The Forsyte saga - Complete
dreamless night of it, soothed by the lack of wind. The Mayfly
filly, hardly accustomed to her new quarters, scraped at her
straw a little; and the few night-flitting things—bats, moths,
owls—were vigorous in the warm darkness; but the peace of night
lay in the brain of all day-time Nature, colourless and still.
Men and women, alone, riding the hobby-horses of anxiety or love,
burned their wavering tapers of dream and thought into the lonely
hours.
Fleur, leaning out of her window, heard the hall clock's muffled
chime of twelve, the tiny splash of a fish, the sudden shaking of
an aspen's leaves in the puffs of breeze that rose along the
river, the distant rumble of a night train, and time and again
the sounds which none can put a name to in the darkness, soft
obscure expressions of uncatalogued emotions from man and beast,
bird and machine, or, maybe, from departed Forsytes, Darties,
Cardigans, taking night strolls back into a world which had once
suited their embodied spirits. But Fleur heeded not these sounds;
her spirit, far from disembodied, fled with swift wing from
railway-carriage to flowery hedge, straining after Jon, tenacious
of his forbidden image, and the sound of his voice, which was
taboo. And she crinkled her nose, retrieving from the perfume of
the riverside night that moment when his hand slipped between the
mayflowers and her cheek. Long she leaned out in her freak dress,
keen to burn her wings at life's candle; while the moths brushed
her cheeks on their pilgrimage to the lamp on her dressing-table,
ignorant that in a Forsyte's house there is no open flame. But at
last even she felt sleepy, and, forgetting her bells, drew
quickly in.
Through the open window of his room, alongside Annette's, Soames,
wakeful too, heard their thin faint tinkle, as it might be shaken
from stars, or the dewdrops falling from a flower, if one could
hear such sounds.
'Caprice!' he thought. 'I can't tell. She's wilful. What shall I
do? Fleur!'
And long into the “small” night he brooded.
PART II
I.—MOTHER AND SON
To say that Jon Forsyte accompanied his mother to Spain
unwillingly would scarcely have been adequate. He went as a
well-natured dog goes for a walk with its mistress, leaving a
choice mutton-bone on the lawn. He went looking back at it.
Forsytes deprived of their mutton-bones are wont to sulk. But Jon
had little sulkiness in his composition. He adored his mother,
and it was his first travel. Spain had become Italy by his simply
saying: “I'd rather go to Spain, Mum; you've been to Italy so
many times; I'd like it new to both of us.”
The fellow was subtle besides being naive. He never forgot that
he was going to shorten the proposed two months into six weeks,
and must therefore show no sign of wishing to do so. For one with
so enticing a mutton-bone and so fixed an idea, he made a good
enough travelling companion, indifferent to where or when he
arrived, superior to food, and thoroughly appreciative of a
country strange to the most travelled Englishman. Fleur's wisdom
in refusing to write to him was profound, for he reached each new
place entirely without hope or fever, and could concentrate
immediate attention on the donkeys and tumbling bells, the
priests, patios, beggars, children, crowing cocks, sombreros,
cactus-hedges, old high white villages, goats, olive-trees,
greening plains, singing birds in tiny cages, watersellers,
sunsets, melons, mules, great churches, pictures, and swimming
grey-brown mountains of a fascinating land.
It was already hot, and they enjoyed an absence of their
compatriots. Jon, who, so far as he knew, had no blood in him
which was not English, was often innately unhappy in the presence
of his own countrymen. He felt they had no nonsense about them,
and took a more practical view of things than himself. He
confided to his mother that he must be an unsociable beast—it was
jolly to be away from everybody who could talk about the things
people did talk about. To which Irene had replied simply:
“Yes, Jon, I know.”
In this isolation he had unparalleled opportunities of
appreciating what few sons can apprehend, the whole-heartedness
of a mother's love. Knowledge of something kept from her made
him, no doubt, unduly sensitive; and a Southern people stimulated
his admiration for her type of beauty, which he had been
accustomed to hear called Spanish, but which he now perceived to
be no such thing. Her beauty was neither English, French,
Spanish, nor Italian—it was special! He appreciated, too, as
never before, his mother's subtlety of instinct. He could not
tell, for instance, whether she had noticed his absorption in
that Goya picture, “La Vendimia,” or whether she knew that he had
slipped back there after lunch and again next morning, to stand
before it full half an hour, a second and third time. It was not
Fleur, of course, but like enough to give him heartache—so dear
to lovers—remembering her standing at the foot of his bed with
her hand held above her head. To keep a postcard reproduction of
this picture in his pocket and slip it out to look at became for
Jon one of those bad habits which soon or late disclose
themselves to eyes sharpened by love, fear, or jealousy. And his
mother's were sharpened by all three. In Granada he was fairly
caught, sitting on a sun-warmed stone bench in a little
battlemented garden on the Alhambra hill, whence he ought to have
been looking at the view. His mother, he had thought, was
examining the potted stocks between the polled acacias, when her
voice said:
“Is that your favourite Goya, Jon?”
He checked, too late, a movement such as he might have made at
school to conceal some surreptitious document, and answered:
“Yes.”
“It certainly is most charming; but I think I prefer the
'Quitasol' Your father would go crazy about Goya; I don't believe
he saw them when he was in Spain in '92.”
In '92—nine years before he had been born! What had been the
previous existences of his father and his mother? If they had a
right to share in his future, surely he had a right to share in
their pasts. He looked up at her. But something in her face—a
look of life hard-lived, the mysterious impress of emotions,
experience, and suffering-seemed, with its incalculable depth,
its purchased sanctity, to make curiosity impertinent. His mother
must have had a wonderfully interesting life; she was so
beautiful, and so—so—but he could not frame what he felt about
her. He got up, and stood gazing down at the town, at the plain
all green with crops, and the ring of mountains glamorous in
sinking sunlight. Her life was like the past of this old Moorish
city, full, deep, remote—his own life as yet such a baby of a
thing, hopelessly ignorant and innocent! They said that in those
mountains to the West, which rose sheer from the blue-green
plain, as if out of a sea, Phoenicians had dwelt—a dark, strange,
secret race, above the land! His mother's life was as unknown to
him, as secret, as that Phoenician past was to the town down
there, whose cocks crowed and whose children played and clamoured
so gaily, day in, day out. He felt aggrieved that she should know
all about him and he nothing about her except that she loved him
and his father, and was beautiful. His callow ignorance—he had
not even had the advantage of the War, like nearly everybody
else!—made him small in his own eyes.
That night, from the balcony of his bedroom, he gazed down on the
roof of the town—as if inlaid with honeycomb of jet, ivory, and
gold; and, long after, he lay awake, listening to the cry of the
sentry as the hours struck, and forming in his head these lines:
“Voice in the night crying, down in the old sleeping Spanish city
darkened under her white stars!
“What says the voice-its clear-lingering anguish? Just the
watchman, telling his dateless tale of safety? Just a road-man,
flinging to the moon his song?
“No! Tis one deprived, whose lover's heart is weeping, Just his
cry: 'How long?'”
The word “deprived” seemed to him cold and unsatisfactory, but
“bereaved” was too final, and no other word of two syllables
short-long came to him, which would enable him to keep “whose
lover's heart is weeping.” It was past two by the time he had
finished it, and past three before he went to sleep, having said
it over to himself at least twenty-four times. Next day he wrote
it out and enclosed it in one of those letters to Fleur which he
always finished before he went down, so as to have his mind free
and companionable.
About noon that same day, on the tiled terrace of their hotel, he
felt a sudden dull pain in the back of his head, a queer
sensation in the eyes, and sickness. The sun had touched him too
affectionately. The next three days were passed in semi-darkness,
and a dulled, aching indifference to all except the feel of ice
on his forehead and his mother's smile. She never moved from his
room, never relaxed her noiseless vigilance, which seemed to Jon
angelic. But there were moments when he was extremely sorry for
himself, and wished terribly that Fleur could see him. Several
times he took a poignant imaginary leave of her and of the earth,
tears oozing out of his eyes. He even prepared the message he
would send to her by his mother—who would regret to her dying day
that she had ever sought to separate them—his poor mother! He was
not slow, however, in perceiving that he had now his excuse for
going home.
Toward half-past six each evening came a “gasgacha” of bells—a
cascade of tumbling chimes, mounting from the city below and
falling back chime on chime. After listening to them on the
fourth day he said suddenly:
“I'd like to be back in England, Mum, the sun's too hot.”
“Very well, darling. As soon as you're fit to travel” And at once
he felt better, and—meaner.
They had been out five weeks when they turned toward home. Jon's
head was restored to its pristine clarity, but he was confined to
a hat lined by his mother with many layers of orange and green
silk and he still walked from choice in the shade. As the long
struggle of discretion between them drew to its close, he
wondered more and more whether she could see his eagerness to get
back to that which she had brought him away from. Condemned by
Spanish Providence to spend a day in Madrid between their trains,
it was but natural to go again to the Prado. Jon was elaborately
casual this time before his Goya girl. Now that he was going back
to her, he could afford a lesser scrutiny. It was his mother who
lingered before the picture, saying:
“The face and the figure of the girl are exquisite.”
Jon heard her uneasily. Did she understand? But he felt once more
that he was no match for her in self-control and subtlety. She