The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1

"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

water-colour 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 deep-set 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 and so

many others of his class the core of the nation. In the unostentatious

conduct of their own affairs, to the neglect of everything 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 Russian 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.