He often thought: ‘If she could see me, she wouldn’t go on behaving like this.’
At the end of a fortnight he received from her a letter dated from an hotel at Cheltenham which, though it seemed to show a certain softening, mentioned a nice doctor who had given her some very kind advice–Doctors, indeed, as if he didn’t know them! – and ended with the words: “I trust that you are now prepared, my dear husband, to make me a fixed and regular allowance, of course out of my own money. I think–do you not agree? – that?500 a year is the least amount that would be proper. I feel that if I had that I could come home again. In the meantime I have parted with my emerald pendant. Give my love to the dear children. Your affectionate wife, Fanny.”
Parted with her emerald pendant! The thing had cost him ninety pounds, and he supposed she had got thirty or forty for it. The sheer folly of women had never seemed to him so patent. Five hundred a year, indeed, to throw away in fallals! But a cloud had undoubtedly been lifted from his brain by this letter. Here was at least a definite situation. If he promised her a fixed five hundred a year she would come home. It all came of agitators putting ideas into women’s heads, a mischievous lot! But the boys would be back from school in another week or two; and it would look extremely odd if their mother were not there to go to the seaside with them.
An organ-grinder playing his confounded organ, had said to him only yesterday: “No, Guv’nor, I knows the valley of peace an’ quietness–I don’t move on under ‘arf-a-crown.” The impudence of the ruffian had tickled Nicholas and he had given him the half-crown. Fanny was behaving just like that. And who knew when she wouldn’t be off again to get out of him the rest of the thousand a year he’d received with her. No, on the whole, he didn’t think she’d be as unreasonable as that; but he continued to combat his desire for peace and quietness at so considerable a price. All the time he had a dim feeling that it wasn’t really the money she was after. She had never seemed to know or care much about money, in fact he had often had occasion to reproach her with indifference to its value. What exactly she had in her head he hesitated to characterize by a word which kept creeping nastily into his mind–independence. Fanny independent! Why she’d be in the workhouse tomorrow! Nicholas, indeed, was not unlike most people: he could not understand the need in others for that without which he himself would have been wholly miserable. What would be his own position if he made her independent–he would be subject to her whims and fancies and women’s nonsense of all sorts! And then–this was a bright moment–the solution occurred to him: Make her a fixed and regular allowance, and stop it when he wanted to! Everything seemed suddenly clear, he wondered he hadn’t thought of that before; and by the evening post he wrote off to say that he had reconsidered the matter and was prepared to pay her a regular allowance of a hundred and twenty-five pounds a quarter, and he would send the carriage to meet the five o’clock train the day after tomorrow.
To say that he was surprised on receiving not Fanny, but another letter–saying that she had meant of course that the five hundred a year should be settled on her, with the word settled underlined–would be a gross under-statement. He would never have believed that Fanny of all women could be so sordid. He continued in this mood of surprised disgust for fully an hour seated in his study which specially faced north so that his head should never be heated by the intrusion of the sun. He was determined to do no such thing, and yet extremely conscious that he could not go on much longer in this wifeless condition. She had been away now for seventeen days, and every day his head was getting heavier and less clear. He would have to put an end to it somehow. While he sat thus, turning and turning the wheels of indecision, he was conscious of a whirring noise gradually becoming articulate–that confounded barrel organ, again, grinding out the popular song of the moment: “Up in a balloon boys, up in a balloon.”
A flood of angry colour invaded Nicholas’s clean-shaven face, running almost up into the grizzled cock’s-comb rising from his forehead. He went to the window and threw it wide open. There was the ruffian grinding away and grinning at him. For a moment words failed Nicholas and then a flash of caustic humour redeemed him from his sober self. The fellow’s impudence was really laughable! He grinned back and closed the window. If he’d been the organ grinder it was just what he would have done himself. The beggar seemed to recognise that Greek had met Greek, for, after playing ‘Champagne Charlie,’ he wheeled his organ away.
But in Nicholas the little incident had changed the current of thought, or rather had swung the blood a little more to his head, so that now it seemed to him worth while to get Fanny back even on her own terms. His speech for the General Meeting of the “United Tramways Association” was due on Friday, and in the present heavy state of his head, due to this persistent wifelessness, he would be making a mess of it.
Five hundred a year–what was it after all–settled or not! He would go to James this very minute and get it over; then, with the settlement in his pocket, he would pop down himself tomorrow and bring her back. Calling a hansom, he uttered the word “Poultry” and got in. It was a long drive from Ladbroke Grove, and while he sat, behind the scuttling horse, erect, dapper, and shaken by the cobblestones of the London of those days, he thought of how he should put it to his brother James, in answer to the question the fellow would be sure to ask: “What d’you want to do that for?” And he decided merely to say: “What business is that of yours?” James was always a bit of an old woman, and it was best to be sharp with him.
With a certain dismay therefore he heard James say instead:
“I thought you’d be having to do that–they say Fanny’s on the high horse.”
“WHO says?” barked Nicholas.
James ploughed through one of his ultra-Crimean whiskers: “Oh! They–Timothy and the girls.”
“What business have they to gabble about what they know nothing of?”
James cleared his throat.
“Well,” he said, “I don’t know, they never tell me anything.”
“What!” snapped Nicholas. “Why, you sit there and talk scandal by the hour together. Well, I’ve no time to waste. Draw this settlement and make yourself and old Bustard the trustees. I want it all ship-shape by eleven o’clock tomorrow. You can put in enough of my Great Western Stock to provide five hundred a year.”
Cheltenham–there was something appropriate about the Stock; and to himself he thought: ‘Railways–I don’t trust them; they’ll be inventing something else before long.’
He left James somewhat agitated over the hurry his brother was in. The fellow however came up to the scratch, and with the settlement all signed and sealed, Nicholas caught the afternoon train to Cheltenham. He spent the hours of travel in coining caustic remonstrances against being treated in the way he had been, but when he arrived and found her having tea in the hotel drawing-room looking quite fresh and young, he decided to postpone them, and all he said was: “Well, Fanny, you look quite bobbish.”
And she answered: “What a long time, dear Nicholas! How are the dear children?”
“I’ve been bad with my head,” said Nicholas, “the children are all right. I’ve brought you this,” and he placed the settlement on the tea-table, “it’s all right–you won’t understand a word of it.”
“I’m sure, dear Nicholas, that you’ve done it beautifully.”
And while she read it, wrinkling her brows, Nicholas watched her, and thought:
‘She’s a better-looking woman than I remembered.’
Throughout the evening he was quite cheerful, not to say witty. It all seemed, indeed, a little like the days of their honeymoon at Brighton.
Not until nearly midnight, did he turn on his elbow and say rather suddenly:
“What on earth made you do it?”
“Oh, dear Nicholas,” replied her voice, close to his own, “I did so want a nice quiet rest.”
“Rest? What d’you want a rest from–you’ve got no work?”
She smiled.
“And now,” she said, “I shall be able to go and have one whenever I feel I want it.”
“The deuce you will!”
“How nice it will be, too, never having to ask you for money. It does so annoy you sometimes.”
And Nicholas thought: ‘Well, I HAVE been and gone and done it. Women!’ Turning still more on his elbow, he regarded her lying on her back with that queer little smile on her lips as if she were saying to herself: ‘Dear Nicholas, the cleverest man in London!’
So was Nicholas, in common with other Kings, limited by his Constitution.
A SAD AFFAIR, 1867
In 1866, at the age of nineteen, young Jolyon Forsyte left Eton and went up to Cambridge, in the semi-whiskered condition of those days. An amiable youth of fair scholastic and athletic attainments, and more susceptible to emotions, aesthetic and otherwise, than most young barbarians, he went up a little intoxicated on the novels of Whyte Melville. From continually reading about whiskered dandies, garbed to perfection and imperturbably stoical in the trying circumstances of debt and discomfiture, he had come to the conviction that to be whiskered and unmoved by Fortune was quite the ultimate hope of existence. There was something not altogether ignoble at the back of his creed. He passed imperceptibly into a fashionable set, and applied himself to the study of whist. All the heroes of Whyte Melville played whist admirably; all rode horses to distraction. Young Jolyon joined the Drag, and began to canter over to Newmarket, conveniently situated for Cambridge undergraduates. Like many youths before and after him, he had gone into residence with little or no idea of the value of money; and in the main this ‘sad affair’ must be traced to the fact that while he had no idea of the value of money, and, in proportion to his standards, not much money, his sire, Old Jolyon, had much idea of the value of money, and still more money. The hundred pounds placed to his credit for his first term seemed to young Jolyon an important sum, and he had very soon none of it left. This surprised him, but was of no great significance, because all Whyte Melville’s dandies were in debt; indeed, half their merit consisted in an imperturbable indifference to mere financial liability. Young Jolyon proceeded, therefore, to get into debt. It was easy, and ‘the thing.’ At the end of his first term he had spent just double his allowance. He was not vicious nor particularly extravagant–but what, after all, was money? Besides, to live on the edge of Fortune was the only way to show that one could rise above it. Not that he deliberately hired horses, bought clothes, boots, wine and tobacco, for that purpose; still, there was in a sense a principle involved. This is made plain, because it was exactly what was not plain to Old Jolyon later on. He, as a young man, with not half his son’s allowance, had never been in debt, had paid his way, and made it. But then he had not had the advantages of Eton, Cambridge, and the novels of Whyte Melville. He had simply gone into Tea.
Young Jolyon going up for his second term, with another hundred pounds from an unconscious sire, at once perceived that if he paid his debts, or any appreciable portion of them, he would have no money for the term’s expenses. He therefore applied his means to the more immediate ends of existence–College fees, ‘wines,’ whist, riding, and so forth–and left his debts to grow.
At the end of his first year he was fully three hundred pounds to the bad, and beginning to be reflective.
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