The Forsyte Saga 3: To Let

by John Galsworthy

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

Soames Forsyte has built a good life for himself with his second wife Annette. And he has a new focus and purpose; his beautiful, beloved daughter Fleur. But the sins of the father come flooding back to cast a shadow over his child's future. When Fleur, a vibrant and impetuous young woman, catches the eye of warm-hearted and idealistic Jon Forsyte at a chance meeting, it seems fate is determined to torture them all with the hurts of the past...

Release date: August 4, 2011

Publisher: Headline

Print pages: 318

Sample

John Galsworthy was born on August 14, 1867, at Kingston Hill in Surrey, the son of John and Blanche Galsworthy and the second
of four children. John Galsworthy senior, whose family came from Devon, was a successful solicitor in London and a man of
‘new money’, determined to provide privilege and security for his family. They idolised him. By contrast, their mother Blanche
was a more difficult woman, strict and distant. Galsworthy commented, ‘My father really predominated in me from the start … I was so truly and deeply fond of him that I seemed not to have a fair share of love left to give my mother’.


Young Johnny enjoyed the happy secure childhood of a Victorian, upper-middle-class family. Educated at Harrow, he was popular
at school and a good sportsman. Holidays were spent with family and friends, moving between their country houses. After finishing
school, John went up to New College, Oxford to read law. There he enjoyed the carefree life of a privileged student, not working
particularly hard, gambling and becoming known as ‘the best dressed man in College’. But he could also be quiet and serious,
a contemporary describing how ‘He moved among us somewhat withdrawn … a sensitive, amused, somewhat cynical spectator of the
human scene’.


The period after university was one of indecision for Galsworthy. Although his father wanted him to become a barrister, the
law held little appeal. So he decided to get away from it all and travel. It was on a voyage in the South Seas in 1893 that
he met Joseph Conrad, and the two became close friends. It was a crucial friendship in Galsworthy’s life. Conrad encouraged
his love of writing, but Galsworthy attributes his final inspiration to the woman he was falling in love with: Ada.


Ada Nemesis Pearson Cooper married Major Arthur Galsworthy, John’s cousin, in 1891. But the marriage was a tragic mistake.
Embraced by the entire family, Ada became close friends with John’s beloved sisters, Lilian and Mabel, and through them John
heard of her increasing misery, fixing in his imagination the pain of an unhappy marriage. Thrown together more and more,
John and Ada eventually became lovers in September 1895. They were unafraid of declaring their relationship and facing the
consequences, but the only person they couldn’t bear to hurt was John’s adored father, with his traditional values. And so
they endured ten years of secrecy until Galsworthy’s father died in December 1904. By September 1905 Ada’s divorce had come through and they were finally able to
marry.


It was around this time, in 1906, that Galsworthy’s writing career flourished. During the previous decade he had been a man
‘in chains’, emotionally and professionally, having finally abandoned law in 1894. He struggled to establish himself as an
author. But after many false starts and battling a lifelong insecurity about his writing, Galsworthy turned an affectionately
satirical eye on the world he knew best and created the indomitable Forsytes, a mirror image of his own relations – old Jolyon:
his father; Irene: his beloved Ada, to name but a few. On reading the manuscript, his sister Lilian was alarmed that he could
so expose their private lives, but John dismissed her fears saying only herself, Mabel and their mother, ‘who perhaps had
better not read the book’, knew enough to draw comparisons. The Man of Property, the first book in The Forsyte Saga, was published to instant acclaim; Galsworthy’s fame as an author was now sealed.


By the time the first Forsyte trilogy had been completed, with In Chancery (1920) and To Let (1921), sales of The Forsyte Saga had reached one million on both sides of the Atlantic. With the public clambering for more, Galsworthy followed these with
six more Forsyte novels, the last of which, Over The River, was completed just before his death in 1933. And their appeal endures, immortalised on screen in much-loved adaptations
such as the film That Forsyte Woman (1949), starring Errol Flynn. The celebrated BBC drama in 1967 with Kenneth Moore and Eric Porter was a phenomenal success,
emptying the pubs and churches of Britain on a Sunday evening, and reaching an estimated worldwide audience of 160 million.
The recent popular 2002 production starred Damien Lewis, Rupert Graves and Ioan Gruffudd and won a Bafta TV award.


Undoubtedly The Forsyte Saga is Galsworthy’s most distinguished work, but he was well known, if not more successful in his time, as a dramatist. His inherent
compassion meant Galsworthy was always involved in one cause or another, from women’s suffrage to a ban on ponies in mines,
and his plays very much focus on the social injustices of his day. The Silver Box (1906) was his first major success, but Justice (1910), a stark depiction of prison life, had an even bigger impact. Winston Churchill was so impressed by it that he immediately
arranged for prison reform, reducing the hours of solitary confinement. The Skin Game (1920) was another big hit and later adapted into a film, under the same title, by Alfred Hitchcock.


Despite Galsworthy’s literary success, his personal life was still troubled. Although he and Ada were deeply in love, the
years of uncertainty had taken their toll. They never had children and their marriage reached a crisis in 1910 when Galsworthy
formed a close friendship with a young dancer called Margaret Morris while working on one of his plays with her. But John,
confused and tortured by the thought of betraying Ada, broke off all contact with Margaret in 1912 and went abroad with his
wife. The rest of their lives were spent constantly on the move; travelling in America, Europe, or at home in London, Dartmoor
and later Sussex. Numerous trips were made in connection with PEN, the international writers club, after Galsworthy was elected
its first president in 1921. Many people have seen the constant travelling as unsettling for Galsworthy and destructive to
his writing, but being with Ada was all that mattered to him: ‘This is what comes of giving yourself to a woman body and soul.
A. paralyses and has always paralysed me. I have never been able to face the idea of being cut off from her.’


By the end of his life, Galsworthy, the man who had railed against poverty and injustice, had become an established, reputable
figure in privileged society. Having earlier refused a knighthood, he was presented with an Order of Merit in 1929. And in
1932 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Although it was fashionable for younger writers to mock the traditional
Edwardian authors, Virginia Woolf dismissing Galsworthy as a ‘stuffed shirt’, J.M. Barrie perceived his contradictory nature:
‘A queer fish, like the rest of us. So sincerely weighed down by the out-of-jointness of things socially … but outwardly a
man-about-town, so neat, so correct – he would go to the stake for his opinions but he would go courteously raising his hat.’


John Galsworthy died on 31 January, 1933, at the age of sixty-five, at Grove Lodge in Hampstead, with Ada by his side. At
his request, his ashes were scattered over Bury Hill in Sussex. The Times hailed him as the ‘mouthpiece’ of his age, ‘the interpreter in drama, and in fiction of a definite phase in English social
history’.


Soames Forsyte emerged from the Knightsbridge Hotel, where he was staying, in the afternoon of 12 May 1920, with the intention
of visiting a collection of pictures in a Gallery off Cork Street, and looking into the Future. He walked. Since the War he
never took a cab if he could help it. Their drivers were, in his view, an uncivil lot, though now that the War was over and
supply beginning to exceed demand again, getting more civil in accordance with the custom of human nature. Still, he had not
forgiven them, deeply identifying them with gloomy memories, and now, dimly, like all members of their class, with revolution.
The considerable anxiety he had passed through during the War, and the more considerable anxiety he had since undergone in
the Peace, had produced psychological consequences in a tenacious nature. He had, mentally, so frequently experienced ruin,
that he had ceased to believe in its material probability. Paying away four thousand a year in income and super tax, one could
not very well be worse off! A fortune of a quarter of a million, encumbered only by a wife and one daughter, and very diversely
invested, afforded substantial guarantee even against that ‘wildcat notion’: a levy on capital. And as to confiscation of
war profits, he was entirely in favour of it, for he had none, and ‘serve the beggars right’! The price of pictures, moreover,
had, if anything, gone up, and he had done better with his collection since the War began than ever before. Air-raids, also, had acted beneficially on a spirit
congenitally cautious, and hardened a character already dogged. To be in danger of being entirely dispersed inclined one to
be less apprehensive of the more partial dispersions involved in levies and taxation, while the habit of condemning the impudence
of the Germans had led naturally to condemning that of Labour, if not openly at least in the sanctuary of his soul.


He walked. There was, moreover, time to spare, for Fleur was to meet him at the Gallery at four o’clock, and it was as yet
but half-past two. It was good for him to walk – his liver was a little constricted, and his nerves rather on edge. His wife
was always out when she was in Town, and his daughter would flibberty-gibbet all over the place like most young women since the War. Still, he must be thankful that she had been too
young to do anything in that War itself. Not, of course, that he had not supported the War from its inception, with all his
soul, but between that and supporting it with the bodies of his wife and daughter, there had been a gap fixed by something
old-fashioned within him which abhorred emotional extravagance. He had, for instance, strongly objected to Annette, so attractive,
and in 1914 only thirty-four, going to her native France, her ‘chère patrie’ as, under the stimulus of war, she had begun to call it, to nurse her ‘braves poilus’, forsooth! Ruining her health and her looks! As if she were really a nurse! He had put a stopper on it. Let her do needlework
for them at home, or knit! She had not gone, therefore, and had never been quite the same woman since. A bad tendency of hers
to mock at him, not openly, but in continual little ways, had grown. As for Fleur, the War had resolved the vexed problem
whether or not she should go to school. She was better away from her mother in her war mood, from the chance of air-raids,
and the impetus to do extravagant things; so he had placed her in a seminary as far west as had seemed to him compatible with excellence, and had missed her horribly. Fleur! He had never regretted
the somewhat outlandish name by which at her birth he had decided so suddenly to call her – marked concession though it had
been to the French. Fleur! A pretty name – a pretty child! But restless – too restless; and wilful! Knowing her power too
over her father! Soames often reflected on the mistake it was to dote on his daughter. To get old and dote! Sixty-five! He
was getting on; but he didn’t feel it, for, fortunately perhaps, considering Annette’s youth and good looks, his second marriage
had turned out a cool affair. He had known but one real passion in his life – for that first wife of his – Irene. Yes, and
that fellow, his cousin Jolyon, who had gone off with her, was looking very shaky, they said. No wonder, at seventy-two, after
twenty years of a third marriage!


Soames paused a moment in his march to lean over the railings of the Row. A suitable spot for reminiscence, halfway between
that house in Park Lane which had seen his birth and his parents’ deaths, and the little house in Montpelier Square where
thirty-five years ago he had enjoyed his first edition of matrimony. Now, after twenty years of his second edition, that old
tragedy seemed to him like a previous existence – which had ended when Fleur was born in place of the son he had hoped for.
For many years he had ceased regretting, even vaguely, the son who had not been born; Fleur filled the bill in his heart.
After all, she bore his name; and he was not looking forward at all to the time when she would change it. Indeed, if he ever
thought of such a calamity, it was seasoned by the vague feeling that he could make her rich enough to purchase perhaps and
extinguish the name of the fellow who married her – why not, since, as it seemed, women were equal to men nowadays? And Soames,
secretly convinced that they were not, passed his curved hand over his face vigorously, till it reached the comfort of his
chin. Thanks to abstemious habits, he had not grown fat and flabby; his nose was pale and thin, his grey moustache close-clipped,
his eyesight unimpaired. A slight stoop closened and corrected the expansion given to his face by the heightening of his forehead
in the recession of his grey hair. Little change had Time wrought in the ‘warmest’ of the young Forsytes, as the last of the
old Forsytes – Timothy – now in his hundred and first year, would have phrased it.


The shade from the plane-trees fell on his neat Homburg hat; he had given up top hats – it was no use attracting attention
to wealth in days like these. Plane-trees! His thoughts travelled sharply to Madrid – the Easter before the War, when, having
to make up his mind about that Goya picture, he had taken a voyage of discovery to study the painter on his spot. The fellow
had impressed him – great range, real genius! Highly as the chap ranked, he would rank even higher before they had finished
with him. The second Goya craze would be greater even than the first; oh, yes! And he had bought. On that visit he had – as
never before – commissioned a copy of a fresco painting called La Vendimia, wherein was the figure of a girl with an arm akimbo, who had reminded him of his daughter. He had it now in the Gallery
at Mapledurham, and rather poor it was – you couldn’t copy Goya. He would still look at it, however, if his daughter were
not there, for the sake of something irresistibly reminiscent in the light, erect balance of the figure, the width between
the arching eyebrows, the eager dreaming of the dark eyes. Curious that Fleur should have dark eyes, when his own were grey
– no pure Forsyte had brown eyes – and her mother’s blue! But of course her grandmother Lamotte’s eyes were dark as treacle!


He began to walk on again toward Hyde Park Corner. No greater change in all England than in the Row! Born almost within hail
of it, he could remember it from 1860 on. Brought there as a child between the crinolines to stare at tight-trousered dandies in whiskers, riding with a cavalry seat; to watch the doffing of curly-brimmed and white top hats;
the leisurely air of it all, and the little bow-legged man in a long red waistcoat who used to come among the fashion with
dogs on several strings, and try to sell one to his mother: King Charles spaniels, Italian greyhounds, affectionate to her
crinoline – you never saw them now. You saw no quality of any sort, indeed, just working people sitting in dull rows with
nothing to stare at but a few young bouncing females in pot hats, riding astride, or desultory Colonials charging up and down
on dismal-looking hacks; with, here and there, little girls on ponies, or old gentlemen jogging their livers, or an orderly
trying a great galumphing cavalry horse; no thoroughbreds, no grooms, no bowing, no scraping, no gossip – nothing; only the
trees the same – the trees indifferent to the generations and declensions of mankind. A democratic England – dishevelled,
hurried, noisy, and seemingly without an apex. And that something fastidious in the soul of Soames turned over within him.
Gone forever, the close borough of rank and polish! Wealth there was – oh, yes! wealth – he himself was a richer man than
his father had ever been; but manners, flavour, quality, all gone, engulfed in one vast, ugly, shoulder-rubbing, petrol-smelling
Cheerio. Little half-beaten pockets of gentility and caste lurking here and there, dispersed and chétif, as Annette would say; but nothing ever again firm and coherent to look up to. And into this new hurly-burly of bad manners
and loose morals his daughter – flower of his life – was flung! And when those Labour chaps got power – if they ever did –
the worst was yet to come.


He passed out under the archway, at last no longer – thank goodness! – disfigured by the gun-grey of its search-light. ‘They’d
better put a search-light on to where they’re all going,’ he thought, ‘and light up their precious democracy!’ And he directed
his steps along the Club fronts of Piccadilly. George Forsyte, of course, would be sitting in the bay window of the Iseeum. The chap was so big now that he was there nearly all
his time, like some immovable, sardonic, humorous eye noting the decline of men and things. And Soames hurried, ever constitutionally
uneasy beneath his cousin’s glance. George, who, as he had heard, had written a letter signed ‘Patriot’ in the middle of the
War, complaining of the Government’s hysteria in docking the oats of race-horses. Yes, there he was, tall, ponderous, neat,
clean-shaven, with his smooth hair, hardly thinned, smelling, no doubt, of the best hair-wash, and a pink paper in his hand.
Well, he didn’t change! And for perhaps the first time in his life Soames felt a kind of sympathy tapping in his waistcoat for that
sardonic kinsman. With his weight, his perfectly parted hair, and bull-like gaze, he was a guarantee that the old order would
take some shifting yet. He saw George move the pink paper as if inviting him to ascend – the chap must want to ask something
about his property. It was still under Soames’s control; for in the adoption of a sleeping partnership at that painful period
twenty years back when he had divorced Irene, Soames had found himself almost insensibly retaining control of all purely Forsyte
affairs.


Hesitating for just a moment, he nodded and went in. Since the death of his brother-in-law Montague Dartie, in Paris, which
no one had quite known what to make of, except that it was certainly not suicide – the Iseeum Club had seemed more respectable
to Soames. George, too, he knew, had sown the last of his wild oats, and was committed definitely to the joys of the table,
eating only of the very best so as to keep his weight down, and owning, as he said, ‘just one or two old screws to give me
an interest in life.’ He joined his cousin, therefore, in the bay window without the embarrassing sense of indiscretion he
had been used to feel up there. George put out a well-kept hand.


‘Haven’t seen you since the War,’ he said. ‘How’s your wife?’

‘Thanks,’ said Soames coldly, ‘well enough.’

Some hidden jest curved, for a moment, George’s fleshy face, and gloated from his eye.

‘That Belgian chap, Profond,’ he said, ‘is a member here now. He’s a rum customer.’

‘Quite!’ muttered Soames. ‘What did you want to see me about?’

‘Old Timothy; he might go off the hooks at any moment. I suppose he’s made his will.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you or somebody ought to give him a look up – last of the old lot; he’s a hundred, you know. They say he’s like a mummy.
Where are you goin’ to put him? He ought to have a pyramid by rights.’


Soames shook his head. ‘Highgate, the family vault.’

‘Well, I suppose the old girls would miss him, if he was anywhere else. They say he still takes an interest in food. He might
last on, you know. Don’t we get anything for the old Forsytes? Ten of them – average age eighty-eight – I worked it out. That ought to be equal to triplets.’


‘Is that all?’ said Soames. ‘I must be getting on.’

‘You unsociable devil,’ George’s eyes seemed to answer. ‘Yes, that’s all: Look him up in his mausoleum – the old chap might
want to prophesy.’ The grin died on the rich curves of his face, and he added: ‘Haven’t you attorneys invented a way yet of
dodging this damned income tax? It hits the fixed inherited income like the very deuce. I used to have two thousand five hundred
a year; now I’ve got a beggarly fifteen hundred, and the price of living doubled.’


‘Ah!’ murmured Soames, ‘the turf’s in danger.’

Over George’s face moved a gleam of sardonic self-defence.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘they brought me up to do nothing, and here I am in the sear and yellow, getting poorer every day. These
Labour chaps mean to have the lot before they’ve done. What are you going to do for a living when it comes? I shall work a
six-hour day teaching politicians how to see a joke. Take my tip, Soames; go into Parliament, make sure of your four hundred – and employ me.’


And, as Soames retired, he resumed his seat in the bay window.

Soames moved along Piccadilly deep in reflections excited by his cousin’s words. He himself had always been a worker and a
saver, George always a drone and a spender; and yet, if confiscation once began, it was he – the worker and the saver – who
would be looted! That was the negation of all virtue, the overturning of all Forsyte principles. Could civilisation be built
on any other? He did not think so. Well, they wouldn’t confiscate his pictures, for they wouldn’t know their worth. But what
would they be worth, if these maniacs once began to milk capital? A drug on the market. ‘I don’t care about myself,’ he thought;
‘I could live on five hundred a year, and never know the difference, at my age.’ But Fleur! This fortune, so widely invested,
these treasures so carefully chosen and amassed, were all for her. And if it should turn out that he couldn’t give or leave
them to her – well, life had no meaning, and what was the use of going in to look at this crazy, futuristic stuff with the
view of seeing whether it had any future?


Arriving at the Gallery off Cork Street, however, he paid his shilling, picked up a catalogue, and entered. Some ten persons
were prowling round. Soames took steps and came on what looked to him like a lamp-post bent by collision with a motor omnibus.
It was advanced some three paces from the wall, and was described in his catalogue as ‘Jupiter’. He examined it with curiosity,
having recently turned some of his attention to sculpture. ‘If that’s Jupiter,’ he thought, ‘I wonder what Juno’s like.’ And
suddenly he saw her, opposite. She appeared to him like nothing so much as a pump with two handles, lightly clad in snow.
He was still gazing at her, when two of the prowlers halted on his left. ‘Épatant!’ he heard one say.


‘Jargon!’ growled Soames to himself.

The other’s boyish voice replied:

‘Missed it, old bean; he’s pulling your leg. When he created them, he was saying: “I’ll see how much these fools will swallow.”
And they’ve lapped up the lot.’


‘You young duffer! Vospovitch is an innovator. Don’t you see that he’s brought satire into sculpture? The future of plastic
art, of music, painting, and even architecture, has set in satiric. It was bound to. People are tired – the bottom’s tumbled
out of sentiment.’


‘Well, I’m quite equal to taking a little interest in beauty. I was through the War. You’ve dropped your handkerchief, sir.’

Soames saw a handkerchief held out in front of him. He took it with some natural suspicion, and approached it to his nose.
It had the right scent – of distant eau-de-Cologne – and his initials in a corner. Slightly reassured, he raised his eyes
to the young man’s face. It had rather fawn-like ears, a laughing mouth, with half a toothbrush growing out of it on each
side, and small lively eyes, above a normally dressed appearance.


‘Thank you,’ he said; and moved by a sort of irritation, added: ‘Glad to hear you like beauty; that’s rare, nowadays.’

‘I dote on it,’ said the young man; ‘but you and I are the last of the old guard, sir.’

Soames smiled.

‘If you really care for pictures,’ he said, ‘here’s my card. I can show you some quite good ones any Sunday, if you’re down
the river and care to look in.’


‘Awfully nice of you, sir. I’ll drop in like a bird. My name’s Mont – Michael.’ And he took off his hat.

Soames, already regretting his impulse, raised his own slightly in response, with a downward look at the young man’s companion,
who had a purple tie, dreadful little sluglike whiskers, and a scornful look – as if he were a poet!


It was the first indiscretion he had committed for so long that he went and sat down in an alcove. What had possessed him
to give his card to a rackety young fellow, who went about with a thing like that? And Fleur, always at the back of his thoughts,
started out like a filigree figure from a clock when the hour strikes. On the screen opposite the alcove was a large canvas
with a great many square tomato-coloured blobs on it, and nothing else, so far as Soames could see from where he sat. He looked
at his catalogue: No. 32 The Future Town – Paul Post. ‘I suppose that’s satiric too,’ he thought. ‘What a thing!’ But his second impulse was more cautious. It did
not do to condemn hurriedly. There . . .