The Forsyte saga - Complete
little study. He opened the long window for air, and the door,
that he might still hear her music drifting in; and, settled in
his father's old armchair, closed his eyes, with his head against
the worn brown leather. Like that passage of the Cesar Franck
Sonata—so had been his life with her, a divine third movement.
And now this business of Jon's—this bad business! Drifted to the
edge of consciousness, he hardly knew if it were in sleep that he
smelled the scent of a cigar, and seemed to see his father in the
blackness before his closed eyes. That shape formed, went, and
formed again; as if in the very chair where he himself was
sitting, he saw his father, black-coated, with knees crossed,
glasses balanced between thumb and finger; saw the big white
moustaches, and the deep eyes looking up below a dome of forehead
and seeming to search his own, seeming to speak. “Are you facing
it, Jo? It's for you to decide. She's only a woman!” Ah! how well
he knew his father in that phrase; how all the Victorian Age came
up with it! And his answer “No, I've funked it—funked hurting her
and Jon and myself. I've got a heart; I've funked it.” But the
old eyes, so much older, so much younger than his own, kept at
it; “It's your wife, your son; your past. Tackle it, my boy!” Was
it a message from walking spirit; or but the instinct of his sire
living on within him? And again came that scent of cigar
smoke-from the old saturated leather. Well! he would tackle it,
write to Jon, and put the whole thing down in black and white!
And suddenly he breathed with difficulty, with a sense of
suffocation, as if his heart were swollen. He got up and went out
into the air. The stars were very bright. He passed along the
terrace round the corner of the house, till, through the window
of the music-room, he could see Irene at the piano, with
lamp-light falling on her powdery hair; withdrawn into herself
she seemed, her dark eyes staring straight before her, her hands
idle. Jolyon saw her raise those hands and clasp them over her
breast. 'It's Jon, with her,' he thought; 'all Jon! I'm dying out
of her—it's natural!'
And, careful not to be seen, he stole back.
Next day, after a bad night, he sat down to his task. He wrote
with difficulty and many erasures.
“MY DEAREST BOY,
“You are old enough to understand how very difficult it is for
elders to give themselves away to their young. Especially
when—like your mother and myself, though I shall never think of
her as anything but young—their hearts are altogether set on him
to whom they must confess. I cannot say we are conscious of
having sinned exactly—people in real life very seldom are, I
believe—but most persons would say we had, and at all events our
conduct, righteous or not, has found us out. The truth is, my
dear, we both have pasts, which it is now my task to make known
to you, because they so grievously and deeply affect your future.
Many, very many years ago, as far back indeed as 1883, when she
was only twenty, your mother had the great and lasting misfortune
to make an unhappy marriage—no, not with me, Jon. Without money
of her own, and with only a stepmother—closely related to
Jezebel—she was very unhappy in her home life. It was Fleur's
father that she married, my cousin Soames Forsyte. He had pursued
her very tenaciously and to do him justice was deeply in love
with her. Within a week she knew the fearful mistake she had
made. It was not his fault; it was her error of judgment—her
misfortune.”
So far Jolyon had kept some semblance of irony, but now his
subject carried him away.
“Jon, I want to explain to you if I can—and it's very hard—how it
is that an unhappy marriage such as this can so easily come
about. You will of course say: 'If she didn't really love him how
could she ever have married him?' You would be right if it were
not for one or two rather terrible considerations. From this
initial mistake of hers all the subsequent trouble, sorrow, and
tragedy have come, and so I must make it clear to you if I can.
You see, Jon, in those days and even to this day—indeed, I don't
see, for all the talk of enlightenment, how it can well be
otherwise—most girls are married ignorant of the sexual side of
life. Even if they know what it means they have not experienced
it. That's the crux. It is this actual lack of experience,
whatever verbal knowledge they have, which makes all the
difference and all the trouble. In a vast number of marriages-and
your mother's was one—girls are not and cannot be certain whether
they love the man they marry or not; they do not know until after
that act of union which makes the reality of marriage. Now, in
many, perhaps in most doubtful cases, this act cements and
strengthens the attachment, but in other cases, and your mother's
was one, it is a revelation of mistake, a destruction of such
attraction as there was. There is nothing more tragic in a
woman's life than such a revelation, growing daily, nightly
clearer. Coarse-grained and unthinking people are apt to laugh at
such a mistake, and say, 'What a fuss about nothing!' Narrow and
self-righteous people, only capable of judging the lives of
others by their own, are apt to condemn those who make this
tragic error, to condemn them for life to the dungeons they have
made for themselves. You know the expression: 'She has made her
bed, she must lie on it!' It is a hard-mouthed saying, quite
unworthy of a gentleman or lady in the best sense of those words;
and I can use no stronger condemnation. I have not been what is
called a moral man, but I wish to use no words to you, my dear,
which will make you think lightly of ties or contracts into which
you enter. Heaven forbid! But with the experience of a life
behind me I do say that those who condemn the victims of these
tragic mistakes, condemn them and hold out no hands to help them,
are inhuman, or rather they would be if they had the
understanding to know what they are doing. But they haven't! Let
them go! They are as much anathema to me as I, no doubt, am to
them. I have had to say all this, because I am going to put you
into a position to judge your mother, and you are very young,
without experience of what life is. To go on with the story.
After three years of effort to subdue her shrinking—I was going
to say her loathing and it's not too strong a word, for shrinking
soon becomes loathing under such circumstances—three years of
what to a sensitive, beauty-loving nature like your mother's,
Jon, was torment, she met a young man who fell in love with her.
He was the architect of this very house that we live in now, he
was building it for her and Fleur's father to live in, a new
prison to hold her, in place of the one she inhabited with him in
London. Perhaps that fact played some part in what came of it.
But in any case she, too, fell in love with him. I know it's not
necessary to explain to you that one does not precisely choose
with whom one will fall in love. It comes. Very well! It came. I
can imagine—though she never said much to me about it—the
struggle that then took place in her, because, Jon, she was
brought up strictly and was not light in her ideas—not at all.
However, this was an overwhelming feeling, and it came to pass
that they loved in deed as well as in thought. Then came a
fearful tragedy. I must tell you of it because if I don't you
will never understand the real situation that you have now to
face. The man whom she had married—Soames Forsyte, the father of
Fleur one night, at the height of her passion for this young man,
forcibly reasserted his rights over her. The next day she met her
lover and told him of it. Whether he committed suicide or whether
he was accidentally run over in his distraction, we never knew;
but so it was. Think of your mother as she was that evening when
she heard of his death. I happened to see her. Your grandfather
sent me to help her if I could. I only just saw her, before the
door was shut against me by her husband. But I have never
forgotten her face, I can see it now. I was not in love with her
then, not for twelve years after, but I have never forgotten. My
dear boy—it is not easy to write like this. But you see, I must.
Your mother is wrapped up in you, utterly, devotedly. I don't
wish to write harshly of Soames Forsyte. I don't think harshly of
him. I have long been sorry for him; perhaps I was sorry even
then. As the world judges she was in error, he within his rights.
He loved her—in his way. She was his property. That is the view
he holds of life—of human feelings and hearts—property. It's not
his fault—so was he born. To me it is a view that has always been
abhorrent—so was I born! Knowing you as I do, I feel it cannot be
otherwise than abhorrent to you. Let me go on with the story.
Your mother fled from his house that night; for twelve years she
lived quietly alone without companionship of any sort, until in
1899 her husband—you see, he was still her husband, for he did
not attempt to divorce her, and she of course had no right to
divorce him—became conscious, it seems, of the want of children,
and commenced a long attempt to induce her to go back to him and
give him a child. I was her trustee then, under your
Grandfather's Will, and I watched this going on. While watching,
I became attached to her, devotedly attached. His pressure
increased, till one day she came to me here and practically put
herself under my protection. Her husband, who was kept informed
of all her movements, attempted to force us apart by bringing a
divorce suit, or possibly he really meant it, I don't know; but
anyway our names were publicly joined. That decided us, and we
became united in fact. She was divorced, married me, and you were
born. We have lived in perfect happiness, at least I have, and I
believe your mother also. Soames, soon after the divorce, married
Fleur's mother, and she was born. That is the story, Jon. I have
told it you, because by the affection which we see you have
formed for this man's daughter you are blindly moving toward what
must utterly destroy your mother's happiness, if not your own. I
don't wish to speak of myself, because at my age there's no use
supposing I shall cumber the ground much longer, besides, what I
should suffer would be mainly on her account, and on yours. But
what I want you to realise is that feelings of horror and
aversion such as those can never be buried or forgotten. They are
alive in her to-day. Only yesterday at Lord's we happened to see
Soames Forsyte. Her face, if you had seen it, would have
convinced you. The idea that you should marry his daughter is a
nightmare to her, Jon. I have nothing to say against Fleur save
that she is his daughter. But your children, if you married her,