The Forsyte saga - Complete
“Bring in Mr. Jolyon’s Will,” he said to an anxious, dark-haired
clerk.
“You going to make some alterations?” And through his mind there
flashed the thought: “Now, am I worth as much as he?”
Old Jolyon put the Will in his breast pocket, and James twisted
his long legs regretfully.
“You’ve made some nice purchases lately, they tell me,” he said.
“I don’t know where you get your information from,” answered old
Jolyon sharply. “When’s this action coming on? Next month? I
can’t tell what you’ve got in your minds. You must manage your
own affairs; but if you take my advice, you’ll settle it out of
Court. Good-bye!” With a cold handshake he was gone.
James, his fixed grey-blue eye corkscrewing round some secret
anxious image, began again to bite his finger.
Old Jolyon took his Will to the offices of the New Colliery
Company, and sat down in the empty Board Room to read it through.
He answered “Down-by-the-starn” Hemmings so tartly when the
latter, seeing his Chairman seated there, entered with the new
Superintendent’s first report, that the Secretary withdrew with
regretful dignity; and sending for the transfer clerk, blew him
up till the poor youth knew not where to look.
It was not—by George—as he (Down-by-the-starn) would have him
know, for a whippersnapper of a young fellow like him, to come
down to that office, and think that he was God Almighty. He
(Down-by-the-starn) had been head of that office for more years
than a boy like him could count, and if he thought that when he
had finished all his work, he could sit there doing nothing, he
did not know him, Hemmings (Down-by-the-starn), and so forth.
On the other side of the green baize door old Jolyon sat at the
long, mahogany-and-leather board table, his thick, loose-jointed,
tortoiseshell eye-glasses perched on the bridge of his nose, his
gold pencil moving down the clauses of his Will.
It was a simple affair, for there were none of those vexatious
little legacies and donations to charities, which fritter away a
man’s possessions, and damage the majestic effect of that little
paragraph in the morning papers accorded to Forsytes who die with
a hundred thousand pounds.
A simple affair. Just a bequest to his son of twenty thousand,
and “as to the residue of my property of whatsoever kind whether
realty or personalty, or partaking of the nature of either—upon
trust to pay the proceeds rents annual produce dividends or
interest thereof and thereon to my said grand-daughter June
Forsyte or her assigns during her life to be for her sole use and
benefit and without, etc... and from and after her death or
decease upon trust to convey assign transfer or make over the
said last-mentioned lands hereditaments premises trust moneys
stocks funds investments and securities or such as shall then
stand for and represent the same unto such person or persons
whether one or more for such intents purposes and uses and
generally in such manner way and form in all respects as the said
June Forsyte notwithstanding coverture shall by her last Will and
Testament or any writing or writings in the nature of a Will
testament or testamentary disposition to be by her duly made
signed and published direct appoint or make over give and dispose
of the same And in default etc.... Provided always...” and so on,
in seven folios of brief and simple phraseology.
The Will had been drawn by James in his palmy days. He had
foreseen almost every contingency.
Old Jolyon sat a long time reading this Will; at last he took
half a sheet of paper from the rack, and made a prolonged pencil
note; then buttoning up the Will, he caused a cab to be called
and drove to the offices of Paramor and Herring, in Lincoln’s Inn
Fields. Jack Herring was dead, but his nephew was still in the
firm, and old Jolyon was closeted with him for half an hour.
He had kept the hansom, and on coming out, gave the driver the
address—3, Wistaria Avenue.
He felt a strange, slow satisfaction, as though he had scored a
victory over James and the man of property. They should not poke
their noses into his affairs any more; he had just cancelled
their trusteeships of his Will; he would take the whole of his
business out of their hands, and put it into the hands of young
Herring, and he would move the business of his Companies too. If
that young Soames were such a man of property, he would never
miss a thousand a year or so; and under his great white moustache
old Jolyon grimly smiled. He felt that what he was doing was in
the nature of retributive justice, richly deserved.
Slowly, surely, with the secret inner process that works the
destruction of an old tree, the poison of the wounds to his
happiness, his will, his pride, had corroded the comely edifice
of his philosophy. Life had worn him down on one side, till, like
that family of which he was the head, he had lost balance.
To him, borne northwards towards his son’s house, the thought of
the new disposition of property, which he had just set in motion,
appeared vaguely in the light of a stroke of punishment, levelled
at that family and that Society, of which James and his son
seemed to him the representatives. He had made a restitution to
young Jolyon, and restitution to young Jolyon satisfied his
secret craving for revenge—revenge against Time, sorrow, and
interference, against all that incalculable sum of disapproval
that had been bestowed by the world for fifteen years on his only
son. It presented itself as the one possible way of asserting
once more the domination of his will; of forcing James, and
Soames, and the family, and all those hidden masses of Forsytes—a
great stream rolling against the single dam of his obstinacy—to
recognise once and for all that _he would be master_. It was
sweet to think that at last he was going to make the boy a richer
man by far than that son of James, that “man of property.” And it
was sweet to give to Jo, for he loved his son.
Neither young Jolyon nor his wife were in (young Jolyon indeed
was not back from the Botanical), but the little maid told him
that she expected the master at any moment:
“He’s always at ’ome to tea, sir, to play with the children.”
Old Jolyon said he would wait; and sat down patiently enough in
the faded, shabby drawing room, where, now that the summer
chintzes were removed, the old chairs and sofas revealed all
their threadbare deficiencies. He longed to send for the
children; to have them there beside him, their supple bodies
against his knees; to hear Jolly’s: “Hallo, Gran!” and see his
rush; and feel Holly’s soft little hand stealing up against his
cheek. But he would not. There was solemnity in what he had come
to do, and until it was over he would not play. He amused himself
by thinking how with two strokes of his pen he was going to
restore the look of caste so conspicuously absent from everything
in that little house; how he could fill these rooms, or others in
some larger mansion, with triumphs of art from Baple and
Pullbred’s; how he could send little Jolly to Harrow and Oxford
(he no longer had faith in Eton and Cambridge, for his son had
been there); how he could procure little Holly the best musical
instruction, the child had a remarkable aptitude.
As these visions crowded before him, causing emotion to swell his
heart, he rose, and stood at the window, looking down into the
little walled strip of garden, where the pear-tree, bare of
leaves before its time, stood with gaunt branches in the
slow-gathering mist of the autumn afternoon. The dog Balthasar,
his tail curled tightly over a piebald, furry back, was walking
at the farther end, sniffing at the plants, and at intervals
placing his leg for support against the wall.
And old Jolyon mused.
What pleasure was there left but to give? It was pleasant to
give, when you could find one who would be thankful for what you
gave—one of your own flesh and blood! There was no such
satisfaction to be had out of giving to those who did not belong
to you, to those who had no claim on you! Such giving as that was
a betrayal of the individualistic convictions and actions of his
life, of all his enterprise, his labour, and his moderation, of
the great and proud fact that, like tens of thousands of Forsytes
before him, tens of thousands in the present, tens of thousands
in the future, he had always made his own, and held his own, in
the world.
And, while he stood there looking down on the smut-covered
foliage of the laurels, the black-stained grass-plot, the
progress of the dog Balthasar, all the suffering of the fifteen
years during which he had been baulked of legitimate enjoyment
mingled its gall with the sweetness of the approaching moment.
Young Jolyon came at last, pleased with his work, and fresh from
long hours in the open air. On hearing that his father was in the
drawing room, he inquired hurriedly whether Mrs. Forsyte was at
home, and being informed that she was not, heaved a sigh of
relief. Then putting his painting materials carefully in the
little coat-closet out of sight, he went in.
With characteristic decision old Jolyon came at once to the
point. “I’ve been altering my arrangements, Jo,” he said. “You
can cut your coat a bit longer in the future—I’m settling a
thousand a year on you at once. June will have fifty thousand at
my death; and you the rest. That dog of yours is spoiling the
garden. I shouldn’t keep a dog, if I were you!”
The dog Balthasar, seated in the centre of the lawn, was
examining his tail.
Young Jolyon looked at the animal, but saw him dimly, for his
eyes were misty.
“Yours won’t come short of a hundred thousand, my boy,” said old
Jolyon; “I thought you’d better know. I haven’t much longer to
live at my age. I shan’t allude to it again. How’s your wife?
And—give her my love.”
Young Jolyon put his hand on his father’s shoulder, and, as
neither spoke, the episode closed.
Having seen his father into a hansom, young Jolyon came back to
the drawing-room and stood, where old Jolyon had stood, looking
down on the little garden. He tried to realize all that this
meant to him, and, Forsyte that he was, vistas of property were
opened out in his brain; the years of half rations through which
he had passed had not sapped his natural instincts. In extremely
practical form, he thought of travel, of his wife’s costume, the
children’s education, a pony for Jolly, a thousand things; but in
the midst of all he thought, too, of Bosinney and his mistress,
and the broken song of the thrush. Joy—tragedy! Which? Which?
The old past—the poignant, suffering, passionate, wonderful past,
that no money could buy, that nothing could restore in all its
burning sweetness—had come back before him.