The Forsyte saga - Complete
“Fleur,” repeated Soames: “Fleur! we’ll call her that.”
The sense of triumph and renewed possession swelled within him.
By God! this—this thing was his! By God! this—this thing was
_his!_
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THE FORSYTE SAGA—VOLUME III.
By John Galsworthy
AWAKENING
TO CHARLES SCRIBNER
AWAKENING
Through the massive skylight illuminating the hall at Robin Hill,
the July sunlight at five o'clock fell just where the broad
stairway turned; and in that radiant streak little Jon Forsyte
stood, blue-linen-suited. His hair was shining, and his eyes,
from beneath a frown, for he was considering how to go
downstairs, this last of innumerable times, before the car
brought his father and mother home. Four at a time, and five at
the bottom? Stale! Down the banisters? But in which fashion? On
his face, feet foremost? Very stale. On his stomach, sideways?
Paltry! On his back, with his arms stretched down on both sides?
Forbidden! Or on his face, head foremost, in a manner unknown as
yet to any but himself? Such was the cause of the frown on the
illuminated face of little Jon....
In that Summer of 1909 the simple souls who even then desired to
simplify the English tongue, had, of course, no cognizance of
little Jon, or they would have claimed him for a disciple. But
one can be too simple in this life, for his real name was Jolyon,
and his living father and dead half-brother had usurped of old
the other shortenings, Jo and Jolly. As a fact little Jon had
done his best to conform to convention and spell himself first
Jhon, then John; not till his father had explained the sheer
necessity, had he spelled his name Jon.
Up till now that father had possessed what was left of his heart
by the groom, Bob, who played the concertina, and his nurse “Da,”
who wore the violet dress on Sundays, and enjoyed the name of
Spraggins in that private life lived at odd moments even by
domestic servants. His mother had only appeared to him, as it
were in dreams, smelling delicious, smoothing his forehead just
before he fell asleep, and sometimes docking his hair, of a
golden brown colour. When he cut his head open against the
nursery fender she was there to be bled over; and when he had
nightmare she would sit on his bed and cuddle his head against
her neck. She was precious but remote, because “Da” was so near,
and there is hardly room for more than one woman at a time in a
man's heart. With his father, too, of course, he had special
bonds of union; for little Jon also meant to be a painter when he
grew up—with the one small difference, that his father painted
pictures, and little Jon intended to paint ceilings and walls,
standing on a board between two step-ladders, in a dirty-white
apron, and a lovely smell of whitewash. His father also took him
riding in Richmond Park, on his pony, Mouse, so-called because it
was so-coloured.
Little Jon had been born with a silver spoon in a mouth which was
rather curly and large. He had never heard his father or his
mother speak in an angry voice, either to each other, himself, or
anybody else; the groom, Bob, Cook, Jane, Bella and the other
servants, even “Da,” who alone restrained him in his courses, had
special voices when they talked to him. He was therefore of
opinion that the world was a place of perfect and perpetual
gentility and freedom.
A child of 1901, he had come to consciousness when his country,
just over that bad attack of scarlet fever, the Boer War, was
preparing for the Liberal revival of 1906. Coercion was
unpopular, parents had exalted notions of giving their offspring
a good time. They spoiled their rods, spared their children, and
anticipated the results with enthusiasm. In choosing, moreover,
for his father an amiable man of fifty-two, who had already lost
an only son, and for his mother a woman of thirty-eight, whose
first and only child he was, little Jon had done well and wisely.
What had saved him from becoming a cross between a lap dog and a
little prig, had been his father's adoration of his mother, for
even little Jon could see that she was not merely just his
mother, and that he played second fiddle to her in his father's
heart: What he played in his mother's heart he knew not yet. As
for “Auntie” June, his half-sister (but so old that she had grown
out of the relationship) she loved him, of course, but was too
sudden. His devoted “Da,” too, had a Spartan touch. His bath was
cold and his knees were bare; he was not encouraged to be sorry
for himself. As to the vexed question of his education, little
Jon shared the theory of those who considered that children
should not be forced. He rather liked the Mademoiselle who came
for two hours every morning to teach him her language, together
with history, geography and sums; nor were the piano lessons
which his mother gave him disagreeable, for she had a way of
luring him from tune to tune, never making him practise one which
did not give him pleasure, so that he remained eager to convert
ten thumbs into eight fingers. Under his father he learned to
draw pleasure-pigs and other animals. He was not a highly
educated little boy. Yet, on the whole, the silver spoon stayed
in his mouth without spoiling it, though “Da” sometimes said that
other children would do him a “world of good.”
It was a disillusionment, then, when at the age of nearly seven
she held him down on his back, because he wanted to do something
of which she did not approve. This first interference with the
free individualism of a Forsyte drove him almost frantic. There
was something appalling in the utter helplessness of that
position, and the uncertainty as to whether it would ever come to
an end. Suppose she never let him get up any more! He suffered
torture at the top of his voice for fifty seconds. Worse than
anything was his perception that “Da” had taken all that time to
realise the agony of fear he was enduring. Thus, dreadfully, was
revealed to him the lack of imagination in the human being.
When he was let up he remained convinced that “Da” had done a
dreadful thing. Though he did not wish to bear witness against
her, he had been compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his
mother and say: “Mum, don't let 'Da' hold me down on my back
again.”
His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two
plaits of hair—“couleur de feuille morte,” as little Jon had not
yet learned to call it—had looked at him with eyes like little
bits of his brown velvet tunic, and answered:
“No, darling, I won't.”
She, being in the nature of a goddess, little Jon was satisfied;
especially when, from under the dining-table at breakfast, where
he happened to be waiting for a mushroom, he had overheard her
say to his father:
“Then, will you tell 'Da,' dear, or shall I? She's so devoted to
him”; and his father's answer:
“Well, she mustn't show it that way. I know exactly what it feels
like to be held down on one's back. No Forsyte can stand it for a
minute.”
Conscious that they did not know him to be under the table,
little Jon was visited by the quite new feeling of embarrassment,
and stayed where he was, ravaged by desire for the mushroom.
Such had been his first dip into the dark abysses of existence.
Nothing much had been revealed to him after that, till one day,
having gone down to the cow-house for his drink of milk fresh
from the cow, after Garratt had finished milking, he had seen
Clover's calf, dead. Inconsolable, and followed by an upset
Garratt, he had sought “Da”; but suddenly aware that she was not
the person he wanted, had rushed away to find his father, and had
run into the arms of his mother.
“Clover's calf's dead! Oh! Oh! It looked so soft!”
His mother's clasp, and her:
“Yes, darling, there, there!” had stayed his sobbing. But if
Clover's calf could die, anything could—not only bees, flies,
beetles and chickens—and look soft like that! This was
appalling—and soon forgotten!
The next thing had been to sit on a bumble bee, a poignant
experience, which his mother had understood much better than
“Da”; and nothing of vital importance had happened after that
till the year turned; when, following a day of utter
wretchedness, he had enjoyed a disease composed of little spots,
bed, honey in a spoon, and many Tangerine oranges. It was then
that the world had flowered. To “Auntie” June he owed that
flowering, for no sooner was he a little lame duck than she came
rushing down from London, bringing with her the books which had
nurtured her own Berserker spirit, born in the noted year of
1869. Aged, and of many colours, they were stored with the most
formidable happenings. Of these she read to little Jon, till he
was allowed to read to himself; whereupon she whisked back to
London and left them with him in a heap. Those books cooked his
fancy, till he thought and dreamed of nothing but midshipmen and
dhows, pirates, rafts, sandal-wood traders, iron horses, sharks,
battles, Tartars, Red Indians, balloons, North Poles and other
extravagant delights. The moment he was suffered to get up, he
rigged his bed fore and aft, and set out from it in a narrow bath
across green seas of carpet, to a rock, which he climbed by means
of its mahogany drawer knobs, to sweep the horizon with his
drinking tumbler screwed to his eye, in search of rescuing sails.
He made a daily raft out of the towel stand, the tea tray, and
his pillows. He saved the juice from his French plums, bottled it
in an empty medicine bottle, and provisioned the raft with the
rum that it became; also with pemmican made out of little
saved-up bits of chicken sat on and dried at the fire; and with
lime juice against scurvy, extracted from the peel of his oranges
and a little economised juice. He made a North Pole one morning
from the whole of his bedclothes except the bolster, and reached
it in a birch-bark canoe (in private life the fender), after a
terrible encounter with a polar bear fashioned from the bolster
and four skittles dressed up in “Da's” nightgown. After that, his
father, seeking to steady his imagination, brought him Ivanhoe,
Bevis, a book about King Arthur, and Tom Brown's Schooldays. He
read the first, and for three days built, defended and stormed
Front de Boeuf's castle, taking every part in the piece except
those of Rebecca and Rowena; with piercing cries of: “En avant,
de Bracy!” and similar utterances. After reading the book about
King Arthur he became almost exclusively Sir Lamorac de Galis,
because, though there was very little about him, he preferred his
name to that of any other knight; and he rode his old
rocking-horse to death, armed with a long bamboo. Bevis he found