The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1

Young Jolyon could not help smiling. He was very well versed in irony,

and everything that evening seemed to him ironical. The episode of the

cat; the announcement of his own daughter's engagement. So he had no

more part or parcel in her than he had in the Puss! And the poetical

justice of this appealed to him.

"What is June like now?" he asked.

"She's a little thing," returned old Jolyon; "they say she's like me,

but that's their folly. She's more like your mother--the same eyes and

hair."

"Ah! and she is pretty?"

Old Jolyon was too much of a Forsyte to praise anything freely;

especially anything for which he had a genuine admiration.

"Not bad looking--a regular Forsyte chin. It'll be lonely here when

she's gone, Jo."

The look on his face again gave young Jolyon the shock he had felt on

first seeing his father.

"What will you do with yourself, Dad? I suppose she's wrapped up in

him?"

"Do with myself?" repeated old Jolyon with an angry break in his voice.

"It'll be miserable work living here alone. I don't know how it's

to end. I wish to goodness...." He checked himself, and added: "The

question is, what had I better do with this house?"

Young Jolyon looked round the room. It was peculiarly vast and dreary,

decorated with the enormous pictures of still life that he remembered

as a boy--sleeping dogs with their noses resting on bunches of carrots,

together with onions and grapes lying side by side in mild surprise.

The house was a white elephant, but he could not conceive of his father

living in a smaller place; and all the more did it all seem ironical.

In his great chair with the book-rest sat old Jolyon, the figurehead

of his family and class and creed, with his white head and dome-like

forehead, the representative of moderation, and order, and love of

property. As lonely an old man as there was in London.

There he sat in the gloomy comfort of the room, a puppet in the power of

great forces that cared nothing for family or class or creed, but moved,

machine-like, with dread processes to inscrutable ends. This was how it

struck young Jolyon, who had the impersonal eye.

The poor old Dad! So this was the end, the purpose to which he had

lived with such magnificent moderation! To be lonely, and grow older and

older, yearning for a soul to speak to!

In his turn old Jolyon looked back at his son. He wanted to talk about

many things that he had been unable to talk about all these years. It

had been impossible to seriously confide in June his conviction that

property in the Soho quarter would go up in value; his uneasiness

about that tremendous silence of Pippin, the superintendent of the New

Colliery Company, of which he had so long been chairman; his disgust at

the steady fall in American Golgothas, or even to discuss how, by some

sort of settlement, he could best avoid the payment of those death

duties which would follow his decease. Under the influence, however, of

a cup of tea, which he seemed to stir indefinitely, he began to speak at

last. A new vista of life was thus opened up, a promised land of talk,

where he could find a harbour against the waves of anticipation and

regret; where he could soothe his soul with the opium of devising how to

round off his property and make eternal the only part of him that was to

remain alive.