The Forsyte Saga John Galsworthy (hot novels to read TXT) 📖

one only has to do another person a wrong to get all the sympathy. I don’t know in what way I was to blame⁠—I’ve never known. I always treated her well. I gave her everything she could wish for. I wanted her.”

Again Jolyon’s reason nodded; again his instinct shook its head. “What is it?” he thought; “there must be something wrong in me. Yet if there is, I’d rather be wrong than right.”

“After all,” said Soames with a sort of glum fierceness, “she was my wife.”

In a flash the thought went through his listener: “There it is! Ownerships! Well, we all own things. But⁠—human beings! Pah!”

“You have to look at facts,” he said drily, “or rather the want of them.”

Soames gave him another quick suspicious look.

“The want of them?” he said.

“Yes, but I am not so sure.”

“I beg your pardon,” replied Jolyon; “I’ve told you what she said. It was explicit.”

“My experience has not been one to promote blind confidence in her word. We shall see.”

Jolyon got up.

“Goodbye,” he said curtly.

“Goodbye,” returned Soames; and Jolyon went out trying to understand the look, half-startled, half-menacing, on his cousin’s face. He sought Waterloo Station in a disturbed frame of mind, as though the skin of his moral being had been scraped; and all the way down in the train he thought of Irene in her lonely flat, and of Soames in his lonely office, and of the strange paralysis of life that lay on them both. “In chancery!” he thought. “Both their necks in chancery⁠—and her’s so pretty!”

IX Val Hears the News

The keeping of engagements had not as yet been a conspicuous feature in the life of young Val Dartie, so that when he broke two and kept one, it was the latter event which caused him, if anything, the greater surprise, while jogging back to town from Robin Hill after his ride with Holly. She had been even prettier than he had thought her yesterday, on her silver-roan, long-tailed palfrey, and it seemed to him, self-critical in the brumous October gloaming and the outskirts of London, that only his boots had shone throughout their two-hour companionship. He took out his new gold “hunter”⁠—present from James⁠—and looked not at the time, but at sections of his face in the glittering back of its opened case. He had a temporary spot over one eyebrow, and it displeased him, for it must have displeased her. Crum never had any spots. Together with Crum rose the scene in the promenade of the Pandemonium. Today he had not had the faintest desire to unbosom himself to Holly about his father. His father lacked poetry, the stirrings of which he was feeling for the first time in his nineteen years. The Liberty, with Cynthia Dark, that almost mythical embodiment of rapture; the Pandemonium, with the woman of uncertain age⁠—both seemed to Val completely “off,” fresh from communion with this new, shy, dark-haired young cousin of his. She rode “Jolly well,” too, so that it had been all the more flattering that she had let him lead her where he would in the long gallops of Richmond Park, though she knew them so much better than he did. Looking back on it all, he was mystified by the barrenness of his speech; he felt that he could say “an awful lot of fetching things” if he had but the chance again, and the thought that he must go back to Littlehampton on the morrow, and to Oxford on the twelfth⁠—“to that beastly exam,” too⁠—without the faintest chance of first seeing her again, caused darkness to settle on his spirit even more quickly than on the evening. He should write to her, however, and she had promised to answer. Perhaps, too, she would come up to Oxford to see her brother. That thought was like the first star, which came out as he rode into Padwick’s livery stables in the purlieus of Sloane Square. He got off and stretched himself luxuriously, for he had ridden some twenty-five good miles. The Dartie within him made him chaffer for five minutes with young Padwick concerning the favourite for the Cambridgeshire; then with the words, “Put the gee down to my account,” he walked away, a little wide at the knees, and flipping his boots with his knotty little cane. “I don’t feel a bit inclined to go out,” he thought. “I wonder if mother will stand fizz for my last night!” With fizz and recollection, he could well pass a domestic evening.

When he came down, speckless after his bath, he found his mother scrupulous in a low evening dress, and, to his annoyance, his Uncle Soames. They stopped talking when he came in; then his uncle said:

“He’d better be told.”

At those words, which meant something about his father, of course, Val’s first thought was of Holly. Was it anything beastly? His mother began speaking.

“Your father,” she said in her fashionably appointed voice, while her fingers plucked rather pitifully at sea-green brocade, “your father, my dear boy, has⁠—is not at Newmarket; he’s on his way to South America. He⁠—he’s left us.”

Val looked from her to Soames. Left them! Was he sorry? Was he fond of his father? It seemed to him that he did not know. Then, suddenly⁠—as at a whiff of gardenias and cigars⁠—his heart twitched within him, and he was sorry. One’s father belonged to one, could not go off in this fashion⁠—it was not done! Nor had he always been the “bounder” of the Pandemonium promenade. There were precious memories of tailors’ shops and horses, tips at school, and general lavish kindness, when in luck.

“But why?” he said. Then, as a sportsman himself, was sorry he had asked. The mask of his mother’s face was all disturbed; and he burst out:

“All right, Mother, don’t tell me! Only, what does it mean?”

“A divorce, Val, I’m afraid.”

Val uttered a queer little grunt, and looked quickly at his uncle⁠—that uncle whom he had been taught to look on