7 best short stories by John Galsworthy

John Galsworthy, August Nemo

• Publisher: Tacet Books
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9783968586540
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Classici

John Galsworthy was an English novelist and playwright, who won Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932. He came from a newly rich upper middle class commercial family. His works mainly dealt with the social class system prevalent at that time. He especially concentrated on the upper middle class to which his own family belonged. Although he treated his characters sympathetically, he highlighted their narrow-minded snobbishness and suffocating moral values.This selection chosen by the critic August Nemocontains the following stories: - The First and Last- A Stoic- The Apple Tree- The Juryman- Indian Summer of a Forsyte- The Hedonist- Buttercup Night

The Author

JOHN GALSWORTHY, (BORN Aug. 14, 1867, Kingston Hill, Surrey, Eng.—died Jan. 31, 1933, Grove Lodge, Hampstead), English novelist and playwright, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1932.

Galsworthy’s family, of Devonshire farming stock traceable to the 16th century, had made a comfortable fortune in property in the 19th century. His father was a solicitor. Educated at Harrow and New College, Oxford, Galsworthy was called to the bar in 1890. With a view to specializing in marine law, he took a voyage around the world, during which he encountered Joseph Conrad, then mate of a merchant ship. They became lifelong friends. Galsworthy found law uncongenial and took to writing. For his first works, From the Four Winds (1897), a collection of short stories, and the novel Jocelyn (1898), both published at his own expense, he used the pseudonym John Sinjohn. The Island Pharisees (1904) was the first book to appear under his own name.

The Man of Property (1906) began the novel sequence known as The Forsyte Saga, by which Galsworthy is chiefly remembered; others in the same series are “Indian Summer of a Forsyte” (1918, in Five Tales), In Chancery (1920), Awakening (1920), and To Let (1921). The saga chronicles the lives of three generations of a large, upper middle-class family at the turn of the century. Having recently risen to wealth and success in the profession and business world, the Forsytes are tenaciously clannish and anxious to increase their wealth. The novels imply that their desire for property is morally wrong. The saga intersperses diatribes against wealth with lively passages describing character and background. In The Man of Property, Galsworthy attacks the Forsytes through the character of Soames Forsyte, a solicitor who considers his wife Irene as a mere form of property. Irene finds her husband physically unattractive and falls in love with a young architect who dies. The other two novels of the saga, In Chancery and To Let, trace the subsequent divorce of Soames and Irene, the second marriages they make, and the eventual romantic entanglements of their children. The story of the Forsyte family after World War I was continued in The White Monkey (1924), The Silver Spoon (1926), and Swan Song (1928), collected in A Modern Comedy (1929). Galsworthy’s other novels include The Country House (1907), The Patrician (1911), and The Freelands (1915).

Galsworthy was also a successful dramatist, his plays, written in a naturalistic style, usually examining some controversial ethical or social problem. They include The Silver Box (1906), which, like many of his other works, has a legal theme and depicts a bitter contrast of the law’s treatment of the rich and the poor; Strife (1909), a study of industrial relations; Justice (1910), a realistic portrayal of prison life that roused so much feeling that it led to reform; and Loyalties (1922), the best of his later plays. He also wrote verse.

In 1905 Galsworthy married Ada Pearson, the divorced wife of his first cousin, A.J. Galsworthy. Galsworthy had, in secret, been closely associated with his future wife for about ten years before their marriage. Irene in The Forsyte Saga is to some extent a portrait of Ada Galsworthy, although her first husband was wholly unlike Soames Forsyte.

Galsworthy’s novels, by their abstention from complicated psychology and their greatly simplified social viewpoint, became accepted as faithful patterns of English life for a time. Galsworthy is remembered for this evocation of Victorian and Edwardian upper middle-class life and for his creation of Soames Forsyte, a dislikable character who nevertheless compels the reader’s sympathy.

A television serial of The Forsyte Saga by the British Broadcasting Corporation achieved immense popularity in Great Britain in 1967 and later in many other nations, especially the United States, reviving interest in an author whose reputation had plummeted after his death.

The First and Last

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“So the last shall be first, and the first last.”

HOLY WRIT.

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I

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IT WAS A DARK ROOM at that hour of six in the evening, when just the single oil reading-lamp under its green shade let fall a dapple of light over the Turkey carpet; over the covers of books taken out of the bookshelves, and the open pages of the one selected; over the deep blue and gold of the coffee service on the little old stool with its Oriental embroidery. Very dark in the winter, with drawn curtains, many rows of leather-bound volumes, oak-panelled walls and ceiling. So large, too, that the lighted spot before the fire where he sat was just an oasis. But that was what Keith Darrant liked, after his day's work—the hard early morning study of his “cases,” the fret and strain of the day in court; it was his rest, these two hours before dinner, with books, coffee, a pipe, and sometimes a nap. In red Turkish slippers and his old brown velvet coat, he was well suited to that framing of glow and darkness. A painter would have seized avidly on his clear-cut, yellowish face, with its black eyebrows twisting up over eyes—grey or brown, one could hardly tell, and its dark grizzling hair still plentiful, in spite of those daily hours of wig. He seldom thought of his work while he sat there, throwing off with practised ease the strain of that long attention to the multiple threads of argument and evidence to be disentangled—work profoundly interesting, as a rule, to his clear intellect, trained to almost instinctive rejection of all but the essential, to selection of what was legally vital out of the mass of confused tactical and human detail presented to his scrutiny; yet sometimes tedious and wearing. As for instance to-day, when he had suspected his client of perjury, and was almost convinced that he must throw up his brief. He had disliked the weak-looking, white-faced fellow from the first, and his nervous, shifty answers, his prominent startled eyes—a type too common in these days of canting tolerations and weak humanitarianism; no good, no good!

Of the three books he had taken down, a Volume of Voltaire—curious fascination that Frenchman had, for all his destructive irony!—a volume of Burton's travels, and Stevenson's “New Arabian Nights,” he had pitched upon the last. He felt, that evening, the want of something sedative, a desire to rest from thought of any kind. The court had been crowded, stuffy; the air, as he walked home, soft, sou'-westerly, charged with coming moisture, no quality of vigour in it; he felt relaxed, tired, even nervy, and for once the loneliness of his house seemed strange and comfortless.

Lowering the lamp, he turned his face towards the fire. Perhaps he would get a sleep before that boring dinner at the Tellasson's. He wished it were vacation, and Maisie back from school. A widower for many years, he had lost the habit of a woman about him; yet to-night he had a positive yearning for the society of his young daughter, with her quick ways, and bright, dark eyes. Curious what perpetual need of a woman some men had! His brother Laurence—wasted—all through women—atrophy of willpower! A man on the edge of things; living from hand to mouth; his gifts all down at heel! One would have thought the Scottish strain might have saved him; and yet, when a Scotsman did begin to go downhill, who could go faster? Curious that their mother's blood should have worked so differently in her two sons. He himself had always felt he owed all his success to it.

His thoughts went off at a tangent to a certain issue troubling his legal conscience. He had not wavered in the usual assumption of omniscience, but he was by no means sure that he had given right advice. Well! Without that power to decide and hold to decision in spite of misgiving, one would never have been fit for one's position at the Bar, never have been fit for anything. The longer he lived, the more certain he became of the prime necessity of virile and decisive action in all the affairs of life. A word and a blow—and the blow first! Doubts, hesitations, sentiment the muling and puking of this twilight age—! And there welled up on his handsome face a smile that was almost devilish—the tricks of firelight are so many! It faded again in sheer drowsiness; he slept....

He woke with a start, having a feeling of something out beyond the light, and without turning his head said: “What's that?” There came a sound as if somebody had caught his breath. He turned up the lamp.

“Who's there?”

A voice over by the door answered:

“Only I—Larry.”

Something in the tone, or perhaps just being startled out of sleep like this, made him shiver. He said:

“I was asleep. Come in!”

It was noticeable that he did not get up, or even turn his head, now that he knew who it was, but waited, his half-closed eyes fixed on the fire, for his brother to come forward. A visit from Laurence was not an unmixed blessing. He could hear him breathing, and became conscious of a scent of whisky. Why could not the fellow at least abstain when he was coming here! It was so childish, so lacking in any sense of proportion or of decency! And he said sharply:

“Well, Larry, what is it?”

It was always something. He often wondered at the strength of that sense of trusteeship, which kept him still tolerant of the troubles, amenable to the petitions of this brother of his; or was it just “blood” feeling, a Highland sense of loyalty to kith and kin; an old-time quality which judgment and half his instincts told him was weakness but which, in spite of all, bound him to the distressful fellow? Was he drunk now, that he kept lurking out there by the door? And he said less sharply:

“Why don't you come and sit down?”

He was coming now, avoiding the light, skirting along the walls just beyond the radiance of the lamp, his feet and legs to the waist brightly lighted, but his face disintegrated in shadow, like the face of a dark ghost.

“Are you ill, man?”

Still no answer, save a shake of that head, and the passing up of a hand, out of the light, to the ghostly forehead under the dishevelled hair. The scent of whisky was stronger now; and Keith thought:

'He really is drunk. Nice thing for the new butler to see! If he can't behave—'

The figure against the wall heaved a sigh—so truly from an overburdened heart that Keith was conscious with a certain dismay of not having yet fathomed the cause of this uncanny silence. He got up, and, back to the fire, said with a brutality born of nerves rather than design:

“What is it, man? Have you committed a murder, that you stand there dumb as a fish?”

For a second no answer at all, not even of breathing; then, just the whisper:

“Yes.”

The sense of unreality which so helps one at moments of disaster enabled Keith to say vigorously:

“By Jove! You have been drinking!”

But it passed at once into deadly apprehension.

“What do you mean? Come here, where I can see you. What's the matter with you, Larry?”

With a sudden lurch and dive, his brother left the shelter of the shadow, and sank into a chair in the circle of light. And another long, broken sigh escaped him.

“There's nothing the matter with me, Keith! It's true!”

Keith stepped quickly forward, and stared down into his brother's face; and instantly he saw that it was true. No one could have simulated the look in those eyes—of horrified wonder, as if they would never again get on terms with the face to which they belonged. To see them squeezed the heart-only real misery could look like that. Then that sudden pity became angry bewilderment.

“What in God's name is this nonsense?”

But it was significant that he lowered his voice; went over to the door, too, to see if it were shut. Laurence had drawn his chair forward, huddling over the fire—a thin figure, a worn, high-cheekboned face with deep-sunk blue eyes, and wavy hair all ruffled, a face that still had a certain beauty. Putting a hand on that lean shoulder, Keith said:

“Come, Larry! Pull yourself together, and drop exaggeration.”

“It's true; I tell you; I've killed a man.”

The noisy violence of that outburst acted like a douche. What was the fellow about—shouting out such words! But suddenly Laurence lifted his hands and wrung them. The gesture was so utterly painful that it drew a quiver from Keith's face.

“Why did you come here,” he said, “and tell me this?”

Larry's face was really unearthly sometimes, such strange gleams passed up on to it!

“Whom else should I tell? I came to know what I'm to do, Keith? Give myself up, or what?”

At that sudden introduction of the practical Keith felt his heart twitch. Was it then as real as all that? But he said, very quietly:

“Just tell me—How did it come about, this—affair?”

That question linked the dark, gruesome, fantastic nightmare on to actuality.

“When did it happen?”

“Last night.”

In Larry's face there was—there had always been—something childishly truthful. He would never stand a chance in court! And Keith said:

“How? Where? You'd better tell me quietly from the beginning. Drink this coffee; it'll clear your head.”

Laurence took the little blue cup and drained it.

“Yes,” he said. “It's like this, Keith. There's a girl I've known for some months now—”

Women! And Keith said between his teeth: “Well?”

“Her father was a Pole who died over here when she was sixteen, and left her all alone. A man called Walenn, a mongrel American, living in the same house, married her, or pretended to—she's very pretty, Keith—he left her with a baby six months old, and another coming. That one died, and she did nearly. Then she starved till another fellow took her on. She lived with him two years; then Walenn turned up again, and made her go back to him. The brute used to beat her black and blue, all for nothing. Then he left her again. When I met her she'd lost her elder child, too, and was taking anybody who came along.”

He suddenly looked up into Keith's face.

“But I've never met a sweeter woman, nor a truer, that I swear. Woman! She's only twenty now! When I went to her last night, that brute—that Walenn—had found her out again; and when he came for me, swaggering and bullying—Look!”—he touched a dark mark on his fore...

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• The Author
• About the Publisher
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