Ah!  She was “fine”—­“fine!”

III

AT ROBIN HILL

Jolyon Forsyte had spent his boy’s nineteenth birthday at Robin Hill, quietly going into his affairs.  He did everything quietly now, because his heart was in a poor way, and, like all his family, he disliked the idea of dying.  He had never realised how much till one day, two years ago, he had gone to his doctor about certain symptoms, and been told: 

“At any moment, on any overstrain.”

He had taken it with a smile—­the natural Forsyte reaction against an unpleasant truth.  But with an increase of symptoms in the train on the way home, he had realised to the full the sentence hanging over him.  To leave Irene, his boy, his home, his work—­though he did little enough work now!  To leave them for unknown darkness, for the unimaginable state, for such nothingness that he would not even be conscious of wind stirring leaves above his grave, nor of the scent of earth and grass.  Of such nothingness that, however hard he might try to conceive it, he never could, and must still hover on the hope that he might see again those he loved!  To realise this was to endure very poignant spiritual anguish.  Before he reached home that day he had determined to keep it from Irene.  He would have to be more careful than man had ever been, for the least thing would give it away and make her as wretched as himself, almost.  His doctor had passed him sound in other respects, and seventy was nothing of an age—­he would last a long time yet, if he could.

Such a conclusion, followed out for nearly two years, develops to the full the subtler side of character.  Naturally not abrupt, except when nervously excited, Jolyon had become control incarnate.  The sad patience of old people who cannot exert themselves was masked by a smile which his lips preserved even in private.  He devised continually all manner of cover to conceal his enforced lack of exertion.

Mocking himself for so doing, he counterfeited conversion to the Simple Life; gave up wine and cigars, drank a special kind of coffee with no coffee in it.  In short, he made himself as safe as a Forsyte in his condition could, under the rose of his mild irony.  Secure from discovery, since his wife and son had gone up to Town, he had spent the fine May day quietly arranging his papers, that he might die to-morrow without inconveniencing any one, giving in fact a final polish to his terrestrial state.  Having docketed and enclosed it in his father’s old Chinese cabinet, he put the key into an envelope, wrote the words outside:  “Key of the Chinese cabinet, wherein will be found the exact state of me, J. F.,” and put it in his breast-pocket, where it would be always about him, in case of accident.  Then, ringing for tea, he went out to have it under the old oak-tree.

All are under sentence of death; Jolyon, whose sentence was but a little more precise and pressing, had become so used to it that he thought habitually, like other people, of other things.  He thought of his son now.