The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (acx book reading txt) 📕

her from the hearth, and, turning away, grumbled: “You oughtn’t to stay out so late; it makes you fit for nothing.”

He was invisible now behind his paper, which he turned with a vicious crackle; but when June came up to kiss him, he said: “Good night, my darling,” in a tone so tremulous and unexpected, that it was all the girl could do to get out of the room without breaking into the fit of sobbing which lasted her well on into the night.

When the door was closed, old Jolyon dropped his paper, and stared long and anxiously in front of him.

“The beggar!” he thought. “I always knew she’d have trouble with him!”

Uneasy doubts and suspicions, the more poignant that he felt himself powerless to check or control the march of events, came crowding upon him.

Was the fellow going to jilt her? He longed to go and say to him: “Look here, you sir! Are you going to jilt my granddaughter?” But how could he? Knowing little or nothing, he was yet certain, with his unerring astuteness, that there was something going on. He suspected Bosinney of being too much at Montpellier Square.

“This fellow,” he thought, “may not be a scamp; his face is not a bad one, but he’s a queer fish. I don’t know what to make of him. I shall never know what to make of him! They tell me he works like a nigger, but I see no good coming of it. He’s unpractical, he has no method. When he comes here, he sits as glum as a monkey. If I ask him what wine he’ll have, he says: ‘Thanks, any wine.’ If I offer him a cigar, he smokes it as if it were a twopenny German thing. I never see him looking at June as he ought to look at her; and yet, he’s not after her money. If she were to make a sign, he’d be off his bargain tomorrow. But she won’t⁠—not she! She’ll stick to him! She’s as obstinate as fate⁠—She’ll never let go!”

Sighing deeply, he turned the paper; in its columns, perchance he might find consolation.

And upstairs in her room June sat at her open window, where the spring wind came, after its revel across the Park, to cool her hot cheeks and burn her heart.

III Drive with Swithin

Two lines of a certain song in a certain famous old school’s songbook run as follows:

“How the buttons on his blue frock shone, tra-la-la!
How he carolled and he sang, like a bird!⁠ ⁠…”

Swithin did not exactly carol and sing like a bird, but he felt almost like endeavouring to hum a tune, as he stepped out of Hyde Park Mansions, and contemplated his horses drawn up before the door.

The afternoon was as balmy as a day in June, and to complete the simile of the old song, he had put on a blue frock-coat, dispensing with an overcoat, after sending Adolf down three times to make sure that there was not the least suspicion of east in the wind; and the frock-coat was buttoned so tightly around his personable form, that, if the buttons did not shine, they might pardonably have done so. Majestic on the pavement he fitted on a pair of dog-skin gloves; with his large bell-shaped top hat, and his great stature and bulk he looked too primeval for a Forsyte. His thick white hair, on which Adolf had bestowed a touch of pomatum, exhaled the fragrance of opopomax and cigars⁠—the celebrated Swithin brand, for which he paid one hundred and forty shillings the hundred, and of which old Jolyon had unkindly said, he wouldn’t smoke them as a gift; they wanted the stomach of a horse!

“Adolf!”

“Sare!”

“The new plaid rug!”

He would never teach that fellow to look smart; and Mrs. Soames he felt sure, had an eye!

“The phaeton hood down; I am going⁠—to⁠—drive⁠—a⁠—lady!”

A pretty woman would want to show off her frock; and well⁠—he was going to drive a lady! It was like a new beginning to the good old days.

Ages since he had driven a woman! The last time, if he remembered, it had been Juley; the poor old soul had been as nervous as a cat the whole time, and so put him out of patience that, as he dropped her in the Bayswater Road, he had said: “Well I’m damned if I ever drive you again!” And he never had, not he!

Going up to his horses’ heads, he examined their bits; not that he knew anything about bits⁠—he didn’t pay his coachman sixty pounds a year to do his work for him, that had never been his principle. Indeed, his reputation as a horsey man rested mainly on the fact that once, on Derby Day, he had been welshed by some thimble-riggers. But someone at the Club, after seeing him drive his greys up to the door⁠—he always drove grey horses, you got more style for the money, some thought⁠—had called him “Four-in-hand Forsyte.” The name having reached his ears through that fellow Nicholas Treffry, old Jolyon’s dead partner, the great driving man notorious for more carriage accidents than any man in the kingdom⁠—Swithin had ever after conceived it right to act up to it. The name had taken his fancy, not because he had ever driven four-in-hand, or was ever likely to, but because of something distinguished in the sound. Four-in-hand Forsyte! Not bad! Born too soon, Swithin had missed his vocation. Coming upon London twenty years later, he could not have failed to have become a stockbroker, but at the time when he was obliged to select, this great profession had not as yet became the chief glory of the upper-middle class. He had literally been forced into land agency.

Once in the driving seat, with the reins handed to him, and blinking over his pale old cheeks in the full sunlight, he took a slow look round⁠—Adolf was already up behind; the cockaded groom at the horses’ heads stood ready to