FRANCIE’S FOURPENNY FOREIGNER, 1888

In the latest ‘eighties there was that still in the appearance of Francie Forsyte which made people refer to her on Forsyte ‘Change as ‘Keltic’ looking. The expression had not long been discovered, and, though no one had any knowledge of what a Kelt looked like, it was felt to be good.

If she did not precisely suggest the Keltic twilight, she had dark hair and large grey eyes, composed music, wrote stories and poems, and played on the violin. For all these reasons she was allowed a certain license by the family, who did not take her too seriously, and the limit of the license granted is here recorded.

Thin, rather tall, intense and expressive, Francie had a certain charm, together with the power, engrained in a daughter of Roger, of marketing her wares, and at the age of thirty she had secured a measure of independence. She still slept at Prince’s Gate, but had a studio in the purlieus of Chelsea. For the period she was advanced, even to the point of inviting to tea there her editors, fellow writers, musicians, and even those young men with whom she danced in Kensington, generically christened ‘Francie’s lovers’ by her brother George.

At Timothy’s in the Bayswater Road, they would say to her at times:

“Do you think it’s quite nice, dear, to have young men to tea with you?”

And Francie would answer:

“Why not?” which always stopped further enquiry, for the aunts felt that it would be even less nice to put a finer point on it, and, after all, dear Francie was musical. It was believed in the family, rather than known, that she was always in love with someone, but that seemed natural in one of her appearance and was taken to be spiritual rather than bodily. And this diagnosis was perfectly correct, such was the essential shrewdness underlying the verbal niceties on Forsyte ‘Change.

It was shortly after she had at last succeeded in getting her violin sonata—so much the most serious item of her music—published, that she met the individual soon to be known as “Francie’s Fourpenny Foreigner.” The word ‘Dago’ not having then come to the surface, the antipathetic contempt felt by Anglo–Saxons for everything male, on two legs, deriving from below the latitude of Geneva, had no verbal outlet. From above the latitude of Geneva a foreigner was, if not respected, at least human, but a foreigner from below was undoubtedly ‘fourpenny,’ if not less.

This young man, whose surname, Racazy, had a catch in it which caught every Forsyte, but whose Christian name was Guido, had come, if Francie was to be believed, from a place called Ragusa to conquer London with his violin. He had been introduced to her by the publisher who had brought forth her sonata, as essentially the right interpreter of that considerable production; partly, no doubt, because at this stage of his career he would interpret anything for nothing, and partly because Francie, free at the moment from any spiritual entanglement, had noticed his hair, like that of Rafael’s best young men, and asked for the introduction.

Within a week he was playing the sonata in her studio for the first and last time. The fact that he never even offered to play it again ought to have warned Francie, but with a strange mixture of loyalty to what she admired at the moment and a Forsytean perception that the more famous he became the more famous would she become, she installed him the ‘lover’ of the year, and proceeded to make his name. No one can deny that her psychology was at fault from the first; she gauged wrongly Guido, her family, and herself; but such misconceptions are slow to make themselves felt, and the license she enjoyed had invested Francie with a kind of bravura. She had the habit of her own way, and no tactical sense of the dividing line between major and minor operations. After trying him out at the Studio on an editor, two girl friends, and a ‘lover’ so out of date that he could be relied on, she began serious work by inviting the young man to dinner at Prince’s Gate. He came in his hair, undressed, with a large bow tie ‘flopping about on his chest,’ as Eustace put it in his remonstrance after the event. It was a somewhat gruesome evening, complicated by the arrival of George, while the men were still at wine, to ‘touch his father for a monkey.’ His Ascot had been lamentable, and he sat, silently staring at the violinist as though he were the monkey.

Roger, in his capacity of host, alone attempted to put the young man at his ease.

“I hear you play the fiddle,” he said. “Can you make your living at that?”

“But yes, I maka ver’ good living.”

“What do you call good?” said Roger, ever practical.

“I maka quite a ‘undred pound a year.”

“H’m!” said Roger: “Do you like the climate here?”

The young man shook his hair.

“No! Rain he rain; no sun to shina.”

“Ha!” said Roger. “What’s your own part of the world?”

“Ragusa.”

“Eh! In the Balkans, um?”

“I am ze ‘alf Italiano.”

At this moment Eustace, obeying a wink from George’s brooding eyes, rose, and said:

“Shall we go up and have some—er—music?”

Roger and George were left; nor was either of them seen again that evening.

In the drawing-room Mrs. Roger, placid by now to the point of torpor, had said to Francie:

“Of course, my dear, he is striking in a way, but he doesn’t look very clean, does he?”

“That’s only his skin, Mother.”

“But how do you know, dear?”

“Oh! Well, he comes from Ragusa.”

“I wonder,” said Mrs. Roger, “if that is where ‘ragouts’ originally came from. I felt that he didn’t care very much for the dinner to-night.”

“He’s all spirit,” said Francie. “Everybody here thinks so much about food.”

“Yes,” sighed Mrs. Roger, “if it weren’t for your father, I shouldn’t think nearly as much about food as I have to. I sometimes wish I could go where sheep and oxen are unknown, and there are no seasons.”

“Food is a terrible bore,” said Francie.

Her mother looked at her intently.

“I’m sure you had nothing but a bun for lunch.”

“A bath bun, dear.”

“It’s not enough, Francie.”

“I never have more if I can help it.”

“Your independence will ruin you one of these days. I’m certain your father won’t like you seeing much of THAT young man.”

“Father’s hopeless,” said Francie. “He ought to be stuffed.”

A faint smile appeared on Mrs. Roger’s face, as if she were thinking: ‘Perhaps he is,’ but she said:

“Don’t be disrespectful, dear.”

At this moment they came, Eustace exceptionally dandified as though to counterbalance his associate. Francie seated her ‘foreigner’ on the sofa, dark and sulky, and herself beside him. Eustace and his mother played piquet. The sound of George leaving (without his monkey) and soon thereafter of Roger going up to bed, brought a somewhat painful evening to its end.

In their bedroom, after holding forth on a son like George, Roger said abruptly:

“And as to Francie, what does she want to pick up with a fourpenny foreigner for! That girl will get herself into a mess.”

Mrs. Roger having exhausted her powers of palliation over George, did not reply.

“A fiddler, too,” added Roger.

“She can’t help being musical, dear,” said Mrs. Roger.

“No good ever came of music,” said Roger. “Wake me if I snore; it gives me a sore throat…”

Undeterred by the wintry nature of that evening, Francie continued to promote the fortunes of her ‘lover.’ She even took him to Timothy’s. It was at a period when the whole family was still slightly in mourning, over that “dreadful business of Soames, Irene and young Bosinney, my dear,” which had so nearly got into the papers. Extraordinary sensitiveness prevailed, and anything manifestly unForsytean was scrutinised as with the eyes of parrots.