The Forsyte saga - Complete
Lounge who thought it well-bred to say nothing but what the whole
world could hear at the top of their voices—quacking inanity!
Coarse, because he had said her dress was low! Well, so it was!
He went out without reply.
Coming into the Lounge from the far end, he at once saw Fleur
where he had left her. She sat with crossed knees, slowly
balancing a foot in silk stocking and grey shoe, sure sign that
she was dreaming. Her eyes showed it too—they went off like that
sometimes. And then, in a moment, she would come to life, and be
as quick and restless as a monkey. And she knew so much, so
self-assured, and not yet nineteen. What was that odious word?
Flapper! Dreadful young creatures—squealing and squawking and
showing their legs! The worst of them bad dreams, the best of
them powdered angels! Fleur was not a flapper, not one of those
slangy, ill-bred young females. And yet she was frighteningly
self-willed, and full of life, and determined to enjoy it. Enjoy!
The word brought no puritan terror to Soames; but it brought the
terror suited to his temperament. He had always been afraid to
enjoy to-day for fear he might not enjoy tomorrow so much. And it
was terrifying to feel that his daughter was divested of that
safeguard. The very way she sat in that chair showed it—lost in
her dream. He had never been lost in a dream himself—there was
nothing to be had out of it; and where she got it from he did not
know! Certainly not from Annette! And yet Annette, as a young
girl, when he was hanging about her, had once had a flowery look.
Well, she had lost it now!
Fleur rose from her chair-swiftly, restlessly; and flung herself
down at a writing-table. Seizing ink and writing paper, she began
to write as if she had not time to breathe before she got her
letter written. And suddenly she saw him. The air of desperate
absorption vanished, she smiled, waved a kiss, made a pretty face
as if she were a little puzzled and a little bored.
Ah! She was “fine”—“fine!”
III.—AT ROBIN HILL
Jolyon Forsyte had spent his boy's nineteenth birthday at Robin
Hill, quietly going into his affairs. He did everything quietly
now, because his heart was in a poor way, and, like all his
family, he disliked the idea of dying. He had never realised how
much till one day, two years ago, he had gone to his doctor about
certain symptoms, and been told:
“At any moment, on any overstrain.”
He had taken it with a smile—the natural Forsyte reaction against
an unpleasant truth. But with an increase of symptoms in the
train on the way home, he had realised to the full the sentence
hanging over him. To leave Irene, his boy, his home, his
work—though he did little enough work now! To leave them for
unknown darkness, for the unimaginable state, for such
nothingness that he would not even be conscious of wind stirring
leaves above his grave, nor of the scent of earth and grass. Of
such nothingness that, however hard he might try to conceive it,
he never could, and must still hover on the hope that he might
see again those he loved! To realise this was to endure very
poignant spiritual anguish. Before he reached home that day he
had determined to keep it from Irene. He would have to be more
careful than man had ever been, for the least thing would give it
away and make her as wretched as himself, almost. His doctor had
passed him sound in other respects, and seventy was nothing of an
age—he would last a long time yet, if he could.
Such a conclusion, followed out for nearly two years, develops to
the full the subtler side of character. Naturally not abrupt,
except when nervously excited, Jolyon had become control
incarnate. The sad patience of old people who cannot exert
themselves was masked by a smile which his lips preserved even in
private. He devised continually all manner of cover to conceal
his enforced lack of exertion.
Mocking himself for so doing, he counterfeited conversion to the
Simple Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of
coffee with no coffee in it. In short, he made himself as safe as
a Forsyte in his condition could, under the rose of his mild
irony. Secure from discovery, since his wife and son had gone up
to Town, he had spent the fine May day quietly arranging his
papers, that he might die to-morrow without inconveniencing any
one, giving in fact a final polish to his terrestrial state.
Having docketed and enclosed it in his father's old Chinese
cabinet, he put the key into an envelope, wrote the words
outside: “Key of the Chinese cabinet, wherein will be found the
exact state of me, J. F.,” and put it in his breast-pocket, where
it would be always about him, in case of accident. Then, ringing
for tea, he went out to have it under the old oak-tree.
All are under sentence of death; Jolyon, whose sentence was but a
little more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that
he thought habitually, like other people, of other things. He
thought of his son now.
Jon was nineteen that day, and Jon had come of late to a
decision. Educated neither at Eton like his father, nor at
Harrow, like his dead half-brother, but at one of those
establishments which, designed to avoid the evil and contain the
good of the Public School system, may or may not contain the evil
and avoid the good, Jon had left in April perfectly ignorant of
what he wanted to become. The War, which had promised to go on
for ever, had ended just as he was about to join the Army, six
months before his time. It had taken him ever since to get used
to the idea that he could now choose for himself. He had held
with his father several discussions, from which, under a cheery
show of being ready for anything—except, of course, the Church,
Army, Law, Stage, Stock Exchange, Medicine, Business, and
Engineering—Jolyon had gathered rather clearly that Jon wanted to
go in for nothing. He himself had felt exactly like that at the
same age. With him that pleasant vacuity had soon been ended by
an early marriage, and its unhappy consequences. Forced to become
an underwriter at Lloyd's, he had regained prosperity before his
artistic talent had outcropped. But having—as the simple
say—“learned” his boy to draw pigs and other animals, he knew
that Jon would never be a painter, and inclined to the conclusion
that his aversion from everything else meant that he was going to
be a writer. Holding, however, the view that experience was
necessary even for that profession, there seemed to Jolyon
nothing in the meantime, for Jon, but University, travel, and
perhaps the eating of dinners for the Bar. After that one would
see, or more probably one would not. In face of these proffered
allurements, however, Jon had remained undecided.
Such discussions with his son had confirmed in Jolyon a doubt
whether the world had really changed. People said that it was a
new age. With the profundity of one not too long for any age,
Jolyon perceived that under slightly different surfaces the era
was precisely what it had been. Mankind was still divided into
two species: The few who had “speculation” in their souls, and
the many who had none, with a belt of hybrids like himself in the
middle. Jon appeared to have speculation; it seemed to his father
a bad lookout.
With something deeper, therefore, than his usual smile, he had
heard the boy say, a fortnight ago: “I should like to try
farming, Dad; if it won't cost you too much. It seems to be about
the only sort of life that doesn't hurt anybody; except art, and
of course that's out of the question for me.”
Jolyon subdued his smile, and answered:
“All right; you shall skip back to where we were under the first
Jolyon in 1760. It'll prove the cycle theory, and incidentally,
no doubt, you may grow a better turnip than he did.”
A little dashed, Jon had answered:
“But don't you think it's a good scheme, Dad?”
“'Twill serve, my dear; and if you should really take to it,
you'll do more good than most men, which is little enough.”
To himself, however, he had said: 'But he won't take to it. I
give him four years. Still, it's healthy, and harmless.'
After turning the matter over and consulting with Irene, he wrote
to his daughter, Mrs. Val Dartie, asking if they knew of a farmer
near them on the Downs who would take Jon as an apprentice.
Holly's answer had been enthusiastic. There was an excellent man
quite close; she and Val would love Jon to live with them.
The boy was due to go to-morrow.
Sipping weak tea with lemon in it, Jolyon gazed through the
leaves of the old oak-tree at that view which had appeared to him
desirable for thirty-two years. The tree beneath which he sat
seemed not a day older! So young, the little leaves of brownish
gold; so old, the whitey-grey-green of its thick rough trunk. A
tree of memories, which would live on hundreds of years yet,
unless some barbarian cut it down—would see old England out at
the pace things were going! He remembered a night three years
before, when, looking from his window, with his arm close round
Irene, he had watched a German aeroplane hovering, it seemed,
right over the old tree. Next day they had found a bomb hole in a
field on Gage's farm. That was before he knew that he was under
sentence of death. He could almost have wished the bomb had
finished him. It would have saved a lot of hanging about, many
hours of cold fear in the pit of his stomach. He had counted on
living to the normal Forsyte age of eighty-five or more, when
Irene would be seventy. As it was, she would miss him. Still
there was Jon, more important in her life than himself; Jon, who
adored his mother.
Under that tree, where old Jolyon—waiting for Irene to come to
him across the lawn—had breathed his last, Jolyon wondered,
whimsically, whether, having put everything in such perfect
order, he had not better close his own eyes and drift away. There
was something undignified in parasitically clinging on to the
effortless close of a life wherein he regretted two things
only—the long division between his father and himself when he was
young, and the lateness of his union with Irene.
From where he sat he could see a cluster of apple-trees in
blossom. Nothing in Nature moved him so much as fruit-trees in
blossom; and his heart ached suddenly because he might never see
them flower again. Spring! Decidedly no man ought to have to die
while his heart was still young enough to love beauty! Blackbirds
sang recklessly in the shrubbery, swallows were flying high, the
leaves above him glistened; and over the fields was every
imaginable tint of early foliage, burnished by the level
sunlight, away to where the distant “smoke-bush” blue was trailed
along the horizon. Irene's flowers in their narrow beds had