The Forsyte Saga - John Galsworthy (best english novels for beginners .txt) 📗

And again came the feeling that it was all dead and disgusting; his own love so different! This letter said his mother⁠—and her father! An awful letter!

Property! Could there be men who looked on women as their property? Faces seen in street and countryside came thronging up before him⁠—red, stock-fish faces; hard, dull faces; prim, dry faces; violent faces; hundreds, thousands of them! How could he know what men who had such faces thought and did? He held his head in his hands and groaned. His mother! He caught up the letter and read on again: “horror and aversion⁠—alive in her today⁠ ⁠… your children⁠ ⁠… grandchildren⁠ ⁠… of a man who once owned your mother as a man might own a slave.⁠ ⁠…” He got up from his bed. This cruel shadowy past, lurking there to murder his love and Fleur’s, was true, or his father could never have written it. “Why didn’t they tell me the first thing,” he thought, “the day I first saw Fleur? They knew I’d seen her. They were afraid, and⁠—now⁠—I’ve⁠—got it!” Overcome by misery too acute for thought or reason, he crept into a dusky corner of the room and sat down on the floor. He sat there, like some unhappy little animal. There was comfort in dusk, and the floor⁠—as if he were back in those days when he played his battles sprawling all over it. He sat there huddled, his hair ruffled, his hands clasped round his knees, for how long he did not know. He was wrenched from his blank wretchedness by the sound of the door opening from his mother’s room. The blinds were down over the windows of his room, shut up in his absence, and from where he sat he could only hear a rustle, her footsteps crossing, till beyond the bed he saw her standing before his dressing-table. She had something in her hand. He hardly breathed, hoping she would not see him, and go away. He saw her touch things on the table as if they had some virtue in them, then face the window-grey from head to foot like a ghost. The least turn of her head, and she must see him! Her lips moved: “Oh! Jon!” She was speaking to herself; the tone of her voice troubled Jon’s heart. He saw in her hand a little photograph. She held it toward the light, looking at it⁠—very small. He knew it⁠—one of himself as a tiny boy, which she always kept in her bag. His heart beat fast. And, suddenly as if she had heard it, she turned her eyes and saw him. At the gasp she gave, and the movement of her hands pressing the photograph against her breast, he said:

“Yes, it’s me.”

She moved over to the bed, and sat down on it, quite close to him, her hands still clasping her breast, her feet among the sheets of the letter which had slipped to the floor. She saw them, and her hands grasped the edge of the bed. She sat very upright, her dark eyes fixed on him. At last she spoke.

“Well, Jon, you know, I see.”

“Yes.”

“You’ve seen Father?”

“Yes.”

There was a long silence, till she said:

“Oh! my darling!”

“It’s all right.” The emotions in him were so, violent and so mixed that he dared not move⁠—resentment, despair, and yet a strange yearning for the comfort of her hand on his forehead.

“What are you going to do?”

“I don’t know.”

There was another long silence, then she got up. She stood a moment, very still, made a little movement with her hand, and said: “My darling boy, my most darling boy, don’t think of me⁠—think of yourself,” and, passing round the foot of the bed, went back into her room.

Jon turned⁠—curled into a sort of ball, as might a hedgehog⁠—into the corner made by the two walls.

He must have been twenty minutes there before a cry roused him. It came from the terrace below. He got up, scared. Again came the cry: “Jon!” His mother was calling! He ran out and down the stairs, through the empty dining-room into the study. She was kneeling before the old armchair, and his father was lying back quite white, his head on his breast, one of his hands resting on an open book, with a pencil clutched in it⁠—more strangely still than anything he had ever seen. She looked round wildly, and said:

“Oh! Jon⁠—he’s dead⁠—he’s dead!”

Jon flung himself down, and reaching over the arm of the chair, where he had lately been sitting, put his lips to the forehead. Icy cold! How could⁠—how could Dad be dead, when only an hour ago⁠—! His mother’s arms were round the knees; pressing her breast against them. “Why⁠—why wasn’t I with him?” he heard her whisper. Then he saw the tottering word “Irene” pencilled on the open page, and broke down himself. It was his first sight of human death, and its unutterable stillness blotted from him all other emotion; all else, then, was but preliminary to this! All love and life, and joy, anxiety, and sorrow, all movement, light and beauty, but a beginning to this terrible white stillness. It made a dreadful mark on him; all seemed suddenly little, futile, short. He mastered himself at last, got up, and raised her.

“Mother! don’t cry⁠—Mother!”

Some hours later, when all was done that had to be, and his mother was lying down, he saw his father alone, on the bed, covered with a white sheet. He stood for a long time gazing at that face which had never looked angry⁠—always whimsical, and kind. “To be kind and keep your end up⁠—there’s nothing else in it,” he had once heard his father say. How wonderfully Dad had acted up to that philosophy! He understood now that his father had known for a long time past that this would come suddenly⁠—known, and not said a word. He gazed with an awed and passionate reverence. The loneliness of it⁠—just to spare his mother and himself! His own trouble seemed small