Thus, of the ten old Forsytes twenty-one young Forsytes had been born;
but of the twenty-one young Forsytes there were as yet only seventeen
descendants; and it already seemed unlikely that there would be more
than a further unconsidered trifle or so. A student of statistics must
have noticed that the birth rate had varied in accordance with the rate
of interest for your money. Grandfather 'Superior Dosset' Forsyte in the
early nineteenth century had been getting ten per cent. for his, hence
ten children. Those ten, leaving out the four who had not married, and
Juley, whose husband Septimus Small had, of course, died almost at
once, had averaged from four to five per cent. for theirs, and produced
accordingly. The twenty-one whom they produced were now getting barely
three per cent. in the Consols to which their father had mostly tied the
Settlements they made to avoid death duties, and the six of them who
had been reproduced had seventeen children, or just the proper two and
five-sixths per stem.
There were other reasons, too, for this mild reproduction. A distrust
of their earning powers, natural where a sufficiency is guaranteed,
together with the knowledge that their fathers did not die, kept them
cautious. If one had children and not much income, the standard of taste
and comfort must of necessity go down; what was enough for two was not
enough for four, and so on--it would be better to wait and see what
Father did. Besides, it was nice to be able to take holidays unhampered.
Sooner in fact than own children, they preferred to concentrate on
the ownership of themselves, conforming to the growing tendency fin
de siecle, as it was called. In this way, little risk was run, and one
would be able to have a motor-car. Indeed, Eustace already had one, but
it had shaken him horribly, and broken one of his eye teeth; so that it
would be better to wait till they were a little safer. In the meantime,
no more children! Even young Nicholas was drawing in his horns, and had
made no addition to his six for quite three years.
The corporate decay, however, of the Forsytes, their dispersion rather,
of which all this was symptomatic, had not advanced so far as to prevent
a rally when Roger Forsyte died in 1899. It had been a glorious summer,
and after holidays abroad and at the sea they were practically all back
in London, when Roger with a touch of his old originality had suddenly
breathed his last at his own house in Princes Gardens. At Timothy's it
was whispered sadly that poor Roger had always been eccentric about his
digestion--had he not, for instance, preferred German mutton to all the
other brands?