The Forsyte Saga 8: Flowering Wilderness
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[Library Edition Audiobook CD in vinyl case.] [Read by David Case] Flowering Wilderness -- the second novel of the third trilogy called 'End of the Chapter' -- is the eighth novel in Galsworthy's 'Forsyte Chronicles', which has become established as one of the most popular and enduring works of twentieth century literature, described by the New York Times as: ''A social satire of epic proportions and one that does not suffer by comparison with Thackeray's Vanity Fair...the whole comedy of manners, convincing both in its fidelity to life and as a work of art.''
Release date: August 4, 2011
Publisher: Blackstone Audio, Inc.
Print pages: 248
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The Forsyte Saga 8: Flowering Wilderness
John Galsworthy
John Galsworthy was born on 14 August, 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 that, ‘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a contemporary describing how ‘He moved among us somewhat withdrawn … a sensitive, amused, somewhat cynical spectator of the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 clamouring 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 More 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’.
In 1930, shortly after the appearance of the Budget, the eighth wonder of the world might have been observed in the neighbourhood
of Victoria Station – three English people, of wholly different type, engaged in contemplating simultaneously a London statue.
They had come separately, and stood a little apart from each other in the south-west corner of the open space clear of the
trees, where the drifting late afternoon light of spring was not in their eyes. One of these three was a young woman of about
twenty-six, one a youngish man of perhaps thirty-four, and one a man of between fifty and sixty. The young woman, slender
and far from stupid-looking, had her head tilted slightly upward to one side, and a faint smile on her parted lips. The younger
man, who wore a blue overcoat with a belt girt tightly round his thin middle, as if he felt the spring wind chilly, was sallow
from fading sunburn; and the rather disdainful look of his mouth was being curiously contradicted by eyes fixed on the statue
with real intensity of feeling. The elder man, very tall, in a brown suit and brown buckskin shoes, lounged, with his hands
in his trouser pockets, and his long, weathered, good-looking face masked in a sort of shrewd scepticism.
In the meantime the statue, which was that of Marshal Foch on his horse, stood high up among those trees, stiller than any of them.
The youngish man spoke suddenly.
‘He delivered us.’
The effect of this breach of form on the others was diverse; the elder man’s eyebrows went slightly up, and he moved forward
as if to examine the horse’s legs. The young woman turned and looked frankly at the speaker, and instantly her face became
surprised.
‘Aren’t you Wilfrid Desert?’
The youngish man bowed.
‘Then,’ said the young woman, ‘we’ve met. At Fleur Mont’s wedding. You were best man, if you remember, the first I’d seen.
I was only sixteen. You wouldn’t remember me – Dinny Cherrell, baptised Elizabeth. They ran me in for bridesmaid at the last
minute.’
The youngish man’s mouth lost its disdain.
‘I remember your hair perfectly.’
‘Nobody ever remembers me by anything else.’
‘Wrong! I remember thinking you’d sat to Botticelli. You’re still sitting, I see.’
Dinny was thinking: ‘His eyes were the first to flutter me. And they really are beautiful.’
The said eyes had been turned again upon the statue.
‘He did deliver us,’ said Desert.
‘You were there, of course.’
‘Flying, and fed up to the teeth.’
‘Do you like the statue?’
‘The horse.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Dinny, ‘it is a horse, not just a prancing barrel, with teeth, nostrils and an arch.’
‘The whole thing’s workmanlike, like Foch himself.’
Dinny wrinkled her brow.
‘I like the way it stands up quietly among those trees.’
‘How is Michael? You’re a cousin of his, if I remember.’
‘Michael’s all right. Still in the House; he has a seat he simply can’t lose.’
‘And Fleur?’
‘Flourishing. Did you know she had a daughter last year?’
‘Fleur? H’m! That makes two, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes; they call this one Catherine.’
‘I haven’t been home since 1927. Gosh! It’s a long time since that wedding.’
‘You look,’ said Dinny, contemplating the sallow darkness of his face, ‘as if you had been in the sun.’
‘When I’m not in the sun I’m not alive.’
‘Michael once told me you lived in the East.’
‘Well, I wander about there.’ His face seemed to darken still more, and he gave a little shiver. ‘Beastly cold, the English
spring!’
‘And do you still write poetry?’
‘Oh! you know of that weakness?’
‘I’ve read them all. I like the last volume best.’
He grinned. ‘Thank you for stroking me the right way; poets, you know, like it. Who’s that tall man? I seem to know his face.’
The tall man, who had moved to the other side of the statue, was coming back.
‘Somehow,’ murmured Dinny, ‘I connect him with that wedding, too.’
The tall man came up to them.
‘The hocks aren’t all that,’ he said.
Dinny smiled.
‘I always feel so thankful I haven’t got hocks. We were just trying to decide whether we knew you. Weren’t you at Michael
Mont’s wedding some years ago?’
‘I was. And who are you, young lady?’
‘We all met there. I’m his first cousin on his mother’s side, Dinny Cherrell. Mr Desert was his best man.’
The tall man nodded.
‘Oh! Ah! My name’s Jack Muskham, I’m a first cousin of his father’s.’ He turned to Desert. ‘You admired Foch, it seems.’
‘I did.’
Dinny was surprised at the morose look that had come on his face.
‘Well,’ said Muskham, ‘he was a soldier all right; and there weren’t too many about. But I came here to see the horse.’
‘It is, of course, the important part,’ murmured Dinny.
The tall man gave her his sceptical smile.
‘One thing we have to thank Foch for, he never left us in the lurch.’
Desert suddenly faced round:
‘Any particular reason for that remark?’
Muskham shrugged his shoulders, raised his hat to Dinny, and lounged away.
When he had gone there was a silence as over deep waters.
‘Which way were you going?’ said Dinny at last.
‘Any way that you are.’
‘I thank you kindly, sir. Would an aunt in Mount Street serve as a direction?’
‘Admirably.’
‘You must remember her, Michael’s mother; she’s a darling, the world’s perfect mistress of the ellipse – talks in stepping
stones, so that you have to jump to follow her.’
They crossed the road and set out up Grosvenor Place on the Buckingham Palace side.
‘I suppose you find England changed every time you come home, if you’ll forgive me for making conversation?’
‘Changed enough.’
‘Don’t you “love your native land”, as the saying is?’
‘She inspires me with a sort of horror.’
‘Are you by any chance one of those people who wish to be thought worse than they are?’
‘Not possible. Ask Michael.’
‘Michael is incapable of slander.’
‘Michael and all angels are outside the count of reality.’
‘No,’ said Dinny, ‘Michael is very real, and very English.’
‘That is his contradictory trouble.’
‘Why do you run England down? It’s been done before.’
‘I never run her down except to English people.’
‘That’s something. But why to me?’
Desert laughed.
‘Because you seem to be what I should like to feel that England is.’
‘Flattered and fair, but neither fat nor forty.’
‘What I object to is England’s belief that she is still “the goods”.’
‘And isn’t she, really?’
‘Yes,’ said Desert, surprisingly, ‘but she has no reason to think so.’
Dinny thought:
‘You’re perverse, brother Wilfrid, the young woman said,
And your tongue is exceedingly wry;
You do not look well when you stand on your head –
Why will you continually try?’
She remarked, more simply:
‘If England is still “the goods”, has no reason to think so and yet does, she would seem to have intuition, anyway. Was it
by intuition that you disliked Mr Muskham?’ Then, looking at his face, she thought: ‘I’m dropping a brick.’
‘Why should I dislike him? He’s just the usual insensitive type of hunting, racing man who bores me stiff.’
‘That wasn’t the reason,’ thought Dinny, still regarding him. A strange face! Unhappy from deep inward disharmony, as though
a good angel and a bad were for ever seeking to fire each other out; but his eyes sent the same thrill through her as when, at sixteen, with her hair still long, she had stood
near him at Fleur’s wedding.
‘And do you really like wandering about in the East?’
‘The curse of Esau is on me.’
‘Some day,’ she thought, ‘I’ll make him tell me why. Only probably I shall never see him again.’ And a little chill ran down
her back.
‘I wonder if you know my Uncle Adrian. He was in the East during the war. He presides over bones at a museum. You probably
know Diana Ferse, anyway. He married her last year.’
‘I know nobody to speak of.’
‘Our point of contact, then, is only Michael.’
‘I don’t believe in contacts through other people. Where do you live, Miss Cherrell?’
Dinny smiled.
‘A short biographical note seems to be indicated. Since the umpteenth century, my family has been “seated” at Condaford Grange
in Oxfordshire. My father is a retired General; I am one of two daughters; and my only brother is a married soldier just coming
back from the Soudan on leave.’
‘Oh!’ said Desert, and again his face had that morose look.
‘I am twenty-six, unmarried but with no children as yet. My hobby seems to be attending to other people’s business. I don’t
know why I have it. When in Town I stay at Lady Mont’s in Mount Street. With a simple upbringing I have expensive instincts
and no means of gratifying them. I believe I can see a joke. Now you?’
Desert smiled and shook his head.
‘Shall I?’ said Dinny. ‘You are the second son of Lord Mullyon, you had too much war; you write poetry; you have nomadic instincts
and are your own enemy; the last item has the only news value. Here we are in Mount Street; do come in and see Aunt Em.’
‘Thank you – no. But will you lunch with me tomorrow and go to a matinée?’
‘I will. Where?’
‘Dumourieux’s, one-thirty.’
They exchanged hand-grips and parted, but as Dinny went into her aunt’s house she was tingling all over, and she stood still
outside the drawing room to smile at the sensation.
The smile faded off her lips under the fire of noises coming through the closed door.
‘My goodness!’ she thought: ‘Aunt Em’s birthday “pawty”, and I’d forgotten.’
Someone playing the piano stopped, there was a rush, a scuffle, the scraping of chairs on the floor, two or three squeals,
silence, and the piano-playing began again.
‘Musical chairs!’ she thought, and opened the door quietly. She who had been Diana Ferse was sitting at the piano. To eight
assorted chairs, facing alternatively east and west, were clinging one large and eight small beings in bright paper hats,
of whom seven were just rising to their feet and two still sitting on one chair. Dinny saw from left to right: Ronald Ferse;
a small Chinese boy; Aunt Alison’s youngest, little Anne; Uncle Hilary’s youngest, Tony; Celia and Dingo (children of Michael’s
married sister Celia Moriston); Sheila Ferse; and on the single chair Uncle Adrian and Kit Mont. She was further conscious
of Aunt Em panting slightly against the fireplace in a large headpiece of purple paper, and of Fleur pulling a chair from
Ronald’s end of the row.
‘Kit, get up! You were out.’
Kit sat firm and Adrian rose.
‘All right, old man, you’re up against your equals now. Fire away!’
‘Keep your hands off the backs,’ cried Fleur. ‘Wu Fing, you mustn’t sit till the music stops. Dingo, don’t stick at the end
chair like that.’
The music stopped. Scurry, hustle, squeals, and the smallest figure, little Anne, was left standing.
‘All right, darling,’ said Dinny, ‘come here and beat this drum. Stop when the music stops, that’s right. Now again. Watch
Auntie Di!’
Again, and again, and again, till Sheila and Dingo and Kit only were left.
‘I back Kit,’ thought Dinny.
Sheila out! Off with a chair! Dingo, so Scotch-looking, and Kit, so bright-haired, having lost his paper cap, were left padding
round and round the last chair. Both were down; both up and on again, Diana carefully averting her eyes, Fleur standing back
now with a little smile; Aunt Em’s face very pink. The music stopped, Dingo was down again; and Kit left standing, his face
flushed and frowning.
‘Kit,’ said Fleur’s voice, ‘play the game!’
Kit’s head was thrown up and he rammed his hands into his pockets.
‘Good for Fleur!’ thought Dinny.
A voice behind her said:
‘Your aunt’s purple passion for the young, Dinny, leads us into strange riots. What about a spot of quiet in my study?’
Dinny looked round at Sir Lawrence Mont’s thin, dry, twisting face, whose little moustache had gone quite white, while his
hair was still only sprinkled.
‘I haven’t done my bit, Uncle Lawrence.’
‘Time you learned not to. Let the heathen rage. Come down and have a quiet Christian talk.’
Subduing her instinct for service with the thought: ‘I should like to talk about Wilfrid Desert!’ Dinny went.
‘What are you working on now, Uncle?’
‘Resting for the minute and reading the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson – a remarkable young woman, Dinny. In the days of the
Regency there were no reputations in high life to destroy; but she did her best. If you don’t know about her, I may tell you
that she believed in love and had a great many lovers, only one of whom she loved.’
‘And yet she believed in love?’
‘Well, she was a kind-hearted baggage, and the others loved her. All the difference in the world between her and Ninon de
l’Enclos, who loved them all; both vivid creatures. A duologue between those two on “virtue”? It’s to be thought of. Sit down!’
‘While I was looking at Foch’s statue this afternoon, Uncle Lawrence, I met a cousin of yours, Mr Muskham.’
‘Jack?’
‘Yes.’
‘Last of the dandies. All the difference in the world, Dinny, between the “buck”, the “dandy”, the “swell”, the “masher”,
the “blood”, the “knut”, and what’s the last variety called? – I never know. There’s been a steady decrescendo. By his age
Jack belongs to the “masher” period, but his cut was always pure dandy – a dyed-in-the-wool Whyte Melville type. How did he
strike you?’
‘Horses, piquet and imperturbability.’
‘Take your hat off, my dear. I like to see your hair.’
Dinny removed her hat.
‘I met someone else there, too; Michael’s best man.’
‘What! Young Desert? He back again?’ And Sir Lawrence’s loose-eyebrow mounted.
A slight colour had stained Dinny’s cheeks.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Queer bird, Dinny.’
Within her rose a feeling rather different from any she had ever experienced. She could not have described it, but it reminded
her of a piece of porcelain she had given to her father on his birthday, two weeks ago; a little china group, beautifully modelled, of a vixen and four fox cubs tucked in
under her. The look on the vixen’s face, soft yet watchful, so completely expressed her own feeling at this moment.
‘Why queer?’
‘Tales out of school, Dinny. Still, to you – There’s no doubt in my mind that that young man made up to Fleur a year or two after her marriage. That’s what started
him as a rolling stone.’
Was that, then, what he had meant when he mentioned Esau? No! By the look of his face when he spoke of Fleur, she did not
think so.
‘But that was ages ago,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes! Ancient story; but one’s heard other things. Clubs are the mother of all uncharitableness.’
The softness of Dinny’s feeling diminished, the watchfulness increased.
‘What other things?’
Sir Lawrence shook his head.
‘I rather like the young man; and not even to you, Dinny, do I repeat what I really know nothing of. Let a man live an unusual
life, and there’s no limit to what people invent about him.’ He looked at her rather suddenly; but Dinny’s eyes were limpid.
‘Who’s the little Chinese boy upstairs?’
‘Son of a former Mandarin,. . .
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 that, ‘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 clamouring 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 More 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’.
In 1930, shortly after the appearance of the Budget, the eighth wonder of the world might have been observed in the neighbourhood
of Victoria Station – three English people, of wholly different type, engaged in contemplating simultaneously a London statue.
They had come separately, and stood a little apart from each other in the south-west corner of the open space clear of the
trees, where the drifting late afternoon light of spring was not in their eyes. One of these three was a young woman of about
twenty-six, one a youngish man of perhaps thirty-four, and one a man of between fifty and sixty. The young woman, slender
and far from stupid-looking, had her head tilted slightly upward to one side, and a faint smile on her parted lips. The younger
man, who wore a blue overcoat with a belt girt tightly round his thin middle, as if he felt the spring wind chilly, was sallow
from fading sunburn; and the rather disdainful look of his mouth was being curiously contradicted by eyes fixed on the statue
with real intensity of feeling. The elder man, very tall, in a brown suit and brown buckskin shoes, lounged, with his hands
in his trouser pockets, and his long, weathered, good-looking face masked in a sort of shrewd scepticism.
In the meantime the statue, which was that of Marshal Foch on his horse, stood high up among those trees, stiller than any of them.
The youngish man spoke suddenly.
‘He delivered us.’
The effect of this breach of form on the others was diverse; the elder man’s eyebrows went slightly up, and he moved forward
as if to examine the horse’s legs. The young woman turned and looked frankly at the speaker, and instantly her face became
surprised.
‘Aren’t you Wilfrid Desert?’
The youngish man bowed.
‘Then,’ said the young woman, ‘we’ve met. At Fleur Mont’s wedding. You were best man, if you remember, the first I’d seen.
I was only sixteen. You wouldn’t remember me – Dinny Cherrell, baptised Elizabeth. They ran me in for bridesmaid at the last
minute.’
The youngish man’s mouth lost its disdain.
‘I remember your hair perfectly.’
‘Nobody ever remembers me by anything else.’
‘Wrong! I remember thinking you’d sat to Botticelli. You’re still sitting, I see.’
Dinny was thinking: ‘His eyes were the first to flutter me. And they really are beautiful.’
The said eyes had been turned again upon the statue.
‘He did deliver us,’ said Desert.
‘You were there, of course.’
‘Flying, and fed up to the teeth.’
‘Do you like the statue?’
‘The horse.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Dinny, ‘it is a horse, not just a prancing barrel, with teeth, nostrils and an arch.’
‘The whole thing’s workmanlike, like Foch himself.’
Dinny wrinkled her brow.
‘I like the way it stands up quietly among those trees.’
‘How is Michael? You’re a cousin of his, if I remember.’
‘Michael’s all right. Still in the House; he has a seat he simply can’t lose.’
‘And Fleur?’
‘Flourishing. Did you know she had a daughter last year?’
‘Fleur? H’m! That makes two, doesn’t it?’
‘Yes; they call this one Catherine.’
‘I haven’t been home since 1927. Gosh! It’s a long time since that wedding.’
‘You look,’ said Dinny, contemplating the sallow darkness of his face, ‘as if you had been in the sun.’
‘When I’m not in the sun I’m not alive.’
‘Michael once told me you lived in the East.’
‘Well, I wander about there.’ His face seemed to darken still more, and he gave a little shiver. ‘Beastly cold, the English
spring!’
‘And do you still write poetry?’
‘Oh! you know of that weakness?’
‘I’ve read them all. I like the last volume best.’
He grinned. ‘Thank you for stroking me the right way; poets, you know, like it. Who’s that tall man? I seem to know his face.’
The tall man, who had moved to the other side of the statue, was coming back.
‘Somehow,’ murmured Dinny, ‘I connect him with that wedding, too.’
The tall man came up to them.
‘The hocks aren’t all that,’ he said.
Dinny smiled.
‘I always feel so thankful I haven’t got hocks. We were just trying to decide whether we knew you. Weren’t you at Michael
Mont’s wedding some years ago?’
‘I was. And who are you, young lady?’
‘We all met there. I’m his first cousin on his mother’s side, Dinny Cherrell. Mr Desert was his best man.’
The tall man nodded.
‘Oh! Ah! My name’s Jack Muskham, I’m a first cousin of his father’s.’ He turned to Desert. ‘You admired Foch, it seems.’
‘I did.’
Dinny was surprised at the morose look that had come on his face.
‘Well,’ said Muskham, ‘he was a soldier all right; and there weren’t too many about. But I came here to see the horse.’
‘It is, of course, the important part,’ murmured Dinny.
The tall man gave her his sceptical smile.
‘One thing we have to thank Foch for, he never left us in the lurch.’
Desert suddenly faced round:
‘Any particular reason for that remark?’
Muskham shrugged his shoulders, raised his hat to Dinny, and lounged away.
When he had gone there was a silence as over deep waters.
‘Which way were you going?’ said Dinny at last.
‘Any way that you are.’
‘I thank you kindly, sir. Would an aunt in Mount Street serve as a direction?’
‘Admirably.’
‘You must remember her, Michael’s mother; she’s a darling, the world’s perfect mistress of the ellipse – talks in stepping
stones, so that you have to jump to follow her.’
They crossed the road and set out up Grosvenor Place on the Buckingham Palace side.
‘I suppose you find England changed every time you come home, if you’ll forgive me for making conversation?’
‘Changed enough.’
‘Don’t you “love your native land”, as the saying is?’
‘She inspires me with a sort of horror.’
‘Are you by any chance one of those people who wish to be thought worse than they are?’
‘Not possible. Ask Michael.’
‘Michael is incapable of slander.’
‘Michael and all angels are outside the count of reality.’
‘No,’ said Dinny, ‘Michael is very real, and very English.’
‘That is his contradictory trouble.’
‘Why do you run England down? It’s been done before.’
‘I never run her down except to English people.’
‘That’s something. But why to me?’
Desert laughed.
‘Because you seem to be what I should like to feel that England is.’
‘Flattered and fair, but neither fat nor forty.’
‘What I object to is England’s belief that she is still “the goods”.’
‘And isn’t she, really?’
‘Yes,’ said Desert, surprisingly, ‘but she has no reason to think so.’
Dinny thought:
‘You’re perverse, brother Wilfrid, the young woman said,
And your tongue is exceedingly wry;
You do not look well when you stand on your head –
Why will you continually try?’
She remarked, more simply:
‘If England is still “the goods”, has no reason to think so and yet does, she would seem to have intuition, anyway. Was it
by intuition that you disliked Mr Muskham?’ Then, looking at his face, she thought: ‘I’m dropping a brick.’
‘Why should I dislike him? He’s just the usual insensitive type of hunting, racing man who bores me stiff.’
‘That wasn’t the reason,’ thought Dinny, still regarding him. A strange face! Unhappy from deep inward disharmony, as though
a good angel and a bad were for ever seeking to fire each other out; but his eyes sent the same thrill through her as when, at sixteen, with her hair still long, she had stood
near him at Fleur’s wedding.
‘And do you really like wandering about in the East?’
‘The curse of Esau is on me.’
‘Some day,’ she thought, ‘I’ll make him tell me why. Only probably I shall never see him again.’ And a little chill ran down
her back.
‘I wonder if you know my Uncle Adrian. He was in the East during the war. He presides over bones at a museum. You probably
know Diana Ferse, anyway. He married her last year.’
‘I know nobody to speak of.’
‘Our point of contact, then, is only Michael.’
‘I don’t believe in contacts through other people. Where do you live, Miss Cherrell?’
Dinny smiled.
‘A short biographical note seems to be indicated. Since the umpteenth century, my family has been “seated” at Condaford Grange
in Oxfordshire. My father is a retired General; I am one of two daughters; and my only brother is a married soldier just coming
back from the Soudan on leave.’
‘Oh!’ said Desert, and again his face had that morose look.
‘I am twenty-six, unmarried but with no children as yet. My hobby seems to be attending to other people’s business. I don’t
know why I have it. When in Town I stay at Lady Mont’s in Mount Street. With a simple upbringing I have expensive instincts
and no means of gratifying them. I believe I can see a joke. Now you?’
Desert smiled and shook his head.
‘Shall I?’ said Dinny. ‘You are the second son of Lord Mullyon, you had too much war; you write poetry; you have nomadic instincts
and are your own enemy; the last item has the only news value. Here we are in Mount Street; do come in and see Aunt Em.’
‘Thank you – no. But will you lunch with me tomorrow and go to a matinée?’
‘I will. Where?’
‘Dumourieux’s, one-thirty.’
They exchanged hand-grips and parted, but as Dinny went into her aunt’s house she was tingling all over, and she stood still
outside the drawing room to smile at the sensation.
The smile faded off her lips under the fire of noises coming through the closed door.
‘My goodness!’ she thought: ‘Aunt Em’s birthday “pawty”, and I’d forgotten.’
Someone playing the piano stopped, there was a rush, a scuffle, the scraping of chairs on the floor, two or three squeals,
silence, and the piano-playing began again.
‘Musical chairs!’ she thought, and opened the door quietly. She who had been Diana Ferse was sitting at the piano. To eight
assorted chairs, facing alternatively east and west, were clinging one large and eight small beings in bright paper hats,
of whom seven were just rising to their feet and two still sitting on one chair. Dinny saw from left to right: Ronald Ferse;
a small Chinese boy; Aunt Alison’s youngest, little Anne; Uncle Hilary’s youngest, Tony; Celia and Dingo (children of Michael’s
married sister Celia Moriston); Sheila Ferse; and on the single chair Uncle Adrian and Kit Mont. She was further conscious
of Aunt Em panting slightly against the fireplace in a large headpiece of purple paper, and of Fleur pulling a chair from
Ronald’s end of the row.
‘Kit, get up! You were out.’
Kit sat firm and Adrian rose.
‘All right, old man, you’re up against your equals now. Fire away!’
‘Keep your hands off the backs,’ cried Fleur. ‘Wu Fing, you mustn’t sit till the music stops. Dingo, don’t stick at the end
chair like that.’
The music stopped. Scurry, hustle, squeals, and the smallest figure, little Anne, was left standing.
‘All right, darling,’ said Dinny, ‘come here and beat this drum. Stop when the music stops, that’s right. Now again. Watch
Auntie Di!’
Again, and again, and again, till Sheila and Dingo and Kit only were left.
‘I back Kit,’ thought Dinny.
Sheila out! Off with a chair! Dingo, so Scotch-looking, and Kit, so bright-haired, having lost his paper cap, were left padding
round and round the last chair. Both were down; both up and on again, Diana carefully averting her eyes, Fleur standing back
now with a little smile; Aunt Em’s face very pink. The music stopped, Dingo was down again; and Kit left standing, his face
flushed and frowning.
‘Kit,’ said Fleur’s voice, ‘play the game!’
Kit’s head was thrown up and he rammed his hands into his pockets.
‘Good for Fleur!’ thought Dinny.
A voice behind her said:
‘Your aunt’s purple passion for the young, Dinny, leads us into strange riots. What about a spot of quiet in my study?’
Dinny looked round at Sir Lawrence Mont’s thin, dry, twisting face, whose little moustache had gone quite white, while his
hair was still only sprinkled.
‘I haven’t done my bit, Uncle Lawrence.’
‘Time you learned not to. Let the heathen rage. Come down and have a quiet Christian talk.’
Subduing her instinct for service with the thought: ‘I should like to talk about Wilfrid Desert!’ Dinny went.
‘What are you working on now, Uncle?’
‘Resting for the minute and reading the Memoirs of Harriette Wilson – a remarkable young woman, Dinny. In the days of the
Regency there were no reputations in high life to destroy; but she did her best. If you don’t know about her, I may tell you
that she believed in love and had a great many lovers, only one of whom she loved.’
‘And yet she believed in love?’
‘Well, she was a kind-hearted baggage, and the others loved her. All the difference in the world between her and Ninon de
l’Enclos, who loved them all; both vivid creatures. A duologue between those two on “virtue”? It’s to be thought of. Sit down!’
‘While I was looking at Foch’s statue this afternoon, Uncle Lawrence, I met a cousin of yours, Mr Muskham.’
‘Jack?’
‘Yes.’
‘Last of the dandies. All the difference in the world, Dinny, between the “buck”, the “dandy”, the “swell”, the “masher”,
the “blood”, the “knut”, and what’s the last variety called? – I never know. There’s been a steady decrescendo. By his age
Jack belongs to the “masher” period, but his cut was always pure dandy – a dyed-in-the-wool Whyte Melville type. How did he
strike you?’
‘Horses, piquet and imperturbability.’
‘Take your hat off, my dear. I like to see your hair.’
Dinny removed her hat.
‘I met someone else there, too; Michael’s best man.’
‘What! Young Desert? He back again?’ And Sir Lawrence’s loose-eyebrow mounted.
A slight colour had stained Dinny’s cheeks.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Queer bird, Dinny.’
Within her rose a feeling rather different from any she had ever experienced. She could not have described it, but it reminded
her of a piece of porcelain she had given to her father on his birthday, two weeks ago; a little china group, beautifully modelled, of a vixen and four fox cubs tucked in
under her. The look on the vixen’s face, soft yet watchful, so completely expressed her own feeling at this moment.
‘Why queer?’
‘Tales out of school, Dinny. Still, to you – There’s no doubt in my mind that that young man made up to Fleur a year or two after her marriage. That’s what started
him as a rolling stone.’
Was that, then, what he had meant when he mentioned Esau? No! By the look of his face when he spoke of Fleur, she did not
think so.
‘But that was ages ago,’ she said.
‘Oh, yes! Ancient story; but one’s heard other things. Clubs are the mother of all uncharitableness.’
The softness of Dinny’s feeling diminished, the watchfulness increased.
‘What other things?’
Sir Lawrence shook his head.
‘I rather like the young man; and not even to you, Dinny, do I repeat what I really know nothing of. Let a man live an unusual
life, and there’s no limit to what people invent about him.’ He looked at her rather suddenly; but Dinny’s eyes were limpid.
‘Who’s the little Chinese boy upstairs?’
‘Son of a former Mandarin,. . .
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The Forsyte Saga 8: Flowering Wilderness
John Galsworthy
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