Awakening & To Let [97]
A generation later, with his own boy, Jolly, Harrow-buttonholed with corn-flowers--by old Jolyon's whim his grandson had been canonised at a trifle less expense--again Jolyon had experienced the heat and counter-passions of the day, and come back to the cool and the strawberry beds of Robin Hill, and billiards after dinner, his boy making the most heart-breaking flukes and trying to seem languid and grown-up. Those two days each year he and his son had been alone together in the world, one on each side--and Democracy just born!
And so, he had unearthed a grey top hat, borrowed a tiny bit of light-blue ribbon from Irene, and gingerly, keeping cool, by car and train and taxi, had reached Lord's Ground. There, beside her in a lawn-coloured frock with narrow black edges, he had watched the game, and felt the old thrill stir within him.
When Soames passed, the day was spoiled. Irene's face was distorted by compression of the lips. No good to go on sitting here with Soames or perhaps his daughter recurring in front of them, like decimals. And he said:
"Well, dear, if you've had enough--let's go!"
That evening Jolyon felt exhausted. Not wanting her to see him thus, he waited till she had begun to play, and stole off to the little study. He opened the long window for air, and the door, that he might still hear her music drifting in; and, settled in his father's old armchair, closed his eyes, with his head against the worn brown leather. Like that passage of the Cesar Franck Sonata--so had been his life with her, a divine third movement. And now this business of Jon's--this bad business! Drifted to the edge of consciousness, he hardly knew if it were in sleep that he smelled the scent of a cigar, and seemed to see his father in the blackness before his closed eyes. That shape formed, went, and formed again; as if in the very chair where he himself was sitting, he saw his father, black-coated, with. knees crossed, glasses balanced between thumb and finger; saw the big white moustaches, and the deep eyes looking up below a dome of forehead and seeming to search his own, seeming to speak. "Are you facing it, Jo? It's for you to decide. She's only a woman!" Ah! how well he knew his father in that phrase; how all the Victorian Age came up with it! And his answer "No, I've funked it--funked hurting her and Jon and myself. I've got a heart; I've funked it." But the old eyes, so much older, so much younger than his own, kept at it; "It's your wife, your son; your past. Tackle it, my boy!" Was it a message from walking spirit; or but the instinct of his sire living on within him? And again came that scent of cigar smoke-from the old saturated leather. Well! he would tackle it, write to Jon, and put the whole thing down in black and white! And suddenly he breathed with difficulty, with a sense of suffocation, as if his heart were swollen. He got up and went out into the air. The stars were very bright. He passed along the terrace round the corner of the house, till, through the window of the music-room, he could see Irene at the piano, with lamp-light falling on her powdery hair; withdrawn into herself she seemed, her dark eyes staring straight before her, her hands idle. Jolyon saw her raise those hands and clasp them over her breast. 'It's Jon, with her,' he thought; 'all Jon! I'm dying out of her--it's natural!'
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