all his life of enjoying things, even imperfect thingsâand there had been many imperfect thingsâhe had enjoyed them all with moderation, so as to keep himself young. But now he was deserted by his power of enjoyment, by his philosophy, and left with this dreadful feeling that it was all done with. Not even the âPrisonersâ Chorus,â nor âFlorianâs Song,â had the power to dispel the gloom of his loneliness.
If Jo were only with him! The boy must be forty by now. He had wasted fourteen years out of the life of his only son. And Jo was no longer a social pariah. He was married. Old Jolyon had been unable to refrain from marking his appreciation of the action by enclosing his son a cheque for £500. The cheque had been returned in a letter from the Hotch Potch, couched in these words.
MY DEAREST FATHER,
Your generous gift was welcome as a sign that you might think worse of me. I return it, but should you think fit to invest it for the benefit of the little chap (we call him Jolly), who bears our Christian and, by courtesy, our surname, I shall be very glad.
I hope with all my heart that your health is as good as ever.
Your loving son,
Jo
The letter was like the boy. He had always been an amiable chap. Old Jolyon had sent this reply:
MY DEAR JO,
The sum (£500) stands in my books for the benefit of your boy, under the name of Jolyon Forsyte, and will be duly credited with interest at five per cent. I hope that you are doing well. My health remains good at present.
With love, I am,
Your affectionate father,
JOLYON FORSYTE
And every year on the first of January he had added a hundred and the interest. The sum was mounting upânext New Yearâs Day it would be fifteen hundred and odd pounds! And it is difficult to say how much satisfaction he had got out of that yearly transaction. But the correspondence had ended.
In spite of his love for his son, in spite of an instinct, partly constitutional, partly the result, as in thousands of his class, of the continual handling and watching of affairs, prompting him to judge conduct by results rather than by principle, there was at the bottom of his heart a sort of uneasiness. His son ought, under the circumstances, to have gone to the dogs; that law was laid down in all the novels, sermons, and plays he had ever read, heard, or witnessed.
After receiving the cheque back there seemed to him to be something wrong somewhere. Why had his son not gone to the dogs? But, then, who could tell?
He had heard, of courseâin fact, he had made it his business to find outâthat Jo lived in St. Johnâs Wood, that he had a little house in Wistaria Avenue with a garden, and took his wife about with him into societyâa queer sort of society, no doubtâand that they had two childrenâthe little chap they called Jolly (considering the circumstances the name struck him as cynical, and old Jolyon both feared and disliked cynicism), and a girl called Holly, born since the marriage. Who could tell what his sonâs circumstances really were? He had capitalized the income he had inherited from his motherâs father and joined Lloydâs as an underwriter; he painted pictures, tooâwatercolours. Old Jolyon knew this, for he had surreptitiously bought them from time to time, after chancing to see his sonâs name signed at the bottom of a representation of the river Thames in a dealerâs window. He thought them bad, and did not hang them because of the signature; he kept them locked up in a drawer.
In the great opera house a terrible yearning came on him to see his son. He remembered the days when he had been wont to slide him, in a brown holland suit, to and fro under the arch of his legs; the times when he ran beside the boyâs pony, teaching him to ride; the day he first took him to school. He had been a loving, lovable little chap! After he went to Eton he had acquired, perhaps, a little too much of