The Forsyte saga - Complete
give me up! If you do, I don't know what—I feel so desperate.
What does it matter—all that past—compared with this?”
She clung to him. He kissed her eyes, her cheeks, her lips. But
while he kissed her he saw, the sheets of that letter fallen down
on the floor of his bedroom—his father's white dead face—his
mother kneeling before it. Fleur's whispered, “Make her! Promise!
Oh! Jon, try!” seemed childish in his ear. He felt curiously old.
“I promise!” he muttered. “Only, you don't understand.”
“She wants to spoil our lives, just because—”
“Yes, of what?”
Again that challenge in his voice, and she did not answer. Her
arms tightened round him, and he returned her kisses; but even
while he yielded, the poison worked in him, the poison of the
letter. Fleur did not know, she did not understand—she misjudged
his mother; she came from the enemy's camp! So lovely, and he
loved her so—yet, even in her embrace, he could not help the
memory of Holly's words: “I think she has a 'having' nature,” and
his mother's “My darling boy, don't think of me—think of
yourself!”
When she was gone like a passionate dream, leaving her image on
his eyes, her kisses on his lips, such an ache in his heart, Jon
leaned in the window, listening to the car bearing her away.
Still the scent as of warm strawberries, still the little summer
sounds that should make his song; still all the promise of youth
and happiness in sighing, floating, fluttering July—and his heart
torn; yearning strong in him; hope high in him yet with its eyes
cast down, as if ashamed. The miserable task before him! If Fleur
was desperate, so was he—watching the poplars swaying, the white
clouds passing, the sunlight on the grass.
He waited till evening, till after their almost silent dinner,
till his mother had played to him and still he waited, feeling
that she knew what he was waiting to say. She kissed him and went
up-stairs, and still he lingered, watching the moonlight and the
moths, and that unreality of colouring which steals along and
stains a summer night. And he would have given anything to be
back again in the past—barely three months back; or away forward,
years, in the future. The present with this dark cruelty of a
decision, one way or the other, seemed impossible. He realised
now so much more keenly what his mother felt than he had at
first; as if the story in that letter had been a poisonous germ
producing a kind of fever of partisanship, so that he really felt
there were two camps, his mother's and his—Fleur's and her
father's. It might be a dead thing, that old tragic ownership and
enmity, but dead things were poisonous till time had cleaned them
away. Even his love felt tainted, less illusioned, more of the
earth, and with a treacherous lurking doubt lest Fleur, like her
father, might want to own; not articulate, just a stealing haunt,
horribly unworthy, which crept in and about the ardour of his
memories, touched with its tarnishing breath the vividness and
grace of that charmed face and figure—a doubt, not real enough to
convince him of its presence, just real enough to deflower a
perfect faith. And perfect faith, to Jon, not yet twenty, was
essential. He still had Youth's eagerness to give with both
hands, to take with neither—to give lovingly to one who had his
own impulsive generosity. Surely she had! He got up from the
window-seat and roamed in the big grey ghostly room, whose walls
were hung with silvered canvas. This house his father said in
that death-bed letter—had been built for his mother to live
in—with Fleur's father! He put out his hand in the half-dark, as
if to grasp the shadowy hand of the dead. He clenched, trying to
feel the thin vanished fingers of his father; to squeeze them,
and reassure him that he—he was on his father's side. Tears,
prisoned within him, made his eyes feel dry and hot. He went back
to the window. It was warmer, not so eerie, more comforting
outside, where the moon hung golden, three days off full; the
freedom of the night was comforting. If only Fleur and he had met
on some desert island without a past—and Nature for their house!
Jon had still his high regard for desert islands, where
breadfruit grew, and the water was blue above the coral. The
night was deep, was free—there was enticement in it; a lure, a
promise, a refuge from entanglement, and love! Milksop tied to
his mother's...! His cheeks burned. He shut the window, drew
curtains over it, switched off the lighted sconce, and went
up-stairs.
The door of his room was open, the light turned up; his mother,
still in her evening gown, was standing at the window. She turned
and said:
“Sit down, Jon; let's talk.” She sat down on the window-seat, Jon
on his bed. She had her profile turned to him, and the beauty and
grace of her figure, the delicate line of the brow, the nose, the
neck, the strange and as it were remote refinement of her, moved
him. His mother never belonged to her surroundings. She came into
them from somewhere—as it were! What was she going to say to him,
who had in his heart such things to say to her?
“I know Fleur came to-day. I'm not surprised.” It was as though
she had added: “She is her father's daughter!” And Jon's heart
hardened. Irene went on quietly:
“I have Father's letter. I picked it up that night and kept it.
Would you like it back, dear?”
Jon shook his head.
“I had read it, of course, before he gave it to you. It didn't
quite do justice to my criminality.”
“Mother!” burst from Jon's lips.
“He put it very sweetly, but I know that in marrying Fleur's
father without love I did a dreadful thing. An unhappy marriage,
Jon, can play such havoc with other lives besides one's own. You
are fearfully young, my darling, and fearfully loving. Do you
think you can possibly be happy with this girl?”
Staring at her dark eyes, darker now from pain, Jon answered
“Yes; oh! yes—if you could be.”
Irene smiled.
“Admiration of beauty and longing for possession are not love. If
yours were another case like mine, Jon—where the deepest things
are stifled; the flesh joined, and the spirit at war!”
“Why should it, Mother? You think she must be like her father,
but she's not. I've seen him.”
Again the smile came on Irene's lips, and in Jon something
wavered; there was such irony and experience in that smile.
“You are a giver, Jon; she is a taker.”
That unworthy doubt, that haunting uncertainty again! He said
with vehemence:
“She isn't—she isn't. It's only because I can't bear to make you
unhappy, Mother, now that Father—” He thrust his fists against
his forehead.
Irene got up.
“I told you that night, dear, not to mind me. I meant it. Think
of yourself and your own happiness! I can stand what's left—I've
brought it on myself.”
Again the word “Mother!” burst from Jon's lips.
She came over to him and put her hands over his.
“Do you feel your head, darling?”
Jon shook it. What he felt was in his chest—a sort of tearing
asunder of the tissue there, by the two loves.
“I shall always love you the same, Jon, whatever you do. You
won't lose anything.” She smoothed his hair gently, and walked
away.
He heard the door shut; and, rolling over on the bed, lay,
stifling his breath, with an awful held-up feeling within him.
VII.—EMBASSY
Enquiring for her at tea time Soames learned that Fleur had been
out in the car since two. Three hours! Where had she gone? Up to
London without a word to him? He had never become quite
reconciled with cars. He had embraced them in principle—like the
born empiricist, or Forsyte, that he was—adopting each symptom of
progress as it came along with: “Well, we couldn't do without
them now.” But in fact he found them tearing, great, smelly
things. Obliged by Annette to have one—a Rollhard with pearl-grey
cushions, electric light, little mirrors, trays for the ashes of
cigarettes, flower vases—all smelling of petrol and
stephanotis—he regarded it much as he used to regard his
brother-in-law, Montague Dartie. The thing typified all that was
fast, insecure, and subcutaneously oily in modern life. As modern
life became faster, looser, younger, Soames was becoming older,
slower, tighter, more and more in thought and language like his
father James before him. He was almost aware of it himself. Pace
and progress pleased him less and less; there was an ostentation,
too, about a car which he considered provocative in the
prevailing mood of Labour. On one occasion that fellow Sims had
driven over the only vested interest of a working man. Soames had
not forgotten the behaviour of its master, when not many people
would have stopped to put up with it. He had been sorry for the
dog, and quite prepared to take its part against the car, if that
ruffian hadn't been so outrageous. With four hours fast becoming
five, and still no Fleur, all the old car-wise feelings he had
experienced in person and by proxy balled within him, and sinking
sensations troubled the pit of his stomach. At seven he
telephoned to Winifred by trunk call. No! Fleur had not been to
Green Street. Then where was she? Visions of his beloved daughter
rolled up in her pretty frills, all blood and dust-stained, in
some hideous catastrophe, began to haunt him. He went to her room
and spied among her things. She had taken nothing—no
dressing-case, no Jewellery. And this, a relief in one sense,
increased his fears of an accident. Terrible to be helpless when
his loved one was missing, especially when he couldn't bear fuss
or publicity of any kind! What should he do if she were not back
by nightfall?
At a quarter to eight he heard the car. A great weight lifted
from off his heart; he hurried down. She was getting out—pale and
tired-looking, but nothing wrong. He met her in the hall.
“You've frightened me. Where have you been?”
“To Robin Hill. I'm sorry, dear. I had to go; I'll tell you
afterward.” And, with a flying kiss, she ran up-stairs.
Soames waited in the drawing-room. To Robin Hill! What did that
portend?
It was not a subject they could discuss at dinner—consecrated to
the susceptibilities of the butler. The agony of nerves Soames
had been through, the relief he felt at her safety, softened his
power to condemn what she had done, or resist what she was going
to do; he waited in a relaxed stupor for her revelation. Life was
a queer business. There he was at sixty-five and no more in
command of things than if he had not spent forty years in
building up security-always something one couldn't get on terms
with! In the pocket of his dinner-jacket was a letter from
Annette. She was coming back in a fortnight. He knew nothing of
what she had been doing out there. And he was glad that he did