"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 pasts, which it is now my task to make known
to you, because they so grievously and deeply affect your future. Many,
very many years ago, as far back indeed as 1883, when she was only
twenty, your mother had the great and lasting misfortune to make an
unhappy marriage--no, not with me, Jon. Without money of her own, and
with only a stepmother--closely related to Jezebel--she was very unhappy
in her home life. It was Fleur's father that she married, my cousin
Soames Forsyte. He had pursued her very tenaciously and to do him
justice was deeply in love with her. Within a week she knew the
fearful mistake she had made. It was not his fault; it was her error of
judgment--her misfortune."
So far Jolyon had kept some semblance of irony, but now his subject
carried him away.
"Jon, I want to explain to you if I can--and it's very hard--how it is
that an unhappy marriage such as this can so easily come about. You will
of course say: 'If she didn't really love him how could she ever have
married him?' You would be right if it were not for one or two rather
terrible considerations. From this initial mistake of hers all the
subsequent trouble, sorrow, and tragedy have come, and so I must make
it clear to you if I can. You see, Jon, in those days and even to this
day--indeed, I don't see, for all the talk of enlightenment, how it can
well be otherwise--most girls are married ignorant of the sexual side
of life. Even if they know what it means they have not experienced it.
That's the crux. It is this actual lack of experience, whatever verbal
knowledge they have, which makes all the difference and all the trouble.
In a vast number of marriages-and your mother's was one--girls are not
and cannot be certain whether they love the man they marry or not; they
do not know until after that act of union which makes the reality of
marriage. Now, in many, perhaps in most doubtful cases, this act cements
and strengthens the attachment, but in other cases, and your mother's
was one, it is a revelation of mistake, a destruction of such attraction
as there was. There is nothing more tragic in a woman's life than such
a revelation, growing daily, nightly clearer. Coarse-grained and
unthinking people are apt to laugh at such a mistake, and say, 'What a
fuss about nothing!' Narrow and self-righteous people, only capable of
judging the lives of others by their own, are apt to condemn those who
make this tragic error, to condemn them for life to the dungeons they
have made for themselves. You know the expression: 'She has made her
bed, she must lie on it!' It is a hard-mouthed saying, quite unworthy of
a gentleman or lady in the best sense of those words; and I can use no
stronger condemnation. I have not been what is called a moral man, but I
wish to use no words to you, my dear, which will make you think lightly
of ties or contracts into which you enter. Heaven forbid! But with
the experience of a life behind me I do say that those who condemn the
victims of these tragic mistakes, condemn them and hold out no hands
to help them, are inhuman, or rather they would be if they had the
understanding to know what they are doing. But they haven't! Let them
go! They are as much anathema to me as I, no doubt, am to them. I have
had to say all this, because I am going to put you into a position to
judge your mother, and you are very young, without experience of what
life is. To go on with the story. After three years of effort to subdue
her shrinking--I was going to say her loathing and it's not too
strong a word, for shrinking soon becomes loathing under such
circumstances--three years of what to a sensitive, beauty-loving nature
like your mother's, Jon, was torment, she met a young man who fell in
love with her. He was the architect of this very house that we live in
now, he was building it for her and Fleur's father to live in, a new
prison to hold her, in place of the one she inhabited with him in
London. Perhaps that fact played some part in what came of it. But in
any case she, too, fell in love with him. I know it's not necessary to
explain to you that one does not precisely choose with whom one will
fall in love. It comes. Very well! It came. I can imagine--though she
never said much to me about it--the struggle that then took place in
her, because, Jon, she was brought up strictly and was not light in her
ideas--not at all. However, this was an overwhelming feeling, and it
came to pass that they loved in deed as well as in thought. Then came a
fearful tragedy. I must tell you of it because if I don't you will never
understand the real situation that you have now to face. The man whom
she had married--Soames Forsyte, the father of Fleur one night, at the
height of her passion for this young man, forcibly reasserted his rights
over her. The next day she met her lover and told him of it. Whether
he committed suicide or whether he was accidentally run over in his
distraction, we never knew; but so it was. Think of your mother as she
was that evening when she heard of his death. I happened to see her.
Your grandfather sent me to help her if I could. I only just saw her,
before the door was shut against me by her husband. But I have never
forgotten her face, I can see it now. I was not in love with her then,
not for twelve years after, but I have never for gotten. My dear boy--it
is not easy to write like this. But you see, I must. Your mother is
wrapped up in you, utterly, devotedly. I don't wish to write harshly of
Soames Forsyte. I don't think harshly of him. I have long been sorry
for him; perhaps I was sorry even then. As the world judges she was
in error, he within his rights. He loved her--in his way. She was his
property. That is the view he holds of life--of human feelings and
hearts--property. It's not his fault--so was he born. To me it is a view
that has always been abhorrent--so was I born! Knowing you as I do, I
feel it cannot be otherwise than abhorrent to you. Let me go on with the
story. Your mother fled from his house that night; for twelve years she
lived quietly alone without companionship of any sort, until in 1899 her
husband--you see, he was still her husband, for he did not attempt
to divorce her, and she of course had no right to divorce him--became
conscious, it seems, of the want of children, and commenced a long
attempt to induce her to go back to him and give him a child. I was her
trustee then, under your Grandfather's Will, and I watched this going
on. While watching, I became attached to her, devotedly attached. His
pressure increased, till one day she came to me here and practically put
herself under my protection. Her husband, who was kept informed of all
her movements, attempted to force us apart by bringing a divorce suit,
or possibly he really meant it, I don't know; but anyway our names were
publicly joined. That decided us, and we became united in fact. She
was divorced, married me, and you were born. We have lived in perfect
happiness, at least I have, and I believe your mother also. Soames, soon
after the divorce, married Fleur's mother, and she was born. That is the
story, Jon. I have told it you, because by the affection which we see
you have formed for this man's daughter you are blindly moving toward
what must utterly destroy your mother's happiness, if not your own.
I don't wish to speak of myself, because at my age there's no use
supposing I shall cumber the ground much longer, besides, what I should
suffer would be mainly on her account, and on yours. But what I want
you to realise is that feelings of horror and aversion such as those
can never be buried or forgotten. They are alive in her to-day. Only
yesterday at Lord's we happened to see Soames Forsyte. Her face, if you
had seen it, would have convinced you. The idea that you should marry
his daughter is a nightmare to her, Jon. I have nothing to say against
Fleur save that she is his daughter. But your children, if you married
her, would be the grandchildren of Soames, as much as of your mother, of
a man who once owned your mother as a man might own a slave. Think what
that would mean. By such a marriage you enter the camp which held your
mother prisoner and wherein she ate her heart out. You are just on the
threshold of life, you have only known this girl two months, and however
deeply you think you love her, I appeal to you to break it off at once.
Don't give your mother this rankling pain and humiliation during the
rest of her life. Young though she will always seem to me, she is
fifty-seven. Except for us two she has no one in the world. She will
soon have only you. Pluck up your spirit, Jon, and break away. Don't put
this cloud and barrier between you. Don't break her heart! Bless you, my
dear boy, and again forgive me for all the pain this letter must bring
you--we tried to spare it you, but Spain--it seems---was no good.