Well, Mr. Forsyte, I shall be sorry if you go off, and I think youll make a mistake, Sir. Theres not a bit of land near London with such a view as this, nor one thats cheaper, all things considered; weve only to advertise, to get a mob of people after it.
They looked at each other. Their faces said very plainly: I respect you as a man of business; and you cant expect me to believe a word you say.
Well, repeated Soames, I havent made up my mind; the thing will very likely go off! With these words, taking up his umbrella, he put his chilly hand into the agents, withdrew it without the faintest pressure, and went out into the sun.
He walked slowly back towards the site in deep thought. His instinct told him that what the agent had said was true. A cheap site. And the beauty of it was, that he knew the agent did not really think it cheap; so that his own intuitive knowledge was a victory over the agents.
Cheap or not, I mean to have it, he thought.
The larks sprang up in front of his feet, the air was full of butterflies, a sweet fragrance rose from the wild grasses. The sappy scent of the bracken stole forth from the wood, where, hidden in the depths, pigeons were cooing, and from afar on the warm breeze, came the rhythmic chiming of church bells.
Cheap or not, I mean to have it, he thought.
The larks sprang up in front of his feet, the air was full of butterflies, a sweet fragrance rose from the wild grasses. The sappy scent of the bracken stole forth from the wood, where, hidden in the depths, pigeons were cooing, and from afar on the warm breeze, came the rhythmic chiming of church bells.
Soames walked with his eyes on the ground, his lips opening and closing as though in anticipation of a delicious morsel. But when he arrived at the site, Bosinney was nowhere to be seen. After waiting some little time, he crossed the warren in the direction of the slope. He would have shouted, but dreaded the sound of his voice.
The warren was as lonely as a prairie, its silence only broken by the rustle of rabbits bolting to their holes, and the song of the larks.
Soames, the pioneer-leader of the great Forsyte army advancing to the civilization of this wilderness, felt his spirit daunted by the loneliness, by the invisible singing, and the hot, sweet air. He had begun to retrace his steps when he at last caught sight of Bosinney.
The architect was sprawling under a large oak tree, whose trunk, with a huge spread of bough and foliage, ragged with age, stood on the verge of the rise.
Soames had to touch him on the shoulder before he looked up.
Hallo! Forsyte, he said, Ive found the very place for your house! Look here!
Soames stood and looked, then he said, coldly:
You may be very clever, but this site will cost me half as much again.
Hang the cost, man. Look at the view!
Almost from their feet stretched ripe corn, dipping to a small dark copse beyond. A plain of fields and hedges spread to the distant grey-bluedowns. In a silver streak to the right could be seen the line of the river.
The sky was so blue, and the sun so bright, that an eternal summer seemed to reign over this prospect. Thistledown floated round them, enraptured by the serenity, of the ether. The heat danced over the corn, and, pervading all, was a soft, insensible hum, like the murmur of bright minutes holding revel between earth and heaven.
Soames looked. In spite of himself, something swelled in his breast. To live here in sight of all this, to be able to point it out to his friends, to talk of it, to possess it! His cheeks flushed. The warmth, the radiance, the glow, were sinking into his senses as, four years before, Irenes beauty had sunk into his senses and made him long for her. He stole a glance at Bosinney, whose eyes, the eyes of the coachmans half-tame leopard, seemed running wild over the landscape. The sunlight had caught the promontories of the fellows face, the bumpy cheekbones, the point of his chin, the vertical ridges above his brow; and Soames watched this rugged, enthusiastic, careless face with an unpleasant feeling.
A long, soft ripple of wind flowed over the corn, and brought a puff of warm air into their faces.
I could build you a teaser here, said Bosinney, breaking the silence at last.
I dare say, replied Soames, drily. You havent got to pay for it.
For about eight thousand I could build you a palace.
Soames had become very pale a struggle was going on within him. He dropped his eyes, and said stubbornly:
I cant afford it.
And slowly, with his mousing walk, he led the way back to the first site.
They spent some time there going into particulars of the projected house, and then Soames returned to the agents cottage.
He came out in about half an hour, and, joining Bosinney, started for the station.
Well, he said, hardly opening his lips, Ive taken that site of yours, after all.
And again he was silent, confusedly debating how it was that this fellow, whom by habit he despised, should have overborne his own decision.
Chapter V
A Forsyte Menage
Like the enlightened thousands of his class and generation in this great city of London, who no longer believe in red velvet chairs, and know that groups of modern Italian marble are vieux jeu, Soames Forsyte inhabited a house which did what it could. It owned a copper door knocker of individual design, windows which had been altered to open outwards, hanging flower boxes filled with fuchsias, and at the back (a great feature) a little court tiled with jade-green tiles, and surrounded by pink hydrangeas in peacock-blue tubs. Here, under a parchment-coloured Japanese sunshade covering the whole end, inhabitants or visitors could be screened from the eyes of the curious while they drank tea and examined at their leisure the latest of Soamess little silver boxes.
The inner decoration favoured the First Empire and William Morris[14]. For its size, the house was commodious; there were countless nooks resembling birds nests, and little things made of silver were deposited like eggs.
In this general perfection two kinds of fastidiousness were at war. There lived here a mistress who would have dwelt daintily on a desert island; a master whose daintiness was, as it were, an investment, cultivated by the owner for his advancement, in accordance with the laws of competition. This competitive daintiness had caused Soames in his Marlborough days[15] to be the first boy into white waistcoats in summer, and corduroy waistcoats in winter, had prevented him from ever appearing in public with his tie climbing up his collar, and induced him to dust his patent leather boots before a great multitude assembled on Speech Day to hear him recite Moliere.
Skin-like immaculateness had grown over Soames, as over many Londoners; impossible to conceive of him with a hair out of place, a tie deviating one-eighth of an inch from the perpendicular, a collar unglossed! He would not have gone without a bath for worlds it was the fashion to take baths; and how bitter was his scorn of people who omitted them!
But Irene could be imagined, like some nymph, bathing in wayside streams, for the joy of the freshness and of seeing her own fair body.
In this conflict throughout the house the woman had gone to the wall. As in the struggle between Saxon and Celt still going on within the nation, the more impressionable and receptive temperament had had forced on it a conventional superstructure.
Thus the house had acquired a close resemblance to hundreds of other houses with the same high aspirations, having become: That very charming little house of the Soames Forsytes, quite individual, my dear really elegant.
For Soames Forsyte read James Peabody, Thomas Atkins, or Emmanuel Spagnoletti, the name in fact of any upper-middle class Englishman in London with any pretensions to taste; and though the decoration be different, the phrase is just.
On the evening of August 8, a week after the expedition to Robin Hill, in the dining-room of this house quite individual, my dear really elegant Soames and Irene were seated at dinner. A hot dinner on Sundays was a little distinguishing elegance common to this house and many others. Early in married life Soames had laid down the rule: The servants must give us hot dinner on Sundays theyve nothing to do but play the concertina.
The custom had produced no revolution. For to Soames a rather deplorable sign servants were devoted to Irene, who, in defiance of all safe tradition, appeared to recognise their right to a share in the weaknesses of human nature.
The happy pair were seated, not opposite each other, but rectangularly, at the handsome rosewood table; they dined without a cloth a distinguishing elegance and so far had not spoken a word.
Soames liked to talk during dinner about business, or what he had been buying, and so long as he talked Irenes silence did not distress him. This evening he had found it impossible to talk. The decision to build had been weighing on his mind all the week, and he had made up his mind to tell her.
His nervousness about this disclosure irritated him profoundly; she had no business to make him feel like that a wife and a husband being one person. She had not looked at him once since they sat down; and he wondered what on earth she had been thinking about all the time. It was hard, when a man worked as he did, making money for her yes, and with an ache in his heart that she should sit there, looking looking as if she saw the walls of the room closing in. It was enough to make a man get up and leave the table.
The light from the rose-shaded lamp fell on her neck and arms Soames liked her to dine in a low dress, it gave him an inexpressible feeling of superiority to the majority of his acquaintance, whose wives were contented with their best high frocks or with tea-gowns, when they dined at home. Under that rosy light her amber-coloured hair and fair skin made strange contrast with her dark brown eyes.
Could a man own anything prettier than this dining-table with its deep tints, the starry, soft-petalled roses, the ruby-coloured glass, and quaint silver furnishing; could a man own anything prettier than the woman who sat at it? Gratitude was no virtue among Forsytes, who, competitive, and full of common-sense, had no occasion for it; and Soames only experienced a sense of exasperation amounting to pain, that he did not own her as it was his right to own her, that he could not, as by stretching out his hand to that rose, pluck her and sniff the very secrets of her heart.