第38章

"Hooray!Oh!hard luck,old man!"or "Hooray!Oh!bad luck,Dad!"to each other,when some disaster at which their hearts bounded happened to the opposing school.And Jolyon would wear a grey top hat,instead of his usual soft one,to save his son's feelings,for a black top hat he could not stomach.When Jolly went up to Oxford,Jolyon went up with him,amused,humble,and a little anxious not to discredit his boy amongst all these youths who seemed so much more assured and old than himself.He often thought,'Glad I'm a painter'for he had long dropped under-writing at Lloyds--'it's so innocuous.You can't look down on a painter--you can't take him seriously enough.'For Jolly,who had a sort of natural lordliness,had passed at once into a very small set,who secretly amused his father.The boy had fair hair which curled a little,and his grandfather's deepset iron-grey eyes.He was well-built and very upright,and always pleased Jolyon's aesthetic sense,so that he was a tiny bit afraid of him,as artists ever are of those of their own sex whom they admire physically.On that occasion,however,he actually did screw up his courage to give his son advice,and this was it:

"Look here,old man,you're bound to get into debt;mind you come to me at once.Of course,I'll always pay them.But you might remember that one respects oneself more afterwards if one pays one's own way.And don't ever borrow,except from me,will you?"And Jolly had said:

"All right,Dad,I won't,"and he never had.

"And there's just one other thing.I don't know much about morality and that,but there is this:It's always worth while before you do anything to consider whether it's going to hurt another person more than is absolutely necessary."Jolly had looked thoughtful,and nodded,and presently had squeezed his father's hand.And Jolyon had thought:'I wonder if I had the right to say that?'He always had a sort of dread of losing the dumb confidence they had in each other;remembering how for long years he had lost his own father's,so that there had been nothing between them but love at a great distance.He under-estimated,no doubt,the change in the spirit of the age since he himself went up to Cambridge in '65;and perhaps he underestimated,too,his boy's power of understanding that he was tolerant to the very bone.It was that tolerance of his,and possibly his scepticism,which ever made his relations towards June so queerly defensive.She was such a decided mortal;knew her own mind so terribly well;wanted things so inexorably until she got them--and then,indeed,often dropped them like a hot potato.Her mother had been like that,whence had come all those tears.Not that his incompatibility with his daughter was anything like what it had been with the first Mrs.

Young Jolyon.One could be amused where a daughter was concerned;in a wife's case one could not be amused.To see June set her heart and jaw on a thing until she got it was all right,because it was never anything which interfered fundamentally with Jolyon's liberty--the one thing on which his jaw was also absolutely rigid,a considerable jaw,under that short grizzling beard.Nor was there ever any necessity for real heart-to-heart encounters.One could break away into irony--as indeed he often had to.But the real trouble with June was that she had never appealed to his aesthetic sense,though she might well have,with her red-gold hair and her viking-coloured eyes,and that touch of the Berserker in her spirit.It was very different with Holly,soft and quiet,shy and affectionate,with a playful imp in her somewhere.He watched this younger daughter of his through the duckling stage with extraordinary interest.Would she come out a swan?With her sallow oval face and her grey wistful eyes and those long dark lashes,she might,or she might not.Only this last year had he been able to guess.Yes,she would be a swan--rather a dark one,always a shy one,but an authentic swan.She was eighteen now,and Mademoiselle Beauce was gone--the excellent lady had removed,after eleven years haunted by her continuous reminiscences of the 'well-brrred little Tayleurs,'to another family whose bosom would now be agitated by her reminiscences of the 'well-brrred little Forsytes.'

She had taught Holly to speak French like herself.

Portraiture was not Jolyon's forte,but he had already drawn his younger daughter three times,and was drawing her a fourth,on the afternoon of October 4th,1899,when a card was brought to him which caused his eyebrows to go up:

Mr.SOAMES FORSYTE

THE SHELTER,CONNOISSEURS CLUB,MAPLEDURHAM.ST.JAMES'S.

But here the Forsyte Saga must digress again .