had for her, then, indeed, she could not mind–she would be glad, and their gaze would cling together across this empty London street, eerie in its silence with not a cat to mark the meeting of their eyes. Blotted against the lamp-post he stayed unmoving, aching for a sight of her. With his coat he blotted the whiteness of his shirt-front, took off his hat and crushed it to him. Now he was any stray early idler with cheek against lamp-post and no face visible, any returning reveller. But his eye close to the lamp-post’s iron moved not from that blank oblong where the curtain stirred feebly in the dawn breeze. And, then he trembled. A white arm from the elbow up had slid into his view, and on the hand of it he saw her face resting, looking straight up over the roof opposite at the brightening sky. With a sort of passion he screwed his eyes to slits that he might see the expression on her face. But he could not–too far, far as she always was, as she must not, should not always be. Of what was she thinking? Of him? Of those little fleecy clouds passing from the west? Of the cooling air? Of herself? Of what? Joined with the lamp-post he stood, still as the dead, for if she caught sight of its thickened base she would vanish. Her neck, her hair looped back were mixed into the folds of curtain–just the arm round and white he saw, just the oval of her lifted face, so still that he held his breath there, a hundred feet away. And then–the sparrows cheeped, all the sky brightened. He saw her rise; for a second saw her nightgowned figure, her hands reach up, the long white arms, and the screening curtains close. A sensation as of madness stirred in his limbs, he sprang away, and, muffling his footsteps, fled back to Victoria Street. There he turned not towards his rooms, but away from them: Paradise deferred! He could not sleep. He walked at a great rate. A policeman stared at him, an early dust-cart passed, the thick horse clop-clopping out the only sound in all the town. Soames turned up towards Hyde Park. This early world of silent streets was to him unaccustomed, as he himself, under this obsession, would be to all who knew and saw him daily, self-contained, diligent, a flat citizen. In Knightsbridge a belated hansom, with a dim couple, fled jingling by, another and another. Soames walked west to where the house, which he with her would inhabit, stood bright with its fresh paint, and a board with a builder’s name. In the garnishing thereof he and she had been more conjoined than ever yet, and he gazed at the little house with gratitude, and a sort of awe. Twelve hours ago he had paid the decorator’s bill. And in that house he would live with HER–incredible! It looked like a dream in this early light–that whole small long square of houses like a dream of his future, her future, strange and unlived.
And superstitious dread came to the unsuperstitious Soames; he turned his eyes away lest he should stare the little house into real unreality. He walked on, past the barracks to the Park rails, still moving west, afraid of turning homewards till he was tired out. Past four o’clock, and still an empty town, empty of all that made it a living hive, and yet this very emptiness gave it intense meaning. He felt that he would always remember a town so different from that he saw every day; and himself he would remember–walking thus, unseen and solitary with his desire.
He went past Prince’s Gate and turned. After all he had his work–ten-thirty at the office! Road and Park and houses stared at him now in the full light of earliest morning. He turned from them into the Park and crossed to the Row side. Funny to see the Row with no horses tearing up and down, or trapesing past like cats on hot bricks, no stream of carriages, no rows of sitting people, nothing but trees and the tan track. The trees and grass, though no dew had fallen, breathed on him; and he stretched himself at full length along a bench, his hands behind his head, his hat crushed on his chest, his eyes fixed on the leaves patterned against the still brightening sky. The air stole faint and fresh about his cheeks and lips, and the backs of his hands. The first sunlight came stealing flat from trunk to trunk, birds did not sing but talked, a wood pigeon back among the trees was cooing. Soames closed his eyes, and instantly imagination began to paint, for the eyes deep down within him, pictures of her. Picture of her–standing passive in her frock flounced to the gleaming floor, while he wrote his initials on her card. Picture of her adjusting with long gloved fingers a camellia come loose in her corsage; turning for him to put her cloak on–pictures, countless pictures, and ever strange, of her face sparkling for moments, or brooding, or averse; of her cheek inclined for his kiss, of her lips turned from his lips, of her eyes looking at him with a question that seemed to have no answer; of her eyes, dark and soft over a grey cat purring in her arms; picture of her auburn hair flowing as he had not seen it yet. Ah! but soon–but soon! And as if answering the call of his imagination a cry–long, not shrill, not harsh exactly, but so poignant–jerked the blood to his heart. From back over there it came trailing, again and again, passionate–the lost soul’s cry of peacock in early morning; and with it there uprose from the spaces of his inner being the vision that was for ever haunting there, of her with hair unbound, of her all white and lost, yielding to his arms. It seared him with delight, swooned in him, and was gone. He opened his eyes; an early water-cart was nearing down the Row. Soames rose and walking fast beneath the trees sought sanity.
FRANCIE’S FOURPENNY FOREIGNER, 1888
In the latest ‘eighties there was that still in the appearance of Francie Forsyte which made people refer to her on Forsyte ‘Change as ‘Keltic’ looking. The expression had not long been discovered, and, though no one had any knowledge of what a Kelt looked like, it was felt to be good.
If she did not precisely suggest the Keltic twilight, she had dark hair and large grey eyes, composed music, wrote stories and poems, and played on the violin. For all these reasons she was allowed a certain license by the family, who did not take her too seriously, and the limit of the license granted is here recorded.
Thin, rather tall, intense and expressive, Francie had a certain charm, together with the power, engrained in a daughter of Roger, of marketing her wares, and at the age of thirty she had secured a measure of independence. She still slept at Prince’s Gate, but had a studio in the purlieus of Chelsea. For the period she was advanced, even to the point of inviting to tea there her editors, fellow writers, musicians, and even those young men with whom she danced in Kensington, generically christened ‘Francie’s lovers’ by her brother George.
At Timothy’s in the Bayswater Road, they would say to her at times:
“Do you think it’s quite nice, dear, to have young men to tea with you?”
And Francie would answer:
“Why not?” which always stopped further enquiry, for the aunts felt that it would be even less nice to put a finer point on it, and, after all, dear Francie was musical. It was believed in the family, rather than known, that she was always in love with someone, but that seemed natural in one of her appearance and was taken to be spiritual rather than bodily. And this diagnosis was perfectly correct, such was the essential shrewdness underlying the verbal niceties on Forsyte ‘Change.
It was shortly after she had at last succeeded in getting her violin sonata–so much the most serious item of her music–published, that she met the individual soon to be known as “Francie’s Fourpenny Foreigner.” The word ‘Dago’ not having then come to the surface, the antipathetic contempt felt by Anglo–Saxons for everything male, on two legs, deriving from below the latitude of Geneva, had no verbal outlet. From above the latitude of Geneva a foreigner was, if not respected, at least human, but a foreigner from below was undoubtedly ‘fourpenny,’ if not less.
This young man, whose surname, Racazy, had a catch in it which caught every Forsyte, but whose Christian name was Guido, had come, if Francie was to be believed, from a place called Ragusa to conquer London with his violin. He had been introduced to her by the publisher who had brought forth her sonata, as essentially the right interpreter of that considerable production; partly, no doubt, because at this stage of his career he would interpret anything for nothing, and partly because Francie, free at the moment from any spiritual entanglement, had noticed his hair, like that of Rafael’s best young men, and asked for the introduction.
Within a week he was playing the sonata in her studio for the first and last time. The fact that he never even offered to play it again ought to have warned Francie, but with a strange mixture of loyalty to what she admired at the moment and a Forsytean perception that the more famous he became the more famous would she become, she installed him the ‘lover’ of the year, and proceeded to make his name. No one can deny that her psychology was at fault from the first; she gauged wrongly Guido, her family, and herself; but such misconceptions are slow to make themselves felt, and the license she enjoyed had invested Francie with a kind of bravura. She had the habit of her own way, and no tactical sense of the dividing line between major and minor operations. After trying him out at the Studio on an editor, two girl friends, and a ‘lover’ so out of date that he could be relied on, she began serious work by inviting the young man to dinner at Prince’s Gate. He came in his hair, undressed, with a large bow tie ‘flopping about on his chest,’ as Eustace put it in his remonstrance after the event. It was a somewhat gruesome evening, complicated by the arrival of George, while the men were still at wine, to ‘touch his father for a monkey.’ His Ascot had been lamentable, and he sat, silently staring at the violinist as though he were the monkey.
Roger, in his capacity of host, alone attempted to put the young man at his ease.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15
The following morning, starting for the office, he said to Warmson:
“There’ll be a picture come today. You’d better get Hunt and Thomas to help you hang it. It’s to go in the middle of that space on the stairs. You’d better have it done when your mistress is out. Let ’em bring it in the back way–it’s eleven foot by six; and mind the paint.”
When he returned, rather late, the Hondekoeter was hung. It covered the space admirably, but the light being poor and the picture dark, it was not possible to see what it was about. It looked quite well. Emily was in the drawing-room when he went in.
“What on earth is that great picture on the stairs, James?”
“That?” said James. “A Hondekoeter; picked it up, a bargain, at Smelter’s sale. Jolyon’s got one at Stanhope Gate.”
“I never saw such a lumbering great thing.”
“What?” said James. “It covers up that space well. It’s not as if you could see anything on the stairs. There’s some good poultry in it.”
“It makes the stairs darker than they were before. I don’t know what Soames will say. Really, James, you oughtn’t to go about alone, buying things like that.”
“I can do what I like with my money, I suppose,” said James. “It’s a well-known name.”
“Well,” said Emily, “for a man of your age–Never mind! Don’t fuss! Sit down and drink your tea.”
James sat down, muttering. Women–always unjust, and no more sense of values than an old tom-cat!
Emily said no more, ever mistress of her suave and fashionable self.
Winifred, with Montague Dartie, came in later, so that all the family were assembled for dinner; Cicely having her hair down, Rachel her hair up–she had ‘come out’ this season; Soames, who had just parted with the little whiskers of the late ‘seventies, looking pale and flatter-cheeked than usual. Winifred, beginning to be ‘interesting,’ owing to the approach of a little Dartie, kept her eyes somewhat watchfully on ‘Monty,’ square and oiled, with a ‘handsome’ look on his sallow face, and a big diamond stud in his shining shirt-front.
It was she who broached the Hondekoeter.
“Pater dear, what made you buy that enormous picture?”
James looked up, and mumbled through his mutton:
“Enormous! It’s the right size for that space on the stairs.” It seemed to him at the moment that his family had very peculiar faces.
“It’s very fine and large!” Dartie was speaking! ‘Um!’ thought James: ‘What does HE want–money?’
“It’s so yellow,” said Rachel, plaintively.
“What do YOU know about a picture?”
“I know what I like, Pater.”
James stole a glance at his son, but Soames was looking down his nose.
“It’s very good value,” said James, suddenly. “There’s some first-rate feather painting in it.”
Nothing more was said at the moment, nobody wanting to hurt the Pater’s feelings, but, upstairs, in the drawing-room after Emily and her three daughters had again traversed the length of the Hondekoeter, a lively conversation broke out.
Really–the Pater! Rococo was not the word for pictures that size! And chickens–who wanted to look at chickens, even if you could see them? But, of course, Pater thought a bargain excused everything.
Emily said:
“Don’t be disrespectful, Cicely.”
“Well, Mater, he does, you know. All the old Forsytes do.”
Emily, who secretly agreed, said: “H’ssh!”
She was always loyal to James, in his absence. They all were, indeed, except among themselves.
“Soames thinks it dreadful,” said Rachel. “I hope he’ll tell the Pater so.”
“Soames will do nothing of the sort,” said Emily. “Really your father can do what he likes in his own house–you children are getting very uppish.”
“Well, Mater, you know jolly well it’s awfully out of date.”
“I wish you would not say ‘awfully’ and ‘jolly,’ Cicely.”
“Why not? Everybody does, at school.”
Winifred cut in:
“They really are the latest words, Mother.”
Emily was silent; nothing took the wind out of her sails like the word ‘latest,’ for, though a woman of much character, she could not bear to be behindhand.
“Listen!” said Rachel, who had opened the door.
A certain noise could be heard; it was James, extolling the Hondekoeter, on the stairs.
“That rooster,” he was saying, “is a fine bird; and look at those feathers floating. Think they could paint those nowadays? Your Uncle Jolyon gave a hundred an’ forty for his Hondekoeter, and I picked this up for twenty-five.”
“What did I say?” whispered Cicely. “A bargain. I hate bargains; they lumber up everything. That Turner was another!”
“Shh!” said Winifred, who was not so young, and wished that Monty had more sense of a bargain than he had as yet displayed. “I like a bargain myself; you know you’ve got something for your money.”
“I’d rather have my money,” said Cicely.
“Don’t be silly, Cicely,” said Emily; “go and play your piece. Your father likes it.”
James and Dartie now entered, Soames having passed on up to his room where he worked at night.
Cicely began her piece. She was at home owing to an outbreak of mumps at her school on Ham Common; and her piece, which contained a number of runs up and down the piano, was one which she was perfecting for the school concert at the end of term. James, who made a point of asking for it, partly because it was good for Cicely, and partly because it was good for his digestion, took his seat by the hearth between his whiskers, averting his eyes from animated objects. Unfortunately, he never could sleep after dinner, and thoughts buzzed in his head. Soames had said there was no demand now for large pictures, and very little for the Dutch school–he had admitted, however, that the Hondekoeter was a bargain as values went; the name alone was worth the money. Cicely commenced her ‘piece’; James brooded on. He really didn’t know whether he was glad he had bought the thing or not. Everyone of them had disapproved, except Dartie; the only one whose disapproval he would have welcomed. To say that James was conscious of a change in the mental outlook of his day would be to credit him with a philosophic sensibility unsuited to his breeding and his age; but he WAS uncomfortably conscious that a bargain was not what it had been. And while Cicely’s fingers ran up and down–he didn’t know, he couldn’t say.
“D’you mean to tell me,” he said, when Cicely shut the piano, “that you don’t like those Dresden vases?”
Nobody knew whom he was addressing or why, so no one replied.
“I bought ’em at Jobson’s in ‘67, and they’re worth three times what I gave for them.”
It was Rachel who responded.
“Well, Pater, do you like them yourself?”
“Like them? What’s that got to do with it? They’re genuine, and worth a lot of money.”
“I wish you’d sell them, then, James,” said Emily. “They’re not the fashion now.”
“Fashion! They’ll be worth a lot more before I die.”
“A bargain,” muttered Cicely, below her breath.
“What’s that?” said James, whose hearing was sometimes unexpectedly sharp.
“I said: ‘A bargain,’ Pater; weren’t they?”
“Of course they were”; and it could be heard from his tone that if they hadn’t been, he wouldn’t have bought them. “You young people know nothing about money, except how to spend it”; and he looked at his son-inlaw, who was sedulously concerned with his finger-nails.
Emily, partly to smooth James, whom she could see was ruffled, and partly because she had a passion for the game, told Cicely to get out the card table, and said with cheery composure:
“Come along, James, we’ll play Nap.”
They sat around the green board for a considerable time playing for farthings, with every now and then a little burst of laughter, when James said: “I’ll go Nap!” At this particular game, indeed, James was always visited by a sort of recklessness. At farthing points he could be a devil of a fellow for very little money. He had soon lost thirteen shillings, and was as dashing as ever.
He rose at last, in excellent humour, pretending to be bankrupt.
“Well, I don’t know,” he said, “I always lose MY money.”
The Hondekoeter, and the misgivings it had given rise to, had faded from his mind.
Winifred and Dartie departing, without the latter having touched on finance, he went up to bed with Emily in an almost cheerful condition; and, having turned his back on her, was soon snoring lightly.
He was awakened by a crash and bumping rumble, as it might be thunder, on the right.
“What on earth’s that, James?” said Emily’s startled voice.
“What?” said James: “Where? Here, where are my slippers?”
“It must be a thunderbolt. Be careful, James.”
For James, in his nightgown, was already standing by the bedside–in the radiance of a night-light, long as a stork. He sniffed loudly.
“D’you smell burning?”
“No,” said Emily.
“Here, give me the candle.”
“Put on this shawl, James. It can’t be burglars; they wouldn’t make such a noise.”
“I don’t know,” muttered James, “I was asleep.” He took the candle from Emily, and shuffled to the door.
“What’s all this?” he said on the landing. By confused candle and night-light he could see a number of white-clothed figures–Rachel, Cicely, and the maid Fifine, in their nightgowns. Soames in his nightshirt, at the head of the stairs, and down below, that fellow Warmson.
The voice of Soames, flat and calm, said:
“It’s the Hondekoeter.”
There, in fact, enormous, at the bottom of the stairs, was the Hondekoeter, fallen on its face. James, holding up his candle, stalked down and stood gazing at it. No one spoke, except Fifine, who said: “La, la!”
Cicely, seized with a fit of giggles, vanished.
Then Soames spoke into the dark well below him, illumined faintly by James’ candle.
“It’s all right, Pater; it won’t be hurt; there was no glass.”
James did not answer, but holding his candle low, returned up the stairs, and without a word went back into his bedroom.
“What was it, James?” said Emily, who had not risen.
“That picture came down with a run–comes of not looking after things yourself. That fellow Warmson! Where’s the eau-de-Cologne?”
He anointed himself, got back into bed, and lay on his back, waiting for Emily to improve the occasion. But all she said was:
“I hope it hasn’t made your head ache, James.”
“No,” said James; and, for some time after she was asleep, he lay with his eyes on the night-light, as if waiting for the Hondekoeter to play him another trick–after he had bought the thing and given it a good home, too!
Next morning, going down to breakfast he passed the picture, which had been lifted, so that it stood slanting, with its back to the stair wall. The white rooster seemed just as much on the point of taking a bath as ever. The feathers floated on their backs, curved like shallops. He passed on into the dining-room.
They were all there, eating eggs and bacon, suspiciously silent.
James helped himself and sat down.
“What are you going to do with it now, James?” said Emily.
“Do with it? Hang it again, of course!”
“Not really, Pater!” said Rachel. “It gave me fits last night.”
“That wall won’t stand it,” said Soames.
“What! It’s a good wall!”
“It really is too big,” said Emily.
“And we none of us like it, Pater,” put in Cicely, “it’s such a monster, and so yellow!”
“Monster, indeed!” said James, and was silent, till suddenly he spluttered:
“What would you have me do with it, then?”
“Send it back; sell it again.”
“I shouldn’t get anything for it.”
“But you said it was a bargain, Pater,” said Cicely.
“So it was!”
There was another silence. James looked sidelong at his son; there was a certain pathos in that glance, as if it were seeking help, but Soames was concentrated above his plate.
“Have it put up in the lumber-room, James,” said Emily, quietly.
James reddened between his whiskers, and his mouth opened; he looked again at his son, but Soames ate on. James turned to his teacup. And there went on within him that which he could not express. It was as if they had asked him: “When is a bargain not a bargain?” and he didn’t know the answer, but they did. A change of epoch, something new-fangled in the air. A man could no longer buy a thing because it was worth more! It was–it was the end of everything. And, suddenly, he mumbled: “Well, have it your own way, then. Throwing money away, I call it!”
After he had gone to the office, the Hondekoeter was conducted to the lumber-room by Warmson, Hunt, and Thomas. There, covered by a dust-sheet to preserve the varnish, it rested twenty-one years, till the death of James in 1901, when it went forth and again came under the hammer. It fetched five pounds, and was bought by a designer of posters, working for a poultry-breeding firm.
CRY OF PEACOCK, 1883
The Ball was over. Soames decided to walk. In the cloak-room, whence he retrieved coat and opera hat, a mirror showed him a white-waistcoated figure still trim, but a half-melted collar, and a brown edging to the gardenia in his button-hole. Hot with a vengeance it had been! And taking a silk handkerchief from his cuff he passed it over his face before putting on his hat.
Down the broad red-carpeted steps where Chinese lanterns had burned out, he passed into the Inner Temple and the dawn. A faint air from the river freshened his face. Half-past three!
Perhaps he had never danced so often as that night–so often and so long. Six times with Irene! Six times with girls of whom he now remembered nothing. Had he danced well–dancing with HER he had been conscious only of her closeness and her scent; and, dancing with those others, only of her circling apart, out of his reach.
Only fourteen days and fourteen nights–until her closeness and her scent should be for ever his! She should be nearly home by now, with that stepmother of hers, in the hansom cab wherein he had placed them. How Irene detested that woman, and no wonder! For Soames knew well enough that to ‘that woman’s’ wish to get her stepdaughter married, so that she might marry again herself, he had owed his own chances these past eighteen months.
From the hall, bright with colour and dark gleaming wood, he moved slowly into half-lit stillness haunted by the drawl of a waltz fading as he went. And, inhaling long breaths of air grass-scented by the Temple Gardens, Soames stripped off his gloves, thin, black-stitched, of lavender hue.
Irene loved dancing! It would not be good form to dance with one’s wife! Would that prevent him? No, by Jove!
By a rambler rose-bush in a tub and a Chinese lantern still alight–last splash of colour in the grey of dawn–he turned, past one dim lamp at the corner of Middle Temple Lane, down to the Embankment, and Cleopatra’s Needle. Cleopatra! A bad lot! If she’d been alive now, they’d have cut her in Rotten Row, and run her in for suicide; and there was her needle and herself a great figure of romance–like those other bad lots, Helen of Troy, Semiramis, Mary Queen of Scots–because–because she had felt in her veins what he felt now! Grand passion, no grander than his own! Well, they would never make HIM a figure of romance! And Soames grinned.
He walked half-conscious, a sensation about his ribs, as though his soul were bathing in a scent of sweet briar. All was empty of sound–no footsteps, and no wheels–empty, foliaged, broad, the grey river coming to colour as the sun trembled to the horizon. All waiting for the one idea of the whole world–heat. And Soames, with his one idea, walked fast. Her window! Surely the light in that window would not yet be out! If, for a moment of fresh air, she drew aside the blind, he might still see her, unseen himself, behind some lamp-post, in some doorway–see her as he had never seen her yet, as soon he would see her every night and every morning. And with that thought racing through him he almost ran past each paling lamp, past Big Ben and the Abbey, slowly creeping to colossal life from its roof down, into Victoria Street, past his own rooms to the corner of the street where she was staying. There he stopped, his heart beating. He must take care! She mustn’t see him. She was strange, she was fitful–she mightn’t like it–she wouldn’t like it. He edged along the far side of the empty street. Dared he go further? Surely she could not mind if he walked swiftly past. Fourth house now–first window on the second floor! And by a lamp-post he halted peering up. Open–yes–and the curtains half drawn back to cool the room before she slept! Dared he? Suppose she saw him stealing by, stealing on her when she thought herself alone, unseen? Yet, if she saw him, would it not prove to her once more how that she was his one thought, one prize, and one desire? Could she mind that? In truth–he did not know, and he stood there, waiting. She must come to close the curtains against the brightening daylight. If only she had for him the feeling he had for her, then, indeed, she could not mind–she would be glad, and their gaze would cling together across this empty London street, eerie in its silence with not a cat to mark the meeting of their eyes. Blotted against the lamp-post he stayed unmoving, aching for a sight of her. With his coat he blotted the whiteness of his shirt-front, took off his hat and crushed it to him. Now he was any stray early idler with cheek against lamp-post and no face visible, any returning reveller. But his eye close to the lamp-post’s iron moved not from that blank oblong where the curtain stirred feebly in the dawn breeze. And, then he trembled. A white arm from the elbow up had slid into his view, and on the hand of it he saw her face resting, looking straight up over the roof opposite at the brightening sky. With a sort of passion he screwed his eyes to slits that he might see the expression on her face. But he could not–too far, far as she always was, as she must not, should not always be. Of what was she thinking? Of him? Of those little fleecy clouds passing from the west? Of the cooling air? Of herself? Of what? Joined with the lamp-post he stood, still as the dead, for if she caught sight of its thickened base she would vanish. Her neck, her hair looped back were mixed into the folds of curtain–just the arm round and white he saw, just the oval of her lifted face, so still that he held his breath there, a hundred feet away. And then–the sparrows cheeped, all the sky brightened. He saw her rise; for a second saw her nightgowned figure, her hands reach up, the long white arms, and the screening curtains close. A sensation as of madness stirred in his limbs, he sprang away, and, muffling his footsteps, fled back to Victoria Street. There he turned not towards his rooms, but away from them: Paradise deferred! He could not sleep. He walked at a great rate. A policeman stared at him, an early dust-cart passed, the thick horse clop-clopping out the only sound in all the town. Soames turned up towards Hyde Park. This early world of silent streets was to him unaccustomed, as he himself, under this obsession, would be to all who knew and saw him daily, self-contained, diligent, a flat citizen. In Knightsbridge a belated hansom, with a dim couple, fled jingling by, another and another. Soames walked west to where the house, which he with her would inhabit, stood bright with its fresh paint, and a board with a builder’s name. In the garnishing thereof he and she had been more conjoined than ever yet, and he gazed at the little house with gratitude, and a sort of awe. Twelve hours ago he had paid the decorator’s bill. And in that house he would live with HER–incredible! It looked like a dream in this early light–that whole small long square of houses like a dream of his future, her future, strange and unlived.
And superstitious dread came to the unsuperstitious Soames; he turned his eyes away lest he should stare the little house into real unreality. He walked on, past the barracks to the Park rails, still moving west, afraid of turning homewards till he was tired out. Past four o’clock, and still an empty town, empty of all that made it a living hive, and yet this very emptiness gave it intense meaning. He felt that he would always remember a town so different from that he saw every day; and himself he would remember–walking thus, unseen and solitary with his desire.
He went past Prince’s Gate and turned. After all he had his work–ten-thirty at the office! Road and Park and houses stared at him now in the full light of earliest morning. He turned from them into the Park and crossed to the Row side. Funny to see the Row with no horses tearing up and down, or trapesing past like cats on hot bricks, no stream of carriages, no rows of sitting people, nothing but trees and the tan track. The trees and grass, though no dew had fallen, breathed on him; and he stretched himself at full length along a bench, his hands behind his head, his hat crushed on his chest, his eyes fixed on the leaves patterned against the still brightening sky. The air stole faint and fresh about his cheeks and lips, and the backs of his hands. The first sunlight came stealing flat from trunk to trunk, birds did not sing but talked, a wood pigeon back among the trees was cooing. Soames closed his eyes, and instantly imagination began to paint, for the eyes deep down within him, pictures of her. Picture of her–standing passive in her frock flounced to the gleaming floor, while he wrote his initials on her card. Picture of her adjusting with long gloved fingers a camellia come loose in her corsage; turning for him to put her cloak on–pictures, countless pictures, and ever strange, of her face sparkling for moments, or brooding, or averse; of her cheek inclined for his kiss, of her lips turned from his lips, of her eyes looking at him with a question that seemed to have no answer; of her eyes, dark and soft over a grey cat purring in her arms; picture of her auburn hair flowing as he had not seen it yet. Ah! but soon–but soon! And as if answering the call of his imagination a cry–long, not shrill, not harsh exactly, but so poignant–jerked the blood to his heart. From back over there it came trailing, again and again, passionate–the lost soul’s cry of peacock in early morning; and with it there uprose from the spaces of his inner being the vision that was for ever haunting there, of her with hair unbound, of her all white and lost, yielding to his arms. It seared him with delight, swooned in him, and was gone. He opened his eyes; an early water-cart was nearing down the Row. Soames rose and walking fast beneath the trees sought sanity.
FRANCIE’S FOURPENNY FOREIGNER, 1888
In the latest ‘eighties there was that still in the appearance of Francie Forsyte which made people refer to her on Forsyte ‘Change as ‘Keltic’ looking. The expression had not long been discovered, and, though no one had any knowledge of what a Kelt looked like, it was felt to be good.
If she did not precisely suggest the Keltic twilight, she had dark hair and large grey eyes, composed music, wrote stories and poems, and played on the violin. For all these reasons she was allowed a certain license by the family, who did not take her too seriously, and the limit of the license granted is here recorded.
Thin, rather tall, intense and expressive, Francie had a certain charm, together with the power, engrained in a daughter of Roger, of marketing her wares, and at the age of thirty she had secured a measure of independence. She still slept at Prince’s Gate, but had a studio in the purlieus of Chelsea. For the period she was advanced, even to the point of inviting to tea there her editors, fellow writers, musicians, and even those young men with whom she danced in Kensington, generically christened ‘Francie’s lovers’ by her brother George.
At Timothy’s in the Bayswater Road, they would say to her at times:
“Do you think it’s quite nice, dear, to have young men to tea with you?”
And Francie would answer:
“Why not?” which always stopped further enquiry, for the aunts felt that it would be even less nice to put a finer point on it, and, after all, dear Francie was musical. It was believed in the family, rather than known, that she was always in love with someone, but that seemed natural in one of her appearance and was taken to be spiritual rather than bodily. And this diagnosis was perfectly correct, such was the essential shrewdness underlying the verbal niceties on Forsyte ‘Change.
It was shortly after she had at last succeeded in getting her violin sonata–so much the most serious item of her music–published, that she met the individual soon to be known as “Francie’s Fourpenny Foreigner.” The word ‘Dago’ not having then come to the surface, the antipathetic contempt felt by Anglo–Saxons for everything male, on two legs, deriving from below the latitude of Geneva, had no verbal outlet. From above the latitude of Geneva a foreigner was, if not respected, at least human, but a foreigner from below was undoubtedly ‘fourpenny,’ if not less.
This young man, whose surname, Racazy, had a catch in it which caught every Forsyte, but whose Christian name was Guido, had come, if Francie was to be believed, from a place called Ragusa to conquer London with his violin. He had been introduced to her by the publisher who had brought forth her sonata, as essentially the right interpreter of that considerable production; partly, no doubt, because at this stage of his career he would interpret anything for nothing, and partly because Francie, free at the moment from any spiritual entanglement, had noticed his hair, like that of Rafael’s best young men, and asked for the introduction.
Within a week he was playing the sonata in her studio for the first and last time. The fact that he never even offered to play it again ought to have warned Francie, but with a strange mixture of loyalty to what she admired at the moment and a Forsytean perception that the more famous he became the more famous would she become, she installed him the ‘lover’ of the year, and proceeded to make his name. No one can deny that her psychology was at fault from the first; she gauged wrongly Guido, her family, and herself; but such misconceptions are slow to make themselves felt, and the license she enjoyed had invested Francie with a kind of bravura. She had the habit of her own way, and no tactical sense of the dividing line between major and minor operations. After trying him out at the Studio on an editor, two girl friends, and a ‘lover’ so out of date that he could be relied on, she began serious work by inviting the young man to dinner at Prince’s Gate. He came in his hair, undressed, with a large bow tie ‘flopping about on his chest,’ as Eustace put it in his remonstrance after the event. It was a somewhat gruesome evening, complicated by the arrival of George, while the men were still at wine, to ‘touch his father for a monkey.’ His Ascot had been lamentable, and he sat, silently staring at the violinist as though he were the monkey.
Roger, in his capacity of host, alone attempted to put the young man at his ease.
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