Two lines of a certain song in a certain famous old school's songbook
run as follows:
'How the buttons on his blue frock shone, tra-la-la! How he carolled and
he sang, like a bird!...'
Swithin did not exactly carol and sing like a bird, but he felt
almost like endeavouring to hum a tune, as he stepped out of Hyde Park
Mansions, and contemplated his horses drawn up before the door.
The afternoon was as balmy as a day in June, and to complete the simile
of the old song, he had put on a blue frock-coat, dispensing with an
overcoat, after sending Adolf down three times to make sure that there
was not the least suspicion of east in the wind; and the frock-coat was
buttoned so tightly around his personable form, that, if the buttons did
not shine, they might pardonably have done so. Majestic on the pavement
he fitted on a pair of dog-skin gloves; with his large bell-shaped
top hat, and his great stature and bulk he looked too primeval for a
Forsyte. His thick white hair, on which Adolf had bestowed a touch of
pomatum, exhaled the fragrance of opoponax and cigars--the celebrated
Swithin brand, for which he paid one hundred and forty shillings the
hundred, and of which old Jolyon had unkindly said, he wouldn't smoke
them as a gift; they wanted the stomach of a horse!
"Adolf!"
"Sare!"
"The new plaid rug!"
He would never teach that fellow to look smart; and Mrs. Soames he felt
sure, had an eye!
"The phaeton hood down; I am going--to--drive--a--lady!"
A pretty woman would want to show off her frock; and well--he was going
to drive a lady! It was like a new beginning to the good old days.
Ages since he had driven a woman! The last time, if he remembered, it
had been Juley; the poor old soul had been as nervous as a cat the whole
time, and so put him out of patience that, as he dropped her in the
Bayswater Road, he had said: "Well I'm d---d if I ever drive you again!"
And he never had, not he!
Going up to his horses' heads, he examined their bits; not that he knew
anything about bits--he didn't pay his coachman sixty pounds a year
to do his work for him, that had never been his principle. Indeed, his
reputation as a horsey man rested mainly on the fact that once, on Derby
Day, he had been welshed by some thimble-riggers. But someone at the
Club, after seeing him drive his greys up to the door--he always drove
grey horses, you got more style for the money, some thought--had called
him 'Four-in-hand Forsyte.' The name having reached his ears through
that fellow Nicholas Treffry, old Jolyon's dead partner, the great
driving man notorious for more carriage accidents than any man in the
kingdom--Swithin had ever after conceived it right to act up to it. The
name had taken his fancy, not because he had ever driven four-in-hand,
or was ever likely to, but because of something distinguished in the
sound. Four-in-hand Forsyte! Not bad! Born too soon, Swithin had missed
his vocation. Coming upon London twenty years later, he could not have
failed to have become a stockbroker, but at the time when he was obliged
to select, this great profession had not as yet became the chief glory
of the upper-middle class. He had literally been forced into land
agency.