The Forsyte saga - Complete
startling individuality that evening, little deep assertions of
gay life. Only Chinese and Japanese painters, and perhaps
Leonardo, had known how to get that startling little ego into
each painted flower, and bird, and beast—the ego, yet the sense
of species, the universality of life as well. They were the
fellows! 'I've made nothing that will live!' thought Jolyon;
'I've been an amateur—a mere lover, not a creator. Still, I shall
leave Jon behind me when I go.' What luck that the boy had not
been caught by that ghastly war! He might so easily have been
killed, like poor Jolly twenty years ago out in the Transvaal.
Jon would do something some day—if the Age didn't spoil him—an
imaginative chap! His whim to take up farming was but a bit of
sentiment, and about as likely to last. And just then he saw them
coming up the field: Irene and the boy; walking from the station,
with their arms linked. And getting up, he strolled down through
the new rose garden to meet them....
Irene came into his room that night and sat down by the window.
She sat there without speaking till he said:
“What is it, my love?”
“We had an encounter to-day.”
“With whom?”
“Soames.”
Soames! He had kept that name out of his thoughts these last two
years; conscious that it was bad for him. And, now, his heart
moved in a disconcerting manner, as if it had side-slipped within
his chest.
Irene went on quietly:
“He and his daughter were in the Gallery, and afterward at the
confectioner's where we had tea.”
Jolyon went over and put his hand on her shoulder.
“How did he look?”
“Grey; but otherwise much the same.”
“And the daughter?”
“Pretty. At least, Jon thought so.”
Jolyon's heart side-slipped again. His wife's face had a strained
and puzzled look.
“You didn't-?” he began.
“No; but Jon knows their name. The girl dropped her handkerchief
and he picked it up.”
Jolyon sat down on his bed. An evil chance!
“June was with you. Did she put her foot into it?”
“No; but it was all very queer and strained, and Jon could see it
was.”
Jolyon drew a long breath, and said:
“I've often wondered whether we've been right to keep it from
him. He'll find out some day.”
“The later the better, Jolyon; the young have such cheap, hard
judgment. When you were nineteen what would you have thought of
your mother if she had done what I have?”
Yes! There it was! Jon worshipped his mother; and knew nothing of
the tragedies, the inexorable necessities of life, nothing of the
prisoned grief in an unhappy marriage, nothing of jealousy or
passion—knew nothing at all, as yet!
“What have you told him?” he said at last.
“That they were relations, but we didn't know them; that you had
never cared much for your family, or they for you. I expect he
will be asking you.”
Jolyon smiled. “This promises to take the place of air-raids,” he
said. “After all, one misses them.”
Irene looked up at him.
“We've known it would come some day.”
He answered her with sudden energy:
“I could never stand seeing Jon blame you. He shan't do that,
even in thought. He has imagination; and he'll understand if it's
put to him properly. I think I had better tell him before he gets
to know otherwise.”
“Not yet, Jolyon.”
That was like her—she had no foresight, and never went to meet
trouble. Still—who knew?—she might be right. It was ill going
against a mother's instinct. It might be well to let the boy go
on, if possible, till experience had given him some touchstone by
which he could judge the values of that old tragedy; till love,
jealousy, longing, had deepened his charity. All the same, one
must take precautions—every precaution possible! And, long after
Irene had left him, he lay awake turning over those precautions.
He must write to Holly, telling her that Jon knew nothing as yet
of family history. Holly was discreet, she would make sure of her
husband, she would see to it! Jon could take the letter with him
when he went to-morrow.
And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material
estate died out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another
began for Jolyon in the shadow of a spiritual disorder which
could not be so rounded off and polished....
But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too,
the prey of a sensation disputed by those who have never known
it, “love at first sight!” He had felt it beginning in him with
the glint of those dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno—a
conviction that this was his 'dream'. so that what followed had
seemed to him at once natural and miraculous. Fleur! Her name
alone was almost enough for one who was terribly susceptible to
the charm of words. In a homoeopathic Age, when boys and girls
were co-educated, and mixed up in early life till sex was almost
abolished, Jon was singularly old-fashioned. His modern school
took boys only, and his holidays had been spent at Robin Hill
with boy friends, or his parents alone. He had never, therefore,
been inoculated against the germs of love by small doses of the
poison. And now in the dark his temperature was mounting fast. He
lay awake, featuring Fleur—as they called it—recalling her words,
especially that “Au revoir!” so soft and sprightly.
He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on
tennis shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept
downstairs and out through the study window. It was just light;
there was a smell of grass. 'Fleur!' he thought; 'Fleur!' It was
mysteriously white out of doors, with nothing awake except the
birds just beginning to chirp. 'I'll go down into the coppice,'
he thought. He ran down through the fields, reached the pond just
as the sun rose, and passed into the coppice. Bluebells carpeted
the ground there; among the larch-trees there was mystery—the
air, as it were, composed of that romantic quality. Jon sniffed
its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the sharpening
light. Fleur! It rhymed with her! And she lived at Mapleduram—a
jolly name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find it in the
atlas presently. He would write to her. But would she answer? Oh!
She must. She had said “Au revoir!” Not good-bye! What luck that
she had dropped her handkerchief! He would never have known her
but for that. And the more he thought of that handkerchief, the
more amazing his luck seemed. Fleur! It certainly rhymed with
her! Rhythm thronged his head; words jostled to be joined
together; he was on the verge of a poem.
Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then
returned to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his
bedroom window out of sheer exhilaration. Then, remembering that
the study window was open, he went down and shut it, first
removing the ladder, so as to obliterate all traces of his
feeling. The thing was too deep to be revealed to mortal
soul-even-to his mother.
IV.—THE MAUSOLEUM
There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time,
leaving their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite
the condition of “Timothy's” on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy's
soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte's body, and Smither
kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and
house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.
To Forsyte imagination that house was now a sort of Chinese
pill-box, a series of layers in the last of which was Timothy.
One did not reach him, or so it was reported by members of the
family who, out of old-time habit or absentmindedness, would
drive up once in a blue moon and ask after their surviving uncle.
Such were Francie, now quite emancipated from God (she frankly
avowed atheism), Euphemia, emancipated from old Nicholas, and
Winifred Dartie from her “man of the world.” But, after all,
everybody was emancipated now, or said they were—perhaps not
quite the same thing!
When Soames, therefore, took it on his way to Paddington station
on the morning after that encounter, it was hardly with the
expectation of seeing Timothy in the flesh. His heart made a
faint demonstration within him while he stood in full south
sunlight on the newly whitened doorstep of that little house
where four Forsytes had once lived, and now but one dwelt on like
a winter fly; the house into which Soames had come and out of
which he had gone times without number, divested of, or burdened
with, fardels of family gossip; the house of the “old people” of
another century, another age.
The sight of Smither—still corseted up to the armpits because the
new fashion which came in as they were going out about 1903 had
never been considered “nice” by Aunts Juley and Hester—brought a
pale friendliness to Soames' lips; Smither, still faithfully
arranged to old pattern in every detail, an invaluable
servant—none such left—smiling back at him, with the words: “Why!
it's Mr. Soames, after all this time! And how are you, sir? Mr.
Timothy will be so pleased to know you've been.”
“How is he?”
“Oh! he keeps fairly bobbish for his age, sir; but of course he's
a wonderful man. As I said to Mrs. Dartie when she was here last:
It would please Miss Forsyte and Mrs. Juley and Miss Hester to
see how he relishes a baked apple still. But he's quite deaf. And
a mercy, I always think. For what we should have done with him in
the air-raids, I don't know.”
“Ah!” said Soames. “What did you do with him?”
“We just left him in his bed, and had the bell run down into the
cellar, so that Cook and I could hear him if he rang. It would
never have done to let him know there was a war on. As I said to
Cook, 'If Mr. Timothy rings, they may do what they like—I'm going
up. My dear mistresses would have a fit if they could see him
ringing and nobody going to him.' But he slept through them all
beautiful. And the one in the daytime he was having his bath. It
was a mercy, because he might have noticed the people in the
street all looking up—he often looks out of the window.”
“Quite!” murmured Soames. Smither was getting garrulous! “I just
want to look round and see if there's anything to be done.”
“Yes, sir. I don't think there's anything except a smell of mice
in the dining-room that we don't know how to get rid of. It's
funny they should be there, and not a crumb, since Mr. Timothy
took to not coming down, just before the War. But they're nasty
little things; you never know where they'll take you next.”
“Does he leave his bed?”—
“Oh! yes, sir; he takes nice exercise between his bed and the
window in the morning, not to risk a change of air. And he's
quite comfortable in himself; has his Will out every day regular.
It's a great consolation to him—that.”