The Forsyte saga - Complete
Read it, and I think I'll go into the garden.” He reached forward
to get up.
Jon, who had taken the letter, said quickly, “No, I'll go”; and
was gone.
Jolyon sank back in his chair. A blue-bottle chose that moment to
come buzzing round him with a sort of fury; the sound was homely,
better than nothing.... Where had the boy gone to read his
letter? The wretched letter—the wretched story! A cruel
business—cruel to her—to Soames—to those two children—to
himself!... His heart thumped and pained him. Life—its loves—its
work—its beauty—its aching, and—its end! A good time; a fine time
in spite of all; until—you regretted that you had ever been born.
Life—it wore you down, yet did not make you want to die—that was
the cunning evil! Mistake to have a heart! Again the blue-bottle
came buzzing—bringing in all the heat and hum and scent of
summer—yes, even the scent—as of ripe fruits, dried grasses,
sappy shrubs, and the vanilla breath of cows. And out there
somewhere in the fragrance Jon would be reading that letter,
turning and twisting its pages in his trouble, his bewilderment
and trouble—breaking his heart about it! The thought made Jolyon
acutely miserable. Jon was such a tender-hearted chap,
affectionate to his bones, and conscientious, too—it was so
unfair, so damned unfair! He remembered Irene saying to him once:
“Never was any one born more loving and lovable than Jon.” Poor
little Jon! His world gone up the spout, all of a summer
afternoon! Youth took things so hard! And stirred, tormented by
that vision of Youth taking things hard, Jolyon got out of his
chair, and went to the window. The boy was nowhere visible. And
he passed out. If one could take any help to him now—one must!
He traversed the shrubbery, glanced into the walled garden—no
Jon! Nor where the peaches and the apricots were beginning to
swell and colour. He passed the Cupressus trees, dark and spiral,
into the meadow. Where had the boy got to? Had he rushed down to
the coppice—his old hunting-ground? Jolyon crossed the rows of
hay. They would cock it on Monday and be carrying the day after,
if rain held off. Often they had crossed this field together—hand
in hand, when Jon was a little chap. Dash it! The golden age was
over by the time one was ten! He came to the pond, where flies
and gnats were dancing over a bright reedy surface; and on into
the coppice. It was cool there, fragrant of larches. Still no
Jon! He called. No answer! On the log seat he sat down, nervous,
anxious, forgetting his own physical sensations. He had been
wrong to let the boy get away with that letter; he ought to have
kept him under his eye from the start! Greatly troubled, he got
up to retrace his steps. At the farm-buildings he called again,
and looked into the dark cow-house. There in the cool, and the
scent of vanilla and ammonia, away from flies, the three
Alderneys were chewing the quiet cud; just milked, waiting for
evening, to be turned out again into the lower field. One turned
a lazy head, a lustrous eye; Jolyon could see the slobber on its
grey lower lip. He saw everything with passionate clearness, in
the agitation of his nerves—all that in his time he had adored
and tried to paint—wonder of light and shade and colour. No
wonder the legend put Christ into a manger—what more devotional
than the eyes and moon-white horns of a chewing cow in the warm
dusk! He called again. No answer! And he hurried away out of the
coppice, past the pond, up the hill. Oddly ironical—now he came
to think of it—if Jon had taken the gruel of his discovery down
in the coppice where his mother and Bosinney in those old days
had made the plunge of acknowledging their love. Where he
himself, on the log seat the Sunday morning he came back from
Paris, had realised to the full that Irene had become the world
to him. That would have been the place for Irony to tear the veil
from before the eyes of Irene's boy! But he was not here! Where
had he got to? One must find the poor chap!
A gleam of sun had come, sharpening to his hurrying senses all
the beauty of the afternoon, of the tall trees and lengthening
shadows, of the blue, and the white clouds, the scent of the hay,
and the cooing of the pigeons; and the flower shapes standing
tall. He came to the rosery, and the beauty of the roses in that
sudden sunlight seemed to him unearthly. “Rose, you Spaniard!”
Wonderful three words! There she had stood by that bush of dark
red roses; had stood to read and decide that Jon must know it
all! He knew all now! Had she chosen wrong? He bent and sniffed a
rose, its petals brushed his nose and trembling lips; nothing so
soft as a rose-leaf's velvet, except her neck—Irene! On across
the lawn he went, up the slope, to the oak-tree. Its top alone
was glistening, for the sudden sun was away over the house; the
lower shade was thick, blessedly cool—he was greatly overheated.
He paused a minute with his hand on the rope of the swing—Jolly,
Holly—Jon! The old swing! And suddenly, he felt horribly—deadly
ill. 'I've over done it!' he thought: 'by Jove! I've overdone
it—after all!' He staggered up toward the terrace, dragged
himself up the steps, and fell against the wall of the house. He
leaned there gasping, his face buried in the honey-suckle that he
and she had taken such trouble with that it might sweeten the air
which drifted in. Its fragrance mingled with awful pain. 'My
love!' he thought; 'the boy!' And with a great effort he tottered
in through the long window, and sank into old Jolyon's chair. The
book was there, a pencil in it; he caught it up, scribbled a word
on the open page.... His hand dropped.... So it was like this—was
it?...
There was a great wrench; and darkness....
III.—IRENE
When Jon rushed away with the letter in his hand, he ran along
the terrace and round the corner of the house, in fear and
confusion. Leaning against the creepered wall he tore open the
letter. It was long—very long! This added to his fear, and he
began reading. When he came to the words: “It was Fleur's father
that she married,” everything seemed to spin before him. He was
close to a window, and entering by it, he passed, through
music-room and hall, up to his bedroom. Dipping his face in cold
water, he sat on his bed, and went on reading, dropping each
finished page on the bed beside him. His father's writing was
easy to read—he knew it so well, though he had never had a letter
from him one quarter so long. He read with a dull
feeling—imagination only half at work. He best grasped, on that
first reading, the pain his father must have had in writing such
a letter. He let the last sheet fall, and in a sort of mental,
moral helplessness began to read the first again. It all seemed
to him disgusting—dead and disgusting. Then, suddenly, a hot wave
of horrified emotion tingled through him. He buried his face in
his hands. His mother! Fleur's father! He took up the letter
again, and read on mechanically. And again came the feeling that
it was all dead and disgusting; his own love so different! This
letter said his mother—and her father! An awful letter!
Property! Could there be men who looked on women as their
property? Faces seen in street and countryside came thronging up
before him—red, stock-fish faces; hard, dull faces; prim, dry
faces; violent faces; hundreds, thousands of them! How could he
know what men who had such faces thought and did? He held his
head in his hands and groaned. His mother! He caught up the
letter and read on again: “horror and aversion-alive in her
to-day.... your children.... grandchildren.... of a man who once
owned your mother as a man might own a slave....” He got up from
his bed. This cruel shadowy past, lurking there to murder his
love and Fleur's, was true, or his father could never have
written it. 'Why didn't they tell me the first thing,' he
thought, 'the day I first saw Fleur? They knew I'd seen her. They
were afraid, and—now—I've—got it!' Overcome by misery too acute
for thought or reason, he crept into a dusky corner of the room
and sat down on the floor. He sat there, like some unhappy little
animal. There was comfort in dusk, and the floor—as if he were
back in those days when he played his battles sprawling all over
it. He sat there huddled, his hair ruffled, his hands clasped
round his knees, for how long he did not know. He was wrenched
from his blank wretchedness by the sound of the door opening from
his mother's room. The blinds were down over the windows of his
room, shut up in his absence, and from where he sat he could only
hear a rustle, her footsteps crossing, till beyond the bed he saw
her standing before his dressing-table. She had something in her
hand. He hardly breathed, hoping she would not see him, and go
away. He saw her touch things on the table as if they had some
virtue in them, then face the window-grey from head to foot like
a ghost. The least turn of her head, and she must see him! Her
lips moved: “Oh! Jon!” She was speaking to herself; the tone of
her voice troubled Jon's heart. He saw in her hand a little
photograph. She held it toward the light, looking at it—very
small. He knew it—one of himself as a tiny boy, which she always
kept in her bag. His heart beat fast. And, suddenly as if she had
heard it, she turned her eyes and saw him. At the gasp she gave,
and the movement of her hands pressing the photograph against her
breast, he said:
“Yes, it's me.”
She moved over to the bed, and sat down on it, quite close to
him, her hands still clasping her breast, her feet among the
sheets of the letter which had slipped to the floor. She saw
them, and her hands grasped the edge of the bed. She sat very
upright, her dark eyes fixed on him. At last she spoke.
“Well, Jon, you know, I see.”
“Yes.”
“You've seen Father?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence, till she said:
“Oh! my darling!”
“It's all right.” The emotions in him were so, violent and so
mixed that he dared not move—resentment, despair, and yet a
strange yearning for the comfort of her hand on his forehead.
“What are you going to do?”
“I don't know.”
There was another long silence, then she got up. She stood a
moment, very still, made a little movement with her hand, and
said: “My darling boy, my most darling boy, don't think of
me—think of yourself,” and, passing round the foot of the bed,
went back into her room.
Jon turned—curled into a sort of ball, as might a hedgehog—into
the corner made by the two walls.
He must have been twenty minutes there before a cry roused him.
It came from the terrace below. He got up, scared. Again came the
cry: “Jon!” His mother was calling! He ran out and down the
stairs, through the empty dining-room into the study. She was