‘Why do you take your own people as the type?’ said he.
‘My people,’ replied young Jolyon, ‘are not very extreme, and they have their own private peculiarities, like every other family, but they possess in a remarkable degree those two qualities which are the real tests of a Forsyte – the power of never being able to give yourself up to anything soul and body, and the “sense of property”.’
Bosinney smiled: ‘How about the big one, for instance?’
‘Do you mean Swithin?’ asked young Jolyon. ‘Ah! in Swithin there’s something primeval still. The town and middle-class life haven’t digested him yet. All the old centuries of farmwork and brute force have settled in him, and there they’ve stuck, for all he’s so distinguished.’
Bosinney seemed to ponder. ‘Well, you’ve hit your cousin Soames off to the life,’ he said suddenly. ‘He’ll never blow his brains out.’
Young Jolyon shot at him a penetrating glance.
‘No,’ he said; ‘he won’t. That’s why he’s to be reckoned with. Look out for their grip! It’s easy to laugh, but don’t mistake me. It doesn’t do to despise a Forsyte; it doesn’t do to disregard them!’
‘Yet you’ve done it yourself!’
Young Jolyon acknowledged the hit by losing his smile.
‘You forget,’ he said with a queer pride, ‘I can hold on, too – I’m a Forsyte myself. We’re all in the path of great forces. The man who leaves the shelter of the wall – well – you know what I mean. I don’t,’ he ended very low, as though uttering a threat, ‘recommend every man to – go – my – way. It depends.’
The colour rushed into Bosinney’s face, but soon receded, leaving it sallow-brown as before. He gave a short laugh, that left his lips fixed in a queer, fierce smile; his eyes mocked young Jolyon.
‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘It’s deuced kind of you. But you’re not the only chaps that can hold on.’ He rose.
Young Jolyon looked after him as he walked away, and, resting his head on his hand, sighed.
In the drowsy, almost empty room the only sounds were the rustle of newspapers, the scraping of matches being struck. He stayed a long time without moving, living over again those days when he, too, had sat long hours watching the clock, waiting for the minutes to pass – long hours full of the torments of uncertainty, and of a fierce, sweet aching; and the slow, delicious agony of that season came back to him with its old poignancy. The sight of Bosinney, with his haggard face, and his restless eyes always wandering to the clock, had roused in him a pity, with which was mingled strange, irresistible envy.
He knew the signs so well. Whither was he going – to what sort of fate? What kind of woman was it who was drawing him to her by that magnetic force which no consideration of honour, no principle, no interest could withstand; from which the only escape was flight?
Flight! But why should Bosinney fly? A man fled when he was in danger of destroying hearth and home, when there were children, when he felt himself trampling down ideals, breaking something. But here, so he had heard, it was all broken to his hand.
He himself had not fled, nor would he fly if it were all to come over again. Yet he had gone further than Bosinney, had broken up his own unhappy home, not someone else’s. And the old saying came back to him: ‘A man’s fate lies in his own heart.’
In his own heart! The proof of the pudding was in the eating – Bosinney had still to eat his pudding.
His thoughts passed to the woman, the woman whom he did not know, but the outline of whose story he had heard.
An unhappy marriage! No ill-treatment – only that indefinable malaise, that terrible blight which killed all sweetness under Heaven; and so from day to day, from night to night, from week to week, from year to year, till death should end it!
But young Jolyon, the bitterness of whose own feelings time had assuaged, saw Soames’s side of the question too. Whence should a man like his cousin, saturated with all the prejudices and beliefs of his class, draw the insight or inspiration necessary to break up this life? It was a question of imagination, of projecting himself into the future beyond the unpleasant gossip, sneers, and tattle that followed on such separations, beyond the passing pangs that the lack of the sight of her would cause, beyond the grave disapproval of the worthy. But few men, and especially few men of Soames’s class, had imagination enough for that. A deal of mortals in this world, and not enough imagination to go round! And sweet Heaven, what a difference between theory and practice; many a man, perhaps even Soames, held chivalrous views on such matters, who when the shoe pinched found a distinguishing factor that made of himself an exception.