The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1

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.