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

“How did he look?”

“Grey; but otherwise much the same.”

“And the daughter?”

“Pretty. At least, Jon thought so.”

Jolyon’s heart side-slipped again. His wife’s face had a strained and puzzled look.

“You didn’t⁠—?” he began.

“No; but Jon knows their name. The girl dropped her handkerchief and he picked it up.”

Jolyon sat down on his bed. An evil chance!

“June was with you. Did she put her foot into it?”

“No; but it was all very queer and strained, and Jon could see it was.”

Jolyon drew a long breath, and said:

“I’ve often wondered whether we’ve been right to keep it from him. He’ll find out some day.”

“The later the better, Jolyon; the young have such cheap, hard judgment. When you were nineteen what would you have thought of your mother if she had done what I have?”

Yes! There it was! Jon worshipped his mother; and knew nothing of the tragedies, the inexorable necessities of life, nothing of the prisoned grief in an unhappy marriage, nothing of jealousy or passion⁠—knew nothing at all, as yet!

“What have you told him?” he said at last.

“That they were relations, but we didn’t know them; that you had never cared much for your family, or they for you. I expect he will be asking you.”

Jolyon smiled. “This promises to take the place of air-raids,” he said. “After all, one misses them.”

Irene looked up at him.

“We’ve known it would come some day.”

He answered her with sudden energy:

“I could never stand seeing Jon blame you. He shan’t do that, even in thought. He has imagination; and he’ll understand if it’s put to him properly. I think I had better tell him before he gets to know otherwise.”

“Not yet, Jolyon.”

That was like her⁠—she had no foresight, and never went to meet trouble. Still⁠—who knew?⁠—she might be right. It was ill going against a mother’s instinct. It might be well to let the boy go on, if possible, till experience had given him some touchstone by which he could judge the values of that old tragedy; till love, jealousy, longing, had deepened his charity. All the same, one must take precautions⁠—every precaution possible! And, long after Irene had left him, he lay awake turning over those precautions. He must write to Holly, telling her that Jon knew nothing as yet of family history. Holly was discreet, she would make sure of her husband, she would see to it! Jon could take the letter with him when he went tomorrow.

And so the day on which he had put the polish on his material estate died out with the chiming of the stable clock; and another began for Jolyon in the shadow of a spiritual disorder which could not be so rounded off and polished.⁠ ⁠…

But Jon, whose room had once been his day nursery, lay awake too, the prey of a sensation disputed by those who have never known it, “love at first sight!” He had felt it beginning in him with the glint of those dark eyes gazing into his athwart the Juno⁠—a conviction that this was his “dream.” so that what followed had seemed to him at once natural and miraculous. Fleur! Her name alone was almost enough for one who was terribly susceptible to the charm of words. In a homoeopathic Age, when boys and girls were co-educated, and mixed up in early life till sex was almost abolished, Jon was singularly old-fashioned. His modern school took boys only, and his holidays had been spent at Robin Hill with boy friends, or his parents alone. He had never, therefore, been inoculated against the germs of love by small doses of the poison. And now in the dark his temperature was mounting fast. He lay awake, featuring Fleur⁠—as they called it⁠—recalling her words, especially that “Au revoir!” so soft and sprightly.

He was still so wide awake at dawn that he got up, slipped on tennis shoes, trousers, and a sweater, and in silence crept downstairs and out through the study window. It was just light; there was a smell of grass. “Fleur!” he thought; “Fleur!” It was mysteriously white out of doors, with nothing awake except the birds just beginning to chirp. “I’ll go down into the coppice,” he thought. He ran down through the fields, reached the pond just as the sun rose, and passed into the coppice. Bluebells carpeted the ground there; among the larch-trees there was mystery⁠—the air, as it were, composed of that romantic quality. Jon sniffed its freshness, and stared at the bluebells in the sharpening light. Fleur! It rhymed with “her”! And she lived at Mapleduram⁠—a jolly name, too, on the river somewhere. He could find it in the atlas presently. He would write to her. But would she answer? Oh! She must. She had said “Au revoir!” Not goodbye! What luck that she had dropped her handkerchief! He would never have known her but for that. And the more he thought of that handkerchief, the more amazing his luck seemed. Fleur! It certainly rhymed with “her”! Rhythm thronged his head; words jostled to be joined together; he was on the verge of a poem.

Jon remained in this condition for more than half an hour, then returned to the house, and getting a ladder, climbed in at his bedroom window out of sheer exhilaration. Then, remembering that the study window was open, he went down and shut it, first removing the ladder, so as to obliterate all traces of his feeling. The thing was too deep to be revealed to mortal soul⁠—even to his mother.

There are houses whose souls have passed into the limbo of Time, leaving their bodies in the limbo of London. Such was not quite the condition of Timothy’s on the Bayswater Road, for Timothy’s soul still had one foot in Timothy Forsyte’s body, and Smither kept the atmosphere unchanging, of camphor and port wine and house whose windows are only opened to air it twice a day.

To Forsyte imagination that house