Awakening To Let | Page 5

disagreeable, for she had a way of luring him from tune to tune,
never making him practise one which did not give him pleasure, so that
he remained eager to convert ten thumbs into eight fingers. Under his
father he learned to draw pleasure-pigs and other animals. He was not a
highly educated little boy. Yet, on the whole, the silver spoon stayed in
his mouth without spoiling it, though "Da" sometimes said that other
children would do him a "world of good."
It was a disillusionment, then, when at the age of nearly seven she held
him down on his back, because he wanted to do something of which
she did not approve. This first interference with the free individualism
of a Forsyte drove him almost frantic. There was something appalling
in the utter helplessness of that position, and the uncertainty as to
whether it would ever come to an end. Suppose she never let him get
up any more! He suffered torture at the top of his voice for fifty
seconds. Worse than anything was his perception that "Da" had taken

all that time to realise the agony of fear he was enduring. Thus,
dreadfully, was revealed to him the lack of imagination in the human
being.
When he was let up he remained convinced that "Da" had done a
dreadful thing. Though he did not wish to bear witness against her, he
had been compelled, by fear of repetition, to seek his mother and say:
"Mum, don't let 'Da' hold me down on my back again."
His mother, her hands held up over her head, and in them two plaits of
hair--"couleur de feuille morte," as little Jon had not yet learned to call
it--had looked at him with eyes like little bits of his brown velvet tunic,
and answered:
"No, darling, I won't."
She, being in the nature of a goddess, little Jon was satisfied; especially
when, from under the dining-table at breakfast, where he happened to
be waiting for a mushroom, he had overheard her say to his father:
"Then, will you tell 'Da,' dear, or shall I? She's so devoted to him"; and
his father's answer:
"Well, she mustn't show it that way. I know exactly what it feels like to
be held down on one's back. No Forsyte can stand it for a minute."
Conscious that they did not know him to be under the table, little Jon
was visited by the quite new feeling of embarrassment, and stayed
where he was, ravaged by desire for the mushroom.
Such had been his first dip into the dark abysses of existence. Nothing
much had been revealed to him after that, till one day, having gone
down to the cow-house for his drink of milk fresh from the cow, after
Garratt had finished milking, he had seen Clover's calf, dead.
Inconsolable, and followed by an upset Garratt, he had sought "Da";
but suddenly aware that she was not the person he wanted, had rushed
away to find his father, and had run into the arms of his mother.
"Clover's calf's dead! Oh! Oh! It looked so soft!"
His mother's clasp, and her:
"Yes, darling, there, there!" had stayed his sobbing. But if Clover's calf
could die, anything could--not only bees, flies, beetles and
chickens--and look soft like that! This was appalling-- and soon
forgotten!
The next thing had been to sit on a bumble bee, a poignant experience,
which his mother had understood much better than "Da"; and nothing

of vital importance had happened after that till the year turned; when,
following a day of utter wretchedness, he had enjoyed a disease
composed of little spots, bed, honey in a spoon, and many Tangerine
oranges. It was then that the world had flowered. To "Auntie" June he
owed that flowering, for no sooner was he a little lame duck than she
came rushing down from London, bringing with her the books which
had nurtured her own Berserker spirit, born in the noted year of 1869.
Aged, and of many colours, they were stored with the most formidable
happenings. Of these she read to little Jon, till he was allowed to read to
himself; whereupon she whisked back to London and left them with
him in a heap. Those books cooked his fancy, till he thought and
dreamed of nothing but midshipmen and dhows, pirates, rafts,
sandal-wood traders, iron horses, sharks, battles, Tartars, Red Indians,
balloons, North Poles and other extravagant delights. The moment he
was suffered to get up, he rigged his bed fore and aft, and set out from
it in a narrow bath across green seas of carpet, to a rock, which he
climbed by means of its mahogany drawer knobs, to sweep the horizon
with his drinking tumbler screwed to his eye, in search