Chapter II: Soames Puts It to the Touch

Of all those radiant firms which emblazon with their windows the
West End of London, Gaves and Cortegal were considered by Soames
the most “attractive” word just coming into fashion. He had never
had his Uncle Swithin’s taste in precious stones, and the
abandonment by Irene when she left his house in 1887 of all the
glittering things he had given her had disgusted him with this
form of investment. But he still knew a diamond when he saw one,
and during the week before her birthday he had taken occasion, on
his way into the Poultry or his way out therefrom, to dally a
little before the greater jewellers where one got, if not one’s
money’s worth, at least a certain cachet with the goods.

Constant cogitation since his drive with Jolyon had convinced him
more and more of the supreme importance of this moment in his
life, the supreme need for taking steps and those not wrong. And,
alongside the dry and reasoned sense that it was now or never
with his self-preservation, now or never if he were to range
himself and found a family, went the secret urge of his senses
roused by the sight of her who had once been a passionately
desired wife, and the conviction that it was a sin against common
sense and the decent secrecy of Forsytes to waste the wife he
had.

In an opinion on Winifred’s case, Dreamer, Q.C.—he would much
have preferred Waterbuck, but they had made him a judge (so late
in the day as to rouse the usual suspicion of a political
job)—had advised that they should go forward and obtain
restitution of conjugal rights, a point which to Soames had never
been in doubt. When they had obtained a decree to that effect
they must wait to see if it was obeyed. If not, it would
constitute legal desertion, and they should obtain evidence of
misconduct and file their petition for divorce. All of which
Soames knew perfectly well. They had marked him ten and one. This
simplicity in his sister’s case only made him the more desperate
about the difficulty in his own. Everything, in fact, was driving
him towards the simple solution of Irene’s return. If it were
still against the grain with her, had _he_ not feelings to
subdue, injury to forgive, pain to forget? He at least had never
injured her, and this was a world of compromise! He could offer
her so much more than she had now. He would be prepared to make a
liberal settlement on her which could not be upset. He often
scrutinised his image in these days. He had never been a peacock
like that fellow Dartie, or fancied himself a woman’s man, but he
had a certain belief in his own appearance—not unjustly, for it
was well-coupled and preserved, neat, healthy, pale, unblemished
by drink or excess of any kind. The Forsyte jaw and the
concentration of his face were, in his eyes, virtues. So far as
he could tell there was no feature of him which need inspire
dislike.

Thoughts and yearnings, with which one lives daily, become
natural, even if far-fetched in their inception. If he could only
give tangible proof enough of his determination to let bygones be
bygones, and to do all in his power to please her, why should she
not come back to him?

He entered Gaves and Cortegal’s therefore, on the morning of
November the 9th, to buy a certain diamond brooch. “Four
twenty-five and dirt cheap, sir, at the money. It’s a lady’s
brooch.” There was that in his mood which made him accept without
demur. And he went on into the Poultry with the flat green
morocco case in his breast pocket. Several times that day he
opened it to look at the seven soft shining stones in their
velvet oval nest.

“If the lady doesn’t like it, sir, happy to exchange it any time.
But there’s no fear of that.” If only there were not! He got
through a vast amount of work, only soother of the nerves he
knew. A cablegram came while he was in the office with details
from the agent in Buenos Aires, and the name and address of a
stewardess who would be prepared to swear to what was necessary.
It was a timely spur to Soames, with his rooted distaste for the
washing of dirty linen in public. And when he set forth by
Underground to Victoria Station he received a fresh impetus
towards the renewal of his married life from the account in his
evening paper of a fashionable divorce suit. The homing instinct
of all true Forsytes in anxiety and trouble, the corporate
tendency which kept them strong and solid, made him choose to
dine at Park Lane. He neither could nor would breathe a word to
his people of his intention—too reticent and proud—but the
thought that at least they would be glad if they knew, and wish
him luck, was heartening.

James was in lugubrious mood, for the fire which the impudence of
Kruger’s ultimatum had lit in him had been cold-watered by the
poor success of the last month, and the exhortations to effort in
_The Times_. He didn’t know where it would end. Soames sought to
cheer him by the continual use of the word Buller. But James
couldn’t tell! There was Colley—and he got stuck on that hill,
and this Ladysmith was down in a hollow, and altogether it looked
to him a “pretty kettle of fish”; he thought they ought to be
sending the sailors—they were the chaps, they did a lot of good
in the Crimea. Soames shifted the ground of consolation. Winifred
had heard from Val that there had been a “rag” and a bonfire on
Guy Fawkes Day at Oxford, and that he had escaped detection by
blacking his face.

“Ah!” James muttered, “he’s a clever little chap.” But he shook
his head shortly afterwards and remarked that he didn’t know what
would become of him, and looking wistfully at his son, murmured
on that Soames had never had a boy. He would have liked a
grandson of his own name. And now—well, there it was!

Soames flinched. He had not expected such a challenge to disclose
the secret in his heart. And Emily, who saw him wince, said:

“Nonsense, James; don’t talk like that!”

But James, not looking anyone in the face, muttered on. There
were Roger and Nicholas and Jolyon; they all had grandsons. And
Swithin and Timothy had never married. He had done his best; but
he would soon be gone now. And, as though he had uttered words of
profound consolation, he was silent, eating brains with a fork
and a piece of bread, and swallowing the bread.

Soames excused himself directly after dinner. It was not really
cold, but he put on his fur coat, which served to fortify him
against the fits of nervous shivering to which he had been
subject all day. Subconsciously, he knew that he looked better
thus than in an ordinary black overcoat. Then, feeling the
morocco case flat against his heart, he sallied forth. He was no
smoker, but he lit a cigarette, and smoked it gingerly as he
walked along. He moved slowly down the Row towards Knightsbridge,
timing himself to get to Chelsea at nine-fifteen. What did she do
with herself evening after evening in that little hole? How
mysterious women were! One lived alongside and knew nothing of
them. What could she have seen in that fellow Bosinney to send
her mad? For there was madness after all in what she had
done—crazy moonstruck madness, in which all sense of values had
been lost, and her life and his life ruined! And for a moment he
was filled with a sort of exaltation, as though he were a man
read of in a story who, possessed by the Christian spirit, would
restore to her all the prizes of existence, forgiving and
forgetting, and becoming the godfather of her future. Under a
tree opposite Knightsbridge Barracks, where the moonlight struck
down clear and white, he took out once more the morocco case, and
let the beams draw colour from those stones. Yes, they were of
the first water! But, at the hard closing snap of the case,
another cold shiver ran through his nerves; and he walked on
faster, clenching his gloved hands in the pockets of his coat,
almost hoping she would not be in. The thought of how mysterious
she was again beset him. Dining alone there night after night—in
an evening dress, too, as if she were making believe to be in
society! Playing the piano—to herself! Not even a dog or cat, so
far as he had seen. And that reminded him suddenly of the mare he
kept for station work at Mapledurham. If ever he went to the
stable, there she was quite alone, half asleep, and yet, on her
home journeys going more freely than on her way out, as if
longing to be back and lonely in her stable! “I would treat her
well,” he thought incoherently. “I would be very careful.” And
all that capacity for home life of which a mocking Fate seemed
for ever to have deprived him swelled suddenly in Soames, so that
he dreamed dreams opposite South Kensington Station. In the
King’s Road a man came slithering out of a public house playing a
concertina. Soames watched him for a moment dance crazily on the
pavement to his own drawling jagged sounds, then crossed over to
avoid contact with this piece of drunken foolery. A night in the
lock-up! What asses people were! But the man had noticed his
movement of avoidance, and streams of genial blasphemy followed
him across the street. “I hope they’ll run him in,” thought
Soames viciously. “To have ruffians like that about, with women
out alone!” A woman’s figure in front had induced this thought.
Her walk seemed oddly familiar, and when she turned the corner
for which he was bound, his heart began to beat. He hastened on
to the corner to make certain. Yes! It was Irene; he could not
mistake her walk in that little drab street. She threaded two
more turnings, and from the last corner he saw her enter her
block of flats. To make sure of her now, he ran those few paces,
hurried up the stairs, and caught her standing at her door. He
heard the latchkey in the lock, and reached her side just as she
turned round, startled, in the open doorway.

“Don’t be alarmed,” he said, breathless. “I happened to see you.
Let me come in a minute.”

She had put her hand up to her breast, her face was colourless,
her eyes widened by alarm. Then seeming to master herself, she
inclined her head, and said: “Very well.”

Soames closed the door. He, too, had need to recover, and when
she had passed into the sitting-room, waited a full minute,
taking deep breaths to still the beating of his heart. At this
moment, so fraught with the future, to take out that morocco case
seemed crude. Yet, not to take it out left him there before her
with no preliminary excuse for coming. And in this dilemma he was
seized with impatience at all this paraphernalia of excuse and
justification. This was a scene—it could be nothing else, and he
must face it. He heard her voice, uncomfortably, pathetically
soft:

“Why have you come again? Didn’t you understand that I would
rather you did not?”

He noticed her clothes—a dark brown velvet corduroy, a sable boa,
a small round toque of the same. They suited her admirably. She
had money to spare for dress, evidently! He said abruptly:

“It’s your birthday. I brought you this,” and he held out to her
the green morocco case.

“Oh! No-no!”

Soames pressed the clasp; the seven stones gleamed out on the
pale grey velvet.

“Why not?” he said. “Just as a sign that you don’t bear me
ill-feeling any longer.”

“I couldn’t.”

Soames took it out of the case.

“Let me just see how it looks.”

She shrank back.

He followed, thrusting his hand with the brooch in it against the
front of her dress. She shrank again.

Soames dropped his hand.

“Irene,” he said, “let bygones be bygones. If _I_ can, surely you
might. Let’s begin again, as if nothing had been. Won’t you?” His
voice was wistful, and his eyes, resting on her face, had in them
a sort of supplication.

She, who was standing literally with her back against the wall,
gave a little gulp, and that was all her answer. Soames went on:

“Can you really want to live all your days half-dead in this
little hole? Come back to me, and I’ll give you all you want. You
shall live your own life; I swear it.”

He saw her face quiver ironically.

“Yes,” he repeated, “but I mean it this time. I’ll only ask one
thing. I just want—I just want a son. Don’t look like that! I
want one. It’s hard.” His voice had grown hurried, so that he
hardly knew it for his own, and twice he jerked his head back as
if struggling for breath. It was the sight of her eyes fixed on
him, dark with a sort of fascinated fright, which pulled him
together and changed that painful incoherence to anger.

“Is it so very unnatural?” he said between his teeth, “Is it
unnatural to want a child from one’s own wife? You wrecked our
life and put this blight on everything. We go on only half alive,
and without any future. Is it so very unflattering to you that in
spite of everything I—I still want you for my wife? Speak, for
Goodness’ sake! do speak.”

Irene seemed to try, but did not succeed.

“I don’t want to frighten you,” said Soames more gently. “Heaven
knows. I only want you to see that I can’t go on like this. I
want you back. I want you.”

Irene raised one hand and covered the lower part of her face, but
her eyes never moved from his, as though she trusted in them to
keep him at bay. And all those years, barren and bitter,
since—ah! when?—almost since he had first known her, surged up in
one great wave of recollection in Soames; and a spasm that for
his life he could not control constricted his face.

“It’s not too late,” he said; “it’s not—if you’ll only believe
it.”

Irene uncovered her lips, and both her hands made a writhing
gesture in front of her breast. Soames seized them.

“Don’t!” she said under her breath. But he stood holding on to
them, trying to stare into her eyes which did not waver. Then she
said quietly:

“I am alone here. You won’t behave again as you once behaved.”

Dropping her hands as though they had been hot irons, he turned
away. Was it possible that there could be such relentless
unforgiveness! Could that one act of violent possession be still
alive within her? Did it bar him thus utterly? And doggedly he
said, without looking up:

“I am not going till you’ve answered me. I am offering what few
men would bring themselves to offer, I want a—a reasonable
answer.”

And almost with surprise he heard her say:

“You can’t have a reasonable answer. Reason has nothing to do
with it. You can only have the brutal truth: I would rather die.”

Soames stared at her.

“Oh!” he said. And there intervened in him a sort of paralysis of
speech and movement, the kind of quivering which comes when a man
has received a deadly insult, and does not yet know how he is
going to take it, or rather what it is going to do with him.

“Oh!” he said again, “as bad as that? Indeed! You would rather
die. That’s pretty!”

“I am sorry. You wanted me to answer. I can’t help the truth, can
I?”

At that queer spiritual appeal Soames turned for relief to
actuality. He snapped the brooch back into its case and put it in
his pocket.

“The truth!” he said; “there’s no such thing with women. It’s
nerves—nerves.”

He heard the whisper:

“Yes; nerves don’t lie. Haven’t you discovered that?” He was
silent, obsessed by the thought: “I _will_ hate this woman. I
_will_ hate her.” That was the trouble! If only he could! He shot
a glance at her who stood unmoving against the wall with her head
up and her hands clasped, for all the world as if she were going
to be shot. And he said quickly:

“I don’t believe a word of it. You have a lover. If you hadn’t,
you wouldn’t be such a—such a little idiot.” He was conscious,
before the expression in her eyes, that he had uttered something
of a non-sequitur, and dropped back too abruptly into the verbal
freedom of his connubial days. He turned away to the door. But he
could not go out. Something within him—that most deep and secret
Forsyte quality, the impossibility of letting go, the
impossibility of seeing the fantastic and forlorn nature of his
own tenacity—prevented him. He turned about again, and there
stood, with his back against the door, as hers was against the
wall opposite, quite unconscious of anything ridiculous in this
separation by the whole width of the room.

“Do you ever think of anybody but yourself?” he said.

Irene’s lips quivered; then she answered slowly:

“Do you ever think that I found out my mistake—my hopeless,
terrible mistake—the very first week of our marriage; that I went
on trying three years—you know I went on trying? Was it for
myself?”

Soames gritted his teeth. “God knows what it was. I’ve never
understood you; I shall never understand you. You had everything
you wanted; and you can have it again, and more. What’s the
matter with me? I ask you a plain question: What is it?”
Unconscious of the pathos in that enquiry, he went on
passionately: “I’m not lame, I’m not loathsome, I’m not a boor,
I’m not a fool. What is it? What’s the mystery about me?”

Her answer was a long sigh.

He clasped his hands with a gesture that for him was strangely
full of expression. “When I came here to-night I was—I hoped—I
meant everything that I could to do away with the past, and start
fair again. And you meet me with ‘nerves,’ and silence, and
sighs. There’s nothing tangible. It’s like—it’s like a spider’s
web.”

“Yes.”

That whisper from across the room maddened Soames afresh.

“Well, I don’t choose to be in a spider’s web. I’ll cut it.” He
walked straight up to her. “Now!” What he had gone up to her to
do he really did not know. But when he was close, the old
familiar scent of her clothes suddenly affected him. He put his
hands on her shoulders and bent forward to kiss her. He kissed
not her lips, but a little hard line where the lips had been
drawn in; then his face was pressed away by her hands; he heard
her say: “Oh! No!” Shame, compunction, sense of futility flooded
his whole being, he turned on his heel and went straight out.