The Forsyte saga - Complete
And soon after he gave her his blessing, received a kiss, and
left her for his bookmaker's, the Iseeum Club, and Victoria
station.
VI.—JON
Mrs. Val Dartie, after twenty years of South Africa, had fallen
deeply in love, fortunately with something of her own, for the
object of her passion was the prospect in front of her windows,
the cool clear light on the green Downs. It was England again, at
last! England more beautiful than she had dreamed. Chance had, in
fact, guided the Val Darties to a spot where the South Downs had
real charm when the sun shone. Holly had enough of her father's
eye to apprehend the rare quality of their outlines and chalky
radiance; to go up there by the ravine-like lane and wander along
toward Chanctonbury or Amberley, was still a delight which she
hardly attempted to share with Val, whose admiration of Nature
was confused by a Forsyte's instinct for getting something out of
it, such as the condition of the turf for his horses' exercise.
Driving the Ford home with a certain humouring, smoothness, she
promised herself that the first use she would make of Jon would
be to take him up there, and show him “the view” under this
May-day sky.
She was looking forward to her young half-brother with a
motherliness not exhausted by Val. A three-day visit to Robin
Hill, soon after their arrival home, had yielded no sight of
him—he was still at school; so that her recollection, like Val's,
was of a little sunny-haired boy, striped blue and yellow, down
by the pond.
Those three days at Robin Hill had been exciting, sad,
embarrassing. Memories of her dead brother, memories of Val's
courtship; the ageing of her father, not seen for twenty years,
something funereal in his ironic gentleness which did not escape
one who had much subtle instinct; above all, the presence of her
stepmother, whom she could still vaguely remember as the “lady in
grey” of days when she was little and grandfather alive and
Mademoiselle Beauce so cross because that intruder gave her music
lessons—all these confused and tantalised a spirit which had
longed to find Robin Hill untroubled. But Holly was adept at
keeping things to herself, and all had seemed to go quite well.
Her father had kissed her when she left him, with lips which she
was sure had trembled.
“Well, my dear,” he said, “the War hasn't changed Robin Hill, has
it? If only you could have brought Jolly back with you! I say,
can you stand this spiritualistic racket? When the oak-tree dies,
it dies, I'm afraid.”
From the warmth of her embrace he probably divined that he had
let the cat out of the bag, for he rode off at once on irony.
“Spiritualism—queer word, when the more they manifest the more
they prove that they've got hold of matter.”
“How?” said Holly.
“Why! Look at their photographs of auric presences. You must have
something material for light and shade to fall on before you can
take a photograph. No, it'll end in our calling all matter
spirit, or all spirit matter—I don't know which.”
“But don't you believe in survival, Dad?”
Jolyon had looked at her, and the sad whimsicality of his face
impressed her deeply.
“Well, my dear, I should like to get something out of death. I've
been looking into it a bit. But for the life of me I can't find
anything that telepathy, sub-consciousness, and emanation from
the storehouse of this world can't account for just as well. Wish
I could! Wishes father thought but they don't breed evidence.”
Holly had pressed her lips again to his forehead with the feeling
that it confirmed his theory that all matter was becoming
spirit—his brow felt, somehow, so insubstantial.
But the most poignant memory of that little visit had been
watching, unobserved, her stepmother reading to herself a letter
from Jon. It was—she decided—the prettiest sight she had ever
seen. Irene, lost as it were in the letter of her boy, stood at a
window where the light fell on her face and her fine grey hair;
her lips were moving, smiling, her dark eyes laughing, dancing,
and the hand which did not hold the letter was pressed against
her breast. Holly withdrew as from a vision of perfect love,
convinced that Jon must be nice.
When she saw him coming out of the station with a kit-bag in
either hand, she was confirmed in her predisposition. He was a
little like Jolly, that long-lost idol of her childhood, but
eager-looking and less formal, with deeper eyes and
brighter-coloured hair, for he wore no hat; altogether a very
interesting “little” brother!
His tentative politeness charmed one who was accustomed to
assurance in the youthful manner; he was disturbed because she
was to drive him home, instead of his driving her. Shouldn't he
have a shot? They hadn't a car at Robin Hill since the War, of
course, and he had only driven once, and landed up a bank, so she
oughtn't to mind his trying. His laugh, soft and infectious, was
very attractive, though that word, she had heard, was now quite
old-fashioned. When they reached the house he pulled out a
crumpled letter which she read while he was washing—a quite short
letter, which must have cost her father many a pang to write.
“MY DEAR,
“You and Val will not forget, I trust, that Jon knows nothing of
family history. His mother and I think he is too young at
present. The boy is very dear, and the apple of her eye. Verbum
sapientibus,
“Your loving father,
“J. F.”
That was all; but it renewed in Holly an uneasy regret that Fleur
was coming.
After tea she fulfilled that promise to herself and took Jon up
the hill. They had a long talk, sitting above an old chalk-pit
grown over with brambles and goosepenny. Milkwort and liverwort
starred the green slope, the larks sang, and thrushes in the
brake, and now and then a gull flighting inland would wheel very
white against the paling sky, where the vague moon was coming up.
Delicious fragrance came to them, as if little invisible
creatures were running and treading scent out of the blades of
grass.
Jon, who had fallen silent, said rather suddenly:
“I say, this is wonderful! There's no fat on it at all. Gull's
flight and sheep-bells.”
“'Gull's flight and sheep-bells'. You're a poet, my dear!”
Jon sighed.
“Oh, Golly! No go!”
“Try! I used to at your age.”
“Did you? Mother says 'try' too; but I'm so rotten. Have you any
of yours for me to see?”
“My dear,” Holly murmured, “I've been married nineteen years. I
only wrote verses when I wanted to be.”
“Oh!” said Jon, and turned over on his face: the one cheek she
could see was a charming colour. Was Jon “touched in the wind,”
then, as Val would have called it? Already? But, if so, all the
better, he would take no notice of young Fleur. Besides, on
Monday he would begin his farming. And she smiled. Was it Burns
who followed the plough, or only Piers Plowman? Nearly every
young man and most young women seemed to be poets now, judging
from the number of their books she had read out in South Africa,
importing them from Hatchus and Bumphards; and quite good—oh!
quite; much better than she had been herself! But then poetry had
only really come in since her day—with motor-cars. Another long
talk after dinner over a wood fire in the low hall, and there
seemed little left to know about Jon except anything of real
importance. Holly parted from him at his bedroom door, having
seen twice over that he had everything, with the conviction that
she would love him, and Val would like him. He was eager, but did
not gush; he was a splendid listener, sympathetic, reticent about
himself. He evidently loved their father, and adored his mother.
He liked riding, rowing, and fencing better than games. He saved
moths from candles, and couldn't bear spiders, but put them out
of doors in screws of paper sooner than kill them. In a word, he
was amiable. She went to sleep, thinking that he would suffer
horribly if anybody hurt him; but who would hurt him?
Jon, on the other hand, sat awake at his window with a bit of
paper and a pencil, writing his first “real poem” by the light of
a candle because there was not enough moon to see by, only enough
to make the night seem fluttery and as if engraved on silver.
Just the night for Fleur to walk, and turn her eyes, and lead
on-over the hills and far away. And Jon, deeply furrowed in his
ingenuous brow, made marks on the paper and rubbed them out and
wrote them in again, and did all that was necessary for the
completion of a work of art; and he had a feeling such as the
winds of Spring must have, trying their first songs among the
coming blossom. Jon was one of those boys (not many) in whom a
home-trained love of beauty had survived school life. He had had
to keep it to himself, of course, so that not even the
drawing-master knew of it; but it was there, fastidious and clear
within him. And his poem seemed to him as lame and stilted as the
night was winged. But he kept it, all the same. It was a “beast,”
but better than nothing as an expression of the inexpressible.
And he thought with a sort of discomfiture: 'I shan't be able to
show it to Mother.' He slept terribly well, when he did sleep,
overwhelmed by novelty.
VII.—FLEUR
To avoid the awkwardness of questions which could not be
answered, all that had been told Jon was:
“There's a girl coming down with Val for the week-end.”
For the same reason, all that had been told Fleur was: “We've got
a youngster staying with us.”
The two yearlings, as Val called them in his thoughts, met
therefore in a manner which for unpreparedness left nothing to be
desired. They were thus introduced by Holly:
“This is Jon, my little brother; Fleur's a cousin of ours, Jon.”
Jon, who was coming in through a French window out of strong
sunlight, was so confounded by the providential nature of this
miracle, that he had time to hear Fleur say calmly: “Oh, how do
you do?” as if he had never seen her, and to understand dimly
from the quickest imaginable little movement of her head that he
never had seen her. He bowed therefore over her hand in an
intoxicated manner, and became more silent than the grave. He
knew better than to speak. Once in his early life, surprised
reading by a nightlight, he had said fatuously “I was just
turning over the leaves, Mum,” and his mother had replied: “Jon,
never tell stories, because of your face nobody will ever believe
them.”
The saying had permanently undermined the confidence necessary to
the success of spoken untruth. He listened therefore to Fleur's
swift and rapt allusions to the jolliness of everything, plied
her with scones and jam, and got away as soon as might be. They
say that in delirium tremens you see a fixed object, preferably