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- Herausgeber: Musaicum Books
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
John Galsworthy's 'The Forsyte Collection - Complete 9 Books' is a sweeping saga that follows the lives of the wealthy Forsyte family over several generations. Galsworthy's elegant prose captures the complexities of love, power, and morality against the backdrop of early 20th century England. The collection's interwoven storylines showcase the author's keen insight into the human condition and his ability to create rich, multifaceted characters. With themes of social class, family dynamics, and personal conflict, 'The Forsyte Collection' remains a timeless work of literature that continues to resonate with readers today. John Galsworthy, a Nobel Prize-winning author, drew inspiration for 'The Forsyte Collection' from his own experiences with the British upper class. His sharp observations and critique of societal norms provide a deeper understanding of the motivations behind the characters' actions. Galsworthy's commitment to social justice and his belief in the power of literature to effect change shine through in this monumental work. I highly recommend 'The Forsyte Collection - Complete 9 Books' to readers interested in thought-provoking historical fiction that delves into the intricacies of human relationships and society. Galsworthy's masterful storytelling and insightful commentary make this collection a must-read for anyone seeking a rich and engaging literary experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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The Forsyte Collection - Complete 9 Books
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Table of Contents
Introduction
The Forsyte Collection – Complete 9 Books gathers the full sequence of John Galsworthy’s Forsyte novels—The Man of Property, In Chancery, To Let; The White Monkey, The Silver Spoon, Swan Song; Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness, Over the River (One More River)—and situates them with the author’s Interludes and the companion volume On Forsyte ‘Change. Its purpose is to present the family chronicle in the shape Galsworthy conceived: a continuous architecture of long novels punctuated by shorter bridges, extended by retrospective tales. Bringing these texts together allows readers to trace, in one sustained experience, the fortunes and temper of a clan and the society it mirrors.
Genres and text types represented here include the panoramic realist novel, novella-length interludes, and short stories. The core is narrative fiction on the grand, many-stranded scale, with an emphasis on social observation and character study. The Interludes—Indian Summer of a Forsyte, Awakening, A Silent Wooing, Passers By—function as lyric pauses and connective tissue, concise in scope yet crucial in mood. On Forsyte ‘Change gathers short stories that revisit earlier epochs of the family, each episode self-contained but resonant with the novels’ concerns. Together they form a composite of forms within a single imaginative world, balancing breadth with intimacy, continuity with variation of tone.
At its simplest premise, the cycle follows an upper-middle-class London family whose identity is bound to property, status, and the habits of security. Beginning in late Victorian England and unfolding into the early twentieth century, the Forsyte story charts marriages, houses, businesses, and the subtle negotiations by which individuals seek happiness within inherited codes. Galsworthy’s canvas includes drawing rooms, chambers, galleries, and streets, yet his focus is steadily human: the price of possession, the discomfort of change, and the persistence of feeling. As generations succeed one another, the reader witnesses how the very practices that create stability also generate conflict and transformation.
The Forsyte Saga establishes the family’s tone and tension. The Man of Property introduces the ethos of acquisition and the conviction that possessions guarantee safety. Indian Summer of a Forsyte turns reflective, centering on late-life tenderness and the solace of continuity. In Chancery examines the pressure exerted by law and convention when personal desire collides with public forms. Awakening offers an intimate interval, attentive to sensibility and threshold moments. To Let follows the younger generation as they navigate a world shifting under their feet. Throughout, Galsworthy sets temperament against tradition, measuring how sentiment and conscience strain within the firm boundaries of respectability.
A Modern Comedy, the second trilogy, observes postwar society as modernity unsettles Victorian certainties. The White Monkey explores the restlessness beneath comfort and the spectacle of urban life. A Silent Wooing and Passers By interpose finely shaded interludes of courtship and encounter, attentive to the unspoken. The Silver Spoon considers reputation and the new power of publicity in shaping fortune and esteem. Swan Song concludes the sequence by contemplating culmination and the ambiguities of success. Together they render an age of display, anxiety, and improvisation, in which the Forsyte capacity for adjustment is tested by markets, media, and shifting moral weather.
End of the Chapter broadens and rebalances the family perspective through the Cherrells, relations by marriage whose traditions of service and conscience deepen the ethical inquiry. Maid in Waiting introduces dilemmas of loyalty and vocation; Flowering Wilderness traces the difficult commerce between integrity and expediency; Over the River, published as One More River, engages the boundaries between private right and public judgment. Without repeating earlier patterns, these novels preserve the cycle’s central concerns while opening fresh social vistas. The effect is not a coda but a renewal: a reckoning with continuity, responsibility, and the claims that history and kinship lay upon choice.
On Forsyte ‘Change supplements the trilogies with short stories that return to earlier generations, sketching episodes that illuminate the origins of habits and the long memory of a family. These pieces stand as independent narratives yet deepen the reader’s understanding of the Forsyte temperament—its prudence, pride, and susceptibility to beauty. By stepping back in time, Galsworthy shows how patterns were set before the great events of the novels and how accident and temperament harden into tradition. The tales enrich the cycle’s texture, allowing the whole to resonate backward and forward, and demonstrating the author’s command of concise, sharply characterized storytelling.
Stylistically, Galsworthy is distinguished by lucid, exact prose; an irony that neither sneers nor excuses; and a flexible omniscience that glides from group portrait to close interior shading. He often employs free indirect narration, allowing the reader to feel a character’s pulse even as the author’s intelligence frames the scene. Descriptive precision—of rooms, fabrics, gestures—anchors moral nuance. Recurrent images of houses, instruments, and artworks carry thematic weight without overt symbolism. The interludes modulate tempo like musical movements, and the trilogies are architected with symphonic care, themes introduced, developed, and returned to across decades, with composition serving character and society alike.
Unifying themes tie the cycle into a single fabric. Property, in its legal and psychological senses, structures choices and relationships. Marriage is treated as both contract and intimate undertaking, capable of sheltering affection or staggering under constraint. The tension between art and commerce sets beauty against possession, taste against appetite. Law appears as a framework that can both protect and confine. Time itself—the transition from Victorian assurance to modern uncertainty—acts as a protagonist, altering speech, manners, and desire. Against these pressures, individual conscience insists on being heard, and the novels ask how one might live decently when systems reward caution over candor.
As social history, the sequence renders the British upper-middle class with unusual completeness, attentive to capital, profession, philanthropy, and the rituals by which standing is measured. The world beyond the family is not a backdrop but a network of institutions—chambers, clubs, galleries, and newspapers—that shape outcomes. Yet the books resist caricature: stability has its comforts, and innovation its costs. By tracking fashion, litigation, investment, and talk, Galsworthy maps the mechanisms by which a society manages change without admitting rupture. The trilogy structure permits scale without blur, while the interludes preserve human proportion, keeping faces and voices vivid amid the panorama.
The cycle’s lasting significance lies in its fusion of narrative pleasure with ethical clarity. John Galsworthy received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. The Forsyte books helped define the modern family saga, influencing later chronicles that use domestic life to interrogate economics and law. Their language remains accessible, their ironies fresh, their questions immediate. Readers encounter not a museum piece but a living argument about security, beauty, freedom, and responsibility. The collection’s completeness enables a long conversation, tracing how private scruple and public custom contend across generations.
This collection presents the nine principal novels in the author’s sequence, set among the Interludes he devised, with On Forsyte ‘Change offering a complementary overture of tales. Readers may approach in publication order, moving through each trilogy with its companion pieces, to experience the intended cadence of rise, pause, and return. The arrangement honors both narrative momentum and reflective space, illuminating how episodes echo across time. The purpose is clarity and wholeness: to provide a coherent passage through a world at once specific and exemplary. Entered patiently, the Forsyte chronicle rewards with breadth, subtlety, and the steady satisfaction of a completed design.
Author Biography
John Galsworthy (1867–1933) was an English novelist and dramatist whose clear-eyed portraits of class, property, and conscience helped define late Victorian and Edwardian realism for 20th‑century readers. Best known for the vast Forsyte chronicles—beginning with The Forsyte Saga and extending through A Modern Comedy and End of the Chapter—he combined social observation with a restrained, ironic style. Across three linked trilogies and related interludes, he traced the pressures of inheritance, marriage, and modern change on a prosperous professional class. The sequence’s architectural design and patient moral inquiry secured Galsworthy an enduring place in modern English letters and made his characters a cultural shorthand for possessive individualism.
Educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford, Galsworthy trained for the law before turning decisively to literature in the 1890s. Travel and wide reading broadened his outlook, and friendships within literary circles—most notably with Joseph Conrad—sharpened his sense of craft and moral nuance. Though he qualified as a barrister, he found the courtroom’s conflicts more compelling as subjects than as a vocation. The legal mind he cultivated shaped his prose: precise in language, careful with evidence, alert to motive and consequence. These habits, allied to a humane skepticism about power and possession, would inform the Forsyte books’ cool scrutiny of social behavior.
His breakthrough as a novelist came with The Man of Property, the opening book of The Forsyte Saga, which introduced readers to a clan whose wealth, taste, and tenacity symbolize a wider ethos of acquisition. The sequence’s design—interludes alternating with full-length novels—allowed Galsworthy to vary tempo and point of view while keeping a continuous social chronicle. Public reception grew steadily, as critics noted his unshowy artistry and moral steadiness. He preferred understatement to sensationalism, letting incident and implication carry judgment. The early success of the Saga enabled him to pursue the long arc of family and national change without haste.
The Forsyte Saga comprises The Man of Property, the interlude Indian Summer of a Forsyte, In Chancery, the interlude Awakening, and To Let. Together they chart the limits of ownership—of houses, of affections, even of memory—across years of shifting social expectation. The interludes, more lyrical and compact, bridge generational gaps and adjust the moral lighting, bringing into focus quiet moments of reckoning between larger dramas. Galsworthy’s legal training is evident in his handling of marital and property disputes, yet he resists verdicts; instead, he stages conflicts so readers test their sympathies against the evidence. The result is a humane, subtly ironic panorama.
A Modern Comedy extends the chronicle into the unsettled 1920s: The White Monkey, the interlude A Silent Wooing, The Silver Spoon, the interlude Passers By, and Swan Song. Here prosperity meets anxiety, as new money, publicity, and shifting manners complicate old certainties. Galsworthy refines his method, juxtaposing intimate domestic scenes with the wider pressures of commerce and reputation. The tone is often wry, alert to fashion’s glitter and its moral costs. Without breaking the sequence’s continuity, he registers a society learning—and sometimes failing—to live with speed, display, and diffuse loyalties, while keeping faith with the inward lives of recurring characters.
End of the Chapter—Maid in Waiting, Flowering Wilderness, and Over the River (One More River)—broadens the series’ orbit, tracing allied families and the after-echoes of Forsyte values in a world edging toward new crises. The late trilogy is quieter, reflective, attentive to the ethics of stewardship and personal choice. In parallel, On Forsyte 'Change gathers short stories that return to earlier eras and side corridors, enriching the tapestry with episodes that illuminate temperaments, habits, and the slow evolution of a class. These pieces reinforce Galsworthy’s preferred scale: the revealing incident, the shaded motive, the moral pressure that accumulates without proclamation.
Beyond fiction, Galsworthy supported writers’ cooperation and freedom of expression, and he maintained a steady public interest in humane reform. His contribution to narrative art—especially the Forsyte sequence—was recognized with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932. He died the following year, having brought his long chronicle to a poised, resonant close. The Forsyte books have remained in print, adapted repeatedly for stage and screen, and studied for their lucid prose, structural poise, and disciplined moral imagination. Their continuing relevance lies in the questions they pose about ownership, obligation, and change—questions that still shape private lives and public cultures.
Historical Context
John Galsworthy’s career spans the late Victorian age through the troubled early 1930s, and The Forsyte Collection compresses that half-century’s upheavals into a single social chronicle. Written between 1906 and 1933, the books trace British society from the 1880s to the early interwar period. They observe the confident wealth of the late nineteenth century, the unsettled Edwardian years, the catastrophe and aftershocks of the First World War, and the new mass culture of the 1920s. Galsworthy’s realism—tempered by moral scrutiny—was shaped by his parallel work as a dramatist and reform-minded public figure, and was honored with the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1932.
Victorian Britain’s longest shadow across the collection is its creed of property and respectability. Industrial prosperity and imperial expansion fostered a powerful professional and mercantile class that prized security, inheritance, and reputation. The City of London’s legal and financial networks underwrote fortunes, while rigid social codes regulated marriage and conduct. Legal reforms slowly adjusted inequalities—the Married Women’s Property Acts (1870, 1882) altered household economics—yet patriarchal norms persisted. Urban growth and a proliferating consumer culture redefined comfort and display. The Forsyte books record this ethos not as caricature but as a system of belief, showing how material safeguards could both protect families and confine individual lives.
The Man of Property, set in the 1880s, is steeped in the late Victorian city’s speculative energy. London was spreading outward into new suburbs, and architecture became a battleground between ornamental taste and emerging Arts and Crafts ideals that valued integrity of design and materials. Galsworthy’s focus on house-building, leases, and conveyances reflects a culture that translated emotion into possession and beauty into appraisal. He captures the rhythms of law offices, the prestige of clubland, and the etiquette of drawing rooms. Trains, cabs, and widening streets lubricate the circulation of people and money, while carefully shaded parlors and contracts codify the boundaries of intimacy.
The interlude Indian Summer of a Forsyte is poised at the fin de siècle, an era of aesthetic experimentation and nervous confidence. The 1890s saw intensified debates about art and morality, along with mounting anxieties over Britain’s imperial responsibilities. Galsworthy uses an older generation’s summer reverie to register these transitions: gardens and galleries become spaces where late Victorian certainties are softened by gentler values and quieter, introspective desires. The episode’s calm also bears the feeling of approaching change, as new amusements, expanding leisure, and a more public culture encroach on private rituals. It is a pause before the legal and emotional storms of the new century.
In Chancery engages directly with the institutions that mediated personal fate: solicitors, judges, and the costs of litigation. The title evokes the English tradition of prolonged civil entanglement, and the narrative turns on marital breakdown against a legal landscape that, before 1923, placed heavier burdens on wives seeking divorce. Galsworthy writes amid a press culture that sensationalized private scandal and a legal profession that could simultaneously protect property and prolong disputes. The atmosphere of the 1890s and early 1900s—of decorum colliding with scrutiny—shapes the tone: personal dilemmas are translated into case law, and courtroom procedure becomes a social theatre.
Awakening, an Edwardian interlude, reflects a culture fascinated by youth, education, and new freedoms while still governed by inherited codes. The years before 1914 witnessed the spread of telephones, motorcars, and cinemas; day-to-day life accelerated and the horizons of the middle class widened. Galsworthy registers how these changes touched family authority and sensibility. The “New Woman” discourse and the gathering suffrage movement questioned assumptions about obedience and vocation. Yet this modernity is domestic as much as political: playgrounds, schoolrooms, and leafed lanes shape emerging desires. The interlude catches a society poised between established forms and a future no longer guaranteed by habit.
To Let unfolds in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, a period of rupture and reckoning for Britain. Demobilization, mourning, and the reallocation of wealth and work altered family expectations. The Addison Act (1919) and a broader housing boom reflected a resolve to build differently; suburban estates proliferated, and the hierarchy of landownership eroded in favor of professional incomes and investment. Inflation and the 1920–21 slump strained fortunes, while wartime experiences sharpened generational contrasts in taste and tolerance. Galsworthy treats property not only as assets and houses, but as the inheritance of memory and the burdens of choices made before 1914.
On Forsyte ‘Change extends the chronicle backward into nineteenth-century commercial London, illuminating the clan’s earlier habits of bargaining, saving, and social climbing. Short episodes return to auction rooms, countinghouses, and parlors where reputations are forged as carefully as legal settlements. Galsworthy traces how prudence becomes a family creed, and how the City’s culture of partnership and caution shaped attitudes toward risk and romance. By sketching antecedents, he clarifies the historical continuities behind later behavior: the language of shares, leases, and securities, the symbols of respectable dress and address, and the quiet authority of elder men who measure life in contracts and receipts.
A Modern Comedy, the second trilogy, surveys postwar Britain’s new tempo: mass entertainment, mass politics, and mass consumption. The 1920s brought volatile economics, from the 1920–21 slump to fragile recoveries, and a transformed media environment—daily newspapers with national reach, radio broadcasting after 1922, and a rapidly growing cinema audience. American fashions and rhythms unsettled older manners; jazz, dance halls, and advertising altered how people spent and presented their lives. Galsworthy depicts a society in which the memory of war coexists with metropolitan bustle, where status is negotiated in showrooms, offices, and salons as often as in drawing rooms and clubs.
The White Monkey opens around 1922, when unemployment and business contraction threw many families into caution while others sought opportunity in newly fluid markets. Galsworthy marks the decline of domestic service, the rise of flats and modern conveniences, and the circulation of art and antiques as alternative stores of value and taste. Office work—files, telephones, typed letters—structures days; leisure is punctuated by cinema and cafés. The old habit of investing feeling in property remains, but it is recoded by a culture of display windows and auctions. The social mood is simultaneously pragmatic and restless, a search for poise after upheaval.
A Silent Wooing, an interlude, distills the social rituals of the mid-1920s: fast cars, shorter hemlines, and dances that juxtapose lightness with calculation. The Equal Franchise Act of 1928, soon to arrive, is already anticipated in diction and demeanor, as women’s voices and choices become more audible in public and private spaces. Cocktail bars and hotel lounges replace some of the earlier era’s drawing-room hierarchies. Yet Galsworthy’s tone is diagnostic rather than celebratory; beneath surfaces of charm lie fragile incomes, inherited anxieties, and reputations still policed by gossip and print. The interlude renders the decade’s glint without ignoring its undertow.
The Silver Spoon is rooted in mid-1920s controversies over reputation, publicity, and money. Britain’s libel laws, protective of individual standing, met a sensationalist press culture driven by circulation and influence; political rows and social skirmishes easily migrated to headlines and courts. The background of labor unrest and the 1926 General Strike sharpened class tensions and forced reflections on loyalty and power. Galsworthy explores how plutocracy, old lineage, and the new publicity state collide in dining rooms and editorial offices. The novel’s legal and journalistic energies show a society that negotiates truth through institutions, with fortunes and futures riding on the outcome.
Passers By, another interlude, captures the sheer motion of interwar London: buses and motorcars, the Underground’s humming arteries, and nighttime streets lit by electric signs. The city becomes a space of anonymity and spectacle, with window-shopping and cafés encouraging casual observation rather than rooted acquaintance. This mobility reshapes etiquette and romance, compressing encounters into trains and pavements. Galsworthy attends to the democratization of experience—public spaces accessible across classes—while noting how tenuous bonds can feel in such churn. The tempo of the metropolis offers freedom from surveillance and tradition, but also the loneliness of lives glimpsed and then gone.
Swan Song stands at the late-1920s crest of confidence just before the world economic crisis. Consumer goods and speculative ventures tempt a public attuned to rising markets; cinema, newly transformed by sound at decade’s end, intensifies the glamour of modernity. Galsworthy dramatizes the exhaustion of Victorian certainties alongside the allure—and anxiety—of wealth built on paper and reputation. The country house and the cocktail party, the gallery and the shop window, function as stages where values are auditioned. The sense of finale is historical as much as personal: one culture has not finished dying as another, unnervingly bright, refuses to settle.
End of the Chapter, the final trilogy, moves into the early 1930s, when Britain faced the global Depression’s strains. The financial crisis of 1931 precipitated a National Government and Britain’s departure from the gold standard; tariff shifts and imperial preference (1932) signaled a retreat from nineteenth-century free trade orthodoxy. Rural estates and professional households alike recalibrated budgets, duty, and pride. Galsworthy broadens his lens beyond the Forsytes to connected families, revealing how public service, colonial ties, and the old language of honor persist under new economic limits. The trilogy weighs continuity against adaptation in a chastened, resourceful society.
Maid in Waiting tests the viability of inherited ideals—loyalty, stewardship, service—under fiscal pressure and modern skepticism. It registers professional women’s expanding roles and the prestige still attached to imperial and civil service careers. Flowering Wilderness, published in 1932, deepens interwar debates about allegiance and conscience, inflected by the trauma of the Great War and a cosmopolitan curiosity about cultures beyond Britain. Galsworthy’s own public advocacy—for prison reform and humane causes, and his involvement with international literary cooperation—resonates in the books’ sympathy for individuals trapped by systems. His Nobel Prize in 1932 confirmed contemporary recognition of his ethical realism and steady social gaze.
Over the River (One More River), from 1933, returns to the legal regulation of marriage and cruelty at a moment when reform was imminent but incomplete. The work anticipates debates that culminated in the Matrimonial Causes Act of 1937, which broadened grounds for divorce. Its courtroom scenes and public scrutiny reflect a nation rethinking privacy, consent, and status. Read with the prequel tales of On Forsyte ‘Change and the earlier trilogies, the whole collection becomes a commentary on British modernity: how property, law, class, and gender shifted from the 1880s to the 1930s. Later readers—helped by influential mid- and early twenty-first-century adaptations—have revisited it as both period document and living critique.
Synopsis (Selection)
The Forsyte Saga (The Man of Property; Indian Summer of a Forsyte; In Chancery; Awakening; To Let)
Spanning late Victorian to Edwardian England, this trilogy follows the prosperous Forsyte clan as their faith in property, propriety, and continuity is unsettled by desire, art, and the law. Across the three novels—framed by the reflective interludes—the story charts marriages under strain, disputed inheritances, and generational rifts without disclosing outcomes. Galsworthy’s cool, ironic omniscience and exact social detail establish enduring themes: possession versus freedom, the costs of respectability, and the uneasy march of modernity.
A Modern Comedy (The White Monkey; A Silent Wooing; The Silver Spoon; Passers By; Swan Song)
Set after the First World War, the second trilogy shifts to the younger Forsytes and their circle as money, media, and fashion recast status and feeling. The three novels—linked by interludes—trace courtship, ambition, and public scandal in a quickening, metropolitan world while keeping key reversals spoiler-safe. The tone blends satiric sparkle with deepening melancholy, showing how old instincts of ownership adapt—and falter—in a culture of speed and spectacle.
End of the Chapter (Maid in Waiting; Flowering Wilderness; Over the River [One More River])
The final trilogy extends the canvas to families allied with the Forsytes, probing crises of honor, belief, and belonging as private loyalties collide with institutional pressures. Without giving away resolutions, the novels move from domestic entanglements to public controversy, testing characters’ integrity under changing social currents. The manner grows quieter and more reflective, evolving the saga’s concerns from property to conscience and the possibility of renewal.
On Forsyte ‘Change
This set of related pieces returns to earlier moments and side corridors of the Forsyte world, illuminating trades, courtships, and domestic codes that shaped the family ethos. Compact episodes provide backstory and counterpoint—often with wry tenderness—that complicate judgments formed in the larger novels. The mosaic emphasizes continuity and change across generations, reinforcing the series’ signature blend of irony, sympathy, and finely observed social detail.
The Forsyte Collection - Complete 9 Books
The Forsyte Saga
Table of Contents
Book 1: The Man of Property
Table of Contents
TO EDWARD GARNETT
PART I
CHAPTER I—'AT HOME' AT OLD JOLYON'S
Table of Contents
Those privileged to be present at a family festival of the Forsytes have seen that charming and instructive sight—an upper middle-class family in full plumage. But whosoever of these favoured persons has possessed the gift of psychological analysis (a talent without monetary value and properly ignored by the Forsytes), has witnessed a spectacle, not only delightful in itself, but illustrative of an obscure human problem. In plainer words, he has gleaned from a gathering of this family—no branch of which had a liking for the other, between no three members of whom existed anything worthy of the name of sympathy—evidence of that mysterious concrete tenacity which renders a family so formidable a unit of society, so clear a reproduction of society in miniature. He has been admitted to a vision of the dim roads of social progress, has understood something of patriarchal life, of the swarmings of savage hordes, of the rise and fall of nations. He is like one who, having watched a tree grow from its planting—a paragon of tenacity, insulation, and success, amidst the deaths of a hundred other plants less fibrous, sappy, and persistent—one day will see it flourishing with bland, full foliage, in an almost repugnant prosperity, at the summit of its efflorescence.
On June 15, eighteen eighty-six, about four of the afternoon, the observer who chanced to be present at the house of old Jolyon Forsyte in Stanhope Gate, might have seen the highest efflorescence of the Forsytes.
This was the occasion of an 'at home' to celebrate the engagement of Miss June Forsyte, old Jolyon's granddaughter, to Mr. Philip Bosinney. In the bravery of light gloves, buff waistcoats, feathers and frocks, the family were present, even Aunt Ann, who now but seldom left the corner of her brother Timothy's green drawing-room, where, under the aegis of a plume of dyed pampas grass in a light blue vase, she sat all day reading and knitting, surrounded by the effigies of three generations of Forsytes. Even Aunt Ann was there; her inflexible back, and the dignity of her calm old face personifying the rigid possessiveness of the family idea.
When a Forsyte was engaged, married, or born, the Forsytes were present; when a Forsyte died—but no Forsyte had as yet died; they did not die; death being contrary to their principles, they took precautions against it, the instinctive precautions of highly vitalized persons who resent encroachments on their property.
About the Forsytes mingling that day with the crowd of other guests, there was a more than ordinarily groomed look, an alert, inquisitive assurance, a brilliant respectability, as though they were attired in defiance of something. The habitual sniff on the face of Soames Forsyte had spread through their ranks; they were on their guard.
The subconscious offensiveness of their attitude has constituted old Jolyon's 'home' the psychological moment of the family history, made it the prelude of their drama.
The Forsytes were resentful of something, not individually, but as a family; this resentment expressed itself in an added perfection of raiment, an exuberance of family cordiality, an exaggeration of family importance, and—the sniff. Danger—so indispensable in bringing out the fundamental quality of any society, group, or individual—was what the Forsytes scented; the premonition of danger put a burnish on their armour. For the first time, as a family, they appeared to have an instinct of being in contact, with some strange and unsafe thing.
Over against the piano a man of bulk and stature was wearing two waistcoats on his wide chest, two waistcoats and a ruby pin, instead of the single satin waistcoat and diamond pin of more usual occasions, and his shaven, square, old face, the colour of pale leather, with pale eyes, had its most dignified look, above his satin stock. This was Swithin Forsyte. Close to the window, where he could get more than his fair share of fresh air, the other twin, James—the fat and the lean of it, old Jolyon called these brothers—like the bulky Swithin, over six feet in height, but very lean, as though destined from his birth to strike a balance and maintain an average, brooded over the scene with his permanent stoop; his grey eyes had an air of fixed absorption in some secret worry, broken at intervals by a rapid, shifting scrutiny of surrounding facts; his cheeks, thinned by two parallel folds, and a long, clean-shaven upper lip, were framed within Dundreary whiskers. In his hands he turned and turned a piece of china. Not far off, listening to a lady in brown, his only son Soames, pale and well-shaved, dark-haired, rather bald, had poked his chin up sideways, carrying his nose with that aforesaid appearance of 'sniff,' as though despising an egg which he knew he could not digest. Behind him his cousin, the tall George, son of the fifth Forsyte, Roger, had a Quilpish look on his fleshy face, pondering one of his sardonic jests. Something inherent to the occasion had affected them all.
Seated in a row close to one another were three ladies—Aunts Ann, Hester (the two Forsyte maids), and Juley (short for Julia), who not in first youth had so far forgotten herself as to marry Septimus Small, a man of poor constitution. She had survived him for many years. With her elder and younger sister she lived now in the house of Timothy, her sixth and youngest brother, on the Bayswater Road. Each of these ladies held fans in their hands, and each with some touch of colour, some emphatic feather or brooch, testified to the solemnity of the opportunity.
In the centre of the room, under the chandelier, as became a host, stood the head of the family, old Jolyon himself. Eighty years of age, with his fine, white hair, his dome-like forehead, his little, dark grey eyes, and an immense white moustache, which drooped and spread below the level of his strong jaw, he had a patriarchal look, and in spite of lean cheeks and hollows at his temples, seemed master of perennial youth. He held himself extremely upright, and his shrewd, steady eyes had lost none of their clear shining. Thus he gave an impression of superiority to the doubts and dislikes of smaller men. Having had his own way for innumerable years, he had earned a prescriptive right to it. It would never have occurred to old Jolyon that it was necessary to wear a look of doubt or of defiance.
Between him and the four other brothers who were present, James, Swithin, Nicholas, and Roger, there was much difference, much similarity. In turn, each of these four brothers was very different from the other, yet they, too, were alike.
Through the varying features and expression of those five faces could be marked a certain steadfastness of chin, underlying surface distinctions, marking a racial stamp, too prehistoric to trace, too remote and permanent to discuss—the very hall-mark and guarantee of the family fortunes.
Among the younger generation, in the tall, bull-like George, in pallid strenuous Archibald, in young Nicholas with his sweet and tentative obstinacy, in the grave and foppishly determined Eustace, there was this same stamp—less meaningful perhaps, but unmistakable—a sign of something ineradicable in the family soul. At one time or another during the afternoon, all these faces, so dissimilar and so alike, had worn an expression of distrust, the object of which was undoubtedly the man whose acquaintance they were thus assembled to make. Philip Bosinney was known to be a young man without fortune, but Forsyte girls had become engaged to such before, and had actually married them. It was not altogether for this reason, therefore, that the minds of the Forsytes misgave them. They could not have explained the origin of a misgiving obscured by the mist of family gossip. A story was undoubtedly told that he had paid his duty call to Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester, in a soft grey hat—a soft grey hat, not even a new one—a dusty thing with a shapeless crown. "So, extraordinary, my dear—so odd," Aunt Hester, passing through the little, dark hall (she was rather short-sighted), had tried to 'shoo' it off a chair, taking it for a strange, disreputable cat—Tommy had such disgraceful friends! She was disturbed when it did not move.
Like an artist for ever seeking to discover the significant trifle which embodies the whole character of a scene, or place, or person, so those unconscious artists—the Forsytes had fastened by intuition on this hat; it was their significant trifle, the detail in which was embedded the meaning of the whole matter; for each had asked himself: "Come, now, should I have paid that visit in that hat?" and each had answered "No!" and some, with more imagination than others, had added: "It would never have come into my head!"
George, on hearing the story, grinned. The hat had obviously been worn as a practical joke! He himself was a connoisseur of such. "Very haughty!" he said, "the wild Buccaneer."
And this mot, the 'Buccaneer,' was bandied from mouth to mouth, till it became the favourite mode of alluding to Bosinney.
Her aunts reproached June afterwards about the hat.
"We don't think you ought to let him, dear!" they had said.
June had answered in her imperious brisk way, like the little embodiment of will she was: "Oh! what does it matter? Phil never knows what he's got on!"
No one had credited an answer so outrageous. A man not to know what he had on? No, no! What indeed was this young man, who, in becoming engaged to June, old Jolyon's acknowledged heiress, had done so well for himself? He was an architect, not in itself a sufficient reason for wearing such a hat[1q]. None of the Forsytes happened to be architects, but one of them knew two architects who would never have worn such a hat upon a call of ceremony in the London season.
Dangerous—ah, dangerous! June, of course, had not seen this, but, though not yet nineteen, she was notorious. Had she not said to Mrs. Soames—who was always so beautifully dressed—that feathers were vulgar? Mrs. Soames had actually given up wearing feathers, so dreadfully downright was dear June!
These misgivings, this disapproval, and perfectly genuine distrust, did not prevent the Forsytes from gathering to old Jolyon's invitation. An 'At Home' at Stanhope Gate was a great rarity; none had been held for twelve years, not indeed, since old Mrs. Jolyon had died.
Never had there been so full an assembly, for, mysteriously united in spite of all their differences, they had taken arms against a common peril. Like cattle when a dog comes into the field, they stood head to head and shoulder to shoulder, prepared to run upon and trample the invader to death. They had come, too, no doubt, to get some notion of what sort of presents they would ultimately be expected to give; for though the question of wedding gifts was usually graduated in this way: 'What are you givin'? Nicholas is givin' spoons!'—so very much depended on the bridegroom. If he were sleek, well-brushed, prosperous-looking, it was more necessary to give him nice things; he would expect them. In the end each gave exactly what was right and proper, by a species of family adjustment arrived at as prices are arrived at on the Stock Exchange—the exact niceties being regulated at Timothy's commodious, red-brick residence in Bayswater, overlooking the Park, where dwelt Aunts Ann, Juley, and Hester.
The uneasiness of the Forsyte family has been justified by the simple mention of the hat. How impossible and wrong would it have been for any family, with the regard for appearances which should ever characterize the great upper middle-class, to feel otherwise than uneasy!
The author of the uneasiness stood talking to June by the further door; his curly hair had a rumpled appearance, as though he found what was going on around him unusual. He had an air, too, of having a joke all to himself. George, speaking aside to his brother, Eustace, said:
"Looks as if he might make a bolt of it—the dashing Buccaneer!"
This 'very singular-looking man,' as Mrs. Small afterwards called him, was of medium height and strong build, with a pale, brown face, a dust-coloured moustache, very prominent cheek-bones, and hollow checks. His forehead sloped back towards the crown of his head, and bulged out in bumps over the eyes, like foreheads seen in the Lion-house at the Zoo. He had sherry-coloured eyes, disconcertingly inattentive at times. Old Jolyon's coachman, after driving June and Bosinney to the theatre, had remarked to the butler:
"I dunno what to make of 'im. Looks to me for all the world like an 'alf-tame leopard." And every now and then a Forsyte would come up, sidle round, and take a look at him.
June stood in front, fending off this idle curiosity—a little bit of a thing, as somebody once said, 'all hair and spirit,' with fearless blue eyes, a firm jaw, and a bright colour, whose face and body seemed too slender for her crown of red-gold hair.
A tall woman, with a beautiful figure, which some member of the family had once compared to a heathen goddess, stood looking at these two with a shadowy smile.
Her hands, gloved in French grey, were crossed one over the other, her grave, charming face held to one side, and the eyes of all men near were fastened on it. Her figure swayed, so balanced that the very air seemed to set it moving. There was warmth, but little colour, in her cheeks; her large, dark eyes were soft.
But it was at her lips—asking a question, giving an answer, with that shadowy smile—that men looked; they were sensitive lips, sensuous and sweet, and through them seemed to come warmth and perfume like the warmth and perfume of a flower.
The engaged couple thus scrutinized were unconscious of this passive goddess. It was Bosinney who first noticed her, and asked her name.
June took her lover up to the woman with the beautiful figure.
"Irene is my greatest chum," she said: "Please be good friends, you two!"
At the little lady's command they all three smiled; and while they were smiling, Soames Forsyte, silently appearing from behind the woman with the beautiful figure, who was his wife, said:
"Ah! introduce me too!"
He was seldom, indeed, far from Irene's side at public functions, and even when separated by the exigencies of social intercourse, could be seen following her about with his eyes, in which were strange expressions of watchfulness and longing.
At the window his father, James, was still scrutinizing the marks on the piece of china.
"I wonder at Jolyon's allowing this engagement," he said to Aunt Ann. "They tell me there's no chance of their getting married for years. This young Bosinney" (he made the word a dactyl in opposition to general usage of a short o) "has got nothing. When Winifred married Dartie, I made him bring every penny into settlement—lucky thing, too—they'd ha' had nothing by this time!"
Aunt Ann looked up from her velvet chair. Grey curls banded her forehead, curls that, unchanged for decades, had extinguished in the family all sense of time. She made no reply, for she rarely spoke, husbanding her aged voice; but to James, uneasy of conscience, her look was as good as an answer.
"Well," he said, "I couldn't help Irene's having no money. Soames was in such a hurry; he got quite thin dancing attendance on her."
Putting the bowl pettishly down on the piano, he let his eyes wander to the group by the door.
"It's my opinion," he said unexpectedly, "that it's just as well as it is."
Aunt Ann did not ask him to explain this strange utterance. She knew what he was thinking. If Irene had no money she would not be so foolish as to do anything wrong; for they said—they said—she had been asking for a separate room; but, of course, Soames had not....
James interrupted her reverie:
"But where," he asked, "was Timothy? Hadn't he come with them?"
Through Aunt Ann's compressed lips a tender smile forced its way:
"No, he didn't think it wise, with so much of this diphtheria about; and he so liable to take things."
James answered:
"Well, HE takes good care of himself. I can't afford to take the care of myself that he does."
Nor was it easy to say which, of admiration, envy, or contempt, was dominant in that remark.
Timothy, indeed, was seldom seen. The baby of the family, a publisher by profession, he had some years before, when business was at full tide, scented out the stagnation which, indeed, had not yet come, but which ultimately, as all agreed, was bound to set in, and, selling his share in a firm engaged mainly in the production of religious books, had invested the quite conspicuous proceeds in three per cent. consols. By this act he had at once assumed an isolated position, no other Forsyte being content with less than four per cent. for his money; and this isolation had slowly and surely undermined a spirit perhaps better than commonly endowed with caution. He had become almost a myth—a kind of incarnation of security haunting the background of the Forsyte universe. He had never committed the imprudence of marrying, or encumbering himself in any way with children.
James resumed, tapping the piece of china:
"This isn't real old Worcester. I s'pose Jolyon's told you something about the young man. From all I can learn, he's got no business, no income, and no connection worth speaking of; but then, I know nothing—nobody tells me anything."
Aunt Ann shook her head. Over her square-chinned, aquiline old face a trembling passed; the spidery fingers of her hands pressed against each other and interlaced, as though she were subtly recharging her will.
The eldest by some years of all the Forsytes, she held a peculiar position amongst them. Opportunists and egotists one and all—though not, indeed, more so than their neighbours—they quailed before her incorruptible figure, and, when opportunities were too strong, what could they do but avoid her!
Twisting his long, thin legs, James went on:
"Jolyon, he will have his own way. He's got no children"—and stopped, recollecting the continued existence of old Jolyon's son, young Jolyon, June's father, who had made such a mess of it, and done for himself by deserting his wife and child and running away with that foreign governess. "Well," he resumed hastily, "if he likes to do these things, I s'pose he can afford to. Now, what's he going to give her? I s'pose he'll give her a thousand a year; he's got nobody else to leave his money to."
He stretched out his hand to meet that of a dapper, clean-shaven man, with hardly a hair on his head, a long, broken nose, full lips, and cold grey eyes under rectangular brows.
"Well, Nick," he muttered, "how are you?"
Nicholas Forsyte, with his bird-like rapidity and the look of a preternaturally sage schoolboy (he had made a large fortune, quite legitimately, out of the companies of which he was a director), placed within that cold palm the tips of his still colder fingers and hastily withdrew them.
"I'm bad," he said, pouting—"been bad all the week; don't sleep at night. The doctor can't tell why. He's a clever fellow, or I shouldn't have him, but I get nothing out of him but bills."
"Doctors!" said James, coming down sharp on his words: "I've had all the doctors in London for one or another of us. There's no satisfaction to be got out of them; they'll tell you anything. There's Swithin, now. What good have they done him? There he is; he's bigger than ever; he's enormous; they can't get his weight down. Look at him!"
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:
"What do you do for a pain there?"
James brightened.
"I take a compound...."
"How are you, uncle?"
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 to-morrow 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 check 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 come 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 percent 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.
She thought of June's father, young Jolyon, who had run away with that foreign girl. And what a sad blow to his father and to them all. Such a promising young fellow! A sad blow, though there had been no public scandal, most fortunately, Jo's wife seeking for no divorce! A long time ago! And when June's mother died, six years ago, Jo had married that woman, and they had two children now, so she had heard. Still, he had forfeited his right to be there, had cheated her of the complete fulfilment of her family pride, deprived her of the rightful pleasure of seeing and kissing him of whom she had been so proud, such a promising young fellow! The thought rankled with the bitterness of a long-inflicted injury in her tenacious old heart. A little water stood in her eyes. With a handkerchief of the finest lawn she wiped them stealthily.
"Well, Aunt Ann?" said a voice behind.
Soames Forsyte, flat-shouldered, clean-shaven, flat-cheeked, flat-waisted, yet with something round and secret about his whole appearance, looked downwards and aslant at Aunt Ann, as though trying to see through the side of his own nose.
"And what do you think of the engagement?" he asked.
Aunt Ann's eyes rested on him proudly; of all the nephews since young Jolyon's departure from the family nest, he was now her favourite, for she recognised in him a sure trustee of the family soul that must so soon slip beyond her keeping.
"Very nice for the young man," she said; "and he's a good-looking young fellow; but I doubt if he's quite the right lover for dear June."
Soames touched the edge of a gold-lacquered lustre.
"She'll tame him," he said, stealthily wetting his finger and rubbing it on the knobby bulbs. "That's genuine old lacquer; you can't get it nowadays. It'd do well in a sale at Jobson's." He spoke with relish, as though he felt that he was cheering up his old aunt. It was seldom he was so confidential. "I wouldn't mind having it myself," he added; "you can always get your price for old lacquer."
"You're so clever with all those things," said Aunt Ann. "And how is dear Irene?"
Soames's smile died.
"Pretty well," he said. "Complains she can't sleep; she sleeps a great deal better than I do," and he looked at his wife, who was talking to Bosinney by the door.
Aunt Ann sighed.
"Perhaps," she said, "it will be just as well for her not to see so much of June. She's such a decided character, dear June!"
Soames flushed; his flushes passed rapidly over his flat cheeks and centered between his eyes, where they remained, the stamp of disturbing thoughts.
"I don't know what she sees in that little flibbertigibbet," he burst out, but noticing that they were no longer alone, he turned and again began examining the lustre.
"They tell me Jolyon's bought another house," said his father's voice close by; "he must have a lot of money—he must have more money than he knows what to do with! Montpellier Square, they say; close to Soames! They never told me, Irene never tells me anything!"
"Capital position, not two minutes from me," said the voice of Swithin, "and from my rooms I can drive to the Club in eight."
The position of their houses was of vital importance to the Forsytes, nor was this remarkable, since the whole spirit of their success was embodied therein.
Their father, of farming stock, had come from Dorsetshire near the beginning of the century.
'Superior Dosset Forsyte, as he was called by his intimates, had been a stonemason by trade, and risen to the position of a master-builder.
Towards the end of his life he moved to London, where, building on until he died, he was buried at Highgate. He left over thirty thousand pounds between his ten children. Old Jolyon alluded to him, if at all, as 'A hard, thick sort of man; not much refinement about him.' The second generation of Forsytes felt indeed that he was not greatly to their credit. The only aristocratic trait they could find in his character was a habit of drinking Madeira.
Aunt Hester, an authority on family history, described him thus: "I don't recollect that he ever did anything; at least, not in my time. He was er—an owner of houses, my dear. His hair about your Uncle Swithin's colour; rather a square build. Tall? No—not very tall" (he had been five feet five, with a mottled face); "a fresh-coloured man. I remember he used to drink Madeira; but ask your Aunt Ann. What was his father? He—er—had to do with the land down in Dorsetshire, by the sea."
James once went down to see for himself what sort of place this was that they had come from. He found two old farms, with a cart track rutted into the pink earth, leading down to a mill by the beach; a little grey church with a buttressed outer wall, and a smaller and greyer chapel. The stream which worked the mill came bubbling down in a dozen rivulets, and pigs were hunting round that estuary. A haze hovered over the prospect. Down this hollow, with their feet deep in the mud and their faces towards the sea, it appeared that the primeval Forsytes had been content to walk Sunday after Sunday for hundreds of years.
Whether or no James had cherished hopes of an inheritance, or of something rather distinguished to be found down there, he came back to town in a poor way, and went about with a pathetic attempt at making the best of a bad job.
"There's very little to be had out of that," he said; "regular country little place, old as the hills...."
Its age was felt to be a comfort. Old Jolyon, in whom a desperate honesty welled up at times, would allude to his ancestors as: "Yeomen—I suppose very small beer." Yet he would repeat the word 'yeomen' as if it afforded him consolation.
They had all done so well for themselves, these Forsytes, that they were all what is called 'of a certain position.' They had shares in all sorts of things, not as yet—with the exception of Timothy—in consols, for they had no dread in life like that of 3 per cent. for their money. They collected pictures, too, and were supporters of such charitable institutions as might be beneficial to their sick domestics. From their father, the builder, they inherited a talent for bricks and mortar. Originally, perhaps, members of some primitive sect, they were now in the natural course of things members of the Church of England, and caused their wives and children to attend with some regularity the more fashionable churches of the Metropolis. To have doubted their Christianity would have caused them both pain and surprise. Some of them paid for pews, thus expressing in the most practical form their sympathy with the teachings of Christ.
Their residences, placed at stated intervals round the park, watched like sentinels, lest the fair heart of this London, where their desires were fixed, should slip from their clutches, and leave them lower in their own estimations.
There was old Jolyon in Stanhope Place; the Jameses in Park Lane; Swithin in the lonely glory of orange and blue chambers in Hyde Park Mansions—he had never married, not he—the Soamses in their nest off Knightsbridge; the Rogers in Prince's Gardens (Roger was that remarkable Forsyte who had conceived and carried out the notion of bringing up his four sons to a new profession. "Collect house property, nothing like it," he would say; "I never did anything else").
The Haymans again—Mrs. Hayman was the one married Forsyte sister—in a house high up on Campden Hill, shaped like a giraffe, and so tall that it gave the observer a crick in the neck; the Nicholases in Ladbroke Grove, a spacious abode and a great bargain; and last, but not least, Timothy's on the Bayswater Road, where Ann, and Juley, and Hester, lived under his protection.
But all this time James was musing, and now he inquired of his host and brother what he had given for that house in Montpellier Square. He himself had had his eye on a house there for the last two years, but they wanted such a price.
Old Jolyon recounted the details of his purchase.
"Twenty-two years to run?" repeated James; "The very house I was after—you've given too much for it!"
Old Jolyon frowned.
"It's not that I want it," said James hastily; "it wouldn't suit my purpose at that price. Soames knows the house, well—he'll tell you it's too dear—his opinion's worth having."
"I don't," said old Jolyon, "care a fig for his opinion."
"Well," murmured James, "you will have your own way—it's a good opinion. Good-bye! We're going to drive down to Hurlingham. They tell me June's going to Wales. You'll be lonely tomorrow. What'll you do with yourself? You'd better come and dine with us!"
Old Jolyon refused. He went down to the front door and saw them into their barouche, and twinkled at them, having already forgotten his spleen—Mrs. James facing the horses, tall and majestic with auburn hair; on her left, Irene—the two husbands, father and son, sitting forward, as though they expected something, opposite their wives. Bobbing and bounding upon the spring cushions, silent, swaying to each motion of their chariot, old Jolyon watched them drive away under the sunlight.
During the drive the silence was broken by Mrs. James.
"Did you ever see such a collection of rumty-too people?"
Soames, glancing at her beneath his eyelids, nodded, and he saw Irene steal at him one of her unfathomable looks. It is likely enough that each branch of the Forsyte family made that remark as they drove away from old Jolyon's 'At Home!'
