The Forsyte Saga - Volume 1
Page 68Even 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 resentments, and
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
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
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.