The Forsyte Saga - Complete - The Original Classic Edition. Galsworthy John
Читать онлайн книгу.
eyes day by day looking forth with the melancholy which sat so strangely on a face wont to be strong and serene.
And so that afternoon he took this journey through St. John's Wood, in the golden-light that sprinkled the rounded green bushes of the acacia's before the little houses, in the summer sunshine that seemed holding a revel over the little gardens; and he looked about him with interest; for this was a district which no Forsyte entered without open disapproval and secret curiosity.
His cab stopped in front of a small house of that peculiar buff colour which implies a long immunity from paint. It had an outer
gate, and a rustic approach.
He stepped out, his bearing extremely composed; his massive head, with its drooping moustache and wings of white hair, very up-
right, under an excessively large top hat; his glance firm, a little angry. He had been driven into this! "Mrs. Jolyon Forsyte at home?"
"Oh, yes sir!--what name shall I say, if you please, sir?"
Old Jolyon could not help twinkling at the little maid as he gave his name. She seemed to him such a funny little toad!
And he followed her through the dark hall, into a small double, drawing-room, where the furniture was covered in chintz, and the
little maid placed him in a chair.
"They're all in the garden, sir; if you'll kindly take a seat, I'll tell them."
Old Jolyon sat down in the chintz-covered chair, and looked around him. The whole place seemed to him, as he would have expressed it, pokey; there was a certain--he could not tell exactly what--air of shabbiness, or rather of making two ends meet, about everything. As far as he could see, not a single piece of furniture was worth a five-pound note. The walls, distempered rather a long time ago, were decorated with watercolour sketches; across the ceiling meandered a long crack.
These little houses were all old, second-rate concerns; he should hope the rent was under a hundred a year; it hurt him more than he could have said, to think of a Forsyte--his own son living in such a place.
The little maid came back. Would he please to go down into the garden?
Old Jolyon marched out through the French windows. In descending the steps he noticed that they wanted painting. Young Jolyon, his wife, his two children, and his dog Balthasar, were all out there under a pear-tree.
This walk towards them was the most courageous act of old Jolyon's life; but no muscle of his face moved, no nervous gesture betrayed him. He kept his deepset eyes steadily on the enemy.
In those two minutes he demonstrated to perfection all that unconscious soundness, balance, and vitality of fibre that made, of him
46
and so many others of his class the core of the nation. In the unostentatious conduct of their own affairs, to the neglect of every-
thing else, they typified the essential individualism, born in the Briton from the natural isolation of his country's life.
The dog Balthasar sniffed round the edges of his trousers; this friendly and cynical mongrel--offspring of a liaison between a Rus-
sian poodle and a fox-terrier--had a nose for the unusual.
The strange greetings over, old Jolyon seated himself in a wicker chair, and his two grandchildren, one on each side of his knees, looked at him silently, never having seen so old a man.
They were unlike, as though recognising the difference set between them by the circumstances of their births. Jolly, the child of sin, pudgy-faced, with his tow-coloured hair brushed off his forehead, and a dimple in his chin, had an air of stubborn amiability, and the eyes of a Forsyte; little Holly, the child of wedlock, was a dark-skinned, solemn soul, with her mother's, grey and wistful eyes.
The dog Balthasar, having walked round the three small flower-beds, to show his extreme contempt for things at large, had also taken a seat in front of old Jolyon, and, oscillating a tail curled by Nature tightly over his back, was staring up with eyes that did not blink.
Even in the garden, that sense of things being pokey haunted old Jolyon; the wicker chair creaked under his weight; the garden-beds
looked 'daverdy'; on the far side, under the smut-stained wall, cats had made a path.
While he and his grandchildren thus regarded each other with the peculiar scrutiny, curious yet trustful, that passes between the very
young and the very old, young Jolyon watched his wife.
The colour had deepened in her thin, oval face, with its straight brows, and large, grey eyes. Her hair, brushed in fine, high curves back from her forehead, was going grey, like his own, and this greyness made the sudden vivid colour in her cheeks painfully pathetic.
The look on her face, such as he had never seen there before, such as she had always hidden from him, was full of secret resent-
ments, and longings, and fears. Her eyes, under their twitching brows, stared painfully. And she was silent.
Jolly alone sustained the conversation; he had many possessions, and was anxious that his unknown friend with extremely large moustaches, and hands all covered with blue veins, who sat with legs crossed like his own father (a habit he was himself trying to acquire), should know it; but being a Forsyte, though not yet quite eight years old, he made no mention of the thing at the moment dearest to his heart--a camp of soldiers in a shop-window, which his father had promised to buy. No doubt it seemed to him too precious; a tempting of Providence to mention it yet.
And the sunlight played through the leaves on that little party of the three generations grouped tranquilly under the pear-tree, which had long borne no fruit.
Old Jolyon's furrowed face was reddening patchily, as old men's faces redden in the sun. He took one of Jolly's hands in his own; the boy climbed on to his knee; and little Holly, mesmerized by this sight, crept up to them; the sound of the dog Balthasar's scratching arose rhythmically.
Suddenly young Mrs. Jolyon got up and hurried indoors. A minute later her husband muttered an excuse, and followed. Old Jolyon
was left alone with his grandchildren.
And Nature with her quaint irony began working in him one of her strange revolutions, following her cyclic laws into the depths of his heart. And that tenderness for little children, that passion for the beginnings of life which had once made him forsake his son
and follow June, now worked in him to forsake June and follow these littler things. Youth, like a flame, burned ever in his breast, and to youth he turned, to the round little limbs, so reckless, that wanted care, to the small round faces so unreasonably solemn or bright, to the treble tongues, and the shrill, chuckling laughter, to the insistent tugging hands, and the feel of small bodies against his legs, to all that was young and young, and once more young. And his eyes grew soft, his voice, and thin-veined hands soft, and soft his heart within him. And to those small creatures he became at once a place of pleasure, a place where they were secure, and could talk and laugh and play; till, like sunshine, there radiated from old Jolyon's wicker chair the perfect gaiety of three hearts.
But with young Jolyon following to his wife's room it was different.
He found her seated on a chair before her dressing-glass, with her hands before her face.
47
Her shoulders were shaking with sobs. This passion of hers for suffering was mysterious to him. He had been through a hundred of these moods; how he had survived them he never knew, for he could never believe they were moods, and that the last hour of his partnership had not struck.
In the night she would be sure to throw her arms round his neck and say: "Oh! Jo, how I make you suffer!" as she had done a hun-
dred times before.
He reached out his hand, and, unseen, slipped his razor-case into his pocket. 'I cannot stay here,' he thought, 'I must go down!' With-
out a word he left the room, and went back to the lawn.
Old Jolyon had little Holly on his knee; she had taken possession of his watch; Jolly,