The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1
Page 36She had quite a reputation for saying the wrong thing, and, tenacious
like all her breed, she would hold to it when she had said it, and add
to it another wrong thing, and so on. With the decease of her husband
the family tenacity, the family matter-of-factness, had gone sterile
within her. A great talker, when allowed, she would converse without the
faintest animation for hours together, relating, with epic monotony, the
innumerable occasions on which Fortune had misused her; nor did she ever
perceive that her hearers sympathized with Fortune, for her heart was
kind.
Having sat, poor soul, long by the bedside of Small (a man of poor
constitution), she had acquired, the habit, and there were countless
subsequent occasions when she had sat immense periods of time to amuse
divest herself of the feeling that the world was the most ungrateful
place anybody could live in. Sunday after Sunday she sat at the feet of
that extremely witty preacher, the Rev. Thomas Scoles, who exercised a
great influence over her; but she succeeded in convincing everybody that
even this was a misfortune. She had passed into a proverb in the family,
and when anybody was observed to be peculiarly distressing, he was known
as a regular 'Juley.' The habit of her mind would have killed anybody
but a Forsyte at forty; but she was seventy-two, and had never looked
better. And one felt that there were capacities for enjoyment about her
which might yet come out. She owned three canaries, the cat Tommy,
and half a parrot--in common with her sister Hester;--and these poor
animals), unlike human beings, recognising that she could not help being
blighted, attached themselves to her passionately.
She was sombrely magnificent this evening in black bombazine, with
a mauve front cut in a shy triangle, and crowned with a black velvet
ribbon round the base of her thin throat; black and mauve for evening
wear was esteemed very chaste by nearly every Forsyte.
Pouting at Swithin, she said:
"Ann has been asking for you. You haven't been near us for an age!"
Swithin put his thumbs within the armholes of his waistcoat, and
replied:
"Ann's getting very shaky; she ought to have a doctor!"
Nicholas Forsyte, cocking his rectangular eyebrows, wore a smile. He
had succeeded during the day in bringing to fruition a scheme for the
employment of a tribe from Upper India in the gold-mines of Ceylon. A
pet plan, carried at last in the teeth of great difficulties--he was
justly pleased. It would double the output of his mines, and, as he had
often forcibly argued, all experience tended to show that a man must
die; and whether he died of a miserable old age in his own country,
or prematurely of damp in the bottom of a foreign mine, was surely of
little consequence, provided that by a change in his mode of life he
benefited the British Empire.