Indian Summer of a Forsyte | Page 2

during that long and tragic business of June,
Soames, Irene his wife, and poor young Bosinney, had been smoothed
out. Even June had thrown off her melancholy at last--witness this

travel in Spain she was taking now with her father and her stepmother.
Curiously perfect peace was left by their departure; blissful, yet blank,
because his son was not there. Jo was never anything but a comfort and
a pleasure to him nowadays--an amiable chap; but women,
somehow--even the best--got a little on one's nerves, unless of course
one admired them.
Far-off a cuckoo called; a wood-pigeon was cooing from the first
elm-tree in the field, and how the daisies and buttercups had sprung up
after the last mowing! The wind had got into the sou'- west, too--a
delicious air, sappy! He pushed his hat back and let the sun fall on his
chin and cheek. Somehow, to-day, he wanted company--wanted a
pretty face to look at. People treated the old as if they wanted nothing.
And with the un-Forsytean philosophy which ever intruded on his soul,
he thought: 'One's never had enough. With a foot in the grave one'll
want something, I shouldn't be surprised!' Down here--away from the
exigencies of affairs--his grandchildren, and the flowers, trees, birds of
his little domain, to say nothing of sun and moon and stars above them,
said, 'Open, sesame,' to him day and night. And sesame had
opened--how much, perhaps, he did not know. He had always been
responsive to what they had begun to call 'Nature,' genuinely, almost
religiously responsive, though he had never lost his habit of calling a
sunset a sunset and a view a view, however deeply they might move
him. But nowadays Nature actually made him ache, he appreciated it so.
Every one of these calm, bright, lengthening days, with Holly's hand in
his, and the dog Balthasar in front looking studiously for what he never
found, he would stroll, watching the roses open, fruit budding on the
walls, sunlight brightening the oak leaves and saplings in the coppice,
watching the water-lily leaves unfold and glisten, and the silvery young
corn of the one wheat field; listening to the starlings and skylarks, and
the Alderney cows chewing the cud, flicking slow their tufted tails; and
every one of these fine days he ached a little from sheer love of it all,
feeling perhaps, deep down, that he had not very much longer to enjoy
it. The thought that some day--perhaps not ten years hence, perhaps not
five--all this world would be taken away from him, before he had
exhausted his powers of loving it, seemed to him in the nature of an
injustice brooding over his horizon. If anything came after this life, it
wouldn't be what he wanted; not Robin Hill, and flowers and birds and

pretty faces--too few, even now, of those about him! With the years his
dislike of humbug had increased; the orthodoxy he had worn in the
'sixties, as he had worn side-whiskers out of sheer exuberance, had long
dropped off, leaving him reverent before three things alone--beauty,
upright conduct, and the sense of property; and the greatest of these
now was beauty. He had always had wide interests, and, indeed could
still read The Times, but he was liable at any moment to put it down if
he heard a blackbird sing. Upright conduct, property-- somehow, they
were tiring; the blackbirds and the sunsets never tired him, only gave
him an uneasy feeling that he could not get enough of them. Staring
into the stilly radiance of the early evening and at the little gold and
white flowers on the lawn, a thought came to him: This weather was
like the music of 'Orfeo,' which he had recently heard at Covent Garden.
A beautiful opera, not like Meyerbeer, nor even quite Mozart, but, in its
way, perhaps even more lovely; something classical and of the Golden
Age about it, chaste and mellow, and the Ravogli 'almost worthy of the
old days'--highest praise he could bestow. The yearning of Orpheus for
the beauty he was losing, for his love going down to Hades, as in life
love and beauty did go--the yearning which sang and throbbed through
the golden music, stirred also in the lingering beauty of the world that
evening. And with the tip of his cork-soled, elastic-sided boot he
involuntarily stirred the ribs of the dog Balthasar, causing the animal to
wake and attack his fleas; for though he was supposed to have none,
nothing could persuade him of the fact. When he had finished he
rubbed the place he had been scratching against his master's calf, and
settled down again with his chin over the instep of the disturbing boot.
And into old Jolyon's mind came a sudden recollection--a face he