The Forsyte Saga by John Galsworthy (acx book reading txt) 📕

The girl lifted the roses in her hand, looked at them, and answered calmly:

“He’s quite a nice boy.”

“Not a bit like Holly or me, is he?”

“Not a bit.”

“She’s cool,” thought June.

And suddenly the girl said: “I wish you’d tell me why our families don’t get on?”

Confronted with the question she had advised her father to answer, June was silent; whether because this girl was trying to get something out of her, or simply because what one would do theoretically is not always what one will do when it comes to the point.

“You know,” said the girl, “the surest way to make people find out the worst is to keep them ignorant. My father’s told me it was a quarrel about property. But I don’t believe it; we’ve both got heaps. They wouldn’t have been so bourgeois as all that.”

June flushed. The word applied to her grandfather and father offended her.

“My grandfather,” she said, “was very generous, and my father is, too; neither of them was in the least bourgeois.”

“Well, what was it then?” repeated the girl: Conscious that this young Forsyte meant having what she wanted, June at once determined to prevent her, and to get something for herself instead.

“Why do you want to know?”

The girl smelled at her roses. “I only want to know because they won’t tell me.”

“Well, it was about property, but there’s more than one kind.”

“That makes it worse. Now I really must know.”

June’s small and resolute face quivered. She was wearing a round cap, and her hair had fluffed out under it. She looked quite young at that moment, rejuvenated by encounter.

“You know,” she said, “I saw you drop your handkerchief. Is there anything between you and Jon? Because, if so, you’d better drop that too.”

The girl grew paler, but she smiled.

“If there were, that isn’t the way to make me.”

At the gallantry of that reply, June held out her hand.

“I like you; but I don’t like your father; I never have. We may as well be frank.”

“Did you come down to tell him that?”

June laughed. “No; I came down to see you.”

“How delightful of you.”

This girl could fence.

“I’m two and a half times your age,” said June, “but I quite sympathize. It’s horrid not to have one’s own way.”

The girl smiled again. “I really think you might tell me.”

How the child stuck to her point!

“It’s not my secret. But I’ll see what I can do, because I think both you and Jon ought to be told. And now I’ll say goodbye.”

“Won’t you wait and see Father?”

June shook her head. “How can I get over to the other side?”

“I’ll row you across.”

“Look!” said June impulsively, “next time you’re in London, come and see me. This is where I live. I generally have young people in the evening. But I shouldn’t tell your father that you’re coming.”

The girl nodded.

Watching her scull the skiff across, June thought: “She’s awfully pretty and well made. I never thought Soames would have a daughter as pretty as this. She and Jon would make a lovely couple.”

The instinct to couple, starved within herself, was always at work in June. She stood watching Fleur row back; the girl took her hand off a scull to wave farewell, and June walked languidly on between the meadows and the river, with an ache in her heart. Youth to youth, like the dragonflies chasing each other, and love like the sun warming them through and through. Her youth! So long ago⁠—when Phil and she⁠—And since? Nothing⁠—no one had been quite what she had wanted. And so she had missed it all. But what a coil was round those two young things, if they really were in love, as Holly would have it⁠—as her father, and Irene, and Soames himself seemed to dread. What a coil, and what a barrier! And the itch for the future, the contempt, as it were, for what was overpast, which forms the active principle, moved in the heart of one who ever believed that what one wanted was more important than what other people did not want. From the bank, awhile, in the warm summer stillness, she watched the water-lily plants and willow leaves, the fishes rising; sniffed the scent of grass and meadow-sweet, wondering how she could force everybody to be happy. Jon and Fleur! Two little lame ducks⁠—charming callow yellow little ducks! A great pity! Surely something could be done! One must not take such situations lying down. She walked on, and reached a station, hot and cross.

That evening, faithful to the impulse toward direct action, which made many people avoid her, she said to her father:

“Dad, I’ve been down to see young Fleur. I think she’s very attractive. It’s no good hiding our heads under our wings, is it?”

The startled Jolyon set down his barley-water, and began crumbling his bread.

“It’s what you appear to be doing,” he said. “Do you realise whose daughter she is?”

“Can’t the dead past bury its dead?”

Jolyon rose.

“Certain things can never be buried.”

“I disagree,” said June. “It’s that which stands in the way of all happiness and progress. You don’t understand the Age, Dad. It’s got no use for outgrown things. Why do you think it matters so terribly that Jon should know about his mother? Who pays any attention to that sort of thing now? The marriage laws are just as they were when Soames and Irene couldn’t get a divorce, and you had to come in. We’ve moved, and they haven’t. So nobody cares. Marriage without a decent chance of relief is only a sort of slave-owning; people oughtn’t to own each other. Everybody sees that now. If Irene broke such laws, what does it matter?”

“It’s not for me to disagree there,” said Jolyon; “but that’s all quite beside the mark. This is a matter of human feeling.”

“Of course it is,” cried June, “the human feeling of those two young things.”

“My dear,” said Jolyon with gentle exasperation; “you’re talking nonsense.”

“I’m not.