The Forsyte Saga(334)

And, careful not to be seen, he stole back.

Next day, after a bad night, he sat down to his task. He wrote with difficulty and many erasures.


My Dearest Boy,

You are old enough to understand how very difficult it is for elders to give themselves away to their young. Especially when – like your mother and myself, though I shall never think of her as anything but young – their hearts are altogether set on him to whom they must confess. I cannot say we are conscious of having sinned exactly – people in real life very seldom are, I believe – but most persons would say we had, and at all events our conduct, righteous or not, has found us out. The truth is, my dear, we both have pasts, which it is now my task to make known to you, because they so grievously and deeply affect your future. Many, very many years ago, as far back indeed as 1883, when she was only twenty, your mother had the great and lasting misfortune to make an unhappy marriage – no, not with me, Jon. Without money of her own, and with only a stepmother – closely related to Jezebel – she was very unhappy in her home life. It was Fleur’s father that she married, my cousin Soames Forsyte. He had pursued her very tenaciously and to do him justice was deeply in love with her. Within a week she knew the fearful mistake she had made. It was not his fault; it was her error of judgement – her misfortune.

So far Jolyon had kept some semblance of irony, but now his subject carried him away.

Jon, I want to explain to you if I can – and it’s very hard – how it is that an unhappy marriage such as this can so easily come about. You will of course say: ‘If she didn’t really love him how could she ever have married him?’ You would be right if it were not for one or two rather terrible considerations. From this initial mistake of hers all the subsequent trouble, sorrow, and tragedy have come, and so I must make it clear to you if I can. You see, Jon, in those days and even to this day – indeed, I don’t see, for all the talk of enlightenment, how it can well be otherwise – most girls are married ignorant of the sexual side of life. Even if they know what it means they have not experienced it. That’s the crux. It is this actual lack of experience, whatever verbal knowledge they have, which makes all the difference and all the trouble. In a vast number of marriages – and your mother’s was one – girls are not and cannot be certain whether they love the man they marry or not; they do not know until after that act of union   which makes the reality of marriage. Now, in many, perhaps in most doubtful cases, this act cements and strengthens the attachment, but in other cases, and your mother’s was one, it is a revelation of mistakes, a destruction of such attraction as there was. There is nothing more tragic in a woman’s life than such a revelation, growing daily, nightly clearer. Coarse-grained and unthinking people are apt to laugh at such a mistake, and say, ‘What a fuss about nothing!’ Narrow and self-righteous people, only capable of judging the lives of others by their own, are apt to condemn those who make this tragic error, to condemn them for life to the dungeons they have made for themselves. You know the expression: ‘She has made her bed, she must lie on it!’ It is a hard-mouthed saying, quite unworthy of a gentleman or lady in the best sense of those words; and I can use no stronger condemnation. I have not been what is called a moral man, but I wish to use no words to you, my dear, which will make you think lightly of ties or contracts into which you enter. Heaven forbid! But with the experience of a life behind me I do say that those who condemn the victims of these tragic mistakes, condemn them and hold out no hands to help them, are inhuman, or rather they would be if they had the understanding to know what they are doing. But they haven’t! Let them go! They are as much anathema to me as I, no doubt, am to them. I have had to say all this, because I am going to put you into a position to judge your mother, and you are very young, without experience of what life is. To go on with the story. After three years of effort to subdue her shrinking – I was going to say her loathing and it’s not too strong a word, for shrinking soon becomes loathing under such circumstances – three years of what to a sensitive, beauty-loving nature like your mother’s, Jon, was torment, she met a young man who fell in love with her. He was the architect of this very house that we live in now, he was building it for her and Fleur’s father to live in, a new prison to hold her, in place of the one she inhabited with him in London. Perhaps that fact played some part in what came of it. But in any case she, too, fell in love with him. I know it’s not necessary to explain to you that one does not precisely choose with whom one will fall in love. It comes! Very well! It came. I can imagine – though she never said much to me about it – the struggle that then took place in her, because, Jon, she was brought up strictly and was not light in her ideas – not at all. However, this was an overwhelming feeling, and it came to pass that they loved in deed as well as in thought. Then came a fearful tragedy. I must tell you of it because if I don’t you will never understand the real situation that you have now to face. The man whom she had married – Soames Forsyte, the father of Fleur – one night, at the height of her passion for this young man, forcibly reasserted his rights over her. The next day she met her lover and told him of it. Whether he committed suicide or whether he was accidentally run over in his distraction, we never knew; but so it was. Think of your mother as she was that evening when she heard of his death. I happened to see her. Your grandfather sent me to help her if I could. I only just saw her, before the door was shut against me by her husband. But I have never forgotten her face, I can see it now. I was not in love with her then, not for twelve years after, but I have never forgotten. My dear boy – it is not easy to write like this. But you see, I must Your mother is wrapped up in you, utterly, devotedly. I don’t wish to write harshly of Soames Forsyte. I don’t think harshly of him. I have long been sorry for him; perhaps I was sorry even then. As the world judges she was in error, he within his rights. Her loved her – in his way. She was his property. That is the view he holds of life – of human feelings and hearts – property. It’s not his fault – so was he born. To me it is a view that has always been abhorrent – so was I born! Knowing you as I do, I feel it cannot be otherwise than abhorrent to you. Let me go on with the story. Your mother fled from his house that night; for twelve years she lived quietly alone without companionship of any sort, until in 1899 her husband – you see, he was still her husband, for he did not attempt to divorce her, and she of course had no right to divorce him – became conscious, it seems, of the want of children, and commenced a long attempt to induce her to go back to him and give him a child. I was her trustee then, under your grandfather’s Will, and I watched this going on. While watching, I became attached to her, devotedly attached. His pressure increased, till one day she came to me here and practically put herself under my protection. Her husband, who was kept informed of all her movements, attempted to force us apart by bringing a divorce suit, or possibly he really meant it, I don’t know; but anyway our names were publicly joined. That decided us, and we became united in fact. She was divorced, married me, and you were born. We have lived in perfect happiness, at least I have, and I believe your mother also. Soames, soon after the divorce, married Fleur’s mother, and she was born. That is the story, Jon. I have told it you, because by the affection which we see you have formed for this man’s daughter you are blindly moving toward what must utterly destroy your mother’s happiness, if not your own. I don’t wish to speak of myself, because at my age there’s no use supposing I shall cumber the ground much longer, besides, what I should suffer would be mainly on her account, and on yours. But what I want you to realize is that feelings of horror and aversion such as those can never be buried or forgotten. They are alive in her today. Only yesterday at Lord’s we happened to see Soames Forsyte. Her face, if you had seen it, would have convinced you. The idea that you should marry his daughter is a nightmare to her, Jon. I have nothing to say against Fleur save that she is his daughter. But your children, if you married her, would be the grandchildren of Soames, as much as of your mother, of a man who once owned your mother as a man might own a slave. Think what that would mean. By such a marriage you enter the camp which held your mother prisoner and wherein she ate her heart out. You are just on the threshold of life, you have only known this girl two months, and however deeply you think you love her, I appeal to you to break it off at once. Don’t give your mother this rankling pain and humiliation during the rest of her life. Young though she will always seem to be, she is fifty-seven. Except for us two she has no one in the world. She will soon have only you. Pluck up your spirit, Jon, and break away. Don’t put this cloud and barrier between you. Don’t break her heart! Bless you, my dear boy, and again forgive me for all the pain this letter must bring you – we tried to spare it you, but Spain – it seems – was no good.