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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14106 ***
+
+THE BELFRY
+
+by
+
+MAY SINCLAIR
+
+Author of the _Three Sisters_, etc.
+
+1916
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+MY BOOK
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Of course this story can't be published as it stands just yet. Not--if
+I'm to be decent--for another generation, because, thank Heaven, they're
+still alive. (They've had me there, as they've always had me everywhere.)
+How they managed it I can't think. I don't mean merely at the end, though
+that was stupendous, but how they ever managed it. It seems to me they
+must have taken _all_ the risks, always.
+
+I suppose if you asked him he'd say, "That's how." It was certainly the
+way they managed the business of living. Perhaps it's why they managed it
+on the whole so well. I remember how when I was shilly-shallying about
+that last job of mine he said, "Take it. Take it. If you can risk living
+at all, my dear fellow, you can risk that."
+
+And he added, "If I'd only _your_ luck!"
+
+Well, that's exactly what he did have. He had my luck, I mean the luck I
+ought to have had, all the time, from the beginning to the very end. But
+there is one thing he can't take from me, and that is the telling of this
+story. He can hold it up as long as he lives--as long as _she_ lives--as
+he has held up pretty nearly everything where I was concerned. But he
+can't take it from me. He doesn't "want" it. Even he with his infernal
+talent couldn't do anything with it. Unscrupulous as he was, and I assure
+you he'd stick at nothing (he'd "take" his mother's last agony if he
+"wanted" it badly enough), indecent as he was, he'd stick at that.
+
+I don't mean he couldn't take his wife, part of her, anyhow, at a pinch.
+And I don't mean he couldn't take himself, his own emotions, his own
+eccentricities, if he happened to want them, and his own meannesses, if
+nobody else's, so to speak, would do. But he couldn't and wouldn't take
+his own big things, particularly not that last thing.
+
+When I say that I can't publish this story yet as it stands, I'm not
+forgetting that I _have_ published the end of it already. But only in the
+way of business; to publish that sort of thing was what I went out for;
+it was all part of my Special Correspondent's job.
+
+And when you think that it was just touch and go--Why, if I hadn't bucked
+up and taken that job when he told me to I might have missed him. No
+amount of hearing about him would have been the same thing. I had to see
+him.
+
+What I wrote then doesn't count. I had to tell what I saw just after I
+had seen it. I had to take it as I saw it, a fragment snapped off from
+the rest of him, and dated October 11th, 1914, as if it didn't belong to
+him; as if he were only another splendid instance. And of course I had
+to leave _her_ out.
+
+Told like that, it didn't amount to much.
+
+This is the real telling.
+
+I must get away from the end, right back to the beginning.
+
+I suppose, to be accurate, the very beginning was the day I first met him
+in nineteen-six--no, nineteen-five it must have been. It was at
+Blackheath Football Ground, the last match of the season, when Woolwich
+Arsenal played East Kent and beat them by two goals and a try. He was
+there as a representative of the Press, "doing" the match for some
+sporting paper.
+
+He held me up at the barrier (yes, he held me up in the first moment of
+our acquaintance) while he fumbled for his pass. He had given the word
+"Press" with an exaggerated aplomb that showed he was young to his job,
+and the gate-keeper challenged him. It was, in fact, the exquisite
+self-consciousness of the little man that made me look at him. And he
+caught me looking at him; he blushed, caught himself blushing and smiled
+to himself with the most delicious appreciation of his own absurdity. And
+as he stood there fumbling, and holding me up while he argued with the
+gate-keeper, who didn't know him, I got his engaging twinkle. It was as
+if he looked at me and said, "See me swank just then? Funny, wasn't it?"
+
+He hung about on the edge of the crowd for a while with his hands in his
+pockets, sucking his little blond moustache and looking dreamy and rather
+incompetent. I was a full-blown journalist even then, and I remember
+feeling a sort of pity for his youth. He was so obviously on his maiden
+trip, and obviously, I fancied, doomed never to arrive in any port.
+
+Well--well; I came upon him afterwards at a crisis in the game. He was
+taking notes in shorthand with a sort of savagery between his tense and
+concentrated glares at the scrimmage that was then massed in the centre
+of the field. Woolwich Arsenal and East Kent, locked in each other's
+bodies, now struggled and writhed and butted like two immense beasts
+welded together by the impact of their battle, now swayed and quivered
+and snorted as one beast torn by a solitary and mysterious rage.
+
+Self-consciousness had vanished from my man. He stood, leaning forward
+with his legs a little apart. His boyish face was deeply flushed; he had
+sucked and bitten his blond moustache into a wisp; he was breathing
+heavily, with his mouth ajar; his very large and conspicuous blue eyes
+glittered with a sort of passion. (He wore those eyes in his odd little
+ugly face like some inappropriate decoration.)
+
+All these symptoms declared that he was "on." They made up a look that I
+was soon to know him by.
+
+I remember marvelling at his excitement.
+
+I remember also discussing the match with him as we went back to town. It
+must have been then that he began to tell me about himself: that his name
+was James Tasker Jevons; that he lived, or hoped to live, by going about
+the country and reporting the big cricket and football matches.
+
+At least he called it reporting. I shouldn't think there has ever been
+any reporting like it before or since.
+
+I told him I was out for my paper, the _Morning Standard_, too. Not
+exactly reporting, in _his_ sense (I little knew what _his_ sense was
+when I put it that way); and there left it. You see, I didn't want to rub
+it into the poor chap that the stranger he had been unfolding himself to
+so quaintly was a cut above his job.
+
+But he saw through it. I don't know how he managed to convey to me that
+my delicacy needn't suffer. Anyhow, he must have had some scruples of his
+own, since he waited for another context before remarking quietly that
+what I was doing now he would be doing in another six months. (And he
+was.) These things, he said, took time, and he gave himself six months.
+(Yes; in less than six months he was holding me up, again, in my own
+paper. I had to wait till he was "out" before I could get in.) He didn't
+seem to boast so much as to trace for my benefit the path of some natural
+force, some upward-tending, indestructible Energy that happened to be
+him.
+
+All this I remember. But I cannot remember by what stages we arrived at
+dining together, as we did that night in a little restaurant in Soho.
+Perhaps there were no stages; we may have simply leaped by one bound at
+that consummation. He had swung himself into my compartment as the train
+was leaving the platform at Blackheath; so I suppose it was destiny.
+After that I was tempted to conceive that he fastened on me as on
+something that he had need of; but I think it was rather that I fell to
+his mysterious attraction.
+
+While we dined he informed me further that he had been reporting football
+matches for six weeks. Before that he had been proof-reader for a firm of
+printers for about a year. Before that he had been a compositor. And
+before that again he had worked in an office with his father, who was
+Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths for some parish down in
+Hertfordshire. He chucked that because he found that the registration of
+births, marriages and deaths was spoiling his handwriting quite as much
+as his handwriting was spoiling the registration of births, marriages and
+deaths. (He was, he said, cultivating a careless, scholarly hand.) He
+liked his present job, because it took him out pretty often into the open
+air. Also he liked looking on at football matches and prize fights.
+
+He said it made him feel manly.
+
+You should have seen him sitting there and telling me these things in a
+gentle, throaty and rather thick voice with a cockney accent and a sort
+of tenor ring in it and a queer, humorous intonation that was like an
+audible twinkle, as if he saw himself as he thought I must see him,
+mainly in the light of absurdity. You should have seen his face, its thin
+cheeks, its vivid flush, its queer, inquisitive, contradictory nose that
+had a slender, high bridge and a tilted, pointed end in profile and
+three-quarters, and turned suddenly all broad and blunt in a full view;
+and his mouth that stood ajar with excitement, and even in moments of
+quiescence failed to hide the tips of two rather prominent white teeth
+pressed down on the lower lip. I don't say there was anything unmanly
+about Jevons's figure (he wasn't noticeably undersized), or about his
+mouth and jaw. I knew a great General with a mouth and jaw like that, and
+he was one of the handsomest figures in the Service. I'm not hinting at
+anything like effeminacy in Jevons, only at a certain oddity that really
+saved him. If he'd been handsome he'd have been dreadful. His flush, his
+decorative eyes, his dark eyebrows and eyelashes, his sleek, light brown
+hair, would have made him vulgar. As it was, his queerness gave them a
+sort of point.
+
+I dwell on these physical details because, afterwards, I found myself
+continually looking at him as if to see where his charm lay. To see, I
+suppose, what _she_ saw in him.
+
+If anybody had asked me that night what I saw in him myself beyond an
+ordinary little journalist "on the make," I don't suppose I could have
+told them. But there's no doubt that I felt his charm, or that night
+would have been the end instead of the beginning.
+
+We sat in the restaurant when he had done telling me about himself; I
+remember we sat quite a long time discussing an English writer--our
+contemporary--whom I rather considered I had discovered. In those days I
+used to apply him as an infallible test. Jevons had read every word of
+him; it was he, in fact, who brought him into the conversation. He
+confessed afterwards that he had done it on purpose. He had been testing
+_me_.
+
+Even so our acquaintance might have lapsed but for the thing that
+happened when the waiter came up with the bill. My share of it was three
+and twopence, and I found myself with only ninepence in my pocket. I had
+to borrow half a crown, from Jevons. You mayn't see anything very
+dreadful in that. I didn't at the time, and there wasn't. The dreadful
+thing was that I forgot to pay him back.
+
+Yes. Something happened that put Jevons and his half-crown out of my head
+for long enough. I forgot to pay him, and he had to go without his dinner
+for three nights in consequence. It was his last half-crown.
+
+He told me this as an immense joke, long afterwards.
+
+And Viola Thesiger cried.
+
+That crying of hers, that child-like softening and breaking down under
+him, in itself so unexpected (I didn't know she could do it), that
+sudden and innocent catastrophe, was the first sign to me that I was done
+for--wiped out. There wasn't any violence or any hysteria about it, only
+grief, only pity. It was an entirely simple, gentle and beautiful
+performance, and it took place in my rooms after Jevons had left us. But,
+as I say, this was long afterwards. The agony of my undoing was a
+horribly protracted affair.
+
+I needn't say that what happened--I mean the thing that made me forget
+all about Jevons and his half-crown--was Viola Thesiger.
+
+I had his address, but the next day--the day after the match--was Sunday,
+so I couldn't get the postal order I had meant to send him. And on Monday
+she walked into my rooms at ten in the morning.
+
+The appointment, I may remark, was for nine-thirty. I had fixed that
+early hour for it because I wanted to get it done with. I wasn't going to
+have my morning murdered with violence when it was two hours old; neither
+did I intend it to be poisoned by the thought of this interview hanging
+over me at the end.
+
+I had just sent for Pavitt, my man, and told him that if Miss Thesiger
+called he was on no account to let her in. He was to say that the
+appointment was for nine-thirty and that Mr. Furnival was now engaged.
+She would have to call again at three if she wished to see him. When
+engaging a typist it is as well to begin as you mean to go on, and I was
+anxious to let Miss Thesiger know at once that I was not a man who would
+stand any nonsense. I was abominably busy that morning.
+
+And Pavitt let her in. (It was the first time he had failed in this way.)
+He never explained or apologized for it afterwards. He seemed to think
+that when I had seen Miss Thesiger I would see, even more vividly than he
+did, how impossible it was to do otherwise, unless he had relinquished
+all claim to manhood and to chivalry. The look he sent me from the
+threshold as he retreated backwards, drawing the door upon himself like a
+screen and shutting me in alone with her, said very plainly, "You may
+curse, sir, and you may swear; but if you think you'll get out of it any
+better than I have you're mistaken."
+
+Yes: it was something more than her appearance and her manner, though
+they, in all conscience, were enough.
+
+I do not know what appearance and what manner, if any, are proper to a
+young woman calling on a young man at his rooms to seek employment. The
+mere situation may, for all I know, bristle with embarrassments. Anyhow,
+I can imagine that in some hands it might have moments, let us say, of
+extreme difficulty on either side. Miss Thesiger's appearance and her
+manner were perfect; but they didn't suggest by any sign or shade that
+she was a young woman seeking employment, that she was a young woman
+seeking anything; but rather that she was a young woman to whom all
+things naturally came.
+
+She approached me very slowly. Her adorable little salutation, with all
+its maturity, its gravity, was somehow essentially young. She was rather
+tall, and her figure had the same serious maturity in youth. She carried
+her small head high, and held her shoulders well back, so that she got a
+sort of squareness into the divine slope of them (people hadn't begun to
+slouch forward from the hips in those days), a squareness that agreed
+somehow with the character of her small face. I didn't know then whether
+it was a pretty face or not. I daresay it was a bit too odd and square
+for prettiness, and, as for beauty, that had all gone into the lines of
+her body (which _was_ beautiful, if you like). When you looked carefully,
+you got a little square, white forehead, and straight eyebrows of the
+same darkness as her hair, and very distinct on the white, and eyes also
+very dark and distinct, and fairly crystalline with youth; and a little
+white and very young nose that started straight and ended absurdly in a
+little soft knob that had a sort of kink in it; and a mouth which would
+have been too large for her face if it hadn't made room for itself by
+tilting up at the corners; and then a little square white chin and jaw;
+they were thrust forward, but so lightly and slenderly that it didn't
+matter. It doesn't sound--does it?--as if she could have been pretty, let
+alone beautiful; and yet--and yet she managed that little head of hers
+and that little odd face so as to give an impression of beauty or of
+prettiness. It was partly the oddness of the face and head, coming on the
+top of all that symmetry, that perfection, that made the total effect of
+her so bewildering. I can't find words for the total effect (I don't know
+that you ever got it all at once, and I certainly didn't get it then),
+and if I were to tell you that what struck me first about her was
+something perverse and wilful and defiant, this would be misleading.
+
+She smiled in her mature, perfunctory manner as she took the chair I gave
+her. She cast out her muff over my writing-table, and flung back the furs
+that covered her breast and shoulders, as if she had come to stay, as if
+it were four o'clock in the afternoon and I had asked her to tea for the
+first time.
+
+I remember saying, "That's right. I'm afraid this room is a bit warm,
+isn't it?"--as if she had done something uninvited and a little
+unexpected, and I wished to reassure her. As if, too, I desired to assert
+my position as the giver of assurances.
+
+(And it was I who needed them, not she.)
+
+She hadn't been in that room five minutes before she had created a
+situation; a situation that bristled with difficulty and danger.
+
+To begin with, she was so young. She couldn't have been, then, a day
+older than one-and-twenty. My first instinct (at least, I suppose it was
+my first) was to send her away; to tell her that I was afraid she
+wouldn't do, that she was too unpunctual, and that I had found, between
+nine-thirty and ten o'clock, somebody who would suit me rather better.
+Any lie I could think of, so long as I got out of it. So long as I got
+her out of it.
+
+I don't know how it was she so contrived to impress me as being in for
+something, some impetuous adventure, some enterprise of enormous
+uncertainty. It may have been because she looked so well-cared-for and
+expensive. I do not understand these matters, but her furs, and her
+tailor-made suit of dark cloth, and the little black velvet hat with the
+fur tail in it were not the sort of clothes I had hitherto seen worn by
+typists seeking for employment. So that I doubted whether financial
+necessity could have driven her to my door. Or else I had a premonition.
+She herself had none. She was guileless and unaware of taking any risks.
+And that, I think, was what disturbed me. The situation bristled because
+she so ignored all difficulty or danger.
+
+Please don't imagine that I regarded myself as dangerous or even
+difficult, or her as being, in any vulgar sense, out for adventure, or as
+balancing herself even for amusement on any perilous edge. It was not
+what she was _out_ for, it was, as I say, what she might possibly be in
+for; and what she would, in consequence, let me in for too. She made me
+feel responsible.
+
+"Let me see," I said; "it's typing, isn't it?"
+
+I began raking through drawers and pigeon-holes, pretending to find her
+letter and the sample of her work that she had sent me, though I knew all
+the time that they lay under my hand hidden by the blotter. I wanted to
+give myself time; I wanted to create the impression that I was old at
+this game; that I had to do with scores and scores of young women seeking
+employment; to make her realize the grim fact of competition; to saturate
+her with the idea that she was only one of scores and scores, all
+docketed and pigeon-holed, any one of whom might have superior qualities;
+when it would be easy enough to say, "I'm sorry, but the fact is, I
+rather think I've engaged somebody already."
+
+"Yes," she said, "it's typing. I can't do anything else. But if you want
+shorthand, I could learn it."
+
+This gave me an opening. "Well--I'm sorry--but the fact is--"
+
+"Did you like what I sent you?"
+
+That staggered me. I hadn't allowed for her voice. For a moment I
+wondered wildly what _had_ she sent me?
+
+"Oh, yes. I liked it. But--" I began it again.
+
+She leaned forward this time, peering under my elbow (the minx! I'm
+convinced she knew the infernal thing was there).
+
+"I see," she said. "You've lost it. Don't bother. I can do another. As
+long as you liked it, that's all right."
+
+I remember thinking violently: "It isn't all right. It's all wrong. And
+the more I like it (if I _do_ like it) the worse it's going to be." But
+all I said was, "You wrote from Canterbury, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+It was as if she challenged me with: "Why not? Why shouldn't one write
+from Canterbury?" And she stuck out her little chin as her eyes opened
+fire on me at close range.
+
+"Do you live there?" I said.
+
+"Yes." She corrected herself. "My people live there."
+
+"Oh! Because--in that case--I'm sorry--but--the fact is, I'm afraid--" I
+floundered, and she watched me floundering. Then I plunged. "I must have
+a typist who lives in London." (And I might have added "a typist who
+won't open fire on me at close range.")
+
+"But," she said, "I do--at least, I'm going to to-morrow evening."
+
+I must have sat staring then quite a long time, not at her, but at one of
+Roland Simpson's sketches on the wall in front of me.
+
+She followed, but not quite accurately, the direction of my thoughts.
+
+"If you want references, I can give you heaps. General Thesiger's my
+uncle. Why? Do you know him?"
+
+I had ceased staring. He was not the General I knew, but she had spoken a
+sufficiently distinguished name. I said as much.
+
+"Of course lots of people know him," she went on with a sort of radiant
+rapidity. "And he knows lots of people. But I wouldn't write to him if I
+were you. He'll only be rude, and ask you who the devil _you_ are.
+There's my father, Canon Thesiger. It's no good writing to him, either.
+It'll worry him. And there's--no, you mustn't bother the Archbishop. But
+there's the Dean. You might write to _him_! And there's Colonel
+Braithwaite and Mrs. Braithwaite. They're all dears. You might write to
+any of them. Only I'd much rather you didn't."
+
+"Why?" I said. I thought I was entitled to ask why.
+
+"Because," she said, "it'll only mean a lot more bother for me."
+
+I believe I meditated on this before I asked her, "Why should it?"
+
+"Because it isn't easy to get away and earn your own living in this
+country. And they'll try, poor dears, to stop me. And they can't."
+
+"If they don't," I said, "are you sure it won't mean a lot of bother for
+_them_?"
+
+"Not," she said gravely, "if they're left alone and not worried. It will,
+of course, if you go and write and stir them all up again."
+
+"I see. For the moment, then, they are placated?"
+
+"Rather." (I wondered on what grounds.) "We settled _that_ last night."
+
+"Then--" I said, "forgive my asking so many questions--your people know
+you had this appointment with me?"
+
+Her eyebrows took a little tortured twist in her pity for my stupidity.
+
+"Oh no. That would have upset them all for nothing. It doesn't do to
+worry them with silly details. You see, they don't know anything about
+you."
+
+It was exquisite, the innocence with which she brought it out.
+
+"But," I insisted, "that's rather my point. _You_ don't know anything
+about me either, do you?"
+
+"Yes, I do. I knew," she said, "the minute I came into the room. If it
+comes to that, you don't know anything about _me_."
+
+I said I did; I knew the minute _she_ came into the room. And she faced
+me with, "Well then, you see!" as if that settled it.
+
+I suppose it did settle it. I must have decided that since nobody could
+stop her, and I wasn't, after all, a villain, if she insisted on being
+somebody's typist, she had very much better be mine. You see, she was so
+young. I wanted to protect her. Not that there was anything helpless and
+pathetic about her, anything, except her innocence, that appealed to me
+for protection. On the contrary, she struck me as a creature of high
+courage and defiance. That, of course, was what constituted the danger.
+She would insist on taking risks. Presently I heard myself saying, "Yes,
+the Close, Canterbury. I've got that. But where am I to find you here?"
+
+She gave me an address that made me whistle.
+
+I asked her if she knew anything, anything whatever, about the people of
+the house?
+
+She said she didn't. She had chosen it because it had a nice green door,
+and there was an Angora cat on the door-step. A large orange cat with
+green eyes.
+
+Had she actually taken rooms there?
+
+No. But she had chosen them (I think she said because they had pretty
+chintz curtains.) She was going to take them _now_.
+
+She had her hand on the door. She was eager, like a child that has got
+off at last, after irritating delay.
+
+I closed the door against her precipitate flight. I said I thought we
+could settle that here, over the telephone.
+
+And I settled it.
+
+Having settled it, I sent Pavitt, my man, to get rooms for her that
+afternoon in Hampstead, with his sister-in-law, in a house overlooking
+the Heath. I said I couldn't promise her chintz curtains and a green door
+and an orange Angora cat with green eyes, but I thought she would be
+fairly comfortable with Mrs. Pavitt.
+
+She was.
+
+She told me a week later that the Hampstead rooms _had_ chintz curtains
+and there was a Persian kitten too. A blue Persian, with yellow eyes.
+
+There was. But I didn't tell her who put them there.
+
+The kitten alone (it was a pure-bred Persian) cost me three guineas; and
+to this day she thinks that Pavitt, who brought it to her, found it on
+the Heath.
+
+Yet, with all my precautions, there was trouble when Canterbury heard
+about my typist. (She had become my typist, though I had never said a
+word about engaging her.)
+
+This, of course, was owing to the criminal secrecy with which Viola
+conducted her affairs. The Minor Canon wrote to me as if I had seduced,
+or was about to seduce, his daughter. (He had upset himself by rushing up
+to take her back to Canterbury, and finding that she wouldn't go with
+him.) I think, in his excitement, he ordered me to give her up. He was a
+guileless and indeed a holy man; and it's always the guileless and the
+holy people who raise the uncleanest scandals. And Mrs. Thesiger wrote,
+and the General and the Dean; and I've no doubt the Archbishop would have
+written too, if I hadn't unearthed _my_ General at his club, and asked
+him if he knew the Thesigers, and found out that he did, and implored him
+to arrange the horrid business for me as best he could. I said he might
+tell them that if the girl had been left to them to look after her, she
+would have got into rooms in--I named the street, and testified to the
+sinister character of the house. And my General wrote and explained to
+the other General and to the Minor Canon what a thoroughly nice chap I
+was, and how lamentably they had misunderstood what I believed he was
+pleased to call my relations with Miss Thesiger. I'm not at all sure that
+he didn't even go farther and stick in a lot about my family, and suggest
+that I was eligible to the extent that, though my fortunes were still
+to make, I had (besides private means that enabled me to live in spite of
+journalism) considerable expectations (he knew an aunt of mine--better,
+it would seem, than I did). In short, that I was a thoroughly nice chap,
+and that the father of seven daughters (five unmarried) might do far
+worse than cultivate my acquaintance. He must have gone quite as far as
+that, or farther, otherwise I couldn't account for the peculiarly tender
+note that the Minor Canon put into the letter of apology that he wrote
+me, still less for the invitation I received by the same post from Mrs.
+Thesiger to spend Whitsuntide with them at Canterbury. (Viola had said
+she was going home for Whitsuntide.)
+
+Dear lady, she was herself the daughter of a Canon, and she had lived all
+her life in a cathedral close, and the atmosphere of a cathedral close
+may foster innocence, but I cannot think it could have been entirely
+responsible for the kind of indiscretion Mrs. Thesiger was guilty of.
+Neither do I think Mrs. Thesiger was entirely responsible herself. She is
+a nice woman, and I am sure she couldn't have written as she did unless
+my friend the General had led her to believe that there was some sort of
+an understanding between me and Viola. But still, for all she knew about
+me, I might have been a villain. Not perhaps the gross villain the Minor
+Canon took me for, but a villain in some profound and subtle way
+inappreciable to my friend the General.
+
+Well, of course I didn't spend Whitsuntide with the Thesigers at
+Canterbury. It would have been sheer waste of Viola. For the worst of all
+this confounded rumpus was that it made me put off proposing to Viola
+till she had forgotten all about it. She would never have listened to me
+while the trail of the scandal still lingered.
+
+In fact, it was only the marked coldness of my manner to her just then
+that saved me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It saved me to suffer. I didn't know it was possible to suffer as she
+made me suffer--I mean as _they_ made me, between them.
+
+It didn't begin all at once. It didn't begin, really, for another three
+months, the end of those six months that Jevons had given himself. Not
+even then. Not, you may say, for a whole year; because he gave himself
+another six months as soon as he saw her. He was always giving himself
+these periods of time, as if, with his mania for taking risks, he was
+always having some prodigious bet on himself. I never knew a man back his
+own enterprises as he did.
+
+But until he turned up again I was happy. I say I, not we. I don't know
+whether Viola was happy or not, though she looked it. I had enough sense
+to see that her happiness, if she was happy, had nothing to do with me
+except in so far as I was the humble means, under Providence, of the
+definite escape from Canterbury.
+
+For I very soon saw what had been the matter with her. She was one of
+nine, the youngest but one of seven daughters. The Minor Canon had only
+been able to educate one of the seven properly, because he had had a son
+at Sandhurst, and the other was still reading for the Bar, which is
+pretty expensive too if you're as amiably stupid as Bertie Thesiger. (I
+mention Bertie because, though he doesn't come into this story, his
+stupidity and his amiability combined to tighten the situation
+considerably for Viola.) And Mrs. Thesiger had only been able to marry
+off two of her seven daughters. Of the others, one (the one who had been
+to Girton) was a High School teacher in Canterbury and she lived at home;
+one was a trained nurse and lived at home between cases; that left three
+girls living continually at home and, as Viola put it, eating their
+heads off.
+
+These were the circumstances which Viola (with some omissions) recited by
+way of justification for her revolt; the fact being that she would have
+revolted anyway. She was, as I have said, a creature of high courage and
+vitality and she was tied up much too tight in that Cathedral Close,
+besides being much too well fed; and she longed to do things. To do them
+with her hands and with her head. She was tired of playing tennis on the
+velvet lawns of the Canons' gardens; she was tired of calling on the
+Canons' wives and talking to their daughters. I am aware that Canterbury
+is a garrison town and that other resources, and other prospects, I
+suppose, were open to Viola. But Viola was tired of talking to the
+garrison. I think she would have been tired in any case, even if the
+garrison hadn't been bespoken, as it were, by her unmarried sisters. (It
+is, humanly speaking, impossible that, even in a garrison town, seven
+sisters will _all_ marry into the Service, as I fatuously supposed Mrs.
+Thesiger must have realized when she asked me to Canterbury.) It always
+bored Viola to do what her family did, and what her family, just because
+they did it, expected her to do. And somehow, in the long hours spent in
+the Cathedral Close, she had acquired a taste for what she called
+"literature," what she innocently believed to be literature. She was of
+an engaging innocence in this respect; so that typing authors'
+manuscripts appealed to her as a vocation that combined one of the
+highest forms of cerebral activity with I don't know what glamour of
+romantic adventure.
+
+Her enthusiasm, her veneration for the written word made her an admirable
+typist. But not all at once. To say that she brought to her really
+horrible task a respect, a meticulous devotion, would give you no idea of
+the child's attitude; it was a blind, savage superstition that would have
+been exasperating if it had not been so heart-rending. It cleared
+gradually until it became intelligent co-operation.
+
+I trained her for six months.
+
+I don't suppose I ever worked harder than I did in that first half year
+of her. I mean my output was never greater. For every blessed thing I
+wrote was an excuse for going to see her, or for her coming to see me. It
+was a perpetual journeying between my rooms in Brunswick Square, and her
+rooms in Hampstead overlooking the Heath. The more I wrote the more I saw
+of her.
+
+I trained her for six months--until Jevons was ready for her.
+
+When I tell you that she reverenced my performances you may imagine in
+what spirit she approached his.
+
+For their meeting, as for what happened afterwards, I alone am
+responsible. I brought it on myself. By sheer quixotic fuss and
+interference with what, after all, wasn't my affair. For little Jevons
+most decidedly was not. I might easily have let that sleeping dog lie. He
+certainly did sleep, in some obscure kennel of London; he had slept ever
+since I had left him at the door of that restaurant in Soho. He slept
+almost for the six months he had then given himself.
+
+And then, before (according to his own schedule) he was quite due, he
+appeared in the columns (in my columns) of the _Morning Standard_. I had
+almost forgotten his existence; but when I saw his name, James Tasker
+Jevons, stick out familiarly under the big headlines, I remembered that
+that name, on a card with an address, had been lying in my left-hand
+writing-table drawer all this time; I remembered that it was there
+because he had lent me half a crown, and that I had never paid him.
+Then he came back to me--he lived again.
+
+I sent him a postal order and an apology. I referred, very handsomely as
+I thought, to his cuckoo's nesting in my paper. (I informed him, in fact,
+that he "did it" better than I did); and because I had worked myself up
+to a pitch of affability and generosity, I asked him to come and see me
+at such time as he should be free. And because, also, I was indifferent
+and lazy and didn't want to be seriously bothered with him, instead of
+asking him to lunch or dine with me, I said I was generally free myself
+between four and five.
+
+Between four and five was an hour when Viola was very apt to come in.
+
+In the instant that followed the posting of that letter I saw what I had
+done. And I wrote to him the next day asking him to dinner, in order that
+he should not come in between four and five. For some weeks, whenever I
+fancied he was about due at four o'clock, I wrote and asked him to
+dinner. That was how I fastened him to me. There wasn't any sense in
+which he fastened on me. I wasn't by any means his only hope.
+
+I may say at once I was prostrated as any slave before his conversation.
+
+I shall never forget the radiance of his twinkle when he told me he had
+been sacked three weeks ago from the sporting paper that had provided him
+with his sole visible means of subsistence. It was his blessed (only he
+didn't call it blessed) style that had dished him: the suicidal _élan_
+that he brought to the business. He was warned, he said. He was aware
+that his existence as a reporter hung by the bare thread of statement
+(wearing thinner and thinner) on which he weaved his fantastic web. His
+editor told him he was engaged to report football, not to play it with
+the paper. But he couldn't help it. He had got, he said, the ensanguined
+habit. Still, I was not to imagine that he bungled things. He jolly well
+knew his way about. In his wildest flights there was a homing impulse; he
+was preparing a place for himself all the time (that it happened to be
+_my_ place didn't seem to afflict him in the least). Like St. Paul, he
+knew how to abound and he knew how to abstain. His abstinence, in fact,
+gave the measure of his abundance. He held himself in for five perilous
+weeks; and when he let himself rip again it was with a burst that landed
+him in the front page of the _Morning Standard_.
+
+What he sketched for me had no resemblance to the career of a peaceful
+man of letters. It was a hot race, a combat as bloody (his own word) as
+those contests of which he was the delighted eye-witness.
+
+He had come thin and worn out of the struggle, but you gathered that he
+had borne himself in it with coolness and deliberate caution. His phrases
+produced a false effect of vehemence and excitement. You saw that he had
+simply followed out a calculated scheme, not one step of which had
+miscarried. And you felt that his most passionate affairs would be
+conducted with the same formidable precision.
+
+I ought to have felt it. For we were precious soon in the thick of it--of
+his most passionate affair.
+
+I had dined him, I suppose, about three times, and I had lunched him
+twice. And I had had tea with him once in his bedroom. He was living in
+one room in a street off the Euston Road, and he called it his bedroom
+because it looked so much more that than anything else. I might have let
+it go at that. But I didn't. I had seen his bedroom. I took the liberty
+of inquiring into his finances. They were, he said, as yet undeveloped.
+He had a scheme of his own for improving them, but while it was maturing
+he was, he certainly _was_ open to offers of work. I got him some
+translation. (He was a fairly good French scholar.)
+
+Then--it was the fatality of the proceedings that impressed them on my
+memory--then (I forgot to say that at that time I was reader to a firm of
+publishers; these things are in themselves so inessential to this story)
+I turned over to him any books that came more into his province than
+mine. His province, I can tell you, was pretty extensive, too.
+
+He began by doing me the honour to consult me about any instances that
+seemed doubtful.
+
+And so--you see how carefully I had prepared his path for him--one
+afternoon he turned up at my rooms, uninvited, between four and five. He
+said he remembered I had told him I should be free at that hour.
+
+He remembered. Yes; I don't think Tasker Jevons ever forgot anything,
+anything likely to be useful to him, in his life.
+
+And he hadn't been with me ten minutes before Viola Thesiger came in.
+
+He was saying, "Why the Heaven-afflicted idiot" (his author) "should
+think it necessary--" when Viola came in.
+
+She came in, and suddenly I made up my mind that she was beautiful. I
+hadn't seen it before. I don't know why I saw it now. It may have been
+some turn of her small, squarish head that surprised me with subtle
+tendernesses and curves; or more likely it may have been her effect on
+him. I may have seen her with his eyes. I don't know--I don't know. I
+hardly like to think he saw anything in her I hadn't seen first.
+
+He stopped talking. They looked at each other. I introduced him. Not to
+have introduced him would have struck him as a slight.
+
+I ordered tea at once in the hope of hastening his departure. He had been
+curiously silent since she had come in.
+
+But he didn't go. He just sat there, saying nothing, but looking at her
+furtively now and again, and blinking, as if looking at her hurt him.
+Whenever she said anything he stared, with his mouth a little open,
+breathing heavily.
+
+She hadn't paid very much attention to him. Then, suddenly, as if
+intrigued by his silence, she said:
+
+"Who is the Heaven-afflicted idiot?"
+
+I said, "Ask Mr. Jevons."
+
+She did.
+
+Jevons didn't answer her. He simply looked at her and blinked. Then he
+looked away again.
+
+"Come," I said, "you might finish what you were going to say."
+
+"I don't know," he muttered, "that I was going to say anything--Oh
+yes--that thing you sent me. Why the silly blighter should suppose it's
+necessary to stick in a storm at sea when it's quite obvious he hasn't
+seen one--he talks about a brig when he means a bark, and from the way he
+navigates her you'd say the wind blew all ways at once in the Atlantic."
+
+I said it might for all I knew; and I asked him if he'd ever seen a storm
+at sea himself.
+
+It seemed he had. He'd been ordered a sea-voyage for his health after his
+spell of printing; and his uncle, who was a sea-captain, took him with
+him to Hong-Kong in his ship. And he had been all through a cyclone in
+the Pacific.
+
+I got him--with some difficulty, for he had become extremely shy--I got
+him to tell us about it.
+
+He did. And by the time he had finished with us we had all been through a
+cyclone in the Pacific.
+
+It was too much. The little beast could talk almost as well as he wrote.
+A fellow who can write like Tasker Jevons has no business to talk at all.
+
+Viola left soon after six. He had outstayed her. I went downstairs with
+her. When I came back to him he was still staring at the doorway she had
+passed through.
+
+"Who's that girl?" he said.
+
+I said she was my typist.
+
+He meditated, and brought out as the result: "Do you mind telling me how
+much she charges you?"
+
+I told him. He looked dejected.
+
+"I can't afford her," he said presently. "No. I can't possibly afford
+her. Not yet." He paused. "Do you mind giving me her address?"
+
+"I thought you said you couldn't afford her?"
+
+"I can't. Not yet. But I _will_ afford her. I will. I give myself
+another--" He stopped. His mouth fell ajar, and I saw his lips moving as
+he went through some inaudible calculation--"another six months."
+
+He hid his face in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair.
+Then, as if he conceived himself to be unobserved behind this shelter,
+he let himself go; and I became the witness of an agony, a passion, a
+self-abandoned nakedness, to the utter shedding of all reticences and
+decencies, with nothing but those thin hands and that hair between
+me and it.
+
+"I'll work," he said. "I'll work like a hundred bloody niggers. Like ten
+hundred thousand million sweated tailors in a stinking cellar. I'll
+pinch. I'll skimp and save. I'll deny myself butter. I'll wear celluloid
+collars and sell my dress-suit. My God! I'd sell the coat off my back and
+the shoes off my feet; I'd sell my own mother's body off her death-bed,
+and go without my dinner for nine months to see her again for five
+minutes. Just to see her for five minutes. Five (unprintable) little
+minutes that another man wouldn't know what to do with, wouldn't use for
+tying up a bootlace in."
+
+Pause.
+
+"I didn't know it hurt. I didn't know a girl's face could land you one
+like this, and her eyes jab you, and her voice turn round and round in
+your stomach like a circular saw. That's what it feels like. Exactly.
+
+"Dry up, you old Geyser, yourself. I'm getting it, not you. You'd spout
+if you'd had to sit tight with all the gas in the shop blazing away under
+you for the last hour. If you can turn it off at the meter, turn it. I
+can't. No, I won't have another cup of tea. And I won't get up and clear
+out, I'm going to sit here another five minutes. I'm not well, I tell
+you, and it relieves me to talk about it. I don't care if you don't
+listen. Or if you do. I'm past caring.
+
+"D'you notice that I didn't speak a word to her--not one blessed word the
+whole time? I should have choked if I'd tried to. I didn't want to look
+at her, to think of her. That's why I told that rotten story, just to
+keep myself going. What a blethering idiot she must have thought me! What
+a putrid ass! The sea--And _me_!
+
+"And the way she looked at me--"
+
+I said, "D'you mean to say, Jevons, it didn't happen?"
+
+And he groaned. "Oh, it _happened_ all right. I can't invent things to
+save my life.
+
+"God! It isn't even as if she was pretty. I could understand _that_."
+
+He grabbed his throat suddenly and began to cough.
+
+I tried to be kind to him. "Look here," I said, "old chap. I'm awfully
+sorry if it takes you this way. But it's no good."
+
+He turned on me coughing and choking. I cannot remember all he said or
+half the things he called me, but it was something like this: "You
+snivelling defective." (Cough) "You septic idiot." (Cough) "You poisonous
+and polluted ass." (Cough, cough, cough) "You scarlet imbecile." (I have
+to water down the increasing richness of his epithets.) "You last
+diminutive purple embryo of an epileptic stock, do you suppose I don't
+know that? No good? Of course it's no good--yet. I got to wait for
+another six months. And you can take it from me, if a fellow knows what
+he wants, and doesn't try to get it--doesn't know how to get it--in six
+months--and doesn't find out--_he_'s no good, if you like."
+
+These words didn't strike me at the time as having any personal
+application. He was to repeat them later on, however, in circumstances
+which I defy anybody to have foreseen.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+I cannot recall the precise phases of their remarkable friendship. I
+wasn't present at its earliest stages.
+
+I had my first intimation of its existence one evening in the winter of
+nineteen-five, when he dropped in on me to consult me, he said, about a
+rather delicate matter, in which I gathered there lurked for his
+inexperience the most frightful pitfalls of offence. That he should come
+to me in this spirit was evidence that a certain chastening had been
+going on in him.
+
+The delicate matter was this. He had given Miss Thesiger a lot of work,
+the typing of a whole book, in fact. And--he had immense difficulty in
+getting to this part of it--she had refused to take any payment. She had
+got it into her head that he was hard up. He had sent her a cheque three
+times, and three times she had returned it. She was as obstinate as a
+mule about it. And now she was saying that she had never meant him to pay
+her; she had done the whole thing out of friendship, which, of course,
+was very pretty of her, but it put him in a beastly position. He'd never
+been precisely in that position before and he didn't know what to do
+about it. He didn't want to offend her and yet he didn't see--did I?--how
+he could let her do it. It was, he said, all the wrong way about,
+according to his notions. And for the life of him he didn't know what to
+do. It might seem to me incredible that such virgin innocence as his
+should exist in a world where the rules for most sorts of conduct were
+fairly settled. He had lived all his life in an atmosphere of births,
+marriages and deaths, and he knew all the rules for the registration of
+them. And that was about all he did know. And it was the most infernally
+hard luck to be stumped like this at the very beginning, just when he
+wanted most awfully to do the right thing.
+
+Besides, it had knocked him all to bits--the sheer prettiness of it.
+
+He laid bare for me all the curious intricacies of a soul tortured by its
+own delicacy. There was agony in his eyes.
+
+If he were to take this kindness from a lady--would it, in my opinion, or
+would it not, be cricket?
+
+I didn't like to tell him that he had brought his agony on himself by his
+imprudence in employing a typist when he couldn't afford one. So I only
+said that, if I knew the lady, he would find her uncommonly hard to move.
+
+He hadn't any hope, he said, of moving her; but did I think that if he
+made her a present--say, the Collected Works of George Meredith, it would
+meet the case?
+
+I said it would meet the case all right, but that in my opinion it would
+spoil its prettiness. If Miss Thesiger didn't want to be paid in one way,
+she wouldn't at all care about being paid in another. Perhaps Miss
+Thesiger liked being pretty. Hadn't he better leave it at that, anyhow,
+for the present?
+
+You see I looked on Viola and Viola's behaviour as infinitely more my
+concern than his. I found myself replying for her as she would have
+wished me to reply, as if I could claim an intenser appreciation of her
+motives than was his, as if she and I were agreed about this question of
+helping Tasker Jevons and I were the custodian of her generosity.
+
+He said he supposed it wouldn't hurt him to leave it at that. It wasn't
+as if it wouldn't be all one in the long run. He gave himself three
+months.
+
+I supposed he meant to pay her in.
+
+Three weeks later I heard that Jevons was actually living up in Hampstead
+in the same house as Viola. I didn't hear it from Viola, but from my man,
+Pavitt, who had it from his sister-in-law. And what Pavitt came to tell
+me was that Mr. Jevons had been ill.
+
+I went up to Hampstead that afternoon to see him.
+
+I found him in a back room, at the top of the house, sitting by the fire
+in an easy-chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was as thin as a lath and his
+face was a bright yellow. The very whites of his eyes were yellow. I
+would have said you never saw a more miserable object, but that Jevons
+was not miserable. He was happy. And as far as his devastated condition
+would allow him, he looked happy. This face, yellow with jaundice, was
+doing its best to smile. The smile was a grimace, not an affair of
+the lips at all, but of the deep crescent lines drawn at right angles to
+them. Still, he was smiling. In a sort of ecstasy.
+
+He was smiling at Viola, who sat in the chair facing him on the other
+side of the hearth. She looked as if she had been there for ages. Also,
+as if she had been sitting up all night.
+
+She was smiling too, straight at Jevons. What I saw was the beatitude of
+his response.
+
+He tried to smile at me, too, as I came in, but the effort was a failure.
+He wasn't really a bit glad to see me. Viola got up and left me with him.
+I wasn't to stay with him for more than ten minutes, she said. It was the
+first day he had been allowed to sit up.
+
+I sat with him for fifteen minutes.
+
+He was lodged, as before, in one room; but its domestic character was
+disguised by many ingenious devices giving you the idea that it was
+nothing but his study.
+
+Well, there he was, haggard and yellow with jaundice, utterly pitiable as
+to his appearance and surroundings; and yet he looked at me in,
+positively, a sort of triumph, as much as to say, "Yes. Here I am. And
+you, with all your superior resources, haven't managed half so well."
+
+And I thought that he (not knowing Viola so well as I did) was suffering
+from a lamentable delusion.
+
+He said she had been awfully good to him. But it was rather hard luck on
+him, wasn't it, that he should have gone and turned this beastly colour?
+
+I said rather loftily I didn't suppose it mattered to Viola what colour
+he turned.
+
+(What _could_ it matter to her?)
+
+She came in presently and took me down to her sitting-room, and gave me
+tea. She owned to having sat up three nights with Jevons. She couldn't
+have believed it possible that anybody could be so ill. For three days
+and three nights the poor thing hadn't been able to keep anything
+down--not even a drop of water. But to-day she had been feeding him on
+the whites of eggs beaten up with brandy.
+
+She seemed to me to be obsessed with Jevons's illness, and I made her
+come out with me for ten minutes for a blow on the Heath. I tried to lead
+her mind to other things, and she listened politely. Then there was
+silence, and presently I felt her arm slide into mine (she had these
+adorable impulses of confidence).
+
+"Furny," she said, "what does jaundice come from?"
+
+I said it generally came from chill.
+
+She frowned, as if she were not satisfied with that explanation. And
+there was another silence. Then she began again:
+
+"Would being unhappy--very, _very_ unhappy--give it you?"
+
+I thought I saw how her mind was working and I advised her to put that
+idea out of her head. Happiness, I said, wouldn't be good for Jevons.
+
+She said, "Oh, _wouldn't_ it!" And, after prolonged meditation, "I wonder
+if he'll stay that funny yellow colour all his life."
+
+I found out from her that he had been living in that top room above hers
+for three weeks--ever since he had finished his book. It looked as if he
+had become frantic when he saw the end of his pretexts and occasions for
+meeting her, and had cast off all prudence and had followed her,
+determined to live under the same roof.
+
+I looked on it as a madness that possessed him.
+
+But that it should ever possess _her_--that was inconceivable.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+He recovered.
+
+The brilliant orange of his jaundice faded to lemon, and the lemon to a
+sallow tint that cleared rapidly as it was flooded by his flush.
+
+I did not realize then what sources he was drawing on. Looking back on it
+all, I am amazed at my own stupidity. I was, of course, aware that Viola
+was sorry for him; but I might have known that a girl's pity was not a
+stimulant that would keep a man like Jevons going for very long. I am
+sure he would never have lowered himself by any appeal to it. Why, the
+bare idea of pity would have been intolerable to him, bursting, as he
+was, with vitality and invading with the courage and energy and genius of
+a conqueror a world that was not his.
+
+He laid before me very soon what I can only call his plan of campaign.
+Journalism with him was a purely defensive operation; but the novel and
+the short story were his attack. The work that Viola had typed for him
+was his first novel. He had dug himself in very securely that winter, and
+each paper that he had occupied and left behind him was a line of
+trenches that shifted nearer and nearer towards the desired territory. He
+didn't begin his assault on the public before he had secured his retreat.
+
+I know I am writing about a man whom many people still consider a great
+novelist and a great playwright. God knows I don't want to disparage him.
+But to me what he has written matters so little; it has no interest for
+me except as his vehicle, the vehicle in which he arrived; which brought
+him to his destination quicker perhaps than any other which he could have
+chosen. His talent was so adroit that he might have chosen almost any
+other; chance and a happy knack and a habit of observation determined his
+selection of the written word. Compared with the spectacle of his
+arrival, what he has written is neither here nor there. What I have
+written myself is neither here nor there. For the purposes of this
+history it counts only as the means which enabled me to witness the last
+act of his drama.
+
+That is why I say so much about his adventure, his campaign, his
+business, and so little about his books. In this I am adopting his own
+values, almost his own phrases. He wanted most awfully to arrive. How far
+he took himself seriously as a writer nobody will ever know. Viola was
+convinced, and always will be convinced, that he was a great genius.
+(There's no doubt he traded with her on her conviction. He wanted most
+awfully to arrive, but more than anything he wanted Viola.) Still, he was
+too clever, I think, ever to have quite convinced himself.
+
+His adventure, then, began with his reporting; his campaign with his
+journalism, and his earlier novels; his business was to follow later in
+the long period of peace and prosperity he saw ahead of him.
+
+His first novel, he told me, was calculated, deliberately, to startle and
+arrest; to hit the public, rather unpleasantly, in the eye. _That_, he
+said, was the way to be remembered. It wouldn't sell. He didn't want it
+to sell. What he wanted first was to gain a position; then to consolidate
+it; then to build. He talked like the consummate architect of his own
+fortunes.
+
+His second novel would be designed, deliberately, to counteract the
+disagreeable effects of his first.
+
+"Why," I asked, "counteract them?"
+
+Because, he said, if he went on being disagreeable, he'd alienate the
+very sections of the public he most wished to gain. His retirement was
+simply the preparation for the Grand Attack.
+
+It was in his third novel that he meant, still deliberately, to come into
+his kingdom and his power and his glory, for ever and ever, Amen. His
+third novel, he declared, would sell; and it would be his best. On that
+utterly secure and yet elevated basis he could build afterwards pretty
+much as he pleased. I asked him if it wasn't a mistake to put his best so
+early in the series? Wouldn't it be more effective if he worked up to it?
+But he said No. He'd thought of that. There wasn't anything he hadn't
+thought of. That third novel was to start his big sales. And the worst of
+a big sale was this, that when you'd caught your public you were bound to
+go on giving them the sort of thing you'd caught them with, therefore,
+he'd be jolly careful to start 'em with the sort of thing he happened to
+like himself, otherwise he'd have to spend the rest of his life knuckling
+under to them. He could get a cheaper glory if he chose to try for it;
+but a cheaper glory wouldn't satisfy him. That was why he decided to make
+for the highest point he could reach in the beginning, so that his very
+fallings-off would be glorious and would pay him as no gradual working up
+and up could possibly be made to pay. Besides, he wanted his glory and
+his pay quick. He couldn't afford to wait a month longer than his third
+novel. As for the different quality in the glory it would be years
+before anybody but himself could tell the difference, and by the time
+they spotted him he'd be at another game. A game in which he defied
+anybody to catch him out.
+
+He'd be writing plays.
+
+All this he told me, sitting in an arm-chair in my rooms, with his feet
+up on another chair, and smiling, smiling with one side of his mouth
+while with the other he smoked innumerable cigarettes. I can see his blue
+eyes twinkle still, through the cigarette smoke that obscured him. That
+night he had got down to solid business.
+
+It was quite clear that Jevons's business was the business of the
+speculator who loves the excitement of the risks he takes. I remember
+exhorting him to prudence. I said: "This isn't art, it's speculation.
+You're taking considerable risks, my friend."
+
+He took his cigarette out of his mouth, dispersed the smoke, and looked
+at me very straight and without a twinkle.
+
+"I've got to make money," he said, "and to make it soon. I should be
+taking worse risks if I didn't."
+
+It's marvellous how he has pulled it off. Just as he said, dates and all.
+For he named the dates for each stage of his advance.
+
+That was in March; about a week before Easter, nineteen-six.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day I went up to Hampstead towards teatime, to see how Viola was
+getting on. I didn't expect to see Jevons there, for he'd left. He told
+me in a burst of confidence he'd had to. He couldn't stand it. It was
+getting too risky. He was living now in rooms in Bernard Street, not far
+from mine.
+
+At Hampstead I was told that Miss Thesiger was out. She had gone for a
+walk on the Heath with Mr. Jevons, but they were coming in at half-past
+four for tea. If I'd step upstairs into the sitting-room I'd find her
+brother, Captain Thesiger, waiting there.
+
+I stepped upstairs and found Captain Thesiger. I was glad to find him,
+for I don't mind owning that by this time I was getting somewhat uneasy
+about Viola.
+
+It was all very well for Viola to nurse Jevons through his jaundice, she
+might have done that out of pure humanity; but she had no business to be
+going for walks with the little bounder. Even the charm of his
+conversation and his personality (and it _had_ a charm) couldn't
+conceal the fact that he was a little bounder. Why, in moments of
+excitement he had gestures that must have made her shudder all down her
+spine, and more than once I have known his aitches become fugitive,
+though, on the whole, I must say he was pretty careful. And Viola was
+letting herself in for him. In sheer innocence and recklessness she was
+letting herself in. I felt that if ever it should come to getting her out
+I would be glad of an ally. Now that I saw what Viola was capable of, I
+began to feel some sympathy with her people at Canterbury who had tried
+so ineffectually to hold her in.
+
+There was nothing ineffectual about Reggie Thesiger. I suppose he would
+have been impressive anyway from the sheer height and breadth of him, his
+visible and palpable perfection; but what "had" me was not his
+perfection, but the odd likeness to his sister which he combined, and in
+some mysterious way reconciled, with it. His face had taken over not only
+the dominant and defiant look of hers, exaggerated by his sheer virility;
+but it had the very tricks of her charm, even to the uptilted lines of
+her mouth; his little black moustache followed and gave accent to them. I
+said to myself: "Here is a young man who will not stand any nonsense."
+
+He greeted me with a joy that I could not account for all at once in an
+entire stranger, and it was mixed with a childlike and candid surprise. I
+wondered what I had done that he should be so glad to see me.
+
+His manner very soon left me in no doubt as to what I had done. I had
+brought the most intense relief to the Captain's innocent mind. I do not
+know by what subtle shades he managed to convey to me that, compared with
+the queer chap I so easily might have been, he found me distinctly
+agreeable. It was obvious that I existed for him only as the chap, the
+strange and legendary chap, that Viola had taken up with, and that in
+this capacity he, to his own amazement, approved of me. I gathered that,
+knowing his sister, he had feared the worst, and that the blessed relief
+of it was more than he could bear if he didn't let himself go a bit.
+
+He had quite evidently come, or had been sent, to see what Viola was up
+to. Possibly he may have had in his mind the extraordinary treatment I
+had received from his father, and he may have been anxious to atone.
+
+Any relief that I might have brought to Captain Thesiger was surpassed by
+the reassurance that I took from my first sight of him. It was as if I
+had instantly argued to myself: "This is the sort of thing that has
+produced Viola. This is the sort of man she has been brought up with.
+When Viola thinks of men it is this sort of man she is thinking of. It is
+therefore inconceivable that Tasker Jevons should exist for her otherwise
+than as a curious intellectual freak. Even _her_ perversity couldn't--no,
+it could not--fall so far from this familiar perfection." Though Captain
+Thesiger's perfection might not help me personally, it did dispose of
+little Jevons. Looking at him, I felt as if my uneasiness, you may say my
+jealousy, of Jevons (it almost amounted to that) had been an abominable
+insult to his sister.
+
+Reggie--he is my brother-in-law now, and I cannot go on calling him
+Captain Thesiger--Reggie was good enough to say that he had heard of me
+from his sister. His voice conveyed, without any vulgar implication, an
+acknowledgment of my right to be heard of from her--but, of course, he
+went on agreeably, he had heard of me in any case; he supposed everybody
+had. My celebrity was so immature that I should not have recognized this
+allusion to it if Reggie had not gone on even more genially. He said he
+liked awfully the things I did in the _Morning Standard_. Most especially
+and enthusiastically he liked my account of the big boxing match at
+Olympia. You could see it was written by a chap who knew what he was
+talking about.
+
+I had to confess that Tasker Jevons was the chap who wrote it. Reggie,
+quite prettily abashed, tried to recover himself and plunged further. He
+brought up from his memory one thing after another. And all his
+reminiscences were of Jevons. He had mixed us up hopelessly, as people
+did in those days. They knew I was associated with the _Morning
+Standard_, and that was all they knew about me; if they wanted to recall
+anything striking I had done, it was always Jevons they remembered. Poor
+Reggie was so inveterate in his blundering that after his fourth
+desperate effort he gave it up. His memory, he said, was rotten.
+
+I said, on the contrary, his memory for Jevons was perfect, and he looked
+at me charmingly and laughed.
+
+While he was laughing Viola came in. She had Jevons with her.
+
+It was evident that neither of them was prepared for Reggie Thesiger.
+They had let themselves in with a latch-key and come straight upstairs
+without encountering Mrs. Pavitt.
+
+At the sight of her brother Viola betrayed a feeling I should not have
+believed possible to her. For the first and I may say the last, time in
+my experience of her, I saw Viola show funk.
+
+It was the merest tremor of her tilted mouth, the flicker of an eyelash,
+an almost invisible veiling of her brilliant eyes; I do not think it
+would have been perceptible to anybody who watched her with a less tense
+anxiety than mine. But it was there, and it hurt me to see it.
+
+There was one person, only one person, in the world whom Viola was
+afraid of, and that was her brother Reggie. She was afraid of him because
+she loved him. He was the person in the world that she loved best,
+before--before the catastrophe. And this fear of hers that I alone saw
+(Reggie most certainly had not seen it) ought to have warned me if
+nothing else had.
+
+It probably would have warned me but for what she did next; but for her
+whole subsequent behaviour.
+
+She broke loose from Reggie, who had closed on her with a shout of
+"Hallo, Vee-Vee!" and an embrace; she broke loose from Reggie and turned
+to me, all laughing and rosy from his impact, with an outstretched hand
+and a voice that swept to me and rippled with a sort of nervous joy. And
+she said: "Oh, Wally, this _is_ nice of you! You'll stop for tea."
+
+Her mouth said that. But her eyes--they had grown suddenly pathetic--said
+a lot more. They said: "Don't go, Wally, _please_ don't go. Whatever you
+do, don't leave me alone with him." At least, I can see now that that's
+what they were saying. And even at the time I saw on her dear face the
+same blessed relief (at finding me there) that I had seen on Reggie's.
+
+Neither Reggie nor I, mind you, had seen Jevons yet (I am speaking of
+fractions of seconds of time); and he wasn't actually in the room; but
+Viola and I were aware of him outside. If he had not paused on the
+landing to dispose of his overcoat and his hat and his stick, their
+entrance would have been simultaneous.
+
+That pause saved them.
+
+His stick slipped and tumbled down on the landing with a clatter. We
+heard him prop it up again. Our eyes met. I'm afraid mine said: "What are
+you going to do _now_?"
+
+Then he came in and I saw the gallant Reggie take the shock of him. I
+don't suppose he had ever before met anything like Jevons--I mean really
+met him, at close quarters--in his life. But he was gallant, and he had
+his face well under control. Only the remotest, vanishing quiver and
+twinkle betrayed the extremity of his astonishment.
+
+Viola, with an admirable air of detachment from Jevons, introduced them.
+I don't know how she did it. It was as if, without any actual
+repudiation, she declined to hold herself responsible for Jevons'
+appearance; for the extraordinary little bow he made; for his jerky
+aplomb and for his "Glad to meet you, Captain." And for the rest, she
+just handed him over to her brother and trusted Reggie to be decent to
+him.
+
+I had wondered: Are they going to let on that they've been out together?
+She cannot--she cannot own up to that. But how are they going to get out
+of it, and will he betray her?
+
+I saw how they were going to get out of it. If they didn't say in as many
+words that they'd met on the doorstep they implied it in everything they
+said. They asked each other polite questions, all to the tune of: "What
+have you been doing since I last saw you?"--to convey the impression that
+they had met thus casually after a long interval. Jevons played up to her
+well, almost too well; so well, in fact, did he play, that not long
+afterwards I was to ask myself: Was this perfection the result of
+collusion? Had they anticipated just such a sudden, disconcerting
+encounter? Had they thought it all out and arranged with each other
+beforehand how they should behave? I don't know. I never cared to ask
+her.
+
+The game lasted some little time. I didn't like to see her driven to
+these shifts (I was afraid, in fact, they'd overdo it), and I came to her
+help by telling Jevons that Captain Thesiger was an enthusiastic admirer
+of his work; and Reggie burst in jubilantly--he was evidently glad to
+be able to meet Jevons on this happy ground--with: "Are you the chap who
+wrote those things I've been reading? I say, Vee-Vee, you might have told
+me."
+
+He fastened upon Jevons then and there. He started him off on the boxing
+match. There was very little about boxing that Reggie didn't know, but he
+appealed to Jevons with a charming deference as to an expert. The dear
+boy had a good deal of his sister's innocent veneration for the chaps who
+wrote the things they'd been reading, who could, that is to say, do
+something they couldn't do.
+
+And Jevons, once started on the boxing match, fairly let himself go. He
+careered over the field of sport, interrupting his own serious
+professional _élan_ with all sorts of childlike and spontaneous gambols.
+In some of his turns he was entirely lovable. It was clear that Reggie
+loved him as you love a strange little animal at play, or any vital
+object that diverts you. From his manner I gathered that, provided he
+were not committed to closer acquaintance with Jevons, he was willing
+enough to snatch the passing joy of him.
+
+I do not know by what transitions they slid together on to the Boer War.
+The Boer War happened to be Reggie's own ground. He had served in it. You
+would have said that Jevons had served in it too, to hear him. He traced
+the course of the entire campaign for Reggie's benefit. He showed him by
+what error each regrettable incident (as they called them then) had
+occurred, and by what strategy it might have been prevented.
+
+And Reggie--who had been there--listened respectfully to Jevons.
+
+Viola had lured me into a corner where only scraps of their conversation
+reached us from time to time. So I do not know whether it was in
+connection with the Boer War that Jevons began telling Reggie that
+journalism was a rotten game; that from birth he had been baulked of his
+ambition. He had wanted to be tall and handsome. He had wanted to be
+valorous and athletic. And here he was sent into the world undersized and
+not even passably good-looking. And what--he asked Reggie--_could_ he do
+with a physique like his?
+
+I remember Reggie telling Jevons his physique didn't matter a hang. He
+could be a war correspondent in the next war. I remember Jevons saying in
+an awful voice: That was just it. He couldn't be anything in the next
+war--and, by God, there was a big war coming--he gave it eight years--but
+he couldn't be in it. He was an arrant coward.
+
+That, he said, was his tragedy. His cowardice--his distaste for
+danger--his certainty that if any danger were ever to come near him he
+would funk.
+
+And I remember Reggie saying, "My dear fellow, if you've the courage to
+say so--" and Jevons beating off this consolation with a funny gesture of
+despair. And then his silence.
+
+It was as if suddenly, in the midst of his gambolling, little Jevons had
+fallen into an abyss. He sat there, at the bottom of the pit, staring at
+us in the misery of the damned.
+
+I looked at Viola. Her eyelids drooped; her head drooped. Her whole body
+drooped under the affliction of his stare, and she would not look at me.
+
+Reggie (he really _was_ decent) tried to turn it off. "I wouldn't worry,
+if I were you," he said. "Wait till the war comes."
+
+"Oh, it's coming all right," said little Jevons. "No fear."
+
+And as if he could no longer bear to contemplate his cowardice, he said
+good-bye to us and left. Reggie's eyes followed his dejected, retreating
+figure.
+
+"How quaint!" he said. "But he's a smart chap, anyway. And, mind you,
+he's right about that war."
+
+I said (Heaven knows why, except that I think I must have wanted Reggie's
+opinion of Jevons): "D'you think he's right about his own cowardice?"
+
+Reggie said, "Ask me another. You can't tell. I only know I've seen men
+look like that and talk like that before an engagement."
+
+Viola raised her head. Her voice came with the clear tremor of a bell:
+"And did they funk?"
+
+"They didn't run away, if that's what you mean. I daresay they felt like
+Jevons. I've felt like Jevons myself."
+
+Of course, knowing Jevons as I do now, I have sometimes fancied his talk
+about cowardice may have been mere bravado, the risk he took with Reggie.
+But here again I am not quite sure. I don't really know.
+
+I am, however, entirely enlightened as to the game Viola played with me
+that night.
+
+Jevons had stayed till half-past six. He had talked for two hours and a
+half. When I got up to go, Reggie suggested that his sister should come
+and dine with him somewhere in town and do a play afterwards.
+
+She said, All right. She was on. And Furny would come too.
+
+He said, of course I was coming too. That was what he had meant (it
+wasn't).
+
+And in the end I went. I say in the end--for of course I protested. It
+was his one evening with his sister. But Viola's poor eyes signalled to
+me and implored me: "Don't leave me alone with him, whatever you do." She
+wanted to put off the dreadful moment that must come when he would ask
+her: "Where on earth did you pick up that shocking little bounder?"
+
+But the question never came. To begin with, Reggie was so enthralled by
+the funny play we went to that he forgot all about Jevons. And then
+Viola's game, that started in the restaurant and went on all through
+dinner, began again and continued in the taxi after the play. And though
+Reggie was discretion itself, you could see that he had taken it for
+granted--and no wonder--that she and I were, well, on the brink of an
+engagement if we hadn't fallen in. As for Jevons, he simply couldn't
+have conceived him in that connection. To Reggie, Jevons was simply an
+amusing little scallywag who could write. That Viola should have taken
+Jevons seriously surpassed his imagination of the possible. So that she
+never was in any danger of discovery, and there was no need for her
+manoeuvres. He couldn't have so much as found out that she had gone for a
+walk with Jevons, because it wouldn't have entered his head that you
+could go for a walk with him. People didn't do these things.
+
+Besides, he never was alone with her that evening. She took good care of
+that. She insisted on dropping him at his hotel, which we passed on our
+way northwards. She actually said to him, "You must get out here.
+Furny'll see me home. I want to talk to him."
+
+And instead of talking to me, she sat leaning forward with her back half
+turned to me, staring through the window at nothing at all.
+
+That was how I came to propose to Viola in the taxi. I had been afraid to
+do it before. I wasn't going to do it at all unless I was sure of her.
+But it seemed to me that she had been trying all afternoon and all
+evening to tell me that I might be sure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well--she wouldn't have me. She was most decided about it. I had no hope
+and no defence and no appeal from her decision. Unless I was prepared to
+be a bounder--and a fatuous bounder at that--I couldn't tell her that
+she had given me encouragement that almost amounted to invitation. To do
+her justice, until the dreadful moment in the taxi she hadn't known that
+she had given me anything. She confessed that she had been trying to
+convey to Reggie the impression that if her affections were engaged in
+any quarter it was in mine. She had been so absorbed in calculating the
+effect on Reggie that she had never considered the effect on me. She said
+she thought I knew what she was up to and that I was simply seeing her
+through. She spoke of Jevons as if he was a joke--a joke that might be
+disastrous if her family took it seriously. It might end in her recall
+from town. She intimated that there were limits even to Reggie's
+enjoyment of the absurd; she owned quite frankly that she was afraid of
+Reggie--afraid of what he might think of her and say to her; because, she
+said, she was so awfully fond of him. As for me, and what _I_ might
+think, it was open to me to regard her solitary stroll with Jevons as a
+funny escapade.
+
+I do not believe the poor child was trying to throw dust in my eyes. It
+was her own eyes she was throwing dust in. She didn't want to think of
+herself what she was afraid of Reggie thinking.
+
+As to the grounds of my rejection (I was determined to know them), she
+was clear enough in her own little mind. She liked me; she liked me
+immensely; she liked me better than anybody in the world but Reggie. She
+admired me; she admired everything I did; she thought me handsome; I was
+the nicest-looking man she knew, next to Reggie. But she didn't love me.
+
+"What's more, Furny," she said, "I can't think why I don't love you."
+
+I couldn't see her clearly and continuously in the taxi. The lamp-posts
+we passed on the way to Hampstead lit her up at short, regular intervals,
+and at short, regular intervals she faded and was withdrawn from me. And
+in the same intermittent way, her soul, as she was trying to show it to
+me, was illuminated and withdrawn.
+
+"I ought to love you," she went on. "I know I ought. It would be the very
+best thing I could do."
+
+The folly in me clutched at that admission and gave tongue. "If that's
+so," I said, "don't you think you could try to do what you ought?"
+
+The lamp-light fell on her then. She was smiling a little sad,
+wise smile. "No," she said. "No. I think that's _why_ I can't love
+you--because I ought."
+
+And then she went on to explain that what she had against me was my
+frightful rectitude.
+
+"You're too nice for me, Furny, much too nice. And ever so much too good.
+I simply couldn't live with integrity like yours." She paused and then
+turned to me full as we passed a lamp-post.
+
+"I suppose you know my people would like me to marry you?"
+
+I said a little irritably that I had no reason to suppose anything of the
+sort.
+
+"They would," she said. "Why, bless you, that's what they asked you down
+at Whitsuntide for! I don't mean that they said to each other: Let's ask
+him down and then he'll marry Viola. They wouldn't even think it--they're
+much too nice. Poor dears--they'd be horrified if they knew I knew it!
+But it was underneath their minds, you know, pushing them on all the
+time. I believe they sent Reggie up to have a look at you, though they
+don't know that either. They think they sent him to see what I was up to.
+You see, Furny dear, from their point of view you _are_ so eligible. And
+really, do you know, I think that's what's dished you--what's dished us
+both, if you like to put it that way. I'm sure you may."
+
+I said it didn't matter much what dished me or how I put it, provided I
+_was_ dished. But--was I?
+
+Oh yes! She left me in no doubt that I was dished. And I saw--I still
+see, and if anything more clearly--why.
+
+I was everything that Canterbury approved of. And Viola, in her young
+revolt, was up against everything of which Canterbury approved. Her
+people were dear people; they were charming people, well-bred people;
+they had unbroken traditions of beautiful behaviour. And they had tied
+her up too tight in their traditions; that was all. Viola would never
+marry anybody on whom Canterbury had set its seal.
+
+And seeing all that, I saw that I had missed her by a mere accident. It
+was my friend the General who had dished me when he testified to my
+entire eligibility. That's to say, it was my own fault. If I had let well
+alone; if I hadn't turned the General on to them, _I_ should have been
+in the highest degree ineligible; _I_ should have been a person of whom
+Canterbury most severely disapproved; when I've no doubt that Viola, out
+of sheer perversity, would have insisted on marrying me.
+
+She said as much. So far she saw into herself and no farther.
+
+The Northern Heights were favourable to this interview, for the taxi
+broke down in an attempt to scale East Heath Road, so that we walked the
+last few hundred yards together to her door.
+
+It was while we were walking that--stung by a sudden fear, a reminiscence
+of the afternoon--I asked her: Was there anybody else?
+
+No, she said, there wasn't. How could there be? Hadn't she told me she
+liked me better than anybody else, next to Reggie?
+
+"Are you sure?" I said. "Are you quite sure?"
+
+She stopped in the middle of the road and looked at me.
+
+"Of course," she said. "There _isn't_ anybody. Except poor, funny little
+Jevons. And you couldn't mean him."
+
+That was as near as we got to him then.
+
+But a week later--the week before Easter--he came to us suddenly in my
+rooms where Viola was correcting proofs for me.
+
+He had come to tell us of his good luck. His novel had been accepted.
+
+I was glad, of course. But Viola was more than glad. She was excited,
+agitated. She jumped up and said: "Oh, Jimmy!" (She called him Jimmy, and
+her voice told me that it was not for the first time.) "Jimmy! How
+simply spiffing!"
+
+And I saw him look at her with a grave and tender assurance, as a man
+looks at the woman he loves when he knows that the hour of his triumph is
+her hour.
+
+And I thought even then: It's nothing. It's only that she's glad the poor
+chap has pulled it off.
+
+Then she said: "Let's all go and dine somewhere together. You don't mind,
+Furny dear, do you? I'll take it home and sit up with it."
+
+Oh, I didn't mind. We all went somewhere and dined together. We went, for
+the sheer appropriateness of it, to that restaurant in Soho where I had
+dined with Jevons for the first time. That was how it happened--what did
+happen, I mean, afterwards, in my rooms where Jevons had left us.
+
+We had gone back there for coffee and cigarettes. (Canterbury wouldn't
+have approved of this.)
+
+He had said good night to us when he turned on the threshold with his
+reminiscence. The restaurant in Soho had aroused it.
+
+"I say, Furnival, do you remember that half-crown you borrowed from me?"
+
+I said I did. And that to remind me of it now was a joke in very
+questionable taste.
+
+He said, "You never really knew the joke. I kept it from you most
+carefully. That little orgy of ours had just about cleared me out and the
+half-crown was my last half-crown. I had to go without any dinner for
+three days."
+
+I mumbled something about his not meaning it.
+
+He said, "Of course I meant it. Why, my dear chap, that's the joke!"
+
+He stood there in the doorway, rocking with laughter. Then he saw our
+faces.
+
+"I say, I wouldn't have told you if I'd thought it would harrow you like
+that. Thought you'd think it funny. It _is_ funny."
+
+I said, "No, my dear fellow, it's just missed being funny."
+
+I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him from the room. (I had seen
+Viola's face and I didn't want him to see it.) I led him gently
+downstairs with a hand still on his shoulder. He was a little grieved at
+giving pain when he had hoped to give pleasure.
+
+At the bottom of the stairs he turned and looked at me with his
+ungovernable twinkle. "It _was_ funny," he said. "But it wasn't half so
+funny, Furnival, as your face."
+
+I found Viola sitting at my writing-table, with her arms flung out over
+it and her head bowed on them. And she was crying--crying with little
+soft sobs. I've said that I didn't think she could do it. And I didn't.
+She wasn't the sort that cries. I'm convinced she hadn't cried like this
+for years, perhaps never since she was a child.
+
+I put my arms round her as if she had been a child; I held her soft,
+warm, quivering body close to mine; I wiped her tears away with her
+pocket-handkerchief. And like a child she abandoned herself to my--to my
+rectitude. She trusted in it utterly. I might have been her brother
+Reggie.
+
+I said: "You mustn't mind. He was only rotting us." And she said: "He
+wasn't. It was true. He told me that six months ago he was starving."
+
+I said: "Vee-Vee, if he _was_, you mustn't think about him. You mustn't,
+really."
+
+Then she drew away from me and dried her eyes herself, carefully and
+efficiently, and said in a calm and measured voice: "I'm not thinking
+about him."
+
+I went on as if I hadn't heard her: "You mustn't be sorry for him. Jevons
+is quite clever enough to take care of himself. He isn't a bit pathetic.
+You mustn't let him get at you that way."
+
+She raised her head with her old, high defiance. "He isn't trying to get
+at me. I'm not sorry for him--any more than he's sorry for himself."
+
+I said, "You don't know. You're just a dear little ostrich hiding its
+head in the sand."
+
+"No," she said. "No. I'm not a fool, Furny. Even an ostrich isn't such a
+fool as it looks. It doesn't imagine for a moment that it isn't seen. It
+hides its head because it knows it's going to be caught, anyway, and it's
+afraid of seeing what's going to catch it."
+
+I asked her then, Was _she_ afraid?
+
+She was standing beside me now, leaning back against my writing-table.
+Her two hands clutched the edge of it. Her eyes had a far-seeing, candid
+gaze.
+
+"I'm not afraid," she said, "of anything outside me. Only of things
+inside me--sometimes."
+
+"What sort of things?"
+
+She smiled, the queerest little, far-off smile.
+
+"Oh, funny things--things you wouldn't understand, Furny."
+
+To that I said, "I wish you'd marry me, Viola."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders and said, so did she, and it was much worse
+for her than it was for me. And then: "Do you know, Reggie liked you
+immensely. He told me so."
+
+I said it would be more to the point if _she_ did. But since she didn't,
+since she couldn't marry me, I wished--"I wish," I said, "you'd go back
+to Canterbury and marry some nice man like Reggie."
+
+"Can't you see," she cried, "that I shall never marry a nice man like
+Reggie?"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The next thing that happened was that she went off with Jevons.
+
+At least, to all appearances she went off with him. They were in Belgium,
+at Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent and Bruges again together. I found them
+at Bruges after having tracked them through all the other places.
+
+It was Captain Thesiger who started me. Reggie (whose family seemed to
+employ him chiefly to find out what Viola was up to) had called at my
+rooms after Easter to ask me if I could give him his sister's address.
+He said they hadn't got it at Hampstead, where he had been to see her,
+and they didn't know where she was staying. They thought it was in the
+country somewhere, and that she wouldn't be very long away, as she told
+them not to forward any letters. He thought I might possibly have her
+address.
+
+I told him that I hadn't, and that I didn't know how to get it, either.
+
+He said, "It's a rotten habit she's got of sloping off like this without
+telling you." It wouldn't matter, only his regiment was ordered off to
+India. He was sailing next week. She was to have come down to Canterbury
+for Easter and she hadn't. If he only knew the people she was stopping
+with--if he'd any idea of the town or the village or the county, he'd try
+and find her. But she might be in the Hebrides for all he knew.
+
+I said I was sorry I couldn't help. All I knew was she had gone into the
+country (I didn't know it, but I assumed the knowledge for her
+protection). She had told me she might be going (she had), and I didn't
+think she'd be away for more than a day or two. I was pretty sure she'd
+be back before he sailed.
+
+I'd no reason, you see, to suppose she wouldn't be. Anyhow, I satisfied
+him.
+
+I marvel now at the ease with which I did it. But he was used to Viola's
+casual behaviour; and the monstrous improbability of the thing she had
+done this time was her cover. Who in the world would have dreamed that
+she would go off with Jevons? I don't really know that I dreamed it
+myself at the moment. I may be mixing up with my first vague dread the
+certainty that came later. But sometimes I wonder why Reggie didn't
+suspect _me_. I suppose my rectitude that had dished me with Viola saved
+me with her brother.
+
+He took me to lunch with him at his club, and went off quite happily
+afterwards to the Army and Navy Stores to see about his kit.
+
+I went straight to Jevons's rooms in Bernard Street. Jevons was away. Had
+been away since Easter. His landlady couldn't give me his address. He
+hadn't told them where he was going to, and they rather thought he was
+abroad. His letters were all forwarded to his publishers. _They_ might
+give me his address.
+
+I went to his publishers. They wouldn't give me his address. They weren't
+allowed to give addresses, but they would forward any letters to Mr.
+Jevons. I said I was a friend of Mr. Jevons's. Could they at least tell
+me whether he was or was not in England? They said that when they had
+last heard from him he was not.
+
+Then I went down to Fleet Street, to his editor, my editor. He couldn't
+give me Jevons's address because he hadn't got it. He rang up the office.
+In the office they rather thought Jevons was in Belgium. They'd had a
+manuscript from him posted at Ostend. They looked up the date. It was
+three days ago.
+
+I sailed that night for Ostend.
+
+Of course I had no business to follow Jevons. He had a perfect right to
+travel--to travel anywhere he liked, without interference from anybody.
+And in fixing on a time to travel in, nothing was more likely than with
+his mania upon him he would choose a time that had become valueless to
+him--a time that he had no other use for, the time when Viola Thesiger
+was away. The poverty of his resources was such that he couldn't afford
+to waste any opportunity of seeing her. So that I really could not have
+given any satisfactory answer if I had been asked why I had jumped to the
+preposterous conclusion that, because they were away at the same time,
+they were away together. It ought to have been as inconceivable to me as
+it was to Reggie. I can only say that in following him I acted on an
+intimation that amounted to certainty, founded on I know not what
+underground flashes of illumination and secret fear.
+
+I must have trusted to more flashes in pursing his trail. For when I
+reached Folkestone there wasn't any trail at all. My only clue was that
+three days ago Jevona had posted a manuscript at Ostend. He might not be
+in Belgium at all. He might be in Holland or in France or Germany by this
+time.
+
+When we got to Ostend I made systematic inquiries at the Post Office and
+at all probable hotels. At the eleventh hotel (a very humble one) I heard
+that a "Mr. Chevons" had stayed there one night, three nights ago. No, he
+had nobody with him. He had left no address. They didn't know where he
+was going on to. I found out under another rubric that Englishmen never
+came to this hotel. There was no point in making a separate search for
+Viola; if my intuition held good, all I had to do was to find out where
+Jevons was.
+
+I went on to Bruges. Why, I cannot tell you. I had never heard either
+Viola or Jevons say they would like to see Bruges. But Bruges was the
+sort of place that people did like to see.
+
+No trace of Jevons or of Viola in Bruges.
+
+I went on to Antwerp (it was another of the likely places), and then, in
+sheer desperation, to Ghent.
+
+And in Ghent, in a certain hotel in the _Place d'Armes_, I ran up against
+Burton Withers, the man who used to be on the old _Dispatch_, and the
+very last person I could have wished to see. I didn't ask him if he'd
+seen Jevons; I didn't mention Jevons; but before we'd parted he had told
+me that, by the way, he'd come across Jevons in Bruges. He was going
+about with my typist, Miss Thesiger. They were staying in the same hotel.
+
+I tried to say as casually as I could that Miss Thesiger had wired to me
+that she was staying in that hotel with her people.
+
+The little bounder then intimated that when he saw Miss Thesiger her
+people were less conspicuous than Jevons.
+
+I replied that that was probably the reason why they'd asked me to join
+them when I'd seen Ghent.
+
+Withers advised me to go on seeing Ghent if I wanted to be popular.
+They--Jevons and Miss Thesiger--didn't look at all as if they wanted to
+be seen, much less joined.
+
+He had the air of knowing a good deal more than he cared to tell me; but
+then he always had that air; you may say he lived on it.
+
+I asked him presently (in a suitable context) whether he was going back
+soon; and to my relief I learned that he had only just come out--for his
+paper--and was going on into Germany through Brussels. He wouldn't be
+back in England for another three weeks or more.
+
+He wouldn't be back, I reflected, to tell what he knew or what he didn't
+know, till Reggie Thesiger had sailed.
+
+I got rid of the little beast on the first likely pretext, having dealt
+with him so urbanely that he couldn't possibly think he had told me
+anything I saw reason to believe and therefore to resent.
+
+Then I went back to Bruges.
+
+This time my quest was fairly easy. I didn't know what hotel Jevons
+was staying in; but I did know the sort of hotel that Withers stayed
+in when he was travelling for his paper. My errand was narrowed down to
+three or four (good, but not too good), and the first I struck in the
+Market-Place was Withers's hotel. It was one of those that three days ago
+had known nothing of Jevons.
+
+I inquired this time for Withers and was told that he had left that
+morning. I engaged a room and strolled out into the Market-Place. I
+visited the Cathedral, the Belfry, and the Béguinage, in the hope of
+coming suddenly across Viola and Jevons.
+
+I did not come across them in any of those places; but I was not very
+earnest about the search. I was so sure that if Withers had not lied to
+me they would presently come across me at their hotel. I meant that it
+should be that way, if possible: that they should come across me in a
+place where they could not evade me. God only knows what I meant to say
+to them when they had found me.
+
+As I entered the hotel again I saw the proprietor's wife make a sign to
+her husband. They conferred together, and sent the _concierge_ upstairs
+after me. He wanted to know if I was the gentleman who had inquired the
+other day for Mr. Chevons, because, if I was, Mr. Chevons had arrived the
+day before yesterday and was staying in the hotel.
+
+There was no doubt about it; his name, James Tasker Jevons, was in the
+visitors' list.
+
+Viola's was not.
+
+From the enthusiasm of the fat proprietor and his wife you would have
+supposed that Jevons and I had roamed the habitable globe for months in
+search of one another; and that Jevons, at any rate, would be overpowered
+with joy when he found that I was here. They said nothing about Viola.
+
+And before I could ask myself what earthly motive Withers could have had
+for lying to me, I concluded that he _had_ lied.
+
+Or perhaps--it was more than likely--he had been mistaken.
+
+Jevons, I said to myself, was bound to turn up at dinner. If Viola was in
+Bruges, Viola would probably be with him. I chose a table by the door
+behind a screen, where I could see everybody as they came in without
+being seen first of all by anybody.
+
+Jevons didn't turn up for dinner.
+
+I found him later on in the evening, on the bridge outside the eastern
+gate of the city. He stood motionless and alone, leaning over the parapet
+and looking into the water. Away beyond the Canal a long dyke of mist
+dammed back the flooding moonlight, and the things around Jevons--the
+trees, the water, the bridge, the gate and its twin turrets--were
+indistinct. But the man was so poured out and emptied into his posture
+that I could see his dejection, his despair. The posture ought to have
+disarmed me, but it didn't.
+
+He moved away as he saw me coming, then, recognizing me, he stood his
+ground. It was as if almost he were relieved to see me.
+
+"Oh, it's you, is it?" he said.
+
+I asked him who he thought it was, and he said he thought it was that
+little beast Withers.
+
+I said, "I daresay you did. I saw Withers this morning."
+
+He said quite calmly he supposed that was why I was here.
+
+I said I had been here before I had seen Withers.
+
+"I see," he said. "He's told you."
+
+I said Withers had told me nothing I didn't know.
+
+"You didn't know anything," he said. "You simply came here to find out."
+
+I said: Yes, that was what I had come for.
+
+"Well," he went on; "there isn't much to find out. She's here. And I'm
+here. And Withers saw us yesterday. As he told you."
+
+He spoke in the tired, toneless voice of a man stating for the
+thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact. He knew that I
+had tracked him down, but he didn't resent it. I felt more than ever that
+this encounter was in some way a relief to him; things, he almost
+intimated, might have been so much worse. I didn't know then that his
+calmness was the measure of his trust in me.
+
+"The really beastly thing," he said, "was Withers seeing us."
+
+I answered that the really beastly thing was his being there; his having
+brought her there; and that it would give me pleasure to pitch him over
+the canal bridge, only that the canal water was too clean for him.
+
+He said, "The canal water is filthy. But it isn't filthier than--it isn't
+half so filthy as your imagination. Your imagination, Furnival, is like
+the main sewer of this city."
+
+He said it without any sort of passion, in his voice of utter weariness,
+as if he was worn-out with struggling against imaginations such as mine.
+
+"But," he went on, "even your imagination isn't as obscene as Withers's.
+You may as well tell me what he said to you about Miss Thesiger."
+
+"He said that she--that you were staying together in the same hotel."
+
+"Why shouldn't we? It's a pretty big hotel. Do you mind my going back to
+it?"
+
+I said grimly that I was going back to it myself. I wasn't going to let
+Jevons out of my sight. I felt as if I had taken him into custody.
+
+We went back.
+
+We didn't speak till we came into the Market-Place. Then Jevons said
+quietly:
+
+"As it happens, we aren't staying together in that damned hotel. I'm
+staying in it by myself. We were dining there and having breakfast when
+Withers spotted us. You don't suppose she'd let me take her to the same
+hotel, do you? I got a room for her in a boarding-house. Kept by some
+ladies."
+
+"What do you mean by bringing her here at all? If," I said, "you _did_
+bring her."
+
+He meditated as if he too wondered what he had meant by it.
+
+"I brought her all right. That's to say, I made her come."
+
+"You mean you didn't bring her? She followed you?"
+
+(I _had_ to know what they had done, how they had arranged it.)
+
+We stood for a moment in the middle of the vast foreign Market-Place,
+talking in voices whose softness veiled our hostility.
+
+He answered with a little spurt of anger. "You can't call it following.
+She came."
+
+"Don't prevaricate," I said. "She came because you made her come. I'm not
+going to ask you why you made her. It's obvious."
+
+"Is it?" he said. "I wish I knew why. I wish to God I knew."
+
+"Don't talk rot," I said. "You knew all right. And she didn't."
+
+He looked at me. Standing there in the lighted Marketplace, under the
+shadow of the monument, he looked at me with shining, tragic eyes.
+
+"No, Furnival," he said. "Before God I didn't know. Neither of us knew.
+But I know now. And I'm going to-morrow."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He stuck to it that he was going. He seemed to think that his going would
+make it all right. He had just realized--he had only just, after six days
+of it, mind you, realized--that he had compromised her. I said I supposed
+he realized it after Withers had seen them?
+
+He said, No, it had come over him before that. Neither of them really
+cared a damn about Withers. Who was going to care what a beast like
+Withers thought or said? It had come over him that he oughtn't to have
+brought her here. He wished he'd hung himself before he'd thought
+of it, but the fact was that he didn't think. He just felt when he got
+out here himself that it would be a jolly thing for her to come too; it
+would do her good to cut everything--all the mimsy tosh she'd been
+brought up in and hated--to get out of it all--just to do one splendid
+bunk. That, he said, was all it amounted to.
+
+We talked it over, sitting up in his little bedroom under the roof, the
+cheapest room in the hotel. You may wonder how I could have endured to
+talk to him instead of wringing his horrid little neck for him; but there
+wasn't anything else to be done. After all, it wouldn't have done Viola
+or me any good if I had wrung his neck. It was, in fact, to save
+precisely that sort of violent scandal that I had come out here. I had
+realized so well what wringing Jevons's neck would mean to Viola that I
+was determined to get at him before Reggie Thesiger could.
+
+Besides I doubt very much if you could have wrung the neck of anybody so
+abjectly penitent as Jevons was that evening. I felt as if I were shut up
+with a criminal in the condemned cell, and Jevons no doubt felt as if
+he had murdered Viola.
+
+And yet, sitting there on his bed, leaning forward with his head in his
+hands and his eyes staring, staring at the horror he had raised round
+her, he asserted persistently his innocence.
+
+"Practically," he said, "I brought her out to look at Bruges--the
+Belfry."
+
+I said: "Good God! Couldn't she look at the Belfry without _you_?"
+
+He shook his head and replied very gravely: "Not in the same way,
+Furnival. Not in the same way. It wouldn't have been the same thing at
+all."
+
+"You mean it wouldn't have been the same for you, you little bounder."
+
+"It wouldn't have been the same thing for _her_. I wasn't thinking only
+of myself. Who does?"
+
+It was as if he had said: "Who that loves as I love thinks only of
+himself?" But I missed that. I was too angry.
+
+At least I suppose I was too angry. I must have been. Jevons's offence
+was unspeakable, or seemed so. He had outraged all decencies. He had done
+_me_ about the worst injury that one man can do to another--at any rate,
+I wasn't sure that he hadn't. How could I have been sure! Every
+appearance was against him. Even his funny candour left me with a ghastly
+doubt. It was preposterous, his candour. His innocence was preposterous.
+But it is impossible to write about this singular adventure as it must
+have appeared to me at the time. I am saturated with Jevons's point of
+view. I have had to live so long with his innocence and I have forgiven
+him so thoroughly any wrong he ever did to me. All this is bound to
+colour my record and confuse me. I have impression upon impression of
+Jevons piled in my memory; I cannot dig down deep enough to recover the
+original; I cannot get back to that anger of mine, that passion of
+violent integrity, that simple abhorrence of Jevons that I must have
+felt.
+
+He didn't care a rap about me and my abhorrence. He asked me what I
+thought I was doing when I came out here? He simply smiled when I told
+him I'd come out to send Viola back to her people before Reggie Thesiger
+got hold of him and thrashed him within an inch of his life, not because
+I in the least objected to his being thrashed within an inch of his
+life--far from it--but because advertisement in these affairs was
+undesirable. I didn't want Viola's family or anybody else to know about
+this instance. It was to be hushed up on her account and on their account
+alone.
+
+He replied pensively (almost too pensively) that he had supposed that was
+the line I would take. It was his little meditative pose that made me
+call him a thundering scallywag and accuse him of having calculated on
+the line that would be taken.
+
+He said quietly, "The word thundering is singularly inappropriate.
+There's nothing thundering about me. I haven't calculated anything. As
+for hushing it up, I'm hushing it up myself, thank you. Haven't I told
+you I'm going to-morrow? Can't you see that I'm packing?"
+
+He had evidently been trying to pack.
+
+"And what," I asked, "is Miss Thesiger doing?"
+
+"She's staying on here by herself a bit. In the _pension_. As if she'd
+come by herself."
+
+He seemed entirely satisfied with his plan.
+
+I said, "Look here, Jevons, that won't do. It's no good _your_ going.
+You've been seen here. You're supposed to be staying in this hotel
+together. If you go and she stays--in that _pension_--you've deserted
+her. You've seduced her. You're tired of her--in five days--and you've
+left her."
+
+"You don't suppose I have _really_?" said Jevons.
+
+"I don't suppose anything. I don't know what you've done. I don't think
+I want to know. That's what it'll look like. Do, for God's sake, remember
+you've been _seen_."
+
+He gathered a portion of his cheek into his mouth and sucked it.
+
+"I suppose," he said, "it _would_ look like that."
+
+I said of course it would. And he asked me then, quite humbly, what I
+thought he'd better do.
+
+I said I thought he'd better do exactly what I told him. He was to stay
+here till Captain Thesiger had sailed for India (I wasn't going to let
+him get back to England till Reggie was out of it). Miss Thesiger was to
+go back to her people to-morrow, and he was not to see her or write to
+her before she went.
+
+He asked me was I thinking of taking her back myself?
+
+I said I wasn't. Miss Thesiger had behaved as if she had disappeared.
+There was no good in my behaving as if she had disappeared with _me_.
+
+That seemed to pacify him.
+
+I said I should take her to Ostend to-morrow and put her on board the
+boat. I could see that he didn't at all care about this part of the
+programme, but his intelligence accepted the whole as the best thing that
+could be done in the circumstances.
+
+Then I left him to his misery and went round to the _pension_ to see
+Viola.
+
+All my instincts revolted against what I had to do.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She has since told me that I did it beautifully. I don't, of course,
+believe her, and it doesn't matter. The wonder is how I did it at all.
+
+To begin with I was afraid of seeing her, because I conceived that she
+would be afraid of seeing me. I felt as if I had hunted her down and
+caught her in a trap. I didn't want the bright, defiant creature to
+crouch and flinch before me in her corner. And, as I tried to realize
+our encounter, that was how I saw her--crouching and flinching in a
+corner. It wouldn't have been quite so awful if the man had been any
+other man but Jevons. I could not imagine a worse position for a girl
+like Viola Thesiger than to be caught running off to Belgium, or
+anywhere, with Jevons, and told to leave him and go home. Put brutally,
+that was what I had to tell her.
+
+The only way to do it was to ignore the unspeakable element in the
+affair--to ignore Jevons. To behave as if I'd never heard of him; as if
+she were just travelling in Belgium on her own account and staying in
+Bruges alone.
+
+And that--if she had only let me--was what I tried to do.
+
+I remember vividly everything that passed in that interview, but I do not
+know how to reproduce it, how to give anything like an impression of the
+marvellous thing it was, or that it turned into under her hands. It
+ought, you see, to have been so ugly, so humiliating, so absolutely
+intolerable for both of us. And it wasn't. She took it from me, at the
+end, and held it up, as it were a little way out of my grasp; and before
+I knew where I was, with some sudden twist or turn she had brought beauty
+out of it. Clear and exquisite beauty.
+
+I found her in her room at the _pension_. It was at the back, on the
+ground floor; and had long windows opening into a little high-walled
+garden. The room, I remember, was rather dingy and stuffed up with
+furniture. Large Flemish pieces, bureaus, chests and cabinets stood
+against the walls. There was a bed behind the door; she had put her
+travelling-rug over it. And there was a washstand in an alcove with a
+curtain hung across it; and some of her coats and gowns hung behind
+another curtain in a corner, and some were on hooks on the door. And her
+little trunk was on the floor by the foot of the bed. And her shoes stood
+by the stove.
+
+Somehow, when I saw these things--especially the shoes--my heart melted
+inside me with a tenderness that was infinitely more painful than the
+rather austere disapproval of her which I had relied on for support.
+
+I was prepared, as I said, for a cowed and frightened Viola, or for Viola
+in a mood at least in keeping with the poignant and somewhat humbling
+pathos of her surroundings; but not for the Viola I found.
+
+The _garçon_ of the _pension_ closed the door of this room in my face as
+he went in with my card to inquire whether she would receive me. I
+thought, "If she refuses I shall have to insist; and that will be
+unpleasant."
+
+But she didn't refuse. On the other side of the door I heard a subdued,
+but curiously reassuring cry.
+
+She had been sitting outside the open window. Her chair was on the
+flagged path of the garden. As I came in she had risen and was standing
+in the window, with the intense blue darkness of the garden behind her
+and the light of the room on her face. She was smiling in a serene and
+candid joy. For one second I imagined that she had not read the name on
+the card and that she thought I was Jevons. And then I must have looked
+away quite steadily so as not to see her shock of recognition; for her
+voice recalled me.
+
+"Wally--how ripping! However _did_ you get here?"
+
+I don't know what I said. I probably didn't say anything. The sheer
+surprise of it so staggered me that I must have muttered or grunted or
+choked instead. But I know I took her hand and did my best to smile back
+at her with the stiff mouth she noticed later.
+
+She went on: "I _am_ glad to see you. Have you had any dinner?"
+
+I said I had.
+
+"Then," she said, "let's sit in the garden."
+
+I took her hat off a chair and stuck it on a bust on the bureau (Viola
+laughed). I set the chair on the flagged path of the garden.
+
+"Have you had coffee?" she said then.
+
+I had.
+
+"So have I. But I haven't had it in the garden. We'll have some more."
+
+I rang for coffee.
+
+We sat down and faced each other. She was smiling again as if the delight
+of seeing me fairly bubbled out of her. One thing struck me then, that at
+this rate it would be easy enough to ignore Jevons. In fact, if Jevons
+hadn't given Viola away just now I should have thought that she _was_
+travelling in Belgium on her own account and that his being here in the
+same town with her was a coincidence, an accident. I could have got over
+Withers and his story.
+
+Then she said, "Have you come across Mr. Jevons yet? He's here."
+
+I answered, with what I knew to be a very stiff mouth, "We're staying in
+the same hotel."
+
+"You might have brought him along with you," she said.
+
+I said I didn't want to bring him along with me.
+
+She raised her eyebrows in delicate reproof of my rudeness and said, "Why
+not?"
+
+"Because," I said, "I want to talk to you."
+
+"Oh--" I don't think I imagined the faint embarrassment in her tone. But
+it was very faint.
+
+"_And_" I went on, "I don't want to talk about Jevons."
+
+She looked at me then steadily. The look held me, then defied me to pass
+beyond a certain limit. I understood now the terms of our encounter. As
+long as I met her on the ground of a friendship that recognized and
+included Jevons she was glad to treat with me; but any attitude that
+repudiated Jevons, or merely ignored him, was a hostile attitude that she
+was prepared to resent.
+
+"What has he done?" she said.
+
+"I don't know what he's done." I paused. "Why drag in Jevons?"
+
+"Because," she said, "it's his last night. He's going to-morrow."
+
+I said, "And it's my first night. And as it happens he isn't going
+to-morrow. He's arranged to stay here another fortnight."
+
+Her face softened. "Then it's all right," she said.
+
+I had to dash her down from _that_ ground and I did it at once.
+
+I said, "I saw your brother the other day."
+
+I could see her face darken then with a flush of pain. We were sitting
+close to the window, and the light from the room inside showed me all the
+changes of her face.
+
+She asked, "What day?"
+
+"Let me see. This is Friday. It must have been Monday. I came over that
+night, as soon as I'd seen him."
+
+"What did you go and see him for?"
+
+"I didn't go. He came to see me."
+
+She looked at me again, if possible, more steadily than before, but
+without defiance. It was as if she were measuring the extent of my
+loyalty before she committed herself again to speech.
+
+"Why did he come?" she asked presently.
+
+"He wanted to know if I knew where you were."
+
+"You didn't know," she said.
+
+"I didn't or I wouldn't have lost three days in looking for you. But I
+made a good shot, anyhow, when I came to Bruges."
+
+Even in her anguish--for she was in anguish--she smiled at the wonder of
+my shot.
+
+"What made you think of Bruges?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+I couldn't tell her what had made me think of it. I couldn't tell her
+that I had tracked her down through Jevons. I was going to keep him out
+of it, if she would only let me. But she wouldn't.
+
+"I suppose," she meditated gently, "he must have told you."
+
+I answered quite sternly this time, to impress on her the propriety of
+keeping Jevons out of it:
+
+"He didn't tell me anything."
+
+"Then"--she was still puzzled--"what made you come?"
+
+"You."
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Your brother, if you like."
+
+"He should have come himself."
+
+"That," I said, "is what I'm trying to prevent. He doesn't know
+you're here. I want to get you back to England before he does know.
+Besides--he's sailing for India next week."
+
+Then she broke down; that's to say, she lowered her flags. Her head sank
+to her breast; her eyes stared at the stone path; their lids reddened and
+swelled with the springing of tears that would not fall.
+
+"Didn't you know?" I said.
+
+"I suppose I must have known--once."
+
+Up till this moment she had not said one word, she had not made one sign,
+that had really given her away. And nothing could have given her away
+more completely than the thing she had said now. She had confessed to a
+passion so dominating and so blind as to be unaware of anything but
+itself. It was not so much that it had swept before it all the codes and
+traditions she had been brought up in--codes and traditions might well
+have been nothing to Viola--it had struck at her strongest affection and
+her memory. She adored her brother. He was sailing for India next week;
+she must have known it; and she had forgotten it.
+
+Her confession was not made to me (she had forgotten _my_ existence
+utterly); it was made to herself--the old self that had adored Reggie;
+that at this evocation of him arose and sat in judgment on the strange,
+perverted, monstrous self that could forget him. I've called it a
+confession; but it wasn't a confession. It was a cry, a muttering,
+rather, of secret, agonized discovery.
+
+"He wants to see you before he goes," I said.
+
+Her eyelids spilled their tears at that; but only those they had
+gathered; no more came. Her self-control was admirable.
+
+"It's all right," I said. "You've heaps of time. I'm going to take you to
+Ostend in the morning. You'll be in Canterbury to-morrow night."
+
+"Is that what you came for?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It was awfully nice of you."
+
+"There was nothing else," I said, "to do."
+
+"You're coming with me to Canterbury." She stated it.
+
+"No, my dear child," I said, "I am not. You don't want them to think you
+went to Bruges with _me_."
+
+This was by implication a reference to Jevons. It was as near as I had
+let myself get to him.
+
+She said, "What are you going to do, then?"
+
+"I'm going to put you on the boat at Ostend, and then I'm coming back
+here."
+
+It must have been at this point that the _garçon_ brought the coffee. For
+I remember our sitting out there and drinking it amicably until the aroma
+of it gave Viola an idea.
+
+"What time shall we have to start to-morrow?"
+
+I said, "First thing in the morning."
+
+"Then," she said, "it does seem a pity not to send for Jimmy."
+
+I could see now that there was some deadly purpose in her persistence.
+But this time I couldn't bear it, and I lost my temper.
+
+I said, "Send for him. Send for him, if you can't live ten minutes
+without him."
+
+I was sorry even at the time; I have been ashamed since. For, so far from
+resenting my abominable rudeness--as, under any conclusion, she had a
+perfect right to--she merely said, "I'm only thinking that if I've got to
+go so soon to-morrow it'll be horribly lonely for him over there."
+
+"He doesn't expect to see you. We arranged all that."
+
+She pondered it, still with that curious absence of resentment. It was as
+if, recognizing the danger of the situation, she submitted to any steps,
+however disagreeable, that were necessary for her safety. It was clear
+that she trusted me; less clear that she trusted Jevons.
+
+One thing remained mysterious to her.
+
+"What are you coming back here for?" she asked.
+
+I let her have it straight: "To look after Jevons."
+
+"What do you suppose he'd do?"
+
+"He might get into England before your brother got out of it."
+
+She smiled. _"What do you suppose, then, Reggie'd do?"_
+
+I said I knew what I'd do if I were Reggie.
+
+She smiled again. "I see. You're saving him from Reggie."
+
+"I'm not thinking of him, I can assure you."
+
+At that she said, "Dear Wally, so you think you're saving me."
+
+"I'm trying to," I said. "As far as your people are concerned. You don't
+want them to know you've been here. If you'll only leave it to me, they
+won't know."
+
+"I'm not going to lie about it. I shall tell them if they ask me."
+
+"Not Reggie," I said.
+
+"Yes, Reggie. If he asks me. Reggie's the very last person I should think
+of lying to."
+
+It was this attitude of hers that first shook me in my conclusions. For
+I'm afraid I'd come to certain very definite conclusions.
+
+Why, I asked her, hadn't she told them before she came?
+
+"Because," she said, "there's no use worrying them. They'd have tried to
+stop me. You can't imagine what an awful fuss they'd have made. I daresay
+I might never have got off at all."
+
+What I couldn't understand was her attitude. I mean I couldn't reconcile
+the secrecy she had practised with her amazing frankness now.
+
+Her manner was supremely assured.
+
+It wasn't, mind you, the brazen assurance of a woman who has been found
+out and flings up the game; it was a curiously tranquil and patient
+candour, with something mysterious about it, as if she had knowledge that
+I couldn't have, and bore with me through all my ignorance and
+blundering. In fact, from beginning to end, except for the one moment
+when I upset her by telling her about Reggie's sailing, she showed an
+extraordinary tranquillity.
+
+But as I couldn't understand her I simply said, "I wish you hadn't got
+off."
+
+She said in that same quiet way, "I had to."
+
+"Because," I said, "he made you."
+
+Since she had dragged Jevons in she should have him in. I wasn't going to
+keep him out now to spare her. I had a right to know the truth. She had
+shaken my conclusions. She had left me in a doubt more unbearable than
+any certainty, and I considered that I had a right to know. I was
+determined to know now and end it. That shows that I must have trusted
+her; that I knew she wouldn't lie to me.
+
+"But," she said, with the least perceptible surprise, "he didn't make
+me."
+
+"He told me he did."
+
+"He told you?--What did he say exactly?"
+
+"He said--if you must know--that he hadn't brought you, but that he had
+made you come."
+
+"He didn't. He didn't really. But supposing he had--what then?"
+
+"You _want_ me to tell you what I think of it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think it was a beastly thing to make you do. He couldn't have done
+it--you _know_ he couldn't have done it--if he hadn't been a bit of a
+blackguard."
+
+I was going to say, "as well as a bounder"; but I didn't want to rub that
+in. I judged that when the poor child came to her senses her cup would be
+full enough without my pouring.
+
+"But, you see," she said, still peaceably, "he didn't do it. He only
+_said_ he did. That was his niceness. He wanted to save me."
+
+"My dear child, if it's saving you to bring you out here without your
+people knowing anything about it, and to let you be seen with him
+everywhere--"
+
+"He didn't bring me. He said he wished I could come with him. And I said
+I wished I could. I almost asked him to take me; and he said he couldn't.
+Then he went off by himself. He was all right till he got to Bruges. Then
+he wrote and said that the beauty of it hurt him, that it was awful being
+here without me, and that he was coming back at the end of the week
+without seeing any more of it, because he couldn't bear to know what I
+was missing. He was going to keep the other places till we could see them
+together. So I wired to say I was coming, and I came."
+
+"What did you do it for, Viola?"
+
+"Wally, I asked myself that as soon as I got into the train. And it
+wasn't till I was half across the Channel that I knew why."
+
+She stopped and stared as if at the wonder of herself explained.
+
+"I did it to burn my boats."
+
+I suppose _I_ stared at that. For she expounded:
+
+"To make it impossible to go back."
+
+I said, "My dear child, that was very reckless of you."
+
+She said she wanted to be reckless. I asked her if it didn't occur to her
+that some day she might want her boats?
+
+She said: No. It was just her boats that she was afraid of. She didn't
+really want them. She didn't want--really--to go back.
+
+Then she looked at me and said, "You know Jimmy wants to marry me." And
+then, "Did you know?"
+
+I said I was not in Jevons's confidence, but I had guessed as much. I
+said, "Do you want to marry him?"
+
+She said, "Yes. I want to marry him more than anything. I don't want to
+marry anybody else. I never shall marry anybody else. Most of me wants to
+marry Jimmy. But there's a little bit of me that doesn't. It's mean and
+snobbish--and dreadful, and it's afraid to marry him. And, you see, if I
+were to go to my people and say, 'I'm not going to marry Mr. Furnival;
+I'm going to marry Mr. Jevons,' and I were to show Jimmy to them, they'd
+all get up and side with that horrid and shameful little bit of me.
+Reggie would, too. It wouldn't be in the least horrid or snobbish of
+them, you know, because they wouldn't know what Jimmy's really like.
+They're just very fastidious and correct. But it's simply awful of me,
+because I do know."
+
+"It isn't awful. It simply means that he isn't your sort. _You_'re
+fastidious and correct. You _can't_ marry him, and you know it. You won't
+be able to bear it. He'll make you shudder all down your spine."
+
+"All that doesn't prevent my caring for him. I care for him more than for
+anything on earth, even Reggie. That's why I've burned my boats. So that
+I may have what I care for without their tearing me to pieces over it."
+
+So far was I from understanding her that it struck me that what she was
+telling me was as ugly a thing as could be told in words; that she was
+confessing that, being too weak to stand up against her family, she had
+deliberately compromised herself with Jevons so that she might marry him
+without their opposition; just as I was sure that Jevons had compromised
+her so that he could marry her without opposition from herself.
+
+"But--what you are saying is horrible," I said. "I don't believe you know
+how horrible it is."
+
+So far was she from understanding _me_ that she answered: "Yes, it is
+horrible. But it was only a little bit of me. And it's all over. Burned
+away, Wally. I burned it when I burned my boats. Don't think of me as if
+I were really like that."
+
+You see? We had been talking about different things. My mind had been
+fastened on an external incident, ugly in itself, ugly in its apparent
+purpose, ugly in its consequences, ugly every way you looked at it. Hers
+had been concentrated on the event that had happened in her soul, an
+event to her altogether beautiful--the destruction of the cowardice that
+would have brought her back, that shrank from taking the risk that her
+soul dared.
+
+This, she seemed to say, is how I deal with cowardice.
+
+That she had compromised herself by dealing with it in this way had
+simply never occurred to her. It couldn't. She didn't know and wouldn't
+have believed it possible that people did these things.
+
+What had frightened her, she said, was Jimmy's saying that about keeping
+the other places till they could see them together. He meant, you see,
+till they were married. It brought it so home to her. And it brought home
+to her what it meant to him. Because he couldn't afford to marry yet for
+ages.
+
+If she'd gone back, she said, it would have been so cruel to him. And it
+would have been so cruel to herself, too.
+
+Then she told me what they had done together. Heavens! How she must have
+trusted him. She joined him here in Bruges. And they'd gone to Antwerp,
+then to Ghent, then back to Bruges. (I had followed close on their
+traces, a day behind them at each city.)
+
+And it had all been so beautiful. She simply couldn't tell me how
+beautiful it had been. It was as if she had never seen anything properly
+before.
+
+Jimmy had made her see things. "I can understand," she said, "what he
+meant when he said that the beauty of this place hurt him. It hurts
+_me_."
+
+I reminded her that Jimmy had said it hurt him because she wasn't there.
+
+She looked up and smiled. "He isn't here _now_, Furny."
+
+I took her to Ostend first thing in the morning and saw her on to the
+boat. I advised her to remove the foreign labels from her trunk at Dover,
+and to contrive so that she shouldn't be seen arriving by the up platform
+at Canterbury.
+
+"Oh," she said. "You have to take _some_ risk!"
+
+We were on the gangway, saying good-bye. And from the boat's gunwale she
+flung me buoyantly, "If I'm caught I'll say it was _you_ I went off with.
+They won't mind that half so much."
+
+I went back to Bruges the same day and found Jevons disconsolate where I
+had left him in his hotel. I took him to Brussels in the hope of finding
+Withers there and confusing him in his ideas. We didn't find him. He had
+gone on into Germany, carrying with him his impression of Viola and
+Jevons staying together at Bruges in the same hotel.
+
+It was at Bruges that I said to Jevons, "By the way, Miss Thesiger says
+you _didn't_ make her come. She proposed coming herself."
+
+He flushed furiously and denied it. "Of course I made her come. It wasn't
+likely she'd propose a thing like that."
+
+His chivalry was up in arms to defend her. But I could see also that his
+vanity wasn't going to relinquish the manly role of having made her come
+to him.
+
+Well, I suppose in a sense he _had_ made her.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+We didn't stay in Brussels more than a day or two. Jevons didn't like it.
+He had become sentimentally attached to Bruges, and he wasn't happy till
+I took him back there. I can't say he was exactly happy then except in so
+far as he may have enjoyed his own suicidal gloom. I wasn't very happy
+either. All my recollections of Bruges are poisoned by Jevons's gloom and
+by my own miserable business of looking after him and seeing that he
+didn't walk gloomily into any of the canals. As for seeing Bruges, I
+don't know to this day whether the Belfry is beautiful or not. I only
+know that it stood there in the grey sky like an immense monument to the
+melancholy of Jevons. He made me horribly uneasy. I thought every day
+that if he didn't walk into a canal he'd have another fit of jaundice.
+
+He seemed to be suffering chiefly from remorse, and oddly enough it was
+this remorse of his that gave me the measure of his essential innocence,
+as if Viola hadn't given it me already.
+
+It was in his dejection that he showed his tact. He had, for our
+remarkable circumstances, the right manner. If Jevons had been jaunty; if
+he had tried to brazen it out, I should have hated him. As it was, his
+misery might be poisonous, but it was most disarming. So was his trust
+in me. He realized that he had got Viola into the devil of a mess, and he
+looked, intelligently, to me to get her out of it. And with the same
+confiding simplicity he put himself into my hands now. The adventure had
+shaken his nerve and he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some
+supremely foolish thing like following Viola to Canterbury. I believe he
+would have consented to stay in Bruges long after the term I had imposed
+if I had told him it was necessary.
+
+I said I took him to Brussels and brought him back to Bruges. He
+submitted to be brought and taken; to be banged about in trains and
+omnibuses, to be fetched and carried like a parcel. He let me feel in the
+most touching manner that my presence was a comfort to him, while he
+recognized that his might be anything but a comfort to me. I know I had
+nothing to do with Jevons's melancholy. The fat proprietor and his wife
+(who smiled at us by way of encouragement in our passages to and fro
+before their bureau), these thralls of Jevons's odd fascination, had
+confided to me that he had been much worse the day before I came. The
+poor gentleman could neither eat nor sleep; other guests in the hotel had
+come upon him wandering by himself at strange hours on the quays. (There
+were a good many English in Bruges that spring.)
+
+I was greatly relieved by these disclosures; they testified to the fact
+that Jevons, at any rate on Viola's last day, had been seen very much by
+himself.
+
+We had not spoken of Viola since the day when I had come back from Ostend
+after seeing her off. I can't recall much of what we did talk about, but
+I remember that Jevons's remarks were always interesting, and that in his
+lucid intervals he laid himself out to be amusing. In one respect only he
+had deteriorated. Jevons's strong language was no longer strong. It came,
+if it came at all, in brief spurts, never with the passionate rush, the
+gorgeous colour, the sustained crescendo of his first runnings. It was a
+thing of feeble _clichés_ that might have passed in any drawing-room.
+
+We didn't, then, talk about Viola. But I know that he heard from her and
+that I didn't.
+
+The first week of Jevons's fortnight was up when I got a wire from
+Canterbury. It said: "Reggie sailed yesterday. Trouble. Can you come
+Canterbury at once. Viola."
+
+Of course the word that stuck out of it was "Trouble." For the rest it
+was ambiguous. I couldn't tell, neither could Jevons, whether the trouble
+was connected somehow with Reggie's sailing, or whether in announcing his
+departure she meant to intimate that Jevons might now return to England;
+the coast was clear. Jevons, I may say, took this view of it and I did
+not. It was I and not Jevons who was asked to come at once. Jevons, for
+Viola's present purposes, was ignored.
+
+With his usual intelligence he saw my point. We made out that the message
+suggested trouble with Viola's family, and he agreed heartily that he was
+not precisely the person to deal with that.
+
+Oh yes, he trusted me. He gave me his word of honour that he would stay
+in Bruges until I either sent for him or came back to fetch him.
+
+Before I left I had a straight talk with him.
+
+I pointed out to him (what he said he knew as well as I did) that on the
+most lenient view of his case he had compromised Miss Thesiger very
+seriously. But, I said, he would have had to have compromised her more
+seriously still before her people would consent to her marrying him. He
+must see that, with what he had done, by stopping short of what he
+might have done, he had made himself, if anything, more unacceptable
+than he was to begin with. She might--she probably would in her present
+mood--insist on marrying him without their consent. On the other hand,
+she just mightn't. And it wasn't as if he could afford to marry her at
+once, while her present mood was on.
+
+He said, No. But in six months he could afford it. He gave himself six
+months.
+
+I said, Anything might happen in six months. Miss Thesiger's present mood
+(which, I put it to him, was very much made up of old Flemish glamour)
+might change. And if it did, it was just conceivable that she might marry
+_me_. He was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if he got the chance. _I_
+was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if _I_ got the chance. At the
+present most of the chances, I owned, were in his favour. But there was
+just the off-chance in mine.
+
+And that off-chance, I told him plainly, I meant to make the most of. I
+wouldn't be human if I didn't. I wasn't taking any unfair advantage of
+him, considering the tremendous innings he had had in Flanders, with the
+Flemish atmosphere to help him. If I could make any running in
+Canterbury, with the Canterbury atmosphere to help _me_ (he owned very
+handsomely that it would help me, that I'd be "in it" quite beautifully)
+why, I'd make it.
+
+Had he anything to say?
+
+He looked at me very straight, with just the least perceptible twinkle,
+and he said, "All right, old man, cut in, and take your chance. I'll risk
+it."
+
+I got to Canterbury in the early evening and went straight from my
+Fifteenth Century hotel to the Thesigers' house in the Close. I spotted
+it at once. It was all old red brick and grey stone like the Tudor houses
+in John's and Margaret's Quad.
+
+I asked for Miss Viola Thesiger and was shown into the Canon's library.
+To my great relief the Canon wasn't in his library. It looked out on to a
+perfect garden with a thick green lawn, and an old red-brick wall, very
+high, all round it, and tall elms topping the wall, and long beds of
+wallflowers and tulips blazing away underneath it. I said to myself, "If
+I want atmosphere I've got it. Bruges is nothing to the Thesigers' garden
+in Canterbury Close." I'd time to take it all in, for Viola kept me
+waiting.
+
+I was glad of the peace of the garden, for I'd taken in more atmosphere
+than I wanted already as I came through the house. You went upstairs to
+the Canon's library, and along a narrow black-oak corridor. And in
+passing I was aware of a peculiar quietness everywhere. It wasn't simply
+the quietness and laziness of the Cathedral Close. It was something in
+the house. I felt it as I crossed the threshold and the hall. It was the
+sum of slight but definite impressions: the sudden silence of voices
+that were talking somewhere when I came in; the shutting of a door that
+stood ajar; the withdrawal of footsteps approaching on the landing.
+
+It was as if there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank
+and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker
+called in to help them to bury their dead.
+
+The trouble was strictly confined to the Thesigers' house. From the
+tennis-lawns under the high walls of other gardens there came shouts of
+girls and of young men at play.
+
+Presently Viola came to me. She held her head if anything higher than
+usual, and the expression of her face was out of keeping with the trouble
+in the air. But as she came nearer I saw that this gay face was white,
+its tissue had a sort of sick smoothness, and there were dark smears
+under her eyes.
+
+The poor child had paid her tribute to the Trouble.
+
+She said, "It _is_ good of you to come. Did you mind awfully?"
+
+I said, of course I didn't. She smiled again, the little white, blank
+smile she had for me in those days, and I asked her what had happened.
+
+She said, "Everything's happened. It's been awful."
+
+Her smile took on significance--the whole wild irony of disaster. Then
+she said, "They know."
+
+"All of them? Your brother?"
+
+"No. Not Reggie. He got away in time. They won't tell him. They won't
+even tell Bertie. They'll never talk about it. But they know."
+
+I said, "Supposing they _do_ know--as long as other people don't--"
+
+"But, Wally, that's just it. Everybody does know."
+
+I couldn't take her quite seriously yet. I asked her: Was it the labels?
+and she said, No, she'd picked all the foreign ones off at Dover, and she
+got the Dover ones off in the cab coming home, and she'd had Heaven's own
+luck at the station, nobody'd seen her on the up platform, and her people
+thought she'd come from London. Of course they all asked her where she'd
+been, and she told them she wasn't going to let on just yet, that it
+wasn't good for them to know too much, and that if they behaved
+themselves they'd know some day. She meant to tell them as soon as ever
+Reggie'd gone. "Really and truly, Wally, I meant to tell them."
+
+"And do you know," she said, "they thought I was rotting them, that I'd
+been in some stuffy place in the country all the time."
+
+"Then how on earth," I said, "did they find out?"
+
+"They didn't. They never do find out things. They heard--last night.
+Somebody saw us."
+
+"Withers?" I said. I'd thought of Withers at once. But he didn't seem
+likely. He wasn't back yet.
+
+"No. Not Withers. Some women who knew my uncle, General Thesiger. They
+were in your hotel in Bruges, and they knew some other women staying in
+the _pension_. They saw my name in the visitors' book and it excited
+them. It all comes, you see, of my uncle being so beastly distinguished,
+so that they _had_ to say they knew him. And then of course the other
+people chipped in and told them all they knew about _me_. Can't you see
+them doing it?"
+
+I could indeed.
+
+"I never thought the _pension_ was a good scheme," she said; "but poor
+Jimmy _would_ make me go to it. He said it was safe. You see how safe it
+was."
+
+I wasn't quite clear yet as to where Jevons came in.
+
+"You say these people saw you. You mean they saw you and Jevons?"
+
+She smiled more than ever. "No, Wally. It was _you_ they saw."
+
+I don't know whether I was glad or sorry. I believe I was both. I was
+glad that Jevons--the ugly element--was disposed of. I was sorry--sorry,
+indeed, is hardly the word for what I felt--when I thought of the
+impression Viola's family had of me _now_; of the terms on which I should
+be received into it if I were received into it at all. I couldn't clear
+myself entirely, you see, without dragging in Jevons, and for Viola's
+sake Jevons had at any cost to be suppressed.
+
+"What on earth," I said, "must your people think of me?"
+
+She said surprisingly, "They think you a perfect dear."
+
+"What, for carrying you off to Belgium? That's what I seem to have done.
+I don't quite see how I'm to get out of it unless we can persuade them
+that we met by accident."
+
+"Oh," she said, "_I_ got you out of it all right."
+
+I asked her, "How?"
+
+She said, "I told them the truth. I said it wasn't you; it was Jimmy."
+
+"What did you do that for?"
+
+"Because it _was_ Jimmy I went off with. You're all right. They _know_
+it's Jimmy."
+
+I groaned. "That's precisely what I've been trying to prevent them
+knowing."
+
+"They know that, _too_. I told them that you came out to look for
+me--like a lamb, to save me--and that you made me come back. They
+think that was dear of you."
+
+She paused on it with a tenderness that touched me.
+
+"You see," she said, "I've saved you."
+
+I could only say, "My dear child--have you saved _yourself_?"
+
+She was visibly troubled.
+
+"I think--I _think_ they believe me. They say they do. But they don't
+understand. That's why I sent for you. I want you to make them see."
+
+"Make them see what?" I said. (It was clumsy of me.)
+
+"What it really was," she said.
+
+I asked her if they knew I was there. She said, Yes, they were coming in
+to see me.
+
+"They want to see you. They want to know."
+
+I saw then what my work was to be. I was not only to witness to her
+innocence and Jevons's--if they doubted it; I was to show them what she
+had shown me in the garden at Bruges, the beauty of the whole thing as it
+appeared to her. I was to show them Jevons's beauty.
+
+Well, I thought, it'll take some showing.
+
+"Do they," I asked her, "at all realize Jevons?"
+
+"Yes. They asked me if he was the man Reggie met at my rooms. Of course I
+had to say he was. It's almost a pity Reggie met him. That's what's
+frightened them. You see, he only saw the funny part of him."
+
+(I could imagine what Reggie's description of the funny part of Jevons
+had been.)
+
+I said she was asking me to do a rather difficult thing.
+
+She said, "Yes. And I've made it worse by telling them I'm going to marry
+Jimmy."
+
+"And I'm to persuade them that that's the best thing you can do, am I?"
+
+She said, Yes--if I could do that--
+
+I said I couldn't. I couldn't persuade myself. How could I, when I was
+convinced that the best thing she could do was to marry _me_?
+
+She said she'd forgotten that and that I could leave the marrying part of
+it to her. "It's about Bruges," she said, "that I want you to tell them."
+
+"I can't very well if they don't ask me," I expounded.
+
+"Oh, but," she said, "they _will_ ask you. At least Daddy will."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was at this point (when, I must say, we had thrashed it out pretty
+thoroughly) that Mrs. Thesiger came in. Viola left me to her.
+
+I noticed that, except for the moment of Viola's formal introduction of
+me, neither of them spoke to or looked at the other.
+
+I have said that Mrs. Thesiger was a charming woman. I may have said
+other things that imply she was not so charming; those things, if I
+really said them, I take back, now that I have come to my first meeting
+with her. When I recall that ten minutes--it didn't last longer--I cannot
+think of her as otherwise than perfect. It took perfection, of a sort, to
+deal creditably with the situation. Nothing could well have been more
+painful for Mrs. Thesiger. I, an utter stranger, was supposed to know all
+about her daughter, to know more than she or any of them knew. I held the
+secret of those dubious seven days in Belgium. That the days would be
+dubious I must have known when I set out to bring Viola back from
+Belgium. I must, the poor lady probably said to herself, have known
+Viola. And my knowledge of her, so dreadful and so intimate, was a thing
+she was afraid of; she didn't want to come too near it. But it was also a
+thing that must be exceedingly painful to me. She conceived that I would
+dread her approach every bit as much as she dreaded mine.
+
+And so--and so Mrs. Thesiger ignored my knowledge; she ignored the
+situation. Beautifully and consistently, from the beginning to the end of
+my stay in Canterbury, she ignored it.
+
+She had come in now to bring me her invitation, and her husband's
+invitation, to stay. Her husband, she said, expected me. He was out; he
+had had to go to a Diocesan Meeting--but it would be over by now, the
+tiresome meeting, and he would be here in a few minutes.
+
+I protested. I had taken rooms at my Fifteenth Century hotel.
+
+She insisted. They could make that all right. They knew the hotel-keeper.
+He was used to having people taken from him at the last minute. They
+would send round for my things. My room was waiting for me.
+
+I said, Really?--But they were too kind--
+
+She said, No. It was the least they could do.
+
+This, with its faint suggestion of indebtedness, was as near as she got
+to the situation.
+
+She must have sighted it in the distance, for she slanted away from it
+with a perilous and graceful sweep. She had heard so much about me from
+her daughter. She had wanted to make my acquaintance. She was glad of
+this opportunity--
+
+(We smiled at each other to show that there was nothing to wince at in
+her phrase.)
+
+I said I was glad of it too, and what a charming garden they had.
+
+Wasn't it? And did I know Canterbury? I wished I did. Well--I would know
+it now. And if I didn't mind ringing the bell the butler would fetch my
+things over from the "Tabard." And so on, charmingly, till the Canon came
+in and relieved her.
+
+She had done very well.
+
+He, dear, charming man, did the same thing, and did it even better.
+That's to say, he had a beautiful voice and he was happier in his
+phrases. He could ignore with the greater ease because he wouldn't have
+to keep it up so long.
+
+He kept it up till dinner-time. Only now and then his kind, keen look at
+me told me that he was going to have it out with me, and that he was
+measuring the man with whom he would have to do.
+
+But before dinner they had taken me to my room. They hoped I wouldn't
+mind having Bertie's room. The house was full; all the girls were at
+home, so they had had to give me Bertie's room.
+
+As I dressed in Bertie's room (the drawback of it was that it looked bang
+out on to the Cathedral Tower and was fairly raked by the chimes), with
+the Cathedral Tower before my eyes and the Cathedral chimes in my ears,
+and Canon Thesiger's beautiful voice and Mrs. Thesiger's beautiful face
+and the beautiful manners of both of them in my memory, it came over me
+with renewed conviction that Jevons was impossible; that Viola's people
+knew and felt he was impossible; that Viola knew and felt he was
+impossible herself; and that in the face of all this impossibility I had
+a chance. Bruges might back Jevons, but Canterbury would never back him;
+whereas it was quite evident that Canterbury was backing me.
+
+I was in the drawing-room ten minutes before dinner-time. They were
+all there: the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and their five unmarried
+daughters--Victoria, the eldest, Millicent, the High School teacher,
+Mildred, the nurse, Viola, the youngest but one, and Norah, the youngest.
+
+They were all there, the whole seven of them. And they were all silent
+until I appeared. As I went down the stairs and through the hall I
+noticed that the door was open and that no sounds came through it. I
+caught sight of Viola standing by the window with her back to her family;
+the others sat or stood in attitudes averted from her and from each
+other.
+
+When they heard me they all stirred and began talking. And as I came into
+the room I found the girls drawn together (even Viola had turned from her
+window).
+
+I see them now: Canon Thesiger standing on the hearthrug, looking
+handsome; and Mrs. Thesiger beside him, looking handsome, too, in grey
+silk and a little flushed. I hadn't realized in our first meeting _how_
+handsome they both were, and how brilliantly unlike. He was well-built,
+slender, aquiline, clean-cut and clean-shaven; he had thin, beautiful
+lips that he held in stiffly; he had dark eyes like his son Reggie's, and
+dark hair parted correctly in the middle, hair that waved. He had tried
+to depress and subdue it by hard brushing with a wet brush, but it
+continued to wave in spite of him, and the crests of the waves were
+silver, which accentuated them.
+
+Mrs. Thesiger was tall and at the same time plump. She was fair and
+blue-eyed and still delicately florid; she had perfect little features,
+with mutinous upward curves in the plumpness. I say mutinous, because
+Mrs. Thesiger's way of being handsome was in revolt against her
+husband's. Her light-brown hair waved, too, and to a discreet extent she
+encouraged its waving. This sounds as if Mrs. Thesiger's appearance was
+frivolous. But it was not. All these florid plumpnesses and the upward
+curves were held in tight, like Canon Thesiger's mouth. Their intentions
+were denied and frustrated, the original design was altered to harmonize
+with his. Herein you saw the superior restraint, the superior plasticity,
+the superior _art_ of Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+It was all very well for him to be correct when his features were formed
+that way, but this was the very triumph of correctness.
+
+And she was, if anything, braver than her husband. He could only just
+smile with his stiff lip; she could laugh over the business of presenting
+me to the four unmarried daughters whom (she emphasized it) I _didn't_
+know.
+
+And they--the four daughters--I'm not sure that they weren't the most
+gallant of this gallant family.
+
+I suppose that it was the violent dissimilarity in their parents' beauty
+that had produced the engaging irregularity of their features. Not one of
+those five little faces was correct. Victoria's had tried hard for
+correctness in her father's manner, but her mother's irrepressible
+plumpness had made her miss it, poor girl, just as (I was soon to learn)
+she had missed everything.
+
+Millicent's face, the face of the one who had been at Girton, hadn't
+tried for it; it had achieved a plainness I admired because it was oddly
+like Viola's face, only that Millicent was sallow and thin and dry and
+wore pince-nez.
+
+Mildred, the nurse, was frankly plump and fair and florid like her
+mother; her face would have been pretty if her father's nose hadn't
+stepped in and struggled with her mother's and so spoilt it for her.
+
+Norah, the youngest, was pretty--and odd. She was Viola all over again,
+but more slender and coloured differently, coloured all wrong. I didn't
+take to Norah all at once. I wasn't prepared for a Viola with blue eyes
+and pink cheeks and light hair, and the figure of a young foal. Besides,
+her hair was outrageous; it waved too much; it was all crinkles, and she
+hadn't found out yet how to keep it tidy.
+
+She told me afterwards it was "up" that evening for the first time. When
+it came to her turn, she said: "There are such a dreadful lot of us,
+aren't there?"
+
+There certainly was. And as I looked at them I thought: Viola has done an
+irreparable injury to her family, to all these charming people. She has
+hurt her father and mother in their beauty and their dignity and their
+honour. As for her sisters, she has ruined what they are much too
+well-bred to call their "chances." The story of the going off to Belgium
+with Jevons is spreading through the Close, and through the High School
+where Millicent teaches, and through the garrison. They will try to hush
+it up, but they won't be able to; it will reach Chatham and Dover. If
+they go up to town it will follow them there. Wherever they go it will
+ultimately follow them. She has struck at the solidarity of the family.
+To be sure, it was the solidarity of the family that drove her to strike
+at it. But if you were to tell Canon and Mrs. Thesiger that they had
+driven her, that they had tied her up too tight, they wouldn't see it.
+They would say: "We never stopped her going off to London. But that
+wasn't enough for her. She must go off to Belgium with that man Jevons.
+She must ruin us."
+
+And Viola knew that she had ruined them.
+
+And there they were, all holding themselves well, and all well
+dressed--the two youngest in white, the elders in light colours on a
+scale that deepened to Victoria's old rose. I remember them, even to what
+they wore and the pathos of their wearing it; they stood out so against
+the black panelling of the old room. It was full of oak chests and
+bureaus and Chinese cabinets, and Madonnas in Italian frames, and red and
+white ivory chessmen, and little bookcases with books in white vellum
+with scarlet title-pieces, and family portraits, and saints in triptychs
+on golden backgrounds, and murderous assegais and the skins and horns of
+animals. And the leaves of the old elms stuffed up the low, mullioned
+windows looking on the garden.
+
+And somehow you were aware of great streams of empire and of race,
+streams of august tradition; of sanctity and heroism and honour, and
+beautiful looks and gentle ways and breeding, all meeting there.
+
+I looked at the Thesigers and I looked at all these things, and I thought
+again of Jevons--of Jevons as absolutely impossible. You may say it was
+pure snobbishness to think of him in that way, and I daresay it was; but
+there wasn't any other way.
+
+It wasn't their tradition, you see, that appealed to me so much as their
+behaviour. I don't think I ever met people who knew so well how to
+behave.
+
+They kept it up. All evening they behaved like people under some heavy
+calamity which they ignored for the comfort of their guest and for their
+own dignity. And yet, even if I hadn't known of their calamity, I must
+have felt it in the air. They knew that I knew it; but that was all the
+more reason why they should ignore it; they wanted to remove from me the
+oppression of my knowledge.
+
+During dinner, perhaps, you felt the tension of the catastrophe; any
+guest who knew as much as I did was bound to be aware of it. It was in
+little sudden, momentary silences, in the hushed voices and half-scared
+movements of the butler and the parlourmaid, in the stiffness of the
+Canon's lip, and in some shade of the elder girls' manner to Viola.
+
+I remember how, in one of those silences, Norah, who sat facing me,
+leaned forward and addressed me. She said, "Mr. Furnival, you've come
+from Belgium, haven't you? Do tell me about it! I can't get a word out of
+Viola."
+
+I supposed they hadn't told Norah. They had spared the youngest. She was
+only seventeen.
+
+The butler and the parlourmaid, standing rigid by the sideboard, looked
+at each other in their fright. Mrs. Thesiger saw them and flushed. But
+Canon Thesiger, who had his back to them, observed that Belgium was a
+large order, and that Mr. Furnival would have to tell her about it
+afterwards.
+
+But there was never any afterwards for Norah. She said, "I believe
+there's a joke about Belgium, and that Mr. Furnival's in it."
+
+Viola laughed. It was, on the whole, the best thing she could do. If I'd
+giggled, too, it might have helped, but I didn't dare to, sitting there
+beside Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+The Canon pushed a dish of chocolates in front of his youngest daughter
+to keep her quiet, and then plunged like a hero into the tendencies of
+modern music, which he deplored. He asked my opinion of Richard Strauss,
+a composer of whom he was profoundly ignorant. Scarlatti and Corelli
+tided us over dessert, and Purcell floated us tenderly into the
+drawing-room and coffee. After coffee the Canon took me into the library
+(he said) for a smoke.
+
+I could see by the fuss he made about his cigarettes that he was nervous,
+staving off the moment.
+
+It came with the silence of the first cigarette. There were no
+transitions. He simply settled himself a little deeper into his chair and
+said, "I'm a little anxious about that girl of mine."
+
+I said, "_Are_ you, sir?" as if I were surprised.
+
+"Well"--he was evidently trying to steer between his decision to ignore
+and his desire for knowledge--"you see, she's rather reckless and
+impulsive."
+
+I agreed. She was--a little.
+
+"More than a little, I'm afraid. Do you know anything of this man Jevons
+she talks about?"
+
+That was masterly of the Canon, the subtle suggestion that Viola did no
+more than talk about Jevons, the still more subtle implication that if
+she _could_ talk about him all was well.
+
+I said that Jevons was a very decent fellow, and added that Captain
+Thesiger had met him.
+
+It was mean of me to shovel the responsibility on to Reggie, but I wanted
+to gain time, too.
+
+The Canon remembered that Reggie had said something. And then suddenly he
+discarded subtlety and told me straight out that Reggie had said Jevons
+was a bit of a bounder, and he supposed he was.
+
+I could see him watching me, trying to break down my defences.
+
+I dodged him with "These things are comparative," and he floored me with
+a sudden thrust:
+
+"No, my dear boy, they are _not_."
+
+He meditated. "What sort of age is he?"
+
+I told him, "About thirty-one or two."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+And then: Did I know anything about the young man's morals?
+
+I assured him I had never heard a word against them.
+
+He looked at me keenly and I remembered the words of Withers which I
+_had_ heard. Still, I knew nothing against Jevons's morals, and I said
+they were all right for all I knew.
+
+"Never mind what you _know_," he answered. "What do you think?"
+
+I said I thought that Jevons had as clean a record as any man I knew.
+
+"You mean," he said, "these things are comparative?"
+
+I said I meant I only wished my morals were as clean. (I went as far as
+that for Viola--to save her. Besides, there was Jevons to be thought of.
+I was there to take a fair advantage of him, not an unfair one.)
+
+He took another look at me that seemed to satisfy him, for he said:
+"Thank you. That's all I want to know."
+
+We smoked in silence. Presently we went into the drawing-room "for a
+little music." Victoria played. The Canon and Mildred and Norah sang.
+Millicent went upstairs to prepare a lecture.
+
+When the music was over Viola and Mildred and Norah and I went into the
+garden, and very soon Mildred and Norah drifted back into the house again
+and left me with Viola.
+
+She began at once, "Well--did you make him understand?"
+
+I said I hadn't had much opportunity.
+
+Did he ask me about Bruges? No, but he had asked me about Jevons. I told
+her more or less how I had answered, and she said it was dear of me.
+
+"But it's no use telling them anything about _me_, Wally."
+
+I asked her, Had they said much?
+
+She said, "No. It's what they think. Or rather, what they don't think.
+They'll never think the same of me again. And they'll never trust me."
+
+I said, Come, it wasn't so bad as all that.
+
+But she stuck to it.
+
+"There!" she said. "Didn't I tell you?"
+
+Mrs. Thesiger from the drawing-room window was calling to us to come in.
+The grass was damp.
+
+"They won't trust me even with you."
+
+I thought: "Poor little Viola--she's burned her boats with a vengeance."
+
+Presently it was Bertie's room again, and moonlight, and the Cathedral
+chimes. They kept me awake all night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of course I hadn't made them understand. How could I? The peculiar
+awfulness of their calamity was that they knew so little about it. They
+didn't know, after all, what had happened at Bruges; they didn't know
+what lengths Viola had gone to. And though they evidently thought that I
+knew, that wasn't any good to them. They couldn't ask me what had
+happened at Bruges. They couldn't cross-question me about Viola's
+"lengths." I couldn't tell them that, according to my lights, nothing
+_had_ happened, that Viola's lengths were not likely to be very long.
+Besides, even if I had come with the proofs of her innocence in my
+hands, and removed their private sorrow, that wouldn't have repaired
+their public wrong. Nobody was going to believe in Viola's innocence.
+Appearances were dead against her.
+
+It was awful for them every way they looked at it; awful if she married
+Jevons just because she had to; awful even if she hadn't to, so long as
+people thought she had; awful if she married him for any reason; more
+awful if she didn't marry him at all. And supposing she married him. They
+might go on ignoring for ever and ever, but who else would, with that
+marriage staring them in the face and perpetuating the disgraceful
+memory?
+
+It struck me that Viola herself must see that there was only one way in
+which I could make them understand, only one thing that I could do for
+her, and that I had come to do it.
+
+The next morning I asked Canon Thesiger if he could give me half an hour.
+He gave it with a sort of sad alacrity. I didn't anticipate the smallest
+difficulty with him or with any of Viola's family. They seemed to be
+looking to me pathetically to save them. I had every reason to know that
+my one chance was good, and that poor Jevons, with all his chances,
+wasn't anywhere. In fact, I found in that half-hour with the Canon that
+my very fairness to Jevons had worked against him to abase him, while it
+raised me several points in the Canon's estimation. He had seen what I
+had been driving at. The cleaner I made out Jevons's record to be, the
+better I succeeded in shielding Viola. He expressed in the most moving
+terms his admiration of my moral beauty.
+
+And yet (I suppose I must have overdone it) it was my moral beauty that
+dished me with the Canon. I had reckoned, you see, without his, without
+Mrs. Thesiger's.
+
+I told him straight out that if he and Mrs. Thesiger would allow me, I
+meant to ask Viola to marry me. His lip stiffened.
+
+I said I hoped it wouldn't be a violent shock to them--they must have had
+some idea of what I had come for.
+
+He said, Yes. They had been afraid I had come for that.
+
+And then--oh, it was a terrible half-hour!
+
+They had been afraid, and they had talked it over. He didn't tell me all
+they'd said, but I could imagine most of it: how they had seen that my
+marrying Viola was the one way out for them, the one way out for her, and
+how it had occurred to them that perhaps I didn't know what I was doing,
+and how they had decided--dear, simple, honourable people--that it would
+be very wrong to deceive me, and that in any case they had no right to
+accept so great a sacrifice, even if it _was_ the one way out. I daresay
+they said to each other that they couldn't put such a burden on an
+innocent young man; it was their child's doing and they must bear the
+whole ghastly ruin and shame of it themselves. They even went further.
+What Jevons had done to Viola (they'd made up their minds about him) was
+devil's work. What Viola had done to them was in some way the
+expression--the very singular and unintelligible and bizarre
+expression--of God's will. It was the cross they had to bear. God, I
+suppose, knew the kind of cross that would hurt them most.
+
+A great deal of this he did say to me. He said it very simply, without
+phrases.
+
+Nothing, he said, would have pleased them better than that I should marry
+Viola. But--he didn't think that he could let me do it. If I had only
+come to him three weeks ago--
+
+He hadn't been able--naturally--to talk about it last night. He had hoped
+he wouldn't have to say anything about it at all, but I had forced him.
+
+It couldn't have been worse if I'd seen him about to put a knife into his
+breast. I tried to stop him, but he would do it, he _would_ put the knife
+in.
+
+"We don't know," he said, "what may have occurred at Bruges."
+
+"Nothing occurred," I said, "nothing that you need mind."
+
+He said, "That's what the child tells me."
+
+And I, "Surely, sir, you believe her word?"
+
+Of course--of course he believed her word. Viola, he said, might keep the
+truth from them if (he smiled in spite of himself) if she thought it
+would not be good for them to know it. But she had never told them an
+untruth. Never. She was--essentially--truthful.
+
+"Only," he said, "we don't know what she may have been driven to. She may
+have been trying to shield that man Jevons."
+
+I said I was convinced that, technically, Jevons was innocent. It looked
+as if he had been criminally reckless and inconsiderate; but he seemed to
+have honestly thought that there was no harm in Viola's joining him in
+Bruges.
+
+But the Canon didn't want to know what Jevons had thought, honestly or
+otherwise. Or what Viola had thought. "It's what they've done," he said.
+"You can't get over it."
+
+I said what they'd done didn't amount to more than, looking at the
+Belfry. I could very easily get over that.
+
+He said that I was an Israelite indeed. But the world wasn't all
+Belfries, and we must look at it like men of the world.
+
+"They travelled together, Furnival. They travelled together."
+
+I said, "Yes. And it wasn't till they'd got to Bruges the second time
+that Jevons realized that they never ought to. As soon as he did realize
+it, he cleared out."
+
+He did that too late, the Canon insisted. It was no good my trying to
+shield Jevons. It wasn't easy to believe that Jevons was as innocent as
+Viola, and, as nobody was going to believe it, the injury the brute had
+done her was irreparable.
+
+"Not," I said, "if she marries me."
+
+He said, "My dear boy, supposing--supposing it isn't all as innocent as
+you think? You can't marry her."
+
+I said that made no difference. It was all the more reason.
+
+All the more reason, he insisted, for her marrying Jevons.
+
+That, he said, was what they'd have to go into.
+
+But there I took a high stand. I said it was for me to go into it, and if
+I didn't, why should they? If I believed in Viola, surely they might? If
+I knew that she could do nothing and feel nothing that was not beautiful,
+wasn't my knowledge good enough for them? I said, "I shall go to her at
+once and ask her to marry me."
+
+He got up and laid his hand on my arm. "No," he said. "Not at once. Wait.
+Far better wait."
+
+I asked him, "How long?"
+
+He said, "Till she's had time to get over him."
+
+Mrs. Thesiger (I had half an hour with her, too) said the same thing.
+"Wait," she said, "at any rate, another week."
+
+She had given her, as Jevons would have said, a week.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I waited.
+
+I stayed with the Thesigers a week. In fact, I stayed ten days. I got
+used to the chimes and slept through them. I played chess with Mrs.
+Thesiger; I played golf and tennis with the girls and the young
+subalterns of the garrison; I played violent hockey with Mildred and
+Norah; I walked with Viola and Victoria; I tried to talk to Millicent
+(Millicent, I must own, was a bit beyond me); I played tennis again
+(singles) against Norah, who was bent on beating me. We all went for
+picnics with the subalterns into Romney Marshes and visited Winchelsea
+and Rye. And in between I was taken by Canon and Mrs. Thesiger to lunch
+or dinner or tea in the other Canons' houses, and was introduced to the
+Dean and the Archbishop. I attended the Cathedral services to an extent
+that provoked Viola to denounce me as a humbug.
+
+I told her I did it in order to look at the finest spectacle of defiance
+I had ever seen--the Canon in his stall in the chancel singing the solo
+in the anthem with his beautiful voice, in the very teeth of disaster, as
+if nothing had happened.
+
+She said, "Daddy is beautiful, isn't he? He had a sore throat for a
+fortnight after Aunt Vicky died. And he thinks this is far worse, but he
+won't go back on me. So he sings."
+
+I was sitting with her in the garden on the Sunday evening. I said to
+her, "Viola, you were caught with the beauty of Bruges. Why can't you see
+the beauty of all this?"
+
+She looked at me with her great dark eyes (they were very young and
+brilliant), and she answered, "Dear Walter, I've been seeing the beauty
+of it all my life."
+
+I was seeing it for the first time.
+
+I made the most of it, of the Canterbury atmosphere. I sank into it and
+felt it sinking into me. I was, as Jevons had said I should be, "in it."
+
+And, as I made my running, I thought with some remorse of that
+unfortunate one, languishing in Bruges on his parole. But Canterbury
+would have been no use to Jevons if he had been there.
+
+There's no doubt that I did something for the Thesigers in those ten
+days. I had effaced Jevons's legend. I had even effaced my own legend
+(for the scandal, if you remember, had begun with me). And the Thesigers
+were tackling their catastrophe with dignity and courage and, I think,
+considerable success. By having me there, by being charming to me, by
+presenting me openly and honourably to all their friends, they gave
+slander the most effective answer. People asked each other: Was it likely
+that the Thesigers would receive young Furnival with open arms if young
+Furnival had been the man they'd heard about?
+
+At the end of my week the whole seven of them were almost merry. (I may
+say Norah, the youngest, had been merry all the time.) My visit lapped
+over into another week.
+
+At the end of ten days my relations with Canon and Mrs. Thesiger became
+so intimate that we could discuss the situation. They could even smile
+when I reminded them that there was one good thing about it--Canterbury
+didn't, and _couldn't_, realize Jevons.
+
+They hoped devoutly that it never would.
+
+And they thought it wouldn't. By this time, poor darlings, they believed
+that I had saved them; that Jevons was an illness and that Viola had got
+over him; that I had cured Viola of Jevons.
+
+I believed it myself. She had avoided me most of the time; she had left
+me to her sisters, particularly the youngest, Norah. And when I was alone
+with her she was silent and embarrassed. I thought: "She is beginning to
+be afraid of me. And that is an excellent sign."
+
+The night before I left Canterbury I asked her, for the third time, to
+marry me.
+
+She said, "I know why you're asking me, and it's dear of you. But it's no
+good. It can't be done. Not even that way."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The next day I went back to Bruges to release Jevons from his parole.
+
+I found him sitting tight in his hotel in the Market-Place, waiting my
+return with composure.
+
+He had recovered in my absence and had been making the best of his
+internment. He had written a series of articles on "The Old Cities of
+Flanders." He worked them up afterwards into that little masterpiece of
+his, "My Flemish Journal," which gave him his European celebrity (it must
+have made delightful reading for the Thesigers). There was no delay, no
+reverse, no calamity that Jevons couldn't turn into use and profit as it
+came. Yes, I know, and into charm and beauty. Viola Thesiger lives in his
+"Flemish Journal" with an enduring beauty and charm.
+
+I said I was sorry for keeping him shut up in Bruges so long. He said it
+didn't matter a bit. He had been very busy.
+
+I thought it was his articles and his book (he had been dreaming of it)
+that had made Jevons so happy. But I was mistaken.
+
+We spent half the night in talking, sitting up in my big room on the
+first floor for the sake of space and air.
+
+Jevons went straight to the point by asking me how I had got on at
+Canterbury.
+
+I felt that I owed him a perfect frankness in return for the liberties I
+had taken with him, so I told him how I had got on.
+
+He said, "I'm not going to pretend to be astonished. But you can't say I
+didn't play fair. I gave you your innings, didn't I?"
+
+I said I'd had them, anyhow. We'd leave it at that.
+
+He said, No. We couldn't leave it at that. He'd _given_ me my innings. He
+could have stopped my having them any minute, but he'd made up his mind I
+should have them. So that nobody should say afterwards he hadn't played
+fair.
+
+I remember perfectly everything that Jevons said to me that night. I am
+putting it all down so that it may be clear that what the Thesigers
+called the beauty of my behaviour was nothing to the beauty of his. Think
+of him, shut up there in his hotel in Bruges, giving me my innings, when
+he could have struck in and won the game without waiting those horrible
+ten days.
+
+Well, I suppose he knew that he had it in his hands all the time.
+
+"You see," he went on, "I knew you'd got one chance, and I meant you to
+have it. I meant you to make the most of it. There are things, Furnival,
+I haven't got the hang of--yet--little, little things like breeding and
+good looks, where you might get the pull of me still if you had a free
+hand.
+
+"Well, I gave you a free hand.
+
+"You needn't thank me. I wasn't thinking of you so much. I was thinking
+of Viola. I wanted to be perfectly fair to _her_. If there _was_ a chance
+of her liking you better than she liked me, and being happier with you, I
+wanted her to have her chance. I wanted, you see, to be rather more than
+fair. If I was going to win this game I was going to win it hands over,
+not just to sneak in on a doubtful point. I wanted Viola to know what she
+was doing. I wanted her to see exactly what she was giving up if she
+married me--to go home and see it all over again in case she had
+forgotten.
+
+"And of course I was thinking of myself too. I'm an egoist. For my own
+sake I wanted her to be quite sure she hadn't any sort of hankering after
+you."
+
+I said if it was any comfort to him he could be. Viola hadn't any
+hankering after me at all. This--if he cared to know it--was the third
+time that I had proposed to her and been turned down.
+
+He said he _did_ care to know it, very much. It was most important.
+
+"I," he said, "have never proposed to her at all.
+
+"That," he went on, "is just the one risk I wouldn't take.
+
+"And there," he explained, "is where I've scored. I knew that Viola is
+obstinate, and that if she starts by turning you down she'll keep it up
+out of sheer cussedness.
+
+"So I never let her start. Women," he generalized, "admire success. If I
+were to give you your innings all over again, Furnival--and I will if you
+like--you couldn't make anything of them with those three howlers to your
+account. There isn't any record of failure against _me_. Good God! D'you
+suppose _I_'d be such a damn fool as to muff it three times with the same
+woman? Not me!"
+
+I said he needn't rub it in.
+
+He said he was rubbing it in for my good, so that I shouldn't go and do
+the same thing next time.
+
+"Because--_now_ we're coming to the point--there will be a next time for
+you, Furnival. That's why I don't even pretend to be sorry for you.
+There'll be other women. But there aren't any next times for me, and
+there aren't any other women. This--I mean _she_--was my one chance. It
+was pretty jumpy work, I can tell you, sitting tight and gambling with it
+for ten blasted days. Any other man would have gone clean off his chump
+with worrying over it. There've been times when I've felt like it myself.
+It was infernal--when you think what I stood to lose."
+
+I said that was all rot. It was his beastly egoism. He didn't stand to
+lose more than I did.
+
+He said it wasn't a question of more or less. And it wasn't his egoism.
+It was his sweetness and his heart-rending humility. He'd stood to lose
+everything. He'd be done for if Viola wouldn't have him. He couldn't look
+at any other woman after her. And he put it to me: What other woman would
+look at him? Whereas my resources were practically inexhaustible. Almost
+any nice woman would know that I would give her what she wanted. And
+almost any nice woman would give me what I wanted, too. When I insisted
+that I didn't see it, he said I'd see it shortly. He gave me six months.
+
+Viola, he declared, would never have given me what I wanted. I could
+never give her what she wanted. And he could.
+
+He said he admitted that it was odd that he should be able to succeed
+where I failed; but so it was, and he went on to expound to me all the
+reasons for my failure.
+
+"To begin with, you're not her sort; or, rather, you're too much her
+sort. You with your integrity are one of the beautiful works of God, and
+she's been used to that sort of beauty all her life and she's tired of
+it. But she isn't used to me. She never will be. She's never seen
+anything in the least like me before, and she never will see anything
+quite like me again as long as she lives. I'm the queer, unexpected thing
+she wants and always will want.
+
+"But let that pass.
+
+"You couldn't get her because you didn't give your mind to it. You didn't
+know how to get her and you didn't try to find out. You set about it the
+wrong way. I told you ages ago that a man's a fool if he wants a thing
+and doesn't find out how to get it. You should have begun by trying to
+find out something about _her_. But you didn't try. With all your
+opportunities you haven't found out anything. You don't know the least
+thing about her. You don't know what she wants, you don't know what she's
+thinking, or what she's feeling, or what she'll do--how she'll behave if
+you propose to her three times running. She's told you things and you
+haven't understood them or tried to understand. Because the whole blessed
+time you were thinking about yourself, or what she was thinking about
+you, or was going to think. Whereas I haven't been thinking about
+anything but her--I've been studying her straight on end for ten months
+and I've found out a little bit about her. At any rate, I jolly well know
+what she wants and I jolly well know how to give it her.
+
+"You see, I was determined to get her, and I left no stone unturned. I
+took trouble."
+
+I suggested that _I_'d taken trouble enough in all conscience. He
+laughed.
+
+"_You_ only took trouble to get her away, old man, when she wanted to be
+here with me. What do you suppose I brought her here for? Would _you_
+have ever thought of letting her come with you? Of giving her what she
+wanted to that extent? Not you! You'd only have thought of shutting her
+up and protecting her for your own wretched sake--which was the last
+thing she wanted. She'd had about enough of that."
+
+I replied that certainly I should have thought of protecting a young girl
+before everything else; that it never would have occurred to me to
+compromise her in order to marry her--even if I did find I couldn't marry
+her in any other way.
+
+I had hit him there. He was quiet for a little while after it. I didn't
+look at him--I didn't want to look at him--but I could feel him there,
+breathing hard from the shock of it, with his mouth a little open.
+
+Presently he took the thing up again. He went on, placably, quietly
+explaining. "I thought of protecting her too. Only I wasn't such an idiot
+as to think of it before everything else."
+
+"No. You were clever enough to think of it afterwards--when you'd got
+what you wanted. When you had compromised her."
+
+"I suppose you mean there was only one thing I wanted? There, Furnival,
+you lie."
+
+I said I only meant that she _was_ compromised. At any rate, that was
+what it looked like to her people and to everybody to whom it mattered.
+
+"If you will persist in taking the ugliest view of it, of course it'll
+look like that. I can't help how it looks to a set of old ladies and
+clergymen in Canterbury. Come to that, it matters a damned sight more to
+_me_ than it can to any of you people."
+
+I said he wouldn't say so if he knew how he had made them suffer.
+
+He laughed out at that.
+
+"Suffer? They haven't suffered a quarter as much as I have. Not a
+hundredth part as much. They've suffered thinking of themselves--of their
+precious respectability. I've suffered thinking of _her_.
+
+"Suffer? I've been through all _that_. It wasn't right, Furnival, it
+wasn't right for anybody to have to go through what I did. But I've come
+out of it. You've been pretty hard on me with your infernal virtue; but
+if you think you can make me suffer more, you can't. I'm past it."
+
+I said I was sorry if I seemed too hard on him. But it would be well if
+he tried to look at his really very outrageous behaviour as it was bound
+to appear to other people.
+
+"You admit, then," he said, "that it appears more outrageous than it is?"
+
+I said, "You see, my dear fellow, I don't yet know what it is."
+
+He asked me if I'd like to know what it was? And I told him that,
+certainly, some sort of an account was owing and that he'd better perhaps
+make a clean breast of it while he was about it.
+
+Well--he made his clean breast.
+
+He confessed that the sting of a great deal that I had said to him was in
+its truth. I needn't be frightened. Nothing had happened. Nothing beyond
+what I knew. But--there was a point, he said, when everything might have.
+When he had meant that it should happen.
+
+He hadn't meant it at first. Nothing had been further from him when he
+let her come to Bruges. He had meant nothing--nothing beyond looking at
+the Belfry. He had thought--as she did--that it would be quite possible
+to be content with looking at the Belfry. That was where the damned folly
+of the thing had come in. They began to be aware of the folly when they
+found themselves going together to Antwerp. He wasn't aware even then of
+what he meant. But he knew what he meant when he left Antwerp and took
+her to Ghent.
+
+Because he _did_ take her there. He meant--_then_--exactly what Viola's
+father and her brother and her uncles and her male cousins would mean if
+they took a woman to Ghent.
+
+"I meant," he said, "to compromise her. But--here's where you went
+wrong--I didn't mean to compromise her in order to marry her. I didn't
+mean to marry her at all. There was a moment when I thought that marrying
+me--tying herself up to me for ever--was a risk I ought not to let her
+take. I thought--I thought I could make her happy without all that awful
+risk. It seemed to me that after the risk we _had_ taken we had a right
+to happiness. Certainly _she_ had. And I thought she thought the same.
+
+"So I took her to Ghent.
+
+"I say I thought she knew what I meant when I took her.
+
+"I ought to tell you that we _did_ have rooms in the same hotel in
+Antwerp and Ghent. There weren't any English there that mattered--nobody
+that either of us knew.
+
+"But when I'd got her to Ghent I couldn't--I don't know how it was--but
+it came over me that I couldn't--I hadn't the courage. I think I found
+out that she was afraid or something. We'd taken rooms in that hotel
+you were in in the _Place d'Armes_. We were sitting together in the
+lounge--you know that big lounge on the first floor with the glass
+partition in it along the staircase--you can see people through it going
+up and down stairs. She'd got up suddenly and stuck out her hand and said
+good night. And there was a look in her eyes--Fright, a sort of fright.
+
+"I saw her through the glass going up the stair. When she got to the
+landing I saw her turn her head over her shoulder and look down into the
+lounge, to make sure I was still there.
+
+"She looked so helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I
+couldn't.
+
+"No.
+
+"I took her back to Bruges the next morning and put her in the _pension_
+with those women."
+
+I thought of the irony of it.
+
+If Jevons had really been the blackguard he seemed we could have hushed
+it up. If he hadn't repented, if he hadn't taken her back to Bruges and
+put her in the _pension_ with those women, ten to one Withers wouldn't
+have seen them and General Thesiger's friends wouldn't have heard of
+them. I should have got her quietly away from Ghent without Canterbury
+being a bit the wiser.
+
+But I didn't tell Jevons that. I hadn't the heart to.
+
+We stayed three days longer in Bruges. There were still some odd corners
+of the city that he hadn't had time to look up.
+
+Jevons was very kind to me all those three days.
+
+After we got back to England Jevons's affairs picked up and went forward
+with a rush. His novel came out at the end of May. In June he was made
+sub-editor of _Sport_, and thus acquired a settled income. And one
+morning in July I got a letter from Viola written at Quimpol in Brittany:
+
+"MY DEAR WALTER:
+
+"I married Jimmy five days ago. Nobody but Norah knew anything about it
+till it was all over. But I wrote and told Daddy before we left England.
+I'm afraid he's had a sore throat ever since. I wish you'd go down to
+Canterbury and tell them that it's all right and that I'm ever so happy.
+There really isn't any reason why Daddy shouldn't sing.
+
+"As Norah says: 'It's his not singing that gives the show away.' Yours
+ever,
+
+"V. J."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+HER BOOK
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+I did not go down to Canterbury all at once. I was vowed, of course, to
+Mrs. Jevons's everlasting service (I think I've succeeded in making
+_that_ clear), but I could not--under the whacking blow of her marriage I
+could _not_ do as she asked me then and there. The reminiscences of
+Canterbury were poignant. I had to have a little time to recover in. And
+in those first terrible weeks I didn't see why Jevons should have all the
+amusement and I all the hard work and the suffering. I knew that Jevons
+had suffered, too--quite horribly--but his anguish, after all, was a
+thing of the past; while mine, in full career, devastated the present and
+the future. I had done my best for them, and I could not share Viola's
+view that it was my business to go on whitewashing Jevons for ever. There
+was a limit, at any rate, to the number of coats I could contract to put
+on him.
+
+So I waited. I waited till they came back from their half honeymoon in
+Brittany (a fortnight was all the editor of _Sport_ could spare to his
+subordinate). Then at her invitation I went up to Hampstead to see them.
+
+They had found an old four-roomed cottage that had once been a
+labourer's. It was whitewashed (Viola was fond of whitewash), and all the
+wood-work was painted green, and there was a strip of green garden in
+front with a green paling round it.
+
+A furniture van that you could have packed the house in stood in the
+Grove outside it, and big, burly men in white aprons were taking
+furniture out of the van and dumping it down in the garden. Some of it
+wouldn't go in at the gate and had to be lifted over the palings.
+
+Jevons in an old Norfolk suit and with his hair rumpled was standing on a
+ten-foot plot of grass contemplating a bed-tester and four bed-posts that
+leaned up against the palings in the embrace of a bedstead turned upon
+its side, and Viola in the upper window was contemplating Jevons.
+
+He called to her, "Have you measured?" And she answered, "Yes. He says it
+can't be done. Oh, there's Furny!"
+
+Jevons turned to me with a smile addressed to the bed-tester rather than
+to me. Viola came down to us followed by a tall stout carpenter, visibly
+her slave.
+
+The carpenter was saying: "That there room is out by a good four
+inches--by a good four inches 'tis. An' the way you've got to look at
+it is this, m'm. Not as this 'ere tester is too 'igh fer that ceilin',
+but how as that there ceilin' is too low fer this tester."
+
+"Quite so," said Jevons. "And in that case you've got to raise the
+ceiling four inches."
+
+"No, sir," said the carpenter (he spoke severely to Jevons). "You 'ave
+_not_. If I take you off a two inch from each leg of that there bedstead,
+and a two inch from each of them there postsis, it'll be the same as if
+the builder 'e raised you the ceilin' a four inch."
+
+"By Jove," said Jevons. "So it will."
+
+"Ay, and it'll corst you somethin' like four shillin', instead of p'raps
+a matter of forty pound. W'en it comes to tamperin' with ceilin's, you
+never know where you are."
+
+"I don't know where I am now," said Jevons, "but it might be better to
+leave the ceiling alone. They haven't started tampering, have they?"
+
+"No, sir. They have not."
+
+Viola ordered the carpenter to go into the study again and measure for
+those bookshelves. He was her slave and he went.
+
+"Jimmy's been going on like that all day," she said. "He's taken up hours
+of that man's time. We shall never get him out of the house."
+
+"I don't want to get him out of the house," said Jevons. "I'm awfully
+happy with him."
+
+He was happy (like a child) with everything, with his house and his
+garden and his furniture, his oak chests and the dresser and the bureau,
+above all he was happy with his bed-tester. He said be had never slept
+under a bed-tester in his life, and he was dying to know what it would be
+like--to lie there with hundreds of dear little, shy little chintz
+rosebuds squinting down at you.
+
+"You'll not lay under them rosebuds, not for a twenty-four hour--"
+
+The carpenter had come back to us. He treated Jevons exactly like a
+child.
+
+"That tester can't be set up to-night. Not unless, as I say, you squeeges
+of it jam tight between the ceilin' and the floor. An' _then_ you'll 'ave
+to prise the ceilin' up every time you moves of it, else you'll start
+them postsis all a twistin' and a rockin', an' 'ow'll you feel then?"
+
+Jevons said he felt frightened to death as it was, and the carpenter
+could have it his own way provided he didn't hurt the little rosebuds or
+frighten _them_; and the carpenter sighed and said that the study was ten
+by thirteen and would take a hundred and sixteen feet of bookshelves.
+
+"Let's go and look at the study," said Viola. And we went and looked at
+it. And the carpenter came up and looked at _us_. And the foreman and the
+other men came in with furniture and things out of the garden, and _they_
+looked at us. There wasn't one really large and heavy piece of furniture
+except the four-post bed and the tester, and they treated the whole thing
+as a joke, as a funny game they were helping two small children to play
+at. And when Viola and Jevons ought to have been telling the men what
+things were to go into which room and where, they ran back into the
+garden to see what flowers they would plant in it and where.
+
+Then they took me to look all over the house. It was an absurd house. Of
+its four rooms there was one in front that served as a dining-room and a
+drawing-room and a boudoir for Viola, and there was a kitchen at the
+back, and a bedroom over the front room, and Jevons's study was over the
+kitchen. Viola said there were six rooms if you counted the pantry and
+the bathroom, and they were going to put a settee in Jimmy's study that
+would turn into a bed when anybody came to stay. And Mrs. Pavitt knew
+a nice woman who would come in and scrub for them, and sleep in the
+kitchen when they weren't there.
+
+They showed me the little bits of furniture they'd got. Jevons had a
+passion for beautiful old things, for old rosewood bureaus and chests of
+drawers with brass handles. She pointed out the brass handles.
+
+I felt that the poor child was showing me her absurd house and telling me
+all these things because there wasn't and there hadn't been, and perhaps
+there never would be anybody else to tell them to. I thought of the
+mother and the four sisters down at Canterbury and of the other two who
+were married, who had been married so differently. There was something
+queer, something wrong about it all. I believe the very workmen felt that
+it was so and were sorry for her.
+
+When they had all gone away at six o'clock Jevons and I took our coats
+off and settled down for three solid hours to the serious work of moving
+furniture, while Viola tried to find the china, to wash it, and sorted
+all the linen and the blankets. And at nine o'clock we dined on bacon
+that Jevons fried over the gas-stove in the kitchen and cocoa that Viola
+and I made in a white-and-pink jug we found in the bath; it was a buxom,
+wide-pouting jug with an expression that Jevons said reminded him of his
+mother's sister who had brought him up. He said that jug was all that
+Viola would be allowed to see of his relations.
+
+I was left with Viola in the kitchen to wash up while Jevons finished
+what he called his man's job upstairs.
+
+She took advantage of his absence to implore me to go down to Canterbury
+and make it right for her with her people. She said they'd believe
+anything I told them and there wasn't anything they wouldn't do for me.
+
+"Tell them," she said, "that Jimmy's going to be so horribly celebrated
+that they'll look perfect asses if they don't acknowledge him."
+
+I owned there was something in it. She said there was everything in it.
+And I promised her I'd go and do what I could.
+
+Then I went upstairs to help Jevons to finish his man's job. I found him
+in the bedroom, making up a bed on the floor. The carpenter had taken
+away the bedstead and the posts and left him nothing but the mattress and
+the tester with its roof of rosebud chintz. He had propped the tester up
+against the wall where he said he could see it last thing before he went
+to sleep and first thing when he woke up.
+
+The room was very hot, for he'd lit the gas fire to air the sheets and
+things. He had thought of everything. He had even thought of hanging
+Viola's nightgown over the back of a chair before the fire, and setting
+her slippers ready for her feet. He had laid her brush and comb on the
+little rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles, in the recess. He
+had unpacked her little trunk and put her things away all folded in the
+big rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles. He had hung the rosebud
+chintz curtains at the window and fitted its rosebud chintz cover on
+the low chair by the fire. And now he was kneeling on the floor, tucking
+in the blankets and smoothing the pillow for her head. His mouth was just
+a little open. And he was smiling.
+
+You couldn't hate him.
+
+He said he'd come and see me off at the Tube Station. But he didn't
+start. He began walking about, opening drawers and looking at things.
+
+Presently he gave a cry of joy. He had found what he was looking for, a
+rosebud chintz coverlet. He spread it on the bed and said, "There!" He
+brought in an old Persian rug (small but very beautiful) from the landing
+and spread it on the floor by the mattress and said, "That's a bit of all
+right." And he told me he was going to beeswax the floor to-morrow. There
+was nothing to beat oak-stain and beeswax for a floor.
+
+He stood there gazing. He was so pleased with his work that he couldn't
+tear himself away.
+
+He said, "The joke is that she thinks she's going to find this room
+looking like a Jew pawnbroker's shop when, she turns in, and that she'll
+have the time of her life putting it straight for _me_."
+
+Then he took my arm and led me away, shutting the door carefully, so that
+nothing, he said, should break the shock of her surprise.
+
+But there was one drop of bitterness in his cup--"If only I could have
+set up that tester!"
+
+I said he'd had quite enough excitement for one day and that he really
+must leave something for to-morrow.
+
+On our way to the Tube Station I told him that I was going down to
+Canterbury in a day or two. I told him what I was going for. He had been
+so happy thinking about his house and his furniture and Viola that I
+don't believe he'd ever thought about the Thesigers. At the word
+"Canterbury" he thrust out his lower jaw so that the tips of his little
+white teeth were covered (they always disappeared when he was angry).
+
+He said: "Tell that old sinner I don't care a copper damn whether he
+recognizes _me_ or not. What I can't stand and won't stand is the slur
+he's putting on my wife."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And that is more or less what I did tell him.
+
+I wired to the Canon to let him know I was coming, and he replied by
+asking me to stay for the week-end.
+
+I found the family diminished. Mildred had gone to a case; Millicent was
+away for her Midsummer holiday; only Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and Norah
+and Victoria were left. They had the air of survivors of an appalling
+disaster. The Canon and Mrs. Thesiger were aged by about ten years; poor
+Victoria looked tired and haggard; even Norah was depressed. You felt
+that the trouble in the house was irreparable this time. They had held
+their heads up against the scandal that was supposed to have occurred in
+Belgium; they couldn't realize it; it was the sort of thing that occurred
+to other people, not to them. And, after all, they didn't _know_ that it
+had occurred. But the scandal of a _mésalliance_ which really had
+occurred in England three weeks ago was well within their range, and
+it had crushed them. It wasn't, as Jevons cynically maintained, that they
+objected to a _mésalliance_--any _mésalliance_--more than to the other
+thing; I think they had never really believed in the other thing, and
+this marriage, so far from effacing it, had rubbed it in, had made it
+appear publicly as if, after all, it might have been so. It was not only
+excessively disagreeable to them in itself, but it left them in that
+ghastly doubt.
+
+And this time they couldn't look to me to save them.
+
+Still it was evident that they looked to me for something. I was tackled
+by each one of them in turn. The Canon wanted to know if I had anything
+to tell him. Mrs. Thesiger wondered whether Viola would have enough to
+live on. Victoria, in the absence of her parents, took me into a corner
+to inquire under her breath, "Is he really very awful?" Norah--she had
+known all about it; they hadn't spared her, they hadn't kept it from her;
+you couldn't keep anything from Norah; she had got it all out of Viola
+the day before I came down the first time--Norah told me I'd have to make
+her father ask them down. She took Jevons's view that it was the Canon
+who was causing all the scandal now (only she called it fuss). There
+never would have been any if Mummy and Daddy had had the sense to take it
+properly and treat it as a joke. Nobody who knew Viola could take it as
+anything else.
+
+"But," she said, "if Daddy goes about pulling a long face and keeping up
+his sore throat over it, everybody'll think there must be something in
+it. I could have got it all right for them in a jiffy if they'd left it
+to me."
+
+"What would you have done, then?" I was really anxious to know.
+
+"Oh, I'd have run round telling everybody about it--as a joke. A
+thundering good joke. If they'd turned me on to it in time I could have
+easily overtaken those shocking old cats who got in first. As it is," she
+said, "I've stopped a lot of it--though Daddy doesn't know it--just that
+way. You should have seen me with the Colonel and the Dean! But if
+somebody doesn't stop Daddy he'll go and mess it all up again. Don't you
+remember how he dished my game at dinner the first night you were here?"
+
+Yes. I remembered. It came back to me, that startling indiscretion at
+the dinner-table which was, after all, so deliciously discreet. Knowing
+Norah as I know her now, I wouldn't mind betting that Jevons owes his
+position, in Canterbury (and he has one) to-day far more to his youngest
+sister-in-law's manoeuvres with the Dean and Chapter than to my handling
+of his case--No; I'm forgetting what he does owe that to. Let's say,
+then, his position in Canterbury yesterday--a year ago.
+
+Well, I had an hour's talk with the Canon.
+
+There was some awkwardness in having to point out to a man of his beauty
+and dignity that his duty lay in any other direction than the one he was
+so plainly heading for. I put it on the grounds of pity. I pleaded for
+Viola, I said she was unhappy.
+
+He replied that that was not the account she had given of herself.
+
+I said, Perhaps not. But if she wasn't unhappy now she very soon would be
+if he persisted in refusing to acknowledge them.
+
+But his lip went stiffer and stiffer. He was too unhappy himself to be
+got at that way. So I took him on the ground of expediency. I said after
+all Jevons was his son-in-law. He couldn't go on ignoring Jevons. I used
+Viola's argument. He wasn't dealing with an ordinary man. In a few years'
+time Tasker Jevons would be so celebrated that it would be absurd to
+pretend to ignore him.
+
+The Canon stuck to it that he didn't care how celebrated the fellow was.
+
+I said, "You can't keep it up for ever. You'll have to recognize him in
+the end. You don't want to cut the poor chap while he's struggling and
+accept him when he rolls, as he probably will roll."
+
+The Canon said he wasn't going to accept him at all. He said that Jevons
+rolling would he if anything more odious than Jevons as he was. He
+couldn't forget what had happened. And that was the end of it.
+
+I told him that it hadn't happened; but that to repudiate Jevons was the
+way to make everybody think it had. And whether it had happened or not,
+he must surely want other people to forget it. And once start the
+abominable impression, Jevons's celebrity would cause it to be remembered
+for ever, or at any rate for this generation. Whereas he could put a stop
+to the whole thing at once by behaving as if nothing had happened. He had
+only got to ask them down next week.
+
+"Does _he_ want to be asked down?"
+
+I said, No, he didn't. I told him what Jevons had said--that he didn't
+care whether he was recognized or not, but that he "couldn't stand the
+slur that was being put upon his wife."
+
+I saw him wince at that.
+
+"That's how it strikes him?" he said.
+
+I answered that that was how it would strike most people.
+
+"_I'm_ putting the slur on my daughter, am I?"
+
+I was pitiless. I said, Certainly he was. If he persisted.
+
+Then, after telling me that I had hit him hard, he fell back on another
+line of defence. He owed it to his priesthood not to condone his
+daughter's conduct.
+
+"All the more--all the more, Furnival, if she _is_ my daughter."
+
+I said he owed it to his priesthood to stand up for an innocent girl,
+even if she _was_ his daughter. I couldn't see anything in it but her
+innocence--her amazing innocence. I only wished I had his chance of
+proving it.
+
+He shook his head. "That's it, my dear fellow. We can't prove it."
+
+I said at least we could believe in it and act on our belief.
+
+He said it was all very well for me. I was prejudiced.
+
+"My sort of prejudice," I said, "might work the other way."
+
+"You must have been afraid, or you wouldn't have gone out to bring her
+back."
+
+"Jevons was afraid himself, for that matter. When things got dangerous he
+took her back to Bruges and put her in a _pension_ to be safe from him."
+
+He looked up sharply.
+
+"She never told me that--that he took her there to be safe from him."
+
+"I don't suppose she knew. She was as innocent as all that."
+
+"And how do _you_ know?"
+
+"Because he told me so."
+
+I gave him something of what Jevons had told me, but not all.
+
+"That," said the Canon, "seems to make him more credible."
+
+I pictured for him the night of Jevons's remorse.
+
+He said, "That's the best thing I've heard about him yet. You believe
+him?"
+
+I said, "Yes. The man is extremely sensitive and almost insanely frank."
+
+I let it sink in. Presently he owned that it was the platonic version of
+the affair that--as a man of the world--he had found it so hard to
+swallow--"All that nonsense, you know, about the Belfry."
+
+He meditated a while. Then he began to ask questions:
+
+"Where does he come from? Who are his people? What do they do?"
+
+I said his father was a Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in a
+village somewhere in Hertfordshire.
+
+And then: "Is he--is he _very_ impossible?"
+
+I said, No. Only from their point of view a little improbable.
+
+He didn't press it.
+
+"Well," he said, "it looks as if he was inevitable. I suppose we've got
+to make the best of him. What do you want me to do?"
+
+I said I wanted him to ask them down. Very soon.
+
+He said, "All right, Furnival. I'll ask them down next week. But if I do
+you must stop on and see me through. I won't be left alone with him."
+
+I stopped on, playing chess with the Canon and lawn tennis with Norah,
+who was more than ever determined to beat me.
+
+And on Tuesday of the next week they came down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The whitewashing of Jevons had not been an easy matter. It took such a
+lot of coats to make a satisfactory job of him. And it was not a job I
+would have chosen. But I was serving Mrs. Jevons, and if my service had
+demanded miracles I should have had to have worked them somewhere, that
+was all. And perhaps it was a miracle to have turned Jevons out as a
+morally presentable person according to the requirements of a Cathedral
+Close.
+
+But up to that Tuesday afternoon in August my private grievance against
+Jevons remained what it had been. In his absence--even while I
+whitewashed him--I could not extend a Christian forgiveness and
+forbearance to Jevons, any more than Mrs. Thesiger could. I think I hated
+Jevons. I ought to have hated him--by every glorious and manly code,
+pagan or barbarous, I ought to have hated him. And I did--every minute
+that he wasn't there. He had made me a figure of preposterous suffering.
+Because of him I trailed a fatuous tragedy through the Thesigers' house
+and over the green lawns of the Close, under the eyes of the young
+subalterns and of Victoria and Norah. (Canon and Mrs. Thesiger I didn't
+mind so much.) It mattered nothing that they were all extremely kind to
+me, since my suffering was responsible for their kindness and Jevons was
+responsible for my suffering.
+
+Well, on that Tuesday he arrived. He was asked for a week and he stayed
+three days; and in those three days I had forgiven him everything for the
+sake of his performance.
+
+He arrived in the middle of a tennis-party.
+
+The Thesigers hadn't meant to have a party. The subalterns must have
+known that he was coming and turned up simply to look at him. (I wondered
+afterwards whether Norah could have told them. She was dangerously demure
+that afternoon.)
+
+I ought to have said that for the last two days the Canon had been
+preparing himself for Jevons by reading him. He had ordered--in defiance
+of his political principles--the _Morning Standard_, and I had found him
+reading Jevons's novel and surrounded by numbers of the _Blue Review_,
+which, if you remember, published the best of Jevons's earlier work. He
+had no difficulty in getting hold of them; his youngest daughter had been
+able to supply him with more Jevons than he wanted. In fact, in the study
+of Tasker Jevons the Canon was weeks behind the rest of his acquaintance.
+There was hardly a family in Canterbury of any education in which Tasker
+Jevons was not by this time a household word. The garrison club library
+had bought him in quantities. The bookseller in the precincts did not
+stock him (he was not allowed to); but he could order him for you, and
+did. And the book-sellers in the High Street displayed him in their
+windows by the half-dozen.
+
+I have forgotten, in the blaze of his later fame, that (apart from this
+purely local reputation) he passed in the provinces as a fair-sized
+celebrity even then. Only, as Jevons judged himself at every stage with
+accuracy, he hadn't begun to take himself at all seriously yet.
+
+So he arrived in a perfect simplicity, without any of that rather dubious
+aplomb with which he tried to carry off his celebrity when it really
+came.
+
+It was very nasty for him.
+
+He had to come out of the house, following Viola and her mother all
+the way to the far end of the lawn, where the Canon was ready for him
+with a face which, try as he would--and he tried his hardest--he could
+not unstiffen. It must be said of the Canon that he nothing common
+did or mean upon that memorable scene; but he had--as Jevons said
+afterwards--rather too much the air of walking up to the gun's mouth and
+calling on us to observe how beautifully a Christian could die.
+
+And there was Victoria standing beside the Canon and holding herself
+well, and Colonel and Mrs. Braithwaite beside Victoria, trying to look as
+if there was nothing unusual about Jevons or the situation. There was
+Norah at the tennis-net quivering with excitement, and (by the time
+Jevons had caught up with his convoy) there was Mrs. Thesiger alongside
+the others, turned round to present him, and watching him as he came on.
+Viola had turned and was looking at him too. And there were the
+subalterns at the tennis-net with Norah, doing unnecessary things to the
+net and trying _not_ to look at him.
+
+I wondered: How on earth will he carry it off? How is he going to get
+across that tennis-ground?
+
+He was getting across it somehow, holding himself not quite so well as
+Victoria or the subalterns, but still holding himself, coming on, a
+little flushed and twinkling and self-conscious, but coming.
+
+The situation was, for him, most horrible; but it was worse for Viola. I
+wondered: Is she shivering all down her spine? Is she going to flinch?
+Why _will_ she _look_ at the poor chap?
+
+And then I saw. She was looking at him with a little tender smile, a
+smile that helped him across, that said: "Come on. Come on. It's
+difficult, I know, but you're doing it beautifully."
+
+Well, so he was. He was doing it more beautifully than the Canon or any
+of them. For that group on the lawn were like a rather eager rescue
+party, holding out hands to a struggling swimmer in the social surf. They
+expected him to struggle and he didn't. He landed himself in the middle
+of them with an adroitness that put them in the wrong. What's more, he
+held his own when he got there. He looked about as different from any of
+the men on that tennis-ground as a man well could look. He looked odd;
+and that saved him. They with their distinction had not achieved absolute
+difference from each other. His difference from all of them was so
+absolute that it was a sort of distinction in itself.
+
+As soon as he got there Norah came up with the subalterns in tow. She
+made a little friendly rush at him. She said, "I'm Norah, the youngest. I
+expect Viola's told you about me. She's told me lots about _you_."
+
+She meant well, dear child. But she overdid it. She hadn't allowed--none
+of us except Viola had allowed--for his appalling sensitiveness. The poor
+chap told me afterwards that he could bear up against the Canon's stiff
+face and what he called Mrs. Thesiger's ladylike refinements of
+repudiation, and the poker that Victoria had swallowed, but that that
+kid's kindness, coming on the top of it all, floored him. He took her
+hand (I think he squeezed it), and his mouth opened, but he couldn't
+speak; he just breathed hard and flushed furiously; and his eyes looked
+as if he were going to cry. But of course he didn't cry. He was, he said,
+far too much afraid of the subalterns.
+
+It was a good thing, perhaps, after all, that it took him that way. His
+emotion made him quiet and subdued; it toned him down, so that he started
+well from the very beginning.
+
+After tea he recovered and talked to the Colonel and the subalterns while
+the rest of us listened. He said, I remember, that the building of
+Dreadnoughts was of more importance to the country than Disestablishment.
+And even more important than the building of Dreadnoughts was the
+building of submarines. The submarine was the ship of the future. There
+should be, he said, at least fifty submarines for every Dreadnought
+turned out.
+
+That made them all sit up. (It was not a platitude in nineteen-six, but a
+prophecy.) The Colonel and the subalterns hung on his words; and when the
+Canon saw them hanging, his mouth began to relax a little of its own
+accord. In his first hour Jevons had scored, notably.
+
+It was as if he had said to himself, "I'll bring these people round, see
+if I don't. I give myself an hour."
+
+Dinner passed without any misadventure, but you could see that he was
+careful. Also you could see by his twinkle that he was amusing himself by
+his own precautions, as if, again, he had said to himself, "They're all
+expecting me to make noises over my soup, and they'll be disappointed. I
+just won't make any."
+
+We had coffee in the garden afterwards. And it was then that the Canon
+asked him what his politics were?
+
+Jevons said he had no politics. Or rather, he had a great many politics.
+He was a sort of Socialist in time of peace and a red-hot Imperialist in
+time of war, and a Tory for purposes of Tariff Reform, and a Liberal when
+it came to Home Rule.
+
+And when the Canon objected that you couldn't run a Government on those
+lines, little Jevons told him that that was precisely how Governments
+were run. It was a fallacy to suppose that Oppositions didn't rule.
+
+And again he scored. He did it all with a twinkling, dimpling urbanity
+and deprecation, as if the Canon had been a beautiful lady he was paying
+court to, as if he thought it was rather a pity that beauty should lower
+itself to talk politics; but since he insisted on politics, he should
+have them; as if, in short, he loved the Canon, but didn't take him very
+seriously.
+
+Yes; he certainly scored. He gave Viola no cause to flinch.
+
+That evening comes back to me by bits. It must have been that evening
+that the Canon walked round the garden with me. I see him walking round
+and round, with Norah hanging on to his arm, teasing him and chattering.
+I hear her crying out suddenly with no relevance, "Hasn't he got stunning
+eyes, Daddy?" and the Canon saying that Jevons's eyes would look better
+in a pair of earrings than in Jevons's head, and her answering, "Wouldn't
+I like to wear them!" I see his little mock shiver (as if he felt that it
+was those great chunks of unsuitable sapphire that had charmed Viola
+across the Channel), and Norah's funny face as she said, "Oh, come, he
+isn't half bad."
+
+That night he called me into the library when they had all gone to bed.
+Clearly he wanted to know how it had gone off--how he, in particular, had
+behaved. I assured him that his behaviour had been perfect. And I asked
+him what he thought of Jevons?
+
+He said, "Well--he might be worse. He might be much, much worse. He's a
+clever chap. Where does he get it all from?"
+
+But I noticed that the next day he shut himself up in his library
+all morning, was silent at lunch, and never emerged properly till
+dinner-time. Mrs. Thesiger also fought shy of her son-in-law.
+
+Norah and Victoria took him by turns that day. I noticed that he got on
+very well with Norah. She knocked balls over the net for him all morning.
+(He couldn't play, but professed a great eagerness to learn.) In the
+afternoon Victoria took him to look at the Cathedral and the old quarters
+of the town. In the evening, after dinner, we all sat out in the garden.
+Canon and Mrs. Thesiger soon left us; Victoria followed them; and Viola
+and Norah and Jevons and I sat on till long after dark.
+
+Viola and Norah, I remember, sat close together on the long seat under
+the elm tree. Jevons was on the other side of Viola. I sat on a cushion
+at her feet.
+
+The night had a rhythm in it. Stillness and peace. The Cathedral chimes.
+Stillness and peace again. And there was a smell of cut lawn grass with
+dew on it from the ground, and of roses from the borders, and of lichen
+and moss and crumbling mortar from the walls. Sometimes these smells
+pierced the peace like sound; and sometimes they gathered close and
+wrapped us like warmth.
+
+Then Jevons spoke.
+
+"All this," he said, "is very beautiful. Very beautiful indeed."
+
+And Viola sighed.
+
+"Yes, Yes," she said. "I suppose it _is_ beautiful."
+
+"You _know_ it is," he said.
+
+"I know all right. But I don't think I can see it as you do. I've been
+shut up in it so long. It's all this that you've taken me out of."
+
+"It's all this," he said, "that's made you what you are."
+
+"It isn't. This isn't really me. It's just Them. I'm what I've made
+myself. I'm what you've made me. I'm uglier than they are. I'm uglier
+than anything here, but I'm much, much more alive."
+
+"You surely don't suggest," said Jevons, "that I've made you uglier?"
+
+"You've made me stronger and cleverer and bigger--ever so much bigger
+than I was."
+
+"Much better in every way," I said, "than your youngest sister here,
+hasn't he?"
+
+"Poor little Norah! I didn't mean that--you beast--Furny!--Of course I
+didn't. Jimmy--what _did_ I mean?"
+
+He said nothing. But I heard an inarticulate murmur, and I saw that in
+the darkness his arm went round her and drew her closer.
+
+And that, God forgive him, was his heaviest score up till now.
+
+In two days he had absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere. He was in it. In
+it as I wasn't and couldn't be.
+
+And the next day Canon and Mrs. Thesiger took him in hand by turns. The
+Canon showed him the town all over again all morning. And in the
+afternoon Mrs. Thesiger showed him the Cathedral all over again; and took
+him with her to the service. And all dinner-time Jevons was very pensive
+and subdued.
+
+After dinner the Canon talked to Jevons about his novel. (He had retired
+into his library all afternoon in order to finish it.) He asked him why
+he had chosen an ugly subject when he might have found a beautiful one?
+
+And Jevons was more pensive than ever. He said, "Well--that's a
+question--"
+
+He couldn't tell the Canon why he'd chosen it. He couldn't disclose to
+him his plan of campaign.
+
+"You see, sir, I haven't seen many beautiful things."
+
+He still pondered. Then he said, very slowly, as if he dragged it
+out of himself with difficulty, "That book was written--written in my
+head--before I knew my wife."
+
+You could literally see his score running up. By nine o'clock the Canon
+and Mrs. Thesiger had roped him into their game of whist.
+
+I sat out with Viola and Norah in the garden, when Norah told us that she
+thought Jimmy was a dear. She was the only one of them that called him
+Jimmy.
+
+About ten o'clock next morning Viola came to me and asked me to go up to
+Jimmy, in his room. He wanted to speak to me.
+
+I found him packing, packing with a sort of precise and concentrated
+fury.
+
+He was going. Going up to town. He had torn through Canterbury, eaten his
+way through Canterbury, through the beauty and peace of it; he had
+absorbed and assimilated it in three days. And he had had enough. If he
+stayed in it another hour the beauty and the peace of it would kill him.
+The Canon's beauty was, he said, adorable; so was Mrs. Thesiger's.
+
+"But if I stay here I shall ruin it. I can't," he said, "go on giving
+that dear old clergyman clergyman's sore throat. I frighten him so that
+he can't sing. He doesn't know what to do with me, or say to me. He
+doesn't know what to call me. He can't call me Jevons, and he won't
+call me Jimmy, and he knows it would be ridiculous to call me James.
+Besides, he agitates me and makes me drop my aitches.
+
+"So I've had a wire. You'll explain to him the sort of wire I've had."
+
+"And Viola?" I said. "Is she going too?"
+
+"No. Viola's going to stay till our week's up. By that time she'll be
+bored stiff and longing to get back to me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went, and I'm not at all sure that he didn't score by going.
+
+And that night and the next and the next I thought of little Jevons alone
+in his little house in Hampstead, lying all by himself in his four-post
+bed between his rosebud chintz curtains and under his rosebud chintz
+tester, and saying to himself that he had scored.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+The Thesigers lived to be grateful to me for reconciling them to Jevons,
+if it was I who reconciled them. I don't think Mrs. Thesiger ever really
+forgave him, ever really liked him till the end; but the Canon very soon
+owned to a surreptitious regard for him. Luckily he acquired it while
+Jevons was still struggling, otherwise I do not think I could have saved
+their faces.
+
+In the first year of his marriage Jevons made them see how right I was
+when I told them it would be impossible to ignore him. In the second year
+they saw that he had only just given them time to come round before it
+was too late. The minute he became prosperous it would have been too
+late, much too late for their dignity and beauty. And yet they couldn't
+very well have gone on repudiating Viola for ever. A year would have seen
+them through that attitude. And Jevons's great _coup_ had come off in
+the year he "gave" it; so that if they had been left to themselves their
+revulsion of tenderness must have coincided with his prosperity. They
+would have had every appearance of having surrendered to his income.
+
+And they would have missed the spectacle of his struggle.
+
+I believe it was his struggle, the doggedness, the heroism, the wild
+humour that he put into it that brought them round. They didn't like his
+early celebrity and they deplored the cause of it--his first novel.
+
+That book justified everything that Jevons had said of it. It did
+startle. It did arrest. It _was_ unpleasant. So vividly and powerfully
+unpleasant that it nailed your eyes to it and kept them there. It made a
+break and a stain in your memory.
+
+When I say it was unpleasant I mean, and he meant, not that it was
+unclean, but that it was brutal. I shall have written this tale to very
+little purpose if it isn't transparent that Jevons's mind, Jevons's whole
+nature was scrupulously clean. Even his brutality was not spontaneous.
+He broke his neck to get it. You could see him putting his tongue out as
+he laboured the brutality. You could see him sweating as he went over it
+again, removing all the marks of labour, making for his effect of
+sincerity and gorgeous simplicity and ease.
+
+I've said it's doubtful how far Jevons took himself seriously. He
+certainly had no illusions as to the nature of his success. But whenever
+I come to this side of him I feel myself untrustworthy. I cannot see him
+properly. I am prejudiced by knowing him so well. I daresay if I hadn't
+known him, if he hadn't been so frank in his disclosures, if he hadn't
+explained so many times the deliberate calculations of his method, I
+should think him a great novelist. I daresay to a generation that knows
+nothing about him or his disclosures or his method he will seem a great
+novelist again. I daresay he _is_ a great novelist. I don't know.
+
+Anyhow there were three great stages in his career: the Slow Advance; the
+Grand Attack; and Victory. (He had been advancing slowly ever since the
+day I met him on the football-ground at Blackheath).
+
+All these stages are marked for me by the increasing size and splendour
+of the houses that he occupied in turn; the four-roomed cottage at
+Hampstead; the little house in Edwardes Square; the large house in
+Mayfair; the still larger country house he acquired last of all. And the
+Jevons I like to think of is the Jevons of the little whitewashed
+cottage, of the whitewashed rooms, the one sitting-room where we dined;
+the kitchen at the back where we cooked and washed up; the absurd little
+bedroom in the front where the four-post bed was set up like a tent with
+its curtains and its tester; the study at the back where Jevons worked
+and Norah Thesiger slept when she came to stay. I remember Jevons darting
+from the kitchen and the dining-room with steaming dishes in his hands;
+Jevons with a pipe in his mouth and his feet on the chimney-piece,
+talking, talking, talking about anything--Dreadnoughts, submarines, the
+War (he had given it nine years now)--from nine till eleven, and then
+flinging himself out of his chair to turn the settee into a bed for the
+Kiddy. Whatever he was saying or doing, in the middle of a calculation,
+he would break off at eleven and drag sheets and blankets out of a
+coffin-like box under the settee and make up the Kiddy's little bed for
+her, because Kiddies must on no account be allowed to sit up late at
+night. I remember Viola and Norah coming in to help and Jevons shooing
+them away. And Norah would come back again and put her head round the
+door and look at him where he knelt on the floor absurdly, tucking in
+blankets and breathing hard as he tucked. And she would say, "Look at
+him. Isn't he sweet?" as if Jevons had been a rabbit or a guinea-pig, and
+go away again.
+
+Somehow I always see him like that, making beds, stooping over something,
+doing something for one of them or for me.
+
+Sometimes they would burst in on him suddenly in his bedmaking and throw
+pillows at him, or it might be sponges, and there would be madness: two
+girls running amok and little Jevons flying before them through the
+house and squealing in his excitement. Once he went out to post a letter
+in the Grove before midnight and they locked him out and looked at him
+from the window of the front bedroom and defied him to enter, and he
+skipped round to the back and climbed up by the water-butt on to the
+drainpipe of the bathroom, and from the drainpipe, perilously, in through
+the window of his study, where they found him putting hair-brushes in
+Norah's bed.
+
+After the drainpipe adventure (when they saw how game he was) they
+sobered down. I think it was that night that Norah said, "We mustn't
+_kill_ Jimmy. That would never do."
+
+And there would be theatre-parties when Jimmy had tickets given him, and
+eighteenpenny dinners at the "Petit Riche," going and returning by the
+Hampstead Tube.
+
+It seems to me that Norah must have stayed a great deal with them at
+Hampstead, and yet she couldn't have; they were only two years in the
+little four-roomed house. Anyhow, we were all immensely happy in those
+two years; even I was happy. Jevons I know was--and Viola. Viola had
+never been so happy in her life. She cooked: she washed up with Jimmy to
+help her; she mended his clothes and made her own; she did his
+typewriting; she took down his articles in shorthand and typed them; and
+through all his funny little social lapses she adored him.
+
+When you think of it, poverty and close quarters for two years, and the
+menace of some of those lapses hanging over her all the time--it was a
+pretty severe test. You would have said that if she could stand that she
+could stand anything, and she certainly stood it.
+
+But Jimmy hadn't begun yet to unbend. He was still on the defensive,
+holding himself in, every nerve strung up to the Grand Attack. This
+tension affected his behaviour. He knew his danger. He knew there were
+certain gestures that he must restrain, and he restrained them; there
+were certain things he did with spoons and forks and table napkins that
+would wreck him if he were caught doing them, and in those two years he
+kept a very sharp look-out. You would have thought that this life, on the
+edge of an abyss, with full knowledge of his danger, would have made him
+nervous and produced the very disaster that he dreaded. But no. Jevons
+was a fighting man, and he rose to these crises and prevailed. You felt
+that for him the real test would come when he was prosperous, when the
+strain was taken off him and he let himself go.
+
+Meanwhile it was terrifying to see him balancing himself on the edge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They moved into the Edwardes Square house in the September quarter
+of nineteen-eight. This was the year of the weeks of consolidation,
+his second novel and his "Journal," that were to precede the Grand
+Attack. The novel did exactly what he said it would. It did counteract
+the effect its predecessor; and the "Journal" gave him a place in
+_Belles-Lettres_ where he was safe from the legend of his own brutality.
+
+But it strained his relations with the Thesigers for the time being. The
+Rosalind of the "Journal" is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful
+to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said
+to have travelled together before they were married. Her figure moves
+through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an
+adorable innocence and naïveté, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the
+Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy
+and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender
+than the Viola he knew. You couldn't say she wasn't charming. The Canon
+couldn't say it; what he did say was that Jevons should have kept her out
+of it. Jevons's defence was that if he had kept her out of it there
+wouldn't have been any book.
+
+But he never did it again. Having once for all drawn her portrait as a
+young girl, he left it, as if he would have kept her youth immortal. You
+will not find any woman of his novels who suggests even a fugitive
+likeness to the Viola he married.
+
+The house in Edwardes Square stands for the second period: the period of
+sober energy that led up to the Grand Attack. It was also the period of
+deliberate yet vehement refinement. Jevons was determined at all cost to
+be refined. And at considerable cost, with white-painted panelling
+throughout, with blue-and-white Chinese vases here and there, and more
+and more Bokhara rugs everywhere, and tussore silk curtains in the
+windows and every stick of furniture chosen for its premeditated
+chastity, the little brown house was made to serve him as a holy
+standard. He said he had only got to live up to it and he would be all
+right.
+
+And so, in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his
+surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the
+diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers
+laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at
+the back. I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his
+beginnings, how he did it so well. Of course he gave Viola a free hand,
+he let her have what she wanted; but when I complimented her on any
+result she let me know at once that it was Jimmy's doing. She was
+pathetically anxious that I should see that he knew how. She let me know,
+too, the secret of his passionate absorption in gardens and interiors,
+lest I should think it argued any unmanliness in him.
+
+I remember so well her showing me that house in Edwardes Square. I had
+called one afternoon when I had known that Jevons wasn't there. I had
+left him at his club in Dover Street. (He had a club in Dover Street now;
+it was my club; I had put him up for it. He enjoyed his club as he
+enjoyed everything else that he had acquired by conquest; his membership
+marked another step in his advance, another strip of alien territory
+gained. And he had chosen this club, he said, because most of the members
+had retired, to cultivate adipose tissue on pensions, and they made him
+feel adolescent and slender and energetic.) I had left him in the library
+writing letters (he said he found a voluptuous pleasure in writing
+letters on the club paper under that irreproachable address), and I
+rushed off in a taxi to Viola in Edwardes Square.
+
+She was very glad to see me, and she gave me tea, poured out of an
+early eighteenth-century silver teapot, in beautiful old blue-and-white
+Chinese teacups. She wore one of those absurd narrow coats with tails
+that made women look like long, slender birds that year, and she had done
+something unexpected with her hair; it was curls, curls, curls all over,
+the way they did it then, and she sat on a wine-coloured sofa with a
+wine-coloured rug at her feet.
+
+She began straight away by talking about Jimmy's last book, the
+"Journal."
+
+"Don't you see _now_," she said, "why I went out to him, and how
+beautiful it all was?"
+
+I asked her did she think I'd ever doubted? She said: "No. But Daddy
+hates the book. So does Mummy. They all hate it except Norah and me. I'm
+glad he wrote it. I'm glad he put me into it. I never knew I was so nice,
+did you?"
+
+"Oh, come," I said, "surely I always knew?"
+
+But she didn't pay any attention to me. She didn't care to know what I
+thought or what I knew. She wasn't thinking of me or of herself. She was
+defending Jimmy with little jerky, stabbing thrusts of defiance. You
+could see that the smallest criticism of him made her suffer; that she
+was capable of infinite suffering where Jimmy was concerned. Also you saw
+that she would have to suffer, and that she knew it, and that it was this
+suffering that she repulsed and thrust from her with her stabs. He was
+making a tender place in her mind that might some day become a wound.
+
+"You know I did," I insisted--I think, to turn her mind from him.
+
+She looked at me gravely before she smiled.
+
+"Nobody but Jimmy really thinks me nice. Nobody but Jimmy knows how nice
+I _am_."
+
+And then she showed me the house.
+
+I praised some detail that Jevons had devised (not that there was much
+detail; it was all extremely simple). And I believe she saw criticism of
+Jimmy in that.
+
+"I know it looks as if he cared a lot about this sort of thing. And I
+daresay you think it's silly of him. But he doesn't really care."
+
+"It certainly looks," I said, "as if he cared about something."
+
+"It's me he cares about," she said.
+
+"And do you care about--this sort of thing, Viola?"
+
+"I care about his caring. But I was every bit as happy in that little
+four-roomed house, if that's what you mean."
+
+"Aren't you glad to have more room to move about in?"
+
+"I'm glad to have room for Daddy and Mummy when they come to stay."
+
+It was as if she had said, "If you think I'm glad to have room to get
+away from him you're mistaken."
+
+And there was another impression that she gave me. It was also as if she
+wanted to warn me not to form the habit of coming to see her when she was
+alone. I should gain nothing by it. If I insisted on seeing her alone I
+should get Jimmy, Jimmy, all the time.
+
+I didn't try to see her again alone.
+
+But I saw her often. Jevons was always asking me there. He made a point
+of it whenever they had what Viola called "anybody interesting." By this
+she meant somebody belonging to the confraternity of letters. Jevons had
+a sort of idea that I liked meeting these people and that it did me good.
+The house in Edwardes Square might have become a haunt of Jimmy's
+_confréres_ if Jimmy had had time to attend to them and if he hadn't been
+so deliberately exclusive. He was trying for the best--not for the great
+names so much as for the great achievements, and they were few. And there
+were one or two of them who rejected Jevons.
+
+And then you had to reckon with Mrs. Jevons's rejections. She was as
+fastidious in her way as he was in his; and besides, she guarded him, so
+that the circle around him was rather tight and small.
+
+Oh, he was faithful; he kept me in it; he gave me of his best; and if he
+could have made me shine I should have blazed among them all.
+
+It doesn't matter now which of them I met there. Jevons was charming to
+them all. He set them blazing. I don't think he cared much whether _he_
+blazed or not, but if he felt like it he could make a bigger blaze than
+any of them. He enjoyed them; he enjoyed them vastly, violently. Having
+once acquired the taste, he couldn't have lived without the intellectual
+excitement they gave him. But except for that, for the stimulus, the
+release of energy, it's surprising how little they really counted for
+him.
+
+And so it's not those evenings and that brilliance that I remember.
+
+In the house in Edwardes Square I seem to have been always meeting Norah
+Thesiger. Now that they had a room to put her in, she would be there for
+months at a time. And whenever she was there they would be sure to ask
+me. If Jevons didn't, Viola did.
+
+There was that summer, too, when Norah and Mildred came together with
+Charlie Thesiger, their cousin, who was engaged to Mildred. Charlie was
+then a lieutenant in the South Kent Hussars. He was a large young man,
+correct, handsome, rather supercilious and rather stupid. He seemed to
+fill the house in Edwardes Square when he was in it.
+
+He doesn't matter. At least, he didn't matter then. God knows he never
+really mattered, poor boy, at any time. But he is important. He fixes
+things for me. He brings me to the incident of June, nineteen-nine.
+
+It was a very slight incident. It wouldn't be worth recording except that
+it stood for others like itself, a whole crowd. And it was of such slight
+things that Viola's torments were to be made.
+
+We were at dinner in the little dining-room looking on the flagged court,
+a party of six: Viola at the head of the round table, with her back to
+the light; Jevons at the foot, facing her, with the light full on him;
+Charlie Thesiger was on Viola's right, I was on her left, facing him.
+Norah sat next to me on Jevons's right, and Mildred sat next to Charlie
+on Jevons's left, facing Norah. We were all so close together that it
+would be difficult for one of us to have missed anything that happened or
+was said. And Viola, with the light behind her, commanded us all.
+
+She had been very gay. I don't suppose Charlie felt anything strained
+about her gaiety--he was not observant--but I did, and I put it down to
+Charlie's presence, to the rather flat correctness that made Jevons stand
+out. Another thing I noticed was that, in labouring for refinement in his
+surroundings, Jevons hadn't allowed for the effect of contrast. It hadn't
+occurred to him that an interior that harmonized with Viola would be
+damaging to him. And it was. Just how damaging I hadn't realized until
+to-night (which shows how careful he must have been at Canterbury). He
+didn't stand out. He burst out. He never sank into his background for a
+single minute. You had to be aware of him all the time.
+
+And yet in a party of the confraternity you were not aware of him like
+this. For then he blazed; and in the flare he made you didn't notice
+whether he tilted his soup-plate the right way or not, or care if he
+couldn't use his table napkin or his pocket-handkerchief and look you
+square in the face at the same time. Neither did you notice these things
+if you were alone with him or if only Norah and Viola were there. He was
+happy with us, and happiness was becoming to him, and he had all sorts of
+endearing ways that would have disarmed us. And then there's no doubt
+that Viola protected him. She watched over him; she smoothed his social
+path for him; she removed his worst pitfalls; she ran, as it were, to
+pick him up before he fell. He didn't know she was watching him; neither,
+I think, did she. It was a blind instinct with her to help him. And Norah
+and I helped him too. And as he wasn't nervous with us everything went
+well. But when strangers got into our party it was different. Viola
+couldn't attend to him properly; and if the stranger happened to be
+rather stupid, like Charlie Thesiger, Jevons didn't blaze and so cover
+himself; he got bored; and when he was bored he got jumpy; and it was
+when he got jumpy that he did things.
+
+And Charlie was getting on his nerves.
+
+Still, everything went well until the table was cleared for dessert; and
+there was no reason why everything shouldn't have gone well even then.
+Viola had guarded against his most inveterate failing--a habit of
+stretching for things across the table--by putting everything he wanted
+within his reach. Within Jevons's reach to-night was a little dish
+containing among other things chocolate nougat. And he was fond of
+nougat. He was fond also of chaffing Norah. And he was not prepared to
+forego one amusement for the other. And Norah had taken a mean advantage
+of him. She had timed a provocation at the moment when for any other man
+retort would have been impossible; and she hadn't reckoned with Jevons's
+ingenuity of resource.
+
+I am not going to say what he did. It wouldn't be fair to him. It was a
+little thing, but you couldn't pretend for one moment that you hadn't
+seen it, any more than Jevons could do anything to cover the fantastic
+horror of it. We simply sat and stiffened; all but Norah, who burst out
+laughing in Jimmy's face.
+
+Mildred, trying to help him, made matters worse by asking for a peach
+when she had got a large one on her plate. Charlie Thesiger looked down
+his nose. I don't know where I looked, but I know that I was conscious
+of Viola's face and of the flush that darkened it to the tip of her chin
+and the roots of her hair. And I could feel the shudder down her back
+passing into mine.
+
+After all, Viola did cover it. She lit a little Roman lamp they had and
+sent it travelling down the table with the cigarette-box. Then she got up
+and went to Jevons and stooped over his shoulder and took the little dish
+from him.
+
+"If anybody wants any more chocolates," she said, "they must come
+upstairs for them."
+
+"She won't trust me with them," said Jevons. (He _had_ a nerve.)
+
+Viola trailed off upstairs with her dish, and Mildred and Charlie
+followed her.
+
+Norah and I held watch with Jevons, who leaned back in his chair and
+smoked and rubbed the forefinger of his right hand--the innocent
+instrument (may I say it?) of his crime--with his table napkin, and
+contemplated Norah in a drowsy imperturbability.
+
+"Did I do anything?" he said presently.
+
+Norah put her hand on his arm and stroked it.
+
+"No, Jimmy dear," she said, "of course you didn't."
+
+It was then that I was aware for the first time of the beauty of Norah's
+face. Norah's, not Viola's. Up till then I could never see anything but
+Viola's face in it, coloured wrong, so that it rather worried me to look
+at it, I resented the everlasting reminder of that likeness under that
+perverse and disconcerting difference. If her eyes hadn't been so blue
+and her cheeks so pink; if only her hair had been a little darker and if
+it hadn't crinkled--
+
+Now, as I looked at her, I wondered how anybody could think she was
+like Viola. There was only her forehead and the odd turn of her jaw and
+nose--her profile, if you like, was Viola's--but (when she wasn't
+laughing) Norah's full face had something that Viola's hadn't and never
+would have. I had caught it now and then and couldn't make up my mind
+what it was. Now I saw that it was a sort of wisdom, a look of soberness
+and goodness that I couldn't quite account for.
+
+Then Jevons explained it for me.
+
+"The Kiddy's growing up," he said (he said it to himself). "She'll be
+twenty to-morrow. She won't throw wet sponges at me any more."
+
+That was it. Norah was growing up. Her soft face was setting and the
+expression I had noticed had come to stay.
+
+Presently Jevons got up. He said he had work to do.
+
+"The Grand Attack, Furnival, the Grand Attack!"
+
+And he left us together.
+
+Norah looked after him.
+
+"Poor little Jimmy," she said. "I don't think he ever did a _bad_ thing
+in his life."
+
+And then, with what seemed a daring irrelevance, "I wish Charlie wasn't
+here. I can't think why Viola ever asked him."
+
+"Why shouldn't she?"
+
+"Because he's bad for Jimmy. He puts him in the wrong."
+
+I'm afraid I laughed a little brutally at the extravagance of this.
+
+"Well," she said. "I can't bear him to suffer."
+
+"You've got a very tender little heart, haven't you?" I said.
+
+"It isn't half as tender as Viola's. But I've got more common sense."
+
+"Then why," I said, "did you laugh at Jimmy just now?"
+
+"That's why. Because it was the best thing you could do. He doesn't mind
+it half so much when you laugh at him. It's people looking down their
+noses, like Charlie, that he minds. It must be awful for the poor little
+chap, when you come to think of it, living on the edge, never knowing
+when he's going to do something that'll make Viola's blood run cold."
+
+"It must be still more awful for Viola."
+
+To that she said, "It isn't. You don't know how Viola feels about Jimmy.
+None of my people do. They simply don't understand it."
+
+"Oh, come," I said, "they've accepted it, haven't they?"
+
+"They've accepted it _because_ they don't understand her. They say they
+never know what she'll do next, and Jimmy's come as a sort of relief to
+them. They thought she might do something much worse. You see, she isn't
+a bit like any of us. If she wants to do a thing she'll do it, no matter
+what it is. She wanted to go to Bruges with Jimmy and look at the Belfry,
+and she did it like a shot. What they can't see is that she'll never
+_want_ to do anything wrong, so she'll never do it. They can't see that
+there was just as much Belfry as Jimmy in it. There always will be a
+Belfry in Viola's life, and when she hears the bells going she'll run off
+to see. And Jimmy's the only man who'll ever take her to a Belfry.
+
+"She's all right. Because she knows that Jimmy's really ten times more
+refined than any of us. His little soul's all made of beautiful clean
+white silk. But Viola can't go on telling people how beautiful he is.
+They've got to see it for themselves.
+
+"I wish _you_ could see it as she does. I wish you could see how she
+feels about it--"
+
+"My dear Norah," I said, "I've been trying for three years to see as
+Viola sees, and feel as Viola feels. But how can I? I'm not Viola."
+
+"But," she said, "you _do_ understand her. If I thought you didn't--if I
+thought that you could go back on her--and if you go back on Jimmy you go
+back on _her_--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, I don't think I could ever speak to you again."
+
+"My dear child," I said, "you're absurd. I haven't gone back on either of
+them. Won't it do if I see Jimmy as _you_ see him?"
+
+"Ye-es," she said. "But--I wonder if you do."
+
+"Norah," I said then, "I wonder if Viola's as sorry for him as you are. I
+hope she isn't."
+
+"She isn't, then. She isn't sorry for him a bit. No more am I. You'll
+make me sorry for _you_ if you don't take care."
+
+When we went to say good night to Jevons we found Viola sitting on the
+arm of his chair with the little dish in her hand, feeding him with
+chocolate nougat. Her posture was one of supple contrition, and we heard
+her say:
+
+"Cheer up, Jimmy. It doesn't really matter what you do. Nobody would ever
+take you for more than four years old."
+
+Yes. Norah, the youngest, was the one who had grown up.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Norah has often told me that I exaggerated the importance of the Nougat
+Incident; that my weakness is a tendency to dwell with a morbid
+concentration on small, inessential details. When I tell her that if I
+succeed in surviving Jimmy I shall write his biography, she tilts her
+chin and says I'm the last person who should attempt it.
+
+"Between us," she says, "we might manage it. But if you're left to
+yourself you'll make him _all_ nougat."
+
+When I retort that if _she_ were left to _her_self she'd eliminate the
+very things that make him the engaging animal he is, and remind her that
+a straw will show the way the wind's blowing, she asks me, "Did any big
+wind ever blow a straw before it all the way?"
+
+Well, perhaps I _am_ the very last person--he made me the last person by
+what he did to me--but when it comes to exaggeration I haven't attached
+more importance to the Nougat Incident than Jevons did himself. Why, when
+he shut himself up in his study that night, instead of hurling himself
+forward in the Grand Attack, he must have sat with his head in his hands
+brooding over it and wondering what he'd done; he must have gone straight
+upstairs to ask Viola what he'd done, or there'd have been no earthly
+sense in what we heard her saying. The detail may have been small, but it
+was not inessential when it could turn Tasker Jevons from the Grand
+Attack as he was turned that night.
+
+I tell you, and Jevons would tell you, it is of such small things that
+tragedies are made--the bitterest, the most insidious.
+
+And when Jevons did finally hurl himself, when he shut himself up,
+morning after morning and night after night, to labour violently on his
+greatest work, though (for just as long as he was actually engaged) he
+might be staving off his tragedy, he was nevertheless precipitating the
+event. You may say that when you get him there in his study on his
+battlefield you are among the big forces at once; but the interesting
+thing is that those big forces by their very expenditure released a whole
+crowd of little, infinitely little ones that, in their turn, in their
+miniature explosion, worked for his destruction. Jevons, struggling with
+his social disabilities, was like a giant devoured by microscopically
+minute organisms over whose generation he had no control.
+
+And the greater the man, mind you, the greater the tragedy.
+
+Still, for those two years in Edwardes Square, he staved it off. It was
+the very violence of his labour, the prodigious front of the battle he
+delivered, that saved him. Then there was his victory, his Third Novel,
+that for the time threw all minor happenings into the background.
+
+He was right again in his forecast. It _was_ his best work, and (I use
+his own phrase) it did the trick.
+
+When it came, the Grand Attack (which was bolder even than his first
+assault) carried, you may say, the whole position, after demolishing at
+one stroke the enemy's defences. For he had enemies. He was the sort of
+man who does have them. He didn't _make_ them, at least, not
+deliberately, he couldn't have been bothered to make them; but he drew
+them; they seemed to rise out of the ground after every one of his
+appearances.
+
+Well, they couldn't say he hadn't done it this time.
+
+_Done_ it. There's no good trying to express such a phenomenon as Jevons
+in terms of literature. You can only think about him in terms of action,
+every book of his being an onslaught by which he laid his public low.
+
+And this time he had conquered America.
+
+Don't ask me how many thousands he made by it. I've forgotten. They've
+melted into the tens of thousands that he made before he had finished.
+Even in the years of the Grand Attack he was making his old father an
+allowance and investing large sums in case of accidents. (He had been
+putting by even in the Hampstead days.) How he did it I can't think,
+though he has tried to explain it to me more than once. The whole thing
+for him was as obvious as any business transaction (he had the sort of
+mind for which business transactions _are_ obvious). He had studied
+the public he set out to capture. He presented the life it knew--the
+moving, changing, fantastically adventurous life of the middle classes.
+Until Jevons rushed on them and forced their eyes open, you may say at
+the point of the bayonet, the middle classes didn't know they were moving
+and changing and being adventurous. Nobody knew. It was Jevons's
+discovery.
+
+Then, as he pointed out, there were innumerable discretions in his
+valour. He knew to a hairbreadth how far he might go, and he went no
+farther. He respected existing prejudices because they existed. He didn't
+ask awkward questions; he didn't raise problems; he had the British
+capacity for doing serious things with an air of not taking himself
+seriously and frivolous things with an astounding gravity.
+
+"You can do anything, Furnival," he said, "if you're only funny enough."
+
+Norah tells me that that really _is_ his secret.
+
+But, he said, the whole thing was as calculable as any successful deal on
+the Stock Exchange. When you asked him: "Then why can't other people do
+it?" he said: "God knows why. They must be precious fools if they want to
+do it and don't find out how. _I_'ve had to find out."
+
+For one year--the last year in Edwardes Square--he enjoyed pure fame. And
+he _did_ enjoy it--I think he enjoyed everything--like a child with a
+mechanical toy, or a girl with a new gown, playing with it and trying it
+on by snatches when he could spare half an hour from his appalling toil.
+
+Heavens, how he worked that year! With a hard, punctual passion, a
+multiplied energy, like five financiers engaged on five separate
+transactions. After victory in the campaign he had settled down to
+business and the works of peace. There was the business of the short
+story; the business of the monograph; the business of the magazine
+article and the newspaper column, and the speculations that developed
+into the immense business of his plays. (I've forgotten how much he
+netted by his first curtain-raiser.) That's five.
+
+As I look back on him he seems to have torn through his stages at an
+incredible pace. There are several that I haven't counted, so suddenly
+did he leave them behind him: the stage when he was literary adviser to a
+firm of publishers, who wouldn't believe him when he said the thing was
+calculable; the stage when he ceased to be sub-editor of _Sport_ and
+became editor, an appointment so lucrative that you may judge the risk he
+took when he abandoned it. And in between there was his stage of cruelty,
+when he did reviewing. It was a brief stage, but he contrived to strew
+the field with the reputations he had slaughtered (Viola used to plead
+with him for certain authors, like Queen Philippa for the burghers of
+Calais), until his job was taken from him in the interests of humanity.
+
+Now--I am speaking in the light of my later knowledge--the first effect
+of these prodigious and passionate labours was beneficent, and I
+shouldn't wonder if Jevons, who had calculated everything to a nicety,
+hadn't allowed for this too. To say nothing of the peculiar purity of his
+earlier fame, which set him in a place apart and assured beyond all
+possible depreciation, so long as he elected to stay there, the very
+conditions of his business saved him. He enjoyed in those two desperate
+years the immunities of a recluse. The results were prominently before
+the public, but Jimmy wasn't. His study was literally his sanctuary.
+Sitting there nearly all day and half the night, he was removed from the
+world's observation at the precise moment when it became inimical. I
+don't mean the observation of the confraternity of letters, which was and
+always had been kindly to his personality, and had taken little or no
+notice of his disabilities; I mean the observation of the world he
+married into, for which disabilities like Jimmy's count.
+
+He was also removed from Viola's observation at a time when I think,
+almost unconsciously, she was beginning to criticize him. When he came to
+her out of his sanctuary he came with its consecration on him. And then
+there was the appeal he made to her tenderness. If the shudders down her
+back began they were checked by the spectacle of his exhaustion. She
+couldn't shudder at the tired conqueror when he flung himself on the
+floor beside her and laid his head in her lap.
+
+I've seen her with him like that--once, one evening when Norah was
+with them, and I had turned in after dinner; it was upstairs in that
+drawing-room in Edwardes Square that they had made, back and front, in an
+L. Norah and I were in the long, narrow part at the back; you know how
+those little town rooms go when they're knocked into one--the fireplaces
+in the same wall and windows opposite each other, so that the back rakes
+the fireplace end of the front part.
+
+Viola and Jevons were by the fireplace in the front, she in her low chair
+and he stretched out on the rug at her feet. And we raked them.
+
+They didn't know they were observed. I think they'd made up their minds
+that when Norah and I were together we couldn't hear or see anything
+except ourselves.
+
+And so we heard Viola saying, "What do you do it for?"
+
+And Jimmy, "Oh, for the fun of the thing, I suppose. What does one do
+things for?"
+
+And she, "It'll be fine fun for me, won't it, when you've killed
+yourself? When you've burst the top of your head off like the kitchen
+boiler?"
+
+"I should have to run dry first," said Jevons.
+
+"Well, you will, boiling away seven--eight--nine hours a day for weeks on
+end. Nobody else does it."
+
+"Nobody else _can_ do it," said Jimmy arrogantly.
+
+"It's all very well; but if you don't burst your head open you'll get
+neuritis, or cramp. Look at that hand."
+
+"Which hand?"
+
+"Your right hand, silly." She took it and poised it from the wrist. "Look
+how it wobbles."
+
+He looked.
+
+"It does wobble a bit. Like a drunkard's. And I don't drink."
+
+He was interested in his hand.
+
+"You goose, where's the fun of letting your right hand go to pieces?"
+
+"Easy on. They won't amputate it," said Jimmy.
+
+That was in nineteen-nine. This is nineteen-fifteen. And only yesterday
+Norah asked me if I remembered what Jimmy said about his hand the night
+we were engaged.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yes, that night I was engaged to Norah Thesiger.
+
+I suppose it was our silence that made Viola and Jimmy aware of us at
+last, for presently I saw Jimmy sit up on the floor and take Viola's hand
+and squeeze it, and then they got up and very quietly and furtively they
+left the room.
+
+And the minute I found myself alone with Norah I proposed to her.
+
+I don't know if even then I should have had the courage to do it if I
+hadn't been driven to it by sheer terror. I forgot to say that I was in
+Edwardes Square for the weekend and that Norah was not staying with her
+sister this time, but with her uncle, General Thesiger, at Lancaster
+Gate. And for three days, ever since her arrival at Lancaster Gate, I had
+seen the possibility of losing her.
+
+Otherwise you would have said that if ever there was a spontaneous and
+unexpected performance, it was my proposal to Norah Thesiger.
+
+But no; it seemed that it had been arranged for me by Jevons, planned
+with his customary deliberation and calculation long ago. This may have
+been the reason why Norah said she wouldn't tell Viola and Jimmy about it
+herself; she'd rather I did.
+
+I thought: I shan't have to tell them till to-morrow. I had to take Norah
+to Lancaster Gate in a taxi, and I walked back across the Serpentine
+between Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, spinning out the time so that
+Viola and Jimmy might be in bed when I got to Edwardes Square.
+
+I found them sitting up for me in Jimmy's study.
+
+I dreaded telling them more than I can say. I don't know with what
+countenance a man can come and tell the woman he has loved (and proposed
+to three times running) that he has consoled himself with her younger
+sister. I wanted to avoid every appearance of a fatuous triumph in my
+success with Norah. And after sticking for four years to my vow of
+everlasting devotion to Mrs. Jevons I shrank from the confession of a new
+allegiance. On the other hand, I owed it to Norah to declare myself
+happy without any airs of deprecation and contrition. And I had certain
+obligations to the Truth. Why I should have supposed that the Truth
+should have been disagreeable to Mrs. Jevons Heaven only knows. I suppose
+these scruples are the last illusions of our egoism. Still, I think that
+only an impudent egoist like Jevons could have carried off such an
+embarrassment with any brilliance.
+
+As it happened it was taken out of my hands. Jimmy, who had foreseen the
+thing itself, foresaw also my predicament and provided for it. As I came
+into the room he said, "It's all right, old man. You haven't got to tell
+us. We know all about it."
+
+I looked at Viola. She was sitting on part of Jimmy's chair, with her arm
+round his shoulder.
+
+"Did Norah tell you, after all?" I said.
+
+Viola pushed out her chin at me and shook her head.
+
+"No, Furny dear, she didn't tell me a thing. It was your face."
+
+"Don't you believe her," Jimmy said. "Your face hasn't anything to do
+with it. Your face is a tomb of secrets--a beautiful, white tomb. And
+_you_ are all rectitude and discretion. We knew it ages ago."
+
+"How could you possibly know it, when I didn't?"
+
+"Because it's one of those things" (he twinkled) "that other people
+always do know."
+
+"Were we as obvious as all that?"
+
+"I didn't say _you_ were obvious. I said _It_ was."
+
+I sat down facing them, and I suppose I must have looked supremely
+foolish, for Viola began to laugh and Jevons went on twinkling, not in
+the least as if he saw a joke, but with a thoughtful and complacent air,
+as if he were turning over the result of some private speculation that
+had come off entirely to his satisfaction.
+
+Then she took pity on me.
+
+"He means it was bound to happen. It was the heaven-appointed thing. The
+first minute I saw you, Wally, I thought, 'What an adorable husband he'd
+make for Norah!' And Jimmy's trying to tell you that we've been hoping it
+would come and wanting it to come and waiting for it to come for the last
+year."
+
+"I'm trying to tell him," said Jimmy, "that we've been meaning it to
+come, and trying to make it come, and seeing it come for the last three
+years."
+
+This was a blow at the attitude of romantic devotion, and I had to defend
+it.
+
+"Do you believe that, Viola?" I said.
+
+"Of course I believe it if Jimmy says so."
+
+I sent her a look that was meant to say, "You ought to know better;" but
+it missed fire somehow. She went on swinging her feet and laughing softly
+at me over Jimmy's shoulder. She seemed, like Jimmy, to be contemplating
+some exquisite knowledge that she had. And at last she said:
+
+"Aren't you glad now that you didn't marry me?"
+
+I said, "What am I to say to that?"
+
+Jimmy got up and clapped me on the shoulder. "Never mind her," he said.
+"Tell the truth and shame the devil. Tell her you're thundering glad."
+
+At that she slid down from her perch and came round to me and patted me
+very gently on the head.
+
+"_I_ am, Wally. Jimmy, you're a beast."
+
+And she went out of the room. Jimmy said that nothing she had contributed
+to the discussion became her like her leaving it.
+
+She had left it to him.
+
+He got into his chair again and sat down to it.
+
+"Now, perhaps," he said, "you see how right I was."
+
+"When?"
+
+"The first time we ever spoke about it."
+
+"My dear Jimmy, I haven't spoken to anybody about it till to-night."
+
+"We spoke about it years ago," he said.
+
+"We couldn't possibly have spoken about it years ago."
+
+"At Bruges. Perhaps it was I who spoke. I tell you I saw it coming. Don't
+you remember I gave you six months?"
+
+"You were out there, anyhow. It's taken three and a half years."
+
+"Because you were such a duffer. You behaved as if you expected the poor
+child to propose to you herself. I've been trying to make you see it for
+the last three and a half years, and you wouldn't. There never was such
+a chap for not seeing what's under his nose."
+
+"Norah isn't under my nose; she's miles above it, and if it comes to
+that, I've _seen_ it for the last three years."
+
+He had tripped me up by the heels.
+
+"There you are--that brings it to the six months I gave you."
+
+"I didn't mean I was thinking of it then. How could I be?"
+
+"Of course you weren't thinking of it. But _she_ was."
+
+"Norah? Not she! A child of seventeen!"
+
+"I don't mean Norah. I mean Viola."
+
+"Viola?"
+
+"Yes. You didn't see what the unscrupulous minx was after. She was
+plotting it and planning it the first time you were at Canterbury. I got
+a letter from her at Bruges--I can't show it you--telling me not to worry
+about you--I _was_ worrying about you, though you were such a damn fool,
+if you don't mind my saying so. She said you'd got over it all right. She
+wouldn't be surprised if some day you married Norah.
+
+"So you see," he said, "you needn't bother about Viola. She knew you
+couldn't keep it up for ever."
+
+"Keep what up?"
+
+(I knew; but something in his tone or in his twinkle made me pretend I
+didn't.)
+
+"Your wonderful attitude," he said. "She meant you to marry Norah."
+
+"Why--on earth--should she have wanted that?"
+
+"Well--because I worried about you, and she wanted me to be happy. And
+because she worried about you, and wanted you to be happy. And because
+she worried about the Kid, and wanted her to be happy. And because she
+wanted the rest of them to be happy too."
+
+I said I didn't know what I'd done to be so happy.
+
+"You've done nothing. You don't owe it to yourself that you're happy. My
+dear fellow, you've been watched, and looked after, and protected for
+three and a half years with an incessant care. If you'd been left to
+yourself you'd have bungled the whole business. Either you wouldn't have
+proposed to her at all, or you'd have proposed three times running when
+it was too late."
+
+I pointed out to him that I hadn't proposed three times running, neither
+was I too late.
+
+"All the same," he said, "you wouldn't have thought of it if she hadn't
+gone to the Thesigers. And she wouldn't have gone to the Thesigers if
+Viola hadn't got the Thesigers to ask her. It was a put-up job. I tell
+you, my son, you've been guided and guarded. Why, you didn't even see
+that the child was grown up till I drew your attention to it."
+
+There was no use pretending I liked it. I didn't.
+
+I said, "Thank you. If a thing comes off it's your doing, and if it
+doesn't it's mine."
+
+He said it looked like that.
+
+When I saw Norah in the morning she asked me whether Jimmy had said he
+knew it was coming?
+
+I said he had.
+
+"And I suppose he thinks he made it come?"
+
+That, I said, was Jimmy's attitude.
+
+"Well, then," she said, "he didn't. You don't believe him, do you?"
+
+Did I? Not perhaps at the moment, and never at any time as Jimmy believed
+it himself. But I do think he meant it to happen. It was one of the moves
+in his difficult game. He couldn't afford to neglect any means of
+strengthening his position in his wife's family. When it came to
+acknowledging Jimmy his wife's family was divided. Portions of it,
+strange cousins whom I never met till after my marriage, refused to
+acknowledge him at all. At Lancaster Gate he was received coldly in
+accordance with the discreet policy by which the Thesigers had avoided
+the appearances of scandal. Down at Canterbury there were degrees and
+shades of recognition. Norah openly loved him. The Canon had what he
+called "a morbid liking for the fellow." Mildred and Victoria tolerated
+him. Millicent endured him as an infliction. Mrs. Thesiger concealed
+under the most beautiful manners and the most Christian charity an
+inveterate repugnance.
+
+I have forgotten Bertie. Bertie, who could generally be found at
+Lancaster Gate when he wasn't in his chambers in the Temple, was
+apathetic and amiably evasive. He took the line that Lancaster Gate took
+when he referred to his brother-in-law as a clever little beast.
+
+And to all these shades Jevons was acutely sensitive.
+
+I have known men (they were of the confraternity of letters) who declared
+that they could not understand why a man like Jevons, in Jevons's
+position, should have bothered his head for two minutes about his wife's
+family. They considered that Jevons's marriage was a disaster, not for
+the Thesigers, but for Jevons, and that his only safe and proper course
+was to leave the Thesigers alone. But it wasn't so easy to leave them
+alone when he had married into them; and to have left them would have
+been for Jevons a confession of failure. He might just as well have laid
+down his arms or pulled down the shutters of his shop. From the very
+beginning, ever since the day when he had met Reggie Thesiger, he
+conceived that the whole world of Thesigers had challenged him to hold
+his own in it, and he was too stubborn a fighter to retire on a
+challenge. Besides, he couldn't have retracted without taking Viola with
+him.
+
+And you must remember that he was thirty-two when he married her, and
+that he had behind him an unknown history of struggle and humiliation and
+defeat. The Thesigers stood for the whole world of things that he had
+missed, the world of admired refinements and beautiful amenities, that,
+without abating one atom of its refinement and amenity, had persistently
+kicked him out. Besides--and this was the pathetic part of it--he had an
+irrepressible affection for the Canterbury Thesigers, and it hungered and
+thirsted for recognition. It nourished itself in secret on any scraps
+that came its way. He met tolerance with grace, and any sort of kindness
+with passionate gratitude. I think he would have broken his neck to give
+Norah or the Canon or even Mrs. Thesiger anything they wanted. And the
+Canon and Mrs. Thesiger wanted Norah to marry me. It wouldn't become me
+to say what Norah wanted.
+
+Viola, in a serious moment, threw a light on it. (I had been dining in
+Edwardes Square on the evening of the day I came back from Canterbury
+after taking Norah down there.)
+
+"I suppose you don't know," she said, "that Mummy and Daddy fell in love
+with you first? Well, they did. They wanted you to marry me to keep me
+out of mischief, but more than anything they wanted you to marry Norah.
+You see, she's their favourite."
+
+And it seemed there was even more in it than that. They wanted to keep
+Norah out of mischief too. "Not," she said, "that Norah would ever have
+run off to Belgium, even with you." But that little adventure of Viola's
+had made them nervous. Norah was inclined to look down on the garrison;
+like Viola, she had declared in the most decided manner that she meant to
+strike out a line for herself; she wasn't going to follow Dorothy's and
+Gwinny's lead (did I say that the two married sisters lived abroad at
+their husbands' stations--Gwinny at Gibraltar, and Dorothy at Simla?),
+and that for lack of originality Mildred's engagement to Charlie Thesiger
+was "the limit."
+
+"It's a good thing, Wally," she said. "It'll knit us all tighter
+together. That's partly why we've wanted it so awfully. Do you know that
+if it hadn't been for you Norah wouldn't have been allowed to come and
+stay with us?"
+
+I said I was sure she was mistaken. Canon Thesiger--
+
+"Oh," she said, "it wasn't Daddy. He wouldn't have minded. It was Mummy.
+She never _could_ bear poor Jimmy."
+
+"But," she went on, "you're his friend. And he worked it for you. They
+can't get over those two things."
+
+I remember wondering whether deep down in her heart she meant that my
+marriage would knit her and Jimmy closer?
+
+I wondered whether Jimmy, in his wisdom, had calculated on that, too?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At that time I didn't realize the innocence that went with Jimmy's
+wisdom. I think I credited him with insight that I know now he never had.
+I know now that, even afterwards--at the very worst--he had no
+misgivings. All the Hampstead time, all through the Edwardes Square time
+he was happy. And afterwards--well--happiness wasn't the word for it; he
+lived in a sort of ecstasy. Which shows how little in those days she had
+let him see.
+
+It was in nineteen-ten, their last year in Edwardes Square, that the
+tension began. Norah and I were married in the autumn of nineteen-nine,
+and we were living in my flat in Brunswick Square. In what I made out
+during this period I had Norah to help me, and she had wonderful lights.
+
+I never could keep track of Jimmy's accelerating material progress, but
+the Year-Books tell me that his fourth novel came out in the spring of
+nineteen-nine, and his first successful play was produced in the summer
+of that year, and ran for the whole season and on through the winter, and
+I remember that in nineteen-ten he was attacking another novel and
+another play, which--But it's the attack that is the important thing, the
+thing that fixes nineteen-ten for me.
+
+You cannot go on attacking, for years on end, with concentrated and
+increasing violence, and not suffer for it. The first effects of Jimmy's
+appalling travail may have been beneficent, but its later workings were
+malign. There's no other word for it. In nineteen-ten Jimmy was beginning
+to show signs of exhaustion. Not of his creative energy or anything
+belonging to it, though he prophesied a falling off after Novel Three,
+and declared that he could detect it. Nobody else could have detected it.
+The exhaustion was in Jimmy himself, and more especially and fatally in
+the Jimmy who struggled against what he called "the damnable tendency to
+do the sort of thing your father does."
+
+He couldn't keep it up. He couldn't stand for ever the double strain of
+attacking and defending himself against his tendency. There's no doubt
+that when he was tired he got careless. I have known him come upstairs
+after dinner, entirely sober, but looking rather drunk, with his hair
+curling over his forehead and his tie crooked and the buttons of his
+irreproachable little waistcoat all undone. I have known him do the
+oddest things with chairs and get into postures inconceivable to ordinary
+men. I have known him drop his aitches for a whole evening because he was
+too dead beat to hang on to them. And Norah, going home with me, would
+say, "Poor Jimmy--he does get it very badly when he's tired."
+
+And I have had to see Viola's face while these things were happening.
+Sometimes, when he was too outrageous, she would look up and smile with
+the queerest little half-frightened wonder, and I would be reminded of
+the time when Jimmy had jaundice and she asked me if I thought he would
+stay that funny yellow colour all his life? It was as if she were asking
+me, Did I think he would keep on all his life doing these rather alarming
+things? Sometimes he would catch himself doing them and say, "See me do
+that? That's because I'm agitated." Or, "There's another aitch gone.
+Collar it, somebody." Or, "I suppose that's what Norah would call one of
+my sillysosms." Sometimes Viola would catch him at it and reprove him.
+And then he would simply throw the responsibility on the poor old
+Registrar down in Hertfordshire.
+
+I have heard him say to her with extreme sweetness and docility: "My dear
+child, if I'd had a father and mother like yours I shouldn't do these
+things." And I have heard him say almost with bitterness: "Does _that_
+shock you? Good Heavens, you should see my father!"
+
+But he took good care she shouldn't see him. I used to think this wasn't
+very nice of him. But what can a man do in a case so desperate? There
+were risks that even Jevons couldn't take. I used to think that he salved
+his conscience by making the Registrar an allowance that increased in
+proportion to his income and by going down into Hertfordshire regularly
+every three months to see him himself. I used to think that Jimmy's
+father must have admirable tact, because he never seemed to have inquired
+why Jimmy always came alone. But Jimmy said it wasn't tact. It was pure
+haughtiness. The old bird, he said, was as proud as a peacock with his
+tail up. I used to think it wasn't very nice of him to talk like that
+about his father. And I used to think it wasn't very nice of Viola never
+to go with Jimmy on his pilgrimages.
+
+I was with them once when she was seeing him off at Euston, and I said to
+her, "Do you never go with him to see the poor old man?"
+
+She turned to me. (I hadn't seen her look stern and fiery before.)
+
+"Wally," she said, "I suppose it's because you're so good that you always
+think other people aren't. That _poor old man_ was a perfect devil to
+Jimmy. I don't say that Jimmy always was an angel to him, but he's been
+pretty decent, considering. He's told me things I couldn't tell you; and
+there were things he couldn't tell me. He says he didn't believe in God
+the Father when he was little, just because he wanted to believe in God.
+He thought God couldn't be anything so frightful as a father.
+
+"That's why he's so awfully fond of Daddy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so it went on. She swung between slight shocks and passionate
+recoveries. One minute Jimmy's manners made her shudder all down her
+spine, and the next he would do some adorable thing that brought her to
+his feet. Half the time she pretended that things hadn't happened when
+they had. And when her flesh crept she had memories that lashed it.
+
+I used to wonder whether this oscillation would slacken or increase with
+time. Would she swing on a longer and more dangerous rhythm? Would she be
+flung backwards and forwards between fascination and repulsion?
+
+And I would catch myself up and answer my own words, "Of course not. The
+poor chap isn't as bad as all that."
+
+Then early in nineteen-ten Reggie Thesiger came home on leave from India.
+
+Looking back on it all now, I seem to see that until he came everything
+was going well. The oscillations, even if I didn't exaggerate them,
+couldn't have counted. Her heart was steady, and in her heart she adored
+her husband. There could be no doubt about it, she adored him. It was
+because she adored him that she suffered. Nobody can stand imperfection
+in their god.
+
+But then she adored Reggie too.
+
+She hadn't a misgiving. When Norah rushed to her with the news that
+Reggie had got his leave, she went wild and nearly strangled poor little
+Jimmy in her joy. She counted the weeks, the days, the hours till he
+landed. She argued with Norah as to which of them should have him first
+and longest when he came to town. Norah told me she didn't think he would
+stop long with _us_ if he could go to Viola. Viola was his favourite
+sister.
+
+Well, he didn't go to Viola at all. He went first to the Thesigers at
+Lancaster Gate. Then he came on to us.
+
+That was all right. We had to arrange our dates to suit the General.
+
+On the Sunday we dined at Lancaster Gate; Viola and Jevons were not
+there. Reggie had come up on the Friday for ten days, and he stayed with
+the General for the weekend.
+
+He said he could stay with us for the whole week if we could have him.
+
+We were out in the hall saying good-bye, and he was getting Norah's cloak
+for her. The hall was full of Thesigers and guests. I remember Norah
+saying, "We'd love to have you. But--we promised Vee-Vee to divide you
+with her."
+
+And I remember seeing Reggie's face stiffen over the collar of the cloak
+as he held it. He said he didn't want to be divided.
+
+It was so startling, she told me afterwards, that she lost her head. She
+said out loud, so that everybody heard her, "Not with Vee-Vee?" And
+everybody heard his answer:
+
+"Not with Jevons."
+
+Then he laughed.
+
+In spite of the laugh Norah was quite frightened. She asked me, going
+home in the taxi, what I thought it meant. I said I thought it meant that
+Reggie didn't particularly care about meeting Jimmy. She said, "Well,
+he'll have to meet him to-morrow night. I'm jolly glad we've asked them."
+
+She added pensively, "Reggie's quite changed. I suppose it's India."
+
+I knew she didn't suppose anything of the sort. She thought the General
+had been telling him things; and I must confess I thought so too. Here, I
+may say at once, we did that kindly and honourable gentleman a wrong.
+
+He came to us in great distress the next morning. He said Viola and
+Jevons were to have dined with them last night, only Reggie had declared
+he wouldn't have anything to do with Jevons. He didn't want to meet him
+if he could help it. He said, Couldn't they ask Viola without him? And
+they _had_ asked Viola without him, and Viola had refused to come.
+
+"And do you know" (he stared at us in a sort of helpless horror) "he
+hasn't been to see her yet."
+
+The poor General went away quite depressed. He lingered with me on the
+doorstep a moment. "I'm afraid, Furnival," he said, "Reggie's going to
+make it very awkward for us."
+
+He did make it awkward.
+
+It might have been discreet to have put off our dinner. But I knew that
+Norah wouldn't hear of it; all the more if Reggie was going to make it
+awkward. You don't suppose one Thesiger was going to knuckle under to
+another. It wasn't their way. They were loyal to the last degree, but
+loyalty was another matter. And if it came to that she was loyal to her
+sister.
+
+I shall never forget that dinner. I shall never forget Viola's coming in
+with Jevons behind her.
+
+She was, as I think I've said, a beautifully-made woman, with long limbs
+and superb shoulders, and a way of holding her small head high. Well, she
+came in (they were a little late) with her head higher than ever, and
+with a sweep of her limbs, as if her crushed draperies (she was all in
+white) were blown backward by a wind; her gauze scarf billowed behind her
+as if it were wings or sails and the wind filled it. She was like the
+Victory of Samothrace; she was like a guardian and avenging angel; she
+was like a ship in full sail breasting a sea. Up to her eyes she was
+everything that was ever splendid and courageous and defiant.
+
+But her eyes--there was a sort of scared grief in them.
+
+I had seen fright in her face once before, the day when she came into the
+room at Hampstead with Jevons behind her and saw Reggie there. I said to
+myself, "She always was afraid of Reggie." But that, for the second that
+it lasted, was sheer fright. This was different. There was anguish in it;
+and it was only in her eyes.
+
+And Jevons's entry, this time, was simultaneous. Little Jimmy came behind
+her, holding himself rather absurdly straight and breathing hard.
+
+And there was Reggie Thesiger waiting for them, standing by the hearth
+between Norah and me.
+
+Oh yes, India had changed him. Surely, I thought, it must be India that
+had made him so lean and stiff and hard. But he was handsomer even than
+he had been five years ago, and he looked taller, he was so formidably
+upright and well-built. (As a competitive exhibition Jimmy's straightness
+was pitiful. And yet, if his antagonist had been anybody but Reggie, it
+might have had a certain dignity.)
+
+I wondered, "_How_ is she going to greet him? Will she lower her flag and
+kiss him, or what?"
+
+She sailed up to Norah first and kissed her. She shook hands with me. She
+smiled at me (I don't know how she managed it). Then she turned to
+Reggie.
+
+She didn't lower her flag. She said, "Well, Reggie," as if they had met
+yesterday. There was no kissing or any anticipation of a kiss; they shook
+hands, not at arm's length, not in the least as if they had had a
+quarrel, but like well-bred people in the house of strangers. It was all
+beautifully done.
+
+Then it was Jimmy's turn. Reggie looked at him as if he wasn't there.
+
+If I could have run away with any decency I'd have run rather than face
+what came then. But the women--Heavens, how they stood to their guns!
+
+Norah said, "Reggie, I think you know your brother-in-law?" with an air
+of stating a platitude rather than of recalling him to a courtesy he had
+forgotten.
+
+"I don't think so," said Reggie.
+
+But he bowed. And Jimmy bowed. There was no handshaking, at arm's length
+or otherwise.
+
+Viola said, "You _do_ know him. You met him four years ago in my rooms at
+Hampstead."
+
+"Did I? I'm afraid I've forgotten."
+
+"You did meet, didn't you, Jimmy?"
+
+"I believe so," said Jimmy, with a quite admirable indifference.
+
+"Anyhow," said Norah sweetly, "you can't say you haven't _heard_ of him."
+
+She meant well, poor darling, but it was a bad shot. It missed its mark
+completely, and it drew down the enemy's fire.
+
+"I _have_ heard of Mr. Jevons," said Reggie, and he looked at Jimmy as if
+he realized for the first time that he was there, and resented it.
+
+Norah turned positively white. It was Viola who saved us.
+
+"Please don't, Norah. It's really awful for poor Jimmy now he's on all
+the buses and in the Tube?"
+
+She referred to the monstrous posters that advertised his play in black
+letters eighteen inches high on a scarlet ground.
+
+"How do you feel when you're in the Tube?" said Norah.
+
+"You feel," said Jimmy--he was sitting in one of his worst attitudes,
+with his legs stretched straight out before him and his feet tilted toes
+upwards. I noticed that Reggie couldn't bear to look at him--"you feel
+first of all as if everybody was looking at you; you feel a silly ass;
+then you feel as if everybody was looking at the posters; then you know
+they aren't looking at them. Then you leave off looking at them yourself.
+And if one does hit you in the eye you feel as if it referred to somebody
+else, and after that you don't feel anything more."
+
+It wasn't brilliant, but the wonder was he found anything to say at all.
+
+I was thankful when Pavitt came in to tell us that dinner was served. It
+delivered us from Jimmy's attitudes.
+
+When it came to dining at our small round table we saw how badly we had
+erred in not asking anybody else but Viola and Jimmy. A sixth, a woman
+(almost any woman would have done in the circumstances), a woman to talk
+to Reggie might have pulled us through. But with Reggie sitting beside
+Viola, with Jimmy opposite them by himself between me and Norah (the only
+possible arrangement) it was terrible.
+
+Reggie persisted in talking to Viola like a well-bred stranger. He
+persisted in ignoring Jevons.
+
+And Jimmy retaliated by ignoring _him_. There was nothing else for him
+to do. Only it wasn't one of the things he did well. Beside Reggie's
+accomplishment he looked mean and pitiful and a little vulgar. God
+forgive me for putting it down, but that is how he looked.
+
+And once or twice, under the strain of it, he dropped an aitch with the
+most disconcerting effect.
+
+I often wonder what Pavitt thought of that family party. He certainly
+served Viola as if he loved her, and Jimmy as if he was sorry for him,
+calling his attention to a dish or a wine which, he seemed to say, it
+would be a pity for him to miss--it might prove a consolation to him.
+
+Our agony became so unbearable that the women ended it when they could by
+leaving us at the stage of coffee and cigarettes. Then, with us three men
+the position became untenable, and Reggie found that he'd have to go out
+at nine; he had an appointment with a fellow. And at nine he went.
+
+Viola and Jimmy left us very soon after.
+
+She said, "It was dear of you to have us," not in the least humbly, but
+as if they had enjoyed it.
+
+Up to the very last she was magnificent, and even Jimmy played up well.
+In fact, when Reggie's perfection was no longer there to damage him he
+was rather fine.
+
+It was poor little Norah who broke down. I found her crying all by
+herself on the couch in my study when they'd gone.
+
+She said, "Wally, this is awful. It's _the_ most awful thing that could
+have happened."
+
+I said, "Oh, come--" and she persisted. "But it _is_. She adored Reggie.
+He used to adore her--and--you've seen him, how he was to-night. It'll
+kill her if he keeps it up."
+
+I said, "He won't keep it up."
+
+"Oh, won't he! You don't know Reggie."
+
+I said, "It's odd. He didn't seem to mind Jimmy so much the first day he
+met him."
+
+"Oh, my dear--he didn't mind, because he never could have dreamed she'd
+marry him."
+
+"He'll come round all right when he knows him," I said.
+
+She shook her head and made little dabs at her face with her
+pocket-handkerchief.
+
+"That's just it. He thinks he does know him. I mean he thinks he knows
+something. I'm sure he thinks it."
+
+"My dear child, however could he? He couldn't even have heard. If you
+mean that Belgian business, it was all over and done with four years ago.
+Have we any of us thought of it since?"
+
+"No--but I think he had an idea then. He guessed that there must be
+something. You see--we never told Vee-Vee, but--he thought it was awfully
+queer of her to go off--anywhere--just when he was sailing."
+
+"Well," I said, "it _was_ a bit odd. She must have been awfully gone on
+Jimmy."
+
+"She was."
+
+"Poor dear. She said she meant to burn her boats."
+
+"Don't you see--that was part of the burning. She had to break the hold
+that Reggie had on her. You don't know what it was like, Wally. She had
+to break it or she could never have married Jimmy at all. It was a
+toss-up between them; and Jimmy won."
+
+"Is it going to be a toss-up between them all over again, d'you think?" I
+said.
+
+"No. It's going to be war to the knife. They won't either of them give in
+as long as Reggie's got that idea in his head."
+
+"We must get it out of his head. Surely," I said, "we can do something."
+
+"No, we can't. There's no way of getting it out. It's no good trying to
+make a joke of it. You can't joke with Reggie past a certain point. And
+it's not as if you could give him a hint. You can't hint at these
+things."
+
+"What do you think he'll do?"
+
+"He won't do anything. He won't say anything. He'll just go on like this
+all the time, and she won't be able to bear it. It'll break her heart."
+
+Well, though I agreed with her, I still thought that something could be
+done. I tried to do it when Reggie got back that night after Norah had
+gone to bed. I couldn't of course assume that he had his idea. My plan
+was to present Jevons to him in a light that was incompatible with his
+idea. It was easy enough to say that Jevons might be rather startling,
+but that he was awfully decent and the soul of honour. The soul of honour
+covered it--absolutely ruled out his idea.
+
+He didn't contradict me. He just sat there smoking amicably, just saying
+every now and then that he couldn't stand him; he was sorry--I might be
+perfectly right and Jevons might be everything I said--only he couldn't
+stand him; and he wasn't going to. Nothing would induce him to stop with
+Jevons. He didn't want to have anything to do with the little beast.
+
+When I said, "I assure you, my dear fellow, it's all right," he only
+threw the onus of suspicion on me by replying suavely, "My dear fellow, I
+assure you I never said it wasn't."
+
+It was as if he really knew it wasn't, knew something that we didn't
+know, and was determined to keep his knowledge to himself.
+
+And when I'd finished he said, "The whole thing's a mystery to _me_. I
+thought she was going to marry you." And then--"How she can stick him I
+can't think. D'you mind, old man, if I go to bed? No, I don't want any
+whisky and soda, thanks."
+
+It was Pavitt, of all people, who threw a light on it when he brought the
+whisky.
+
+"Beg your pardon, sir," said Pavitt, "but I believe I never told you that
+the Captain called here one day when you was in Belgium."
+
+"Are you quite sure, Pavitt? He called the day I left."
+
+"Yes, sir, I remember his calling the day you left. It's only just come
+back to me that he called again, three days after, I think it was. I
+told him you was gone to Belgium, and he said that was all he wanted. He
+didn't leave no message, else I should have remembered. It was the young
+gentleman's likeness to Mrs. Jevons, sir, what fixed him in my mind."
+
+I told Reggie this the next day as an instance of Pavitt's wonderful
+memory. "Only," I said, "he forgot to tell me that you called."
+
+He smiled rather bitterly as if he remembered the incident well.
+
+"Oh, I called all right," he said. "I wanted to know where you were."
+
+After that Norah and I made it out between us. Not all at once, but bit
+by bit, as things occurred to us or as he suggested them.
+
+He must have begun to suspect something when the time went on and Viola
+didn't turn up. Only he thought it was I who was at the bottom of it.
+Perhaps, so long as he thought it was I, he had made up his mind that
+there could be no great harm in it. He had been all right with her down
+at Canterbury those last few days. Anyhow, he hadn't said anything.
+
+Then--when he heard that she had married Jevons--he had his idea. It
+wasn't necessary for him to have heard anything else. And then, even if
+he hadn't guessed it, there was Jimmy's book, the "Flemish Journal," to
+tell him she had been in Belgium with him. And he knew she didn't marry
+him till afterwards.
+
+And so, he thought things. If he didn't think them of Viola he thought
+them of Jevons. (Even on the most charitable assumption he would consider
+his sister's passion for Jimmy a piece of morbid perversity.) And anyhow,
+he was left with an appalling doubt.
+
+And he wasn't going to forgive either of them, ever.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+That we had made out something very like the truth of it I realized when
+I met Burton Withers. For eventually I did meet him. It was at the end of
+June, nineteen-ten, in the green room of the Crown Theatre on the
+hundredth night of Jimmy's play. That is what I remember it by.
+
+Norah and I were with Viola and Jimmy. Withers had come in with a friend,
+an important member of the cast, who was evidently under the impression
+that we had never met before, for he introduced him to us all round.
+Withers showed tact in not recognizing Viola or claiming the acquaintance
+he certainly had with Jevons. He had, in fact, a most reassuring air of
+starting again with a clean slate and no reminiscences. This was in the
+interval between the First and Second Acts. When the curtain rose on Act
+Two, I was alone in Jimmy's box. (Jimmy and Viola and Norah were trying
+the effect of the play from the stalls.) And at the next interval Withers
+came to me there. It was funny, he said, the way little Jevons had come
+on. He didn't suppose any of us had thought of _this_ four years ago when
+we had all met together in Bruges.
+
+I said, "Did we all meet together in Bruges?"
+
+"Well, if it wasn't in Ghent. Oh--of course it was at Ghent you and I
+met. You hadn't joined the others then."
+
+At first I was hopelessly mystified by these allusions. I couldn't think
+what point he was making for or where he would come out. He seemed to be
+trying uneasily to get somewhere. Then I saw that he had had it on his
+mind that when we had last met he had made a defamatory statement to me
+about the lady who had become my sister-in-law, and about a man who had
+become a celebrity (I knew Withers's little weakness for celebrities).
+And he was scared.
+
+I must have seemed a bit lost among his allusions, for he blurted it out.
+
+"D'you know, I've been most awfully sorry for chaffing you in that
+idiotic way--about--your sister-in-law. Silly sort of thing one says, you
+know. But of course you knew I was pulling your leg."
+
+I said, "My dear Withers, of course I knew you were."
+
+Of course I knew he was doing nothing of the sort, for Withers slandered
+right and left when it wasn't worth his while to grovel, and I had no
+doubt now that he believed his own dirty tale when he told it; but he had
+been impressed and thoroughly frightened, even at the time, by the
+calmness of my bluff, and the little beast was far more afraid of us than
+we ever could have been of him now. We could henceforth dismiss Withers
+from our minds. He was a "social climber" of the sort that would eat his
+own words if he thought they would do the smallest damage to his
+climbing.
+
+As for the ladies, General Thesiger's friends, I rather think the General
+had settled with them at the time.
+
+You might say we had nothing to fear from Reggie, if Reggie's
+silence--and his deafness--hadn't been more terrible than anything
+he could have heard or said.
+
+I suppose nineteen-ten ought to stand as the year of Tasker Jevons's
+great Play, the play that ran for a whole year after the hundredth night,
+that ran on and on as if it would never stop, that, when it was taken off
+the Crown stage to make room for its successor, still careered through
+the provinces and the United States. It seemed the year of Jimmy's utmost
+affluence. If he kept it up, we said, he'd be a millionaire before he
+died of it. But it wasn't conceivable that he could keep it up for long.
+We thought he'd never write another play like this one. There never would
+be another year like nineteen-ten.
+
+I believe that even Jimmy thought there'd never be another year like it,
+so far had he surpassed his own calculations, as it was.
+
+But for me nineteen-ten is the year of other things, the things that
+happened in the family, the year of Reggie's return and all the misery
+that came from it, the year of Viola's struggle--the agony of which we,
+Norah and I, were the helpless spectators. _She_ never said a word to us.
+It was Norah who conveyed to me the secret, intimate shock of it.
+
+That year Jimmy rained boxes and stalls and theatre-parties for his play
+on all the Thesigers (except Reggie) and on all their friends, and on
+Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands when they came back from Simla and
+Gibraltar (it was the year of their return too); but we stood behind the
+scenes of a tragedy that mercifully was hidden from Jimmy's eyes. It was
+the year when Mildred broke off her engagement to Charlie Thesiger. It
+was the year when our little girl, Viola, was born; the year when we
+moved from our Bloomsbury flat into the little house in Edwardes Square,
+taking over the end of the lease and all the fixtures and some of the
+furniture from Jimmy. Jimmy hadn't a child, and he had sworn that he
+never would have one; he was so afraid (and this fear was the only thing
+that disturbed his optimism), so horribly afraid that Viola might die.
+But he had outgrown the house in Edwardes Square. It was the year of his
+first really startling expansion.
+
+It was the year when he moved into the house in Mayfair.
+
+Why Mayfair we really couldn't think. He said he liked the sound of
+it; it made him feel as if he was in the country when he wasn't, and as
+if it was the month of May, when there never was any month of May in
+England; as if there were a maypole where the fountain is in Park Lane;
+and as if processions, and processions of horses, splendid stallions and
+brood-mares and thoroughbreds and hacks and great Suffolk punches with
+their manes and tails tied up with ribbons were coming past his house to
+the fair.
+
+He may have felt like that about it. I put no limits to Jimmy's
+imagination; but I suspected him of throwing out these airy fancies as a
+veil to cover the preposterous nature of his ambition.
+
+It was also the year when he began to talk about motor-cars and think
+about motor-cars and dream about motor-cars at night.
+
+And it was the year in which he and Viola went to the Riviera while the
+plumbers and painters were at work on the house in Green Street, Mayfair.
+They stayed away all autumn, and at the end of November they settled in.
+And at Christmas they gave their house-warming.
+
+It wasn't a large party--only a few friends of Viola's, and Jimmy's
+lawyer and his doctor and his agent, and a few picked members of the
+confraternity; the rest were Thesigers. If Jimmy had meant to give a
+demonstration proving that he could gather the whole of his wife's family
+round him at a pinch, he had all but succeeded. I suppose every available
+member had turned up that night, except Reggie. The General and his wife
+and daughters were there; and Charlie Thesiger and Bertie; and Canon and
+Mrs. Thesiger (they had come up from Canterbury on purpose, and were
+staying with the General); and Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands; and
+Victoria and Mildred, who stayed with Viola; and Millicent, who came to
+us; and a whole crowd of miscellaneous aunts and cousins; perhaps sixty
+altogether, counting outsiders.
+
+Norah and I had been away for weeks in the country and had only got back
+that afternoon, so we had not seen the house in Green Street since it had
+been furnished. It burst, it literally burst, on us, without the smallest
+warning or preparation.
+
+Like Jimmy's first novel, it was designed to startle and arrest, hitting
+you in the eye as you came in. The actual reception was held in the large
+hall, which had been formed by turning what had once been the dining-room
+loose into the passage and the stair-place.
+
+So far the architect had done his work well. After that he had been left
+to struggle with and interpret as he best could the baronial idea that
+had been imposed on him. The hall was panelled half-way in dark oak, and
+above the oak the walls were hung with a rough papering of old gold. But
+what hit you in the eye as you came in was the oak staircase that went up
+royally along the bottom wall. It had scarlet-and-gold Tudor roses on the
+flank of the balustrade, and at every third banister there was a shield
+picked out in scarlet and gold. And at the bottom of the balustrade and
+at the turn a little oak lion sat on his haunches and held up yet another
+shield (picked out in scarlet and gold) in his fore-paws. The bare oak
+planks of the upper floor made the ceiling, and there was an enormous
+Tudor rose in the middle of it, where other people might have had a
+chandelier, and little Tudor roses blazed at intervals all along the
+cornice. And there was a great stone hearth and chimney-piece, a Tudor
+chimney-piece, mullioned, with a shield carved in the centre and the
+motto: "_Dominus Defensor Domi_," and on either side the rose and the
+grill, the rose and the grill, alternately. There were andirons on the
+hearth and an immense log burning, and swords and daggers and suits of
+armour hung on the gold walls above the panelling.
+
+And I swear to you that the curtains and upholstery were in tapestry
+cloth, the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground. It was as if
+Jimmy had wanted to say to the Thesigers that if it came to being Tudor,
+he could be as Tudor as any of them, and more so. Thus deeply had he
+absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere.
+
+When she saw the suits of armour Norah squeezed my arm and breathed
+"Oh--my _darling_ Wally!"--in an ecstasy that was anguish. Poor Mildred's
+plump face turned as scarlet as the Tudor roses with an emotion that we
+could not fathom, but judged to be painful.
+
+We had come early with the idea of making ourselves useful, if necessary;
+but there was hardly anybody there yet, only two or three guests drinking
+coffee or champagne-cup at the long table under the windows, and Jimmy,
+who stood in the middle of his Tudor hall, talking to one of the
+confraternity, and rocking himself gently from his toes to his heels and
+from his heels to his toes again, as a sign that he was not in the least
+elated, but only at his ease.
+
+He was delighted to see us, and for quite three seconds he ceased his
+rocking and began to twinkle in a most natural and reassuring manner.
+Then I remember him scuttling away to greet another guest, and the
+_confrère_ gazing after him with affection and turning to us in a sort
+of grave enjoyment of the scene. I remember Viola coming up to us and her
+little baffling smile and her look--the look she was to have for long
+enough--of detachment from Jimmy and his Tudor hall. I remember the dark
+blue, half-transparent gown she wore that was certainly not Tudor, and
+her general air of being an uninvited and inappropriate guest, and how
+she conveyed us to the table to get drinks "all comfy" before the others
+came. And when Viola had drifted away, I remember Charlie Thesiger
+strolling up to us. The supercilious youth had been, getting a drink "all
+comfy" on his own account, and his little stiff moustache was still wet
+with Jimmy's champagne-cup above the atrocious smile he met us with.
+
+He asked us if we'd seen the drawing-room.
+
+We said we hadn't, and he advised us to go up and look at it at once,
+before anybody else did. "You can't see it properly," he said, "unless
+you're alone with it."
+
+I suppose we ought to have been grateful to Charlie for not letting us
+miss it, and it was perfectly true that the way to see it was to be alone
+with it; there would, indeed, have been a positive indecency in seeing it
+in any other way. He had spared our decency. And yet I think we hated him
+for having sent us there. It was as if he had sent us to look at
+something horrible, at an outrage, at violence done to shrinking,
+delicate things.
+
+We looked at it, and we looked at each other. We didn't speak, and I
+don't think either of us smiled. I remember Norah going behind me and
+closing the door swiftly, as she might have closed it on some horror that
+she and I had to deal with alone. I remember her saying then, "This is
+_too_ awful!" not in the least as if she meant what we were looking at,
+but as if she saw something invisible that lurked and loomed behind it,
+so that I asked her what she thought it meant.
+
+"It means," she said, "that Jimmy's done it all himself. He's had to do
+it all himself. She hasn't _cared_."
+
+I said, it looked as if _he_ hadn't cared.
+
+She moaned, "Oh, but he did--he did. He's cared so awfully. That's the
+dreadful part of it. You can see he has. Just look at those vases and
+those cabinets and things. And think of the money the poor thing must
+have spent on it!"
+
+"But," I said, "it's so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable.
+The old house was perfect. So, in its way, was the cottage."
+
+"I'm afraid that wasn't Jimmy's taste--it was Vee-Vee's. She did
+everything."
+
+"She told us _he_ did."
+
+"Poor darling--she wanted us to think he did."
+
+"He appreciated it, anyhow."
+
+"He'd appreciate anything if she did it."
+
+"Then," I said, "why should he break loose like this now?"
+
+"Because she hasn't cared. She hasn't cared a hang. She's left everything
+to him. And you can see, poor dear, how he's spread himself."
+
+Oh, yes, you could see. It was as if he had never had scope before, and
+now, with no limit to his opportunity, he had simply run amok. It wasn't
+that the things he had gathered round him in his orgy were not fine
+things. It was the awful way he'd mixed them, yielding incontinently to
+each solicitation as it came along. Dealers had been on the look-out for
+Jimmy to exploit his fury.
+
+In his Tudor hall he had been constrained to unity by a great idea. But
+not here. And reminiscences of the Canterbury drawing-room had suggested
+to him that you _could_ mix things. So, using a satinwood suite with
+tinted marqueterie and old rose upholsterings (he had succumbed to it in
+the first freshness of his innocence) as a base, he had added Boule
+cabinets and modern Indian tables in carved open-work to Adams cabinets
+and Renaissance tables in ebony inlaid with engraved ivory, and
+eighteenth-century gilded bergère chairs to old oak and Chippendale.
+Cloisonné and Sèvres stood side by side on the same shelf. He had an
+Aubusson carpet in the middle of the floor, and his Bokhara rugs at
+intervals down the sides. Norah was sitting on the emerald-green brocade
+of an Empire sofa, clutching the gilt sphinx head of the arm-end. It was
+a double room, and emerald-green curtains hung at the tall windows in the
+front and at the large stained-glass window at the back, and at the wide
+archway between. And an Algerian lamp swung from the back ceiling, and an
+Early Victorian glass chandelier from the front.
+
+"And the awfullest thing of all is," Norah was saying, "that he's done it
+to please her."
+
+"Don't believe her. That's the beautiful part of it."
+
+Viola had come in by the door of the back room and she was smiling at us.
+
+Yet, even as she smiled, she had that look of being detached, of not
+caring.
+
+We couldn't say anything--we were too miserable. She looked round the
+dreadful rooms as if she were trying to see them for the first time, as
+if some reverberation of the horror we had felt did penetrate to her in
+her remoteness. She smiled faintly.
+
+"What _does_ it matter," she said, "so long as it makes him happy? It
+would be sweet if you'd come down and help us now."
+
+We went down, and the house-warming began.
+
+It was Jimmy who told us what our business was. We were to stand by
+visitors, he said, as they came in and break the shock (he had observed
+it) of the Tudor hall. If we couldn't break it we must do what we could
+to help recovery. He had seen desperate cases yield to champagne-cup
+administered during the first paroxysm.
+
+We had a little trouble with some of the minor confraternity--their
+emotions were facile and champagne intensified them. They would ask where
+the throne-room was and when our host was going to be measured for his
+suit of armour, and what did we think he'd done with the family
+portraits?
+
+But the Thesigers (all except Charlie--and Charlie, Norah said, had no
+heart), the Thesigers offered an example of the most beautiful manners.
+I shall never forget the General's face as the suits of armour struck
+him--his sudden spasm of joy and the austere heroism that suppressed it.
+And the Canon--
+
+The Canon rose to even greater heights. We were a bit afraid that he
+would overdo it and look as if he were trying to show us how a Christian
+gentleman could bear such things as Jimmy's furnishings. But no. He
+behaved as though he saw nothing in the least unusual in his furnishings,
+as though Jimmy's Tudor hall and miscellaneous drawing-room were his
+natural background.
+
+But for sheer pluck and presence of mind not one of them could touch
+Jevons. He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above
+them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his
+atmosphere of deadly peril. He volplaned, he looped the loop. _His_
+behaviour was unsurpassable. For _his_ case, if you like, was desperate.
+I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room.
+He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger,
+not the quiver of an eyelash, had escaped him. And consider what it
+meant to him. In a furious climax of expenditure he had achieved the
+arresting spectacle of his house in Mayfair, and his first night, his
+house-warming, was turning under his eyes into a triumph for the
+Thesigers' manners and a failure for him. He had no illusions. Unless he
+did something to stop it, the whole thing would be one enormous and
+lamentable and expensive failure.
+
+He had to do something. And he did it. He left off his uneasy swagger and
+his rocking. He met the heroic and beautiful faces of the Thesigers with
+his engaging twinkle. He sought out and ministered to two young girls who
+had been brought there by the minor confraternity and were hiding in a
+corner on the point of hysteria. We heard him telling them that the
+throne-room was being built out over the scullery leads (he must have
+known what the minor confraternity had been up to), that in the great
+fireplace in his kitchen you could roast three journalists whole, and
+that the question of the family portraits was receiving his attention. He
+had a deal on with the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery for the
+purchase of the Holbein Henry the Eighth. By the time he had finished it
+was open to us to suppose that the house in Mayfair was his joke and not
+ours, that he had furnished it in this preposterous manner in order to be
+really and truly funny, and to keep himself and Viola in perfect and
+perpetual gaiety. It was as if he were trying to say to us, "None of you
+people--least of all the confraternity--knows how to live. Life isn't a
+calamity; it's a joke; and to live properly you should meet life in its
+own spirit; you should do exuberant and gay and gorgeous things, like
+me."
+
+And then when we had all come round, he rearranged all the furniture in
+his drawing-room for charades (showing no respect whatever for his
+satinwood suite); and after the charades he rolled up his Aubusson carpet
+and cleared the place for a dance that was ruin to his parquet floor.
+And we had supper; and then more dancing till four o'clock in the
+morning.
+
+Of the dancing I remember nothing but Viola whirling round and round, as
+it were for ever, in Charlie Thesiger's arms, and her dead-white face
+looking over his shoulder, as if she saw nothing, nothing whatever; as if
+she were detached even from the arms that held her.
+
+My last recollection is of Jimmy's face when Norah said to him, "Oh,
+Jimmy, I _love_ your dear little lions!"--and Jimmy's answer:
+
+"Little lions--yes--they make me feel tall and majestic."
+
+"He _is_ going it, isn't he?" said Charlie Thesiger.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At this point, when I look back over what I've written, it seems to me
+that I've done nothing but record changes so many and so marked that
+their history has no sort of continuity. But in reality it was not so. Up
+to December, nineteen-ten, there was no break, not even a dividing line.
+Compared with what happened then I am compelled to think of Viola's
+marriage, not as a risky experiment that had so far defeated prophecy,
+but as an entirely serene and happy thing. Between the moment when they
+set up that four-post bed in that absurd little house in Hampstead and
+the day of their leaving Edwardes Square behind them I cannot point to
+any time and say, "That was the beginning of it," or put my finger on an
+event and show the difference there.
+
+Unless it was Reggie's coming back.
+
+But the results of that didn't appear till later.
+
+Any difference I may have noted previously was an affair of shades, of
+delicate oscillations. There was no lapse without a recovery, no
+departure without a return.
+
+And here, at the end of nineteen-ten, I got a line drawn sharply on
+either side of a break I cannot bridge. The minute Jimmy moved into that
+house in Mayfair things began to go wrong.
+
+It was as if Jimmy, in his love of doing risky things, had cast, this
+time, a dreadful die.
+
+From that evening onward I watched them with anxiety. I do not know how
+far Jevons was aware that the house in Mayfair was a blunder; I think he
+wouldn't have acknowledged that it was a blunder at all. His own attitude
+to it was not in the least disturbed by his humorous perception of other
+people's. With his dexterity in adjustments he was quite capable of
+reconciling them, quite capable of enjoying the effect it had on nervous
+organisms while he himself took it seriously. It was, after all, his own
+achievement, and a very astonishing achievement too. He continued to
+respect it as the immense sign of his material prosperity, the
+advertisement, you may say, of his arrival. His business instinct would
+never have allowed him to repent of an advertisement.
+
+There _was_ this gross element in his enjoyment.
+
+And there was also the pure and charming happiness of a child that
+suddenly finds itself left, with boundless opportunity, to its own
+gorgeous caprice. You could no more blame Jevons for the bad taste of his
+drawing-room and his Tudor hall than you could blame a child for its
+joy in a treasure of tinsel and coloured glass.
+
+But when we asked ourselves where, in this outbreak of Jimmy's fantasy,
+did Viola come in, we had to own that she came in nowhere. Not only had
+she stood by without lifting a finger to interfere with its tempestuous
+course; not only had she submitted without a protest; she seemed to show
+no adequate sense of what had happened. Her detachment was the unnatural
+and dreadful thing.
+
+And this happiness of his was at Viola's mercy. It would last just so
+long as she could keep him from knowing that he had outraged the beauty,
+the fitness and the simplicity she loved. I thought how he had once
+boasted that he knew what she wanted, that he knew what she was thinking
+and feeling all the time. How could he have imagined that she wanted
+_this_? What was his knowledge worth if he didn't know what she would
+think and feel about it?
+
+Unless, indeed, she had lied to him. Lied from first to last,
+deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the
+pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and
+it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola
+had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside,
+where you would have thought she would have most wanted to plunge in; the
+calculation and the indifference both were so beyond her that you could
+only think one thing: she hated it; she hated the new turn his prosperity
+had taken; she almost hated him because of it; and her heart was broken
+because of Reggie, and it was hardening where it broke; she hated Reggie
+at moments; and she had moments of hating Jevons because he had come
+between them; and she was compounding with her conscience, punishing
+herself for all these hatreds and for a thousand secret criticisms and
+disloyalties and repugnances; avenging, as it were beforehand, all
+hatreds and criticisms, disloyalties and repugnances to come. For she saw
+it all now--how it was going to be. And she was trying to make up for it
+by giving Jimmy his own way in the things that, as she had said, "didn't
+matter."
+
+And if Jimmy's way was to surround her with pretentious silliness instead
+of beautiful simplicity, then she must rise above her surroundings. Her
+spirit, at any rate, must refuse to be surrounded.
+
+Her attitude was more lofty than you can imagine. As Norah had said,
+there would always be a Belfry--something high and unusual--in Viola's
+life. Well, she was going to live in the Belfry, that was all. And if she
+was to be perfectly safe in her Belfry, and Jimmy perfectly happy in his
+Tudor hall, he mustn't know that she was there.
+
+I don't know how she really put it to herself; I don't suppose she "put"
+it any way; but subconsciously, as they say, it must have been like that.
+Anyhow, her behaviour amounted to an evasion of Jimmy, and this
+particular evasion was sad enough when you consider that in the beginning
+it had been Jimmy who had taken her to look at the Belfry--who was the
+one man who could be trusted to take her, and that she would never have
+dreamed of setting off on such an adventure by herself, and that she
+wasn't fitted for it. In fact, I can't think of anybody less fit.
+
+It showed more than anything how the glamour must have worn off him.
+
+It had worn off even for us to whom he came each time with a comparative
+freshness. And if it hadn't worn off for his public and for the
+confraternity, it was simply because as an engineer of literature he was
+inexhaustible. He had so perfected his machinery that the turning out
+of novels and of plays had become with him a sort of automatic habit, and
+if there was any falling off in his quality he was right when he said
+that nobody but himself would find it out. He had got an infinite
+capacity for plagiarizing himself; and in his worst things he imitated
+his best so closely that he might well defy you to tell the difference.
+
+But you cannot work as he had worked for five years at a stretch and not
+suffer for it. And you cannot aim at material success as he had aimed,
+deliberately and continuously, for five years without becoming yourself a
+bit material. And you cannot be immersed and wallow in it as he wallowed
+without corruption.
+
+There's no doubt that for the next, two--three--four years he wallowed.
+He was so deep in that, even after Viola's illness that came in
+nineteen-thirteen and purged him somewhat, he continued to wallow. And we
+had to stand by while he was doing it and pretend that we weren't
+shocked. There was no good trying to give him a hand to help him out, he
+was so happy wallowing.
+
+I am far from blaming him. Personally, if it hadn't been for Viola, I
+should have liked to think that he was able to get all that ecstasy out
+of his sordid triumph. For it _was_ sordid. If it wasn't for Viola you
+could tick off each year with a note of his preposterously increasing
+income, and say that was all there was in it.
+
+I muddle up the first years of it. I know that in nineteen-eleven he
+brought out his fifth novel and his third play and that the run and
+the returns of both were astounding, even for him. I know that in
+nineteen-twelve he brought out two novels and two new plays that ran at
+the same time, and that he roped in Europe and the Colonies; and that his
+income rose into five figures. He couldn't help it. His business was a
+thing that had passed beyond his control. With infinite exertions he had
+set it spinning, and now it looked as if he had only to touch it now and
+then with his finger to keep it going. And if he did get a bit excited is
+it any wonder? There was the dreadful fascination of the thing that
+compelled him to watch it till its perpetual gyrations went to his head
+and made it reel.
+
+His figure seems to me to reel slightly as it moves through those rooms
+in the house in Green Street, and before the footlights as he answered
+calls, and across the banquet-halls of the "Ritz" or the "Criterion" or
+the "Savoy," when--about three times a year--he celebrated his triumphs.
+I see those years as a succession of banquets running indistinguishably
+into each other. I see him buying more and more furniture and
+superintending its disposal with excitement. He seems to me to have been
+always buying things. I've forgotten most of them except the things he
+bought for Viola--the jewellery that frightened her, the opera cloak that
+made her hysterical, the furs that had to be sent back again (you'd have
+thought he couldn't have gone wrong with furs, but he did), and the hats
+that even Jimmy owned it was impossible to wear. I can see his face
+saddened by these failures and a little puzzled, as if he couldn't
+conceive how his star should have gone back on him like that. I can see
+him, and I can see Viola, kneeling on the floor in his study and packing
+some beastly thing up in paper, tenderly, as if it had been the corpse of
+a beloved hope; and I can hear him saying (it was after the opera cloak
+and the hysterics), "Walter, you can monkey with a woman's 'eart, and you
+can ruin her immortal soul, but if you meddle with her clothes it's hell
+for both of you. Don't you do it, my boy."
+
+I remember scores of little things like that, things done and things said
+with an incorruptible sweetness and affection, but things accentuated
+with lapsed aitches and with gestures that only Jimmy was unaware of.
+Those years are marked for me more than anything by the awful increase
+in his solecisms. Their number, their enormity and frequency rose with
+his income, and for the best of reasons. It was as if, his object being
+gained, he could afford them. He was no longer on his guard. He had no
+longer any need to be. The strain was over--he relaxed, and in relaxation
+he fell back into his old habits.
+
+All those years we seem to have been looking on at the slow, slow process
+of his vulgarization. By nineteen-twelve the confraternity had begun to
+regard Tasker Jevons as an outrageous joke. And in nineteen-thirteen,
+when both his plays were still running, even his father-in-law said that
+he was a disgusting spectacle. And Reggie (he was Major Thesiger now,
+with a garrison appointment at Woolwich) Reggie kept as far away from him
+as ever.
+
+Sometimes I have thought that Viola's detachment helped his undoing. She
+wasn't there to pull him up or to cover his disasters; she had more and
+more the look of not being there at all.
+
+And Charlie Thesiger was always there. There with a most decided look of
+being up to something.
+
+Jevons didn't seem to mind him. You might have said that Charlie was
+another of the risks he took.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+In nineteen-thirteen Jimmy bought a motor-car.
+
+He was more excited about his motor-car than he had been about his
+house--any of his houses. Even Viola was interested and came rushing down
+from her Belfry when it arrived.
+
+He bought it at the end of January. A good, useful car that would shut or
+open and serve for town or country. But it was no good to them till
+April.
+
+For all February and March Viola was ill. She had been running down
+gradually for about two years, getting a little whiter and a little
+slenderer every month, and in the first week of February she got
+influenza and ignored it, and went out for a drive in the motor-car with
+a temperature of a hundred and four.
+
+Nineteen-thirteen stands out for me as the year of Viola's illness.
+
+It turned to pneumonia and she was dangerously ill for three weeks, in
+fact, she nearly died of it; and for more weeks than I can remember she
+lay about on sofas to which Jimmy and the nurse or one of us carried her
+from her bed. And in all that time Jimmy nursed and waited on her and sat
+up with her at night. If he slept it was with one eye and both ears open.
+And I never saw anybody as gentle as he was and as skilful with his hands
+and quiet. He didn't even breathe hard. And when she was convalescent and
+a little fretful and troublesome there wasn't anybody else who could
+manage her. The nurses would call him to feed her and give her her
+medicine and lift her. She couldn't bear anybody else to touch her.
+
+I remember one day when she had been moved from her bed to the couch for
+the first time and she was so weak, poor darling, that she cried. I
+remember her saying, "Jimmy, if you'll only put your hands on my forehead
+and keep them there."
+
+I think he must have sat for hours with his hands on her forehead.
+
+I doubt if he was ever away from her for more than a few minutes except
+when one of us came and dragged him out for a walk in the Park against
+his will. It was always for a walk in the Park--the same walk, through
+Stanhope Gate to the end of the Serpentine and back again, so that he
+could time it to a minute. He wouldn't look at his motor-car. I think he
+hated it. Anyhow, I know he lent it to us until she was well enough to go
+out in it again.
+
+She wasn't well enough till April. She never would have been well enough,
+she never would have been with us at all, the doctors and the nurses
+said, if it hadn't been for Jimmy. He swore that they were fools when
+they gave her up and said she couldn't live. He said he'd _make_ her
+live. And I believe he made her.
+
+He gave her till April to get well in; and when April came she did get
+well. And he took her away to the South of France, and to Switzerland
+when the months grew warmer (the doctor told him it was a risk, but he
+said he'd take it); he took her in the motor-car, and he brought her back
+in June, still slender but recovered.
+
+That illness of hers saved them for the time. It reinstated him. It
+improved him. He couldn't, you see, be devoted and vulgar at the same
+time. All lighter agitations and excitements might be dangerous to
+Jevons, but passion and great grief and grave anxiety ennobled him. He
+came back from Switzerland chastened and purified of all offence. Even
+Reggie couldn't have found a flaw in him.
+
+That had always been Jevons's way. Just when you had made up your mind
+that you couldn't bear him he would go and do something so beautiful that
+it made your heart ache. From the very fact that he was intolerable
+to-day you might be sure he'd be adorable to-morrow.
+
+And when we saw him the night he brought Viola home, moving quietly about
+the house, giving orders in that gentle voice that he had in reserve, we
+thought, Really, it will be all right now. Viola's passion for him had
+been near death so many times, and each time he had saved it.
+
+We hadn't allowed for the reaction--he was bound to feel it after three
+months' unnatural repression; we hadn't allowed for the reaction that
+Viola was bound to feel after three years' unnatural detachment; we
+hadn't allowed for the state of her nerves after her illness; there were
+all sorts of things we hadn't allowed for, and they all came at once;
+they burst out from under their covers one evening in June when Norah and
+I were dining in Green Street.
+
+It was one of Jimmy's gestures that began it. Viola had never been able
+to control his gestures; she had never been able to get used to them; and
+there were two in particular that made her wince still as she had winced
+in the beginning. She had contracted the habit of wincing in response to
+them. Whenever Jimmy jerked his thumb over his shoulder you saw her
+blink; and whenever he cracked his knuckles she shrank back. The blink
+followed the jerk, and the shrinking followed the cracking as the flash
+follows the snap of the trigger.
+
+I have never known Jimmy jerk as he jerked that evening. When Norah had
+no salad, when my glass was empty, when Viola wanted more potatoes, when
+he wanted more potatoes himself, Jimmy jerked his thumb. The butler
+seemed to have made it a point of honour to acknowledge no other signal.
+And every time it happened I noticed the increasing violence of Viola's
+reaction. What had once been a gentle flicker of the eyelashes was now a
+succession of spasms that left her eyebrows twisted.
+
+And at the fifth jerk she covered her eyes with her hands and cried out,
+"Jimmy, if you do that _once_ more I shall scream."
+
+Poor Jimmy asked innocently, "What did I do?"
+
+"You jerked your thumb. You jerked it five times, and I simply cannot
+bear it."
+
+"All right--_all_ right," said Jimmy. "I needn't jerk it again. It's
+quite easy not to."
+
+"I was afraid it wasn't," she sighed.
+
+I was thinking, "Whatever will she do if he cracks his knuckles?" and
+that very minute he cracked them. The butler, demoralized by Jimmy's
+methods, had gone out of the room just when he was wanted. That annoyed
+Jimmy. I have never known him produce such a detonation.
+
+Viola started as if he had hit her. But she said nothing this time.
+
+Jimmy didn't see her. He was looking over his shoulder to see whether the
+butler was or was not answering his summons. And then--I think that at
+one period of his life he must have been a little proud of his
+accomplishment--he did it again. He did it _crescendo, fortissimo,
+prestissimo, strabato and con molto expressione_; he played on his
+knuckles with a virtuosity of which I have never seen the like.
+
+The sheer technique of the performance ought to have disarmed her. (It
+enchanted Norah. But then Norah hadn't had an illness.) She flung a wild
+look round the room as if she called on treacherous heavenly powers to
+save her, then rose and very slowly, in silence and a matchless dignity,
+she walked out, past me, past Jimmy, past the returning butler, and down
+the passage and into the Tudor hall.
+
+"Well--I _am_ blowed," said Jevons.
+
+Norah put her hand on his arm.
+
+"You were wonderful, Jimmy dear," she said. "I could have listened to you
+for ever. So could Walter. But then, we haven't any nerves."
+
+"After all," said Jimmy, "what _did_ I do?"
+
+I said, "You made a most infernal noise, old chap, you know."
+
+"I say! _Come_--"
+
+We had heard the andirons go down with a clatter.
+
+That was how we knew she was in the Tudor hall.
+
+He found her there when he trotted out and took her some wine and a
+peach. He came back almost instantly.
+
+"It's all right," he said. "She's eating it."
+
+But it was very far from all right.
+
+All the prisoned storms and the secret agonies of years were loose that
+night, and they had their way with her.
+
+We found her dreadfully calm when we got back to her. She had peeled her
+peach and eaten it, and she had drunk her wine, and she was sitting by
+the great hearth where she had kicked down the andirons; she was sitting,
+I remember, on one of the Tudor chairs with the carved backs and the
+tapestry--the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground--sitting very
+upright, in her beautiful trailing gown that curled round her feet; and
+she was a little flushed (but that may have been the wine).
+
+Jimmy went and stood next her in front of his hearth, with his hands in
+his trouser pockets--I mean with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets,
+where he seemed to have put them to keep them out of mischief; and he
+twinkled as if he were still thinking of the andirons. And every now and
+then he glanced at his wife sideways out of his brilliant sapphire eyes,
+without moving his head a hair's-breadth.
+
+And none of us said anything.
+
+Then Jimmy rang for coffee, and that started her.
+
+She said, "Are you going to do any work to-night?"
+
+"No," said Jimmy, "I don't think so. Why?"
+
+"Because, if you don't want your study I'll sit in it."
+
+"All right." He said it vaguely. But he must have suspected something was
+up, for he turned his head round and looked at her straight; and again he
+said, "Why?"
+
+"Because," she said, "it's the only tolerable room in the house."
+
+He flushed faintly at this. "You mean," he said, "it's the only one I
+didn't bother about?"
+
+"I _said_ it was the only tolerable one."
+
+"I see." His flush went deep, and his mouth closed over his teeth.
+
+There was no doubt he saw.
+
+She had hurt him badly. It was quite a minute before he spoke again,
+and when he did speak you felt that he had yielded, in spite of
+himself, to an overpowering curiosity. He must--he seemed to be saying to
+himself--sift this mystery to the bottom.
+
+"D'you mean," he said, "that _this_ room doesn't--er--appeal to you?
+What's wrong with it?"
+
+"There's nothing wrong with it," she said, "if you like it."
+
+"Never mind whether I like it or not. It's detestable. _And_ the
+drawing-room?"
+
+She did not answer. I think she was ashamed of herself.
+
+"Even more so, I suppose. And--your boudoir?"
+
+(I've forgotten the boudoir. She hardly ever let any of us go into it. It
+was pretty awful.)
+
+"I do wish," she said, "you'd leave me alone. What _does_ it matter?"
+
+"Your boudoir," he went on, as if she hadn't said anything, "is, if
+possible, more detestable than the drawing-room."
+
+"I never said so."
+
+"Precisely. That's my grievance. Why, in Heaven's name, didn't you say
+so? Why did you tell me that you _liked_ all these abominations?"
+
+"Because they didn't matter."
+
+"Why lie about them if they didn't matter?"
+
+"I mean they didn't matter to me. They don't."
+
+"My dear child, what on earth do you suppose they matter to me? What made
+you think they mattered?"
+
+"The way you went on about them."
+
+"Oh--the way I go on--Well, if _that_ matters--"
+
+She rose. I think she had heard the tinkle of the coffee-cups in the
+corridor and wanted to put an end to what in any hands but Jimmy's would
+have been an unseemly altercation.
+
+"Will it matter if we go upstairs?"
+
+"No. Not a bit." He snapped and twinkled at the same time.
+
+She went, and Norah followed her.
+
+Jevons settled himself in an armchair. I saw how unperturbed and
+deliberate he was as he took his coffee from the tray, and with what an
+incorrigible air he jerked his thumb towards the staircase. I can still
+hear him call up the staircase in a magisterial voice, "The ladies are
+in the study, Parker." When we were alone he fell into meditation.
+
+It was apparently as the result of meditation that he said, "I suppose it
+is a bit crude, if you come to think of it. Only why couldn't she say so
+at the time?"
+
+I said I supposed she was afraid of hurting his feelings.
+
+"My feelings? How could I have any feelings about a blanketty
+drawing-room suite? Does she really think I'm such a fool that I can't
+live without lions on my staircase? I stuck the beastly things there
+because I thought she'd like 'em. If I thought she'd like a tame
+rhinoceros in her boudoir I'd have got her one, if I'd 'ad to go out and
+catch 'im and train 'im myself. If I thought _now_ that the only way to
+preserve her affection was to wear that suit of armour every night at
+dinner I'd wear it and glory in wearing it. There isn't any damned silly
+thing I wouldn't do and glory in."
+
+And then--"Her nerves must be in an awful state."
+
+He meditated again.
+
+"Tell you what--I'll get rid of this place. I'll let it go furnished for
+what it'll fetch. I'll only keep the things we had before--the things she
+liked. They _are_ prettier."
+
+He looked round him with his disenchanted eyes.
+
+"I can see it's all wrong, this sort of thing. It's in bad taste. Rotten
+bad taste. I suppose I must have been a bit excited about it at the
+time--I must have thought it was all right or I couldn't have stood it.
+
+"It's a phase I've gone through.
+
+"I can understand perfectly well how she feels about it.
+
+"Fact is, I hate the place myself--the whole beastly house I hate. I've
+hated it ever since she was ill in it. I can't get away from her illness.
+I shall always see her ill. She'll be ill again if we go on living in it.
+
+"I'm tired of the whole business--I'll let it to-morrow and take a house
+in the country.
+
+"You might go upstairs, old man, and see what she's doing."
+
+I went upstairs.
+
+She was sitting in one corner of the study with a book in her hand
+pretending to read. Norah was sitting in another corner with a book in
+her hand, pretending to read. I gathered that Norah had been talking to
+her sister. I took up a book and pretended to read too.
+
+Presently, when she thought we were absorbed, Viola got up and left us.
+Norah waited till the door had closed on her. Then she spoke.
+
+"Wally--it's more awful than we've ever imagined. I don't think she'll be
+able to stand it much longer."
+
+"Well," I said, "she won't have to stand it much longer. He's going to
+chuck the place. It's got on _his_ nerves, too. He understands exactly
+how she feels about it."
+
+"Let's hope he doesn't understand how she feels about--It isn't the
+place, Wally."
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"I'm most awfully afraid it's Jimmy."
+
+"Jimmy? You don't mean she doesn't care about him?"
+
+"Oh, no, she cares about him, and it's because she cares so that she
+can't stand him."
+
+"Well," I said, "whether she cares or not, it's rough on Jimmy."
+
+"It's rough on her. It's rough on both of them. It's getting rougher and
+rougher, and it's wearing her out."
+
+"Won't it wear him out too?"
+
+"N-no. Nothing will wear Jimmy out. He's indestructible. He'll wear her
+out."
+
+"He says he's going to take a house in the country. How do you think
+that'll answer?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I don't know, Walter. I don't really know. It sounds risky."
+
+"The whole thing," I said, "was risky from the start."
+
+"There are two things," she said, "that would save them--if Reggie were
+to come round. Or if Jimmy were to have an illness; and neither of them
+is in the least likely to happen."
+
+"There's a third thing," I said--"if Viola were to have a baby."
+
+"That isn't likely either. He'd never let her. He says it would kill her.
+It's pitiful, it's pitiful. Can't you see," she said, "that he adores
+her?"
+
+I said I didn't see what we were there for, and that it was time for us
+to go.
+
+As I followed her down the stairs that led to the Tudor hall she paused
+suddenly on the landing where a second lion marked the turn. She had her
+finger to her lip. We drew back. But not before I had looked down over
+the balustrade into the hall and seen Jimmy sitting on one of the thrones
+with the lilies of France, and Viola crouching beside him on the rug with
+her head hidden on his knee.
+
+He had his hands on her forehead and was saying, "It's all right. Do you
+suppose I don't understand?"
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+It was late in August before Jevons found a country house large enough,
+yet not too large, and old enough, yet not too old--he would have nothing
+that even remotely suggested the Tudor period. And in the intervals of
+looking for his house he wrote another novel and two more plays. There
+was a decided falling-off in all of them, and I think Jevons himself was
+a little nervous. He said he'd have to be careful next time or they'd
+find him out. Once he had settled the affair of the house he would set to
+work and strengthen the position which, after all, he hadn't lost.
+
+He had gained, if anything. Nineteen-thirteen stands as his year of
+maximum prosperity. Even the house in Mayfair justified itself when he
+let it, with all its principal rooms furnished, to an American railway
+magnate at a rent that enabled him to indulge the passion he had
+conceived for Amershott Old Grange.
+
+He used to say he would never have been happy again if he couldn't have
+had Amershott Old Grange. Everything about it seemed propitious. They had
+found it by a happy accident when they weren't looking for it, weren't
+thinking of it, when they were trying to get out of Sussex and back to
+London after a long day's motoring in search of houses. Nothing that
+Essex or Kent or Buckinghamshire (Hertfordshire was ruled out by the
+presence in it of the Registrar) or Surrey or Hampshire or Sussex, so
+far, could do had satisfied them, and Jevons was beginning to talk rather
+wildly about Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and Wilts, and even Devon
+and Cornwall, when they lost their way in the cross-country roads between
+Midhurst and Petworth and so came upon Amershott Old Grange. It was
+hidden behind an old rose-red brick wall in a lane, and it was only by
+standing up in the motorcar that they caught sight of its long line of
+red-tiled dormer windows. The very notice-board was hidden, staggering
+back in an ivy bush that topped the wall.
+
+"I won't have a house," said Jimmy, "that's a day older than Queen Anne."
+No more would Viola.
+
+And the Old Grange was not a day older than Queen Anne or a day younger.
+It was the most perfect specimen of a Queen Anne house you could have
+wished to see--the long, straight front, the slender door, the two
+storeys with their rows of straight, flat windows and the steep brows of
+the dormers over them. It was all rose-red brick and rose-red tiles, with
+roses and clematis bursting out in crimson and purple all over the front.
+It stood at right angles to the wall and to the lane, and there was a
+long grass-garden in front of it, with walls all round and herbaceous
+borders under the walls; and from the high postern door in the outer wall
+opening to the lane a wide flagged path went all the way in front of the
+house to the door in the inner wall that led into the kitchen garden and
+the orchard. Further down the lane were the doors of the courtyard at the
+back of the house where the outhouses and the stables and the dovecot
+were; and beyond the courtyard there was a paddock, and you would have
+thought that was enough. But, besides his Queen Anne house and his
+gardens and his orchard and his courtyard and his dovecot and his
+paddock, Jimmy had acquired ten acres of moorland, to say nothing of a
+belt of pinewood that ran the whole length of his estate behind the
+kitchen garden and the paddock and the moor. And the whole business of
+acquiring this property went without a hitch. He took it on the long
+tail-end of a lease from an impecunious landlord who couldn't afford to
+keep it up.
+
+He obtained possession by September and in the early spring of
+nineteen-fourteen he was settled in Amershott Old Grange.
+
+They furnished it as they had furnished the house in Edwardes Square,
+with the most complete return to beautiful simplicity.
+
+Jimmy polished off a short novel and a play between October and June, and
+kept himself going on the proceeds of his old novels, his old plays, and
+his old short stories collected in a volume. Then I think he must have
+sat down to wait events.
+
+For when we went down to stay with them we found him waiting. He was
+entirely prepared for certain contingencies. If anybody knew anything
+about English social conditions it was Tasker Jevons. He had calculated
+all the chances and provided for the ostracism that attends the inexpert
+invader of the country-side. He was aware that there were powers in and
+around Amershott that were not to be conciliated. The very fact that
+their territory lay so near the frontier (Amershott is only sixty-seven
+miles from London) kept them on their guard. To any good old county
+family, Tasker Jevons's celebrity was nothing, if it was not an added
+offence, and his opulence was less than nothing. In settling among them
+he ran the risk of being ignored. But when it came to ignoring, Jimmy
+considered that success lay with the party who got in first. So before he
+settled he took care to diffuse a sort of impression that the Tasker
+Jevonses were never at home to anybody, that it was not to be expected
+that a great novelist and playwright would have time for calling and
+being called on, even if he had the absurd inclination. He had one
+solitary introduction in the neighbourhood, and he worked it very
+adroitly, not to obtain other introductions, but to spread the rumour of
+retirement and exclusiveness.
+
+His arrival, preceded by this attractive legend, became an event. You
+couldn't even affect to overlook it. And if it was not possible for Jimmy
+to subdue his features to an expression of complete ignoring, he had got
+in so promptly with his attitude that it took the wind out of the sails
+of any people who were merely proposing to ignore.
+
+Then, having come amongst them as a shy recluse, Jimmy began instantly to
+focus attention on himself. He hadn't been six weeks in the county before
+he had become the most conspicuous object in it.
+
+I don't know how he did it; you never really caught him at it; and yet,
+when you came down to stay with him, you felt all the time that he was
+doing it; you felt a sort of shame (a shame that he couldn't feel) in
+seeing that he did it so perpetually and so well. He had a way of making
+his privacy a public thing. There was something positively indecent in
+his detachment; it advertised him as no possible immersion could have
+done. I've seen him lying out on his moor basking all by himself in the
+sun; I've seen him meditating all by himself in his pinewood; I've seen
+him sitting in his walled garden, with the apparatus of his business all
+about him, when you would have said that if ever a man's life was hidden
+and withdrawn it was Tasker Jevons's. And yet it wasn't. You knew it
+wasn't; and he knew that you knew. He knew that his gardener and his
+chauffeur and his butler and his cook and his housemaid and his
+parlourmaid knew that he was sitting in his garden writing, or meditating
+in his pinewood or basking on his moor in the sun, and that their
+knowledge penetrated to every house in the village, to every house in the
+county within a radius of twenty miles. And when he was not doing any of
+these prominently tranquil things he was tearing about the country in his
+motor-car.
+
+I have never seen anything like Jevons's motoring. It was in this new
+aspect of his that he was, I think, most remarkable. I say he made his
+privacy a public thing; but in the furious publicity of his motoring it
+was the other way round. He turned the public roads into a private track
+through paradise. I do not mean that he was a road-hog; far from it. He
+had the most exquisite manners of the road, He would slow down for a hen
+in the distance and upset himself into the ditch to avoid a rabbit. I
+have known him (with his first car) give a lift to any filthy tramp
+between Midhurst and Portsmouth. I mean that the act of motoring
+transported him; and he did these things instinctively, mechanically,
+without interruption to his rapture. Speed and the wind of speed, the air
+rushing by like a water-race as he ripped through it, the streaming past
+him of trees and hedges, the humming and throbbing of his engines, were
+ecstasy to Jimmy. He had learned to drive the thing, and his sense of
+power over it gave him the physical exaltation that he craved for. I
+believe that when he sat in his motor-car, driving it, he was filled,
+intoxicated, with the pride and splendour of life. He had power over
+everybody and everything that lay in his track, except other motor-cars;
+and he exulted in his knowledge that he could annihilate them and didn't.
+He enjoyed (voluptuously) his own mercy that spared them. Through his
+motor-car he attained such an extension of his personality that he became
+intolerable to other people and unrecognizable to himself.
+
+And yet I do not think that even at the height of his ecstasy he ever
+really forgot that he was Tasker Jevons, the great novelist and
+playwright, in his motor-car. When he drove you through Portsmouth or
+Chichester, or even through little Midhurst, you felt that he thrilled
+from head to foot with self-consciousness. He knew and had acute pleasure
+in knowing that people noticed him as he went by; that the tradesmen
+turned out of their shops to stare after him; and that everybody said,
+"See that chap? That's Tasker Jevons. He always drives his own car."
+
+He owned that he enjoyed it. I remember the first time we went down to
+stay with them (it was in May of nineteen-fourteen), when he was driving
+us through Midhurst from the station, how he said to us, "I'm glad I
+thought of living in the country. It makes me feel celebrated."
+
+We asked him if he hadn't ever felt it before; and he answered solemnly,
+"Never for a minute. Never, I mean, like I do down here. In London, if
+you do gather a crowd round you, you're swallowed up in it. Besides, you
+can't always gather a crowd. D'you suppose, if I were to drive down
+Piccadilly in this car--short of standing on my head--I could attract the
+attention I've attracted to-day? You saw those fellows come out and look
+at me? Well--they do that pretty nearly every time, Furnival.
+
+"No. London's no good. Too many houses--too many people--too many
+motor-cars. You can't stand out. What a man wants to set him off is
+landscape, Furny, landscape. You should see me on the goose-green at
+Amershott towards post-time."
+
+Well, I did see him on the goose-green towards post-time, and I saw what
+he meant. It was really as if I'd never seen him before properly.
+
+Heavens, how he stood out! It was as if a stage had been cleared for him,
+and for the figure he cut. He was quite right. You couldn't have done it
+in Piccadilly, or even in the suburbs. And he wasn't in his motor-car,
+mind you, then; he was simply strolling over from his house to post a
+letter in the village on the green, and I do not know how he contrived to
+infuse into so simple an act that subtle taint of advertisement. There
+was no necessity for him to post his own letters, he could easily have
+sent a servant. But I do believe he couldn't bear to miss the opportunity
+of being seen. When he passed the Vicarage, the Vicar and his wife and
+daughters were generally in their garden, and they turned to look at his
+passing, and he was exquisitely conscious of them. The villagers came out
+on to their doorsteps to look at him, and he was conscious of the
+villagers. The geese followed him in a long line across the common and
+stretched out their necks after him, and he was conscious of the geese.
+He enjoyed the publicity they gave him, and he said so.
+
+And I began to wonder whether the funny frankness that had so disarmed us
+was really as funny as it looked (the idea of disarmament, you see, was
+serious), whether he didn't say these things because he knew we saw him
+as he really was; because he saw himself as he really was, and couldn't
+bear it; because there was no escape for him unless he could make believe
+that he was in fun when he really wasn't.
+
+I do believe there was a time (any time before his Tudor period) when he
+_was_ in fun, pure fun; and even through the Tudor period his enjoyment
+of himself was innocent. But as I walked home with him across his moor
+that evening it was borne in upon me that Jimmy's innocence was gone.
+Living in the country had killed it. I had never perceived so definite a
+taint of vulgarity in him before.
+
+You would have thought it would have been all the other way, that living
+in the country would have made altogether for simplicity and purity. I
+believe that quite honestly he had thought it would, that he had come
+into the country to be purified and simplified, and to put himself right
+with Viola for ever. And the horrid irony of it was that the country
+didn't do any of these things to him; it complicated him, it saturated
+him with that taint I've mentioned, and instead of putting him right it
+showed him up. Quite horribly and cruelly it showed him up. I do not
+think there was a single weakness or a single secret meanness that he had
+that didn't suddenly rise up and stand out on the background of
+Amershott.
+
+All through that summer there, quite frankly, I detested Jevons. I
+believe that Norah came near detesting him, that she felt something very
+like contempt for him.
+
+And if Norah felt it you may imagine what Viola would feel.
+
+She was with us one evening (it was June, I think, and our second visit),
+when Jimmy showed most unmistakably the cloven hoof. We had come in from
+a long motor drive, and he had made at once, as he always did, for the
+silver plate in the hall where cards left by callers were put, if any
+callers came. I can see him now, breathing hard. I can see the glance he
+cast at the cards, and the little jerky curb he put on his excitement--he
+had the grace to be ashamed of it. And then I see him holding four cards
+in his hand, sober and quiet and flushed like a man who has triumphed
+solemnly. And I hear him read out the names: "Lord Amerley, Lady Amerley,
+Lady Octavia Amerley, the Honourable Frances Amerley. _That's_ all right.
+I gave them three months."
+
+And I see Viola look at him, taking in his figure in its motor-dress, and
+his face, with the foolish, weak elation he couldn't for the life of him
+keep out of it.
+
+Again I see him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity--and I
+don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there--very
+spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party
+they took us to.
+
+And later on--in the very beginning of July it must have been--I see him
+on his own lawn at his own garden-party, and--I didn't dream it this
+time--he was really dreadful. Instead of carrying it off with the levity
+that had so often saved him from perdition, there was that revolting
+triumph about him and an uneasy eagerness, as if he knew that his triumph
+wasn't quite complete. But the garden-party was, as he would have said,
+all right. They were all there, those people he had given three months
+to. He had pulled it off precisely as he had schemed and calculated.
+Those legends of his detachment and his hermit habits had been worked so
+as to excite a supreme curiosity--and it was being satisfied.
+
+And I cannot tell you whether he was really altered, or whether he had
+been like that all the time before Amershott had shown him up, and none
+of us had seen it except Viola.
+
+Oh no--it's impossible. He had altered. If he had been like this we must
+have seen it. What Viola had seen--if she had seen anything--was only the
+foreshadowing, the bare possibility of this.
+
+Charlie Thesiger was at that garden-party (he had retired from the
+service with the rank of Captain).
+
+And it was at the garden-party that I first noticed a change in his
+manner to his cousin's husband. He used to treat Jevons with a certain
+superciliousness, and with as much amusement, as much perception of his
+absurdity, as was possible for Charlie, who perceived so few things. Now
+I was struck with the correct young man's deference to his host. It was
+really as if it had at last dawned on Charlie that Jevons _was_ his host,
+and that he had other claims to distinction as well. The more dreadful
+Jimmy was, the more courteous Charlie showed himself to Jimmy. And this
+in spite of the fact that Jevons had a way of treating Charlie as if he
+didn't matter, as if for all recognizable purposes he wasn't there.
+
+When I spoke of this to Norah, she said that Viola had told him that if
+he couldn't be decent to Jimmy she wouldn't have him there.
+
+Well, there he was, hanging about Viola from morning till night; he had
+any amount of time on his hands now, and he spent most of it at
+Amershott. He was there when we weren't sometimes, so that we couldn't
+keep track of him. But his purposes ought to have been apparent to us. I
+think it was partly because he was aware of them himself that he went out
+of his way to be decent to Jimmy, almost as if he were sorry for him
+beforehand.
+
+For it was evident enough that Viola liked his being there, and liked to
+have him hanging round her. There was nothing about him that shocked or
+grated. I've no doubt he made himself entirely charming. His manners
+could be as beautiful as any of the Thesigers' when he chose, and they
+soothed her. I think she had ceased to feel them as a reproach to Jimmy.
+She had given up _his_ manners, poor dear, long ago, as a bad job. It was
+as if she had slaked her thirst for the unusual. Some secret and strong
+revulsion had thrown her back on the people and the things that she had
+been brought up amongst and that she had run away from. When Jimmy jarred
+on her she turned to Charlie for relief. And, after all, as Norah said,
+he was her cousin.
+
+I don't think we either of us saw anything more in it than that. Without
+some such reaction she must have surrendered to Amershott. She couldn't
+defend Jevons against that showing up. She couldn't defend herself
+against those revelations, she could only stand by and look on at his
+enormity and shudder. Unless she had put her dear eyes out she must have
+seen that in the country he was not only a bounder but a snob. And she
+must have writhed in feeling that to see him that way was to be a bit of
+a snob herself. She had accused herself of snobbishness long ago, before
+she married him, when, in order to marry him, she had burned her boats.
+
+What could she do? She couldn't put her eyes out. But I believe she would
+have been grateful to anybody who would have put them out for her.
+
+I can't tell whether she was always unhappy. I rather think she had liked
+Amershott, the house and the garden and the pinewood and the bit of moor,
+and I am certain that she liked motoring almost as much as Jimmy did at
+first. She could even take pleasure in Jimmy's power over the car when
+they were alone with it in the open country, when his pleasure had no
+taint in it. I've heard her say, when he wanted to run down to Chichester
+or Portsmouth, "Oh, for Heaven's sake, let's go somewhere where nobody
+can look at us!"
+
+She must have regarded the open country as the last refuge of his
+innocence. For her, more than for any of us, he had lost it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How far he really lost it we shall never know. Even now, with all my
+lights, with that intense country light fairly beating on him, I can
+wonder: Am I saying these things because I think them? Or because I
+believe I must have thought them then? And I cannot answer my own wonder.
+I remember how at Amershott, when I sat beside him in that car of his and
+watched his ecstasy, I used to pull myself up and say to myself, "You
+_know_ he isn't like that. Look at him--what woolly lamb could be more
+simple and innocent than he is now?" And if anybody had come to me and
+asked me if I didn't think that Jevons _was_ a little awful I should have
+said that if you were a little awful yourself you might think so, but not
+otherwise. My conscience has told me that as he became more successful I
+became more critical; it has even suggested that I may have been jealous
+of his success.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But that was in the days (they were comparatively innocent) of his first
+motor-car. Round that car there really is a light of romance and of
+adventure, a glamour that isn't at all the glamour of his opulence. In
+those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of
+pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income. In June, at
+any rate, he was still the master of his car and not--as we saw him later
+on--its servant. There never was anything like that first fury of his
+motoring.
+
+It couldn't last. He was wearing himself out. Those early excesses
+exhausted his capacity for pleasure, and when we came to stay with him in
+the last two weeks of July we found him apathetic about motoring.
+
+But not about motor-cars. As far as the cars went he had developed into
+an incurable motor-maniac. He was never tired of talking about
+carburetters, and tyres, and petrol, and garages and gear. He dreamed of
+these things at night. Every day he invented some extraordinary
+contrivance for increasing speed and lessening friction. He knew all that
+was to be known about the different kinds of cars; and he would roll
+their names on his tongue--Panhard and Fiat and Daimler and Mercédès and
+Rolls-Royce, as if the sound of them caressed him like music.
+
+And the first car which he had mastered--it was a comparatively cheap
+one, but it wouldn't be fair to say what kind it was, for the poor thing
+had gone to pieces under his hand in six months; he had served her, his
+chauffeur said, something cruel--that first car had been sold for a
+hundred and fifty pounds, and Viola was mourning for it when we came down
+in July.
+
+We couldn't think why she mourned, for he had bought another. We supposed
+that the new car had broken down, for we were met at Midhurst station by
+the local cab proprietor. But we were very soon to know that nothing
+had happened to the new car, and that something very serious indeed had
+happened to Jimmy.
+
+He had gone mad--you can only call it mad--over his new car.
+
+As soon as we had tea we were taken to see it where it stood in the
+coach-house that served as a garage.
+
+It was a magpie car--the first, Jimmy told me, that had appeared down in
+that part of the country--white, with black bonnet and black
+splashboards, and black leather hood and cushions; so black that its
+body, in the matchless purity of its whiteness, staggered you. Anybody,
+Jevons said, could have an all-white car, and it wouldn't be noticed any
+more than a common taxi-cab. But one magpie in a countless crowd of cars
+annihilated all the rest. Lemon colour was good and so was scarlet; but
+for effect--for sheer destruction to other automobilists--there was
+nothing like a white car with black points. It was, Jimmy said and
+Kendal, the chauffeur, said, a perfect car. From their tone you wondered
+what you had ever done that you should be allowed to approach and see it
+where it stood.
+
+Where it stood, I say. You couldn't see that car doing anything else. It
+stood like an immense idol in a temple; and it looked as if all its life
+it never had done anything else but stand in its perfection to be stared
+at. And by its air of self-consciousness, of majesty, of arrogant power
+in repose, you gathered that it knew it was there to be stared at. The
+thing was drawn up at the far end of the garage, where no breath could
+blow on it, over an open pit. You knew that Kendal, the chauffeur, went
+down on a ladder into the pit to examine the secret being of the car; you
+knew it and yet it was incredible. You refused to believe that an outrage
+to which common cars were subject ever had been or would be perpetrated
+on this holy one. You would have said that no spot of mud or dust or rain
+had ever lighted on it; it might have descended into the garage out of
+heaven for any sign of travel that it showed. It was surrounded by I
+know not what atmosphere of consecration and immunity.
+
+So that Norah's first question sounded like a profanity.
+
+"What speed is it?" she said.
+
+It might have been fancy, but I thought that Jevons's face underwent a
+change. I certainly saw Kendal the chauffeur looking at it.
+
+"Speed?" he said. "Speed? Well--you _can_ speed her up to sixty miles an
+hour if you want to." (He seemed to say, "If she ever is speeded up," or
+"You jolly well may want.")
+
+He ran his hand lovingly along the car's white flank as if it were alive
+and could respond to the caress.
+
+"She's a beauty," he said.
+
+The chauffeur looked at him again.
+
+"You won't want to knock her about like you did the last one, Mr.
+Jevons," he said.
+
+And Jimmy's face expressed a sort of horror.
+
+The chauffeur looked at us then, and, if you can wink without any motion
+of the eyelids, he winked. He saw, and he was trying to indicate to us,
+the state that Jevons had fallen into.
+
+It was infatuation; it was idolatry; it was the most extraordinary
+passion I have ever known a man otherwise sane to be possessed by. You
+would have said that that creature with the black-and-white body and the
+terrific bowels of machinery had some sinister and magic power over him.
+He loved it; he worshipped it; he was afraid of it. And when you think of
+how, as the chauffeur said, he had "served" the other car--
+
+Knock her about, indeed! He daren't take her out of the garage for a
+fifteen-mile run without agonies of apprehension. He never took her out
+at all unless he was certain that it wouldn't rain and that there
+wouldn't be any mud or any dust or any wind (I don't know what harm he
+thought the wind would do her). Instead of taking her out he would spend
+hours in the garage standing still and looking at her, stooping sometimes
+to examine her for a spot or a crack on her enamel, but always with
+reverence. I believe he never touched her without washing his hands
+first.
+
+We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn't been out in that car three
+times, though the weather was perfect. Jimmy never could see that it was
+perfect enough. If it hadn't rained for two days he was afraid of dust;
+if it did rain he was afraid of mud; what he wanted was one light shower
+to lay the dust; and when he got it he was afraid of another shower
+coming. And on hot days he was afraid the sun might do something. And he
+was afraid of _us_ all the time lest we should ask him to take the car
+out on a day that wouldn't do.
+
+I do not know how or why he had come to look on that car as his god. It
+wasn't, I do believe that it wasn't, because the thing was valuable,
+because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he
+had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a
+sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint
+of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering
+beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the
+remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of
+his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself:
+"Motor-cars are perishable things. I did for my first beloved by my
+excesses. Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from
+motoring." And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune
+out of Jimmy's abstinence.
+
+The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. (He too had come
+down for the last fortnight in July.) He was the only one of us who
+didn't protest, didn't clamour, didn't try to reason or to laugh Jimmy
+out of his insanity. And he went further. He refused to enter the car, to
+be taken in it on the few suitable days when Jimmy allowed it to go out.
+It was as if he were dominated by some scruple as morbid as his host's
+passion. We couldn't account for it at the time, for he liked motoring
+excessively, and he couldn't afford it.
+
+I've wondered since whether this wasn't the way Charlie settled with
+his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency. He could eat Jimmy's bread
+and drink his wine and stay for weeks under his roof, since his
+necessity--the necessity of seeing Viola--compelled him, but to profit by
+him to that extent, to make use of Jimmy's opulence, was beyond him. His
+conscience may have even said to him, "If he loves his motor-car, for
+God's sake let him have _that_, at any rate, to himself."
+
+And Viola seemed to share Charlie's scruple. She, too, shrank from using
+the new car. And I remember her saying to me one day as we crossed the
+courtyard and saw Jimmy, as usual, in the garage, worshipping his car,
+"I'm so glad he's got it. I think it makes him happier." As if she had
+confessed that it was all he _had_ got; that she was not able to make him
+happy any more; and as if, in some day of unhappiness that she saw
+coming, it would be a consolation to the poor chap. At any rate, as if
+she were not in the least jealous of the power it had over him.
+
+So, that July, Norah and I drove with Jimmy when the car, so to speak,
+let him drive it; and Viola walked through the woods and over the downs
+with Charlie Thesiger.
+
+We often wondered what they found to talk about.
+
+That wonder, of what Viola could see in Charlie, and how she could endure
+for so many hours the burden of his society, was all that Norah had
+allowed herself, so far, to express. If she felt any uneasiness she had
+not yet confided it to me. As for Jevons, he tolerated him as you only
+tolerate a thing that doesn't matter. I think honestly that to both of
+them, Charlie, in any serious connection with Viola, was as impossible as
+Jevons himself had been to her brother Reggie.
+
+So little did he take him seriously that at the very end of July he went
+up to London for the inside of the week (he went by train so as to save
+the car) while Charlie was still at the Old Grange.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the week of the international crisis, and European mobilization
+was occupying Jimmy's mind to the exclusion of other matters. Still, you
+could hardly suppose that it was the crisis that was taking him up to
+London. I remember thinking he had run away from Charlie Thesiger,
+because he bored him.
+
+He left on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, and he was to be back on Friday,
+the thirty-first, and Charlie was to leave with Norah and me and our
+nurse and Baby on the Monday following, when our fortnight was up.
+
+So on Friday afternoon I was a little astonished to find my
+sister-in-law, dressed in her town suit of white cloth, drinking tea at
+three o'clock before going up to London. She simply stated the fact that
+she was going up. Norah had said she might stay in our house and she
+hoped I wouldn't mind.
+
+When I suggested that it would surely be nicer for us all to go up
+together on Monday she looked at me with a certain long-suffering
+expression that she had for me at times, and said that wouldn't suit her,
+since she had got to go to-day. She was of course awfully sorry to leave
+us, but Norah understood, and Jimmy would look after us very well.
+
+No. She wasn't going up by Midhurst. She was going by Selham.
+
+She rose. I noticed the impatient energy of her little hands as they
+knotted her veil under her chin. I looked up her trains and found that
+there was none from Selham till four forty-five. I pointed out to her
+that there was no hurry; she had missed the two fifty-five, which had
+left Selham fifteen minutes ago, and she had an hour to spare even if the
+car took half an hour getting to the station. (The day was fine and there
+was no dust. Even Jimmy couldn't have objected to her taking the car.)
+
+But she said she hadn't missed the two fifty-five; she wasn't trying for
+it; and she wasn't going in the car; it would be wanted to meet Jimmy at
+Midhurst Station; and no--no--_no_--she didn't want a cab from Midhurst.
+She was going to walk.
+
+I said it was absurd for her to walk four miles on a hot day like this,
+and she replied that the day would be cool enough if only I'd keep quiet.
+(She was still long-suffering.)
+
+Then of course I said I'd walk with her.
+
+But that was too much for her, and she stamped her foot and said I'd do
+nothing of the kind. She didn't want anybody to walk with her.
+
+And when I inquired about her luggage--But I can't repeat what she said
+about her luggage!
+
+Then she softened suddenly, as her way was, and kissed Norah, and said I
+was a dear, and she was sorry for snapping my head off, but it was all
+right. Norah knew all about it. She'd explain.
+
+I can see her standing in the postern doorway and saying these things and
+then giving me her hand and holding mine tight, while she shook her head
+at me and smiled that little baffling smile that seemed to come up
+flickering from her depths of wisdom on purpose to put me in the wrong.
+
+"The trouble with you, Furny," she said, "is that you're much too good."
+
+She went; and we saw her tall, lithe figure swinging up the lane, past
+the courtyard and the paddock and the moor.
+
+Then Norah plucked me in by the coat-sleeve as if she thought we oughtn't
+to be looking at her. We shut the door on her flight and turned to each
+other where we stood on the flagged path before the house.
+
+"What does it mean?" I said.
+
+"It means that she's at the end of her tether."
+
+"The end--?" I think I must have gasped.
+
+"The very end. She can't stand it any longer."
+
+"But," I said, "she--she's got to stand it. After all--"
+
+"There's no good talking that way. She _can't_, and that settles it. I
+knew she couldn't, once she got beyond a certain point."
+
+"Do you mean to say," I said, "that she's going to leave him?"
+
+"I--don't--know. I believe--she's going to think about it."
+
+"But--it's out of the question. She mustn't think about it."
+
+"You can't stop her thinking, Wally. She's gone away to think about it
+sanely. It's the best thing she can do."
+
+"And you're helping her to get away?"
+
+She was silent for a moment.
+
+"I'm only helping her to think," she said.
+
+I was stern with her. "You're not. You're just helping her to bolt," I
+said. "You're conniving at her bolting. You've lent her our house."
+
+"Isn't it better she should come to us?"
+
+"No, it isn't better. I don't like it. And I won't have it. I won't have
+you mixed up in it. Do you understand?"
+
+"Dear Wally--there isn't anything to be mixed up in. We'll be back on
+Monday; then she'll only be staying with us."
+
+"And till then--?"
+
+"Till then--for Heaven's sake let the poor thing have peace for three
+days to think in."
+
+"That's all very well," I said, "but what are we to say to Jimmy when he
+comes back this afternoon?"
+
+"You say--you say she's tired of--of Amershott and wants three days in
+London to herself.--No, you don't. You don't say anything. You leave it
+to me. Vee-Vee said it was to be left to me."
+
+"And _I_ say I won't have you dragged into it. Good Heavens, have you any
+idea what you may be let in for, supposing--?"
+
+"Supposing what?"
+
+I couldn't say what. But I don't think I really had supposed
+anything--then.
+
+"You needn't suppose things," she said. "Vee-Vee would never let us in.
+Look here, Wally--you've got to trust me this time. I'm going to see
+Vee-Vee through, and I'm going to see Jimmy through; but I can't do it if
+you don't trust me. I can't do it if you interfere."
+
+I said I did trust her, and that God knew I didn't want to interfere, but
+was she quite sure she was doing a wise thing?
+
+She said, "Quite sure. Let's go and lie down in the pine-wood till
+tea-time. I wonder if Jimmy would mind us going into Midhurst with the
+car. We shouldn't hurt it, sitting in it."
+
+We lay out in the pine-wood till we heard the bell for tea, which we
+had ordered a little before four, in case Jevons should wire for the
+car to meet him by the early afternoon train that got to Midhurst at
+four-sixteen.
+
+The table was set as usual in the garden on the lawn in front of the
+house.
+
+By four o'clock no wire had come from Jevons; so we knew we needn't
+expect him till a later train. He nearly always came by Waterloo and
+Petersfield and was met at Midhurst, which gave him his public. But he
+might come, as Viola had gone, by Victoria and Horsham and be met
+at Selham.
+
+I remember saying, in a startling manner as the idea struck me,
+"Supposing he comes by Victoria?"
+
+And Norah said, "What if he does?"
+
+And I, "They might meet at Horsham."
+
+"Why shouldn't they?" she said. "You don't suppose he'll eat her for
+running up to town?"
+
+"He might," I said, "think it odd of her."
+
+"Not he. The beauty of Jimmy is that odd things don't seem odd to him. Do
+you know where Charlie is?"
+
+I didn't. We had finished tea before either of us had thought of him. We
+shouted to him through the open windows of the house, for Charlie had a
+habit of mooning about indoors till Viola was ready to walk with him.
+
+No answer came to our summons, but it brought Parker, the butler, out on
+to the lawn. He had a slightly surprised and slightly embarrassed look on
+his respectable and respectful face, no longer demoralized by Jimmy.
+
+"Were you looking for the Captain, sir?" he said.
+
+I said we were.
+
+Something grave and a little sorrowful came into Parker's embarrassed
+look.
+
+"Didn't you know he'd gone, sir?"
+
+I said I didn't even know he was going; and then I saw Norah looking at
+me.
+
+Parker was trying not to look at Norah. He began gathering up the
+tea-things as if to justify his presence and explain it.
+
+"When did he go?" I said as casually as I could.
+
+"Well, sir--the cab was ordered to catch the four thirty-five from
+Midhurst."
+
+Now the four thirty-five from Midhurst is the four forty-five from
+Selham, the train that Viola had gone by. We knew this; and Parker knew
+that we knew it. That was why, instead of stating outright that Captain
+Thesiger had gone by that train, he tried to soften the blow to us by
+saying that the cab had been ordered to catch it, and leaving it open to
+us to suppose that perhaps, after all, it might have missed it.
+
+"Did he say when he was coming back?" I asked, again casually.
+
+"He isn't coming back, sir," said Parker. "He's took his luggage with him
+and all."
+
+"Of course," said Norah. "He's gone to see what they're doing at the War
+Office. He said he would."
+
+But I knew and she knew and Parker knew he hadn't--or, if he had, it was
+only one of the things he had gone for. Because, if the War Office had
+been all that he had in his mind he would have told us, and Viola would
+have told us, and they would have gone openly together, instead of
+dodging about like two clumsy criminals, one at Midhurst and the other at
+Selham.
+
+When Parker had left (he did it very quickly) Norah got on her feet.
+
+She said, "Go and find Kendal and tell him to bring the car around at
+once."
+
+I asked her what she was going to do?
+
+"Do?" she flashed at me. She had changed all in a moment into a woman
+whom I did not know.
+
+"I'm going to fetch her back," she said. She had wriggled into her coat.
+"We'll overtake her before she gets to Selham, if you're quick."
+
+I looked at my watch. It was barely half-past four. Yes, if we were
+quick, if we started at once, if we let the new car rip we should
+overtake her on the road, or at the station before she could get into
+that train with Charlie Thesiger in it. I meant, and Norah's eyes meant,
+that we would stop her going with him, if we had to drag her from the
+platform.
+
+We ran to the garage to find Kendal. The new car, the superb black and
+white creature, stood in the middle of the courtyard, ready to start when
+Jimmy's wire came. So far it was all right.
+
+But we had reckoned without Kendal, the chauffeur.
+
+Kendal, absolved from the four-sixteen train at Midhurst, was at his tea
+in the servants' hall, and at my summons he came out slowly, munching as
+he came. He was visibly outraged at our intrusion on his sacred leisure.
+And when he was ordered to start at once for Selham, he refused. There
+was no train from Victoria, he said, between the four-four that Mr.
+Jevons hadn't come by and the five fifty-two. _If_, Kendal said, he did
+come by Victoria, and he always came by Waterloo.
+
+What was the sense, said Kendal, with his mouth full, of going to Selham
+when we hadn't got a wire?
+
+The sense of it, Norah told him, was that we had a message--an important
+message--for Mrs. Jevons, which she _must_ get before she started.
+
+At this Kendal left off munching and looked at my wife. Even in my
+eagerness I was struck by the singular intelligence of that look. There
+was nothing covert in it. On the contrary it was a most straightforward
+and transparent look. Kendal's knowledge--which might have sought cover
+if you had hunted it--had come out to meet ours on equal terms.
+
+It only lasted for the fraction of a second. Kendal repeated firmly, but
+this time respectfully, that she was Mr. Jevons's car and he couldn't
+take her out without Mr. Jevons's orders, for if he did Mr. Jevons would
+give him the sack.
+
+To which Norah replied that Mr. Jevons would give him the sack if he
+didn't, or if he made us miss that train by arguing. I told him sternly
+to look sharp. He looked it and we got off. I had begun to crank up the
+car myself while I spoke.
+
+But he had wasted three minutes of our valuable fifteen. Though on the
+open road we speeded up the car to her sixty miles an hour, we had to
+slow down in the narrow lanes. Once we were held up by a country cart,
+and once by cows in our track, and Norah was beside herself at each halt.
+
+As we careened into the station yard I thought that my wife would have
+hurled herself out of the car.
+
+The station-master stood by the booking-office door. He had an ominous
+air of leisure. And when he saw us coming he looked at his watch.
+
+He told us that we had missed the train by three minutes (the three
+minutes that Kendal had wasted).
+
+I had jumped out of the car and was telling Kendal that it was all his
+fault, and that if he'd done what he was told we should have caught the
+train, when he turned on me as only a chauffeur convicted of folly can
+turn.
+
+"Stand away from the car, sir," he shouted. He jerked her nose round with
+the savage energy of a chauffeur in the wrong; he seemed to impart his
+own fury to the car. She snorted and screamed as he backed her and drove
+her forward and backed her again.
+
+And again he shouted to me. "You get in, sir, if you don't want to be
+left be'ind."
+
+As he seemed to be animated chiefly by the fear of Jevons (whom, by the
+way, he adored), we could only suppose that his idea was to fly back to
+Amershott in time for Jimmy's wire.
+
+On the high road past the station he took the wrong turn.
+
+_I_ shouted then, "What do you think you're doing, you confounded fool?"
+
+"Ketch the London train at 'Orsham, sir," said Kendal. And he grinned.
+
+"You can't do it," we said.
+
+"I'll 'ave a try," said Kendal.
+
+His honour as a chauffeur was at stake. His blood was up. His knowledge
+had begun to work in him and he adored his master. He knew what he was
+trying to do.
+
+We could do it if we kept our heads; if we exceeded the speed limit; if
+we had luck; if we didn't break down; if neither the county constabulary
+nor the country traffic held us up.
+
+Kendal declared we could do it easily and allow for accidents. At Horsham
+Junction you have nearly half an hour to wait between the arrival of the
+Midhurst and Selham train and the departure of the London express. And
+the local trains take more than half an hour to get from Selham to
+Horsham. At a pinch you could speed the car up to the limit of the local
+train. And, as we had to allow for accidents, we did speed her up
+whenever we saw a clean track before us.
+
+The run to Selham was nothing to it. It was as if we were racing the
+train with its three minutes start, as if, positively, we might overtake
+it at any of the intermediate stations, as if it were in this hope that
+we dashed up the long white slope to Petworth.
+
+The heat of the day gathered over our heads and smouldered in the east.
+
+And as we ran I realized at last why we were running and what the race
+was and the hunt, and what our quarry. I remembered that other slower
+chase that was yet so keen and so agonizing; that hunting down of the
+same tender flesh and blood, over the Channel and across a foreign
+country. That was bad enough; but it was not like this. For then I was
+alone in my hunting of Viola; there was nobody but me, who loved her, to
+see her run to earth and caught crouching in her corner. That she would
+crouch, this time, and hide herself, I had no doubt. This hunt that I
+shared with her sister and her servant was abominable to me and shameful.
+And between the shame of that flight of hers and this flight there was no
+comparison. You don't go looking at belfries with Charlie Thesiger. I
+could not reconcile that enchanting and enchanted Viola of the garden of
+Bruges with this dreadful flying figure.
+
+I hated myself; I hated Kendal, the chauffeur, as I sat behind his tight,
+efficient body that quivered with the fury of the hunt. (To think that
+_his_ blood should be up and against Viola!) I hated the car that seemed
+more than ever a living thing, that breathed and snorted and vibrated
+with the same passion, and was endowed with this incredible speed and
+this superhuman power. With its black nose and white flanks, and its
+black hood and the black wings of its splash-boards, it was some terrible
+and sinister and malignant monster of prey hunting down Viola. Its body
+had been built, its engines had been forged, to hunt down Viola. The
+infernal thing had been invented to hunt down Viola.
+
+Somewhere between Petworth and Fittleworth Kendal stopped to water his
+engine. It was then that we noticed how the gathering heat was piled into
+a bank of cloud over the east. At the back of our necks we could feel a
+little hot puff of wind that came up from the west.
+
+"Shouldn't wonder if there was a storm," said Kendal. He added, with the
+ghost of a grin, "If Mr. Jevons sees that cloud, sir, he'll not wire to
+be met at Midhurst. He'd crawl home on his 'ands and knees first."
+
+He slipped into his seat and we dashed on.
+
+At Fittleworth, within a stone's-throw of the railway and the road, there
+is a patch of moor where the ground rises in a hillock. In July and
+August when the heather's out this hillock is a crimson landmark above
+the water meadows.
+
+When we came within sight of it Kendal suddenly slowed down, then jammed
+his brakes hard, and with an awful grinding and snorting the car came to
+a stand-still.
+
+Kendal stood up. He muttered something about being blowed. Then he
+turned.
+
+"Got the glasses there, sir?"
+
+I found the glasses, but I didn't give them to Kendal. I stood up too and
+looked through them.
+
+I couldn't see anything at first.
+
+"There, sir," said Kendal, pointing. "No. You're looking too much to the
+left. You got to get right o' thet sandy patch--against thet there clump
+of heather. Now d'you see, sir?"
+
+I did.
+
+Kendal had made out with the naked eye a figure, the figure of a woman,
+seated on the hillside, a white figure that showed plainly against the
+red background of the heather.
+
+"It's Mrs. Jevons, sir," he stated.
+
+It was.
+
+I could see her quite distinctly through the field-glasses. She was
+sitting on the clump of heather to the right of the sandy patch, settled
+and motionless, in the attitude of one who waited at her ease, with hours
+before her. And she was alone.
+
+We went on as far as we could towards the moor. Norah and I left the car
+and struck across the moor by the sandy track that led to the bare patch
+and the clump of heather.
+
+The seated figure must have been aware of us from the first moment of our
+approach. You couldn't miss that black and white car as it charged along
+the highway, or as it stood now, with its engines still humming, by the
+roadside. But the figure remained seated in its attitude of waiting. It
+waited while we crossed the moor; and as we climbed the hillock we became
+intensely aware of it and of its immobility.
+
+We saw its face fixed on us with an expression of tranquil patience and
+expectation. I may say that I felt an intolerable embarrassment before
+this quietness of the hunted thing that we had run to earth; especially
+as it was on me, and not Norah, that Viola's face was fixed as we came
+nearer.
+
+Then she smiled at me; there was neither conciliation nor defiance
+in her smile, but a sort of serene assurance and--yes, it was
+unmistakable--contempt.
+
+She said, "Whatever do you think you're doing _now_?"
+
+I said we might not know what we were doing, but we knew what we were
+going to do. We were going to take her back with us in the car.
+
+At that she asked us (but without any sign of perturbation) if we had got
+Jimmy there?
+
+Norah said No, our idea was to run back to Amershott before Jimmy got
+there.
+
+"Where were you running to when you saw me sitting up here?" she said.
+
+I said we'd meant to catch her at Selham but we missed the train and were
+trying to get to Horsham before the London train started.
+
+She was looking at me now with a sort of compassion, the tenderness of
+her contempt.
+
+"I see," she said. "You _were_ clever, weren't you?"
+
+She looked at her watch. "Well, as you _are_ here," she said, "I'd let
+you run me down to Horsham, if you want a run, only I can't very well use
+Jimmy's car."
+
+I think it was Norah who asked her what on earth she was doing at
+Fittleworth.
+
+"Can't you see," she said, "that I'm waiting for the next train?"
+
+"Did you walk here from Amershott, or what?" I said.
+
+She said, "Rather not. I was in the train."
+
+Then Norah said, "What happened?"
+
+It had dawned on us both how odd it was that Viola should be here,
+apparently alone, at Fittleworth. It was also odd how we were all
+ignoring Charlie. I believe I had a sort of idea that she had got him
+hidden somewhere in the landscape.
+
+Viola smiled a reminiscent smile. "If you _must_ know," she said, "what
+happened was that Charlie was in that train, too--he came bursting out on
+to the platform at Selham, awfully pleased with himself, because he'd
+picked my luggage up at Midhurst and bagged a corner seat for me, and
+made faces at people to keep them out."
+
+"Did you know he was going up to town?" I said.
+
+"No, of course I didn't. He didn't know it himself. There was no reason
+why he shouldn't go. And you'd have thought there was no reason why we
+shouldn't go together. He was all right till we got to Petworth. But
+after that he lost his head and made such an ass of himself that I had to
+get out here and make him go on by himself. Silly idiot!"
+
+We were sitting in the heather, one on each side of her, and I saw my
+wife slip her arm into hers and hug it to her.
+
+"Did _you_ know," she said, "that Charlie'd gone?"
+
+We didn't answer. We simply couldn't.
+
+And then Viola said, "Poor little Norah!"
+
+And she told her to run away for ten minutes while she talked to me.
+
+"Why poor little Norah?" I asked when we were alone.
+
+"Because," she said, "you frightened her."
+
+"I? Frightened her?"
+
+"Yes," she said. "You made her think I was going to run away with
+Charlie. There's no good trying to look as if you didn't. You're quite
+awful, Furny, in the things you think. You can't help it, I know. You're
+so good, so shockingly good, and you can't bear other people to be
+naughty. You thought I'd run away to Belgium with Jimmy and you came
+rushing after me and fetched me back. You thought I'd run away with
+Charlie and you came rushing--in your dreadful rectitude, and in Jimmy's
+motor-car that he won't let anybody look at. You'll have an awful time
+with Jimmy when you get back. It's going to rain, and there'll be mud on
+the car, and he'll dance with rage when he sees it. And he won't think
+it's any excuse if you tell him you thought I was running away with
+Charlie, and you took the car to fetch me back; he'll say you'd no
+business to think it and in any case you'd no business to take the car
+out. And poor Kendal will be sacked.
+
+"That's all you've done," she said, "by your fussy interference."
+
+She went on. "It wouldn't matter what you think about me--but it was
+beastly of you to go and make Norah think it."
+
+I said I didn't suppose either of us thought anything, except that since
+she was going up to town with the idea of leaving her husband, it was not
+desirable that she should go up with Charlie Thesiger.
+
+"Who could possibly have supposed," she said, "that Charlie would be such
+an ass?"
+
+I said I for one could.
+
+"Oh, you--haven't I told you you're always supposing things?"
+
+"Surely?" I said, "you must have seen--yourself--"
+
+She smiled. "My dear--I couldn't see anything but poor Jimmy."
+
+"And yet," I said, "you could think of leaving him?"
+
+She moaned. "You fool--you fool--that's _why_ I'm thinking of it."
+
+She pressed her hands to her eyes as if she shut back the sight of him.
+
+"You aren't thinking of it," I said. "You haven't left him. You've only
+been for a good long walk to Fittleworth, and we've come to fetch you
+back in the car."
+
+"Haven't I told you that I can't and won't use Jimmy's car?"
+
+"You can't use it to run away from him in; but you can very well use it
+to go back to him."
+
+"I'm not going back to him," she said. "Can't you see that I've burnt my
+boats?"
+
+"You may have burnt the old ones, Viola," I said. "But you can build
+new."
+
+"You must give me time, Wally. It'll take a long time. And you don't
+understand me. I _want_ to get away from Jimmy. That's why I'm going away
+now, while he isn't there. That's what I mean by burning my boats.
+If I go back to him--if I see him--I shall never get away. I shan't have
+the courage. I shall just crumple up with the first sight of him--with
+the first word he says--"
+
+"Why not," I said, "crumple up?"
+
+She lifted her head as I had seen her lift it before.
+
+"Because," she said, "I wish to be straight."
+
+I asked her if running away behind Jimmy's back was her idea of
+straightness? To which she replied that _my_ rectitude was excruciating
+and that I'd twist anything to a moral purpose, but it was twisting all
+the same. Couldn't I see that _the_ awful thing would be to come sneaking
+back and pretend to Jimmy that she hadn't run away from him?--If that was
+my idea of straightness she was sorry for me.
+
+I said, "My dear child, you must see that running away by yourself is one
+thing, and running away with Charlie Thesiger is another. It would be all
+very well if Charlie hadn't got into that train."
+
+She wanted to know what that mattered when she had got out of the train?
+I suggested that the people who saw Charlie get in hadn't seen her get
+out, and that she must look at the thing as it appeared to other people.
+
+"Look," I said, "at the facts. Mrs. Jevons walks to Selham Station for
+the London train. Captain Thesiger joins her there, presumably by
+pre-arrangement, leaving by Midhurst station so that they may not be seen
+going away together. She is, however, seen entering his compartment at
+Selham. At Fittleworth she is seized with prudence and with panic. She is
+seen getting out on to the platform. And she is seen two hours later
+following the Captain up to London by the next train."
+
+She seemed to be considering it.
+
+"How many people," she said, "know that Charlie was in that train? People
+that matter--I don't mean you and Norah."
+
+"Your butler, your parlourmaid, your housemaid, your cook, your
+gardener--by this time--and Baby's nurse--"
+
+("And Baby," she interrupted.)
+
+"--The guard of the train, the booking clerks and porters at Midhurst and
+Selham, and the station-masters at Midhurst and Selham and Petworth
+(probably) and Fittleworth. Quite a number of important people, to say
+nothing of Kendal, who is perhaps the most important of them all."
+
+"And who was it who brought Kendal into it?"
+
+I was silent.
+
+"Nobody but you, Furny, or a born fool, would have dreamed of bringing
+Kendal in."
+
+I said that a little reflection would show her that it was impossible to
+keep him out. To this she said, "Please go and find Norah. I want her."
+
+I found Norah. I warned her that Viola was going to be extremely
+difficult. She said it would be all right if I left Viola to her.
+
+As we approached, Viola turned to her sister with an air of outraged and
+long-suffering dignity.
+
+"Norah," she said. "I do wish you would make Wally see what an ass he's
+making of himself."
+
+My wife said, in her admirable, judicial way, "How an ass?"
+
+"Well--trying to make me go back and bringing Kendal out here to fetch
+me. He doesn't seem to see that if I do go back with him it'll be as good
+as proclaiming to everybody that I ran away with Charlie and was found
+out by my clever brother-in-law who tracked me down in my husband's
+motor-car and brought me back in it. Whereas, if I go quietly on to
+London, as I meant to and as everybody knows I meant to, it'll be all
+right."
+
+"It won't," I said, "as long as Charlie's there. It will be if you come
+home with us in the car now, and go up to town with Norah and me on
+Monday."
+
+"I've told you," she said wearily, "that I can't go back because I shall
+never get away if I do. And I _must_--I must--and I will."
+
+"Yes, dear, and you shall," my wife said, as if she were humouring
+somebody who was mad.
+
+But for a mad woman Viola, I must say, was extraordinarily lucid.
+
+"What excuse did you give to Kendal for following me in this way?"
+
+"We told him we had an important message to give you before you started."
+
+"Important message! That was pretty thin. I'd have thought of something
+cleverer than that if I'd been you. You _are_ a precious pair of
+conspirators. Can't you see that it's you--with your ridiculous
+suspicions--that have given me away?"
+
+Norah answered her.
+
+"Oh, Vee-Vee," she said, "we hadn't any suspicions. The message was to
+tell you that Charlie was in the train. We knew you didn't know it."
+
+To this Viola said coldly, "Walter didn't."
+
+I tried to reassure her, but she waved me away with her hands and
+implored me to "let her think."
+
+"Well," she said presently, "it isn't as bad as you've tried to make it,
+even with Kendal thrown in. You came rushing after me to give me a
+message, and you _have_ given me a message, and now you'll go and tell
+Kendal that it's all right, and thank him nicely for catching me up, and
+_you_ rush home again, and I go on quietly to London by the next train."
+
+"Yes, dear," said Norah. "And I'm going up with you while Wally rushes
+home and follows with Nurse and Baby and the luggage by the morning
+train."
+
+"That's all very well," said Viola, "but who explains to Jimmy?"
+
+"Oh," said my wife, "Wally does that. You can trust him. Besides you
+haven't got to explain things to Jimmy."
+
+Well, we settled it that way. It was the only possible solution. The more
+she thought of it, Viola said, the more she liked it. And she rubbed it
+into me that it was Norah's solution, and not mine.
+
+Her last words to me as I saw them off at Fittleworth Station were that I
+needn't worry. It was going to rain. And when poor Jimmy saw his car come
+in all splashed with rain and covered with mud--"It won't be me," she
+said, "you'll have to explain about."
+
+And it wasn't.
+
+The storm came down just as we were leaving Fittleworth, and we brought
+that car back in an awful state. You wouldn't have known it had ever been
+a black-and-white car. And Jevons (in a mackintosh) was waiting for me in
+the lane by the courtyard gates. He had caught the early train, but he
+had seen the storm coming and had walked up from Midhurst, and, as I say,
+he was waiting for us.
+
+Well--neither Viola nor Norah was with us, and the language, that Jimmy
+poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour
+of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the
+colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a
+gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly,
+a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur
+was prostrated with admiration.
+
+"When Mr. Jevons lays himself out to express himself, sir," he said
+to me as we retreated, "he pulls it off what you may call a bleedin'
+masterpiece."
+
+I tried to explain about Viola an hour later. But he wouldn't listen to
+me. That was all right, he said. He was going to ask us to take her for a
+month or so anyhow. It was getting a bit stuffy for her down here.
+
+Then he fixed me with "Did Thesiger go up with her?"
+
+There was no good trying to lie to Jevons, so I said that had been
+Thesiger's idea, but Viola hadn't cared much about having him, for she
+had got out at Fittleworth and taken Norah on with her.
+
+"I suppose the young ass tried to make love to her. He's fool enough for
+anything," said Jimmy. But he reverted. "I still can't see why you took
+the car out. Anybody but an idiot would have known it was going to rain."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+HIS BOOK
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+At this period, and even now when I go back to it, I am completely
+puzzled by Jevons. Here was a man who professed to understand his wife,
+to know what she was feeling and thinking in every moment of her
+existence; he would tell you that a man was a fool if he couldn't get the
+woman he wanted; and yet, having got her, he didn't seem to know in the
+most elementary way how to keep her. He didn't seem to care. He adored
+her, and yet he didn't seem to care. I believe he knew that she was
+leaving him, that she had left him; and yet, here he was, treating her
+departure as if it didn't matter, as if it were the most natural and
+reasonable thing in the world, and lashing himself into a fury about his
+wretched motor-car. And he was treating the dangerous element in the
+case, Charlie Thesiger, as if it didn't matter either; as if it didn't
+exist. He must have known we'd taken his car out to bring his wife
+back--he knew we wouldn't have touched the beastly thing for anything
+short of saving her life or his honour; and yet he had flown into a
+passion and sworn at his chauffeur because we'd taken it. He adored his
+wife and yet he behaved as if she were of no importance compared with the
+god he'd made of his motor-car.
+
+All that evening, I remember, he was absorbed in the solitary problem of
+how he could save his god from further outrages. He settled it towards
+midnight by saying that he'd buy another car that we could do what we
+damn-pleased with--a car that wouldn't matter--that you could take out in
+all weathers.
+
+"I'll not have that black-and-white car used as it was used this
+afternoon," he said. And after lashing himself up again he ended quite
+sweetly by saying, "It's my fault, Furny. I ought to have had two cars
+all along."
+
+I said it _would_ be a good plan, if a black-and-white car was only to be
+looked at.
+
+He admitted (with a recrudescence of his old childlike innocence) that he
+liked looking at it. I've no doubt he said it made him feel something,
+but I forget what.
+
+But when the morning came he wouldn't hear of my going. I was to stay out
+my fortnight. It was a fine day and the dust was laid; perhaps he could
+take me for a spin across the Downs to the coast or somewhere. He'd send
+Parker up to town to look after Nurse and Baby and the luggage. He didn't
+want, he said, to be left alone.
+
+Oh yes, it was plain to me that he didn't want to be left--that he
+couldn't bear it. He was trying to lure me to stay with him by holding
+out this prospect of a spin. I have since believed that he would have
+agreed to take his car out in almost any weather, if that had been the
+only way to keep me. He clung to me desperately, pathetically, as he had
+clung nine years ago at Bruges when Viola had left him there. He might,
+possibly, this time, have clung to anybody; he was so afraid of being
+left alone. I think he felt that loneliness here, in the vast, unfamiliar
+landscape that he had invaded, would be as bad as loneliness in Bruges.
+He would be abandoned, as he had been then, in a foreign country.
+
+So till Sunday morning I stayed with him.
+
+It was on my last evening, the evening of Saturday, August the first,
+that he spoke of Viola.
+
+He asked me if I thought that Norah and I could keep her with us, if
+necessary, for--he hesitated--for six months? (It was as if he had given
+her six months.) It would, he said, be better.
+
+I said that Norah would be delighted to keep her for any number of
+months. But did he think she'd stay?
+
+He said why shouldn't she stay? Of course she'd stay. She was awfully
+fond of us and it was the best thing she could do. And it would make it
+so much easier for him. He'd feel more comfortable as long as he knew she
+was with us.
+
+He spoke as if it were he and not Viola who was leaving.
+
+I said then that though we were glad to have her we couldn't, of course,
+accept any responsibility--
+
+He smiled slightly and asked, "For what?"
+
+I said, "Well--" And he answered his own question in the pause I made.
+
+"I suppose you mean for anything she may take it into her head to do?"
+
+I put it to him that Viola's movements were not always exactly
+calculable. She might take it into her head to do anything. I really
+couldn't answer for her.
+
+"_You_ can't," he said. "But _I_ can. She may go off and look at a belfry
+or two." (I should have said that "looking at the belfry" was a phrase
+the family had adopted for any queer thing that any of us might do.) "If
+there's a belfry anywhere to be seen you may depend upon it she'd want to
+look at it."
+
+"Whether," I said, "it's in a dangerous place or not?"
+
+"Whether it's in a dangerous place or not. But I'll trust you to keep her
+out of dangerous places. That's rather what I wanted to talk to you
+about."
+
+I protested. "There's no good talking about it. I've told you that's just
+precisely the responsibility I won't take. And I won't let Norah take it.
+If you think there's going to be any danger you must look after your own
+wife yourself."
+
+"My dear fellow, how can I look after her if I'm not here?"
+
+"You're as much here as I am," I said. "More so. And she's your wife, not
+mine."
+
+I can say now--there's no reason why I shouldn't; it would only amuse
+Jimmy if he were to see it written--I can say now that for one awful
+moment I suspected Jimmy of meditating an infidelity. Perhaps he was; but
+not as we count infidelity.
+
+He ignored what I took to be the essence of the thing.
+
+"We don't know," he said, "where any of us are going to be for the next
+four months--or the next four years. I know that _I_ jolly well shan't be
+here. What I want to propose is this: that you'll look after Viola and
+let her have your house when she wants to be in town; and that you have
+this house for yourself and Norah and Baby when you want to be in the
+country--just as if it was your own. There'll be that other motor-car you
+can have--as if it was your own. You can run up to town in it. And you'll
+probably find that the country will be the best place for you. It'll be
+much the best place for _them_, and the safest--if you aren't here."
+
+I couldn't see it even then. I said, "My dear chap, why shouldn't I be
+here? I certainly mean to be here."
+
+And he considered it and said, "I don't see why not. It's different for
+you. You've got a child and I haven't."
+
+I said I couldn't see what Baby had to do with it.
+
+And he replied that a young child was an infernal complication, and that
+he was jolly glad he hadn't got one. What Baby had to do with it was to
+keep me out of it.
+
+Then I asked him what on earth he was talking about.
+
+He said, "_I'm_ talking about the European conflagration. What are you?"
+
+He had been talking about it all the time, he had been thinking of
+nothing but the European conflagration for the last four days. It was the
+thing, he said, that he had prophesied nine years ago--didn't I remember?
+(Oh yes, I remembered; but then, he was always prophesying something.)
+Well then, here it was. And it had come, by God, at the very date he had
+given it.
+
+I can see him sitting there in his study at Amershott Old Grange. He was
+deadly quiet. Not a gesture came to disturb my sense of his tranquil
+triumph in the fulfilment of his prophecy. To say that he enjoyed the
+European conflagration because it had proved him so abundantly right
+would give a false impression of an extraordinary and complicated state
+of mind. There _was_ a sort of exaltation about him (his face positively
+shone, as if the European conflagration illuminated it from afar); but it
+was a holy and a sacred exaltation, pure from egoism, except that he saw
+himself--there's no doubt that already he did see himself--figuring.
+
+I remember saying, as lots of people were saying then, that I didn't
+suppose for a moment we should be dragged into it.
+
+"Dragged?" he said. "Dragged? We shall be in it without dragging--in the
+very thick."
+
+From the instant the Germans broke into Luxembourg--and he gave them
+twenty-four hours--we should be in it. We couldn't keep out with a rag of
+honour to our names. France, he declared, would be in to-day. He gave us,
+I _think_--but I do not like to say positively that he gave us--three
+days; he couldn't have been as dead right as all that.
+
+What struck me then as so extravagantly odd was, not that he had
+foreseen the war, and England's part in it, but that he should have
+seen himself there, in the thick--blazing away in the very middle of the
+conflagration. What on earth Jimmy conceived that _he_ should have to
+do with it I couldn't think. And all of a sudden I had a reminiscence of
+Jevons as I had seen him nine years ago, talking to Reggie Thesiger in
+Viola's rooms at Hampstead, prophesying war, and lamenting that he
+wouldn't be in it because he was an arrant coward.
+
+And as I looked at him again I saw that what made his face shine like
+that was the sweat that had broken out on it.
+
+Then he made a remark about Charlie Thesiger. Thesiger, he said, knew all
+about it. He had gone up--he supposed I knew that?--to offer his services
+to the War Office in the event of England's coming in.
+
+That Charlie had used the opportunity of going to make love to Jimmy's
+wife didn't seem to bother Jimmy in the least.
+
+Sunday, I remember, was a fine day, with all the dust laid, and Jimmy
+made himself lovable by running me up to London in his sacred car. He
+still clung--I could see that he clung--to the superstition of its
+sanctity.
+
+He left me at my door in Edwardes Square, which he refused to enter. I
+think he was afraid of seeing Viola. I thought at the time that this was
+because he was aware of her attitude; that he knew she was at the end of
+her tether, and that he wanted to be righteously fair, to give her time
+to think about leaving him, if she wanted to leave him; that he was
+behaving now as he had behaved at Bruges when he stood back and let me
+have my innings, and gave her her chance to free herself. And yet I was
+puzzled. Even he could hardly stand back to give Thesiger an innings. He
+_may_ have had an inkling. There may have been something of his queer,
+scrupulous tenderness in this avoidance of her; there may have been his
+reckless propensity to take the risk; but I am convinced that even then
+his main object was--like Viola--to burn his boats. He was afraid that if
+he were to see Viola again he wouldn't be able to go through with it. He
+may even have been glad that she had left him, because it had made his
+way easier.
+
+And so, when he had landed me at my door, he turned the black nose of his
+car round and ran out of Edwardes Square faster than he had run in; as if
+he were afraid that the place would catch and keep him.
+
+He didn't go back to Amershott. He stayed in London in one of his clubs
+(he had several now, besides the club in Dover Street), and I saw him
+sometimes. I didn't say anything to Viola about him. I didn't tell her he
+was in town. It was as if there had been some tacit understanding among
+the three of us; there must have been some tacit agreement between him
+and me.
+
+Sunday passed, and Monday somehow; and on Tuesday, the fourth, we were
+all holding our breaths under the tension of the Ultimatum.
+
+I have no doubt that in those three days I had some opinion of my own
+about the European conflagration, that I must have stared with my own
+eyes sometimes at the fate of Europe and the fate of England, that I must
+have felt _some_ horror and anxiety and excitement that was my own. But
+as I look back on it all I am aware chiefly of Jevons, of _his_ opinions,
+_his_ vision, _his_ horror and excitement. I seem to have spent the
+greater part of those three days with Jevons, and there are moments, in
+looking back, when he fills the scene. He is the largest and most
+prominent figure in the crowd that walked the streets with me on the
+evening of the Ultimatum, that waited with me outside Buckingham Palace,
+when London let itself loose in madness; he seems the only sane figure in
+that crowd or in the processions that moved for hours on end up and down
+Parliament Street, between Trafalgar Square and Palace Yard. It is as if
+I had stood alone with Jevons before the Mansion House at midnight when
+the Ultimatum was declared.
+
+And when I say that it was his horror and anxiety and excitement--and his
+defiance and exaltation, if you like--that I felt, I do not mean that
+Jevons talked about it. He was, for those three days, mostly silent. It
+is that I saw him consumed and burned up by the fever of patriotism and
+war, and that beside his passion any emotion I may have felt hardly
+counted.
+
+And every minute we expected to hear him say that he _liked_ the War
+because it made him feel manly. Norah and I pretended to each other that
+he would say it--it was our idea of a joke, God forgive us.
+
+It was on Wednesday, the fifth, very early in the morning, that he began
+trying to enlist. It was the first thing he did; and we thought _that_
+funny.
+
+We thought it so funny that even if he hadn't told us not to tell Viola
+we wouldn't have told her; we felt that it wouldn't have been quite fair
+to either of them.
+
+And none of the Thesigers, or anybody connected with the Thesigers, could
+take Jimmy seriously for one moment. With General Thesiger waiting to be
+sent to the Front, and Reggie Thesiger preparing to go, and Charlie
+Thesiger who might be called on any day, with Bertie and all his male
+cousins enlisting and pulling all the ropes they could lay their hands on
+to get their commissions, they hadn't time for Jimmy and his importunity.
+He _was_ importunate; and I'm afraid that in those weeks Jimmy didn't
+exist for them or any of us, except as a jest that lightened our labours
+now and then. They were so busy getting their kits that they couldn't
+even think of the fate of Europe.
+
+And Viola--what she was thinking and feeling God (or Jevons) only knew.
+She didn't tell us. But I was pretty sure that with Reggie starting for
+the front in two weeks it wasn't Jevons she was thinking of. I suspected
+that she wasn't far from feeling that secret hatred of Jimmy that had
+come to her once or twice before, when she had thought of Reggie.
+Remember that all this time, even after that illness of hers last year,
+when she and Reggie met they met as well-bred strangers. She had never
+lowered her flag or made one sign. She had just suffered in secret with
+the thought of Reggie biting deeper and deeper into her mind, till,
+wherever the memory of Reggie was there was a wound. And she had been ill
+of her wounds and had nearly died of them.
+
+And in those two weeks she had begun to look as if she were going to be
+ill again. It was bad enough for Norah and for all of them, but conceive
+what it must have been for her!
+
+And so we came to Reggie's last day and the night when he came to us to
+say good-bye.
+
+I think she must have written to him or made some sign. But I'm not sure.
+I only know that he was prepared for her; and that when she came into the
+room at the last minute, as he turned from Norah's arms, he closed on
+her, and that they held each other an instant--tight, like lovers--and
+that neither of them said a word.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After that the War must have seemed to her, as it seemed to all of us, to
+have wiped Jimmy out.
+
+Just at first we thought that this was the secret of Jimmy's agony, of
+his rushings round and round, and of his ceaseless manoeuvring. He knew
+that the War was going to wipe him out; he knew that the world had no use
+for his sort, the men who only wrote things. There was an end of his
+writing, of his novels and his short stories and his plays, and if he
+didn't look out and do something there would be an end of _him_. And he
+couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear to be reduced to inactivity and
+insignificance--to be wiped out. He wasn't going to be made an end of if
+he could help it. These were the things we said about him. What we saw,
+or thought we saw, was the revolt of his egoism. It didn't look quite
+sane.
+
+He was furious when he found out that, even if he enlisted, he couldn't
+buy a commission. He didn't seem to realize that there were things he
+couldn't buy. He was still more furious when he found that the Thesigers
+wouldn't help him. They _could_ help him, he declared, if they liked.
+Commissions were being given every day to the wrong people, by influence.
+
+Up till now, with his talk about commissions, he had been purely funny,
+and we had laughed at him. But when he found that he couldn't enlist,
+that they wouldn't have him, that he wasn't strong enough--they'd
+discovered a leaky valve in his heart or something--and that in any case
+he was too old, when he broke down as he tried to tell me this, he wasn't
+funny at all. He'd been to every recruiting station in London and his own
+county, and they all said the same thing. He was too old.
+
+This, he said, was where his beastly celebrity had gone back on him. He
+could very easily have lied about his age (he didn't look it), in fact,
+he _had_ lied about it freely, to every one of them; but his age was
+recorded against him in the Year-Books of his craft. And he couldn't lie
+about his heart, he didn't know it had a valve that leaked. He didn't
+believe it. He had given the man who examined it the lie; and he had gone
+to a heart-specialist to get the report (which he regarded as a libel)
+contradicted, and the heart-specialist had confirmed it, and told him he
+wasn't the first man who had come to him to get an opinion overruled. He
+said he was to keep quiet and avoid excitement. He mustn't dream of going
+to the front. I think the specialist must have been sorry for Jevons, for
+he went on to tell him that there were other ways in which he could serve
+his country. He seems to have talked a lot of rot about the pen being
+mightier than the sword, and to have advised Jimmy to "use his wonderful
+pen." And at that Jimmy seems to have broken from him in a passion.
+
+And here he was, in a passion still, ramping up and down that private
+room he had at his club, and saying, "Damn my powerful pen, Furny! Damn
+my powerful pen!" The whole system, he said, was rotten. He'd a good mind
+to expose it. He'd expose it in the papers. _That_ was the use he'd make
+of his powerful pen. See how they'd like _that_.
+
+I remember it because it was then that I laid before him my own problem.
+The _Daily Post_ had asked me if I'd go out as its War-Correspondent. I
+was to wire "Yes" or "No" in the next half-hour, and if I went I should
+have to start to-night.
+
+I said I didn't know what to do about it.
+
+He stared. "You don't know what to _do_?"
+
+I said: No. It wasn't so simple when you had a wife and child dependent
+on you. I didn't know whether I ought to take the risk.
+
+And then he said his memorable thing: "If you can take the risk of
+living--My God," he said, "if I only had your luck!"
+
+_His_ luck, I told him, was a dead certainty. There wasn't a paper that
+would refuse Tasker Jevons as War-Correspondent. He'd only got to
+volunteer. Why on earth, I asked him, didn't he?
+
+He became very grave. He seemed to be considering it.
+
+"No," he said, "no. That isn't quite good enough for me. I don't want to
+go out to the war to write about it. I want to do things.
+
+"Perhaps--if there's no other way--I may be driven to it."
+
+For a moment, then, I suspected him. I doubted his sincerity. He was
+making all this fuss about enlisting to cover up his cowardice. He must
+have known all the time they wouldn't take him. He was safe. But put
+before him a thing he could do--do better than anybody else--a thing that
+would take him into the thick and keep him there, if he wasn't killed,
+and he said, No, thank you. That wasn't quite good enough for him.
+
+I didn't believe in his "Perhaps--if there was no other way--he might be
+driven to it." I saw him driven to do anything he didn't mean to do!
+
+Meanwhile he drove _me_. Before I had seen him I hadn't really meant to
+take that job. He did something to me that changed my mind.
+
+That was how I went out to Belgium as a War-Correspondent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was out for a month. Then--I was in Ghent at the same old hotel in the
+Place d'Armes--I got a touch of malaria and had to come home, and the
+_Daily Post_ sent another man out instead of me.
+
+That was how I managed to see Jevons in what Norah called his second
+war-phase. He had been trying hard to get out with the Red Cross
+volunteers, and it had been even funnier, she said, and more pathetic,
+than his enlisting. I don't know what Viola thought of his war-phases;
+to Norah they were just that--funny and pathetic. To the other Thesigers
+he was purely offensive. They resented Jevons's trying to have anything
+to do with the war, as if it had been some sort of impertinent
+interference with their prerogative. His mother-in-law, I know, had no
+patience with him. His frantic efforts to get to the front were nothing,
+she declared, but a form of war-panic. It took some people like that. She
+said the only really cruel thing I had ever heard her say of him. She
+said he _looked_ panic-stricken. (He was lean and haggard by this time,
+and had a haunted look which may have been what she meant.) And well--if
+it wasn't panic that was the matter with him it was self-advertisement,
+and if I'd any regard for him or any influence with him I'd stop it. The
+little man was simply making himself ridiculous.
+
+I was staying in Canterbury with Norah for the weekend, and I heard all
+about it. He did seem to have been rather funny. He had begun with a
+scheme for taking out a Red Cross Motor Field Ambulance which he proposed
+to command in person. He had offered himself with his convoy first to the
+War Office, then to the Admiralty, then to the War Office again, and the
+War Office and the Admiralty kicked him out. Then he had gone round to
+each of the Red Cross Societies in turn, the American included. And they
+had all got their own schemes for Motor Field Ambulances, and didn't want
+his. What they _did_ want was his subscriptions and his powerful pen to
+support their schemes. And Jevons had said, "Damn my powerful pen!" to
+every one of them. As for subscriptions, he subscribed enormously to his
+own Motor Ambulance Corps. He had actually raised his unit, found his
+volunteers, his surgeons, his chauffeurs and his stretcher-bearers, he
+had bought and equipped a Motor Ambulance car, the one he had proposed to
+go with himself. And they took his subscriptions and his Ambulance Car
+and his volunteers; but they wouldn't take him; no, not at any price.
+They put one of his surgeons at the head of the thing instead of him and
+sent it out without him, and Jimmy had to see it go. But when they
+proposed that Jimmy should use his powerful pen to maintain it in the
+field, he swore that he would use it to expose the whole system. And when
+he found that the responsibility for rejecting his services rested with
+the War Office, he went down to the War Office and complained, and to the
+Admiralty and complained, and to the Home Office and complained. After
+that he seems to have visited all the Embassies in turn--the American,
+the French, the Belgian, and I suppose the Russian and the Japanese.
+
+When I asked the Thesigers what he was doing now they said they didn't
+know. They hadn't heard of him and his activities for quite a fortnight,
+and they didn't bother about him. They were too much wrapped up in
+Bertie and in Reggie, even if they hadn't been too busy--every one of
+them up to their necks in work for the Army or the hospitals. They
+admitted that he had sent them large subscriptions.
+
+It seemed to me, as far as I could make out, that Viola hadn't seen or
+heard of him since she had left Amershott. She was too busy and too much
+wrapped in Reggie to bother about him either; at least, it looked like
+it. She seems to have known in a vague way that he had talked about going
+to the front, but I didn't believe she thought he would ever get there.
+
+And he had lain low for a fortnight.
+
+When we had got back to London at noon on Tuesday, which was the end of
+Jimmy's fortnight, I found a wire from Amershott waiting for me. It had
+been sent that morning. It said: "Leaving to-morrow. Must see you urgent
+business. Can you come down this evening. JEVONS."
+
+I knew that he wouldn't send a wire like that without good reason; so I
+went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A light rain was falling when I reached Midhurst. A hired dog-cart met me
+at the station, so I gathered that Jimmy's mad passion for his motor-car
+had survived the war.
+
+And at Amershott everything seemed to have survived. If it had not been
+for troops on the high road, and for the stillness of the coverts, and
+for the recruiting posters stuck everywhere on the barn-doors, and for
+the strange figure of old Perrott driving the mail-cart from Midhurst to
+Amershott instead of his son, you wouldn't have known that the war had
+anything to do with England. And I expected to find Jimmy in his old
+Norfolk suit standing in the garage and looking with adoration at his
+motor-car.
+
+As I thought all this I smiled when Parker told me that Mr. Jevons was in
+the garage. Parker, I noticed, didn't smile.
+
+And in another minute it was Jevons who did all the smiling.
+
+I found him in the garage--no, I can't say I found him, for I didn't
+recognize him, but I heard his voice assuring me that it was he. He was
+in khaki; from head to foot, from his peaked military cap to his puttees
+he was in faultless, well-fitting khaki; even his shirt and his neck-tie
+were khaki. Jimmy's colours showed up wonderfully out of all that
+brownish, greyish, yellowish green. His flush fairly flamed, and his
+eyes, his eyes looked enormous and very bright--great chunks of dark
+sapphire his eyes were. They were twinkling at me.
+
+"It's me all right, old man," he said, and turned from me in his deep
+preoccupation. And as he turned I saw that he wore round his right arm a
+white brassard with a red cross on it.
+
+At the far end of the coach-house where the great black and white idol
+used to stand there was a khaki car with a huge red cross on a white
+square on its flank and on its khaki canvas hood. This was what his eyes
+turned to.
+
+"But--where's the black-and-white god?" I asked.
+
+"There she is," he said, "you're looking at her."
+
+"You haven't--"
+
+"Yes, I have. She's had her new coat on for the last three weeks. You
+couldn't take her out as she was, all black and white. She'd have been
+knocked to bits before we'd begun our job. So I had her painted. She's a
+good enough target for shell-fire as she is."
+
+"You don't mean," I said, "that you're going out?"
+
+"What else have I been meaning ever since there was a war?"
+
+"But--where are you going _to_?"
+
+"Belgium," he said. He added that it was the only blessed place he
+_could_ get to.
+
+"And what are you going to do when you get there?"
+
+He said he was going to scout for wounded, of course.
+
+And as he saw me still incredulous he told me how he'd managed it. He had
+gone every day for three weeks to the Belgian Legation and worried the
+Belgian Minister into a state of nervous prostration. And when the
+Minister was at his worst and was obliged to leave things a bit to his
+secretaries, he'd gone to the secretaries and worried _them_ till the
+First Secretary had given him his passport and a letter of introduction
+to the President of the Belgian Red Cross Society at Ghent. And he had
+gone to Ghent--went there last week--and he had seen the President and
+talked to him. He had talked for ten minutes before his services had been
+accepted by the Belgian Red Cross.
+
+And he was going out to-morrow.
+
+"It's just taken me six weeks to do it. I gave myself six weeks."
+
+Of course I congratulated him. But I couldn't realize it. The whole thing
+seemed incredible. Jevons in his khaki was incredible. The transformed
+motor-car was incredible, as a thing that Jevons was concerned with.
+Above all, it was incredible that he should have sacrificed his god.
+
+I couldn't believe it until Kendal, the chauffeur, turned up, also in
+khaki and with a Red Cross brassard on his right arm. Kendal was credible
+enough; he looked as if he had been going to the war all his life. It was
+evident that he was keen on the adventure. It was also evident that he
+adored Jevons more than ever. By watching Kendal in the act of adoration
+and keeping my eyes fixed on him I was able to take it in, and to assent
+to the statement that Jevons was going to the war.
+
+He was of course if Kendal said so.
+
+Kendal was asking me what I thought of the car.
+
+"She's not the beauty she was, sir," said Kendal. "I don't suppose Mr.
+Jevons will care much how he knocks her about now. And they do say the
+Belgium roads is fair destruction to cars."
+
+I said they were. I'd motored on them. Kendal looked at me as he might
+have looked at the survivor of a shattering experience. Then he looked at
+his car. He seemed to be seeing all the roads in Belgium in a hideous
+vision.
+
+Then he spoke. "Well, they may be bad roads, but Mr. Jevons isn't going
+to be done. He'll take out ten cars before 'e turns back. Ten cars, he
+will."
+
+Yes, yes, I might have known it. Was there ever anything Jevons had made
+up his mind to do and didn't? Had I ever known him turn back from any
+adventure that he had set out on? If he said he was going to the war,
+why couldn't I have known that he would go? The more incredible the thing
+was, the more likely he was to do it.
+
+When I said so he shook his head and said it wasn't really as likely as
+it looked.
+
+We were sitting together after dinner in his garden. Though it was the
+third week in September the nights were still warm. Without Viola, the
+stillness of the place was strange to me, almost uncanny, as if Viola
+were dead and had come back and was listening to us somewhere. I had just
+told him it was splendid of him going out like this, and he had smiled
+back at me and asked, "Like what?" And then I had said I might have known
+it; it was the sort of thing he would do.
+
+No, he went on, it wasn't likely. It had been touch and go, he had only
+just pulled it off by the skin of his teeth. It had given him more
+trouble than anything he'd ever tried for. It had bothered him more. It
+had bothered him most damnably.
+
+I thought he was referring to his struggles with the recruiting depots
+and the War Office and the Home Office and the Embassies and all the rest
+of it. And I said it _was_ pretty hard luck his own Ambulance Corps being
+sent out without him. But he said, No; it wasn't. He hadn't been very
+keen on the Ambulance Corps. He hadn't really wanted to go out with all
+that beastly crowd. This quick scouting game--by himself--was more in his
+line. All he regretted was the time he'd lost.
+
+Well, I said, anyhow he was a lucky beggar to have got what he wanted
+after six weeks.
+
+At that he looked at me suddenly and his face went all sharp and thin. Or
+else I hadn't noticed till then how sharp and thin it was. His flush had
+seemed to flood it and fill it out somehow, and his eyes struck your
+attention like two great flashes of energy. The flash had gone out now as
+he looked at me.
+
+I reminded him: "Haven't you always said you could get what you wanted?"
+
+"Oh yes, I've _said_ it, and I've done it. That's nothing. Any fool can
+do that. The great thing is to make yourself get what you don't want. I
+didn't _want_ to do this. I had to."
+
+"No. You wanted to enlist. But I'm not sure that from your point of view
+this isn't better."
+
+"Jolly lot you know," he said, "about my point of view."
+
+"Your idea," I explained, "of doing things on your own. Isn't that what
+you wanted?"
+
+He answered very slowly: "I don't think--it matters--what I wanted--or
+what I didn't want. It's enough--isn't it?--if I want to _now_--if I want
+it more than anything else?"
+
+I said, No, I didn't think it did matter.
+
+But I hadn't a notion what he meant. I didn't know that he was on the
+edge of a confession. I couldn't see that he was trying to tell me
+something about himself, and that I had started him off by telling him he
+was splendid. It was as if--then--he too had felt that Viola was there
+and listening to us, as if he were speaking to her and not to me.
+
+For the next thing he said was, "I want you to tell Viola about it. Tell
+her it's all right. Tell her I'm all right. See?"
+
+"But shan't you," I said, "be seeing her? Isn't she going to see you off
+or something?"
+
+He said, "No. Much better not. She wouldn't be content with seeing me
+off. She'd try to come out with me. She'd worry me to take her. And
+I'm not going to take her. She isn't to know I'm going till I've gone.
+And she isn't to know where I've gone to. I won't have her coming out
+to me. _You've_ got to see to that, Furny. You've got to stop her if
+she tries to get out. They're _all_ trying. You should just see the
+bitches--tumbling, and wriggling and scrabbling with their claws and
+crawling on their stomachs to get to the front--tearing each other's eyes
+out to get there first. And there are fellows that'll take them. They'll
+even take their wives.
+
+"Not me. Not much. I wouldn't let Viola cross in the same boat with that
+lot.
+
+"It ought to be put a stop to.
+
+"The place I'm going to--the things I'm going to see--and to do--aren't
+fit for women--aren't fit for women to come within ten miles of. Whatever
+you do, Furny--and I don't care what you do--you're not to let her get
+out."
+
+I suppose--I suppose I made him some sort of promise. He says I did. I
+don't remember.
+
+I _do_ remember telling him I thought it was a pity--if he meant to go
+out--that he hadn't seen Viola all this time.
+
+And I remember his answer. "I haven't seen her--all this time--_because_
+I meant to go out. I meant that nothing on this earth should stop me."
+
+"How do you know," I said, "that she'd have stopped you?"
+
+"How do I know? How do I know anything?--It's you who don't know. You
+don't know anything at all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, he went--like that--without telling any of them.
+
+I ran down on the car with him to Folkestone and saw him off on the boat
+to Ostend, he and Kendal, his chauffeur--he, as he pointed out to me,
+superior to Kendal only in the perfect fitting of his khaki. "Otherwise
+there isn't a pin to choose between us. Except," he said, "that Kendal
+doesn't funk it and I do."
+
+And with Kendal grinning from ear to ear over Mr. Jevons's delicious
+joke, and Jimmy waving his khaki cap in a final valediction, and Kendal's
+grin dying abruptly as he achieved the military salute he judged
+appropriate, we parted.
+
+Jimmy's last words to me, thrown over the gunwale, were, "Don't run after
+me, Furny. You won't catch me _this_ time."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Then I went back and told Viola about it. I took her into my library that
+had once been Jevons's study, where he had delivered the Grand Attack. I
+gave her a letter that Jevons had scribbled before lunch in the hotel at
+Folkestone. I suppose he had explained things in it.
+
+But as for me, or any power I had to break it to her, I might just as
+well have told her that he was dead.
+
+Except that perhaps then she wouldn't have turned on me.
+
+"You _knew_ this," she said, "you knew he was going and you never told
+me?"
+
+I said I had only known it last night--how could I have told her?
+
+She persisted. "You _knew_--at what time last night?"
+
+I hesitated and she drove it home.
+
+"You might have wired. It wasn't too late."
+
+I said it was, and that I didn't know that she didn't know till it was
+too late to wire.
+
+"Do you suppose," she said, "--if I'd known--that I should be _here_?"
+
+I couldn't tell her--she was so white under her wound and the shock of
+it--I couldn't tell her that she had given me no reason to suppose that
+she would be with him.
+
+And she went on. "Why couldn't you have wired in the morning, then? I
+could have caught that boat."
+
+"Because, my dear girl, he doesn't want you to go out."
+
+"It doesn't matter what he wants--or thinks he wants--I'm going.
+
+"And what's more," she said, "you've got to take me. That's all you've
+gained by trying to stop me."
+
+I replied that nothing would induce me to take her out, that I'd promised
+Jimmy she shouldn't go.
+
+She said that didn't matter. Jimmy'd know I couldn't keep a silly promise
+like that, and if I wouldn't take her she'd simply go by herself.
+
+I tried to explain to her very gently that her going--at all--was out of
+the question. She would do no good to anybody by going; she would annoy
+Jimmy most frightfully; untrained women were not wanted at the front.
+
+Untrained? She had got her certificate three days ago. What did I suppose
+she had wanted it for--if it wasn't to go out with Jimmy if he went?
+
+"You knew he was going, then?" I said.
+
+"I knew he wanted to go. But I didn't think he'd go so soon. I didn't
+really think he'd go at all. They told me I needn't worry, that he hadn't
+a chance."
+
+"Who told you?"
+
+"Oh, everybody. The General and Colonel Braithwaite and Charlie, and
+Bertie, and Reggie--at least he told Norah--and the people at the War
+Office and the Admiralty and the Embassies."
+
+"You _went_ to them? You went to the War Office?"
+
+"I went everywhere where he did, or as near as I could get. And they all
+told me the same thing--he hadn't a chance. Not the ghost of a chance. I
+really thought he hadn't. When you think of the men--men who can do
+things, who are dying to go and are being kept back--"
+
+"You were helping him to go?" I said. I saw a vision, or I tried to see
+it, a pathetic vision of Viola following poor Jimmy in his pursuit of
+secretaries and ambassadors, doing insane, impossible things to help him.
+
+And then I saw Viola herself. She was looking at me, with all her
+features tilted in that funny way she had.
+
+"Well--no," she said; "I wasn't exactly _helping_."
+
+"What _were_ you doing, then?"
+
+"I'm afraid I was trying to stop him."
+
+The sheer folly of it took my breath away.
+
+"Surely," I said, "if he hadn't the ghost of a chance, it wasn't
+necessary?"
+
+"Well--it _was_ necessary, you see. He's so awfully clever. He was very
+nearly off once or twice. Only we just managed to get in in time."
+
+"Who got in in time?"
+
+"Oh, it wasn't only me, Furny, it was all of us. We were all out trying
+to stop him--Charlie and Reggie and Uncle Billy--_he_ pulled all the
+ropes--we couldn't do much."
+
+"But what--what did General Thesiger do?"
+
+"He didn't 'do' anything. He hadn't got to. He just said things. Told
+them _about_ Jimmy."
+
+I don't know whether my face expressed horror or admiration. It must have
+been a sort of horror, for she began to excuse herself.
+
+"Why not? Why should poor little Jimmy go?"
+
+"Because he wants to. You'd no business to stop him when he wanted to
+go."
+
+"But--that was it. He didn't want to go. He only thought he _ought_ to
+go."
+
+"How," I said sternly, "do you know what he wanted?"
+
+"Because," she said, "he told Uncle Billy. He kept on saying he ought to
+go. And we told him he oughtn't. What earthly good can Jimmy do out
+there, with his poor little heart all dicky? He'll simply die of it. You
+don't suppose I'd have stopped him if I'd thought it was good for him to
+go? Or if I'd thought he really wanted to? We told him all that--Uncle
+Billy and I did--we told him straight that if he tried to get out we'd
+try and stop him."
+
+"Oh," I said, "you _told_ him. That's a different thing."
+
+"Things, Furny, always are different to what you think them. At least
+they're never half so nasty. Of course we told him. And of course he
+laughed in our faces. We thought we _had_ stopped him. But--he's slipped
+through our fingers.
+
+"We might," she said, "have known."
+
+I heard her say all that, though I wasn't listening. It comes back to me
+that she said it. It was dawning on me that in this queer business there
+were details, quite important details, that had escaped me. The war had
+taken up my attention to the exclusion of Viola's affairs. But it was
+evident that things had happened while I was away. I was thinking of
+something that she let out.
+
+"Look here," I said, "when you say you told him, do you mean that you and
+he have been seeing each other?"
+
+"Of course we've been seeing each other. Until he stopped it. He said he
+couldn't stand the strain."
+
+"And you?" I said. "Did you stand it?"
+
+She looked at me straight and hard.
+
+"You've no right to ask me that," she said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, perhaps I hadn't. And if I had owned frankly that I hadn't all
+might have been well. But, as it was, before I knew where we both were,
+we had quarrelled.
+
+Yes. I quarrelled with Viola; or she quarrelled with me; it really
+doesn't matter how you put it; and it shows the awful tension we must
+have been living in.
+
+When I heard her say that I had no right to ask her that question I
+answered that I thought I had.
+
+She said, "What right?"
+
+And I said if she would think a little she would see what right.
+
+And at that she fired up and the blaze was awful. We two were up there
+alone and she had me at her mercy. She held me in the blaze.
+
+"I suppose," she said, "I'm to think of your everlasting meddling with my
+affairs?"
+
+I pointed out that a charge of meddling came rather oddly from a lady who
+honoured me by staying in my house because she preferred it to her
+husband's.
+
+"You know perfectly well why I'm staying in your house; and if you don't,
+Norah does. I could have stayed with my father, for that matter."
+
+I said I thought that that was extremely doubtful--in the circumstances.
+
+I had her there, and she knew it, for she retired in bad order on an
+irrelevant point. She said I was no judge of the circumstances.
+
+I said peaceably that perhaps I wasn't, but that she must own that I had
+behaved as if I were. At any rate I'd given her the benefit of the doubt.
+
+She said, "You talk as if I'd been through the Divorce Court. Perhaps
+that's where you think I ought to be. The benefit of the doubt! You
+certainly _have_ given it me. It's been nothing but doubt with you,
+Walter, ever since I knew you. You always thought awful things about me.
+I know you have. I could _see_ you thinking them. You thought vile things
+about me, and vile things about Jimmy. You came rushing out to Belgium
+because you thought them. And the other day you thought the same thing of
+me and Charlie Thesiger, and you came rushing after me again and giving
+me away, and behaving so that everybody else would think me awful too."
+
+"My dear child, you owned yourself that Charlie--"
+
+"Oh--Charlie! As if he mattered! He was only being an ass--the war upset
+him, or something. I don't care what you think about Charlie--he doesn't
+either--but why you should go out of your way to think _me_ awful--"
+
+I said I thought we'd done with that.
+
+"No," she said, "we haven't done with it. I want to get to the bottom of
+it. What _makes_ you do these things? I believe you _want_ to make out
+that I'm horrid, just as you wanted to make out that poor little Jimmy
+was, when I went to him in Bruges."
+
+She went on. "I can understand _that_, because I did go to him, and I--I
+cared for him and you didn't like it. I can even understand your wanting
+_me_ to be horrid then, because it made it easier for you. I had the
+sense to see that that was all that was the matter with you _then_, so I
+didn't mind. But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can
+it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or horrid?"
+
+She had rushed on, carried away by her own passion, without seeing where
+she was going. I don't think she had seen, any more than I had, that for
+nine years I had been living behind a screen. A screen that had hidden me
+from myself. I don't think she saw even now when she came crashing into
+it.
+
+It was I who saw.
+
+The thing was down about my ears; and it wasn't the violence of its fall
+that terrified me; it was my own nakedness. I wasn't prepared to find
+myself morally undressed.
+
+I turned away from her. I began fiddling with my pens and papers. I
+trailed long slip-proofs under her eyes, pretending that I had work to
+do. But she saw through my pretences and her voice followed me.
+
+It was softer, though. It seemed to be pleading, as if she knew nothing
+about me and my screen.
+
+"What harm did I ever do you? Or poor Jimmy either? I didn't let you
+marry me. You ought to be grateful to Jimmy. At least he saved you from
+that."
+
+I said I thought we needn't drag her husband into it, and I haven't a
+notion what I meant. I had to say something, and if it sounded
+disagreeable, so much the better.
+
+And she said there I was again--thinking that I had to remind her that
+Jimmy _was_ her husband.
+
+"You certainly seem to have forgotten it," I said.
+
+"_He_ knows how much I've forgotten."
+
+With that last word she left me.
+
+I tried hard to shake the horror of it off. I remember I sat down to my
+proofs, and I suppose I tried to correct them. But all the time I heard
+Viola's voice saying, "I can understand your wanting me to be horrid
+_then_, because it made it easier for you.... But why on earth you should
+keep it up like this! What can it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or
+horrid?"
+
+It went on in my head till the words ceased to have any meaning. I had
+only a dreadful sense that I should remember them to-morrow, and that
+perhaps when to-morrow came I should know what they meant.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+And when to-morrow came the war took up my attention again, so that I
+actually forgot that Viola had said she was going out to it.
+
+She had let the subject drop abruptly. She didn't even refer to it when
+my friend the editor of the _Morning Standard_ rang me up the next day to
+ask me if I'd go out to Belgium as their Special Correspondent.
+
+He was charmingly frank about it. He told me that it was Tasker Jevons he
+wanted, and Tasker Jevons he had asked to go, but since he couldn't get
+him (and his powerful pen) why then, he'd had to fall back on me. Jevons,
+he said, had let him down pretty badly; he'd understood from Jevons that
+he was prepared to go for them at twelve hours' notice. And he'd given
+him twenty-four hours; and he'd found that he'd gone out there two days
+ago. Chucked them, my friend the editor supposed, for another paper.
+Could I, at twenty-three hours' notice, take his place?
+
+I said I could and I would, and I put him right about Jevons.
+
+And then I went to see about my motor-car.
+
+It was when Viola began to bother me about her passport that the fight
+began.
+
+First of all, she asked me what I was doing about a motor-car? I told her
+she needn't worry herself about my motor-car. It wasn't any concern of
+hers. She grinned at that and said, All right. What she really wanted was
+to consult me about her passport.
+
+And when I refused to be consulted about her passport, to hear a word
+about her passport or about her going, she walked straight out of the
+house into a passing taxi that took her to the Belgian Legation, where
+she saw that weak-minded secretary that Jevons had handled; and she came
+back in time for tea, very cheerful and dressed in a sort of khaki
+uniform she had ordered, with a tunic and knee-breeches and puttees and a
+Red Cross brassard on her right arm.
+
+She said it had been a very tight squeeze, but she'd worked it, down
+to her uniform, and it was all right, and if I'd had any difficulty with
+my motor people (I had had awful difficulty, but how she knew it I
+haven't to this day found out. Sometimes I think she'd worked that too;
+she knew the firm, and she wasn't Mrs. Tasker Jevons for nothing)--if
+I'd had any difficulty she could put that straight for me. She'd got
+_her_ car--Jimmy'd ordered it for Amershott and forgotten about it--and
+her chauffeur, and I could go in it with her if I liked.
+
+It was a better car than the one I'd had in Belgium before or, she said
+significantly, than the one I was going to take out with me. It was true
+that I didn't know anything about cars.
+
+Then Norah, my wife, stood up beside her sister, flagrantly partisan, and
+said, Couldn't I see it wasn't any use trying to stop her? She had me at
+every point. If I wouldn't take her she'd go by herself with the
+chauffeur.
+
+And when I said, How about my promises--my word of honour? Viola laughed.
+
+"Your honour's all right, Wally," she said. "You're not taking me out;
+I'm taking you."
+
+And very early in the morning we motored down to Folkestone to catch the
+midday boat for Ostend. And Norah came with us to see us off. If I'd
+given her the smallest encouragement she'd have come too. I _might_ take
+her, she said; it was beastly being left behind.
+
+I said, like a savage, that Belgium was no place for women. I'd take my
+sister-in-law there, but not my wife.
+
+I suppose the dressing-down I'd got from Viola two nights before had
+rankled. I must have felt that I was getting my own back that time, when
+I threw it up to her that she wasn't my wife.
+
+Norah, I said, had too much sense to want to go where she wasn't wanted.
+
+But Viola only laughed again and said, "Please remember that I'm taking
+you, not you me. And Norah wants to go as much as I do, and it isn't
+altogether on your account. You needn't think it. As for keeping her
+back, you couldn't do it if she meant to go. It's Baby that's keeping
+her, not you."
+
+And then she thanked God she hadn't got a child.
+
+And so, sparring and chaffing by turns, half in play and half in
+earnest--for a secret subterranean anger smouldered still in both of
+us--we got off. I remember at the last moment Norah--dear little
+Norah--telling her that she was not to bully me. She was to let me sit
+in the motor-car as much as I liked; and she was to see that I didn't
+get into any danger.
+
+Danger? Danger? As the great fans of the screws churned the harbour water
+into foam that the waves thinned and flattened out again till the green
+lane broadened between our track and the pier head where Norah stood, and
+the little, slender, dark blue figure became a dot on the pier and lost
+itself in the crowd of dots and disappeared, then, for the first time, it
+struck me that to be going off like this, alone, with Viola, was danger
+in itself.
+
+Because, the other night she had made me see myself as I really was--a
+man, not of an irreproachable rectitude, an immaculate purity (had I
+ever, had anybody ever really supposed that I was such a man?) but quite
+deplorably human, and blind--yes, my dear Viola, blind as any bat--and
+vulnerable, so vulnerable that I think you might have spared me, you
+might have had some pity.
+
+I found myself addressing her like that, in my heart, as I walked up and
+down, up and down the deck, not looking at her, but acutely aware of her,
+where she sat in her deck-chair, bundled up in her great khaki motor-coat
+and in the rugs I had wrapped round her.
+
+I resented the power she had over me to make me aware of her--at such a
+time, or at any time, for that matter. Here was I, a Special
+Correspondent, going out to the war; and there, on the other side of the
+Channel, _was_ the war; in the fields of France and of Flanders men were
+fighting, men were slaughtering each other every day by thousands. I was
+a man and I should have been thinking of those men; and here I was,
+compelled against my conscience and my will to think of this woman. She
+had come out with me against my conscience and my will, and against my
+judgment and my good taste and my honour and my common sense, against
+everything in me that I set most store by. I hadn't meant to take her
+with me, and she had made me take her.
+
+And when my common sense told me that she hadn't; that I wasn't taking
+her, and that she had as much right to be on the Ostend boat as I had, I
+still resented her being there. I still raged as I realized the power she
+had over me. She had always had it. She had had it the first day I ever
+saw her, when she had walked into my rooms against my orders, half an
+hour behind the time I had appointed, and had made herself my secretary
+against my will. She had had it when she used me as a stalking-horse
+to draw her brother's suspicions away from her and Jevons; she had had it
+when she drew me after her to Belgium, and when I followed her from
+Bruges to Canterbury at her bidding; she had had it when I married Norah
+(hadn't she told me, in the insolence of it, that she had meant that I
+should marry Norah?). She had had it, this malign power over me, the
+other night, and she had it now. She always would have it.
+
+It wasn't my fault, I told myself, if she compelled me to look at her,
+this time, as I passed her deck-chair.
+
+I looked at her, and she sent me a little sad interrogative smile that
+asked me why I walked the decks thus savagely and alone? And I paid no
+attention to her or to her smile. In the very arrogance of isolation I
+continued to walk the decks. I meant her to see that I _could_ be alone
+and savage if I liked.
+
+And when I looked at her again (she couldn't have _made_ me this time,
+for she was unaware of me, lost in some profound meditation of her own),
+when I looked at her again my anger and my resentment died with a sort of
+struggle and a pang.
+
+She had, after all, the grace of her ignorance and innocence. If she had
+had no pity on me, it was because she was as blind as she had said I was.
+She didn't, she couldn't see me as she had made me see myself. She didn't
+know that she had any power over me, or else she wouldn't have used her
+power; she was too honourable for that, too chivalrous. You could trust
+her to play the game until she threw it up and left it.
+
+And I passed again in my sullen tramping, and I looked at her for the
+third time, urged by the remorse that stung me. And this time she drew me
+so that I went over to her and sat by her. I looked at my watch, we had
+been two hours on board.
+
+I had left her two hours alone; and in those two hours she had suffered.
+Her face was set now in a sort of brooding fear and anguish; her
+breathing had a tremor in it, as if her heart dragged at her side. It was
+better, far better, that we should quarrel than she should suffer and sit
+quivering in silence and see frightful things.
+
+But I saw that she wasn't going to quarrel, she wasn't going to pitch
+into me; she wasn't going to assert herself and domineer over me just
+now. This agony of hers had made her gentle, so that she spoke to me as
+if she were sorry for me after all.
+
+"Are you tired," she said, "of tramping up and down?"
+
+"Horribly tired."
+
+"Put my rug round you if you're going to sit still. Norah wouldn't let
+you sit still without a rug."
+
+"Norah wouldn't let me do anything I shouldn't do."
+
+She smiled down at me, still sad, but with the least little flicker of
+irony on the top of her sadness. "Norah's job isn't very hard. You don't
+ever _want_ to do anything you shouldn't."
+
+"Oh--don't I?"
+
+"No, never. That's the pull you have over naughty people like me. You're
+so good."
+
+"It wasn't my goodness you were rubbing into me the other night."
+
+"Never mind the other night. It doesn't matter what I said the other
+night. Only what I'm saying now this minute has any importance. But it
+was your goodness, if it comes to that."
+
+"Queer sort of goodness." I was still, you see, a little stung.
+
+"All goodness," she said, "is queer, carried to that pitch. But you're a
+dear in spite of it. I won't bully you."
+
+We made the last part of the crossing on the highway of the sunset. The
+propeller lashed through crimson and fiery copper, and the white wake
+tossed on to the highway turned to rose and gold and its edges to purple.
+
+I had left her again and I called to her to look at this wonder of the
+sky and sea; but she shook her head at me. There was no need to call her.
+She had looked. I could see by her eyes that the intolerable beauty had
+brought Jevons back to her. He was there for her in all beauty and in all
+wonder.
+
+Then she called to _me_. "Wally, come here. I want to speak to you."
+
+I came.
+
+"You thought I was going to leave Jimmy. But I wasn't. _He_ knew I
+wasn't. Why, the first night I knew how impossible it was."
+
+I said, Yes. Of course it was impossible. And of course he knew.
+
+"I shan't mind if only we can get to him before anything happens."
+
+I said nothing would happen, and of course we should get to him.
+
+She was silent so long that I was startled when she said, "Wally--your
+nervous aren't _you_, are they?"
+
+I said, No. No. Of course they weren't.
+
+I knew what she was thinking. Out of the intolerable beauty she had seen
+Jimmy rise with all his gestures. She heard the cracking of his knuckles
+and saw the jerking of his thumb. And these things became tender and
+pathetic and dear to her as if he were dead.
+
+And she had seen herself shudder at them as if it had been another woman
+who shuddered, a strange and pitiless woman whom she hated.
+
+"It wouldn't matter so much if he had wanted to go," she said.
+
+"Why do you keep on saying that he didn't want to go?"
+
+"Because he said so. He said he was only going because he couldn't go."
+
+"I think you're doing him a great injustice. He told me he wanted to go;
+I've no doubt he did want to go--just like any other man."
+
+"Yes. To be just like any other man--_that's_ what he wanted. But he
+couldn't be. He isn't like any other man. And so it's worse for him.
+Can't you see that it's worse for him? It'll hurt him more."
+
+I said I didn't see it, and that she was absurd and morbid and utterly
+unreasonable, and that she was making Jimmy out unreasonable and morbid
+and absurd.
+
+She told me then I didn't understand either of them; and we were silent,
+as if we had quarrelled again, until we came in sight of the Flemish
+coast.
+
+We sailed into Ostend on the tail-end of the sunset. What was left of it
+was enough to keep up for us the intense moment of transfiguration, so
+that we didn't miss it. The long white Digue, the towers, the domes of
+the casinos and hotels, the high, flat fronts of the houses showed
+soaked in light, quivering with light. Ostend might have been some
+enchanted Eastern city. It was as if the heroic land faced us with the
+illusion of enchantment, to cover the desolation that lay beyond her
+dykes.
+
+And we who looked at it were still silent, not now as if we had
+quarrelled, but as if this beauty had made peace between us.
+
+Viola's face had changed. It reminded me in the oddest way of her brother
+Reggie's. I think that for the moment, while it lasted, she had forgotten
+Jimmy, she had forgotten her brother Reggie; she had touched the fringe
+of the immensity that had drawn them from her and swallowed them up. And
+in forgetting them she had forgotten her unhappy self.
+
+In Ostend, at any rate, I was to have no more of her brooding. We had no
+sooner landed than she became the adorable creature who had run away with
+Jevons nine years ago and led me that dance through the cities of
+Flanders. She showed the same wholehearted devotion to the adventure, the
+same innocence, the same tact in ignoring my state of mind. She seemed to
+be making terms with me as she had made them then, suggesting that if _I_
+would ignore a few things I should find her the most delightful companion
+in my travels. We must, she seemed to say, of course forget everything
+that she had said to me the other night or that I had said to her before
+or since; and, as she swung beside me in her khaki, her freedom and her
+freshness declared how admirably _she_ had forgotten. It wasn't as if we
+didn't know what we were really out for.
+
+Except that she was a maturer person--thirty-one and not twenty-two--I
+might have mistaken her for Viola Thesiger, my secretary, setting out, in
+defiance of all conventions, with little Jevons, to look for Belfries in
+Belgium, and taking the war, since there _was_ a war on, in her stride.
+
+And as I walked with her through the same streets where nine years ago I
+had hunted for her and Jevons, it struck me as a strange, unsettling
+thing that I should be taking her out to look for Jevons and at the same
+time playing precisely Jevons's part in the adventure. She too must have
+been aware of this oddness--for she stopped suddenly to say to me, "Do
+you remember when I ran away with Jimmy? Isn't it funny that I should be
+running away with you?"
+
+I said it was. Very funny indeed. And I wondered why she had drawn my
+attention to it just now? Did she want to make me judge by the
+transparent innocence of this running the not quite so transparent
+innocence of that? I think so. Remember, it was Reggie Thesiger's
+apparent doubt as to her innocence that had been at the bottom of all the
+trouble of the last five years. It accounted for her attack on me the
+other night. It was as if she had turned to say to me triumphantly, "Now,
+perhaps, when I'm running away with _your_ precious perfection, at last
+you understand?"
+
+We had some difficulty in finding quarters and Viola insisted on our
+staying in the Station Hotel, which had been bombarded by an aeroplane
+the night before. She pointed out that it was almost entirely empty. "And
+so," she said, "there won't be anybody to see us."
+
+It was as if she wished to remind me by how thin a thread _my_ reputation
+hung.
+
+The business of our passports kept us in Ostend the next morning. I had
+made up my mind there would be difficulty about Viola's military pass, I
+was even contemplating the possibility of her being sent back to England
+by the next boat; but no; she had forestalled obstruction, and the pocket
+of her khaki coat was stuffed with letters from the War Office, the
+British Red Cross, and the French and Belgian Embassies. In fact, there
+was one horrid moment at the depot when it looked as if the Special
+Correspondent would be smuggled through under Viola's protection.
+
+"You see, Furny," she said, "nobody's going to stop me. Nobody wants to
+stop me."
+
+At last we got off, and early in the afternoon we were in Bruges.
+
+We had run into the Market-Place before we knew where we were; and yonder
+in the street at the back of it was Viola's _pension_, and here on our
+right hand was Jimmy's hotel, and there, towering before us, was the
+Belfry. We looked at each other. And through the war and across nine
+years, it all came back to us.
+
+"The Belfry's still there," I said.
+
+"It always was." She said it a little sternly. But she had smiled at the
+allusion, all the same--the smile that had never been denied to it.
+
+We stayed an hour in Bruges and lunched there in Jimmy's hotel. The fat
+proprietor and his wife were still there and they remembered us. They
+remembered Jimmy. And they had seen him three days ago. Mr. Chevons had
+passed through Bruges in his Red Cross motor-car. They seemed uncertain
+whether Viola was Mrs. Chevons or Mrs. Furnival, and they addressed her
+indifferently as either. An awful indifference had come to them. Of the
+war they said, _"C'est triste, nest-ce pas?"_ We left them, sitting
+pallid and depressed behind the barricade of their bureau, gazing after
+us with the saddest of smiles.
+
+That hour in Bruges was a mistake; so was our lunching at Jimmy's hotel.
+It was too much for Viola. It brought Jimmy so horribly near to her. I
+don't know what she was thinking, but I am convinced that from the moment
+of our entering Bruges the poor child had made up her mind that Jimmy had
+been killed. The smile she had given to the Belfry was the last flicker
+of her self-control, and halfway through lunch the grey melancholy that
+Bruges had absorbed from Jimmy nine years ago came down on her, as nine
+years ago it had come down on me, and it swallowed her up. By the time
+the waiter brought the coffee she was done for. Her eyes stared, hard and
+hot, over the cup she tried to drink from. She couldn't drink because of
+the spasm in her throat.
+
+"Come," I said, "we must clear out of this."
+
+We cleared out.
+
+I too was invaded by the grey melancholy as we came to the bridge by the
+eastern gate where I had found Jevons that night leaning over and looking
+into the Canal. It was the sentry's sudden springing up to challenge us
+that saved me. I hoped that it would save Viola. She enjoyed the
+sentries.
+
+But not this time. Her nerves were all on edge and she showed some
+irritation at the delay. I felt then that I had to take her in hand.
+
+"My dear child," I said (we were running out on the road to Ghent now),
+"do you realize that there's a war?"
+
+She answered, "Yes, Wally, yes, I know there is."
+
+"Do you know that Antwerp's over there, a little way to the north? And
+that they've dragged up the big guns from Namur for the siege of
+Antwerp?"
+
+"Oh, Wally--_have_ they?"
+
+She turned her face to the north as if she thought she could see or hear
+the siege-guns.
+
+"But you _said_ Jimmy was in Ghent."
+
+"Jimmy," I said, "is probably in Ghent. If he isn't, he's in Antwerp. Do
+you know that the battlefields are down there--no--there--to the south,
+where I'm pointing? There's fighting going on there _now_."
+
+She said, "Yes, dear, I know, I know," very gently; and she put her hand
+on my knee, as if she recognized the war as my private tragedy and was
+sorry for me. Then she fell back to her brooding.
+
+Somewhere on the great flagged road between Bruges and Ecloo we met a
+straggling train of refugees--old men and women and children, bent double
+under their enormous bundles, making for Bruges and Ostend. They stared,
+not at us, but at the road in front of them, with a dreadful apathy, as
+we passed.
+
+"This," I said, "is what finishes _me_--every time I see it."
+
+She said nothing.
+
+"Do you realize," I said, "that those women and those little children are
+flying for their lives? That they've come, doubled up like that, for
+miles--from Termonde or Alost? That they've lost everything they ever
+had?" (I can hear my own voice beating out the horror of it in hard,
+cruel jerks.) "That their homes--their _homes_--are burned to ashes
+somewhere down there?"
+
+At my last jerk she turned.
+
+"No," she said. "I'm cold and hard and stupid, and I do _not_ realize it.
+Neither do you. If either of us realized it for two seconds we should be
+either cutting our throats in that ditch or going back to Ostend now with
+a load of those women and children, instead of tearing past them like
+devils in this damned car.
+
+"I can't realize anything till I know whether Jimmy's all right or not. I
+can't see anything, or feel anything, or think of anything but Jimmy.
+Bruges is Jimmy and Belgium is Jimmy and the whole war is Jimmy--to me.
+I don't care if you _are_ horrified. I can't help it if I _am_ callous.
+It is so. And you can't make it different."
+
+I remember saying quite abjectly that I was sorry--that I was only trying
+to turn her mind to other things as a relief.
+
+"I'm to turn my mind to _that_--as a relief!"
+
+She showed me a woman I was trying not to see, a woman who carried the
+bedding of her household on her back and dragged a four-year-old child by
+the hand. The child slipped to its knees at every other yard, and at
+every other yard was pulled up whimpering and dragged again--not with
+anger or any emotion whatever, but with a sickening repetition, as if its
+mother's arm was a mechanism set going to pull and drag.
+
+If ever there was a weathercock it was my sister-in-law. Without even
+pretending to consult me, she made Colville, the chauffeur, turn the car
+round. (He was _her_ chauffeur, after all, she said.)
+
+"I don't know," she said, "whether I realize that woman or not, or
+whether you do. But I'm going to take her into Bruges."
+
+And we took her. (Viola nursed the four-year-old child all the way.) We
+also took an old man and a young woman with a baby at her breast, and two
+small children. It was the only thing to be done, Viola said.
+
+It was nearly half-past five when we left Bruges the second time.
+
+"God only knows," I groaned, "what time we'll get to Ghent!"
+
+"He does," she said. "He knows perfectly well we shall get there by
+half-past seven."
+
+And we did.
+
+It was dark when we turned into the Place d'Armes and drew up before the
+long, grey Hôtel de la Poste. I jumped out and stood by the kerb to give
+Viola my hand.
+
+"But--" she said, "I _know_ this place."
+
+"You ought to."
+
+I don't know where she expected us to go. She still sat in the car as if
+held there by the shock of recognition. She ignored my outstretched hand.
+
+"You'd better take your things," she said at last, "if you want to get
+out here. I'm going on to look for Jimmy."
+
+I had then my first full sense of what I was in for. I saw that she was
+perfectly prepared to throw me over, to dump me down here or anywhere
+else and go on by herself with the car and the chauffeur that were, or
+ought to have been, mine.
+
+She didn't care if I was Special Correspondent to the _Morning Standard_,
+and she had that beastly chauffeur in her pocket all the time. (I
+discovered afterwards that she'd laid in food for him and hidden it in
+the locker under the front seat, so that they might be ready for any
+sort of adventure.) And yet in the very moment that I realized her
+disastrous obstinacy I found her intolerably pathetic.
+
+"If you want to look for Jimmy," I said, "you'd better get out too. He'll
+be here if he's anywhere in Ghent."
+
+But she was already on the kerb, brushing me aside. She had seen behind
+my back the approach of the concierge and she made for him.
+
+"Is Mr. Jevons in this hotel--Mr. Tasker Jevons?"
+
+Yes, Mr. Chevons was in the hotel. Madame would find him in the lounge.
+
+She had swept past him to the stair of the lounge, and I was following
+her discreetly when the proprietor dashed out of his bureau to intercept
+us. The lounge, he said, was reserved from seven till nine o'clock for
+the officers of the General Staff.
+
+Viola had paid no attention to the proprietor and was sweeping up the
+stair. I gave Jevons's name and explained that the lady was Mrs. Jevons.
+
+The proprietor, a portly and pompous Belgian, positively dissolved in
+smiles and bows and apologetic gestures. _Mille pardons, monsieur, mille
+pardons._ It would be _all_ right. Monsieur Chevons was dining with the
+officers of the General Staff.
+
+He did not know that Madame was expected. He was to reserve a room for
+Monsieur?
+
+I told him to reserve rooms for me and the chauffeur, and to consult Mr.
+Jevons about Madame. And I hurried up the stair after Viola.
+
+She was waiting for me at the turn, on the landing, by the wide archway
+of the lounge, where the great glass screen began that shut off the
+staircase. She stood back from the entrance, looking in, and smiling at
+what she saw. It was clear by her attitude and her absorption that
+something was happening in there.
+
+As I approached she made a sign to me and withdrew farther back and up
+the stair.
+
+"He's there," she whispered. "Over there. In that corner."
+
+For a moment we stood together on the stair, looking down through the
+glass screen into the lounge.
+
+The far end of the lounge had been turned into a dining-place for the
+officers of the Belgian General Staff. Most of the tables were cleared
+now and deserted. But from our place on the stair we had a clear view
+slantwise of one small table in the corner. And we saw Jimmy seated at
+that table.
+
+At least we made him out.
+
+All but Jimmy's head was hidden by the figures of a Belgian General and
+two Colonels. They had closed in on him (they were evidently all four at
+the end of their dinner); they had closed in on him in an access of
+emotion and enthusiasm. The General (the one who sat beside him) had his
+arm round Jimmy's shoulder; the two who sat facing him leaned towards
+Jimmy over half the table, and one grasped Jimmy's right hand in his; the
+other was making some sort of competitive demonstration. The disengaged
+arms of the three held up the glasses in which they were about to pledge
+him. And at the other end of the room a scattered group of soldiers rose
+to their feet and looked on smiling and signalling applause.
+
+What was happening down there was public homage to Jimmy.
+
+And in between the two dark Belgian uniforms that obscured him you could
+just see a bit of Jimmy's khaki, and from among the white and grizzled
+heads that pressed on him you saw Jimmy's face and Jimmy's flush and
+Jimmy's twinkle; his incredible, irrepressible twinkle. You could even
+see the tips of Jimmy's little front teeth trying to bite down his lip
+into some sort of composure. You could see that he was very shy and very
+modest; you could see that in spite of his shyness and his modesty he
+was frightfully pleased; but more than anything you could see that he was
+amused.
+
+Positively, positively, he had the air of not taking his Belgian officers
+very seriously.
+
+"We mustn't go down yet," said Viola, "or we'll spoil it."
+
+So we waited, looking at Jimmy through the screen, while the officers
+clinked their glasses and drank to him and called his name; and the group
+that looked on echoed it; and the waiters who had come in to see what was
+happening, repeated it among themselves.
+
+"_Vive l'Angleterre! Vive les Anglais! Vive Chevons! Chevons! Chevons!_"
+
+"I wonder," said Viola, "what Jimmy has been up to? You can take me to
+him."
+
+When we got to the table we found Jimmy trying to explain to the General
+and the two Colonels in execrable French that he didn't know what it was
+all about. _He_ hadn't done anything.
+
+Then he saw Viola.
+
+For one second, while he stared at her across the room, he appeared to be
+suffering from a violent shock. He was so visibly hit that the two men
+who had their backs to us turned round to see what it was that had
+affected him. His flush had gone suddenly and he was breathing hard, with
+his mouth a little open.
+
+I heard him saying something in French about his wife.
+
+He recovered, however, in a second, and disentangled himself from the
+General and the Colonels and from the dinner-table, and came forward.
+
+And as he came, I noticed something odd about him. He limped slightly.
+His khaki had a battered look; it was soiled and torn in places, and the
+Red Cross brassard on his sleeve was simply filthy.
+
+And he had only been out three days, mind you. He was only three days
+ahead of us. But he had lost no time.
+
+As they strolled up to each other and met midway in the big public room,
+in the fraction of time that passed before their hands touched I heard
+him draw a hard, quivering breath and let it out in a long sigh. That
+breath was a suppressed cry of trouble and of acquiescence.
+
+Then (I could have blessed him for it) he twinkled.
+
+Viola said, "What _have_ you been up to?"
+
+And Jimmy, "I say, I like that! What are _you_ doing here? Have you come
+to look at the Belfry?"
+
+"No. I've come to look at _you_!" She put her hand on his shoulder.
+
+He said, "That's a jolly rig-out you've got," and that was all.
+
+The General and the two Colonels came forward and were presented to Mrs.
+Jevons; and Mr. Walter Furnival ("one of our war-correspondents") was
+presented to the General and the two Colonels. They saluted Madame; they
+begged Madame to accept their profoundest congratulations; they regretted
+that Madame had not been present just now when they were drinking her
+husband's health.
+
+And the old General (the one with the white hair and imperial) informed
+her that Monsieur her husband had a very poor opinion of the Belgian
+Army.
+
+"He has saved the lives of three Belgian officers and I do not know _how_
+many Belgian soldiers--and he says that it is nothing!"
+
+And the stout, florid Colonel, who had been trying to look young and
+rakish ever since he had turned and caught sight of Viola, suggested that
+"Perhaps, if he had saved your British, he would not have said that it
+was nothing."
+
+And the lean, iron-grey Colonel with the ferocious moustache remarked in
+an austere, guttural voice, "_Il est impayable--lui!_"
+
+Jimmy had been offering cigarettes to them as if he thought that was the
+only thing that would stop them. Then the old white-haired General sat
+between Viola and him with his arm round Jimmy's shoulder and began
+again, so loudly that everybody in the room could hear him.
+
+"Your husband, Madame, is a man who does not know what fear is--who
+does not care what death is. For two nights and three days, Madame,
+he has been down there--at Alost and Termonde--under shell-fire.
+_Mais--un enfer, Madame!_ You would have thought he had been born under
+fire, your husband. _Ce n'est pas un homme, c'est un salamandre_.
+Bullets--mitrailleuse--shrapnel--it is no more to him than to go out in a
+shower of rain. When our men were scuttling, and shouted to him to get
+under shelter, what do you think he said?--'_Ouvrir une parapluie--ça ne
+vaut pas la peine_."
+
+There was a shout of laughter.
+
+"That," said Viola, "is the sort of thing he _would_ say. And please, I
+want to know what's the matter with his leg."
+
+I can see her now, sitting on that crimson velvet seat in the lounge and
+looking past the gesticulations of the General to Jevons, who was shaking
+his head at her as much as to say, "Don't you believe the old boy, he's a
+shocking story-teller."
+
+The old General seemed aware of her preoccupation, for he rose, murmuring
+affectionately, "_Mon petit Chevons_. I will not praise him to you,
+Madame. No doubt you know what he is."
+
+I can see her standing up there and giving her hand to the old General
+and trying to stiffen her face to say, "I know."
+
+Evidently she thought General Roubaix was too voluble to be entirely
+trustworthy, for, when he left us and Jimmy had gone out to see about our
+dinner, she addressed herself to the two Colonels.
+
+"Please tell me what my husband _really_ did."
+
+Both the Colonels tried to tell her; but it was the younger one with the
+moustache (the one who had said that Jimmy was _"impayable"_) who
+satisfied her.
+
+It was true, every bit of it. Jevons, it seemed, had been in the thick of
+the bombardment of Alost and in the fighting for the bridge at Termonde.
+His practice was to leave Kendal and the motor-car behind him in some
+place of shelter while he walked into the fire. Sometimes he took his
+Belgian stretcher-bearers with him, sometimes, when they didn't like the
+look of it, he went by himself. He didn't care, the Colonel said, _where_
+he went or how. If it was through rifle-fire or mitrailleuse he went on
+his hands and knees--he wriggled on his stomach. If it was shrapnel he
+took his chance. He had saved one of his three officers by carrying him
+straight out of his own battery, when the German guns had found its
+range; and he had driven his car, by himself, across a five-mile-long
+field, under a hailstorm of shrapnel, to get the other two.
+
+"You see," the Colonel expounded, "your husband has chosen the most
+dangerous of all field ambulance work. Those high-speed scouting cars,
+running low on the ground, can go where a big ambulance cannot. It is
+magnificent what he has done."
+
+When Jevons came back they could still hardly keep their eyes off him;
+they could hardly tear themselves away. It was "_À demain, Monsieur_,"
+and "_À demain, Colonel_" as if they had arranged another deadly tryst.
+
+"Well," said Jimmy, "how do you like them?"
+
+"Oh--they're dears," said Viola, "especially the one with the moustache.
+Do you know, they've told me everything except what's the matter with
+leg."
+
+"My leg?" said Jimmy. "A bit of shell barked it. I'm jolly glad it's my
+leg and not my hand."
+
+I was a little frightened when Viola left us alone after dinner. I
+thought he would pitch into me for bringing her. But he only said sadly,
+"You oughtn't to have brought her, Furny. But I suppose you couldn't stop
+her."
+
+I said, No, I couldn't stop her. But I hadn't brought her. She had
+brought me.
+
+We sat on till the lounge was open to the guests of the hotel. And when
+the war-correspondents began to drop in I saw that Jevons was uneasy.
+
+"D'you mind if I turn in, old man?" he said.
+
+I asked him if his wound was hurting him.
+
+He stooped and caressed it pensively.
+
+"No," he said. "Not a bit. I like my wound. It--it makes me feel manly."
+
+Presently he said good night and left me.
+
+I thought--yes, I certainly thought--that he exaggerated his limp a
+little as he crossed the room, and for a moment I wondered, "Is he
+playing up to the correspondents?"
+
+Then I saw that Viola stood in the doorway waiting for him and that she
+gave him her arm.
+
+And then through the glass screen I saw them going together up the stair.
+And I remembered the tale that he had told me nine years ago, how he had
+seen her standing there and looking down at him--half frightened--through
+the glass screen, and how he had said to me, "I couldn't. She was so
+helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I couldn't."
+
+It was the same room and the same glass screen and the same stair. And it
+was the same man. I knew him. I knew him. I had always known him. (Was
+there ever any risk he hadn't taken?) I had never, really, for one
+moment misunderstood.
+
+I certainly knew why he "liked" his wound.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+We had breakfast very early the next morning, for Jevons was under orders
+to start at eight o'clock for Termonde. We had a table reserved for us in
+a corner of the restaurant. The hotel was full of Belgian officers, and
+I found I was infinitely better off in attaching myself to Jevons than if
+I had joined the war-correspondents.
+
+Viola (I may say that her rig-out which Jevons had admired so much, the
+khaki tunic and breeches, made us terribly conspicuous) had come down in
+a contrite mood. I heard her telling Jevons that he must be kind to me,
+for I had had an awful time with her and I had been an angel.
+
+Well, I had had an awful time; I don't think I remember ever having had a
+worse time than the hours I had spent in her company since she had laid
+into me on Tuesday evening.
+
+But I had not been an angel; far from it. Looking back on those hours, I
+can see that I behaved to her like a perfect brute.
+
+She had her revenge. One of those revenges that are the more
+triumphant because they are unpremeditated. She had dished me as a
+war-correspondent.
+
+For I declare that from the moment when we found Jevons and his General
+in the hotel I became the victim of her miserable point of view. I could
+only see the war through Jevons, and as a part of Jevons; I might have
+said, like Viola, that to me Ghent was Jevons, and Belgium was Jevons,
+and the war was Jevons. I suppose I saw as much of the War from first to
+last as any Special Correspondent at the front, and I know, that, barring
+the Siege of Antwerp, the three weeks when Jimmy was in it were by no
+means the most important or the most thrilling weeks in the war; and of
+the one event, the Siege of Antwerp, I didn't see as much as I ought to
+have seen, being most terribly handicapped by Viola. And yet--perhaps
+a little because of Viola, but infinitely more because of Jevons--those
+three weeks stand out in my memory before the battles of the Aisne and
+Marne and the long fight for Calais. Because of Jevons I have made them
+figure, in the columns of the _Morning Standard_ and elsewhere, with a
+superior vividness; even now when I recall them I seem to have lived with
+Jevons in Flanders through long periods of time.
+
+I have the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of
+the _Morning Standard_, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are
+interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his
+performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written a very fine
+account of Melle, which I understand is a small village four and a-half
+miles from Ghent. But there are other events--the Fall of Antwerp, for
+instance."
+
+Well, we got the story of the Fall of Antwerp all right. But Jimmy wrote
+it for me. It was the last thing he did write.
+
+Yes: he had only three weeks of it, all told. He went out on Tuesday,
+September the twenty-second, and he came back on Tuesday, October the
+thirteenth. It was his infernal luck that he should have had no more of
+it.
+
+And yet, I don't know. I don't see how he could have held out much longer
+at his pitch of intensity. Three weeks would have been nothing to any
+other man. But Jevons could do more with three weeks than another man
+could do with a three years' campaign, and he contrived to crowd into his
+term the maximum of glory and of risk. And when it was all over it was
+less as if Fate had foiled him than as if he had "given" himself three
+weeks.
+
+But Jimmy was discontented, and every morning at breakfast we listened to
+the most extraordinary lamentations. His job, he said, wasn't at all the
+jolly thing it looked. For he was under orders the whole blessed time.
+He'd no more freedom, hadn't Jimmy, than that poor devil of a waiter.
+He'd got to go or to stay where a fussy old ram of a Colonel sent him. So
+here he was in Ghent, an open city, when he wanted to be in Antwerp. He
+hadn't been anywhere--anywhere at all. As for what he'd done, he couldn't
+see what the fuss was all about. He hadn't done anything. He'd seen a
+little fight in a turnip-field, and a little squabble for a bridge you
+could blow up to-day and build again to-morrow, and a little tin-pot town
+peppered. And look at the war! Just look at the war!
+
+And when we tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo,
+the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next
+week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There
+wouldn't be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said. "There
+won't be any Waterloo for another two years, if then."
+
+He wasn't always lugubrious. It was only when he thought that he was
+missing the Siege of Antwerp that his happiness was incomplete.
+
+It was on our third morning, when he rushed off joyously (to Quatrecht, I
+think), that I said to Viola, "You thought it would hurt him more than
+other people. You needn't have come out after him. You see how much it's
+hurting him."
+
+"I'm glad I came," she said. "I don't mind as long as I can see."
+
+"Do you remember him telling Reggie that he wouldn't be in the war
+because he was a coward? Don't you wish Reggie could see him now?"
+
+She didn't answer, and I saw that there was still a sting for her in
+Reggie's name. The war might have made her forgive him, but there were
+things that the war couldn't wipe out from her memory. And there was her
+own rather appalling injustice to Jimmy. I wondered whether she was
+thinking of how she had tried to stop his going to the front, and how she
+had said he didn't want to go.
+
+But I had to own that she had done the best thing for her peace of mind
+by coming out.
+
+_My_ peace of mind, I was told quite frankly, didn't matter. Jevons,
+though he admitted that I couldn't have stopped her coming out, made me
+responsible for her presence at the seat of war. The trouble was that she
+insisted on following him wherever he went. And as it wasn't to be
+expected that he would take her with him into the tight places that he
+managed to get into in his own car, I had to have her in mine. Not that
+Viola consented to my putting it that way. It was clear that she made
+herself mistress of the situation when she obtained possession of that
+car and manoeuvred (as I am convinced she did manoeuvre) for my own
+failure with the firm that supplied it. On our first morning in Ghent we
+came to what she called an understanding, when she rubbed it well into me
+that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out,
+and that the man was under her orders, not mine. If I liked to come with
+her, why, of course I could. Otherwise, I could go halves with one of the
+other correspondents in one of their cars. But she pointed out that I
+could hardly do better than come with her, for by simply following Jimmy
+I should get nearer to the firing-line than anybody else. (She had
+assumed that the firing-line was the goal of every war-correspondent's
+ambition.) I would find, she said, that it would work quite well.
+
+It did. It worked better than if I had gone halves with the other
+correspondents. For at this time war-correspondents were not greatly
+loved by the military authorities, and they were having considerable
+difficulty in getting near anything, and the time, Jimmy said, was
+coming when they would be cleared neck and crop out of Belgium. My astute
+sister-in-law had calculated on all this and on her own part in it.
+
+"If you'll only trust me, Wally," she said the first day we started, when
+all the correspondents in the hotel had turned out to see us off, "you'll
+find that I'm your Providence and not your curse. I can get you through
+where you'd never get yourself. Just look at those men how sick they
+are."
+
+I said I thought it would be only decent to take two or three of them
+with us. We had room.
+
+But Viola was firm. She said it would be most indecent. We should want
+all the room we had for our wounded.
+
+"Do you suppose I'm going to chivy Jimmy about without doing anything to
+help him? As for you, you've only to sit tight and do what you're told.
+You'll be all right as long as we follow Jimmy."
+
+And so we followed him. My God, what a chase! But Viola's little
+chauffeur was game and we followed. Though Jimmy had made elaborate
+arrangements for stopping his wife's progress at least two miles outside
+the danger-zone she always managed to get through. Sentries, colonels,
+army medical officers--she twisted them into coils round her little
+finger, and cast them from her and got through. And once through, we were
+really quite useful in transporting wounded. Jevons and I between us
+managed to keep her out of the actual firing-line by telling her she was
+in all of it there was; and when we were loaded up with wounded there was
+no difficulty in getting her away.
+
+And certainly it served my turn well enough. Though I was compelled to
+see the war through Jimmy, I saw the war.
+
+By the end of our first week Jimmy seemed to get used to being followed
+as a matter of course. We had followed him to Alost and Termonde and
+Quatrecht and Zele. When we weren't following him we were near him
+somewhere, working at the dressing-stations or among the refugees.
+
+Then he did a mean thing. He managed to get himself sent to Antwerp for
+three days. He sneaked off there by himself on the Sunday, and when we
+tried to follow him we were turned back at Saint Nicolas, just too late
+to see the British go through. He had worked it this time.
+
+When he got back from Antwerp at the end of his three days we knew that
+something had happened, something that he was keeping from us. It wasn't
+only the fate of Antwerp that was hanging over him, as it hung over all
+of us in that awful second week. It was as if he had seen something
+intimate and terrible that he couldn't talk about.
+
+That night after Viola had gone to her room he told me what had happened.
+He had seen Charlie Thesiger's regiment at Saint Nicolas on Sunday. And
+to-day--which was Tuesday--he had seen Charlie Thesiger. He had found him
+lying dangerously wounded in the British Hospital at Antwerp. That, he
+said, was what had kept him there. And he had brought him back with him
+to Ghent. He was in the Couvent de Saint Pierre.
+
+He thought, perhaps, it would be better not to tell Viola just yet.
+Charlie didn't know, he said, that she was here.
+
+The war was beginning to close round us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day (Wednesday) he announced that he was going to Zele; but he
+didn't, he really didn't want me to take Viola there. I could go by
+myself, of course, if I liked, though he didn't care about her being
+left.
+
+But we did go. Viola's blood was up, after what she called Jimmy's
+meanness, and there was no keeping her back.
+
+We were a little uncertain of our way, for following Jimmy as we did, or
+rather, following the direction Colville swore he had seen him start in,
+took us much too far to the north. We found ourselves on the Antwerp
+road, jammed in the traffic, and caught by a stream of refugees. We were
+obliged to turn back to Ghent to get our bearings, but the business of
+transporting women and children kept us on the Antwerp road all morning,
+and it was past two o'clock before we started for Zele.
+
+I remember this particular chase after Jimmy for many reasons. First, we
+lost our way and never got to Zele at all.
+
+Down in the south-east on the sky-line we saw a fleet of little clouds
+that seemed to be anchored to the earth, and every cloud of the fleet was
+the smoke from a burning village. West of the fleet was an enormous cloud
+blown by the wind across miles of sky.
+
+Viola was certain that the big cloud was Zele being burned to the ground,
+and that Jimmy would be burned with it.
+
+When I told her that it wasn't likely that Jimmy would stay in Zele when
+it was burning she said that I didn't know Jimmy, and anyhow it was there
+that she was going.
+
+Suddenly Viola sat up very straight.
+
+"Furny, is that guns I hear, or thunder?"
+
+I said it was guns. A deep and solemn booming came from before and behind
+us and on either side, east and west. We had rushed bang between the
+French and German batteries.
+
+The big cloud turned out to be smoke from a factory that the Belgians had
+set fire to themselves, and in following it we had gone miles from Zele.
+Now we followed the guns.
+
+We turned east and struck off south and found ourselves in the village of
+Baerlere. The lines of fire seemed suddenly to narrow in on us here.
+
+There was a clean path down the centre of the street, for men and horses
+stood back close under the housewalls on each side. The place was full of
+soldiers. One of them told us that we could get to Zele by going east
+through the village, but as the road was being shelled, he didn't advise
+us to try.
+
+We went down that clean middle of the street. We were safe enough as long
+as we ran between the houses; but the village very soon came to an end,
+and then, in the open road, we were in for it.
+
+The fields dropped away from us on each side, leaving us as naked to the
+German batteries as if we were running on a raised causeway. At the
+bottom of the fields to our right there was a line of willows, beyond the
+willows there was the river, and behind the river bank, on the further
+side, were the German lines.
+
+The grey smoke of their fire was still tangled in the willow-tops.
+
+Colville drew up under the lee of the last house in the village. He
+didn't like the look of that open road. Neither did I.
+
+"Go on," said Viola. "What are you stopping for?"
+
+The guns ceased firing for a moment and we rushed it.
+
+"I do wish," said Viola, "you'd tuck your arm in, Furny. It's your right
+arm and you're on the wrong side of the car."
+
+I asked her what made her think of my right arm just then.
+
+"Because it's the only part of himself that Jimmy ever thinks of," she
+said.
+
+There was about three-quarters of a mile of causeway and it ended in a
+little hamlet. And the hamlet--it had been knocked to bits before we got
+into it--the hamlet ended in a hillock of bricks and mortar.
+
+The road to Zele was completely blocked.
+
+"Well--" said Colville, "I _am_ blowed."
+
+"You've got to take it," said Viola.
+
+"Sorry, m'm. It can't be done. You want a motor traction with caterpillar
+wheels for this business."
+
+He was backing the car when a shell burst and buried itself in the place
+where we had stood.
+
+To my horror I saw that Viola had opened the door of the car and was
+getting out.
+
+"What on earth are you doing?" I said.
+
+"I'm going to walk to Zele."
+
+I pulled her back and held her down in her seat by main force. She was
+horribly strong. And as she struggled with me she said quietly, "It's all
+right. You two _must_ go back and I must go to Jimmy."
+
+I shouted to Colville, "Turn her round, can't you, and get out of this."
+
+He turned her. He drew up deftly under the shelter of a barn that still
+stood intact. Then he spoke.
+
+"Are you quite sure, sir, that Mr. Jevons is in that place? Because, sir,
+I heard Kendal say something this morning about their going to Antwerp."
+
+"Then why the devil didn't you say so?"
+
+"I didn't think of it, sir, until I saw Mrs. Jevons getting out."
+
+He added by way of afterthought, "Besides, I promised Kendal. You and
+Mrs. Jevons wasn't to know he was going on to Antwerp."
+
+Viola and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.
+
+Somewhere behind us from beyond the river a gun boomed and we took no
+notice of it. We went on laughing.
+
+"He's had us again," she said.
+
+"Yes. We've been done this time. Well--we'd better scoot."
+
+We made a rush for it between guns and got to Baerlere. Once we were out
+of the village and heading for the Ghent road we were safe.
+
+We were hardly out of sound of the guns when I heard Viola saying, "You
+know it really _was_ funny of Jimmy."
+
+I said, "He won't think it quite so funny when he hears what we've done."
+
+He didn't think it funny at all. He was furious when he heard what we'd
+done. He forbade Viola to follow him again. He threatened to sack
+Colville. He said he'd have me sent home to-morrow and kept there, and
+Viola should go with me.
+
+And when he'd finished he told us that Antwerp had fallen.
+
+That was how Jevons came to write the story of the Fall of Antwerp
+instead of me.
+
+Well, he didn't sack Colville; and he didn't get me packed off with the
+other war-correspondents who left Ghent in a body the next day. And he
+said nothing about sending Viola away. He did better than that. He told
+her he had brought Charlie Thesiger from Antwerp yesterday, and that her
+cousin was dying in the Couvent de Saint Pierre, and that perhaps it
+would be a bit easier for him if she were with him.
+
+We took her to the convent that morning. On the way there she asked Jimmy
+why he hadn't told her about Charlie yesterday. He said that up till
+midnight we weren't absolutely certain that Charlie wouldn't recover, and
+that she was safer with us in the hotel than she would be away from us in
+the convent.
+
+"My safety is to be considered before everything?" she said.
+
+He answered that it was surely enough for her if he risked it now.
+
+I can't think why she didn't see through him. I and Kendal and Colville
+knew perfectly well that he was taking her to the convent to be safe. I
+think he argued that if she had poor Charlie to look after it would keep
+her quiet, and she would be out of mischief till it was time for the
+Germans to march into Ghent.
+
+So we took her to him.
+
+We found him in a little whitewashed cell that one of the sisters had
+given up to him. He lay under a crucifix on the nun's narrow bed, which
+was too short for him, so that his naked feet showed through the blankets
+at the bottom. The naked feet of the Christ pointed downwards to his
+head.
+
+He had been shot through the lungs and was dying of pneumonia, sending
+out his breath in fierce, rapid jerks.
+
+He lay on his side with his back towards us, and his face was hidden from
+us as we came in.
+
+The sister who sat with him made a sign that said, "Oh yes, you can come
+in, all of you; it will make no difference."
+
+The cell was so small that Jevons and I had to draw back and let Viola go
+in by herself. We two stood in the doorway and looked in. After the first
+glance at the bed--it was enough for me--I looked, I couldn't help
+looking, at Viola, (Jevons, I noticed, kept his eyes fixed on the body of
+the dying man.) I heard her catch her breath in a sob before she could
+have seen him.
+
+He had slipped his blankets from his shoulder, and it was the sight of
+his back--under the half-open hospital shirt which showed the bandages
+and dressings of his wound--that upset her; his back that might have been
+any man's back, the innocent back that she had no memory of, that
+disguised and hid him from her and made him strange to her and utterly
+pathetic. And then, there was the back of his head, sunk like lead into
+his pillow. The cropped hair had begun to grow. You could see a little
+greyish tuft. You wouldn't have known that it was Charlie's head.
+
+She went slowly round the bed, taking care not to graze the feet that
+were stretched out to her. And then she saw him.
+
+She saw a deep purplish flush and glazed eyes that couldn't see her, and
+a greyish beard pointing on an unshaved jaw; and a mouth half open,
+jerking out its breath. She laid her left hand on his shoulder and with
+her right she held the limp hand that hung over the mattress.
+
+I heard her say in French, "If only he knew me--"
+
+And the nun, "Perhaps--at the end--he will know you."
+
+And we left her there with his hand in her right hand and her left hand
+on his shoulder. She was on her honour to stay with him till the end; but
+her eyes were fixed on Jevons, and they followed him as he went through
+the doorway of the cell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The very minute he had left her Jimmy made his bolt for Lokeren. He said
+he didn't want me; but I had seen Viola's eyes, and I said it would be
+safer. If I took Viola's car and Colville, she couldn't follow us.
+
+"She won't follow us," he said. "She can't leave him."
+
+We made the first bolt into Lokeren together; and we got out, each with a
+load of wounded, just as the Germans were coming in. He made his second
+bolt by himself and secretly, while Colville and I were lunching. We
+followed, and were stopped in a village two miles from Lokeren.
+
+A Belgian Red Cross man met us here and told us that Jevons had got
+through in spite of them, and they didn't in the least expect him to come
+back again. He shrugged his shoulders and seemed to be disgusted and
+annoyed with Jimmy rather than to admire him.
+
+We hung about in that village an interminable time. I do not remember its
+name, if I ever knew it; but I know and remember every house in it and
+every tree in the avenue at the turn of the grey road that led to
+Lokeren, and even now, in my worst dreams, I find myself in the little
+plantation at the end of the village on the left where the railway siding
+is, and where the trains came in loaded with wounded. I am always waiting
+for Jimmy and looking for Jimmy and not finding him. And at one point I
+always stumble over Viola's body. I find her lying wounded in a ditch
+that runs through the plantation. And when I find her I know that Jimmy
+is dead. And that frightens me--Jimmy's death, I mean, not Viola's body.
+I take Viola's body as a matter of course.
+
+It is an abominable dream.
+
+But even that dream is not more astonishing, and it is far less
+improbable than what I was to see. We were at the end of the village.
+Colville had drawn our car up in the middle of the street, and I was
+standing by him, when two Belgian soldiers rushed up to us, pointing up
+the road, and shouting to Colville to clear out of the way.
+
+I turned. Round the bend of the road where the avenue of trees was I saw
+a train of horses and gun-carriages careening with the curve, and a
+battery of Belgian artillery came charging down in full retreat. And now
+in the middle of the battery as if he were part of it and informed it
+with his energy and speed, and now in front of it as if he led it, and
+joyous as if he had turned its retreat into a victory, came Jimmy driving
+his car.
+
+The inside of the car was packed with wounded men; and, wedged up against
+Jimmy, and standing on the steps, and sitting on the bonnet, and hanging
+on wherever they could find a foothold and hang, were seven officers and
+soldiers of the Belgian Army.
+
+Kendal--bleeding profusely from a flesh wound on his forehead, but
+otherwise unhurt--sat inside among the wounded.
+
+It _had_ been a victory for Jimmy. He had advanced within fifty yards of
+the German lines, he had picked up two of his wounded from under their
+sentry's fire, and the rest of the men and the officers he had gathered
+on his way.
+
+We sent them all to Ghent with Colville.
+
+Before he left, Kendal implored us just to look at Mr. Jevons's car.
+
+Mr. Jevons's car was worth looking at. It had a hole in the back of it
+where a bullet had gone clean through and buried itself in the cushions.
+There were five bullet-holes in its hood. Its flank was scraped by a
+flying fragment of shell, the same that had tilted its right rear
+splash-board. Inside, its canvas covers and its rubber mat were stained
+with blood.
+
+Drawn up motionless in that village street and stared at, Jimmy's car had
+something of its old self-conscious air. It looked pleased, and at the
+same time surprised at itself.
+
+And while Jevons was dressing and bandaging his flesh-wound for him an
+idea struck Kendal and he grinned.
+
+"D'you remember the time, sir, when you wouldn't let her out if there was
+a spot of rain?"
+
+"I do," said Jevons.
+
+"And look at her now--not three weeks. What a life she's 'ad!"
+
+And when Kendal (he was as pleased as Punch with his bandage) when Kendal
+had climbed into Colville's car, Jimmy turned his round again; though the
+officers implored him to come on, for the Germans were on our backs. But
+Jimmy only jerked his thumb in the direction of Lokeren and made his
+third bolt. I scrambled in beside him as he started.
+
+I don't mind saying that I hated this adventure. It was one thing to go
+into Antwerp when the Germans were so busy storming it that they couldn't
+attend to you, and quite another thing to be alone with Jimmy on that
+horrid grey road with the Germans coming every minute round the turn of
+it.
+
+Jimmy explained that there was a wounded man hiding in a ditch about a
+mile from Lokeren, and he'd got to fetch him.
+
+We fetched him and another car-load without any misadventure.
+
+When we got back to our village we found a Field Ambulance there. Jimmy
+said, "I believe that's _my_ Field Ambulance." Presently he gave a start
+that made the car swerve as if he had run over a dog.
+
+"Well, I'm damned if there isn't Viola."
+
+Yes, there she was. She had come out with the Field Ambulance. And it
+_was_ Jimmy's Field Ambulance, the one that had been sent out without
+him. It had come on into Ghent from Antwerp yesterday, and Viola had
+found it.
+
+"This is too bad," said Jevons. "You ought to be looking after Charlie.
+Why _aren't_ you looking after him?"
+
+"Charlie," she said, "died three hours ago--at twelve o'clock."
+
+It wasn't five hours since we had left her with him in the nun's cell
+under the crucifix. I don't think I had realized it before, but now it
+came over me as a new and strange thing, how little he had mattered. Then
+it struck me that Jevons must have known it all the time.
+
+"I've done everything," she said, "that had to be done. And I've written
+to Aunt Matty and Uncle George--and Mildred."
+
+"Mildred?" I wondered.
+
+"Well--_yes_."
+
+Jevons and I had forgotten Mildred. We had forgotten her engagement to
+Charlie, though I suppose nobody knew better than we did why it had been
+broken off.
+
+To his father and mother and Mildred he _did_ matter.
+
+And perhaps he mattered to Viola, in a way; for she said she would have
+given anything to have saved him. He must have mattered to Jevons when he
+brought him from Antwerp and when we buried him in Ghent.
+
+And the cross on his grave reproves me, reminding me that to his country
+he mattered supremely, after all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Lokeren Jevons and I tried to come to terms with Viola.
+
+The conference took place upstairs in their bedroom, where we had
+withdrawn for greater privacy. Viola sat on the one chair and Jimmy and
+I on the bed. Jimmy did most of the talking.
+
+He said, "Look here, my dear child, if there wasn't a war on, I wouldn't
+stand in the way of your amusement for the world. And there's a great
+deal to be said for you. _I_ think you adorable in a tunic and breeches,
+and General Roubaix agrees with me, if Furny doesn't. We all think you
+heroic, and you are sometimes useful. But there isn't a thing you've done
+yet that a man can't do better--except getting Furny through the lines,
+and nobody wants Furny _in_ the lines. And when _you're_ in them you've a
+moral effect equal to about ten seventeen-inch guns. If the men see you
+hovering round their trenches they're so jumpy they can hardly hold their
+rifles. If Kendal sees you he's so jumpy he can hardly steer. Colville
+says he'd rather hang himself than go through another day like Baerlere.
+Furny all but lost his job on the _Morning Standard_ because he was told
+off to look after you when he ought to have gone to Antwerp--he _would_
+have lost it if I hadn't done his work for him. And you don't make things
+easier for _me_. Good God!--sometimes I don't know what I'm doing.
+
+"It isn't fair on us. It isn't fair."
+
+"It isn't fair on _me_," she said. "_I_'m jumpy when I'm kept back. You
+don't know what it's like, Jimmy. _Don't_ turn me back."
+
+And the poor child began to talk about her duty to the wounded, and that
+made him burst out again.
+
+"The wounded? If you think you're any more comfort to the wounded than
+you are to Furny and me I can tell you you're mistaken. There was a poor
+devil at Lokeren the other day with a bullet in his stomach who told me
+he didn't mind his wounds and he didn't mind the Germans; what worried
+him was the lady being there when he wasn't able to defend her."
+
+She tilted her chin at that and said she didn't want anybody to defend
+her.
+
+"Perhaps you don't, but what would you think of a man who didn't want to
+defend you? What would you think of Furny and me if we wanted you to be
+here?"
+
+"I should like you to want me," she said.
+
+"No, my dear child, you wouldn't. You don't know what you're saying."
+
+And then he said, "I know better than you do what you want. Men aren't
+made like that--if they _are_ men. You can't have it both ways." And he
+said something about chivalry that drove her back in sheer self-defence
+on a Feminist line. She said that nowadays women had chivalry too.
+
+"And _our_ chivalry is to go down before yours?"
+
+"Can't you have both?"
+
+"Not in war-time. _Your_ chivalry is to keep back and not make yourself a
+danger and a nuisance."
+
+"Come," she said, "what about Joan of Arc?" And that was too much for
+Jimmy. He jumped up off the bed and walked away from her and sat on the
+table as if it gave him some advantage.
+
+"No, no," he said. "I can't stand that rot. When you're a saint--or I'm a
+saint--you can talk about Joan of Arc. If you want to be Joan of Arc go
+and be it with some man who isn't your husband--who isn't in love with
+you. Perhaps _he_ won't mind. Go with Furny if you like, though it's
+rather hard on him."
+
+I said I thought he was rather hard on Viola--if he'd seen the poor child
+at Baerlere, flinging herself out of the car and proposing to climb over
+the ruins of several houses and walk by herself--under shell-fire--to
+Zele, because she thought he was there--
+
+Jimmy looked at her; and he did what he had done that night when he
+saw her coming towards him in the lounge. He sighed a long sigh of
+complicated anguish and satisfaction.
+
+She heard it and she understood it, and she said, "I can't help it if I
+am like that. You'll have to take the risk of me. Please go away, Furny."
+
+And I went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Norah has been reading what I've just written, and she tells me that
+there's a great deal about Jimmy's "joy" and his "adventure" and all
+that; and not one word about his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice.
+She says I don't give a serious impression of him. He might have gone
+out to the war just for fun, and that it isn't fair to him.
+
+I don't know whether it's fair or not. I write as he compels me to write.
+I find that I cannot separate his joy and his adventure from his duty and
+devotion and self-sacrifice; he didn't separate them himself. I don't
+even know that self-sacrifice is really the word for it; and the
+impression he gave me is just that--of going out for fun. It was the wild
+humour of his devotion that made it the spectacle it was.
+
+(She has told me that it's all right, so long as I recognize that it
+_was_ devotion.)
+
+After Lokeren I had no desire to go through the rest of the war with
+Jimmy. To be with Jimmy was destruction to your sense of values. I have
+got it firmly fixed in my head that the taking of Lokeren was an
+important affair.
+
+As for what Jimmy called the "tinpot bombardment of Melle" (there was
+nothing wrong with _his_ sense of values), I shall see it insanely, for
+ever and ever, as _the_ event of the war.
+
+And there is this to be said, that Lokeren filled the last gap in the
+line closing round Ghent, north, south and east, and drew it tighter. And
+Melle (only four and a-half miles away) was the last point in the German
+advance on Ghent. The taking of Melle would be a sign to us that the game
+was up.
+
+For three days Jimmy operated joyously in the village and over the
+leagues of turnip-fields that lay outside it.
+
+Of the first two days I remember an endless tramping over endless furrows
+that were ditches for the dead; an endless staggering under stretchers
+that dripped blood; an endless struggling with Viola to keep her under
+shelter of the walls; each of those acts seemed to be endless, though one
+gave place to the other, and it was only the firing that went on all the
+time, till even Jimmy complained once or twice that he was fed up with
+it.
+
+I remember that Jimmy's Field Ambulance played a great part in these
+adventures. I remember feeling a malicious satisfaction in the thought
+that at the same time it was compelled to witness _his_ performances. It
+couldn't miss him.
+
+I remember all these things; but of Melle itself I remember nothing but
+the Town Hall, with its double flight of steps up to its door, and the
+two tall stone pillars, one on each side of the door, and the Greek
+pediment above it; that and the little old Flemish house that stood back
+by itself on the other side of the road, and its white walls and its
+red-tiled roof, and the two green poplars in its garden, mounting guard.
+The house and its garden and its poplars are always vivid and still; they
+always appear to me as charged with mystery and significance and as
+connected in some secret way with Jimmy's fate.
+
+In the pauses of our movements the Field Ambulance and Jimmy's car and
+Viola's were always drawn up before the Town Hall, facing the little
+house.
+
+Then came Sunday, the eleventh, the third day of Melle, when Viola was
+left behind at Ghent.
+
+Jimmy had made her promise on her honour to be brave, _this_ time, and
+stay in the hotel and wait for orders.
+
+Colville stayed with her. They were to pack our things and be ready to
+leave at a minute's notice. Colville had secret orders that, if we were
+not back by midnight, he was to take Viola on to Bruges in his car, and
+wait for us there.
+
+For we knew now that we were in for it.
+
+And we knew that the war, which was coming closer and closer to the
+city, was coming closer to us. It had been Charlie Thesiger first,
+now it might be Reggie. At least, we knew that Reggie's regiment, the
+Third ----shires, had come up from Ostend the day before, that it was
+quartered somewhere between Ghent and Melle, and that it had been engaged
+at Quatrecht.
+
+Our own orders were to stick to Melle.
+
+I suppose from the way the ambulances were massed there that the end
+had been foreseen. That afternoon the battle began to sweep round from
+Quatrecht to Melle; and on our third journey out a rumour reached us
+at the barrier where the sentry stood guard. It was one of those
+preposterous rumours that run before disaster and are started God knows
+how when a retreat begins. I think it was the Belgian Red Cross men who
+spread it, for I heard the guide who went with Jimmy's Field Ambulance
+assuring him seriously that seven thousand British had been surrounded
+and cut to pieces on the road between Quatrecht and Melle. To be sure the
+number diminished with each repetition of the tale, dropping from seven
+thousand to seven hundred and from seven hundred to seventy. But in
+another hour we were bringing in the men of the ----shires.
+
+And towards the end of the day the real bombardment of Melle began, and
+on our last journey out we and Jimmy's Field Ambulance were in the thick
+of it.
+
+I can remember nothing of that bombardment but the three shells.
+
+The first ripped open the roof of the Town Hall and set fire to it.
+
+The second struck the Greek pediment and brought the whole front toppling
+into the street.
+
+Then, about five minutes after, there was the third shell.
+
+The light was going out of the sky, so that we saw the first shell like a
+sheet of curved lightning making for the village as we approached from
+the Ghent side. There was a deadly attraction about the thing that made
+you feel that it and you were the only objects in God's universe, and
+that you were about to be merged in each other. It looked as if it were
+rushing out of heaven straight for us, so that we were surprised when it
+apparently swerved aside and hit the Town Hall instead.
+
+(Jimmy and I were in the front of the car. Kendal, whose flesh wound was
+beginning to worry him, sat behind.)
+
+A battery of artillery charged past us, followed by the remnants of a
+French regiment on the run. Jimmy put more speed on. By the time we got
+into the village the Town Hall was spouting flame.
+
+Jimmy drew up his car about fifty yards away from it. The Field Ambulance
+had turned, and took its stand a little further away behind us, under the
+cover of the opposite walls. Its men began dragging out their stretchers.
+Kendal and I made ready with ours. The wounded were being brought out of
+every house they were in.
+
+A Belgian Colonel rode past us, trying to look unaware that he was
+retreating. He shouted to us to clear out of it. This was the only sign
+of interest that he showed.
+
+Somebody else came up to Jevons and told him that there were three or
+four wounded men somewhere inside the Town Hall, but that the place was
+on fire and it was absolutely impossible to get them out. He advised us
+to pick up the men who were lying in the street, and clear out.
+
+I saw Jevons nod his head as if he agreed and consented. I saw him get
+out of the car. And then I heard Kendal say, "Give us a hand, sir," and I
+turned to my stretchers.
+
+When I looked round again Jevons was running towards the Town Hall. The
+man who had told us to pick up our wounded and clear out was looking
+after him with a face of the most perfect horror.
+
+Kendal and I followed with the stretchers, and we saw Jevons run up the
+steps of the Town Hall. He turned at the top of the steps and waved to us
+to keep back.
+
+Then he went through the big doors between the pillars.
+
+There was a crash and a roar as if the whole building had fallen in. It
+was the top story plunging to the second floor. The upper half of the
+Town Hall was like a crate filled with blazing straw. The Greek pediment
+was the only solid thing that subsisted in that fire.
+
+Then the first floor was caught. It burned more slowly.
+
+Kendal and I and the ambulance men ran forward with the stretchers. And
+Jimmy came through the doors carrying a wounded Frenchman. He went in
+again and came out with another Frenchman.
+
+(The ground floor had begun to burn behind him.)
+
+He went in a third time and came out with Reggie Thesiger.
+
+He must have had to go further into the hall to find him, for it was a
+much longer business. We, Kendal and I, were down the street by the
+ambulance when they came out, and I didn't see that it was Reggie till I
+heard Kendal say, "Sir, that's Major Thesiger he's got!"
+
+Reggie's arm was round Jimmy's shoulder and Jimmy's arm was round
+Reggie's waist. He half carried, half supported him. He came out in the
+middle of a cloud of smoke that hid him. The smoke was followed by a
+burst of fire and another crash and roar as the ceiling of the first
+story plunged to the ground floor.
+
+With all this going on behind him Jevons paused on the top of the steps
+to readjust his burden to the descent. We heard afterwards that Reggie
+had said, "You'd better leave me, old man, and scoot. You can't do it."
+
+It didn't look as if he could. But as we went back to them we saw that
+Jevons had heaved Reggie over his shoulder and was carrying him down the
+steps. He came very carefully and slowly, so that we had reached the Town
+Hall before he had staggered to the last step.
+
+As we pressed closer to help him he told us to get back if we didn't want
+the whole damned place down on the top of us.
+
+We gave back and he followed us. I don't know how we got Reggie on to the
+stretcher--he had a piece of shell somewhere in his thigh--but we did it
+and ran with him to the ambulance. We had about a minute to do it in and
+no more.
+
+And then the second shell came.
+
+It hit the Greek pediment from behind, and we saw the two tall pillars
+that supported it stagger, snap like two sticks, and bend forwards,
+looking suddenly queer and corpulent in their fore-shortening; then they
+parted and fell, bringing down the whole front of the Town Hall.
+
+The Town Hall was spreading itself over the street, with a noise like a
+ship's coal going down the shute in a thunderstorm, as Reggie's stretcher
+slid home along its grooves in the ambulance. Kendal and I were inside
+for a second or two doing things for Reggie. The engine throbbed. The
+whole ambulance shook with its throbbing.
+
+In that second Jevons had run back to fetch his car, calling out to us to
+cut and he would overtake us. He had cranked up his engines and jumped in
+before Kendal could get down and go to his help. When we saw him start we
+started. There wasn't any time to lose.
+
+Kendal and I were sitting on the back steps of the ambulance, so that we
+kept him in sight. It was quite certain that he would overtake us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was running straight down the middle of the road when the third shell
+came.
+
+It burst on the ground behind him, on his right, a little to one side.
+Some of it must have struck the steering gear.
+
+The car plunged to the left. It climbed reeling to the top of a bank and
+paused there, then fell, front over back, into the ditch and lay there,
+belly uppermost, and its wheels whirling in the air.
+
+Jevons lay on his face, half in, half out of the ditch.
+
+He lay for about three seconds; then, as we ran to him, we saw him raise
+himself on his left arm and crawl out of the ditch; and when we reached
+him he was trying to stand.
+
+And he tried to smile at us. "You needn't look like that," he said. "I'm
+as right as rain." And then he tried to raise his right arm.
+
+You saw a khaki cuff, horribly stained. A red rag hung from it, a fringe
+that dripped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Reggie opened his eyes and turned his face towards the stretcher that
+slid into its grooves beside him.
+
+"That isn't--Jimmy--is it?" he said.
+
+I saw him move his left hand to find Jimmy's right. And I heard Jimmy
+saying again (in a weak voice this time) that he was as right as rain.
+
+We had got out of the range of the guns and the surgeons had done their
+business with bandages and splints. They had taken Reggie first, then
+Jimmy.
+
+And so, lying beside Reggie, on his own stretcher and in his own
+ambulance, he was brought back to Ghent.
+
+The military hospitals were full, so we took them to the Convent de Saint
+Pierre. And I went over to the Hôtel de la Poste to fetch Viola.
+
+I don't know what I said to her. I think I must have done what Jimmy told
+me and said they were all right. _She_ never said a word till we got to
+the Convent. (She told me afterwards that when she saw me coming in alone
+she had been sure that Jimmy was killed. She didn't know about Reggie
+yet, you see.)
+
+This part of it is all confused and horrible.
+
+We had to wait before we could see our surgeons at the Convent. The nuns
+took us into a little parlour and left us there.
+
+And I told her then what had happened. I can see her sitting in the nuns'
+parlour, looking out of the window as I told her; looking as if she
+wasn't listening. And I can hear my own voice. It sounded strange and
+affected, as if I had made it all up and didn't believe what I was
+telling her.
+
+"He saved Reggie's life--do you see? at the risk of his own.
+
+"At--the risk--of his own."
+
+And still she looked as if she wasn't listening. It didn't sound as if it
+had really happened.
+
+And I feel--now--as if I had taken hours to tell her.
+
+Then one of our men came to us. He drew back when he saw Mrs. Jevons, and
+I followed him to the doorway. He said they were busy with Major
+Thesiger. They hadn't started yet with Mr. Jevons.
+
+And then--ages afterwards--one of the surgeons came and called me out of
+the room. He said the Major would be all right. They'd got the bit of
+shell out. But--there was Jevons's hand. They'd have to take it off.
+They couldn't possibly save it. And it was going to be a beastly
+business. They'd run out of anaesthetics. Thesiger had had the last
+they'd got.
+
+Yes, of course it would have been better. But Jevons wouldn't hear of it.
+_He_ knew they were short and Thesiger didn't, and he'd insisted on their
+doing Thesiger first.
+
+It was an awful mistake, he said, because it would hurt Jevons ten times
+more than it would hurt anybody else. He thought that I had better get
+Mrs. Jevons out of that room; the ward where they were operating was next
+to it.
+
+I couldn't get her out of it.
+
+There were five minutes when I sat there and Viola crouched on the floor
+beside me with her face hidden on my knees and her hands grabbing me
+tighter and tighter.
+
+And the door opened and I saw two nuns looking in. I heard one say to
+another, "_C'est sa pauvre femme qui devient folle_." And the door closed
+on us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"All that fuss about a hand!" Jimmy had come out of his faint and was
+trying to restore Viola to a sense of proportion. If all the rest of him
+had been blown away, he said, by that confounded shell, and only his hand
+had been left, she might have had something to cry for.
+
+And yet she cried inconsolably for Jimmy's hand.
+
+God knows what memories came to her when she thought of it. I don't think
+she thought of it as the hand that had written masterpieces and flung
+them aside, that could steer a car straight through hell-fire, and that
+could nurse, and bind up wounds. I know I thought of all these obvious
+things. But she must have thought of the hand that she knew like her own
+hand, the hand with the firm, nervous fingers, and the three strong lines
+in the pinkish palm, the hand she adored and had shrunk from, whose
+gesture had been torture to her and whose touch was ecstasy, the hand
+that the surgeons had cut off and tossed into a basket to be cast out
+with the refuse of the wards.
+
+Not that either of us had much time for thinking of anything but how we
+could get out of Ghent before the Germans got into it. Viola said it
+would be quite easy. There was the ambulance, and there was _her_ car and
+there was Jimmy's car.
+
+I told her that Jimmy's god-like car was lying bottom upwards in a ditch
+between Ghent and Melle, an object half piteous, half obscene. She said
+it was a jolly good thing then that she'd brought hers. Perhaps it was.
+
+We had just got Jimmy and Reggie into their first sleep at six o'clock in
+the morning when the orders came for us to clear out.
+
+We cleared out in Viola's car, with Reggie on his stretcher and Jimmy
+(propped up with pillows) at his head, and Viola at his feet, and two
+wounded men in front with Colville, and Kendal and me standing one on
+each step. (Most of our luggage was on the Boulevard in front of the
+Convent where we had left it.)
+
+We went, as we had come, through Bruges. We drew up to rest in the Market
+Place under the Belfry.
+
+"You'd better look at it while you can, Viola," said Jevons. "You may
+never see it again."
+
+"I? I shall never see anything else," she said.
+
+We looked at the Belfry. It was as if, under that menace of destruction,
+we saw it for the first time.
+
+We _might_ have enjoyed that run back, Viola said; only somehow we
+didn't. Reggie was ill from his anesthetic all the way, and Jimmy's
+temperature went up with every mile, and we missed the boat at Ostend,
+and had to stay there all night; and Jimmy became delirious in the night
+and thought that he had left Viola behind in the Town Hall at Melle. And
+there was no room on the morning boat; and when we did get on board the
+Naval Transport at Dunkirk, Kendal took it into his head to be seasick
+till he nearly died.
+
+We had no peace till seven o'clock on Tuesday, when we got to Canterbury.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+I think I have said that Jevons made me suffer. He did. I can say that
+before those three weeks of his all my contacts with him were infected by
+the poison of my suffering. But all that was nothing to what he made me
+suffer since, what I suffer now when I remember the things I have said of
+him, the things I have thought and felt--my furtive belittling of him, my
+unwilling admiration, the doubt that I encouraged in the mean hope that
+it would become a certainty.
+
+I would give anything to be like the Canon or my wife, the only two of us
+whose conscience doesn't reproach them when they see Jimmy's right
+sleeve.
+
+I remember Norah saying to me once, "I shall be sorry for _you_ if you
+don't take care." Well, I am sorry for myself.
+
+But I am still sorrier for Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+I know there's a great deal to be said for her. I had wired to them from
+Dunkirk to tell them that Reggie was slightly wounded but recovering, and
+that the four of us would be in Canterbury that evening. It wasn't my
+fault if Reggie, being a British officer, was taken from us at Dover, and
+sent to a military hospital; but I admit I ought to have wired again to
+the Thesigers to inform them of the fact. I ought to have remembered that
+Reggie was more important to Mrs. Thesiger than Jevons, even if Jevons
+had done what Mrs. Thesiger didn't yet know he'd done.
+
+The maternal passion is a terrible thing. It has made women commit
+crimes. It made my mother-in-law push Viola from her on her threshold and
+turn on me as I was helping Jimmy out of the car. It made her say,
+"You've brought my son-in-law. What have you done with my son?"
+
+(To do her justice, she hadn't seen what had happened to Jimmy. Though he
+was tired and weak, he could still stand up and stagger along if you held
+him tight.)
+
+And the maternal passion is not more terrible than the passion that Viola
+had for Jevons. It made her say to her mother as the Canon and I brought
+Jimmy in (the dear old man had seen in an instant why he wore his coat
+slung loose over his right shoulder), "You can see what we're doing with
+my husband."
+
+And when we were all in the drawing-room and I was explaining gently that
+Reggie was all right, but that we'd _had_ to send him to the military
+hospital, it made her say, "If it wasn't for your son-in-law your son
+wouldn't be alive."
+
+God knows what thirst she satisfied, what bitterness she exhausted, what
+secret anguish she avenged.
+
+They were all there, the Thesiger women--they had come, you see, to meet
+Reggie--Victoria and Millicent and Mildred; and they heard her. But it
+was Mildred who _saw_. She spoke to her mother.
+
+"Can't you _see_?" she said.
+
+Viola was kneeling by the sofa where her father had made Jimmy lie, and
+she had unbuttoned and taken from him his heavy coat. She looked at me
+and said, "Please take them away somewhere and tell them. Jimmy _is_ so
+tired."
+
+I know that must seem awful. It _was_ awful to come back from the
+battlefields of Flanders, from sieges and sackings and slaughter, and see
+the women flashing fire at each other. And they were mother and daughter.
+But, you see, they were women. I know that the war should have purged
+them of their passions (perhaps it did purge them); but your lover is
+your lover and your son your son for all that.
+
+And it wasn't easy for Mrs. Thesiger to see how her son-in-law could
+have saved her son. I am not sure that she wouldn't have thought it
+presumption in Jevons to suppose that he could save anybody, let alone
+her son. There were people like the Thesigers from whom heroism was
+expected as a matter of course; and there were people like Jevons. You
+know what she said about his going to the front.
+
+When I had finished the tale--and I let her have the whole of it, from
+the first shell that hit the Town Hall to the bit of the third shell
+that hit Jimmy--she said, "You mean that if he hadn't gone back for his
+car--" She had broken down and was sobbing quietly, but you could see how
+her mind worked.
+
+I said, "I mean that if he hadn't gone back to the Town Hall to look for
+Reggie he wouldn't have been hit."
+
+Then I told her how they took Jimmy's hand off.
+
+I heard the Canon groan. Millicent and Victoria began to sob as their
+mother had sobbed. Mildred set her teeth firmly; and Mrs. Thesiger turned
+to me a queer, disordered face, and spoke.
+
+"They--they gave the anaesthetic to--Reggie?"
+
+"They did," I said. "Because Jimmy made them."
+
+Yes. I am very sorry for Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+She cried, softly, and with a great recovery of beauty and dignity, for
+about fifteen seconds (the Canon had gone back to Jevons); then she rose
+and addressed her daughter.
+
+"Mildred dear, I think Jimmy had better have Reggie's room."
+
+Then she went to him; and I am told that she kissed him for the first
+time. She kissed him as if he had been her son. (Poor Jimmy, I may say,
+was so tired that he didn't want to be kissed by anybody.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He still had Reggie's room six weeks later when I came back from France
+for a week-end. Reggie had recovered, and was with them for a fortnight's
+leave before he went out again.
+
+Norah and I went down on Saturday to see him. (His leave was up on Sunday
+night.)
+
+Without Reggie I don't think I should have realized Jevons in his final
+phase.
+
+He had been happy, I know, at Hampstead in the first two years of his
+marriage; he had been happy most of the time in Edwardes Square; even in
+Mayfair he had had moments; and Amershott had been, on the whole, an
+improvement on Mayfair. And he had lived through his three weeks in Ghent
+in a sort of ecstasy. And before that, all the time, there had been his
+work, which I am always forgetting, and his fame, when he didn't forget
+it.
+
+But there had always been something.
+
+At first it had been the Thesigers. As long as Mrs. Thesiger--as long
+as _one_ Thesiger--held out against him he had felt defeat. And then
+there had been Reggie's return and his appalling doubt. He had pretended
+not to see his doubt and not to mind it. And he had seen it, as he saw
+everything, and he had minded awfully. Then came Viola's illness, which
+you could put down to Reggie's doubt. And after that it had been Viola
+pretty nearly all the time. And even at Ghent, by the tortures of anxiety
+she had caused him, you may say that she had spoiled his ecstasy.
+
+And now, without any effort, or any calculation or foresight, by a
+stupendous accident, he had found happiness and peace and certainty. The
+thing was so consummately done, and so timed to the minute, that when you
+saw him there enjoying it, you could have sworn that he had played for it
+and pulled it off. It was as if he had said to himself, "Give me time,
+and I'll bring all these people round, even Mrs. Thesiger, even Reggie.
+I'll _make_ them love me. Wait, and you'll just see how I shall score."
+
+And there he was scoring.
+
+And it was as if he had said to himself long ago, "As for Viola, I know
+all about it. I know I do things that make the poor child shudder; but I
+can put that all right. I can make her forget it. I give myself three
+weeks." As if he said, "She thought she was going to leave me. I knew
+that, too, and I didn't care. She might have left me a thousand times and
+I should have brought her back."
+
+I used to think it pathetic that Jevons should have wanted Mrs. Thesiger
+to love him--that he should have wanted Reggie to. But I must say his
+pathos was avenged. _They_ were pathetic now. That big, hulking Major
+wasn't happy unless he was writing Jimmy's letters, or cutting up Jimmy's
+meat for him, or helping him in and out of his clothes. Mrs. Thesiger
+wasn't happy unless she was doing things for him. The Canon wasn't happy
+(though, like Norah, he had nothing on his conscience) and Mildred and
+Millicent and Victoria weren't happy, nor the Thesiger's friends in the
+Cathedral Close.
+
+And then--after they had made a hero of him for six weeks--on that
+Saturday night when we were all together in the Canon's library, Jevons
+made his confession.
+
+We had been, exchanging reminiscences. Something had made Viola think of
+Jimmy's General and the two Colonels at Ghent. She began telling the
+Canon how we had watched them through the glass screen, and how funny
+General Roubaix had looked with his arm round Jimmy's neck, and how he
+had said that Jimmy was a salamander, and that he didn't know what fear
+is.
+
+"Oh, _don't_ I!" said Jimmy.
+
+And that sent Reggie back to the day when he had first seen Jimmy.
+
+"Look here, old man, what made you say you were an arrant coward?"
+
+"Because," said Jimmy simply, "I am one. Dear old Roubaix was talking
+through his hat.
+
+"Not know what fear is! I know a good many things, but I don't know
+anything better than that. You can't tell me anything about fear I don't
+know.
+
+"You've no idea how I funked going out to the war. Yes--_funked_.
+
+"It wasn't any ordinary funk, mind you, the little, creepy feeling in
+your waist, and your tummy tumbling down, and your heart sort of
+fluttering over the place where it used to be. I believe you can get over
+_that_. And I never had that--ever, except once when I saw Viola in a
+place where she'd no business to be. It was something much worse. It--it
+was in my head--in my brain. A sort of madness. And it never let me
+alone. It was worse at night, and after I got up and began to go about in
+the morning--when my brain woke and remembered, but it was there all the
+time.
+
+"I saw things--horrors. And I heard them. I saw and heard the whole
+war. All the blessed time--all those infernal five weeks before I got
+out to it, I kept seeing horrors and hearing them. There was a lot of
+detail--realism wasn't in it--and it was all correct; because I verified
+it afterwards. Things _were_ just like that. Every morning when I got up
+I said to myself I'm going out to that damned war, but I wish to God
+somebody'd come and chloroform me before I get there. There were moments
+when I could have chloroformed myself. I felt as if it was the utter
+injustice of God that I--_I_--had to be mixed up in it.
+
+"Not know what fear is!
+
+"Just conceive," said Jimmy, "a man living like that, in abject,
+abominable terror, in black funk--keeping it up, all day and half the
+night, for five solid weeks--before he got there."
+
+"And when you did get there," said Reggie, "were you in a funk?"
+
+"Oh, well, you see, by the time I'd got there it had pretty well worn
+itself out. There wasn't any funk left to _be_ in."
+
+And when I saw Reggie look at him I knew he had scored again.
+
+Still, I wondered how it really stood with them; and whether Reggie
+had settled with his doubt, or whether sometimes, when you caught him
+looking at Jimmy, it had come over him again. The kind of virtue his
+brother-in-law had displayed in Flanders wouldn't help him, you see, to
+that particular solution. And with the Thesigers--when they took after
+their mother--things died hard.
+
+He must have felt that he had to settle it before he went.
+
+Viola told us what happened.
+
+It was his last evening, and the three were together in that room of
+Reggie's. He had just said that Viola wouldn't care how many Town Halls
+he was buried under, as long as Jimmy didn't go and dig him out. And
+then, suddenly, he went straight for it.
+
+"Jimmy," he said, "did you run away with my sister, or didn't you? I
+don't care whether you did or not, but--did you?"
+
+"No, I didn't," said Jimmy.
+
+"Then what the dickens," Reggie said, "were you doing together in
+Bruges?"
+
+"We were looking at the Belfry," said Jimmy.
+
+And Reggie shook his head. "That's beyond me," he said.
+
+"Yes," said Viola. "But it wasn't beyond Jimmy."
+
+That's the real story of Tasker Jevons and his wife.
+
+Don't ask me what would have happened to them if there hadn't been a war.
+
+I've tried to show you the sort of man he was. He knew his hour even
+before it found him. And you cannot separate him from his hour.
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 14106 ***
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #14106 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14106)
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Belfry, by May Sinclair
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Belfry
+
+Author: May Sinclair
+
+Release Date: November 21, 2004  [eBook #14106]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELFRY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects,
+Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+THE BELFRY
+
+by
+
+MAY SINCLAIR
+
+Author of the _Three Sisters_, etc.
+
+1916
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+MY BOOK
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Of course this story can't be published as it stands just yet. Not--if
+I'm to be decent--for another generation, because, thank Heaven, they're
+still alive. (They've had me there, as they've always had me everywhere.)
+How they managed it I can't think. I don't mean merely at the end, though
+that was stupendous, but how they ever managed it. It seems to me they
+must have taken _all_ the risks, always.
+
+I suppose if you asked him he'd say, "That's how." It was certainly the
+way they managed the business of living. Perhaps it's why they managed it
+on the whole so well. I remember how when I was shilly-shallying about
+that last job of mine he said, "Take it. Take it. If you can risk living
+at all, my dear fellow, you can risk that."
+
+And he added, "If I'd only _your_ luck!"
+
+Well, that's exactly what he did have. He had my luck, I mean the luck I
+ought to have had, all the time, from the beginning to the very end. But
+there is one thing he can't take from me, and that is the telling of this
+story. He can hold it up as long as he lives--as long as _she_ lives--as
+he has held up pretty nearly everything where I was concerned. But he
+can't take it from me. He doesn't "want" it. Even he with his infernal
+talent couldn't do anything with it. Unscrupulous as he was, and I assure
+you he'd stick at nothing (he'd "take" his mother's last agony if he
+"wanted" it badly enough), indecent as he was, he'd stick at that.
+
+I don't mean he couldn't take his wife, part of her, anyhow, at a pinch.
+And I don't mean he couldn't take himself, his own emotions, his own
+eccentricities, if he happened to want them, and his own meannesses, if
+nobody else's, so to speak, would do. But he couldn't and wouldn't take
+his own big things, particularly not that last thing.
+
+When I say that I can't publish this story yet as it stands, I'm not
+forgetting that I _have_ published the end of it already. But only in the
+way of business; to publish that sort of thing was what I went out for;
+it was all part of my Special Correspondent's job.
+
+And when you think that it was just touch and go--Why, if I hadn't bucked
+up and taken that job when he told me to I might have missed him. No
+amount of hearing about him would have been the same thing. I had to see
+him.
+
+What I wrote then doesn't count. I had to tell what I saw just after I
+had seen it. I had to take it as I saw it, a fragment snapped off from
+the rest of him, and dated October 11th, 1914, as if it didn't belong to
+him; as if he were only another splendid instance. And of course I had
+to leave _her_ out.
+
+Told like that, it didn't amount to much.
+
+This is the real telling.
+
+I must get away from the end, right back to the beginning.
+
+I suppose, to be accurate, the very beginning was the day I first met him
+in nineteen-six--no, nineteen-five it must have been. It was at
+Blackheath Football Ground, the last match of the season, when Woolwich
+Arsenal played East Kent and beat them by two goals and a try. He was
+there as a representative of the Press, "doing" the match for some
+sporting paper.
+
+He held me up at the barrier (yes, he held me up in the first moment of
+our acquaintance) while he fumbled for his pass. He had given the word
+"Press" with an exaggerated aplomb that showed he was young to his job,
+and the gate-keeper challenged him. It was, in fact, the exquisite
+self-consciousness of the little man that made me look at him. And he
+caught me looking at him; he blushed, caught himself blushing and smiled
+to himself with the most delicious appreciation of his own absurdity. And
+as he stood there fumbling, and holding me up while he argued with the
+gate-keeper, who didn't know him, I got his engaging twinkle. It was as
+if he looked at me and said, "See me swank just then? Funny, wasn't it?"
+
+He hung about on the edge of the crowd for a while with his hands in his
+pockets, sucking his little blond moustache and looking dreamy and rather
+incompetent. I was a full-blown journalist even then, and I remember
+feeling a sort of pity for his youth. He was so obviously on his maiden
+trip, and obviously, I fancied, doomed never to arrive in any port.
+
+Well--well; I came upon him afterwards at a crisis in the game. He was
+taking notes in shorthand with a sort of savagery between his tense and
+concentrated glares at the scrimmage that was then massed in the centre
+of the field. Woolwich Arsenal and East Kent, locked in each other's
+bodies, now struggled and writhed and butted like two immense beasts
+welded together by the impact of their battle, now swayed and quivered
+and snorted as one beast torn by a solitary and mysterious rage.
+
+Self-consciousness had vanished from my man. He stood, leaning forward
+with his legs a little apart. His boyish face was deeply flushed; he had
+sucked and bitten his blond moustache into a wisp; he was breathing
+heavily, with his mouth ajar; his very large and conspicuous blue eyes
+glittered with a sort of passion. (He wore those eyes in his odd little
+ugly face like some inappropriate decoration.)
+
+All these symptoms declared that he was "on." They made up a look that I
+was soon to know him by.
+
+I remember marvelling at his excitement.
+
+I remember also discussing the match with him as we went back to town. It
+must have been then that he began to tell me about himself: that his name
+was James Tasker Jevons; that he lived, or hoped to live, by going about
+the country and reporting the big cricket and football matches.
+
+At least he called it reporting. I shouldn't think there has ever been
+any reporting like it before or since.
+
+I told him I was out for my paper, the _Morning Standard_, too. Not
+exactly reporting, in _his_ sense (I little knew what _his_ sense was
+when I put it that way); and there left it. You see, I didn't want to rub
+it into the poor chap that the stranger he had been unfolding himself to
+so quaintly was a cut above his job.
+
+But he saw through it. I don't know how he managed to convey to me that
+my delicacy needn't suffer. Anyhow, he must have had some scruples of his
+own, since he waited for another context before remarking quietly that
+what I was doing now he would be doing in another six months. (And he
+was.) These things, he said, took time, and he gave himself six months.
+(Yes; in less than six months he was holding me up, again, in my own
+paper. I had to wait till he was "out" before I could get in.) He didn't
+seem to boast so much as to trace for my benefit the path of some natural
+force, some upward-tending, indestructible Energy that happened to be
+him.
+
+All this I remember. But I cannot remember by what stages we arrived at
+dining together, as we did that night in a little restaurant in Soho.
+Perhaps there were no stages; we may have simply leaped by one bound at
+that consummation. He had swung himself into my compartment as the train
+was leaving the platform at Blackheath; so I suppose it was destiny.
+After that I was tempted to conceive that he fastened on me as on
+something that he had need of; but I think it was rather that I fell to
+his mysterious attraction.
+
+While we dined he informed me further that he had been reporting football
+matches for six weeks. Before that he had been proof-reader for a firm of
+printers for about a year. Before that he had been a compositor. And
+before that again he had worked in an office with his father, who was
+Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths for some parish down in
+Hertfordshire. He chucked that because he found that the registration of
+births, marriages and deaths was spoiling his handwriting quite as much
+as his handwriting was spoiling the registration of births, marriages and
+deaths. (He was, he said, cultivating a careless, scholarly hand.) He
+liked his present job, because it took him out pretty often into the open
+air. Also he liked looking on at football matches and prize fights.
+
+He said it made him feel manly.
+
+You should have seen him sitting there and telling me these things in a
+gentle, throaty and rather thick voice with a cockney accent and a sort
+of tenor ring in it and a queer, humorous intonation that was like an
+audible twinkle, as if he saw himself as he thought I must see him,
+mainly in the light of absurdity. You should have seen his face, its thin
+cheeks, its vivid flush, its queer, inquisitive, contradictory nose that
+had a slender, high bridge and a tilted, pointed end in profile and
+three-quarters, and turned suddenly all broad and blunt in a full view;
+and his mouth that stood ajar with excitement, and even in moments of
+quiescence failed to hide the tips of two rather prominent white teeth
+pressed down on the lower lip. I don't say there was anything unmanly
+about Jevons's figure (he wasn't noticeably undersized), or about his
+mouth and jaw. I knew a great General with a mouth and jaw like that, and
+he was one of the handsomest figures in the Service. I'm not hinting at
+anything like effeminacy in Jevons, only at a certain oddity that really
+saved him. If he'd been handsome he'd have been dreadful. His flush, his
+decorative eyes, his dark eyebrows and eyelashes, his sleek, light brown
+hair, would have made him vulgar. As it was, his queerness gave them a
+sort of point.
+
+I dwell on these physical details because, afterwards, I found myself
+continually looking at him as if to see where his charm lay. To see, I
+suppose, what _she_ saw in him.
+
+If anybody had asked me that night what I saw in him myself beyond an
+ordinary little journalist "on the make," I don't suppose I could have
+told them. But there's no doubt that I felt his charm, or that night
+would have been the end instead of the beginning.
+
+We sat in the restaurant when he had done telling me about himself; I
+remember we sat quite a long time discussing an English writer--our
+contemporary--whom I rather considered I had discovered. In those days I
+used to apply him as an infallible test. Jevons had read every word of
+him; it was he, in fact, who brought him into the conversation. He
+confessed afterwards that he had done it on purpose. He had been testing
+_me_.
+
+Even so our acquaintance might have lapsed but for the thing that
+happened when the waiter came up with the bill. My share of it was three
+and twopence, and I found myself with only ninepence in my pocket. I had
+to borrow half a crown, from Jevons. You mayn't see anything very
+dreadful in that. I didn't at the time, and there wasn't. The dreadful
+thing was that I forgot to pay him back.
+
+Yes. Something happened that put Jevons and his half-crown out of my head
+for long enough. I forgot to pay him, and he had to go without his dinner
+for three nights in consequence. It was his last half-crown.
+
+He told me this as an immense joke, long afterwards.
+
+And Viola Thesiger cried.
+
+That crying of hers, that child-like softening and breaking down under
+him, in itself so unexpected (I didn't know she could do it), that
+sudden and innocent catastrophe, was the first sign to me that I was done
+for--wiped out. There wasn't any violence or any hysteria about it, only
+grief, only pity. It was an entirely simple, gentle and beautiful
+performance, and it took place in my rooms after Jevons had left us. But,
+as I say, this was long afterwards. The agony of my undoing was a
+horribly protracted affair.
+
+I needn't say that what happened--I mean the thing that made me forget
+all about Jevons and his half-crown--was Viola Thesiger.
+
+I had his address, but the next day--the day after the match--was Sunday,
+so I couldn't get the postal order I had meant to send him. And on Monday
+she walked into my rooms at ten in the morning.
+
+The appointment, I may remark, was for nine-thirty. I had fixed that
+early hour for it because I wanted to get it done with. I wasn't going to
+have my morning murdered with violence when it was two hours old; neither
+did I intend it to be poisoned by the thought of this interview hanging
+over me at the end.
+
+I had just sent for Pavitt, my man, and told him that if Miss Thesiger
+called he was on no account to let her in. He was to say that the
+appointment was for nine-thirty and that Mr. Furnival was now engaged.
+She would have to call again at three if she wished to see him. When
+engaging a typist it is as well to begin as you mean to go on, and I was
+anxious to let Miss Thesiger know at once that I was not a man who would
+stand any nonsense. I was abominably busy that morning.
+
+And Pavitt let her in. (It was the first time he had failed in this way.)
+He never explained or apologized for it afterwards. He seemed to think
+that when I had seen Miss Thesiger I would see, even more vividly than he
+did, how impossible it was to do otherwise, unless he had relinquished
+all claim to manhood and to chivalry. The look he sent me from the
+threshold as he retreated backwards, drawing the door upon himself like a
+screen and shutting me in alone with her, said very plainly, "You may
+curse, sir, and you may swear; but if you think you'll get out of it any
+better than I have you're mistaken."
+
+Yes: it was something more than her appearance and her manner, though
+they, in all conscience, were enough.
+
+I do not know what appearance and what manner, if any, are proper to a
+young woman calling on a young man at his rooms to seek employment. The
+mere situation may, for all I know, bristle with embarrassments. Anyhow,
+I can imagine that in some hands it might have moments, let us say, of
+extreme difficulty on either side. Miss Thesiger's appearance and her
+manner were perfect; but they didn't suggest by any sign or shade that
+she was a young woman seeking employment, that she was a young woman
+seeking anything; but rather that she was a young woman to whom all
+things naturally came.
+
+She approached me very slowly. Her adorable little salutation, with all
+its maturity, its gravity, was somehow essentially young. She was rather
+tall, and her figure had the same serious maturity in youth. She carried
+her small head high, and held her shoulders well back, so that she got a
+sort of squareness into the divine slope of them (people hadn't begun to
+slouch forward from the hips in those days), a squareness that agreed
+somehow with the character of her small face. I didn't know then whether
+it was a pretty face or not. I daresay it was a bit too odd and square
+for prettiness, and, as for beauty, that had all gone into the lines of
+her body (which _was_ beautiful, if you like). When you looked carefully,
+you got a little square, white forehead, and straight eyebrows of the
+same darkness as her hair, and very distinct on the white, and eyes also
+very dark and distinct, and fairly crystalline with youth; and a little
+white and very young nose that started straight and ended absurdly in a
+little soft knob that had a sort of kink in it; and a mouth which would
+have been too large for her face if it hadn't made room for itself by
+tilting up at the corners; and then a little square white chin and jaw;
+they were thrust forward, but so lightly and slenderly that it didn't
+matter. It doesn't sound--does it?--as if she could have been pretty, let
+alone beautiful; and yet--and yet she managed that little head of hers
+and that little odd face so as to give an impression of beauty or of
+prettiness. It was partly the oddness of the face and head, coming on the
+top of all that symmetry, that perfection, that made the total effect of
+her so bewildering. I can't find words for the total effect (I don't know
+that you ever got it all at once, and I certainly didn't get it then),
+and if I were to tell you that what struck me first about her was
+something perverse and wilful and defiant, this would be misleading.
+
+She smiled in her mature, perfunctory manner as she took the chair I gave
+her. She cast out her muff over my writing-table, and flung back the furs
+that covered her breast and shoulders, as if she had come to stay, as if
+it were four o'clock in the afternoon and I had asked her to tea for the
+first time.
+
+I remember saying, "That's right. I'm afraid this room is a bit warm,
+isn't it?"--as if she had done something uninvited and a little
+unexpected, and I wished to reassure her. As if, too, I desired to assert
+my position as the giver of assurances.
+
+(And it was I who needed them, not she.)
+
+She hadn't been in that room five minutes before she had created a
+situation; a situation that bristled with difficulty and danger.
+
+To begin with, she was so young. She couldn't have been, then, a day
+older than one-and-twenty. My first instinct (at least, I suppose it was
+my first) was to send her away; to tell her that I was afraid she
+wouldn't do, that she was too unpunctual, and that I had found, between
+nine-thirty and ten o'clock, somebody who would suit me rather better.
+Any lie I could think of, so long as I got out of it. So long as I got
+her out of it.
+
+I don't know how it was she so contrived to impress me as being in for
+something, some impetuous adventure, some enterprise of enormous
+uncertainty. It may have been because she looked so well-cared-for and
+expensive. I do not understand these matters, but her furs, and her
+tailor-made suit of dark cloth, and the little black velvet hat with the
+fur tail in it were not the sort of clothes I had hitherto seen worn by
+typists seeking for employment. So that I doubted whether financial
+necessity could have driven her to my door. Or else I had a premonition.
+She herself had none. She was guileless and unaware of taking any risks.
+And that, I think, was what disturbed me. The situation bristled because
+she so ignored all difficulty or danger.
+
+Please don't imagine that I regarded myself as dangerous or even
+difficult, or her as being, in any vulgar sense, out for adventure, or as
+balancing herself even for amusement on any perilous edge. It was not
+what she was _out_ for, it was, as I say, what she might possibly be in
+for; and what she would, in consequence, let me in for too. She made me
+feel responsible.
+
+"Let me see," I said; "it's typing, isn't it?"
+
+I began raking through drawers and pigeon-holes, pretending to find her
+letter and the sample of her work that she had sent me, though I knew all
+the time that they lay under my hand hidden by the blotter. I wanted to
+give myself time; I wanted to create the impression that I was old at
+this game; that I had to do with scores and scores of young women seeking
+employment; to make her realize the grim fact of competition; to saturate
+her with the idea that she was only one of scores and scores, all
+docketed and pigeon-holed, any one of whom might have superior qualities;
+when it would be easy enough to say, "I'm sorry, but the fact is, I
+rather think I've engaged somebody already."
+
+"Yes," she said, "it's typing. I can't do anything else. But if you want
+shorthand, I could learn it."
+
+This gave me an opening. "Well--I'm sorry--but the fact is--"
+
+"Did you like what I sent you?"
+
+That staggered me. I hadn't allowed for her voice. For a moment I
+wondered wildly what _had_ she sent me?
+
+"Oh, yes. I liked it. But--" I began it again.
+
+She leaned forward this time, peering under my elbow (the minx! I'm
+convinced she knew the infernal thing was there).
+
+"I see," she said. "You've lost it. Don't bother. I can do another. As
+long as you liked it, that's all right."
+
+I remember thinking violently: "It isn't all right. It's all wrong. And
+the more I like it (if I _do_ like it) the worse it's going to be." But
+all I said was, "You wrote from Canterbury, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+It was as if she challenged me with: "Why not? Why shouldn't one write
+from Canterbury?" And she stuck out her little chin as her eyes opened
+fire on me at close range.
+
+"Do you live there?" I said.
+
+"Yes." She corrected herself. "My people live there."
+
+"Oh! Because--in that case--I'm sorry--but--the fact is, I'm afraid--" I
+floundered, and she watched me floundering. Then I plunged. "I must have
+a typist who lives in London." (And I might have added "a typist who
+won't open fire on me at close range.")
+
+"But," she said, "I do--at least, I'm going to to-morrow evening."
+
+I must have sat staring then quite a long time, not at her, but at one of
+Roland Simpson's sketches on the wall in front of me.
+
+She followed, but not quite accurately, the direction of my thoughts.
+
+"If you want references, I can give you heaps. General Thesiger's my
+uncle. Why? Do you know him?"
+
+I had ceased staring. He was not the General I knew, but she had spoken a
+sufficiently distinguished name. I said as much.
+
+"Of course lots of people know him," she went on with a sort of radiant
+rapidity. "And he knows lots of people. But I wouldn't write to him if I
+were you. He'll only be rude, and ask you who the devil _you_ are.
+There's my father, Canon Thesiger. It's no good writing to him, either.
+It'll worry him. And there's--no, you mustn't bother the Archbishop. But
+there's the Dean. You might write to _him_! And there's Colonel
+Braithwaite and Mrs. Braithwaite. They're all dears. You might write to
+any of them. Only I'd much rather you didn't."
+
+"Why?" I said. I thought I was entitled to ask why.
+
+"Because," she said, "it'll only mean a lot more bother for me."
+
+I believe I meditated on this before I asked her, "Why should it?"
+
+"Because it isn't easy to get away and earn your own living in this
+country. And they'll try, poor dears, to stop me. And they can't."
+
+"If they don't," I said, "are you sure it won't mean a lot of bother for
+_them_?"
+
+"Not," she said gravely, "if they're left alone and not worried. It will,
+of course, if you go and write and stir them all up again."
+
+"I see. For the moment, then, they are placated?"
+
+"Rather." (I wondered on what grounds.) "We settled _that_ last night."
+
+"Then--" I said, "forgive my asking so many questions--your people know
+you had this appointment with me?"
+
+Her eyebrows took a little tortured twist in her pity for my stupidity.
+
+"Oh no. That would have upset them all for nothing. It doesn't do to
+worry them with silly details. You see, they don't know anything about
+you."
+
+It was exquisite, the innocence with which she brought it out.
+
+"But," I insisted, "that's rather my point. _You_ don't know anything
+about me either, do you?"
+
+"Yes, I do. I knew," she said, "the minute I came into the room. If it
+comes to that, you don't know anything about _me_."
+
+I said I did; I knew the minute _she_ came into the room. And she faced
+me with, "Well then, you see!" as if that settled it.
+
+I suppose it did settle it. I must have decided that since nobody could
+stop her, and I wasn't, after all, a villain, if she insisted on being
+somebody's typist, she had very much better be mine. You see, she was so
+young. I wanted to protect her. Not that there was anything helpless and
+pathetic about her, anything, except her innocence, that appealed to me
+for protection. On the contrary, she struck me as a creature of high
+courage and defiance. That, of course, was what constituted the danger.
+She would insist on taking risks. Presently I heard myself saying, "Yes,
+the Close, Canterbury. I've got that. But where am I to find you here?"
+
+She gave me an address that made me whistle.
+
+I asked her if she knew anything, anything whatever, about the people of
+the house?
+
+She said she didn't. She had chosen it because it had a nice green door,
+and there was an Angora cat on the door-step. A large orange cat with
+green eyes.
+
+Had she actually taken rooms there?
+
+No. But she had chosen them (I think she said because they had pretty
+chintz curtains.) She was going to take them _now_.
+
+She had her hand on the door. She was eager, like a child that has got
+off at last, after irritating delay.
+
+I closed the door against her precipitate flight. I said I thought we
+could settle that here, over the telephone.
+
+And I settled it.
+
+Having settled it, I sent Pavitt, my man, to get rooms for her that
+afternoon in Hampstead, with his sister-in-law, in a house overlooking
+the Heath. I said I couldn't promise her chintz curtains and a green door
+and an orange Angora cat with green eyes, but I thought she would be
+fairly comfortable with Mrs. Pavitt.
+
+She was.
+
+She told me a week later that the Hampstead rooms _had_ chintz curtains
+and there was a Persian kitten too. A blue Persian, with yellow eyes.
+
+There was. But I didn't tell her who put them there.
+
+The kitten alone (it was a pure-bred Persian) cost me three guineas; and
+to this day she thinks that Pavitt, who brought it to her, found it on
+the Heath.
+
+Yet, with all my precautions, there was trouble when Canterbury heard
+about my typist. (She had become my typist, though I had never said a
+word about engaging her.)
+
+This, of course, was owing to the criminal secrecy with which Viola
+conducted her affairs. The Minor Canon wrote to me as if I had seduced,
+or was about to seduce, his daughter. (He had upset himself by rushing up
+to take her back to Canterbury, and finding that she wouldn't go with
+him.) I think, in his excitement, he ordered me to give her up. He was a
+guileless and indeed a holy man; and it's always the guileless and the
+holy people who raise the uncleanest scandals. And Mrs. Thesiger wrote,
+and the General and the Dean; and I've no doubt the Archbishop would have
+written too, if I hadn't unearthed _my_ General at his club, and asked
+him if he knew the Thesigers, and found out that he did, and implored him
+to arrange the horrid business for me as best he could. I said he might
+tell them that if the girl had been left to them to look after her, she
+would have got into rooms in--I named the street, and testified to the
+sinister character of the house. And my General wrote and explained to
+the other General and to the Minor Canon what a thoroughly nice chap I
+was, and how lamentably they had misunderstood what I believed he was
+pleased to call my relations with Miss Thesiger. I'm not at all sure that
+he didn't even go farther and stick in a lot about my family, and suggest
+that I was eligible to the extent that, though my fortunes were still
+to make, I had (besides private means that enabled me to live in spite of
+journalism) considerable expectations (he knew an aunt of mine--better,
+it would seem, than I did). In short, that I was a thoroughly nice chap,
+and that the father of seven daughters (five unmarried) might do far
+worse than cultivate my acquaintance. He must have gone quite as far as
+that, or farther, otherwise I couldn't account for the peculiarly tender
+note that the Minor Canon put into the letter of apology that he wrote
+me, still less for the invitation I received by the same post from Mrs.
+Thesiger to spend Whitsuntide with them at Canterbury. (Viola had said
+she was going home for Whitsuntide.)
+
+Dear lady, she was herself the daughter of a Canon, and she had lived all
+her life in a cathedral close, and the atmosphere of a cathedral close
+may foster innocence, but I cannot think it could have been entirely
+responsible for the kind of indiscretion Mrs. Thesiger was guilty of.
+Neither do I think Mrs. Thesiger was entirely responsible herself. She is
+a nice woman, and I am sure she couldn't have written as she did unless
+my friend the General had led her to believe that there was some sort of
+an understanding between me and Viola. But still, for all she knew about
+me, I might have been a villain. Not perhaps the gross villain the Minor
+Canon took me for, but a villain in some profound and subtle way
+inappreciable to my friend the General.
+
+Well, of course I didn't spend Whitsuntide with the Thesigers at
+Canterbury. It would have been sheer waste of Viola. For the worst of all
+this confounded rumpus was that it made me put off proposing to Viola
+till she had forgotten all about it. She would never have listened to me
+while the trail of the scandal still lingered.
+
+In fact, it was only the marked coldness of my manner to her just then
+that saved me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It saved me to suffer. I didn't know it was possible to suffer as she
+made me suffer--I mean as _they_ made me, between them.
+
+It didn't begin all at once. It didn't begin, really, for another three
+months, the end of those six months that Jevons had given himself. Not
+even then. Not, you may say, for a whole year; because he gave himself
+another six months as soon as he saw her. He was always giving himself
+these periods of time, as if, with his mania for taking risks, he was
+always having some prodigious bet on himself. I never knew a man back his
+own enterprises as he did.
+
+But until he turned up again I was happy. I say I, not we. I don't know
+whether Viola was happy or not, though she looked it. I had enough sense
+to see that her happiness, if she was happy, had nothing to do with me
+except in so far as I was the humble means, under Providence, of the
+definite escape from Canterbury.
+
+For I very soon saw what had been the matter with her. She was one of
+nine, the youngest but one of seven daughters. The Minor Canon had only
+been able to educate one of the seven properly, because he had had a son
+at Sandhurst, and the other was still reading for the Bar, which is
+pretty expensive too if you're as amiably stupid as Bertie Thesiger. (I
+mention Bertie because, though he doesn't come into this story, his
+stupidity and his amiability combined to tighten the situation
+considerably for Viola.) And Mrs. Thesiger had only been able to marry
+off two of her seven daughters. Of the others, one (the one who had been
+to Girton) was a High School teacher in Canterbury and she lived at home;
+one was a trained nurse and lived at home between cases; that left three
+girls living continually at home and, as Viola put it, eating their
+heads off.
+
+These were the circumstances which Viola (with some omissions) recited by
+way of justification for her revolt; the fact being that she would have
+revolted anyway. She was, as I have said, a creature of high courage and
+vitality and she was tied up much too tight in that Cathedral Close,
+besides being much too well fed; and she longed to do things. To do them
+with her hands and with her head. She was tired of playing tennis on the
+velvet lawns of the Canons' gardens; she was tired of calling on the
+Canons' wives and talking to their daughters. I am aware that Canterbury
+is a garrison town and that other resources, and other prospects, I
+suppose, were open to Viola. But Viola was tired of talking to the
+garrison. I think she would have been tired in any case, even if the
+garrison hadn't been bespoken, as it were, by her unmarried sisters. (It
+is, humanly speaking, impossible that, even in a garrison town, seven
+sisters will _all_ marry into the Service, as I fatuously supposed Mrs.
+Thesiger must have realized when she asked me to Canterbury.) It always
+bored Viola to do what her family did, and what her family, just because
+they did it, expected her to do. And somehow, in the long hours spent in
+the Cathedral Close, she had acquired a taste for what she called
+"literature," what she innocently believed to be literature. She was of
+an engaging innocence in this respect; so that typing authors'
+manuscripts appealed to her as a vocation that combined one of the
+highest forms of cerebral activity with I don't know what glamour of
+romantic adventure.
+
+Her enthusiasm, her veneration for the written word made her an admirable
+typist. But not all at once. To say that she brought to her really
+horrible task a respect, a meticulous devotion, would give you no idea of
+the child's attitude; it was a blind, savage superstition that would have
+been exasperating if it had not been so heart-rending. It cleared
+gradually until it became intelligent co-operation.
+
+I trained her for six months.
+
+I don't suppose I ever worked harder than I did in that first half year
+of her. I mean my output was never greater. For every blessed thing I
+wrote was an excuse for going to see her, or for her coming to see me. It
+was a perpetual journeying between my rooms in Brunswick Square, and her
+rooms in Hampstead overlooking the Heath. The more I wrote the more I saw
+of her.
+
+I trained her for six months--until Jevons was ready for her.
+
+When I tell you that she reverenced my performances you may imagine in
+what spirit she approached his.
+
+For their meeting, as for what happened afterwards, I alone am
+responsible. I brought it on myself. By sheer quixotic fuss and
+interference with what, after all, wasn't my affair. For little Jevons
+most decidedly was not. I might easily have let that sleeping dog lie. He
+certainly did sleep, in some obscure kennel of London; he had slept ever
+since I had left him at the door of that restaurant in Soho. He slept
+almost for the six months he had then given himself.
+
+And then, before (according to his own schedule) he was quite due, he
+appeared in the columns (in my columns) of the _Morning Standard_. I had
+almost forgotten his existence; but when I saw his name, James Tasker
+Jevons, stick out familiarly under the big headlines, I remembered that
+that name, on a card with an address, had been lying in my left-hand
+writing-table drawer all this time; I remembered that it was there
+because he had lent me half a crown, and that I had never paid him.
+Then he came back to me--he lived again.
+
+I sent him a postal order and an apology. I referred, very handsomely as
+I thought, to his cuckoo's nesting in my paper. (I informed him, in fact,
+that he "did it" better than I did); and because I had worked myself up
+to a pitch of affability and generosity, I asked him to come and see me
+at such time as he should be free. And because, also, I was indifferent
+and lazy and didn't want to be seriously bothered with him, instead of
+asking him to lunch or dine with me, I said I was generally free myself
+between four and five.
+
+Between four and five was an hour when Viola was very apt to come in.
+
+In the instant that followed the posting of that letter I saw what I had
+done. And I wrote to him the next day asking him to dinner, in order that
+he should not come in between four and five. For some weeks, whenever I
+fancied he was about due at four o'clock, I wrote and asked him to
+dinner. That was how I fastened him to me. There wasn't any sense in
+which he fastened on me. I wasn't by any means his only hope.
+
+I may say at once I was prostrated as any slave before his conversation.
+
+I shall never forget the radiance of his twinkle when he told me he had
+been sacked three weeks ago from the sporting paper that had provided him
+with his sole visible means of subsistence. It was his blessed (only he
+didn't call it blessed) style that had dished him: the suicidal _élan_
+that he brought to the business. He was warned, he said. He was aware
+that his existence as a reporter hung by the bare thread of statement
+(wearing thinner and thinner) on which he weaved his fantastic web. His
+editor told him he was engaged to report football, not to play it with
+the paper. But he couldn't help it. He had got, he said, the ensanguined
+habit. Still, I was not to imagine that he bungled things. He jolly well
+knew his way about. In his wildest flights there was a homing impulse; he
+was preparing a place for himself all the time (that it happened to be
+_my_ place didn't seem to afflict him in the least). Like St. Paul, he
+knew how to abound and he knew how to abstain. His abstinence, in fact,
+gave the measure of his abundance. He held himself in for five perilous
+weeks; and when he let himself rip again it was with a burst that landed
+him in the front page of the _Morning Standard_.
+
+What he sketched for me had no resemblance to the career of a peaceful
+man of letters. It was a hot race, a combat as bloody (his own word) as
+those contests of which he was the delighted eye-witness.
+
+He had come thin and worn out of the struggle, but you gathered that he
+had borne himself in it with coolness and deliberate caution. His phrases
+produced a false effect of vehemence and excitement. You saw that he had
+simply followed out a calculated scheme, not one step of which had
+miscarried. And you felt that his most passionate affairs would be
+conducted with the same formidable precision.
+
+I ought to have felt it. For we were precious soon in the thick of it--of
+his most passionate affair.
+
+I had dined him, I suppose, about three times, and I had lunched him
+twice. And I had had tea with him once in his bedroom. He was living in
+one room in a street off the Euston Road, and he called it his bedroom
+because it looked so much more that than anything else. I might have let
+it go at that. But I didn't. I had seen his bedroom. I took the liberty
+of inquiring into his finances. They were, he said, as yet undeveloped.
+He had a scheme of his own for improving them, but while it was maturing
+he was, he certainly _was_ open to offers of work. I got him some
+translation. (He was a fairly good French scholar.)
+
+Then--it was the fatality of the proceedings that impressed them on my
+memory--then (I forgot to say that at that time I was reader to a firm of
+publishers; these things are in themselves so inessential to this story)
+I turned over to him any books that came more into his province than
+mine. His province, I can tell you, was pretty extensive, too.
+
+He began by doing me the honour to consult me about any instances that
+seemed doubtful.
+
+And so--you see how carefully I had prepared his path for him--one
+afternoon he turned up at my rooms, uninvited, between four and five. He
+said he remembered I had told him I should be free at that hour.
+
+He remembered. Yes; I don't think Tasker Jevons ever forgot anything,
+anything likely to be useful to him, in his life.
+
+And he hadn't been with me ten minutes before Viola Thesiger came in.
+
+He was saying, "Why the Heaven-afflicted idiot" (his author) "should
+think it necessary--" when Viola came in.
+
+She came in, and suddenly I made up my mind that she was beautiful. I
+hadn't seen it before. I don't know why I saw it now. It may have been
+some turn of her small, squarish head that surprised me with subtle
+tendernesses and curves; or more likely it may have been her effect on
+him. I may have seen her with his eyes. I don't know--I don't know. I
+hardly like to think he saw anything in her I hadn't seen first.
+
+He stopped talking. They looked at each other. I introduced him. Not to
+have introduced him would have struck him as a slight.
+
+I ordered tea at once in the hope of hastening his departure. He had been
+curiously silent since she had come in.
+
+But he didn't go. He just sat there, saying nothing, but looking at her
+furtively now and again, and blinking, as if looking at her hurt him.
+Whenever she said anything he stared, with his mouth a little open,
+breathing heavily.
+
+She hadn't paid very much attention to him. Then, suddenly, as if
+intrigued by his silence, she said:
+
+"Who is the Heaven-afflicted idiot?"
+
+I said, "Ask Mr. Jevons."
+
+She did.
+
+Jevons didn't answer her. He simply looked at her and blinked. Then he
+looked away again.
+
+"Come," I said, "you might finish what you were going to say."
+
+"I don't know," he muttered, "that I was going to say anything--Oh
+yes--that thing you sent me. Why the silly blighter should suppose it's
+necessary to stick in a storm at sea when it's quite obvious he hasn't
+seen one--he talks about a brig when he means a bark, and from the way he
+navigates her you'd say the wind blew all ways at once in the Atlantic."
+
+I said it might for all I knew; and I asked him if he'd ever seen a storm
+at sea himself.
+
+It seemed he had. He'd been ordered a sea-voyage for his health after his
+spell of printing; and his uncle, who was a sea-captain, took him with
+him to Hong-Kong in his ship. And he had been all through a cyclone in
+the Pacific.
+
+I got him--with some difficulty, for he had become extremely shy--I got
+him to tell us about it.
+
+He did. And by the time he had finished with us we had all been through a
+cyclone in the Pacific.
+
+It was too much. The little beast could talk almost as well as he wrote.
+A fellow who can write like Tasker Jevons has no business to talk at all.
+
+Viola left soon after six. He had outstayed her. I went downstairs with
+her. When I came back to him he was still staring at the doorway she had
+passed through.
+
+"Who's that girl?" he said.
+
+I said she was my typist.
+
+He meditated, and brought out as the result: "Do you mind telling me how
+much she charges you?"
+
+I told him. He looked dejected.
+
+"I can't afford her," he said presently. "No. I can't possibly afford
+her. Not yet." He paused. "Do you mind giving me her address?"
+
+"I thought you said you couldn't afford her?"
+
+"I can't. Not yet. But I _will_ afford her. I will. I give myself
+another--" He stopped. His mouth fell ajar, and I saw his lips moving as
+he went through some inaudible calculation--"another six months."
+
+He hid his face in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair.
+Then, as if he conceived himself to be unobserved behind this shelter,
+he let himself go; and I became the witness of an agony, a passion, a
+self-abandoned nakedness, to the utter shedding of all reticences and
+decencies, with nothing but those thin hands and that hair between
+me and it.
+
+"I'll work," he said. "I'll work like a hundred bloody niggers. Like ten
+hundred thousand million sweated tailors in a stinking cellar. I'll
+pinch. I'll skimp and save. I'll deny myself butter. I'll wear celluloid
+collars and sell my dress-suit. My God! I'd sell the coat off my back and
+the shoes off my feet; I'd sell my own mother's body off her death-bed,
+and go without my dinner for nine months to see her again for five
+minutes. Just to see her for five minutes. Five (unprintable) little
+minutes that another man wouldn't know what to do with, wouldn't use for
+tying up a bootlace in."
+
+Pause.
+
+"I didn't know it hurt. I didn't know a girl's face could land you one
+like this, and her eyes jab you, and her voice turn round and round in
+your stomach like a circular saw. That's what it feels like. Exactly.
+
+"Dry up, you old Geyser, yourself. I'm getting it, not you. You'd spout
+if you'd had to sit tight with all the gas in the shop blazing away under
+you for the last hour. If you can turn it off at the meter, turn it. I
+can't. No, I won't have another cup of tea. And I won't get up and clear
+out, I'm going to sit here another five minutes. I'm not well, I tell
+you, and it relieves me to talk about it. I don't care if you don't
+listen. Or if you do. I'm past caring.
+
+"D'you notice that I didn't speak a word to her--not one blessed word the
+whole time? I should have choked if I'd tried to. I didn't want to look
+at her, to think of her. That's why I told that rotten story, just to
+keep myself going. What a blethering idiot she must have thought me! What
+a putrid ass! The sea--And _me_!
+
+"And the way she looked at me--"
+
+I said, "D'you mean to say, Jevons, it didn't happen?"
+
+And he groaned. "Oh, it _happened_ all right. I can't invent things to
+save my life.
+
+"God! It isn't even as if she was pretty. I could understand _that_."
+
+He grabbed his throat suddenly and began to cough.
+
+I tried to be kind to him. "Look here," I said, "old chap. I'm awfully
+sorry if it takes you this way. But it's no good."
+
+He turned on me coughing and choking. I cannot remember all he said or
+half the things he called me, but it was something like this: "You
+snivelling defective." (Cough) "You septic idiot." (Cough) "You poisonous
+and polluted ass." (Cough, cough, cough) "You scarlet imbecile." (I have
+to water down the increasing richness of his epithets.) "You last
+diminutive purple embryo of an epileptic stock, do you suppose I don't
+know that? No good? Of course it's no good--yet. I got to wait for
+another six months. And you can take it from me, if a fellow knows what
+he wants, and doesn't try to get it--doesn't know how to get it--in six
+months--and doesn't find out--_he_'s no good, if you like."
+
+These words didn't strike me at the time as having any personal
+application. He was to repeat them later on, however, in circumstances
+which I defy anybody to have foreseen.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+I cannot recall the precise phases of their remarkable friendship. I
+wasn't present at its earliest stages.
+
+I had my first intimation of its existence one evening in the winter of
+nineteen-five, when he dropped in on me to consult me, he said, about a
+rather delicate matter, in which I gathered there lurked for his
+inexperience the most frightful pitfalls of offence. That he should come
+to me in this spirit was evidence that a certain chastening had been
+going on in him.
+
+The delicate matter was this. He had given Miss Thesiger a lot of work,
+the typing of a whole book, in fact. And--he had immense difficulty in
+getting to this part of it--she had refused to take any payment. She had
+got it into her head that he was hard up. He had sent her a cheque three
+times, and three times she had returned it. She was as obstinate as a
+mule about it. And now she was saying that she had never meant him to pay
+her; she had done the whole thing out of friendship, which, of course,
+was very pretty of her, but it put him in a beastly position. He'd never
+been precisely in that position before and he didn't know what to do
+about it. He didn't want to offend her and yet he didn't see--did I?--how
+he could let her do it. It was, he said, all the wrong way about,
+according to his notions. And for the life of him he didn't know what to
+do. It might seem to me incredible that such virgin innocence as his
+should exist in a world where the rules for most sorts of conduct were
+fairly settled. He had lived all his life in an atmosphere of births,
+marriages and deaths, and he knew all the rules for the registration of
+them. And that was about all he did know. And it was the most infernally
+hard luck to be stumped like this at the very beginning, just when he
+wanted most awfully to do the right thing.
+
+Besides, it had knocked him all to bits--the sheer prettiness of it.
+
+He laid bare for me all the curious intricacies of a soul tortured by its
+own delicacy. There was agony in his eyes.
+
+If he were to take this kindness from a lady--would it, in my opinion, or
+would it not, be cricket?
+
+I didn't like to tell him that he had brought his agony on himself by his
+imprudence in employing a typist when he couldn't afford one. So I only
+said that, if I knew the lady, he would find her uncommonly hard to move.
+
+He hadn't any hope, he said, of moving her; but did I think that if he
+made her a present--say, the Collected Works of George Meredith, it would
+meet the case?
+
+I said it would meet the case all right, but that in my opinion it would
+spoil its prettiness. If Miss Thesiger didn't want to be paid in one way,
+she wouldn't at all care about being paid in another. Perhaps Miss
+Thesiger liked being pretty. Hadn't he better leave it at that, anyhow,
+for the present?
+
+You see I looked on Viola and Viola's behaviour as infinitely more my
+concern than his. I found myself replying for her as she would have
+wished me to reply, as if I could claim an intenser appreciation of her
+motives than was his, as if she and I were agreed about this question of
+helping Tasker Jevons and I were the custodian of her generosity.
+
+He said he supposed it wouldn't hurt him to leave it at that. It wasn't
+as if it wouldn't be all one in the long run. He gave himself three
+months.
+
+I supposed he meant to pay her in.
+
+Three weeks later I heard that Jevons was actually living up in Hampstead
+in the same house as Viola. I didn't hear it from Viola, but from my man,
+Pavitt, who had it from his sister-in-law. And what Pavitt came to tell
+me was that Mr. Jevons had been ill.
+
+I went up to Hampstead that afternoon to see him.
+
+I found him in a back room, at the top of the house, sitting by the fire
+in an easy-chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was as thin as a lath and his
+face was a bright yellow. The very whites of his eyes were yellow. I
+would have said you never saw a more miserable object, but that Jevons
+was not miserable. He was happy. And as far as his devastated condition
+would allow him, he looked happy. This face, yellow with jaundice, was
+doing its best to smile. The smile was a grimace, not an affair of
+the lips at all, but of the deep crescent lines drawn at right angles to
+them. Still, he was smiling. In a sort of ecstasy.
+
+He was smiling at Viola, who sat in the chair facing him on the other
+side of the hearth. She looked as if she had been there for ages. Also,
+as if she had been sitting up all night.
+
+She was smiling too, straight at Jevons. What I saw was the beatitude of
+his response.
+
+He tried to smile at me, too, as I came in, but the effort was a failure.
+He wasn't really a bit glad to see me. Viola got up and left me with him.
+I wasn't to stay with him for more than ten minutes, she said. It was the
+first day he had been allowed to sit up.
+
+I sat with him for fifteen minutes.
+
+He was lodged, as before, in one room; but its domestic character was
+disguised by many ingenious devices giving you the idea that it was
+nothing but his study.
+
+Well, there he was, haggard and yellow with jaundice, utterly pitiable as
+to his appearance and surroundings; and yet he looked at me in,
+positively, a sort of triumph, as much as to say, "Yes. Here I am. And
+you, with all your superior resources, haven't managed half so well."
+
+And I thought that he (not knowing Viola so well as I did) was suffering
+from a lamentable delusion.
+
+He said she had been awfully good to him. But it was rather hard luck on
+him, wasn't it, that he should have gone and turned this beastly colour?
+
+I said rather loftily I didn't suppose it mattered to Viola what colour
+he turned.
+
+(What _could_ it matter to her?)
+
+She came in presently and took me down to her sitting-room, and gave me
+tea. She owned to having sat up three nights with Jevons. She couldn't
+have believed it possible that anybody could be so ill. For three days
+and three nights the poor thing hadn't been able to keep anything
+down--not even a drop of water. But to-day she had been feeding him on
+the whites of eggs beaten up with brandy.
+
+She seemed to me to be obsessed with Jevons's illness, and I made her
+come out with me for ten minutes for a blow on the Heath. I tried to lead
+her mind to other things, and she listened politely. Then there was
+silence, and presently I felt her arm slide into mine (she had these
+adorable impulses of confidence).
+
+"Furny," she said, "what does jaundice come from?"
+
+I said it generally came from chill.
+
+She frowned, as if she were not satisfied with that explanation. And
+there was another silence. Then she began again:
+
+"Would being unhappy--very, _very_ unhappy--give it you?"
+
+I thought I saw how her mind was working and I advised her to put that
+idea out of her head. Happiness, I said, wouldn't be good for Jevons.
+
+She said, "Oh, _wouldn't_ it!" And, after prolonged meditation, "I wonder
+if he'll stay that funny yellow colour all his life."
+
+I found out from her that he had been living in that top room above hers
+for three weeks--ever since he had finished his book. It looked as if he
+had become frantic when he saw the end of his pretexts and occasions for
+meeting her, and had cast off all prudence and had followed her,
+determined to live under the same roof.
+
+I looked on it as a madness that possessed him.
+
+But that it should ever possess _her_--that was inconceivable.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+He recovered.
+
+The brilliant orange of his jaundice faded to lemon, and the lemon to a
+sallow tint that cleared rapidly as it was flooded by his flush.
+
+I did not realize then what sources he was drawing on. Looking back on it
+all, I am amazed at my own stupidity. I was, of course, aware that Viola
+was sorry for him; but I might have known that a girl's pity was not a
+stimulant that would keep a man like Jevons going for very long. I am
+sure he would never have lowered himself by any appeal to it. Why, the
+bare idea of pity would have been intolerable to him, bursting, as he
+was, with vitality and invading with the courage and energy and genius of
+a conqueror a world that was not his.
+
+He laid before me very soon what I can only call his plan of campaign.
+Journalism with him was a purely defensive operation; but the novel and
+the short story were his attack. The work that Viola had typed for him
+was his first novel. He had dug himself in very securely that winter, and
+each paper that he had occupied and left behind him was a line of
+trenches that shifted nearer and nearer towards the desired territory. He
+didn't begin his assault on the public before he had secured his retreat.
+
+I know I am writing about a man whom many people still consider a great
+novelist and a great playwright. God knows I don't want to disparage him.
+But to me what he has written matters so little; it has no interest for
+me except as his vehicle, the vehicle in which he arrived; which brought
+him to his destination quicker perhaps than any other which he could have
+chosen. His talent was so adroit that he might have chosen almost any
+other; chance and a happy knack and a habit of observation determined his
+selection of the written word. Compared with the spectacle of his
+arrival, what he has written is neither here nor there. What I have
+written myself is neither here nor there. For the purposes of this
+history it counts only as the means which enabled me to witness the last
+act of his drama.
+
+That is why I say so much about his adventure, his campaign, his
+business, and so little about his books. In this I am adopting his own
+values, almost his own phrases. He wanted most awfully to arrive. How far
+he took himself seriously as a writer nobody will ever know. Viola was
+convinced, and always will be convinced, that he was a great genius.
+(There's no doubt he traded with her on her conviction. He wanted most
+awfully to arrive, but more than anything he wanted Viola.) Still, he was
+too clever, I think, ever to have quite convinced himself.
+
+His adventure, then, began with his reporting; his campaign with his
+journalism, and his earlier novels; his business was to follow later in
+the long period of peace and prosperity he saw ahead of him.
+
+His first novel, he told me, was calculated, deliberately, to startle and
+arrest; to hit the public, rather unpleasantly, in the eye. _That_, he
+said, was the way to be remembered. It wouldn't sell. He didn't want it
+to sell. What he wanted first was to gain a position; then to consolidate
+it; then to build. He talked like the consummate architect of his own
+fortunes.
+
+His second novel would be designed, deliberately, to counteract the
+disagreeable effects of his first.
+
+"Why," I asked, "counteract them?"
+
+Because, he said, if he went on being disagreeable, he'd alienate the
+very sections of the public he most wished to gain. His retirement was
+simply the preparation for the Grand Attack.
+
+It was in his third novel that he meant, still deliberately, to come into
+his kingdom and his power and his glory, for ever and ever, Amen. His
+third novel, he declared, would sell; and it would be his best. On that
+utterly secure and yet elevated basis he could build afterwards pretty
+much as he pleased. I asked him if it wasn't a mistake to put his best so
+early in the series? Wouldn't it be more effective if he worked up to it?
+But he said No. He'd thought of that. There wasn't anything he hadn't
+thought of. That third novel was to start his big sales. And the worst of
+a big sale was this, that when you'd caught your public you were bound to
+go on giving them the sort of thing you'd caught them with, therefore,
+he'd be jolly careful to start 'em with the sort of thing he happened to
+like himself, otherwise he'd have to spend the rest of his life knuckling
+under to them. He could get a cheaper glory if he chose to try for it;
+but a cheaper glory wouldn't satisfy him. That was why he decided to make
+for the highest point he could reach in the beginning, so that his very
+fallings-off would be glorious and would pay him as no gradual working up
+and up could possibly be made to pay. Besides, he wanted his glory and
+his pay quick. He couldn't afford to wait a month longer than his third
+novel. As for the different quality in the glory it would be years
+before anybody but himself could tell the difference, and by the time
+they spotted him he'd be at another game. A game in which he defied
+anybody to catch him out.
+
+He'd be writing plays.
+
+All this he told me, sitting in an arm-chair in my rooms, with his feet
+up on another chair, and smiling, smiling with one side of his mouth
+while with the other he smoked innumerable cigarettes. I can see his blue
+eyes twinkle still, through the cigarette smoke that obscured him. That
+night he had got down to solid business.
+
+It was quite clear that Jevons's business was the business of the
+speculator who loves the excitement of the risks he takes. I remember
+exhorting him to prudence. I said: "This isn't art, it's speculation.
+You're taking considerable risks, my friend."
+
+He took his cigarette out of his mouth, dispersed the smoke, and looked
+at me very straight and without a twinkle.
+
+"I've got to make money," he said, "and to make it soon. I should be
+taking worse risks if I didn't."
+
+It's marvellous how he has pulled it off. Just as he said, dates and all.
+For he named the dates for each stage of his advance.
+
+That was in March; about a week before Easter, nineteen-six.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day I went up to Hampstead towards teatime, to see how Viola was
+getting on. I didn't expect to see Jevons there, for he'd left. He told
+me in a burst of confidence he'd had to. He couldn't stand it. It was
+getting too risky. He was living now in rooms in Bernard Street, not far
+from mine.
+
+At Hampstead I was told that Miss Thesiger was out. She had gone for a
+walk on the Heath with Mr. Jevons, but they were coming in at half-past
+four for tea. If I'd step upstairs into the sitting-room I'd find her
+brother, Captain Thesiger, waiting there.
+
+I stepped upstairs and found Captain Thesiger. I was glad to find him,
+for I don't mind owning that by this time I was getting somewhat uneasy
+about Viola.
+
+It was all very well for Viola to nurse Jevons through his jaundice, she
+might have done that out of pure humanity; but she had no business to be
+going for walks with the little bounder. Even the charm of his
+conversation and his personality (and it _had_ a charm) couldn't
+conceal the fact that he was a little bounder. Why, in moments of
+excitement he had gestures that must have made her shudder all down her
+spine, and more than once I have known his aitches become fugitive,
+though, on the whole, I must say he was pretty careful. And Viola was
+letting herself in for him. In sheer innocence and recklessness she was
+letting herself in. I felt that if ever it should come to getting her out
+I would be glad of an ally. Now that I saw what Viola was capable of, I
+began to feel some sympathy with her people at Canterbury who had tried
+so ineffectually to hold her in.
+
+There was nothing ineffectual about Reggie Thesiger. I suppose he would
+have been impressive anyway from the sheer height and breadth of him, his
+visible and palpable perfection; but what "had" me was not his
+perfection, but the odd likeness to his sister which he combined, and in
+some mysterious way reconciled, with it. His face had taken over not only
+the dominant and defiant look of hers, exaggerated by his sheer virility;
+but it had the very tricks of her charm, even to the uptilted lines of
+her mouth; his little black moustache followed and gave accent to them. I
+said to myself: "Here is a young man who will not stand any nonsense."
+
+He greeted me with a joy that I could not account for all at once in an
+entire stranger, and it was mixed with a childlike and candid surprise. I
+wondered what I had done that he should be so glad to see me.
+
+His manner very soon left me in no doubt as to what I had done. I had
+brought the most intense relief to the Captain's innocent mind. I do not
+know by what subtle shades he managed to convey to me that, compared with
+the queer chap I so easily might have been, he found me distinctly
+agreeable. It was obvious that I existed for him only as the chap, the
+strange and legendary chap, that Viola had taken up with, and that in
+this capacity he, to his own amazement, approved of me. I gathered that,
+knowing his sister, he had feared the worst, and that the blessed relief
+of it was more than he could bear if he didn't let himself go a bit.
+
+He had quite evidently come, or had been sent, to see what Viola was up
+to. Possibly he may have had in his mind the extraordinary treatment I
+had received from his father, and he may have been anxious to atone.
+
+Any relief that I might have brought to Captain Thesiger was surpassed by
+the reassurance that I took from my first sight of him. It was as if I
+had instantly argued to myself: "This is the sort of thing that has
+produced Viola. This is the sort of man she has been brought up with.
+When Viola thinks of men it is this sort of man she is thinking of. It is
+therefore inconceivable that Tasker Jevons should exist for her otherwise
+than as a curious intellectual freak. Even _her_ perversity couldn't--no,
+it could not--fall so far from this familiar perfection." Though Captain
+Thesiger's perfection might not help me personally, it did dispose of
+little Jevons. Looking at him, I felt as if my uneasiness, you may say my
+jealousy, of Jevons (it almost amounted to that) had been an abominable
+insult to his sister.
+
+Reggie--he is my brother-in-law now, and I cannot go on calling him
+Captain Thesiger--Reggie was good enough to say that he had heard of me
+from his sister. His voice conveyed, without any vulgar implication, an
+acknowledgment of my right to be heard of from her--but, of course, he
+went on agreeably, he had heard of me in any case; he supposed everybody
+had. My celebrity was so immature that I should not have recognized this
+allusion to it if Reggie had not gone on even more genially. He said he
+liked awfully the things I did in the _Morning Standard_. Most especially
+and enthusiastically he liked my account of the big boxing match at
+Olympia. You could see it was written by a chap who knew what he was
+talking about.
+
+I had to confess that Tasker Jevons was the chap who wrote it. Reggie,
+quite prettily abashed, tried to recover himself and plunged further. He
+brought up from his memory one thing after another. And all his
+reminiscences were of Jevons. He had mixed us up hopelessly, as people
+did in those days. They knew I was associated with the _Morning
+Standard_, and that was all they knew about me; if they wanted to recall
+anything striking I had done, it was always Jevons they remembered. Poor
+Reggie was so inveterate in his blundering that after his fourth
+desperate effort he gave it up. His memory, he said, was rotten.
+
+I said, on the contrary, his memory for Jevons was perfect, and he looked
+at me charmingly and laughed.
+
+While he was laughing Viola came in. She had Jevons with her.
+
+It was evident that neither of them was prepared for Reggie Thesiger.
+They had let themselves in with a latch-key and come straight upstairs
+without encountering Mrs. Pavitt.
+
+At the sight of her brother Viola betrayed a feeling I should not have
+believed possible to her. For the first and I may say the last, time in
+my experience of her, I saw Viola show funk.
+
+It was the merest tremor of her tilted mouth, the flicker of an eyelash,
+an almost invisible veiling of her brilliant eyes; I do not think it
+would have been perceptible to anybody who watched her with a less tense
+anxiety than mine. But it was there, and it hurt me to see it.
+
+There was one person, only one person, in the world whom Viola was
+afraid of, and that was her brother Reggie. She was afraid of him because
+she loved him. He was the person in the world that she loved best,
+before--before the catastrophe. And this fear of hers that I alone saw
+(Reggie most certainly had not seen it) ought to have warned me if
+nothing else had.
+
+It probably would have warned me but for what she did next; but for her
+whole subsequent behaviour.
+
+She broke loose from Reggie, who had closed on her with a shout of
+"Hallo, Vee-Vee!" and an embrace; she broke loose from Reggie and turned
+to me, all laughing and rosy from his impact, with an outstretched hand
+and a voice that swept to me and rippled with a sort of nervous joy. And
+she said: "Oh, Wally, this _is_ nice of you! You'll stop for tea."
+
+Her mouth said that. But her eyes--they had grown suddenly pathetic--said
+a lot more. They said: "Don't go, Wally, _please_ don't go. Whatever you
+do, don't leave me alone with him." At least, I can see now that that's
+what they were saying. And even at the time I saw on her dear face the
+same blessed relief (at finding me there) that I had seen on Reggie's.
+
+Neither Reggie nor I, mind you, had seen Jevons yet (I am speaking of
+fractions of seconds of time); and he wasn't actually in the room; but
+Viola and I were aware of him outside. If he had not paused on the
+landing to dispose of his overcoat and his hat and his stick, their
+entrance would have been simultaneous.
+
+That pause saved them.
+
+His stick slipped and tumbled down on the landing with a clatter. We
+heard him prop it up again. Our eyes met. I'm afraid mine said: "What are
+you going to do _now_?"
+
+Then he came in and I saw the gallant Reggie take the shock of him. I
+don't suppose he had ever before met anything like Jevons--I mean really
+met him, at close quarters--in his life. But he was gallant, and he had
+his face well under control. Only the remotest, vanishing quiver and
+twinkle betrayed the extremity of his astonishment.
+
+Viola, with an admirable air of detachment from Jevons, introduced them.
+I don't know how she did it. It was as if, without any actual
+repudiation, she declined to hold herself responsible for Jevons'
+appearance; for the extraordinary little bow he made; for his jerky
+aplomb and for his "Glad to meet you, Captain." And for the rest, she
+just handed him over to her brother and trusted Reggie to be decent to
+him.
+
+I had wondered: Are they going to let on that they've been out together?
+She cannot--she cannot own up to that. But how are they going to get out
+of it, and will he betray her?
+
+I saw how they were going to get out of it. If they didn't say in as many
+words that they'd met on the doorstep they implied it in everything they
+said. They asked each other polite questions, all to the tune of: "What
+have you been doing since I last saw you?"--to convey the impression that
+they had met thus casually after a long interval. Jevons played up to her
+well, almost too well; so well, in fact, did he play, that not long
+afterwards I was to ask myself: Was this perfection the result of
+collusion? Had they anticipated just such a sudden, disconcerting
+encounter? Had they thought it all out and arranged with each other
+beforehand how they should behave? I don't know. I never cared to ask
+her.
+
+The game lasted some little time. I didn't like to see her driven to
+these shifts (I was afraid, in fact, they'd overdo it), and I came to her
+help by telling Jevons that Captain Thesiger was an enthusiastic admirer
+of his work; and Reggie burst in jubilantly--he was evidently glad to
+be able to meet Jevons on this happy ground--with: "Are you the chap who
+wrote those things I've been reading? I say, Vee-Vee, you might have told
+me."
+
+He fastened upon Jevons then and there. He started him off on the boxing
+match. There was very little about boxing that Reggie didn't know, but he
+appealed to Jevons with a charming deference as to an expert. The dear
+boy had a good deal of his sister's innocent veneration for the chaps who
+wrote the things they'd been reading, who could, that is to say, do
+something they couldn't do.
+
+And Jevons, once started on the boxing match, fairly let himself go. He
+careered over the field of sport, interrupting his own serious
+professional _élan_ with all sorts of childlike and spontaneous gambols.
+In some of his turns he was entirely lovable. It was clear that Reggie
+loved him as you love a strange little animal at play, or any vital
+object that diverts you. From his manner I gathered that, provided he
+were not committed to closer acquaintance with Jevons, he was willing
+enough to snatch the passing joy of him.
+
+I do not know by what transitions they slid together on to the Boer War.
+The Boer War happened to be Reggie's own ground. He had served in it. You
+would have said that Jevons had served in it too, to hear him. He traced
+the course of the entire campaign for Reggie's benefit. He showed him by
+what error each regrettable incident (as they called them then) had
+occurred, and by what strategy it might have been prevented.
+
+And Reggie--who had been there--listened respectfully to Jevons.
+
+Viola had lured me into a corner where only scraps of their conversation
+reached us from time to time. So I do not know whether it was in
+connection with the Boer War that Jevons began telling Reggie that
+journalism was a rotten game; that from birth he had been baulked of his
+ambition. He had wanted to be tall and handsome. He had wanted to be
+valorous and athletic. And here he was sent into the world undersized and
+not even passably good-looking. And what--he asked Reggie--_could_ he do
+with a physique like his?
+
+I remember Reggie telling Jevons his physique didn't matter a hang. He
+could be a war correspondent in the next war. I remember Jevons saying in
+an awful voice: That was just it. He couldn't be anything in the next
+war--and, by God, there was a big war coming--he gave it eight years--but
+he couldn't be in it. He was an arrant coward.
+
+That, he said, was his tragedy. His cowardice--his distaste for
+danger--his certainty that if any danger were ever to come near him he
+would funk.
+
+And I remember Reggie saying, "My dear fellow, if you've the courage to
+say so--" and Jevons beating off this consolation with a funny gesture of
+despair. And then his silence.
+
+It was as if suddenly, in the midst of his gambolling, little Jevons had
+fallen into an abyss. He sat there, at the bottom of the pit, staring at
+us in the misery of the damned.
+
+I looked at Viola. Her eyelids drooped; her head drooped. Her whole body
+drooped under the affliction of his stare, and she would not look at me.
+
+Reggie (he really _was_ decent) tried to turn it off. "I wouldn't worry,
+if I were you," he said. "Wait till the war comes."
+
+"Oh, it's coming all right," said little Jevons. "No fear."
+
+And as if he could no longer bear to contemplate his cowardice, he said
+good-bye to us and left. Reggie's eyes followed his dejected, retreating
+figure.
+
+"How quaint!" he said. "But he's a smart chap, anyway. And, mind you,
+he's right about that war."
+
+I said (Heaven knows why, except that I think I must have wanted Reggie's
+opinion of Jevons): "D'you think he's right about his own cowardice?"
+
+Reggie said, "Ask me another. You can't tell. I only know I've seen men
+look like that and talk like that before an engagement."
+
+Viola raised her head. Her voice came with the clear tremor of a bell:
+"And did they funk?"
+
+"They didn't run away, if that's what you mean. I daresay they felt like
+Jevons. I've felt like Jevons myself."
+
+Of course, knowing Jevons as I do now, I have sometimes fancied his talk
+about cowardice may have been mere bravado, the risk he took with Reggie.
+But here again I am not quite sure. I don't really know.
+
+I am, however, entirely enlightened as to the game Viola played with me
+that night.
+
+Jevons had stayed till half-past six. He had talked for two hours and a
+half. When I got up to go, Reggie suggested that his sister should come
+and dine with him somewhere in town and do a play afterwards.
+
+She said, All right. She was on. And Furny would come too.
+
+He said, of course I was coming too. That was what he had meant (it
+wasn't).
+
+And in the end I went. I say in the end--for of course I protested. It
+was his one evening with his sister. But Viola's poor eyes signalled to
+me and implored me: "Don't leave me alone with him, whatever you do." She
+wanted to put off the dreadful moment that must come when he would ask
+her: "Where on earth did you pick up that shocking little bounder?"
+
+But the question never came. To begin with, Reggie was so enthralled by
+the funny play we went to that he forgot all about Jevons. And then
+Viola's game, that started in the restaurant and went on all through
+dinner, began again and continued in the taxi after the play. And though
+Reggie was discretion itself, you could see that he had taken it for
+granted--and no wonder--that she and I were, well, on the brink of an
+engagement if we hadn't fallen in. As for Jevons, he simply couldn't
+have conceived him in that connection. To Reggie, Jevons was simply an
+amusing little scallywag who could write. That Viola should have taken
+Jevons seriously surpassed his imagination of the possible. So that she
+never was in any danger of discovery, and there was no need for her
+manoeuvres. He couldn't have so much as found out that she had gone for a
+walk with Jevons, because it wouldn't have entered his head that you
+could go for a walk with him. People didn't do these things.
+
+Besides, he never was alone with her that evening. She took good care of
+that. She insisted on dropping him at his hotel, which we passed on our
+way northwards. She actually said to him, "You must get out here.
+Furny'll see me home. I want to talk to him."
+
+And instead of talking to me, she sat leaning forward with her back half
+turned to me, staring through the window at nothing at all.
+
+That was how I came to propose to Viola in the taxi. I had been afraid to
+do it before. I wasn't going to do it at all unless I was sure of her.
+But it seemed to me that she had been trying all afternoon and all
+evening to tell me that I might be sure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well--she wouldn't have me. She was most decided about it. I had no hope
+and no defence and no appeal from her decision. Unless I was prepared to
+be a bounder--and a fatuous bounder at that--I couldn't tell her that
+she had given me encouragement that almost amounted to invitation. To do
+her justice, until the dreadful moment in the taxi she hadn't known that
+she had given me anything. She confessed that she had been trying to
+convey to Reggie the impression that if her affections were engaged in
+any quarter it was in mine. She had been so absorbed in calculating the
+effect on Reggie that she had never considered the effect on me. She said
+she thought I knew what she was up to and that I was simply seeing her
+through. She spoke of Jevons as if he was a joke--a joke that might be
+disastrous if her family took it seriously. It might end in her recall
+from town. She intimated that there were limits even to Reggie's
+enjoyment of the absurd; she owned quite frankly that she was afraid of
+Reggie--afraid of what he might think of her and say to her; because, she
+said, she was so awfully fond of him. As for me, and what _I_ might
+think, it was open to me to regard her solitary stroll with Jevons as a
+funny escapade.
+
+I do not believe the poor child was trying to throw dust in my eyes. It
+was her own eyes she was throwing dust in. She didn't want to think of
+herself what she was afraid of Reggie thinking.
+
+As to the grounds of my rejection (I was determined to know them), she
+was clear enough in her own little mind. She liked me; she liked me
+immensely; she liked me better than anybody in the world but Reggie. She
+admired me; she admired everything I did; she thought me handsome; I was
+the nicest-looking man she knew, next to Reggie. But she didn't love me.
+
+"What's more, Furny," she said, "I can't think why I don't love you."
+
+I couldn't see her clearly and continuously in the taxi. The lamp-posts
+we passed on the way to Hampstead lit her up at short, regular intervals,
+and at short, regular intervals she faded and was withdrawn from me. And
+in the same intermittent way, her soul, as she was trying to show it to
+me, was illuminated and withdrawn.
+
+"I ought to love you," she went on. "I know I ought. It would be the very
+best thing I could do."
+
+The folly in me clutched at that admission and gave tongue. "If that's
+so," I said, "don't you think you could try to do what you ought?"
+
+The lamp-light fell on her then. She was smiling a little sad,
+wise smile. "No," she said. "No. I think that's _why_ I can't love
+you--because I ought."
+
+And then she went on to explain that what she had against me was my
+frightful rectitude.
+
+"You're too nice for me, Furny, much too nice. And ever so much too good.
+I simply couldn't live with integrity like yours." She paused and then
+turned to me full as we passed a lamp-post.
+
+"I suppose you know my people would like me to marry you?"
+
+I said a little irritably that I had no reason to suppose anything of the
+sort.
+
+"They would," she said. "Why, bless you, that's what they asked you down
+at Whitsuntide for! I don't mean that they said to each other: Let's ask
+him down and then he'll marry Viola. They wouldn't even think it--they're
+much too nice. Poor dears--they'd be horrified if they knew I knew it!
+But it was underneath their minds, you know, pushing them on all the
+time. I believe they sent Reggie up to have a look at you, though they
+don't know that either. They think they sent him to see what I was up to.
+You see, Furny dear, from their point of view you _are_ so eligible. And
+really, do you know, I think that's what's dished you--what's dished us
+both, if you like to put it that way. I'm sure you may."
+
+I said it didn't matter much what dished me or how I put it, provided I
+_was_ dished. But--was I?
+
+Oh yes! She left me in no doubt that I was dished. And I saw--I still
+see, and if anything more clearly--why.
+
+I was everything that Canterbury approved of. And Viola, in her young
+revolt, was up against everything of which Canterbury approved. Her
+people were dear people; they were charming people, well-bred people;
+they had unbroken traditions of beautiful behaviour. And they had tied
+her up too tight in their traditions; that was all. Viola would never
+marry anybody on whom Canterbury had set its seal.
+
+And seeing all that, I saw that I had missed her by a mere accident. It
+was my friend the General who had dished me when he testified to my
+entire eligibility. That's to say, it was my own fault. If I had let well
+alone; if I hadn't turned the General on to them, _I_ should have been
+in the highest degree ineligible; _I_ should have been a person of whom
+Canterbury most severely disapproved; when I've no doubt that Viola, out
+of sheer perversity, would have insisted on marrying me.
+
+She said as much. So far she saw into herself and no farther.
+
+The Northern Heights were favourable to this interview, for the taxi
+broke down in an attempt to scale East Heath Road, so that we walked the
+last few hundred yards together to her door.
+
+It was while we were walking that--stung by a sudden fear, a reminiscence
+of the afternoon--I asked her: Was there anybody else?
+
+No, she said, there wasn't. How could there be? Hadn't she told me she
+liked me better than anybody else, next to Reggie?
+
+"Are you sure?" I said. "Are you quite sure?"
+
+She stopped in the middle of the road and looked at me.
+
+"Of course," she said. "There _isn't_ anybody. Except poor, funny little
+Jevons. And you couldn't mean him."
+
+That was as near as we got to him then.
+
+But a week later--the week before Easter--he came to us suddenly in my
+rooms where Viola was correcting proofs for me.
+
+He had come to tell us of his good luck. His novel had been accepted.
+
+I was glad, of course. But Viola was more than glad. She was excited,
+agitated. She jumped up and said: "Oh, Jimmy!" (She called him Jimmy, and
+her voice told me that it was not for the first time.) "Jimmy! How
+simply spiffing!"
+
+And I saw him look at her with a grave and tender assurance, as a man
+looks at the woman he loves when he knows that the hour of his triumph is
+her hour.
+
+And I thought even then: It's nothing. It's only that she's glad the poor
+chap has pulled it off.
+
+Then she said: "Let's all go and dine somewhere together. You don't mind,
+Furny dear, do you? I'll take it home and sit up with it."
+
+Oh, I didn't mind. We all went somewhere and dined together. We went, for
+the sheer appropriateness of it, to that restaurant in Soho where I had
+dined with Jevons for the first time. That was how it happened--what did
+happen, I mean, afterwards, in my rooms where Jevons had left us.
+
+We had gone back there for coffee and cigarettes. (Canterbury wouldn't
+have approved of this.)
+
+He had said good night to us when he turned on the threshold with his
+reminiscence. The restaurant in Soho had aroused it.
+
+"I say, Furnival, do you remember that half-crown you borrowed from me?"
+
+I said I did. And that to remind me of it now was a joke in very
+questionable taste.
+
+He said, "You never really knew the joke. I kept it from you most
+carefully. That little orgy of ours had just about cleared me out and the
+half-crown was my last half-crown. I had to go without any dinner for
+three days."
+
+I mumbled something about his not meaning it.
+
+He said, "Of course I meant it. Why, my dear chap, that's the joke!"
+
+He stood there in the doorway, rocking with laughter. Then he saw our
+faces.
+
+"I say, I wouldn't have told you if I'd thought it would harrow you like
+that. Thought you'd think it funny. It _is_ funny."
+
+I said, "No, my dear fellow, it's just missed being funny."
+
+I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him from the room. (I had seen
+Viola's face and I didn't want him to see it.) I led him gently
+downstairs with a hand still on his shoulder. He was a little grieved at
+giving pain when he had hoped to give pleasure.
+
+At the bottom of the stairs he turned and looked at me with his
+ungovernable twinkle. "It _was_ funny," he said. "But it wasn't half so
+funny, Furnival, as your face."
+
+I found Viola sitting at my writing-table, with her arms flung out over
+it and her head bowed on them. And she was crying--crying with little
+soft sobs. I've said that I didn't think she could do it. And I didn't.
+She wasn't the sort that cries. I'm convinced she hadn't cried like this
+for years, perhaps never since she was a child.
+
+I put my arms round her as if she had been a child; I held her soft,
+warm, quivering body close to mine; I wiped her tears away with her
+pocket-handkerchief. And like a child she abandoned herself to my--to my
+rectitude. She trusted in it utterly. I might have been her brother
+Reggie.
+
+I said: "You mustn't mind. He was only rotting us." And she said: "He
+wasn't. It was true. He told me that six months ago he was starving."
+
+I said: "Vee-Vee, if he _was_, you mustn't think about him. You mustn't,
+really."
+
+Then she drew away from me and dried her eyes herself, carefully and
+efficiently, and said in a calm and measured voice: "I'm not thinking
+about him."
+
+I went on as if I hadn't heard her: "You mustn't be sorry for him. Jevons
+is quite clever enough to take care of himself. He isn't a bit pathetic.
+You mustn't let him get at you that way."
+
+She raised her head with her old, high defiance. "He isn't trying to get
+at me. I'm not sorry for him--any more than he's sorry for himself."
+
+I said, "You don't know. You're just a dear little ostrich hiding its
+head in the sand."
+
+"No," she said. "No. I'm not a fool, Furny. Even an ostrich isn't such a
+fool as it looks. It doesn't imagine for a moment that it isn't seen. It
+hides its head because it knows it's going to be caught, anyway, and it's
+afraid of seeing what's going to catch it."
+
+I asked her then, Was _she_ afraid?
+
+She was standing beside me now, leaning back against my writing-table.
+Her two hands clutched the edge of it. Her eyes had a far-seeing, candid
+gaze.
+
+"I'm not afraid," she said, "of anything outside me. Only of things
+inside me--sometimes."
+
+"What sort of things?"
+
+She smiled, the queerest little, far-off smile.
+
+"Oh, funny things--things you wouldn't understand, Furny."
+
+To that I said, "I wish you'd marry me, Viola."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders and said, so did she, and it was much worse
+for her than it was for me. And then: "Do you know, Reggie liked you
+immensely. He told me so."
+
+I said it would be more to the point if _she_ did. But since she didn't,
+since she couldn't marry me, I wished--"I wish," I said, "you'd go back
+to Canterbury and marry some nice man like Reggie."
+
+"Can't you see," she cried, "that I shall never marry a nice man like
+Reggie?"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The next thing that happened was that she went off with Jevons.
+
+At least, to all appearances she went off with him. They were in Belgium,
+at Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent and Bruges again together. I found them
+at Bruges after having tracked them through all the other places.
+
+It was Captain Thesiger who started me. Reggie (whose family seemed to
+employ him chiefly to find out what Viola was up to) had called at my
+rooms after Easter to ask me if I could give him his sister's address.
+He said they hadn't got it at Hampstead, where he had been to see her,
+and they didn't know where she was staying. They thought it was in the
+country somewhere, and that she wouldn't be very long away, as she told
+them not to forward any letters. He thought I might possibly have her
+address.
+
+I told him that I hadn't, and that I didn't know how to get it, either.
+
+He said, "It's a rotten habit she's got of sloping off like this without
+telling you." It wouldn't matter, only his regiment was ordered off to
+India. He was sailing next week. She was to have come down to Canterbury
+for Easter and she hadn't. If he only knew the people she was stopping
+with--if he'd any idea of the town or the village or the county, he'd try
+and find her. But she might be in the Hebrides for all he knew.
+
+I said I was sorry I couldn't help. All I knew was she had gone into the
+country (I didn't know it, but I assumed the knowledge for her
+protection). She had told me she might be going (she had), and I didn't
+think she'd be away for more than a day or two. I was pretty sure she'd
+be back before he sailed.
+
+I'd no reason, you see, to suppose she wouldn't be. Anyhow, I satisfied
+him.
+
+I marvel now at the ease with which I did it. But he was used to Viola's
+casual behaviour; and the monstrous improbability of the thing she had
+done this time was her cover. Who in the world would have dreamed that
+she would go off with Jevons? I don't really know that I dreamed it
+myself at the moment. I may be mixing up with my first vague dread the
+certainty that came later. But sometimes I wonder why Reggie didn't
+suspect _me_. I suppose my rectitude that had dished me with Viola saved
+me with her brother.
+
+He took me to lunch with him at his club, and went off quite happily
+afterwards to the Army and Navy Stores to see about his kit.
+
+I went straight to Jevons's rooms in Bernard Street. Jevons was away. Had
+been away since Easter. His landlady couldn't give me his address. He
+hadn't told them where he was going to, and they rather thought he was
+abroad. His letters were all forwarded to his publishers. _They_ might
+give me his address.
+
+I went to his publishers. They wouldn't give me his address. They weren't
+allowed to give addresses, but they would forward any letters to Mr.
+Jevons. I said I was a friend of Mr. Jevons's. Could they at least tell
+me whether he was or was not in England? They said that when they had
+last heard from him he was not.
+
+Then I went down to Fleet Street, to his editor, my editor. He couldn't
+give me Jevons's address because he hadn't got it. He rang up the office.
+In the office they rather thought Jevons was in Belgium. They'd had a
+manuscript from him posted at Ostend. They looked up the date. It was
+three days ago.
+
+I sailed that night for Ostend.
+
+Of course I had no business to follow Jevons. He had a perfect right to
+travel--to travel anywhere he liked, without interference from anybody.
+And in fixing on a time to travel in, nothing was more likely than with
+his mania upon him he would choose a time that had become valueless to
+him--a time that he had no other use for, the time when Viola Thesiger
+was away. The poverty of his resources was such that he couldn't afford
+to waste any opportunity of seeing her. So that I really could not have
+given any satisfactory answer if I had been asked why I had jumped to the
+preposterous conclusion that, because they were away at the same time,
+they were away together. It ought to have been as inconceivable to me as
+it was to Reggie. I can only say that in following him I acted on an
+intimation that amounted to certainty, founded on I know not what
+underground flashes of illumination and secret fear.
+
+I must have trusted to more flashes in pursing his trail. For when I
+reached Folkestone there wasn't any trail at all. My only clue was that
+three days ago Jevona had posted a manuscript at Ostend. He might not be
+in Belgium at all. He might be in Holland or in France or Germany by this
+time.
+
+When we got to Ostend I made systematic inquiries at the Post Office and
+at all probable hotels. At the eleventh hotel (a very humble one) I heard
+that a "Mr. Chevons" had stayed there one night, three nights ago. No, he
+had nobody with him. He had left no address. They didn't know where he
+was going on to. I found out under another rubric that Englishmen never
+came to this hotel. There was no point in making a separate search for
+Viola; if my intuition held good, all I had to do was to find out where
+Jevons was.
+
+I went on to Bruges. Why, I cannot tell you. I had never heard either
+Viola or Jevons say they would like to see Bruges. But Bruges was the
+sort of place that people did like to see.
+
+No trace of Jevons or of Viola in Bruges.
+
+I went on to Antwerp (it was another of the likely places), and then, in
+sheer desperation, to Ghent.
+
+And in Ghent, in a certain hotel in the _Place d'Armes_, I ran up against
+Burton Withers, the man who used to be on the old _Dispatch_, and the
+very last person I could have wished to see. I didn't ask him if he'd
+seen Jevons; I didn't mention Jevons; but before we'd parted he had told
+me that, by the way, he'd come across Jevons in Bruges. He was going
+about with my typist, Miss Thesiger. They were staying in the same hotel.
+
+I tried to say as casually as I could that Miss Thesiger had wired to me
+that she was staying in that hotel with her people.
+
+The little bounder then intimated that when he saw Miss Thesiger her
+people were less conspicuous than Jevons.
+
+I replied that that was probably the reason why they'd asked me to join
+them when I'd seen Ghent.
+
+Withers advised me to go on seeing Ghent if I wanted to be popular.
+They--Jevons and Miss Thesiger--didn't look at all as if they wanted to
+be seen, much less joined.
+
+He had the air of knowing a good deal more than he cared to tell me; but
+then he always had that air; you may say he lived on it.
+
+I asked him presently (in a suitable context) whether he was going back
+soon; and to my relief I learned that he had only just come out--for his
+paper--and was going on into Germany through Brussels. He wouldn't be
+back in England for another three weeks or more.
+
+He wouldn't be back, I reflected, to tell what he knew or what he didn't
+know, till Reggie Thesiger had sailed.
+
+I got rid of the little beast on the first likely pretext, having dealt
+with him so urbanely that he couldn't possibly think he had told me
+anything I saw reason to believe and therefore to resent.
+
+Then I went back to Bruges.
+
+This time my quest was fairly easy. I didn't know what hotel Jevons
+was staying in; but I did know the sort of hotel that Withers stayed
+in when he was travelling for his paper. My errand was narrowed down to
+three or four (good, but not too good), and the first I struck in the
+Market-Place was Withers's hotel. It was one of those that three days ago
+had known nothing of Jevons.
+
+I inquired this time for Withers and was told that he had left that
+morning. I engaged a room and strolled out into the Market-Place. I
+visited the Cathedral, the Belfry, and the Béguinage, in the hope of
+coming suddenly across Viola and Jevons.
+
+I did not come across them in any of those places; but I was not very
+earnest about the search. I was so sure that if Withers had not lied to
+me they would presently come across me at their hotel. I meant that it
+should be that way, if possible: that they should come across me in a
+place where they could not evade me. God only knows what I meant to say
+to them when they had found me.
+
+As I entered the hotel again I saw the proprietor's wife make a sign to
+her husband. They conferred together, and sent the _concierge_ upstairs
+after me. He wanted to know if I was the gentleman who had inquired the
+other day for Mr. Chevons, because, if I was, Mr. Chevons had arrived the
+day before yesterday and was staying in the hotel.
+
+There was no doubt about it; his name, James Tasker Jevons, was in the
+visitors' list.
+
+Viola's was not.
+
+From the enthusiasm of the fat proprietor and his wife you would have
+supposed that Jevons and I had roamed the habitable globe for months in
+search of one another; and that Jevons, at any rate, would be overpowered
+with joy when he found that I was here. They said nothing about Viola.
+
+And before I could ask myself what earthly motive Withers could have had
+for lying to me, I concluded that he _had_ lied.
+
+Or perhaps--it was more than likely--he had been mistaken.
+
+Jevons, I said to myself, was bound to turn up at dinner. If Viola was in
+Bruges, Viola would probably be with him. I chose a table by the door
+behind a screen, where I could see everybody as they came in without
+being seen first of all by anybody.
+
+Jevons didn't turn up for dinner.
+
+I found him later on in the evening, on the bridge outside the eastern
+gate of the city. He stood motionless and alone, leaning over the parapet
+and looking into the water. Away beyond the Canal a long dyke of mist
+dammed back the flooding moonlight, and the things around Jevons--the
+trees, the water, the bridge, the gate and its twin turrets--were
+indistinct. But the man was so poured out and emptied into his posture
+that I could see his dejection, his despair. The posture ought to have
+disarmed me, but it didn't.
+
+He moved away as he saw me coming, then, recognizing me, he stood his
+ground. It was as if almost he were relieved to see me.
+
+"Oh, it's you, is it?" he said.
+
+I asked him who he thought it was, and he said he thought it was that
+little beast Withers.
+
+I said, "I daresay you did. I saw Withers this morning."
+
+He said quite calmly he supposed that was why I was here.
+
+I said I had been here before I had seen Withers.
+
+"I see," he said. "He's told you."
+
+I said Withers had told me nothing I didn't know.
+
+"You didn't know anything," he said. "You simply came here to find out."
+
+I said: Yes, that was what I had come for.
+
+"Well," he went on; "there isn't much to find out. She's here. And I'm
+here. And Withers saw us yesterday. As he told you."
+
+He spoke in the tired, toneless voice of a man stating for the
+thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact. He knew that I
+had tracked him down, but he didn't resent it. I felt more than ever that
+this encounter was in some way a relief to him; things, he almost
+intimated, might have been so much worse. I didn't know then that his
+calmness was the measure of his trust in me.
+
+"The really beastly thing," he said, "was Withers seeing us."
+
+I answered that the really beastly thing was his being there; his having
+brought her there; and that it would give me pleasure to pitch him over
+the canal bridge, only that the canal water was too clean for him.
+
+He said, "The canal water is filthy. But it isn't filthier than--it isn't
+half so filthy as your imagination. Your imagination, Furnival, is like
+the main sewer of this city."
+
+He said it without any sort of passion, in his voice of utter weariness,
+as if he was worn-out with struggling against imaginations such as mine.
+
+"But," he went on, "even your imagination isn't as obscene as Withers's.
+You may as well tell me what he said to you about Miss Thesiger."
+
+"He said that she--that you were staying together in the same hotel."
+
+"Why shouldn't we? It's a pretty big hotel. Do you mind my going back to
+it?"
+
+I said grimly that I was going back to it myself. I wasn't going to let
+Jevons out of my sight. I felt as if I had taken him into custody.
+
+We went back.
+
+We didn't speak till we came into the Market-Place. Then Jevons said
+quietly:
+
+"As it happens, we aren't staying together in that damned hotel. I'm
+staying in it by myself. We were dining there and having breakfast when
+Withers spotted us. You don't suppose she'd let me take her to the same
+hotel, do you? I got a room for her in a boarding-house. Kept by some
+ladies."
+
+"What do you mean by bringing her here at all? If," I said, "you _did_
+bring her."
+
+He meditated as if he too wondered what he had meant by it.
+
+"I brought her all right. That's to say, I made her come."
+
+"You mean you didn't bring her? She followed you?"
+
+(I _had_ to know what they had done, how they had arranged it.)
+
+We stood for a moment in the middle of the vast foreign Market-Place,
+talking in voices whose softness veiled our hostility.
+
+He answered with a little spurt of anger. "You can't call it following.
+She came."
+
+"Don't prevaricate," I said. "She came because you made her come. I'm not
+going to ask you why you made her. It's obvious."
+
+"Is it?" he said. "I wish I knew why. I wish to God I knew."
+
+"Don't talk rot," I said. "You knew all right. And she didn't."
+
+He looked at me. Standing there in the lighted Marketplace, under the
+shadow of the monument, he looked at me with shining, tragic eyes.
+
+"No, Furnival," he said. "Before God I didn't know. Neither of us knew.
+But I know now. And I'm going to-morrow."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He stuck to it that he was going. He seemed to think that his going would
+make it all right. He had just realized--he had only just, after six days
+of it, mind you, realized--that he had compromised her. I said I supposed
+he realized it after Withers had seen them?
+
+He said, No, it had come over him before that. Neither of them really
+cared a damn about Withers. Who was going to care what a beast like
+Withers thought or said? It had come over him that he oughtn't to have
+brought her here. He wished he'd hung himself before he'd thought
+of it, but the fact was that he didn't think. He just felt when he got
+out here himself that it would be a jolly thing for her to come too; it
+would do her good to cut everything--all the mimsy tosh she'd been
+brought up in and hated--to get out of it all--just to do one splendid
+bunk. That, he said, was all it amounted to.
+
+We talked it over, sitting up in his little bedroom under the roof, the
+cheapest room in the hotel. You may wonder how I could have endured to
+talk to him instead of wringing his horrid little neck for him; but there
+wasn't anything else to be done. After all, it wouldn't have done Viola
+or me any good if I had wrung his neck. It was, in fact, to save
+precisely that sort of violent scandal that I had come out here. I had
+realized so well what wringing Jevons's neck would mean to Viola that I
+was determined to get at him before Reggie Thesiger could.
+
+Besides I doubt very much if you could have wrung the neck of anybody so
+abjectly penitent as Jevons was that evening. I felt as if I were shut up
+with a criminal in the condemned cell, and Jevons no doubt felt as if
+he had murdered Viola.
+
+And yet, sitting there on his bed, leaning forward with his head in his
+hands and his eyes staring, staring at the horror he had raised round
+her, he asserted persistently his innocence.
+
+"Practically," he said, "I brought her out to look at Bruges--the
+Belfry."
+
+I said: "Good God! Couldn't she look at the Belfry without _you_?"
+
+He shook his head and replied very gravely: "Not in the same way,
+Furnival. Not in the same way. It wouldn't have been the same thing at
+all."
+
+"You mean it wouldn't have been the same for you, you little bounder."
+
+"It wouldn't have been the same thing for _her_. I wasn't thinking only
+of myself. Who does?"
+
+It was as if he had said: "Who that loves as I love thinks only of
+himself?" But I missed that. I was too angry.
+
+At least I suppose I was too angry. I must have been. Jevons's offence
+was unspeakable, or seemed so. He had outraged all decencies. He had done
+_me_ about the worst injury that one man can do to another--at any rate,
+I wasn't sure that he hadn't. How could I have been sure! Every
+appearance was against him. Even his funny candour left me with a ghastly
+doubt. It was preposterous, his candour. His innocence was preposterous.
+But it is impossible to write about this singular adventure as it must
+have appeared to me at the time. I am saturated with Jevons's point of
+view. I have had to live so long with his innocence and I have forgiven
+him so thoroughly any wrong he ever did to me. All this is bound to
+colour my record and confuse me. I have impression upon impression of
+Jevons piled in my memory; I cannot dig down deep enough to recover the
+original; I cannot get back to that anger of mine, that passion of
+violent integrity, that simple abhorrence of Jevons that I must have
+felt.
+
+He didn't care a rap about me and my abhorrence. He asked me what I
+thought I was doing when I came out here? He simply smiled when I told
+him I'd come out to send Viola back to her people before Reggie Thesiger
+got hold of him and thrashed him within an inch of his life, not because
+I in the least objected to his being thrashed within an inch of his
+life--far from it--but because advertisement in these affairs was
+undesirable. I didn't want Viola's family or anybody else to know about
+this instance. It was to be hushed up on her account and on their account
+alone.
+
+He replied pensively (almost too pensively) that he had supposed that was
+the line I would take. It was his little meditative pose that made me
+call him a thundering scallywag and accuse him of having calculated on
+the line that would be taken.
+
+He said quietly, "The word thundering is singularly inappropriate.
+There's nothing thundering about me. I haven't calculated anything. As
+for hushing it up, I'm hushing it up myself, thank you. Haven't I told
+you I'm going to-morrow? Can't you see that I'm packing?"
+
+He had evidently been trying to pack.
+
+"And what," I asked, "is Miss Thesiger doing?"
+
+"She's staying on here by herself a bit. In the _pension_. As if she'd
+come by herself."
+
+He seemed entirely satisfied with his plan.
+
+I said, "Look here, Jevons, that won't do. It's no good _your_ going.
+You've been seen here. You're supposed to be staying in this hotel
+together. If you go and she stays--in that _pension_--you've deserted
+her. You've seduced her. You're tired of her--in five days--and you've
+left her."
+
+"You don't suppose I have _really_?" said Jevons.
+
+"I don't suppose anything. I don't know what you've done. I don't think
+I want to know. That's what it'll look like. Do, for God's sake, remember
+you've been _seen_."
+
+He gathered a portion of his cheek into his mouth and sucked it.
+
+"I suppose," he said, "it _would_ look like that."
+
+I said of course it would. And he asked me then, quite humbly, what I
+thought he'd better do.
+
+I said I thought he'd better do exactly what I told him. He was to stay
+here till Captain Thesiger had sailed for India (I wasn't going to let
+him get back to England till Reggie was out of it). Miss Thesiger was to
+go back to her people to-morrow, and he was not to see her or write to
+her before she went.
+
+He asked me was I thinking of taking her back myself?
+
+I said I wasn't. Miss Thesiger had behaved as if she had disappeared.
+There was no good in my behaving as if she had disappeared with _me_.
+
+That seemed to pacify him.
+
+I said I should take her to Ostend to-morrow and put her on board the
+boat. I could see that he didn't at all care about this part of the
+programme, but his intelligence accepted the whole as the best thing that
+could be done in the circumstances.
+
+Then I left him to his misery and went round to the _pension_ to see
+Viola.
+
+All my instincts revolted against what I had to do.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She has since told me that I did it beautifully. I don't, of course,
+believe her, and it doesn't matter. The wonder is how I did it at all.
+
+To begin with I was afraid of seeing her, because I conceived that she
+would be afraid of seeing me. I felt as if I had hunted her down and
+caught her in a trap. I didn't want the bright, defiant creature to
+crouch and flinch before me in her corner. And, as I tried to realize
+our encounter, that was how I saw her--crouching and flinching in a
+corner. It wouldn't have been quite so awful if the man had been any
+other man but Jevons. I could not imagine a worse position for a girl
+like Viola Thesiger than to be caught running off to Belgium, or
+anywhere, with Jevons, and told to leave him and go home. Put brutally,
+that was what I had to tell her.
+
+The only way to do it was to ignore the unspeakable element in the
+affair--to ignore Jevons. To behave as if I'd never heard of him; as if
+she were just travelling in Belgium on her own account and staying in
+Bruges alone.
+
+And that--if she had only let me--was what I tried to do.
+
+I remember vividly everything that passed in that interview, but I do not
+know how to reproduce it, how to give anything like an impression of the
+marvellous thing it was, or that it turned into under her hands. It
+ought, you see, to have been so ugly, so humiliating, so absolutely
+intolerable for both of us. And it wasn't. She took it from me, at the
+end, and held it up, as it were a little way out of my grasp; and before
+I knew where I was, with some sudden twist or turn she had brought beauty
+out of it. Clear and exquisite beauty.
+
+I found her in her room at the _pension_. It was at the back, on the
+ground floor; and had long windows opening into a little high-walled
+garden. The room, I remember, was rather dingy and stuffed up with
+furniture. Large Flemish pieces, bureaus, chests and cabinets stood
+against the walls. There was a bed behind the door; she had put her
+travelling-rug over it. And there was a washstand in an alcove with a
+curtain hung across it; and some of her coats and gowns hung behind
+another curtain in a corner, and some were on hooks on the door. And her
+little trunk was on the floor by the foot of the bed. And her shoes stood
+by the stove.
+
+Somehow, when I saw these things--especially the shoes--my heart melted
+inside me with a tenderness that was infinitely more painful than the
+rather austere disapproval of her which I had relied on for support.
+
+I was prepared, as I said, for a cowed and frightened Viola, or for Viola
+in a mood at least in keeping with the poignant and somewhat humbling
+pathos of her surroundings; but not for the Viola I found.
+
+The _garçon_ of the _pension_ closed the door of this room in my face as
+he went in with my card to inquire whether she would receive me. I
+thought, "If she refuses I shall have to insist; and that will be
+unpleasant."
+
+But she didn't refuse. On the other side of the door I heard a subdued,
+but curiously reassuring cry.
+
+She had been sitting outside the open window. Her chair was on the
+flagged path of the garden. As I came in she had risen and was standing
+in the window, with the intense blue darkness of the garden behind her
+and the light of the room on her face. She was smiling in a serene and
+candid joy. For one second I imagined that she had not read the name on
+the card and that she thought I was Jevons. And then I must have looked
+away quite steadily so as not to see her shock of recognition; for her
+voice recalled me.
+
+"Wally--how ripping! However _did_ you get here?"
+
+I don't know what I said. I probably didn't say anything. The sheer
+surprise of it so staggered me that I must have muttered or grunted or
+choked instead. But I know I took her hand and did my best to smile back
+at her with the stiff mouth she noticed later.
+
+She went on: "I _am_ glad to see you. Have you had any dinner?"
+
+I said I had.
+
+"Then," she said, "let's sit in the garden."
+
+I took her hat off a chair and stuck it on a bust on the bureau (Viola
+laughed). I set the chair on the flagged path of the garden.
+
+"Have you had coffee?" she said then.
+
+I had.
+
+"So have I. But I haven't had it in the garden. We'll have some more."
+
+I rang for coffee.
+
+We sat down and faced each other. She was smiling again as if the delight
+of seeing me fairly bubbled out of her. One thing struck me then, that at
+this rate it would be easy enough to ignore Jevons. In fact, if Jevons
+hadn't given Viola away just now I should have thought that she _was_
+travelling in Belgium on her own account and that his being here in the
+same town with her was a coincidence, an accident. I could have got over
+Withers and his story.
+
+Then she said, "Have you come across Mr. Jevons yet? He's here."
+
+I answered, with what I knew to be a very stiff mouth, "We're staying in
+the same hotel."
+
+"You might have brought him along with you," she said.
+
+I said I didn't want to bring him along with me.
+
+She raised her eyebrows in delicate reproof of my rudeness and said, "Why
+not?"
+
+"Because," I said, "I want to talk to you."
+
+"Oh--" I don't think I imagined the faint embarrassment in her tone. But
+it was very faint.
+
+"_And_" I went on, "I don't want to talk about Jevons."
+
+She looked at me then steadily. The look held me, then defied me to pass
+beyond a certain limit. I understood now the terms of our encounter. As
+long as I met her on the ground of a friendship that recognized and
+included Jevons she was glad to treat with me; but any attitude that
+repudiated Jevons, or merely ignored him, was a hostile attitude that she
+was prepared to resent.
+
+"What has he done?" she said.
+
+"I don't know what he's done." I paused. "Why drag in Jevons?"
+
+"Because," she said, "it's his last night. He's going to-morrow."
+
+I said, "And it's my first night. And as it happens he isn't going
+to-morrow. He's arranged to stay here another fortnight."
+
+Her face softened. "Then it's all right," she said.
+
+I had to dash her down from _that_ ground and I did it at once.
+
+I said, "I saw your brother the other day."
+
+I could see her face darken then with a flush of pain. We were sitting
+close to the window, and the light from the room inside showed me all the
+changes of her face.
+
+She asked, "What day?"
+
+"Let me see. This is Friday. It must have been Monday. I came over that
+night, as soon as I'd seen him."
+
+"What did you go and see him for?"
+
+"I didn't go. He came to see me."
+
+She looked at me again, if possible, more steadily than before, but
+without defiance. It was as if she were measuring the extent of my
+loyalty before she committed herself again to speech.
+
+"Why did he come?" she asked presently.
+
+"He wanted to know if I knew where you were."
+
+"You didn't know," she said.
+
+"I didn't or I wouldn't have lost three days in looking for you. But I
+made a good shot, anyhow, when I came to Bruges."
+
+Even in her anguish--for she was in anguish--she smiled at the wonder of
+my shot.
+
+"What made you think of Bruges?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+I couldn't tell her what had made me think of it. I couldn't tell her
+that I had tracked her down through Jevons. I was going to keep him out
+of it, if she would only let me. But she wouldn't.
+
+"I suppose," she meditated gently, "he must have told you."
+
+I answered quite sternly this time, to impress on her the propriety of
+keeping Jevons out of it:
+
+"He didn't tell me anything."
+
+"Then"--she was still puzzled--"what made you come?"
+
+"You."
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Your brother, if you like."
+
+"He should have come himself."
+
+"That," I said, "is what I'm trying to prevent. He doesn't know
+you're here. I want to get you back to England before he does know.
+Besides--he's sailing for India next week."
+
+Then she broke down; that's to say, she lowered her flags. Her head sank
+to her breast; her eyes stared at the stone path; their lids reddened and
+swelled with the springing of tears that would not fall.
+
+"Didn't you know?" I said.
+
+"I suppose I must have known--once."
+
+Up till this moment she had not said one word, she had not made one sign,
+that had really given her away. And nothing could have given her away
+more completely than the thing she had said now. She had confessed to a
+passion so dominating and so blind as to be unaware of anything but
+itself. It was not so much that it had swept before it all the codes and
+traditions she had been brought up in--codes and traditions might well
+have been nothing to Viola--it had struck at her strongest affection and
+her memory. She adored her brother. He was sailing for India next week;
+she must have known it; and she had forgotten it.
+
+Her confession was not made to me (she had forgotten _my_ existence
+utterly); it was made to herself--the old self that had adored Reggie;
+that at this evocation of him arose and sat in judgment on the strange,
+perverted, monstrous self that could forget him. I've called it a
+confession; but it wasn't a confession. It was a cry, a muttering,
+rather, of secret, agonized discovery.
+
+"He wants to see you before he goes," I said.
+
+Her eyelids spilled their tears at that; but only those they had
+gathered; no more came. Her self-control was admirable.
+
+"It's all right," I said. "You've heaps of time. I'm going to take you to
+Ostend in the morning. You'll be in Canterbury to-morrow night."
+
+"Is that what you came for?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It was awfully nice of you."
+
+"There was nothing else," I said, "to do."
+
+"You're coming with me to Canterbury." She stated it.
+
+"No, my dear child," I said, "I am not. You don't want them to think you
+went to Bruges with _me_."
+
+This was by implication a reference to Jevons. It was as near as I had
+let myself get to him.
+
+She said, "What are you going to do, then?"
+
+"I'm going to put you on the boat at Ostend, and then I'm coming back
+here."
+
+It must have been at this point that the _garçon_ brought the coffee. For
+I remember our sitting out there and drinking it amicably until the aroma
+of it gave Viola an idea.
+
+"What time shall we have to start to-morrow?"
+
+I said, "First thing in the morning."
+
+"Then," she said, "it does seem a pity not to send for Jimmy."
+
+I could see now that there was some deadly purpose in her persistence.
+But this time I couldn't bear it, and I lost my temper.
+
+I said, "Send for him. Send for him, if you can't live ten minutes
+without him."
+
+I was sorry even at the time; I have been ashamed since. For, so far from
+resenting my abominable rudeness--as, under any conclusion, she had a
+perfect right to--she merely said, "I'm only thinking that if I've got to
+go so soon to-morrow it'll be horribly lonely for him over there."
+
+"He doesn't expect to see you. We arranged all that."
+
+She pondered it, still with that curious absence of resentment. It was as
+if, recognizing the danger of the situation, she submitted to any steps,
+however disagreeable, that were necessary for her safety. It was clear
+that she trusted me; less clear that she trusted Jevons.
+
+One thing remained mysterious to her.
+
+"What are you coming back here for?" she asked.
+
+I let her have it straight: "To look after Jevons."
+
+"What do you suppose he'd do?"
+
+"He might get into England before your brother got out of it."
+
+She smiled. _"What do you suppose, then, Reggie'd do?"_
+
+I said I knew what I'd do if I were Reggie.
+
+She smiled again. "I see. You're saving him from Reggie."
+
+"I'm not thinking of him, I can assure you."
+
+At that she said, "Dear Wally, so you think you're saving me."
+
+"I'm trying to," I said. "As far as your people are concerned. You don't
+want them to know you've been here. If you'll only leave it to me, they
+won't know."
+
+"I'm not going to lie about it. I shall tell them if they ask me."
+
+"Not Reggie," I said.
+
+"Yes, Reggie. If he asks me. Reggie's the very last person I should think
+of lying to."
+
+It was this attitude of hers that first shook me in my conclusions. For
+I'm afraid I'd come to certain very definite conclusions.
+
+Why, I asked her, hadn't she told them before she came?
+
+"Because," she said, "there's no use worrying them. They'd have tried to
+stop me. You can't imagine what an awful fuss they'd have made. I daresay
+I might never have got off at all."
+
+What I couldn't understand was her attitude. I mean I couldn't reconcile
+the secrecy she had practised with her amazing frankness now.
+
+Her manner was supremely assured.
+
+It wasn't, mind you, the brazen assurance of a woman who has been found
+out and flings up the game; it was a curiously tranquil and patient
+candour, with something mysterious about it, as if she had knowledge that
+I couldn't have, and bore with me through all my ignorance and
+blundering. In fact, from beginning to end, except for the one moment
+when I upset her by telling her about Reggie's sailing, she showed an
+extraordinary tranquillity.
+
+But as I couldn't understand her I simply said, "I wish you hadn't got
+off."
+
+She said in that same quiet way, "I had to."
+
+"Because," I said, "he made you."
+
+Since she had dragged Jevons in she should have him in. I wasn't going to
+keep him out now to spare her. I had a right to know the truth. She had
+shaken my conclusions. She had left me in a doubt more unbearable than
+any certainty, and I considered that I had a right to know. I was
+determined to know now and end it. That shows that I must have trusted
+her; that I knew she wouldn't lie to me.
+
+"But," she said, with the least perceptible surprise, "he didn't make
+me."
+
+"He told me he did."
+
+"He told you?--What did he say exactly?"
+
+"He said--if you must know--that he hadn't brought you, but that he had
+made you come."
+
+"He didn't. He didn't really. But supposing he had--what then?"
+
+"You _want_ me to tell you what I think of it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think it was a beastly thing to make you do. He couldn't have done
+it--you _know_ he couldn't have done it--if he hadn't been a bit of a
+blackguard."
+
+I was going to say, "as well as a bounder"; but I didn't want to rub that
+in. I judged that when the poor child came to her senses her cup would be
+full enough without my pouring.
+
+"But, you see," she said, still peaceably, "he didn't do it. He only
+_said_ he did. That was his niceness. He wanted to save me."
+
+"My dear child, if it's saving you to bring you out here without your
+people knowing anything about it, and to let you be seen with him
+everywhere--"
+
+"He didn't bring me. He said he wished I could come with him. And I said
+I wished I could. I almost asked him to take me; and he said he couldn't.
+Then he went off by himself. He was all right till he got to Bruges. Then
+he wrote and said that the beauty of it hurt him, that it was awful being
+here without me, and that he was coming back at the end of the week
+without seeing any more of it, because he couldn't bear to know what I
+was missing. He was going to keep the other places till we could see them
+together. So I wired to say I was coming, and I came."
+
+"What did you do it for, Viola?"
+
+"Wally, I asked myself that as soon as I got into the train. And it
+wasn't till I was half across the Channel that I knew why."
+
+She stopped and stared as if at the wonder of herself explained.
+
+"I did it to burn my boats."
+
+I suppose _I_ stared at that. For she expounded:
+
+"To make it impossible to go back."
+
+I said, "My dear child, that was very reckless of you."
+
+She said she wanted to be reckless. I asked her if it didn't occur to her
+that some day she might want her boats?
+
+She said: No. It was just her boats that she was afraid of. She didn't
+really want them. She didn't want--really--to go back.
+
+Then she looked at me and said, "You know Jimmy wants to marry me." And
+then, "Did you know?"
+
+I said I was not in Jevons's confidence, but I had guessed as much. I
+said, "Do you want to marry him?"
+
+She said, "Yes. I want to marry him more than anything. I don't want to
+marry anybody else. I never shall marry anybody else. Most of me wants to
+marry Jimmy. But there's a little bit of me that doesn't. It's mean and
+snobbish--and dreadful, and it's afraid to marry him. And, you see, if I
+were to go to my people and say, 'I'm not going to marry Mr. Furnival;
+I'm going to marry Mr. Jevons,' and I were to show Jimmy to them, they'd
+all get up and side with that horrid and shameful little bit of me.
+Reggie would, too. It wouldn't be in the least horrid or snobbish of
+them, you know, because they wouldn't know what Jimmy's really like.
+They're just very fastidious and correct. But it's simply awful of me,
+because I do know."
+
+"It isn't awful. It simply means that he isn't your sort. _You_'re
+fastidious and correct. You _can't_ marry him, and you know it. You won't
+be able to bear it. He'll make you shudder all down your spine."
+
+"All that doesn't prevent my caring for him. I care for him more than for
+anything on earth, even Reggie. That's why I've burned my boats. So that
+I may have what I care for without their tearing me to pieces over it."
+
+So far was I from understanding her that it struck me that what she was
+telling me was as ugly a thing as could be told in words; that she was
+confessing that, being too weak to stand up against her family, she had
+deliberately compromised herself with Jevons so that she might marry him
+without their opposition; just as I was sure that Jevons had compromised
+her so that he could marry her without opposition from herself.
+
+"But--what you are saying is horrible," I said. "I don't believe you know
+how horrible it is."
+
+So far was she from understanding _me_ that she answered: "Yes, it is
+horrible. But it was only a little bit of me. And it's all over. Burned
+away, Wally. I burned it when I burned my boats. Don't think of me as if
+I were really like that."
+
+You see? We had been talking about different things. My mind had been
+fastened on an external incident, ugly in itself, ugly in its apparent
+purpose, ugly in its consequences, ugly every way you looked at it. Hers
+had been concentrated on the event that had happened in her soul, an
+event to her altogether beautiful--the destruction of the cowardice that
+would have brought her back, that shrank from taking the risk that her
+soul dared.
+
+This, she seemed to say, is how I deal with cowardice.
+
+That she had compromised herself by dealing with it in this way had
+simply never occurred to her. It couldn't. She didn't know and wouldn't
+have believed it possible that people did these things.
+
+What had frightened her, she said, was Jimmy's saying that about keeping
+the other places till they could see them together. He meant, you see,
+till they were married. It brought it so home to her. And it brought home
+to her what it meant to him. Because he couldn't afford to marry yet for
+ages.
+
+If she'd gone back, she said, it would have been so cruel to him. And it
+would have been so cruel to herself, too.
+
+Then she told me what they had done together. Heavens! How she must have
+trusted him. She joined him here in Bruges. And they'd gone to Antwerp,
+then to Ghent, then back to Bruges. (I had followed close on their
+traces, a day behind them at each city.)
+
+And it had all been so beautiful. She simply couldn't tell me how
+beautiful it had been. It was as if she had never seen anything properly
+before.
+
+Jimmy had made her see things. "I can understand," she said, "what he
+meant when he said that the beauty of this place hurt him. It hurts
+_me_."
+
+I reminded her that Jimmy had said it hurt him because she wasn't there.
+
+She looked up and smiled. "He isn't here _now_, Furny."
+
+I took her to Ostend first thing in the morning and saw her on to the
+boat. I advised her to remove the foreign labels from her trunk at Dover,
+and to contrive so that she shouldn't be seen arriving by the up platform
+at Canterbury.
+
+"Oh," she said. "You have to take _some_ risk!"
+
+We were on the gangway, saying good-bye. And from the boat's gunwale she
+flung me buoyantly, "If I'm caught I'll say it was _you_ I went off with.
+They won't mind that half so much."
+
+I went back to Bruges the same day and found Jevons disconsolate where I
+had left him in his hotel. I took him to Brussels in the hope of finding
+Withers there and confusing him in his ideas. We didn't find him. He had
+gone on into Germany, carrying with him his impression of Viola and
+Jevons staying together at Bruges in the same hotel.
+
+It was at Bruges that I said to Jevons, "By the way, Miss Thesiger says
+you _didn't_ make her come. She proposed coming herself."
+
+He flushed furiously and denied it. "Of course I made her come. It wasn't
+likely she'd propose a thing like that."
+
+His chivalry was up in arms to defend her. But I could see also that his
+vanity wasn't going to relinquish the manly role of having made her come
+to him.
+
+Well, I suppose in a sense he _had_ made her.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+We didn't stay in Brussels more than a day or two. Jevons didn't like it.
+He had become sentimentally attached to Bruges, and he wasn't happy till
+I took him back there. I can't say he was exactly happy then except in so
+far as he may have enjoyed his own suicidal gloom. I wasn't very happy
+either. All my recollections of Bruges are poisoned by Jevons's gloom and
+by my own miserable business of looking after him and seeing that he
+didn't walk gloomily into any of the canals. As for seeing Bruges, I
+don't know to this day whether the Belfry is beautiful or not. I only
+know that it stood there in the grey sky like an immense monument to the
+melancholy of Jevons. He made me horribly uneasy. I thought every day
+that if he didn't walk into a canal he'd have another fit of jaundice.
+
+He seemed to be suffering chiefly from remorse, and oddly enough it was
+this remorse of his that gave me the measure of his essential innocence,
+as if Viola hadn't given it me already.
+
+It was in his dejection that he showed his tact. He had, for our
+remarkable circumstances, the right manner. If Jevons had been jaunty; if
+he had tried to brazen it out, I should have hated him. As it was, his
+misery might be poisonous, but it was most disarming. So was his trust
+in me. He realized that he had got Viola into the devil of a mess, and he
+looked, intelligently, to me to get her out of it. And with the same
+confiding simplicity he put himself into my hands now. The adventure had
+shaken his nerve and he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some
+supremely foolish thing like following Viola to Canterbury. I believe he
+would have consented to stay in Bruges long after the term I had imposed
+if I had told him it was necessary.
+
+I said I took him to Brussels and brought him back to Bruges. He
+submitted to be brought and taken; to be banged about in trains and
+omnibuses, to be fetched and carried like a parcel. He let me feel in the
+most touching manner that my presence was a comfort to him, while he
+recognized that his might be anything but a comfort to me. I know I had
+nothing to do with Jevons's melancholy. The fat proprietor and his wife
+(who smiled at us by way of encouragement in our passages to and fro
+before their bureau), these thralls of Jevons's odd fascination, had
+confided to me that he had been much worse the day before I came. The
+poor gentleman could neither eat nor sleep; other guests in the hotel had
+come upon him wandering by himself at strange hours on the quays. (There
+were a good many English in Bruges that spring.)
+
+I was greatly relieved by these disclosures; they testified to the fact
+that Jevons, at any rate on Viola's last day, had been seen very much by
+himself.
+
+We had not spoken of Viola since the day when I had come back from Ostend
+after seeing her off. I can't recall much of what we did talk about, but
+I remember that Jevons's remarks were always interesting, and that in his
+lucid intervals he laid himself out to be amusing. In one respect only he
+had deteriorated. Jevons's strong language was no longer strong. It came,
+if it came at all, in brief spurts, never with the passionate rush, the
+gorgeous colour, the sustained crescendo of his first runnings. It was a
+thing of feeble _clichés_ that might have passed in any drawing-room.
+
+We didn't, then, talk about Viola. But I know that he heard from her and
+that I didn't.
+
+The first week of Jevons's fortnight was up when I got a wire from
+Canterbury. It said: "Reggie sailed yesterday. Trouble. Can you come
+Canterbury at once. Viola."
+
+Of course the word that stuck out of it was "Trouble." For the rest it
+was ambiguous. I couldn't tell, neither could Jevons, whether the trouble
+was connected somehow with Reggie's sailing, or whether in announcing his
+departure she meant to intimate that Jevons might now return to England;
+the coast was clear. Jevons, I may say, took this view of it and I did
+not. It was I and not Jevons who was asked to come at once. Jevons, for
+Viola's present purposes, was ignored.
+
+With his usual intelligence he saw my point. We made out that the message
+suggested trouble with Viola's family, and he agreed heartily that he was
+not precisely the person to deal with that.
+
+Oh yes, he trusted me. He gave me his word of honour that he would stay
+in Bruges until I either sent for him or came back to fetch him.
+
+Before I left I had a straight talk with him.
+
+I pointed out to him (what he said he knew as well as I did) that on the
+most lenient view of his case he had compromised Miss Thesiger very
+seriously. But, I said, he would have had to have compromised her more
+seriously still before her people would consent to her marrying him. He
+must see that, with what he had done, by stopping short of what he
+might have done, he had made himself, if anything, more unacceptable
+than he was to begin with. She might--she probably would in her present
+mood--insist on marrying him without their consent. On the other hand,
+she just mightn't. And it wasn't as if he could afford to marry her at
+once, while her present mood was on.
+
+He said, No. But in six months he could afford it. He gave himself six
+months.
+
+I said, Anything might happen in six months. Miss Thesiger's present mood
+(which, I put it to him, was very much made up of old Flemish glamour)
+might change. And if it did, it was just conceivable that she might marry
+_me_. He was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if he got the chance. _I_
+was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if _I_ got the chance. At the
+present most of the chances, I owned, were in his favour. But there was
+just the off-chance in mine.
+
+And that off-chance, I told him plainly, I meant to make the most of. I
+wouldn't be human if I didn't. I wasn't taking any unfair advantage of
+him, considering the tremendous innings he had had in Flanders, with the
+Flemish atmosphere to help him. If I could make any running in
+Canterbury, with the Canterbury atmosphere to help _me_ (he owned very
+handsomely that it would help me, that I'd be "in it" quite beautifully)
+why, I'd make it.
+
+Had he anything to say?
+
+He looked at me very straight, with just the least perceptible twinkle,
+and he said, "All right, old man, cut in, and take your chance. I'll risk
+it."
+
+I got to Canterbury in the early evening and went straight from my
+Fifteenth Century hotel to the Thesigers' house in the Close. I spotted
+it at once. It was all old red brick and grey stone like the Tudor houses
+in John's and Margaret's Quad.
+
+I asked for Miss Viola Thesiger and was shown into the Canon's library.
+To my great relief the Canon wasn't in his library. It looked out on to a
+perfect garden with a thick green lawn, and an old red-brick wall, very
+high, all round it, and tall elms topping the wall, and long beds of
+wallflowers and tulips blazing away underneath it. I said to myself, "If
+I want atmosphere I've got it. Bruges is nothing to the Thesigers' garden
+in Canterbury Close." I'd time to take it all in, for Viola kept me
+waiting.
+
+I was glad of the peace of the garden, for I'd taken in more atmosphere
+than I wanted already as I came through the house. You went upstairs to
+the Canon's library, and along a narrow black-oak corridor. And in
+passing I was aware of a peculiar quietness everywhere. It wasn't simply
+the quietness and laziness of the Cathedral Close. It was something in
+the house. I felt it as I crossed the threshold and the hall. It was the
+sum of slight but definite impressions: the sudden silence of voices
+that were talking somewhere when I came in; the shutting of a door that
+stood ajar; the withdrawal of footsteps approaching on the landing.
+
+It was as if there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank
+and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker
+called in to help them to bury their dead.
+
+The trouble was strictly confined to the Thesigers' house. From the
+tennis-lawns under the high walls of other gardens there came shouts of
+girls and of young men at play.
+
+Presently Viola came to me. She held her head if anything higher than
+usual, and the expression of her face was out of keeping with the trouble
+in the air. But as she came nearer I saw that this gay face was white,
+its tissue had a sort of sick smoothness, and there were dark smears
+under her eyes.
+
+The poor child had paid her tribute to the Trouble.
+
+She said, "It _is_ good of you to come. Did you mind awfully?"
+
+I said, of course I didn't. She smiled again, the little white, blank
+smile she had for me in those days, and I asked her what had happened.
+
+She said, "Everything's happened. It's been awful."
+
+Her smile took on significance--the whole wild irony of disaster. Then
+she said, "They know."
+
+"All of them? Your brother?"
+
+"No. Not Reggie. He got away in time. They won't tell him. They won't
+even tell Bertie. They'll never talk about it. But they know."
+
+I said, "Supposing they _do_ know--as long as other people don't--"
+
+"But, Wally, that's just it. Everybody does know."
+
+I couldn't take her quite seriously yet. I asked her: Was it the labels?
+and she said, No, she'd picked all the foreign ones off at Dover, and she
+got the Dover ones off in the cab coming home, and she'd had Heaven's own
+luck at the station, nobody'd seen her on the up platform, and her people
+thought she'd come from London. Of course they all asked her where she'd
+been, and she told them she wasn't going to let on just yet, that it
+wasn't good for them to know too much, and that if they behaved
+themselves they'd know some day. She meant to tell them as soon as ever
+Reggie'd gone. "Really and truly, Wally, I meant to tell them."
+
+"And do you know," she said, "they thought I was rotting them, that I'd
+been in some stuffy place in the country all the time."
+
+"Then how on earth," I said, "did they find out?"
+
+"They didn't. They never do find out things. They heard--last night.
+Somebody saw us."
+
+"Withers?" I said. I'd thought of Withers at once. But he didn't seem
+likely. He wasn't back yet.
+
+"No. Not Withers. Some women who knew my uncle, General Thesiger. They
+were in your hotel in Bruges, and they knew some other women staying in
+the _pension_. They saw my name in the visitors' book and it excited
+them. It all comes, you see, of my uncle being so beastly distinguished,
+so that they _had_ to say they knew him. And then of course the other
+people chipped in and told them all they knew about _me_. Can't you see
+them doing it?"
+
+I could indeed.
+
+"I never thought the _pension_ was a good scheme," she said; "but poor
+Jimmy _would_ make me go to it. He said it was safe. You see how safe it
+was."
+
+I wasn't quite clear yet as to where Jevons came in.
+
+"You say these people saw you. You mean they saw you and Jevons?"
+
+She smiled more than ever. "No, Wally. It was _you_ they saw."
+
+I don't know whether I was glad or sorry. I believe I was both. I was
+glad that Jevons--the ugly element--was disposed of. I was sorry--sorry,
+indeed, is hardly the word for what I felt--when I thought of the
+impression Viola's family had of me _now_; of the terms on which I should
+be received into it if I were received into it at all. I couldn't clear
+myself entirely, you see, without dragging in Jevons, and for Viola's
+sake Jevons had at any cost to be suppressed.
+
+"What on earth," I said, "must your people think of me?"
+
+She said surprisingly, "They think you a perfect dear."
+
+"What, for carrying you off to Belgium? That's what I seem to have done.
+I don't quite see how I'm to get out of it unless we can persuade them
+that we met by accident."
+
+"Oh," she said, "_I_ got you out of it all right."
+
+I asked her, "How?"
+
+She said, "I told them the truth. I said it wasn't you; it was Jimmy."
+
+"What did you do that for?"
+
+"Because it _was_ Jimmy I went off with. You're all right. They _know_
+it's Jimmy."
+
+I groaned. "That's precisely what I've been trying to prevent them
+knowing."
+
+"They know that, _too_. I told them that you came out to look for
+me--like a lamb, to save me--and that you made me come back. They
+think that was dear of you."
+
+She paused on it with a tenderness that touched me.
+
+"You see," she said, "I've saved you."
+
+I could only say, "My dear child--have you saved _yourself_?"
+
+She was visibly troubled.
+
+"I think--I _think_ they believe me. They say they do. But they don't
+understand. That's why I sent for you. I want you to make them see."
+
+"Make them see what?" I said. (It was clumsy of me.)
+
+"What it really was," she said.
+
+I asked her if they knew I was there. She said, Yes, they were coming in
+to see me.
+
+"They want to see you. They want to know."
+
+I saw then what my work was to be. I was not only to witness to her
+innocence and Jevons's--if they doubted it; I was to show them what she
+had shown me in the garden at Bruges, the beauty of the whole thing as it
+appeared to her. I was to show them Jevons's beauty.
+
+Well, I thought, it'll take some showing.
+
+"Do they," I asked her, "at all realize Jevons?"
+
+"Yes. They asked me if he was the man Reggie met at my rooms. Of course I
+had to say he was. It's almost a pity Reggie met him. That's what's
+frightened them. You see, he only saw the funny part of him."
+
+(I could imagine what Reggie's description of the funny part of Jevons
+had been.)
+
+I said she was asking me to do a rather difficult thing.
+
+She said, "Yes. And I've made it worse by telling them I'm going to marry
+Jimmy."
+
+"And I'm to persuade them that that's the best thing you can do, am I?"
+
+She said, Yes--if I could do that--
+
+I said I couldn't. I couldn't persuade myself. How could I, when I was
+convinced that the best thing she could do was to marry _me_?
+
+She said she'd forgotten that and that I could leave the marrying part of
+it to her. "It's about Bruges," she said, "that I want you to tell them."
+
+"I can't very well if they don't ask me," I expounded.
+
+"Oh, but," she said, "they _will_ ask you. At least Daddy will."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was at this point (when, I must say, we had thrashed it out pretty
+thoroughly) that Mrs. Thesiger came in. Viola left me to her.
+
+I noticed that, except for the moment of Viola's formal introduction of
+me, neither of them spoke to or looked at the other.
+
+I have said that Mrs. Thesiger was a charming woman. I may have said
+other things that imply she was not so charming; those things, if I
+really said them, I take back, now that I have come to my first meeting
+with her. When I recall that ten minutes--it didn't last longer--I cannot
+think of her as otherwise than perfect. It took perfection, of a sort, to
+deal creditably with the situation. Nothing could well have been more
+painful for Mrs. Thesiger. I, an utter stranger, was supposed to know all
+about her daughter, to know more than she or any of them knew. I held the
+secret of those dubious seven days in Belgium. That the days would be
+dubious I must have known when I set out to bring Viola back from
+Belgium. I must, the poor lady probably said to herself, have known
+Viola. And my knowledge of her, so dreadful and so intimate, was a thing
+she was afraid of; she didn't want to come too near it. But it was also a
+thing that must be exceedingly painful to me. She conceived that I would
+dread her approach every bit as much as she dreaded mine.
+
+And so--and so Mrs. Thesiger ignored my knowledge; she ignored the
+situation. Beautifully and consistently, from the beginning to the end of
+my stay in Canterbury, she ignored it.
+
+She had come in now to bring me her invitation, and her husband's
+invitation, to stay. Her husband, she said, expected me. He was out; he
+had had to go to a Diocesan Meeting--but it would be over by now, the
+tiresome meeting, and he would be here in a few minutes.
+
+I protested. I had taken rooms at my Fifteenth Century hotel.
+
+She insisted. They could make that all right. They knew the hotel-keeper.
+He was used to having people taken from him at the last minute. They
+would send round for my things. My room was waiting for me.
+
+I said, Really?--But they were too kind--
+
+She said, No. It was the least they could do.
+
+This, with its faint suggestion of indebtedness, was as near as she got
+to the situation.
+
+She must have sighted it in the distance, for she slanted away from it
+with a perilous and graceful sweep. She had heard so much about me from
+her daughter. She had wanted to make my acquaintance. She was glad of
+this opportunity--
+
+(We smiled at each other to show that there was nothing to wince at in
+her phrase.)
+
+I said I was glad of it too, and what a charming garden they had.
+
+Wasn't it? And did I know Canterbury? I wished I did. Well--I would know
+it now. And if I didn't mind ringing the bell the butler would fetch my
+things over from the "Tabard." And so on, charmingly, till the Canon came
+in and relieved her.
+
+She had done very well.
+
+He, dear, charming man, did the same thing, and did it even better.
+That's to say, he had a beautiful voice and he was happier in his
+phrases. He could ignore with the greater ease because he wouldn't have
+to keep it up so long.
+
+He kept it up till dinner-time. Only now and then his kind, keen look at
+me told me that he was going to have it out with me, and that he was
+measuring the man with whom he would have to do.
+
+But before dinner they had taken me to my room. They hoped I wouldn't
+mind having Bertie's room. The house was full; all the girls were at
+home, so they had had to give me Bertie's room.
+
+As I dressed in Bertie's room (the drawback of it was that it looked bang
+out on to the Cathedral Tower and was fairly raked by the chimes), with
+the Cathedral Tower before my eyes and the Cathedral chimes in my ears,
+and Canon Thesiger's beautiful voice and Mrs. Thesiger's beautiful face
+and the beautiful manners of both of them in my memory, it came over me
+with renewed conviction that Jevons was impossible; that Viola's people
+knew and felt he was impossible; that Viola knew and felt he was
+impossible herself; and that in the face of all this impossibility I had
+a chance. Bruges might back Jevons, but Canterbury would never back him;
+whereas it was quite evident that Canterbury was backing me.
+
+I was in the drawing-room ten minutes before dinner-time. They were
+all there: the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and their five unmarried
+daughters--Victoria, the eldest, Millicent, the High School teacher,
+Mildred, the nurse, Viola, the youngest but one, and Norah, the youngest.
+
+They were all there, the whole seven of them. And they were all silent
+until I appeared. As I went down the stairs and through the hall I
+noticed that the door was open and that no sounds came through it. I
+caught sight of Viola standing by the window with her back to her family;
+the others sat or stood in attitudes averted from her and from each
+other.
+
+When they heard me they all stirred and began talking. And as I came into
+the room I found the girls drawn together (even Viola had turned from her
+window).
+
+I see them now: Canon Thesiger standing on the hearthrug, looking
+handsome; and Mrs. Thesiger beside him, looking handsome, too, in grey
+silk and a little flushed. I hadn't realized in our first meeting _how_
+handsome they both were, and how brilliantly unlike. He was well-built,
+slender, aquiline, clean-cut and clean-shaven; he had thin, beautiful
+lips that he held in stiffly; he had dark eyes like his son Reggie's, and
+dark hair parted correctly in the middle, hair that waved. He had tried
+to depress and subdue it by hard brushing with a wet brush, but it
+continued to wave in spite of him, and the crests of the waves were
+silver, which accentuated them.
+
+Mrs. Thesiger was tall and at the same time plump. She was fair and
+blue-eyed and still delicately florid; she had perfect little features,
+with mutinous upward curves in the plumpness. I say mutinous, because
+Mrs. Thesiger's way of being handsome was in revolt against her
+husband's. Her light-brown hair waved, too, and to a discreet extent she
+encouraged its waving. This sounds as if Mrs. Thesiger's appearance was
+frivolous. But it was not. All these florid plumpnesses and the upward
+curves were held in tight, like Canon Thesiger's mouth. Their intentions
+were denied and frustrated, the original design was altered to harmonize
+with his. Herein you saw the superior restraint, the superior plasticity,
+the superior _art_ of Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+It was all very well for him to be correct when his features were formed
+that way, but this was the very triumph of correctness.
+
+And she was, if anything, braver than her husband. He could only just
+smile with his stiff lip; she could laugh over the business of presenting
+me to the four unmarried daughters whom (she emphasized it) I _didn't_
+know.
+
+And they--the four daughters--I'm not sure that they weren't the most
+gallant of this gallant family.
+
+I suppose that it was the violent dissimilarity in their parents' beauty
+that had produced the engaging irregularity of their features. Not one of
+those five little faces was correct. Victoria's had tried hard for
+correctness in her father's manner, but her mother's irrepressible
+plumpness had made her miss it, poor girl, just as (I was soon to learn)
+she had missed everything.
+
+Millicent's face, the face of the one who had been at Girton, hadn't
+tried for it; it had achieved a plainness I admired because it was oddly
+like Viola's face, only that Millicent was sallow and thin and dry and
+wore pince-nez.
+
+Mildred, the nurse, was frankly plump and fair and florid like her
+mother; her face would have been pretty if her father's nose hadn't
+stepped in and struggled with her mother's and so spoilt it for her.
+
+Norah, the youngest, was pretty--and odd. She was Viola all over again,
+but more slender and coloured differently, coloured all wrong. I didn't
+take to Norah all at once. I wasn't prepared for a Viola with blue eyes
+and pink cheeks and light hair, and the figure of a young foal. Besides,
+her hair was outrageous; it waved too much; it was all crinkles, and she
+hadn't found out yet how to keep it tidy.
+
+She told me afterwards it was "up" that evening for the first time. When
+it came to her turn, she said: "There are such a dreadful lot of us,
+aren't there?"
+
+There certainly was. And as I looked at them I thought: Viola has done an
+irreparable injury to her family, to all these charming people. She has
+hurt her father and mother in their beauty and their dignity and their
+honour. As for her sisters, she has ruined what they are much too
+well-bred to call their "chances." The story of the going off to Belgium
+with Jevons is spreading through the Close, and through the High School
+where Millicent teaches, and through the garrison. They will try to hush
+it up, but they won't be able to; it will reach Chatham and Dover. If
+they go up to town it will follow them there. Wherever they go it will
+ultimately follow them. She has struck at the solidarity of the family.
+To be sure, it was the solidarity of the family that drove her to strike
+at it. But if you were to tell Canon and Mrs. Thesiger that they had
+driven her, that they had tied her up too tight, they wouldn't see it.
+They would say: "We never stopped her going off to London. But that
+wasn't enough for her. She must go off to Belgium with that man Jevons.
+She must ruin us."
+
+And Viola knew that she had ruined them.
+
+And there they were, all holding themselves well, and all well
+dressed--the two youngest in white, the elders in light colours on a
+scale that deepened to Victoria's old rose. I remember them, even to what
+they wore and the pathos of their wearing it; they stood out so against
+the black panelling of the old room. It was full of oak chests and
+bureaus and Chinese cabinets, and Madonnas in Italian frames, and red and
+white ivory chessmen, and little bookcases with books in white vellum
+with scarlet title-pieces, and family portraits, and saints in triptychs
+on golden backgrounds, and murderous assegais and the skins and horns of
+animals. And the leaves of the old elms stuffed up the low, mullioned
+windows looking on the garden.
+
+And somehow you were aware of great streams of empire and of race,
+streams of august tradition; of sanctity and heroism and honour, and
+beautiful looks and gentle ways and breeding, all meeting there.
+
+I looked at the Thesigers and I looked at all these things, and I thought
+again of Jevons--of Jevons as absolutely impossible. You may say it was
+pure snobbishness to think of him in that way, and I daresay it was; but
+there wasn't any other way.
+
+It wasn't their tradition, you see, that appealed to me so much as their
+behaviour. I don't think I ever met people who knew so well how to
+behave.
+
+They kept it up. All evening they behaved like people under some heavy
+calamity which they ignored for the comfort of their guest and for their
+own dignity. And yet, even if I hadn't known of their calamity, I must
+have felt it in the air. They knew that I knew it; but that was all the
+more reason why they should ignore it; they wanted to remove from me the
+oppression of my knowledge.
+
+During dinner, perhaps, you felt the tension of the catastrophe; any
+guest who knew as much as I did was bound to be aware of it. It was in
+little sudden, momentary silences, in the hushed voices and half-scared
+movements of the butler and the parlourmaid, in the stiffness of the
+Canon's lip, and in some shade of the elder girls' manner to Viola.
+
+I remember how, in one of those silences, Norah, who sat facing me,
+leaned forward and addressed me. She said, "Mr. Furnival, you've come
+from Belgium, haven't you? Do tell me about it! I can't get a word out of
+Viola."
+
+I supposed they hadn't told Norah. They had spared the youngest. She was
+only seventeen.
+
+The butler and the parlourmaid, standing rigid by the sideboard, looked
+at each other in their fright. Mrs. Thesiger saw them and flushed. But
+Canon Thesiger, who had his back to them, observed that Belgium was a
+large order, and that Mr. Furnival would have to tell her about it
+afterwards.
+
+But there was never any afterwards for Norah. She said, "I believe
+there's a joke about Belgium, and that Mr. Furnival's in it."
+
+Viola laughed. It was, on the whole, the best thing she could do. If I'd
+giggled, too, it might have helped, but I didn't dare to, sitting there
+beside Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+The Canon pushed a dish of chocolates in front of his youngest daughter
+to keep her quiet, and then plunged like a hero into the tendencies of
+modern music, which he deplored. He asked my opinion of Richard Strauss,
+a composer of whom he was profoundly ignorant. Scarlatti and Corelli
+tided us over dessert, and Purcell floated us tenderly into the
+drawing-room and coffee. After coffee the Canon took me into the library
+(he said) for a smoke.
+
+I could see by the fuss he made about his cigarettes that he was nervous,
+staving off the moment.
+
+It came with the silence of the first cigarette. There were no
+transitions. He simply settled himself a little deeper into his chair and
+said, "I'm a little anxious about that girl of mine."
+
+I said, "_Are_ you, sir?" as if I were surprised.
+
+"Well"--he was evidently trying to steer between his decision to ignore
+and his desire for knowledge--"you see, she's rather reckless and
+impulsive."
+
+I agreed. She was--a little.
+
+"More than a little, I'm afraid. Do you know anything of this man Jevons
+she talks about?"
+
+That was masterly of the Canon, the subtle suggestion that Viola did no
+more than talk about Jevons, the still more subtle implication that if
+she _could_ talk about him all was well.
+
+I said that Jevons was a very decent fellow, and added that Captain
+Thesiger had met him.
+
+It was mean of me to shovel the responsibility on to Reggie, but I wanted
+to gain time, too.
+
+The Canon remembered that Reggie had said something. And then suddenly he
+discarded subtlety and told me straight out that Reggie had said Jevons
+was a bit of a bounder, and he supposed he was.
+
+I could see him watching me, trying to break down my defences.
+
+I dodged him with "These things are comparative," and he floored me with
+a sudden thrust:
+
+"No, my dear boy, they are _not_."
+
+He meditated. "What sort of age is he?"
+
+I told him, "About thirty-one or two."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+And then: Did I know anything about the young man's morals?
+
+I assured him I had never heard a word against them.
+
+He looked at me keenly and I remembered the words of Withers which I
+_had_ heard. Still, I knew nothing against Jevons's morals, and I said
+they were all right for all I knew.
+
+"Never mind what you _know_," he answered. "What do you think?"
+
+I said I thought that Jevons had as clean a record as any man I knew.
+
+"You mean," he said, "these things are comparative?"
+
+I said I meant I only wished my morals were as clean. (I went as far as
+that for Viola--to save her. Besides, there was Jevons to be thought of.
+I was there to take a fair advantage of him, not an unfair one.)
+
+He took another look at me that seemed to satisfy him, for he said:
+"Thank you. That's all I want to know."
+
+We smoked in silence. Presently we went into the drawing-room "for a
+little music." Victoria played. The Canon and Mildred and Norah sang.
+Millicent went upstairs to prepare a lecture.
+
+When the music was over Viola and Mildred and Norah and I went into the
+garden, and very soon Mildred and Norah drifted back into the house again
+and left me with Viola.
+
+She began at once, "Well--did you make him understand?"
+
+I said I hadn't had much opportunity.
+
+Did he ask me about Bruges? No, but he had asked me about Jevons. I told
+her more or less how I had answered, and she said it was dear of me.
+
+"But it's no use telling them anything about _me_, Wally."
+
+I asked her, Had they said much?
+
+She said, "No. It's what they think. Or rather, what they don't think.
+They'll never think the same of me again. And they'll never trust me."
+
+I said, Come, it wasn't so bad as all that.
+
+But she stuck to it.
+
+"There!" she said. "Didn't I tell you?"
+
+Mrs. Thesiger from the drawing-room window was calling to us to come in.
+The grass was damp.
+
+"They won't trust me even with you."
+
+I thought: "Poor little Viola--she's burned her boats with a vengeance."
+
+Presently it was Bertie's room again, and moonlight, and the Cathedral
+chimes. They kept me awake all night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of course I hadn't made them understand. How could I? The peculiar
+awfulness of their calamity was that they knew so little about it. They
+didn't know, after all, what had happened at Bruges; they didn't know
+what lengths Viola had gone to. And though they evidently thought that I
+knew, that wasn't any good to them. They couldn't ask me what had
+happened at Bruges. They couldn't cross-question me about Viola's
+"lengths." I couldn't tell them that, according to my lights, nothing
+_had_ happened, that Viola's lengths were not likely to be very long.
+Besides, even if I had come with the proofs of her innocence in my
+hands, and removed their private sorrow, that wouldn't have repaired
+their public wrong. Nobody was going to believe in Viola's innocence.
+Appearances were dead against her.
+
+It was awful for them every way they looked at it; awful if she married
+Jevons just because she had to; awful even if she hadn't to, so long as
+people thought she had; awful if she married him for any reason; more
+awful if she didn't marry him at all. And supposing she married him. They
+might go on ignoring for ever and ever, but who else would, with that
+marriage staring them in the face and perpetuating the disgraceful
+memory?
+
+It struck me that Viola herself must see that there was only one way in
+which I could make them understand, only one thing that I could do for
+her, and that I had come to do it.
+
+The next morning I asked Canon Thesiger if he could give me half an hour.
+He gave it with a sort of sad alacrity. I didn't anticipate the smallest
+difficulty with him or with any of Viola's family. They seemed to be
+looking to me pathetically to save them. I had every reason to know that
+my one chance was good, and that poor Jevons, with all his chances,
+wasn't anywhere. In fact, I found in that half-hour with the Canon that
+my very fairness to Jevons had worked against him to abase him, while it
+raised me several points in the Canon's estimation. He had seen what I
+had been driving at. The cleaner I made out Jevons's record to be, the
+better I succeeded in shielding Viola. He expressed in the most moving
+terms his admiration of my moral beauty.
+
+And yet (I suppose I must have overdone it) it was my moral beauty that
+dished me with the Canon. I had reckoned, you see, without his, without
+Mrs. Thesiger's.
+
+I told him straight out that if he and Mrs. Thesiger would allow me, I
+meant to ask Viola to marry me. His lip stiffened.
+
+I said I hoped it wouldn't be a violent shock to them--they must have had
+some idea of what I had come for.
+
+He said, Yes. They had been afraid I had come for that.
+
+And then--oh, it was a terrible half-hour!
+
+They had been afraid, and they had talked it over. He didn't tell me all
+they'd said, but I could imagine most of it: how they had seen that my
+marrying Viola was the one way out for them, the one way out for her, and
+how it had occurred to them that perhaps I didn't know what I was doing,
+and how they had decided--dear, simple, honourable people--that it would
+be very wrong to deceive me, and that in any case they had no right to
+accept so great a sacrifice, even if it _was_ the one way out. I daresay
+they said to each other that they couldn't put such a burden on an
+innocent young man; it was their child's doing and they must bear the
+whole ghastly ruin and shame of it themselves. They even went further.
+What Jevons had done to Viola (they'd made up their minds about him) was
+devil's work. What Viola had done to them was in some way the
+expression--the very singular and unintelligible and bizarre
+expression--of God's will. It was the cross they had to bear. God, I
+suppose, knew the kind of cross that would hurt them most.
+
+A great deal of this he did say to me. He said it very simply, without
+phrases.
+
+Nothing, he said, would have pleased them better than that I should marry
+Viola. But--he didn't think that he could let me do it. If I had only
+come to him three weeks ago--
+
+He hadn't been able--naturally--to talk about it last night. He had hoped
+he wouldn't have to say anything about it at all, but I had forced him.
+
+It couldn't have been worse if I'd seen him about to put a knife into his
+breast. I tried to stop him, but he would do it, he _would_ put the knife
+in.
+
+"We don't know," he said, "what may have occurred at Bruges."
+
+"Nothing occurred," I said, "nothing that you need mind."
+
+He said, "That's what the child tells me."
+
+And I, "Surely, sir, you believe her word?"
+
+Of course--of course he believed her word. Viola, he said, might keep the
+truth from them if (he smiled in spite of himself) if she thought it
+would not be good for them to know it. But she had never told them an
+untruth. Never. She was--essentially--truthful.
+
+"Only," he said, "we don't know what she may have been driven to. She may
+have been trying to shield that man Jevons."
+
+I said I was convinced that, technically, Jevons was innocent. It looked
+as if he had been criminally reckless and inconsiderate; but he seemed to
+have honestly thought that there was no harm in Viola's joining him in
+Bruges.
+
+But the Canon didn't want to know what Jevons had thought, honestly or
+otherwise. Or what Viola had thought. "It's what they've done," he said.
+"You can't get over it."
+
+I said what they'd done didn't amount to more than, looking at the
+Belfry. I could very easily get over that.
+
+He said that I was an Israelite indeed. But the world wasn't all
+Belfries, and we must look at it like men of the world.
+
+"They travelled together, Furnival. They travelled together."
+
+I said, "Yes. And it wasn't till they'd got to Bruges the second time
+that Jevons realized that they never ought to. As soon as he did realize
+it, he cleared out."
+
+He did that too late, the Canon insisted. It was no good my trying to
+shield Jevons. It wasn't easy to believe that Jevons was as innocent as
+Viola, and, as nobody was going to believe it, the injury the brute had
+done her was irreparable.
+
+"Not," I said, "if she marries me."
+
+He said, "My dear boy, supposing--supposing it isn't all as innocent as
+you think? You can't marry her."
+
+I said that made no difference. It was all the more reason.
+
+All the more reason, he insisted, for her marrying Jevons.
+
+That, he said, was what they'd have to go into.
+
+But there I took a high stand. I said it was for me to go into it, and if
+I didn't, why should they? If I believed in Viola, surely they might? If
+I knew that she could do nothing and feel nothing that was not beautiful,
+wasn't my knowledge good enough for them? I said, "I shall go to her at
+once and ask her to marry me."
+
+He got up and laid his hand on my arm. "No," he said. "Not at once. Wait.
+Far better wait."
+
+I asked him, "How long?"
+
+He said, "Till she's had time to get over him."
+
+Mrs. Thesiger (I had half an hour with her, too) said the same thing.
+"Wait," she said, "at any rate, another week."
+
+She had given her, as Jevons would have said, a week.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I waited.
+
+I stayed with the Thesigers a week. In fact, I stayed ten days. I got
+used to the chimes and slept through them. I played chess with Mrs.
+Thesiger; I played golf and tennis with the girls and the young
+subalterns of the garrison; I played violent hockey with Mildred and
+Norah; I walked with Viola and Victoria; I tried to talk to Millicent
+(Millicent, I must own, was a bit beyond me); I played tennis again
+(singles) against Norah, who was bent on beating me. We all went for
+picnics with the subalterns into Romney Marshes and visited Winchelsea
+and Rye. And in between I was taken by Canon and Mrs. Thesiger to lunch
+or dinner or tea in the other Canons' houses, and was introduced to the
+Dean and the Archbishop. I attended the Cathedral services to an extent
+that provoked Viola to denounce me as a humbug.
+
+I told her I did it in order to look at the finest spectacle of defiance
+I had ever seen--the Canon in his stall in the chancel singing the solo
+in the anthem with his beautiful voice, in the very teeth of disaster, as
+if nothing had happened.
+
+She said, "Daddy is beautiful, isn't he? He had a sore throat for a
+fortnight after Aunt Vicky died. And he thinks this is far worse, but he
+won't go back on me. So he sings."
+
+I was sitting with her in the garden on the Sunday evening. I said to
+her, "Viola, you were caught with the beauty of Bruges. Why can't you see
+the beauty of all this?"
+
+She looked at me with her great dark eyes (they were very young and
+brilliant), and she answered, "Dear Walter, I've been seeing the beauty
+of it all my life."
+
+I was seeing it for the first time.
+
+I made the most of it, of the Canterbury atmosphere. I sank into it and
+felt it sinking into me. I was, as Jevons had said I should be, "in it."
+
+And, as I made my running, I thought with some remorse of that
+unfortunate one, languishing in Bruges on his parole. But Canterbury
+would have been no use to Jevons if he had been there.
+
+There's no doubt that I did something for the Thesigers in those ten
+days. I had effaced Jevons's legend. I had even effaced my own legend
+(for the scandal, if you remember, had begun with me). And the Thesigers
+were tackling their catastrophe with dignity and courage and, I think,
+considerable success. By having me there, by being charming to me, by
+presenting me openly and honourably to all their friends, they gave
+slander the most effective answer. People asked each other: Was it likely
+that the Thesigers would receive young Furnival with open arms if young
+Furnival had been the man they'd heard about?
+
+At the end of my week the whole seven of them were almost merry. (I may
+say Norah, the youngest, had been merry all the time.) My visit lapped
+over into another week.
+
+At the end of ten days my relations with Canon and Mrs. Thesiger became
+so intimate that we could discuss the situation. They could even smile
+when I reminded them that there was one good thing about it--Canterbury
+didn't, and _couldn't_, realize Jevons.
+
+They hoped devoutly that it never would.
+
+And they thought it wouldn't. By this time, poor darlings, they believed
+that I had saved them; that Jevons was an illness and that Viola had got
+over him; that I had cured Viola of Jevons.
+
+I believed it myself. She had avoided me most of the time; she had left
+me to her sisters, particularly the youngest, Norah. And when I was alone
+with her she was silent and embarrassed. I thought: "She is beginning to
+be afraid of me. And that is an excellent sign."
+
+The night before I left Canterbury I asked her, for the third time, to
+marry me.
+
+She said, "I know why you're asking me, and it's dear of you. But it's no
+good. It can't be done. Not even that way."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The next day I went back to Bruges to release Jevons from his parole.
+
+I found him sitting tight in his hotel in the Market-Place, waiting my
+return with composure.
+
+He had recovered in my absence and had been making the best of his
+internment. He had written a series of articles on "The Old Cities of
+Flanders." He worked them up afterwards into that little masterpiece of
+his, "My Flemish Journal," which gave him his European celebrity (it must
+have made delightful reading for the Thesigers). There was no delay, no
+reverse, no calamity that Jevons couldn't turn into use and profit as it
+came. Yes, I know, and into charm and beauty. Viola Thesiger lives in his
+"Flemish Journal" with an enduring beauty and charm.
+
+I said I was sorry for keeping him shut up in Bruges so long. He said it
+didn't matter a bit. He had been very busy.
+
+I thought it was his articles and his book (he had been dreaming of it)
+that had made Jevons so happy. But I was mistaken.
+
+We spent half the night in talking, sitting up in my big room on the
+first floor for the sake of space and air.
+
+Jevons went straight to the point by asking me how I had got on at
+Canterbury.
+
+I felt that I owed him a perfect frankness in return for the liberties I
+had taken with him, so I told him how I had got on.
+
+He said, "I'm not going to pretend to be astonished. But you can't say I
+didn't play fair. I gave you your innings, didn't I?"
+
+I said I'd had them, anyhow. We'd leave it at that.
+
+He said, No. We couldn't leave it at that. He'd _given_ me my innings. He
+could have stopped my having them any minute, but he'd made up his mind I
+should have them. So that nobody should say afterwards he hadn't played
+fair.
+
+I remember perfectly everything that Jevons said to me that night. I am
+putting it all down so that it may be clear that what the Thesigers
+called the beauty of my behaviour was nothing to the beauty of his. Think
+of him, shut up there in his hotel in Bruges, giving me my innings, when
+he could have struck in and won the game without waiting those horrible
+ten days.
+
+Well, I suppose he knew that he had it in his hands all the time.
+
+"You see," he went on, "I knew you'd got one chance, and I meant you to
+have it. I meant you to make the most of it. There are things, Furnival,
+I haven't got the hang of--yet--little, little things like breeding and
+good looks, where you might get the pull of me still if you had a free
+hand.
+
+"Well, I gave you a free hand.
+
+"You needn't thank me. I wasn't thinking of you so much. I was thinking
+of Viola. I wanted to be perfectly fair to _her_. If there _was_ a chance
+of her liking you better than she liked me, and being happier with you, I
+wanted her to have her chance. I wanted, you see, to be rather more than
+fair. If I was going to win this game I was going to win it hands over,
+not just to sneak in on a doubtful point. I wanted Viola to know what she
+was doing. I wanted her to see exactly what she was giving up if she
+married me--to go home and see it all over again in case she had
+forgotten.
+
+"And of course I was thinking of myself too. I'm an egoist. For my own
+sake I wanted her to be quite sure she hadn't any sort of hankering after
+you."
+
+I said if it was any comfort to him he could be. Viola hadn't any
+hankering after me at all. This--if he cared to know it--was the third
+time that I had proposed to her and been turned down.
+
+He said he _did_ care to know it, very much. It was most important.
+
+"I," he said, "have never proposed to her at all.
+
+"That," he went on, "is just the one risk I wouldn't take.
+
+"And there," he explained, "is where I've scored. I knew that Viola is
+obstinate, and that if she starts by turning you down she'll keep it up
+out of sheer cussedness.
+
+"So I never let her start. Women," he generalized, "admire success. If I
+were to give you your innings all over again, Furnival--and I will if you
+like--you couldn't make anything of them with those three howlers to your
+account. There isn't any record of failure against _me_. Good God! D'you
+suppose _I_'d be such a damn fool as to muff it three times with the same
+woman? Not me!"
+
+I said he needn't rub it in.
+
+He said he was rubbing it in for my good, so that I shouldn't go and do
+the same thing next time.
+
+"Because--_now_ we're coming to the point--there will be a next time for
+you, Furnival. That's why I don't even pretend to be sorry for you.
+There'll be other women. But there aren't any next times for me, and
+there aren't any other women. This--I mean _she_--was my one chance. It
+was pretty jumpy work, I can tell you, sitting tight and gambling with it
+for ten blasted days. Any other man would have gone clean off his chump
+with worrying over it. There've been times when I've felt like it myself.
+It was infernal--when you think what I stood to lose."
+
+I said that was all rot. It was his beastly egoism. He didn't stand to
+lose more than I did.
+
+He said it wasn't a question of more or less. And it wasn't his egoism.
+It was his sweetness and his heart-rending humility. He'd stood to lose
+everything. He'd be done for if Viola wouldn't have him. He couldn't look
+at any other woman after her. And he put it to me: What other woman would
+look at him? Whereas my resources were practically inexhaustible. Almost
+any nice woman would know that I would give her what she wanted. And
+almost any nice woman would give me what I wanted, too. When I insisted
+that I didn't see it, he said I'd see it shortly. He gave me six months.
+
+Viola, he declared, would never have given me what I wanted. I could
+never give her what she wanted. And he could.
+
+He said he admitted that it was odd that he should be able to succeed
+where I failed; but so it was, and he went on to expound to me all the
+reasons for my failure.
+
+"To begin with, you're not her sort; or, rather, you're too much her
+sort. You with your integrity are one of the beautiful works of God, and
+she's been used to that sort of beauty all her life and she's tired of
+it. But she isn't used to me. She never will be. She's never seen
+anything in the least like me before, and she never will see anything
+quite like me again as long as she lives. I'm the queer, unexpected thing
+she wants and always will want.
+
+"But let that pass.
+
+"You couldn't get her because you didn't give your mind to it. You didn't
+know how to get her and you didn't try to find out. You set about it the
+wrong way. I told you ages ago that a man's a fool if he wants a thing
+and doesn't find out how to get it. You should have begun by trying to
+find out something about _her_. But you didn't try. With all your
+opportunities you haven't found out anything. You don't know the least
+thing about her. You don't know what she wants, you don't know what she's
+thinking, or what she's feeling, or what she'll do--how she'll behave if
+you propose to her three times running. She's told you things and you
+haven't understood them or tried to understand. Because the whole blessed
+time you were thinking about yourself, or what she was thinking about
+you, or was going to think. Whereas I haven't been thinking about
+anything but her--I've been studying her straight on end for ten months
+and I've found out a little bit about her. At any rate, I jolly well know
+what she wants and I jolly well know how to give it her.
+
+"You see, I was determined to get her, and I left no stone unturned. I
+took trouble."
+
+I suggested that _I_'d taken trouble enough in all conscience. He
+laughed.
+
+"_You_ only took trouble to get her away, old man, when she wanted to be
+here with me. What do you suppose I brought her here for? Would _you_
+have ever thought of letting her come with you? Of giving her what she
+wanted to that extent? Not you! You'd only have thought of shutting her
+up and protecting her for your own wretched sake--which was the last
+thing she wanted. She'd had about enough of that."
+
+I replied that certainly I should have thought of protecting a young girl
+before everything else; that it never would have occurred to me to
+compromise her in order to marry her--even if I did find I couldn't marry
+her in any other way.
+
+I had hit him there. He was quiet for a little while after it. I didn't
+look at him--I didn't want to look at him--but I could feel him there,
+breathing hard from the shock of it, with his mouth a little open.
+
+Presently he took the thing up again. He went on, placably, quietly
+explaining. "I thought of protecting her too. Only I wasn't such an idiot
+as to think of it before everything else."
+
+"No. You were clever enough to think of it afterwards--when you'd got
+what you wanted. When you had compromised her."
+
+"I suppose you mean there was only one thing I wanted? There, Furnival,
+you lie."
+
+I said I only meant that she _was_ compromised. At any rate, that was
+what it looked like to her people and to everybody to whom it mattered.
+
+"If you will persist in taking the ugliest view of it, of course it'll
+look like that. I can't help how it looks to a set of old ladies and
+clergymen in Canterbury. Come to that, it matters a damned sight more to
+_me_ than it can to any of you people."
+
+I said he wouldn't say so if he knew how he had made them suffer.
+
+He laughed out at that.
+
+"Suffer? They haven't suffered a quarter as much as I have. Not a
+hundredth part as much. They've suffered thinking of themselves--of their
+precious respectability. I've suffered thinking of _her_.
+
+"Suffer? I've been through all _that_. It wasn't right, Furnival, it
+wasn't right for anybody to have to go through what I did. But I've come
+out of it. You've been pretty hard on me with your infernal virtue; but
+if you think you can make me suffer more, you can't. I'm past it."
+
+I said I was sorry if I seemed too hard on him. But it would be well if
+he tried to look at his really very outrageous behaviour as it was bound
+to appear to other people.
+
+"You admit, then," he said, "that it appears more outrageous than it is?"
+
+I said, "You see, my dear fellow, I don't yet know what it is."
+
+He asked me if I'd like to know what it was? And I told him that,
+certainly, some sort of an account was owing and that he'd better perhaps
+make a clean breast of it while he was about it.
+
+Well--he made his clean breast.
+
+He confessed that the sting of a great deal that I had said to him was in
+its truth. I needn't be frightened. Nothing had happened. Nothing beyond
+what I knew. But--there was a point, he said, when everything might have.
+When he had meant that it should happen.
+
+He hadn't meant it at first. Nothing had been further from him when he
+let her come to Bruges. He had meant nothing--nothing beyond looking at
+the Belfry. He had thought--as she did--that it would be quite possible
+to be content with looking at the Belfry. That was where the damned folly
+of the thing had come in. They began to be aware of the folly when they
+found themselves going together to Antwerp. He wasn't aware even then of
+what he meant. But he knew what he meant when he left Antwerp and took
+her to Ghent.
+
+Because he _did_ take her there. He meant--_then_--exactly what Viola's
+father and her brother and her uncles and her male cousins would mean if
+they took a woman to Ghent.
+
+"I meant," he said, "to compromise her. But--here's where you went
+wrong--I didn't mean to compromise her in order to marry her. I didn't
+mean to marry her at all. There was a moment when I thought that marrying
+me--tying herself up to me for ever--was a risk I ought not to let her
+take. I thought--I thought I could make her happy without all that awful
+risk. It seemed to me that after the risk we _had_ taken we had a right
+to happiness. Certainly _she_ had. And I thought she thought the same.
+
+"So I took her to Ghent.
+
+"I say I thought she knew what I meant when I took her.
+
+"I ought to tell you that we _did_ have rooms in the same hotel in
+Antwerp and Ghent. There weren't any English there that mattered--nobody
+that either of us knew.
+
+"But when I'd got her to Ghent I couldn't--I don't know how it was--but
+it came over me that I couldn't--I hadn't the courage. I think I found
+out that she was afraid or something. We'd taken rooms in that hotel
+you were in in the _Place d'Armes_. We were sitting together in the
+lounge--you know that big lounge on the first floor with the glass
+partition in it along the staircase--you can see people through it going
+up and down stairs. She'd got up suddenly and stuck out her hand and said
+good night. And there was a look in her eyes--Fright, a sort of fright.
+
+"I saw her through the glass going up the stair. When she got to the
+landing I saw her turn her head over her shoulder and look down into the
+lounge, to make sure I was still there.
+
+"She looked so helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I
+couldn't.
+
+"No.
+
+"I took her back to Bruges the next morning and put her in the _pension_
+with those women."
+
+I thought of the irony of it.
+
+If Jevons had really been the blackguard he seemed we could have hushed
+it up. If he hadn't repented, if he hadn't taken her back to Bruges and
+put her in the _pension_ with those women, ten to one Withers wouldn't
+have seen them and General Thesiger's friends wouldn't have heard of
+them. I should have got her quietly away from Ghent without Canterbury
+being a bit the wiser.
+
+But I didn't tell Jevons that. I hadn't the heart to.
+
+We stayed three days longer in Bruges. There were still some odd corners
+of the city that he hadn't had time to look up.
+
+Jevons was very kind to me all those three days.
+
+After we got back to England Jevons's affairs picked up and went forward
+with a rush. His novel came out at the end of May. In June he was made
+sub-editor of _Sport_, and thus acquired a settled income. And one
+morning in July I got a letter from Viola written at Quimpol in Brittany:
+
+"MY DEAR WALTER:
+
+"I married Jimmy five days ago. Nobody but Norah knew anything about it
+till it was all over. But I wrote and told Daddy before we left England.
+I'm afraid he's had a sore throat ever since. I wish you'd go down to
+Canterbury and tell them that it's all right and that I'm ever so happy.
+There really isn't any reason why Daddy shouldn't sing.
+
+"As Norah says: 'It's his not singing that gives the show away.' Yours
+ever,
+
+"V. J."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+HER BOOK
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+I did not go down to Canterbury all at once. I was vowed, of course, to
+Mrs. Jevons's everlasting service (I think I've succeeded in making
+_that_ clear), but I could not--under the whacking blow of her marriage I
+could _not_ do as she asked me then and there. The reminiscences of
+Canterbury were poignant. I had to have a little time to recover in. And
+in those first terrible weeks I didn't see why Jevons should have all the
+amusement and I all the hard work and the suffering. I knew that Jevons
+had suffered, too--quite horribly--but his anguish, after all, was a
+thing of the past; while mine, in full career, devastated the present and
+the future. I had done my best for them, and I could not share Viola's
+view that it was my business to go on whitewashing Jevons for ever. There
+was a limit, at any rate, to the number of coats I could contract to put
+on him.
+
+So I waited. I waited till they came back from their half honeymoon in
+Brittany (a fortnight was all the editor of _Sport_ could spare to his
+subordinate). Then at her invitation I went up to Hampstead to see them.
+
+They had found an old four-roomed cottage that had once been a
+labourer's. It was whitewashed (Viola was fond of whitewash), and all the
+wood-work was painted green, and there was a strip of green garden in
+front with a green paling round it.
+
+A furniture van that you could have packed the house in stood in the
+Grove outside it, and big, burly men in white aprons were taking
+furniture out of the van and dumping it down in the garden. Some of it
+wouldn't go in at the gate and had to be lifted over the palings.
+
+Jevons in an old Norfolk suit and with his hair rumpled was standing on a
+ten-foot plot of grass contemplating a bed-tester and four bed-posts that
+leaned up against the palings in the embrace of a bedstead turned upon
+its side, and Viola in the upper window was contemplating Jevons.
+
+He called to her, "Have you measured?" And she answered, "Yes. He says it
+can't be done. Oh, there's Furny!"
+
+Jevons turned to me with a smile addressed to the bed-tester rather than
+to me. Viola came down to us followed by a tall stout carpenter, visibly
+her slave.
+
+The carpenter was saying: "That there room is out by a good four
+inches--by a good four inches 'tis. An' the way you've got to look at
+it is this, m'm. Not as this 'ere tester is too 'igh fer that ceilin',
+but how as that there ceilin' is too low fer this tester."
+
+"Quite so," said Jevons. "And in that case you've got to raise the
+ceiling four inches."
+
+"No, sir," said the carpenter (he spoke severely to Jevons). "You 'ave
+_not_. If I take you off a two inch from each leg of that there bedstead,
+and a two inch from each of them there postsis, it'll be the same as if
+the builder 'e raised you the ceilin' a four inch."
+
+"By Jove," said Jevons. "So it will."
+
+"Ay, and it'll corst you somethin' like four shillin', instead of p'raps
+a matter of forty pound. W'en it comes to tamperin' with ceilin's, you
+never know where you are."
+
+"I don't know where I am now," said Jevons, "but it might be better to
+leave the ceiling alone. They haven't started tampering, have they?"
+
+"No, sir. They have not."
+
+Viola ordered the carpenter to go into the study again and measure for
+those bookshelves. He was her slave and he went.
+
+"Jimmy's been going on like that all day," she said. "He's taken up hours
+of that man's time. We shall never get him out of the house."
+
+"I don't want to get him out of the house," said Jevons. "I'm awfully
+happy with him."
+
+He was happy (like a child) with everything, with his house and his
+garden and his furniture, his oak chests and the dresser and the bureau,
+above all he was happy with his bed-tester. He said be had never slept
+under a bed-tester in his life, and he was dying to know what it would be
+like--to lie there with hundreds of dear little, shy little chintz
+rosebuds squinting down at you.
+
+"You'll not lay under them rosebuds, not for a twenty-four hour--"
+
+The carpenter had come back to us. He treated Jevons exactly like a
+child.
+
+"That tester can't be set up to-night. Not unless, as I say, you squeeges
+of it jam tight between the ceilin' and the floor. An' _then_ you'll 'ave
+to prise the ceilin' up every time you moves of it, else you'll start
+them postsis all a twistin' and a rockin', an' 'ow'll you feel then?"
+
+Jevons said he felt frightened to death as it was, and the carpenter
+could have it his own way provided he didn't hurt the little rosebuds or
+frighten _them_; and the carpenter sighed and said that the study was ten
+by thirteen and would take a hundred and sixteen feet of bookshelves.
+
+"Let's go and look at the study," said Viola. And we went and looked at
+it. And the carpenter came up and looked at _us_. And the foreman and the
+other men came in with furniture and things out of the garden, and _they_
+looked at us. There wasn't one really large and heavy piece of furniture
+except the four-post bed and the tester, and they treated the whole thing
+as a joke, as a funny game they were helping two small children to play
+at. And when Viola and Jevons ought to have been telling the men what
+things were to go into which room and where, they ran back into the
+garden to see what flowers they would plant in it and where.
+
+Then they took me to look all over the house. It was an absurd house. Of
+its four rooms there was one in front that served as a dining-room and a
+drawing-room and a boudoir for Viola, and there was a kitchen at the
+back, and a bedroom over the front room, and Jevons's study was over the
+kitchen. Viola said there were six rooms if you counted the pantry and
+the bathroom, and they were going to put a settee in Jimmy's study that
+would turn into a bed when anybody came to stay. And Mrs. Pavitt knew
+a nice woman who would come in and scrub for them, and sleep in the
+kitchen when they weren't there.
+
+They showed me the little bits of furniture they'd got. Jevons had a
+passion for beautiful old things, for old rosewood bureaus and chests of
+drawers with brass handles. She pointed out the brass handles.
+
+I felt that the poor child was showing me her absurd house and telling me
+all these things because there wasn't and there hadn't been, and perhaps
+there never would be anybody else to tell them to. I thought of the
+mother and the four sisters down at Canterbury and of the other two who
+were married, who had been married so differently. There was something
+queer, something wrong about it all. I believe the very workmen felt that
+it was so and were sorry for her.
+
+When they had all gone away at six o'clock Jevons and I took our coats
+off and settled down for three solid hours to the serious work of moving
+furniture, while Viola tried to find the china, to wash it, and sorted
+all the linen and the blankets. And at nine o'clock we dined on bacon
+that Jevons fried over the gas-stove in the kitchen and cocoa that Viola
+and I made in a white-and-pink jug we found in the bath; it was a buxom,
+wide-pouting jug with an expression that Jevons said reminded him of his
+mother's sister who had brought him up. He said that jug was all that
+Viola would be allowed to see of his relations.
+
+I was left with Viola in the kitchen to wash up while Jevons finished
+what he called his man's job upstairs.
+
+She took advantage of his absence to implore me to go down to Canterbury
+and make it right for her with her people. She said they'd believe
+anything I told them and there wasn't anything they wouldn't do for me.
+
+"Tell them," she said, "that Jimmy's going to be so horribly celebrated
+that they'll look perfect asses if they don't acknowledge him."
+
+I owned there was something in it. She said there was everything in it.
+And I promised her I'd go and do what I could.
+
+Then I went upstairs to help Jevons to finish his man's job. I found him
+in the bedroom, making up a bed on the floor. The carpenter had taken
+away the bedstead and the posts and left him nothing but the mattress and
+the tester with its roof of rosebud chintz. He had propped the tester up
+against the wall where he said he could see it last thing before he went
+to sleep and first thing when he woke up.
+
+The room was very hot, for he'd lit the gas fire to air the sheets and
+things. He had thought of everything. He had even thought of hanging
+Viola's nightgown over the back of a chair before the fire, and setting
+her slippers ready for her feet. He had laid her brush and comb on the
+little rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles, in the recess. He
+had unpacked her little trunk and put her things away all folded in the
+big rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles. He had hung the rosebud
+chintz curtains at the window and fitted its rosebud chintz cover on
+the low chair by the fire. And now he was kneeling on the floor, tucking
+in the blankets and smoothing the pillow for her head. His mouth was just
+a little open. And he was smiling.
+
+You couldn't hate him.
+
+He said he'd come and see me off at the Tube Station. But he didn't
+start. He began walking about, opening drawers and looking at things.
+
+Presently he gave a cry of joy. He had found what he was looking for, a
+rosebud chintz coverlet. He spread it on the bed and said, "There!" He
+brought in an old Persian rug (small but very beautiful) from the landing
+and spread it on the floor by the mattress and said, "That's a bit of all
+right." And he told me he was going to beeswax the floor to-morrow. There
+was nothing to beat oak-stain and beeswax for a floor.
+
+He stood there gazing. He was so pleased with his work that he couldn't
+tear himself away.
+
+He said, "The joke is that she thinks she's going to find this room
+looking like a Jew pawnbroker's shop when, she turns in, and that she'll
+have the time of her life putting it straight for _me_."
+
+Then he took my arm and led me away, shutting the door carefully, so that
+nothing, he said, should break the shock of her surprise.
+
+But there was one drop of bitterness in his cup--"If only I could have
+set up that tester!"
+
+I said he'd had quite enough excitement for one day and that he really
+must leave something for to-morrow.
+
+On our way to the Tube Station I told him that I was going down to
+Canterbury in a day or two. I told him what I was going for. He had been
+so happy thinking about his house and his furniture and Viola that I
+don't believe he'd ever thought about the Thesigers. At the word
+"Canterbury" he thrust out his lower jaw so that the tips of his little
+white teeth were covered (they always disappeared when he was angry).
+
+He said: "Tell that old sinner I don't care a copper damn whether he
+recognizes _me_ or not. What I can't stand and won't stand is the slur
+he's putting on my wife."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And that is more or less what I did tell him.
+
+I wired to the Canon to let him know I was coming, and he replied by
+asking me to stay for the week-end.
+
+I found the family diminished. Mildred had gone to a case; Millicent was
+away for her Midsummer holiday; only Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and Norah
+and Victoria were left. They had the air of survivors of an appalling
+disaster. The Canon and Mrs. Thesiger were aged by about ten years; poor
+Victoria looked tired and haggard; even Norah was depressed. You felt
+that the trouble in the house was irreparable this time. They had held
+their heads up against the scandal that was supposed to have occurred in
+Belgium; they couldn't realize it; it was the sort of thing that occurred
+to other people, not to them. And, after all, they didn't _know_ that it
+had occurred. But the scandal of a _mésalliance_ which really had
+occurred in England three weeks ago was well within their range, and
+it had crushed them. It wasn't, as Jevons cynically maintained, that they
+objected to a _mésalliance_--any _mésalliance_--more than to the other
+thing; I think they had never really believed in the other thing, and
+this marriage, so far from effacing it, had rubbed it in, had made it
+appear publicly as if, after all, it might have been so. It was not only
+excessively disagreeable to them in itself, but it left them in that
+ghastly doubt.
+
+And this time they couldn't look to me to save them.
+
+Still it was evident that they looked to me for something. I was tackled
+by each one of them in turn. The Canon wanted to know if I had anything
+to tell him. Mrs. Thesiger wondered whether Viola would have enough to
+live on. Victoria, in the absence of her parents, took me into a corner
+to inquire under her breath, "Is he really very awful?" Norah--she had
+known all about it; they hadn't spared her, they hadn't kept it from her;
+you couldn't keep anything from Norah; she had got it all out of Viola
+the day before I came down the first time--Norah told me I'd have to make
+her father ask them down. She took Jevons's view that it was the Canon
+who was causing all the scandal now (only she called it fuss). There
+never would have been any if Mummy and Daddy had had the sense to take it
+properly and treat it as a joke. Nobody who knew Viola could take it as
+anything else.
+
+"But," she said, "if Daddy goes about pulling a long face and keeping up
+his sore throat over it, everybody'll think there must be something in
+it. I could have got it all right for them in a jiffy if they'd left it
+to me."
+
+"What would you have done, then?" I was really anxious to know.
+
+"Oh, I'd have run round telling everybody about it--as a joke. A
+thundering good joke. If they'd turned me on to it in time I could have
+easily overtaken those shocking old cats who got in first. As it is," she
+said, "I've stopped a lot of it--though Daddy doesn't know it--just that
+way. You should have seen me with the Colonel and the Dean! But if
+somebody doesn't stop Daddy he'll go and mess it all up again. Don't you
+remember how he dished my game at dinner the first night you were here?"
+
+Yes. I remembered. It came back to me, that startling indiscretion at
+the dinner-table which was, after all, so deliciously discreet. Knowing
+Norah as I know her now, I wouldn't mind betting that Jevons owes his
+position, in Canterbury (and he has one) to-day far more to his youngest
+sister-in-law's manoeuvres with the Dean and Chapter than to my handling
+of his case--No; I'm forgetting what he does owe that to. Let's say,
+then, his position in Canterbury yesterday--a year ago.
+
+Well, I had an hour's talk with the Canon.
+
+There was some awkwardness in having to point out to a man of his beauty
+and dignity that his duty lay in any other direction than the one he was
+so plainly heading for. I put it on the grounds of pity. I pleaded for
+Viola, I said she was unhappy.
+
+He replied that that was not the account she had given of herself.
+
+I said, Perhaps not. But if she wasn't unhappy now she very soon would be
+if he persisted in refusing to acknowledge them.
+
+But his lip went stiffer and stiffer. He was too unhappy himself to be
+got at that way. So I took him on the ground of expediency. I said after
+all Jevons was his son-in-law. He couldn't go on ignoring Jevons. I used
+Viola's argument. He wasn't dealing with an ordinary man. In a few years'
+time Tasker Jevons would be so celebrated that it would be absurd to
+pretend to ignore him.
+
+The Canon stuck to it that he didn't care how celebrated the fellow was.
+
+I said, "You can't keep it up for ever. You'll have to recognize him in
+the end. You don't want to cut the poor chap while he's struggling and
+accept him when he rolls, as he probably will roll."
+
+The Canon said he wasn't going to accept him at all. He said that Jevons
+rolling would he if anything more odious than Jevons as he was. He
+couldn't forget what had happened. And that was the end of it.
+
+I told him that it hadn't happened; but that to repudiate Jevons was the
+way to make everybody think it had. And whether it had happened or not,
+he must surely want other people to forget it. And once start the
+abominable impression, Jevons's celebrity would cause it to be remembered
+for ever, or at any rate for this generation. Whereas he could put a stop
+to the whole thing at once by behaving as if nothing had happened. He had
+only got to ask them down next week.
+
+"Does _he_ want to be asked down?"
+
+I said, No, he didn't. I told him what Jevons had said--that he didn't
+care whether he was recognized or not, but that he "couldn't stand the
+slur that was being put upon his wife."
+
+I saw him wince at that.
+
+"That's how it strikes him?" he said.
+
+I answered that that was how it would strike most people.
+
+"_I'm_ putting the slur on my daughter, am I?"
+
+I was pitiless. I said, Certainly he was. If he persisted.
+
+Then, after telling me that I had hit him hard, he fell back on another
+line of defence. He owed it to his priesthood not to condone his
+daughter's conduct.
+
+"All the more--all the more, Furnival, if she _is_ my daughter."
+
+I said he owed it to his priesthood to stand up for an innocent girl,
+even if she _was_ his daughter. I couldn't see anything in it but her
+innocence--her amazing innocence. I only wished I had his chance of
+proving it.
+
+He shook his head. "That's it, my dear fellow. We can't prove it."
+
+I said at least we could believe in it and act on our belief.
+
+He said it was all very well for me. I was prejudiced.
+
+"My sort of prejudice," I said, "might work the other way."
+
+"You must have been afraid, or you wouldn't have gone out to bring her
+back."
+
+"Jevons was afraid himself, for that matter. When things got dangerous he
+took her back to Bruges and put her in a _pension_ to be safe from him."
+
+He looked up sharply.
+
+"She never told me that--that he took her there to be safe from him."
+
+"I don't suppose she knew. She was as innocent as all that."
+
+"And how do _you_ know?"
+
+"Because he told me so."
+
+I gave him something of what Jevons had told me, but not all.
+
+"That," said the Canon, "seems to make him more credible."
+
+I pictured for him the night of Jevons's remorse.
+
+He said, "That's the best thing I've heard about him yet. You believe
+him?"
+
+I said, "Yes. The man is extremely sensitive and almost insanely frank."
+
+I let it sink in. Presently he owned that it was the platonic version of
+the affair that--as a man of the world--he had found it so hard to
+swallow--"All that nonsense, you know, about the Belfry."
+
+He meditated a while. Then he began to ask questions:
+
+"Where does he come from? Who are his people? What do they do?"
+
+I said his father was a Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in a
+village somewhere in Hertfordshire.
+
+And then: "Is he--is he _very_ impossible?"
+
+I said, No. Only from their point of view a little improbable.
+
+He didn't press it.
+
+"Well," he said, "it looks as if he was inevitable. I suppose we've got
+to make the best of him. What do you want me to do?"
+
+I said I wanted him to ask them down. Very soon.
+
+He said, "All right, Furnival. I'll ask them down next week. But if I do
+you must stop on and see me through. I won't be left alone with him."
+
+I stopped on, playing chess with the Canon and lawn tennis with Norah,
+who was more than ever determined to beat me.
+
+And on Tuesday of the next week they came down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The whitewashing of Jevons had not been an easy matter. It took such a
+lot of coats to make a satisfactory job of him. And it was not a job I
+would have chosen. But I was serving Mrs. Jevons, and if my service had
+demanded miracles I should have had to have worked them somewhere, that
+was all. And perhaps it was a miracle to have turned Jevons out as a
+morally presentable person according to the requirements of a Cathedral
+Close.
+
+But up to that Tuesday afternoon in August my private grievance against
+Jevons remained what it had been. In his absence--even while I
+whitewashed him--I could not extend a Christian forgiveness and
+forbearance to Jevons, any more than Mrs. Thesiger could. I think I hated
+Jevons. I ought to have hated him--by every glorious and manly code,
+pagan or barbarous, I ought to have hated him. And I did--every minute
+that he wasn't there. He had made me a figure of preposterous suffering.
+Because of him I trailed a fatuous tragedy through the Thesigers' house
+and over the green lawns of the Close, under the eyes of the young
+subalterns and of Victoria and Norah. (Canon and Mrs. Thesiger I didn't
+mind so much.) It mattered nothing that they were all extremely kind to
+me, since my suffering was responsible for their kindness and Jevons was
+responsible for my suffering.
+
+Well, on that Tuesday he arrived. He was asked for a week and he stayed
+three days; and in those three days I had forgiven him everything for the
+sake of his performance.
+
+He arrived in the middle of a tennis-party.
+
+The Thesigers hadn't meant to have a party. The subalterns must have
+known that he was coming and turned up simply to look at him. (I wondered
+afterwards whether Norah could have told them. She was dangerously demure
+that afternoon.)
+
+I ought to have said that for the last two days the Canon had been
+preparing himself for Jevons by reading him. He had ordered--in defiance
+of his political principles--the _Morning Standard_, and I had found him
+reading Jevons's novel and surrounded by numbers of the _Blue Review_,
+which, if you remember, published the best of Jevons's earlier work. He
+had no difficulty in getting hold of them; his youngest daughter had been
+able to supply him with more Jevons than he wanted. In fact, in the study
+of Tasker Jevons the Canon was weeks behind the rest of his acquaintance.
+There was hardly a family in Canterbury of any education in which Tasker
+Jevons was not by this time a household word. The garrison club library
+had bought him in quantities. The bookseller in the precincts did not
+stock him (he was not allowed to); but he could order him for you, and
+did. And the book-sellers in the High Street displayed him in their
+windows by the half-dozen.
+
+I have forgotten, in the blaze of his later fame, that (apart from this
+purely local reputation) he passed in the provinces as a fair-sized
+celebrity even then. Only, as Jevons judged himself at every stage with
+accuracy, he hadn't begun to take himself at all seriously yet.
+
+So he arrived in a perfect simplicity, without any of that rather dubious
+aplomb with which he tried to carry off his celebrity when it really
+came.
+
+It was very nasty for him.
+
+He had to come out of the house, following Viola and her mother all
+the way to the far end of the lawn, where the Canon was ready for him
+with a face which, try as he would--and he tried his hardest--he could
+not unstiffen. It must be said of the Canon that he nothing common
+did or mean upon that memorable scene; but he had--as Jevons said
+afterwards--rather too much the air of walking up to the gun's mouth and
+calling on us to observe how beautifully a Christian could die.
+
+And there was Victoria standing beside the Canon and holding herself
+well, and Colonel and Mrs. Braithwaite beside Victoria, trying to look as
+if there was nothing unusual about Jevons or the situation. There was
+Norah at the tennis-net quivering with excitement, and (by the time
+Jevons had caught up with his convoy) there was Mrs. Thesiger alongside
+the others, turned round to present him, and watching him as he came on.
+Viola had turned and was looking at him too. And there were the
+subalterns at the tennis-net with Norah, doing unnecessary things to the
+net and trying _not_ to look at him.
+
+I wondered: How on earth will he carry it off? How is he going to get
+across that tennis-ground?
+
+He was getting across it somehow, holding himself not quite so well as
+Victoria or the subalterns, but still holding himself, coming on, a
+little flushed and twinkling and self-conscious, but coming.
+
+The situation was, for him, most horrible; but it was worse for Viola. I
+wondered: Is she shivering all down her spine? Is she going to flinch?
+Why _will_ she _look_ at the poor chap?
+
+And then I saw. She was looking at him with a little tender smile, a
+smile that helped him across, that said: "Come on. Come on. It's
+difficult, I know, but you're doing it beautifully."
+
+Well, so he was. He was doing it more beautifully than the Canon or any
+of them. For that group on the lawn were like a rather eager rescue
+party, holding out hands to a struggling swimmer in the social surf. They
+expected him to struggle and he didn't. He landed himself in the middle
+of them with an adroitness that put them in the wrong. What's more, he
+held his own when he got there. He looked about as different from any of
+the men on that tennis-ground as a man well could look. He looked odd;
+and that saved him. They with their distinction had not achieved absolute
+difference from each other. His difference from all of them was so
+absolute that it was a sort of distinction in itself.
+
+As soon as he got there Norah came up with the subalterns in tow. She
+made a little friendly rush at him. She said, "I'm Norah, the youngest. I
+expect Viola's told you about me. She's told me lots about _you_."
+
+She meant well, dear child. But she overdid it. She hadn't allowed--none
+of us except Viola had allowed--for his appalling sensitiveness. The poor
+chap told me afterwards that he could bear up against the Canon's stiff
+face and what he called Mrs. Thesiger's ladylike refinements of
+repudiation, and the poker that Victoria had swallowed, but that that
+kid's kindness, coming on the top of it all, floored him. He took her
+hand (I think he squeezed it), and his mouth opened, but he couldn't
+speak; he just breathed hard and flushed furiously; and his eyes looked
+as if he were going to cry. But of course he didn't cry. He was, he said,
+far too much afraid of the subalterns.
+
+It was a good thing, perhaps, after all, that it took him that way. His
+emotion made him quiet and subdued; it toned him down, so that he started
+well from the very beginning.
+
+After tea he recovered and talked to the Colonel and the subalterns while
+the rest of us listened. He said, I remember, that the building of
+Dreadnoughts was of more importance to the country than Disestablishment.
+And even more important than the building of Dreadnoughts was the
+building of submarines. The submarine was the ship of the future. There
+should be, he said, at least fifty submarines for every Dreadnought
+turned out.
+
+That made them all sit up. (It was not a platitude in nineteen-six, but a
+prophecy.) The Colonel and the subalterns hung on his words; and when the
+Canon saw them hanging, his mouth began to relax a little of its own
+accord. In his first hour Jevons had scored, notably.
+
+It was as if he had said to himself, "I'll bring these people round, see
+if I don't. I give myself an hour."
+
+Dinner passed without any misadventure, but you could see that he was
+careful. Also you could see by his twinkle that he was amusing himself by
+his own precautions, as if, again, he had said to himself, "They're all
+expecting me to make noises over my soup, and they'll be disappointed. I
+just won't make any."
+
+We had coffee in the garden afterwards. And it was then that the Canon
+asked him what his politics were?
+
+Jevons said he had no politics. Or rather, he had a great many politics.
+He was a sort of Socialist in time of peace and a red-hot Imperialist in
+time of war, and a Tory for purposes of Tariff Reform, and a Liberal when
+it came to Home Rule.
+
+And when the Canon objected that you couldn't run a Government on those
+lines, little Jevons told him that that was precisely how Governments
+were run. It was a fallacy to suppose that Oppositions didn't rule.
+
+And again he scored. He did it all with a twinkling, dimpling urbanity
+and deprecation, as if the Canon had been a beautiful lady he was paying
+court to, as if he thought it was rather a pity that beauty should lower
+itself to talk politics; but since he insisted on politics, he should
+have them; as if, in short, he loved the Canon, but didn't take him very
+seriously.
+
+Yes; he certainly scored. He gave Viola no cause to flinch.
+
+That evening comes back to me by bits. It must have been that evening
+that the Canon walked round the garden with me. I see him walking round
+and round, with Norah hanging on to his arm, teasing him and chattering.
+I hear her crying out suddenly with no relevance, "Hasn't he got stunning
+eyes, Daddy?" and the Canon saying that Jevons's eyes would look better
+in a pair of earrings than in Jevons's head, and her answering, "Wouldn't
+I like to wear them!" I see his little mock shiver (as if he felt that it
+was those great chunks of unsuitable sapphire that had charmed Viola
+across the Channel), and Norah's funny face as she said, "Oh, come, he
+isn't half bad."
+
+That night he called me into the library when they had all gone to bed.
+Clearly he wanted to know how it had gone off--how he, in particular, had
+behaved. I assured him that his behaviour had been perfect. And I asked
+him what he thought of Jevons?
+
+He said, "Well--he might be worse. He might be much, much worse. He's a
+clever chap. Where does he get it all from?"
+
+But I noticed that the next day he shut himself up in his library
+all morning, was silent at lunch, and never emerged properly till
+dinner-time. Mrs. Thesiger also fought shy of her son-in-law.
+
+Norah and Victoria took him by turns that day. I noticed that he got on
+very well with Norah. She knocked balls over the net for him all morning.
+(He couldn't play, but professed a great eagerness to learn.) In the
+afternoon Victoria took him to look at the Cathedral and the old quarters
+of the town. In the evening, after dinner, we all sat out in the garden.
+Canon and Mrs. Thesiger soon left us; Victoria followed them; and Viola
+and Norah and Jevons and I sat on till long after dark.
+
+Viola and Norah, I remember, sat close together on the long seat under
+the elm tree. Jevons was on the other side of Viola. I sat on a cushion
+at her feet.
+
+The night had a rhythm in it. Stillness and peace. The Cathedral chimes.
+Stillness and peace again. And there was a smell of cut lawn grass with
+dew on it from the ground, and of roses from the borders, and of lichen
+and moss and crumbling mortar from the walls. Sometimes these smells
+pierced the peace like sound; and sometimes they gathered close and
+wrapped us like warmth.
+
+Then Jevons spoke.
+
+"All this," he said, "is very beautiful. Very beautiful indeed."
+
+And Viola sighed.
+
+"Yes, Yes," she said. "I suppose it _is_ beautiful."
+
+"You _know_ it is," he said.
+
+"I know all right. But I don't think I can see it as you do. I've been
+shut up in it so long. It's all this that you've taken me out of."
+
+"It's all this," he said, "that's made you what you are."
+
+"It isn't. This isn't really me. It's just Them. I'm what I've made
+myself. I'm what you've made me. I'm uglier than they are. I'm uglier
+than anything here, but I'm much, much more alive."
+
+"You surely don't suggest," said Jevons, "that I've made you uglier?"
+
+"You've made me stronger and cleverer and bigger--ever so much bigger
+than I was."
+
+"Much better in every way," I said, "than your youngest sister here,
+hasn't he?"
+
+"Poor little Norah! I didn't mean that--you beast--Furny!--Of course I
+didn't. Jimmy--what _did_ I mean?"
+
+He said nothing. But I heard an inarticulate murmur, and I saw that in
+the darkness his arm went round her and drew her closer.
+
+And that, God forgive him, was his heaviest score up till now.
+
+In two days he had absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere. He was in it. In
+it as I wasn't and couldn't be.
+
+And the next day Canon and Mrs. Thesiger took him in hand by turns. The
+Canon showed him the town all over again all morning. And in the
+afternoon Mrs. Thesiger showed him the Cathedral all over again; and took
+him with her to the service. And all dinner-time Jevons was very pensive
+and subdued.
+
+After dinner the Canon talked to Jevons about his novel. (He had retired
+into his library all afternoon in order to finish it.) He asked him why
+he had chosen an ugly subject when he might have found a beautiful one?
+
+And Jevons was more pensive than ever. He said, "Well--that's a
+question--"
+
+He couldn't tell the Canon why he'd chosen it. He couldn't disclose to
+him his plan of campaign.
+
+"You see, sir, I haven't seen many beautiful things."
+
+He still pondered. Then he said, very slowly, as if he dragged it
+out of himself with difficulty, "That book was written--written in my
+head--before I knew my wife."
+
+You could literally see his score running up. By nine o'clock the Canon
+and Mrs. Thesiger had roped him into their game of whist.
+
+I sat out with Viola and Norah in the garden, when Norah told us that she
+thought Jimmy was a dear. She was the only one of them that called him
+Jimmy.
+
+About ten o'clock next morning Viola came to me and asked me to go up to
+Jimmy, in his room. He wanted to speak to me.
+
+I found him packing, packing with a sort of precise and concentrated
+fury.
+
+He was going. Going up to town. He had torn through Canterbury, eaten his
+way through Canterbury, through the beauty and peace of it; he had
+absorbed and assimilated it in three days. And he had had enough. If he
+stayed in it another hour the beauty and the peace of it would kill him.
+The Canon's beauty was, he said, adorable; so was Mrs. Thesiger's.
+
+"But if I stay here I shall ruin it. I can't," he said, "go on giving
+that dear old clergyman clergyman's sore throat. I frighten him so that
+he can't sing. He doesn't know what to do with me, or say to me. He
+doesn't know what to call me. He can't call me Jevons, and he won't
+call me Jimmy, and he knows it would be ridiculous to call me James.
+Besides, he agitates me and makes me drop my aitches.
+
+"So I've had a wire. You'll explain to him the sort of wire I've had."
+
+"And Viola?" I said. "Is she going too?"
+
+"No. Viola's going to stay till our week's up. By that time she'll be
+bored stiff and longing to get back to me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went, and I'm not at all sure that he didn't score by going.
+
+And that night and the next and the next I thought of little Jevons alone
+in his little house in Hampstead, lying all by himself in his four-post
+bed between his rosebud chintz curtains and under his rosebud chintz
+tester, and saying to himself that he had scored.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+The Thesigers lived to be grateful to me for reconciling them to Jevons,
+if it was I who reconciled them. I don't think Mrs. Thesiger ever really
+forgave him, ever really liked him till the end; but the Canon very soon
+owned to a surreptitious regard for him. Luckily he acquired it while
+Jevons was still struggling, otherwise I do not think I could have saved
+their faces.
+
+In the first year of his marriage Jevons made them see how right I was
+when I told them it would be impossible to ignore him. In the second year
+they saw that he had only just given them time to come round before it
+was too late. The minute he became prosperous it would have been too
+late, much too late for their dignity and beauty. And yet they couldn't
+very well have gone on repudiating Viola for ever. A year would have seen
+them through that attitude. And Jevons's great _coup_ had come off in
+the year he "gave" it; so that if they had been left to themselves their
+revulsion of tenderness must have coincided with his prosperity. They
+would have had every appearance of having surrendered to his income.
+
+And they would have missed the spectacle of his struggle.
+
+I believe it was his struggle, the doggedness, the heroism, the wild
+humour that he put into it that brought them round. They didn't like his
+early celebrity and they deplored the cause of it--his first novel.
+
+That book justified everything that Jevons had said of it. It did
+startle. It did arrest. It _was_ unpleasant. So vividly and powerfully
+unpleasant that it nailed your eyes to it and kept them there. It made a
+break and a stain in your memory.
+
+When I say it was unpleasant I mean, and he meant, not that it was
+unclean, but that it was brutal. I shall have written this tale to very
+little purpose if it isn't transparent that Jevons's mind, Jevons's whole
+nature was scrupulously clean. Even his brutality was not spontaneous.
+He broke his neck to get it. You could see him putting his tongue out as
+he laboured the brutality. You could see him sweating as he went over it
+again, removing all the marks of labour, making for his effect of
+sincerity and gorgeous simplicity and ease.
+
+I've said it's doubtful how far Jevons took himself seriously. He
+certainly had no illusions as to the nature of his success. But whenever
+I come to this side of him I feel myself untrustworthy. I cannot see him
+properly. I am prejudiced by knowing him so well. I daresay if I hadn't
+known him, if he hadn't been so frank in his disclosures, if he hadn't
+explained so many times the deliberate calculations of his method, I
+should think him a great novelist. I daresay to a generation that knows
+nothing about him or his disclosures or his method he will seem a great
+novelist again. I daresay he _is_ a great novelist. I don't know.
+
+Anyhow there were three great stages in his career: the Slow Advance; the
+Grand Attack; and Victory. (He had been advancing slowly ever since the
+day I met him on the football-ground at Blackheath).
+
+All these stages are marked for me by the increasing size and splendour
+of the houses that he occupied in turn; the four-roomed cottage at
+Hampstead; the little house in Edwardes Square; the large house in
+Mayfair; the still larger country house he acquired last of all. And the
+Jevons I like to think of is the Jevons of the little whitewashed
+cottage, of the whitewashed rooms, the one sitting-room where we dined;
+the kitchen at the back where we cooked and washed up; the absurd little
+bedroom in the front where the four-post bed was set up like a tent with
+its curtains and its tester; the study at the back where Jevons worked
+and Norah Thesiger slept when she came to stay. I remember Jevons darting
+from the kitchen and the dining-room with steaming dishes in his hands;
+Jevons with a pipe in his mouth and his feet on the chimney-piece,
+talking, talking, talking about anything--Dreadnoughts, submarines, the
+War (he had given it nine years now)--from nine till eleven, and then
+flinging himself out of his chair to turn the settee into a bed for the
+Kiddy. Whatever he was saying or doing, in the middle of a calculation,
+he would break off at eleven and drag sheets and blankets out of a
+coffin-like box under the settee and make up the Kiddy's little bed for
+her, because Kiddies must on no account be allowed to sit up late at
+night. I remember Viola and Norah coming in to help and Jevons shooing
+them away. And Norah would come back again and put her head round the
+door and look at him where he knelt on the floor absurdly, tucking in
+blankets and breathing hard as he tucked. And she would say, "Look at
+him. Isn't he sweet?" as if Jevons had been a rabbit or a guinea-pig, and
+go away again.
+
+Somehow I always see him like that, making beds, stooping over something,
+doing something for one of them or for me.
+
+Sometimes they would burst in on him suddenly in his bedmaking and throw
+pillows at him, or it might be sponges, and there would be madness: two
+girls running amok and little Jevons flying before them through the
+house and squealing in his excitement. Once he went out to post a letter
+in the Grove before midnight and they locked him out and looked at him
+from the window of the front bedroom and defied him to enter, and he
+skipped round to the back and climbed up by the water-butt on to the
+drainpipe of the bathroom, and from the drainpipe, perilously, in through
+the window of his study, where they found him putting hair-brushes in
+Norah's bed.
+
+After the drainpipe adventure (when they saw how game he was) they
+sobered down. I think it was that night that Norah said, "We mustn't
+_kill_ Jimmy. That would never do."
+
+And there would be theatre-parties when Jimmy had tickets given him, and
+eighteenpenny dinners at the "Petit Riche," going and returning by the
+Hampstead Tube.
+
+It seems to me that Norah must have stayed a great deal with them at
+Hampstead, and yet she couldn't have; they were only two years in the
+little four-roomed house. Anyhow, we were all immensely happy in those
+two years; even I was happy. Jevons I know was--and Viola. Viola had
+never been so happy in her life. She cooked: she washed up with Jimmy to
+help her; she mended his clothes and made her own; she did his
+typewriting; she took down his articles in shorthand and typed them; and
+through all his funny little social lapses she adored him.
+
+When you think of it, poverty and close quarters for two years, and the
+menace of some of those lapses hanging over her all the time--it was a
+pretty severe test. You would have said that if she could stand that she
+could stand anything, and she certainly stood it.
+
+But Jimmy hadn't begun yet to unbend. He was still on the defensive,
+holding himself in, every nerve strung up to the Grand Attack. This
+tension affected his behaviour. He knew his danger. He knew there were
+certain gestures that he must restrain, and he restrained them; there
+were certain things he did with spoons and forks and table napkins that
+would wreck him if he were caught doing them, and in those two years he
+kept a very sharp look-out. You would have thought that this life, on the
+edge of an abyss, with full knowledge of his danger, would have made him
+nervous and produced the very disaster that he dreaded. But no. Jevons
+was a fighting man, and he rose to these crises and prevailed. You felt
+that for him the real test would come when he was prosperous, when the
+strain was taken off him and he let himself go.
+
+Meanwhile it was terrifying to see him balancing himself on the edge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They moved into the Edwardes Square house in the September quarter
+of nineteen-eight. This was the year of the weeks of consolidation,
+his second novel and his "Journal," that were to precede the Grand
+Attack. The novel did exactly what he said it would. It did counteract
+the effect its predecessor; and the "Journal" gave him a place in
+_Belles-Lettres_ where he was safe from the legend of his own brutality.
+
+But it strained his relations with the Thesigers for the time being. The
+Rosalind of the "Journal" is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful
+to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said
+to have travelled together before they were married. Her figure moves
+through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an
+adorable innocence and naïveté, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the
+Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy
+and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender
+than the Viola he knew. You couldn't say she wasn't charming. The Canon
+couldn't say it; what he did say was that Jevons should have kept her out
+of it. Jevons's defence was that if he had kept her out of it there
+wouldn't have been any book.
+
+But he never did it again. Having once for all drawn her portrait as a
+young girl, he left it, as if he would have kept her youth immortal. You
+will not find any woman of his novels who suggests even a fugitive
+likeness to the Viola he married.
+
+The house in Edwardes Square stands for the second period: the period of
+sober energy that led up to the Grand Attack. It was also the period of
+deliberate yet vehement refinement. Jevons was determined at all cost to
+be refined. And at considerable cost, with white-painted panelling
+throughout, with blue-and-white Chinese vases here and there, and more
+and more Bokhara rugs everywhere, and tussore silk curtains in the
+windows and every stick of furniture chosen for its premeditated
+chastity, the little brown house was made to serve him as a holy
+standard. He said he had only got to live up to it and he would be all
+right.
+
+And so, in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his
+surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the
+diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers
+laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at
+the back. I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his
+beginnings, how he did it so well. Of course he gave Viola a free hand,
+he let her have what she wanted; but when I complimented her on any
+result she let me know at once that it was Jimmy's doing. She was
+pathetically anxious that I should see that he knew how. She let me know,
+too, the secret of his passionate absorption in gardens and interiors,
+lest I should think it argued any unmanliness in him.
+
+I remember so well her showing me that house in Edwardes Square. I had
+called one afternoon when I had known that Jevons wasn't there. I had
+left him at his club in Dover Street. (He had a club in Dover Street now;
+it was my club; I had put him up for it. He enjoyed his club as he
+enjoyed everything else that he had acquired by conquest; his membership
+marked another step in his advance, another strip of alien territory
+gained. And he had chosen this club, he said, because most of the members
+had retired, to cultivate adipose tissue on pensions, and they made him
+feel adolescent and slender and energetic.) I had left him in the library
+writing letters (he said he found a voluptuous pleasure in writing
+letters on the club paper under that irreproachable address), and I
+rushed off in a taxi to Viola in Edwardes Square.
+
+She was very glad to see me, and she gave me tea, poured out of an
+early eighteenth-century silver teapot, in beautiful old blue-and-white
+Chinese teacups. She wore one of those absurd narrow coats with tails
+that made women look like long, slender birds that year, and she had done
+something unexpected with her hair; it was curls, curls, curls all over,
+the way they did it then, and she sat on a wine-coloured sofa with a
+wine-coloured rug at her feet.
+
+She began straight away by talking about Jimmy's last book, the
+"Journal."
+
+"Don't you see _now_," she said, "why I went out to him, and how
+beautiful it all was?"
+
+I asked her did she think I'd ever doubted? She said: "No. But Daddy
+hates the book. So does Mummy. They all hate it except Norah and me. I'm
+glad he wrote it. I'm glad he put me into it. I never knew I was so nice,
+did you?"
+
+"Oh, come," I said, "surely I always knew?"
+
+But she didn't pay any attention to me. She didn't care to know what I
+thought or what I knew. She wasn't thinking of me or of herself. She was
+defending Jimmy with little jerky, stabbing thrusts of defiance. You
+could see that the smallest criticism of him made her suffer; that she
+was capable of infinite suffering where Jimmy was concerned. Also you saw
+that she would have to suffer, and that she knew it, and that it was this
+suffering that she repulsed and thrust from her with her stabs. He was
+making a tender place in her mind that might some day become a wound.
+
+"You know I did," I insisted--I think, to turn her mind from him.
+
+She looked at me gravely before she smiled.
+
+"Nobody but Jimmy really thinks me nice. Nobody but Jimmy knows how nice
+I _am_."
+
+And then she showed me the house.
+
+I praised some detail that Jevons had devised (not that there was much
+detail; it was all extremely simple). And I believe she saw criticism of
+Jimmy in that.
+
+"I know it looks as if he cared a lot about this sort of thing. And I
+daresay you think it's silly of him. But he doesn't really care."
+
+"It certainly looks," I said, "as if he cared about something."
+
+"It's me he cares about," she said.
+
+"And do you care about--this sort of thing, Viola?"
+
+"I care about his caring. But I was every bit as happy in that little
+four-roomed house, if that's what you mean."
+
+"Aren't you glad to have more room to move about in?"
+
+"I'm glad to have room for Daddy and Mummy when they come to stay."
+
+It was as if she had said, "If you think I'm glad to have room to get
+away from him you're mistaken."
+
+And there was another impression that she gave me. It was also as if she
+wanted to warn me not to form the habit of coming to see her when she was
+alone. I should gain nothing by it. If I insisted on seeing her alone I
+should get Jimmy, Jimmy, all the time.
+
+I didn't try to see her again alone.
+
+But I saw her often. Jevons was always asking me there. He made a point
+of it whenever they had what Viola called "anybody interesting." By this
+she meant somebody belonging to the confraternity of letters. Jevons had
+a sort of idea that I liked meeting these people and that it did me good.
+The house in Edwardes Square might have become a haunt of Jimmy's
+_confréres_ if Jimmy had had time to attend to them and if he hadn't been
+so deliberately exclusive. He was trying for the best--not for the great
+names so much as for the great achievements, and they were few. And there
+were one or two of them who rejected Jevons.
+
+And then you had to reckon with Mrs. Jevons's rejections. She was as
+fastidious in her way as he was in his; and besides, she guarded him, so
+that the circle around him was rather tight and small.
+
+Oh, he was faithful; he kept me in it; he gave me of his best; and if he
+could have made me shine I should have blazed among them all.
+
+It doesn't matter now which of them I met there. Jevons was charming to
+them all. He set them blazing. I don't think he cared much whether _he_
+blazed or not, but if he felt like it he could make a bigger blaze than
+any of them. He enjoyed them; he enjoyed them vastly, violently. Having
+once acquired the taste, he couldn't have lived without the intellectual
+excitement they gave him. But except for that, for the stimulus, the
+release of energy, it's surprising how little they really counted for
+him.
+
+And so it's not those evenings and that brilliance that I remember.
+
+In the house in Edwardes Square I seem to have been always meeting Norah
+Thesiger. Now that they had a room to put her in, she would be there for
+months at a time. And whenever she was there they would be sure to ask
+me. If Jevons didn't, Viola did.
+
+There was that summer, too, when Norah and Mildred came together with
+Charlie Thesiger, their cousin, who was engaged to Mildred. Charlie was
+then a lieutenant in the South Kent Hussars. He was a large young man,
+correct, handsome, rather supercilious and rather stupid. He seemed to
+fill the house in Edwardes Square when he was in it.
+
+He doesn't matter. At least, he didn't matter then. God knows he never
+really mattered, poor boy, at any time. But he is important. He fixes
+things for me. He brings me to the incident of June, nineteen-nine.
+
+It was a very slight incident. It wouldn't be worth recording except that
+it stood for others like itself, a whole crowd. And it was of such slight
+things that Viola's torments were to be made.
+
+We were at dinner in the little dining-room looking on the flagged court,
+a party of six: Viola at the head of the round table, with her back to
+the light; Jevons at the foot, facing her, with the light full on him;
+Charlie Thesiger was on Viola's right, I was on her left, facing him.
+Norah sat next to me on Jevons's right, and Mildred sat next to Charlie
+on Jevons's left, facing Norah. We were all so close together that it
+would be difficult for one of us to have missed anything that happened or
+was said. And Viola, with the light behind her, commanded us all.
+
+She had been very gay. I don't suppose Charlie felt anything strained
+about her gaiety--he was not observant--but I did, and I put it down to
+Charlie's presence, to the rather flat correctness that made Jevons stand
+out. Another thing I noticed was that, in labouring for refinement in his
+surroundings, Jevons hadn't allowed for the effect of contrast. It hadn't
+occurred to him that an interior that harmonized with Viola would be
+damaging to him. And it was. Just how damaging I hadn't realized until
+to-night (which shows how careful he must have been at Canterbury). He
+didn't stand out. He burst out. He never sank into his background for a
+single minute. You had to be aware of him all the time.
+
+And yet in a party of the confraternity you were not aware of him like
+this. For then he blazed; and in the flare he made you didn't notice
+whether he tilted his soup-plate the right way or not, or care if he
+couldn't use his table napkin or his pocket-handkerchief and look you
+square in the face at the same time. Neither did you notice these things
+if you were alone with him or if only Norah and Viola were there. He was
+happy with us, and happiness was becoming to him, and he had all sorts of
+endearing ways that would have disarmed us. And then there's no doubt
+that Viola protected him. She watched over him; she smoothed his social
+path for him; she removed his worst pitfalls; she ran, as it were, to
+pick him up before he fell. He didn't know she was watching him; neither,
+I think, did she. It was a blind instinct with her to help him. And Norah
+and I helped him too. And as he wasn't nervous with us everything went
+well. But when strangers got into our party it was different. Viola
+couldn't attend to him properly; and if the stranger happened to be
+rather stupid, like Charlie Thesiger, Jevons didn't blaze and so cover
+himself; he got bored; and when he was bored he got jumpy; and it was
+when he got jumpy that he did things.
+
+And Charlie was getting on his nerves.
+
+Still, everything went well until the table was cleared for dessert; and
+there was no reason why everything shouldn't have gone well even then.
+Viola had guarded against his most inveterate failing--a habit of
+stretching for things across the table--by putting everything he wanted
+within his reach. Within Jevons's reach to-night was a little dish
+containing among other things chocolate nougat. And he was fond of
+nougat. He was fond also of chaffing Norah. And he was not prepared to
+forego one amusement for the other. And Norah had taken a mean advantage
+of him. She had timed a provocation at the moment when for any other man
+retort would have been impossible; and she hadn't reckoned with Jevons's
+ingenuity of resource.
+
+I am not going to say what he did. It wouldn't be fair to him. It was a
+little thing, but you couldn't pretend for one moment that you hadn't
+seen it, any more than Jevons could do anything to cover the fantastic
+horror of it. We simply sat and stiffened; all but Norah, who burst out
+laughing in Jimmy's face.
+
+Mildred, trying to help him, made matters worse by asking for a peach
+when she had got a large one on her plate. Charlie Thesiger looked down
+his nose. I don't know where I looked, but I know that I was conscious
+of Viola's face and of the flush that darkened it to the tip of her chin
+and the roots of her hair. And I could feel the shudder down her back
+passing into mine.
+
+After all, Viola did cover it. She lit a little Roman lamp they had and
+sent it travelling down the table with the cigarette-box. Then she got up
+and went to Jevons and stooped over his shoulder and took the little dish
+from him.
+
+"If anybody wants any more chocolates," she said, "they must come
+upstairs for them."
+
+"She won't trust me with them," said Jevons. (He _had_ a nerve.)
+
+Viola trailed off upstairs with her dish, and Mildred and Charlie
+followed her.
+
+Norah and I held watch with Jevons, who leaned back in his chair and
+smoked and rubbed the forefinger of his right hand--the innocent
+instrument (may I say it?) of his crime--with his table napkin, and
+contemplated Norah in a drowsy imperturbability.
+
+"Did I do anything?" he said presently.
+
+Norah put her hand on his arm and stroked it.
+
+"No, Jimmy dear," she said, "of course you didn't."
+
+It was then that I was aware for the first time of the beauty of Norah's
+face. Norah's, not Viola's. Up till then I could never see anything but
+Viola's face in it, coloured wrong, so that it rather worried me to look
+at it, I resented the everlasting reminder of that likeness under that
+perverse and disconcerting difference. If her eyes hadn't been so blue
+and her cheeks so pink; if only her hair had been a little darker and if
+it hadn't crinkled--
+
+Now, as I looked at her, I wondered how anybody could think she was
+like Viola. There was only her forehead and the odd turn of her jaw and
+nose--her profile, if you like, was Viola's--but (when she wasn't
+laughing) Norah's full face had something that Viola's hadn't and never
+would have. I had caught it now and then and couldn't make up my mind
+what it was. Now I saw that it was a sort of wisdom, a look of soberness
+and goodness that I couldn't quite account for.
+
+Then Jevons explained it for me.
+
+"The Kiddy's growing up," he said (he said it to himself). "She'll be
+twenty to-morrow. She won't throw wet sponges at me any more."
+
+That was it. Norah was growing up. Her soft face was setting and the
+expression I had noticed had come to stay.
+
+Presently Jevons got up. He said he had work to do.
+
+"The Grand Attack, Furnival, the Grand Attack!"
+
+And he left us together.
+
+Norah looked after him.
+
+"Poor little Jimmy," she said. "I don't think he ever did a _bad_ thing
+in his life."
+
+And then, with what seemed a daring irrelevance, "I wish Charlie wasn't
+here. I can't think why Viola ever asked him."
+
+"Why shouldn't she?"
+
+"Because he's bad for Jimmy. He puts him in the wrong."
+
+I'm afraid I laughed a little brutally at the extravagance of this.
+
+"Well," she said. "I can't bear him to suffer."
+
+"You've got a very tender little heart, haven't you?" I said.
+
+"It isn't half as tender as Viola's. But I've got more common sense."
+
+"Then why," I said, "did you laugh at Jimmy just now?"
+
+"That's why. Because it was the best thing you could do. He doesn't mind
+it half so much when you laugh at him. It's people looking down their
+noses, like Charlie, that he minds. It must be awful for the poor little
+chap, when you come to think of it, living on the edge, never knowing
+when he's going to do something that'll make Viola's blood run cold."
+
+"It must be still more awful for Viola."
+
+To that she said, "It isn't. You don't know how Viola feels about Jimmy.
+None of my people do. They simply don't understand it."
+
+"Oh, come," I said, "they've accepted it, haven't they?"
+
+"They've accepted it _because_ they don't understand her. They say they
+never know what she'll do next, and Jimmy's come as a sort of relief to
+them. They thought she might do something much worse. You see, she isn't
+a bit like any of us. If she wants to do a thing she'll do it, no matter
+what it is. She wanted to go to Bruges with Jimmy and look at the Belfry,
+and she did it like a shot. What they can't see is that she'll never
+_want_ to do anything wrong, so she'll never do it. They can't see that
+there was just as much Belfry as Jimmy in it. There always will be a
+Belfry in Viola's life, and when she hears the bells going she'll run off
+to see. And Jimmy's the only man who'll ever take her to a Belfry.
+
+"She's all right. Because she knows that Jimmy's really ten times more
+refined than any of us. His little soul's all made of beautiful clean
+white silk. But Viola can't go on telling people how beautiful he is.
+They've got to see it for themselves.
+
+"I wish _you_ could see it as she does. I wish you could see how she
+feels about it--"
+
+"My dear Norah," I said, "I've been trying for three years to see as
+Viola sees, and feel as Viola feels. But how can I? I'm not Viola."
+
+"But," she said, "you _do_ understand her. If I thought you didn't--if I
+thought that you could go back on her--and if you go back on Jimmy you go
+back on _her_--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, I don't think I could ever speak to you again."
+
+"My dear child," I said, "you're absurd. I haven't gone back on either of
+them. Won't it do if I see Jimmy as _you_ see him?"
+
+"Ye-es," she said. "But--I wonder if you do."
+
+"Norah," I said then, "I wonder if Viola's as sorry for him as you are. I
+hope she isn't."
+
+"She isn't, then. She isn't sorry for him a bit. No more am I. You'll
+make me sorry for _you_ if you don't take care."
+
+When we went to say good night to Jevons we found Viola sitting on the
+arm of his chair with the little dish in her hand, feeding him with
+chocolate nougat. Her posture was one of supple contrition, and we heard
+her say:
+
+"Cheer up, Jimmy. It doesn't really matter what you do. Nobody would ever
+take you for more than four years old."
+
+Yes. Norah, the youngest, was the one who had grown up.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Norah has often told me that I exaggerated the importance of the Nougat
+Incident; that my weakness is a tendency to dwell with a morbid
+concentration on small, inessential details. When I tell her that if I
+succeed in surviving Jimmy I shall write his biography, she tilts her
+chin and says I'm the last person who should attempt it.
+
+"Between us," she says, "we might manage it. But if you're left to
+yourself you'll make him _all_ nougat."
+
+When I retort that if _she_ were left to _her_self she'd eliminate the
+very things that make him the engaging animal he is, and remind her that
+a straw will show the way the wind's blowing, she asks me, "Did any big
+wind ever blow a straw before it all the way?"
+
+Well, perhaps I _am_ the very last person--he made me the last person by
+what he did to me--but when it comes to exaggeration I haven't attached
+more importance to the Nougat Incident than Jevons did himself. Why, when
+he shut himself up in his study that night, instead of hurling himself
+forward in the Grand Attack, he must have sat with his head in his hands
+brooding over it and wondering what he'd done; he must have gone straight
+upstairs to ask Viola what he'd done, or there'd have been no earthly
+sense in what we heard her saying. The detail may have been small, but it
+was not inessential when it could turn Tasker Jevons from the Grand
+Attack as he was turned that night.
+
+I tell you, and Jevons would tell you, it is of such small things that
+tragedies are made--the bitterest, the most insidious.
+
+And when Jevons did finally hurl himself, when he shut himself up,
+morning after morning and night after night, to labour violently on his
+greatest work, though (for just as long as he was actually engaged) he
+might be staving off his tragedy, he was nevertheless precipitating the
+event. You may say that when you get him there in his study on his
+battlefield you are among the big forces at once; but the interesting
+thing is that those big forces by their very expenditure released a whole
+crowd of little, infinitely little ones that, in their turn, in their
+miniature explosion, worked for his destruction. Jevons, struggling with
+his social disabilities, was like a giant devoured by microscopically
+minute organisms over whose generation he had no control.
+
+And the greater the man, mind you, the greater the tragedy.
+
+Still, for those two years in Edwardes Square, he staved it off. It was
+the very violence of his labour, the prodigious front of the battle he
+delivered, that saved him. Then there was his victory, his Third Novel,
+that for the time threw all minor happenings into the background.
+
+He was right again in his forecast. It _was_ his best work, and (I use
+his own phrase) it did the trick.
+
+When it came, the Grand Attack (which was bolder even than his first
+assault) carried, you may say, the whole position, after demolishing at
+one stroke the enemy's defences. For he had enemies. He was the sort of
+man who does have them. He didn't _make_ them, at least, not
+deliberately, he couldn't have been bothered to make them; but he drew
+them; they seemed to rise out of the ground after every one of his
+appearances.
+
+Well, they couldn't say he hadn't done it this time.
+
+_Done_ it. There's no good trying to express such a phenomenon as Jevons
+in terms of literature. You can only think about him in terms of action,
+every book of his being an onslaught by which he laid his public low.
+
+And this time he had conquered America.
+
+Don't ask me how many thousands he made by it. I've forgotten. They've
+melted into the tens of thousands that he made before he had finished.
+Even in the years of the Grand Attack he was making his old father an
+allowance and investing large sums in case of accidents. (He had been
+putting by even in the Hampstead days.) How he did it I can't think,
+though he has tried to explain it to me more than once. The whole thing
+for him was as obvious as any business transaction (he had the sort of
+mind for which business transactions _are_ obvious). He had studied
+the public he set out to capture. He presented the life it knew--the
+moving, changing, fantastically adventurous life of the middle classes.
+Until Jevons rushed on them and forced their eyes open, you may say at
+the point of the bayonet, the middle classes didn't know they were moving
+and changing and being adventurous. Nobody knew. It was Jevons's
+discovery.
+
+Then, as he pointed out, there were innumerable discretions in his
+valour. He knew to a hairbreadth how far he might go, and he went no
+farther. He respected existing prejudices because they existed. He didn't
+ask awkward questions; he didn't raise problems; he had the British
+capacity for doing serious things with an air of not taking himself
+seriously and frivolous things with an astounding gravity.
+
+"You can do anything, Furnival," he said, "if you're only funny enough."
+
+Norah tells me that that really _is_ his secret.
+
+But, he said, the whole thing was as calculable as any successful deal on
+the Stock Exchange. When you asked him: "Then why can't other people do
+it?" he said: "God knows why. They must be precious fools if they want to
+do it and don't find out how. _I_'ve had to find out."
+
+For one year--the last year in Edwardes Square--he enjoyed pure fame. And
+he _did_ enjoy it--I think he enjoyed everything--like a child with a
+mechanical toy, or a girl with a new gown, playing with it and trying it
+on by snatches when he could spare half an hour from his appalling toil.
+
+Heavens, how he worked that year! With a hard, punctual passion, a
+multiplied energy, like five financiers engaged on five separate
+transactions. After victory in the campaign he had settled down to
+business and the works of peace. There was the business of the short
+story; the business of the monograph; the business of the magazine
+article and the newspaper column, and the speculations that developed
+into the immense business of his plays. (I've forgotten how much he
+netted by his first curtain-raiser.) That's five.
+
+As I look back on him he seems to have torn through his stages at an
+incredible pace. There are several that I haven't counted, so suddenly
+did he leave them behind him: the stage when he was literary adviser to a
+firm of publishers, who wouldn't believe him when he said the thing was
+calculable; the stage when he ceased to be sub-editor of _Sport_ and
+became editor, an appointment so lucrative that you may judge the risk he
+took when he abandoned it. And in between there was his stage of cruelty,
+when he did reviewing. It was a brief stage, but he contrived to strew
+the field with the reputations he had slaughtered (Viola used to plead
+with him for certain authors, like Queen Philippa for the burghers of
+Calais), until his job was taken from him in the interests of humanity.
+
+Now--I am speaking in the light of my later knowledge--the first effect
+of these prodigious and passionate labours was beneficent, and I
+shouldn't wonder if Jevons, who had calculated everything to a nicety,
+hadn't allowed for this too. To say nothing of the peculiar purity of his
+earlier fame, which set him in a place apart and assured beyond all
+possible depreciation, so long as he elected to stay there, the very
+conditions of his business saved him. He enjoyed in those two desperate
+years the immunities of a recluse. The results were prominently before
+the public, but Jimmy wasn't. His study was literally his sanctuary.
+Sitting there nearly all day and half the night, he was removed from the
+world's observation at the precise moment when it became inimical. I
+don't mean the observation of the confraternity of letters, which was and
+always had been kindly to his personality, and had taken little or no
+notice of his disabilities; I mean the observation of the world he
+married into, for which disabilities like Jimmy's count.
+
+He was also removed from Viola's observation at a time when I think,
+almost unconsciously, she was beginning to criticize him. When he came to
+her out of his sanctuary he came with its consecration on him. And then
+there was the appeal he made to her tenderness. If the shudders down her
+back began they were checked by the spectacle of his exhaustion. She
+couldn't shudder at the tired conqueror when he flung himself on the
+floor beside her and laid his head in her lap.
+
+I've seen her with him like that--once, one evening when Norah was
+with them, and I had turned in after dinner; it was upstairs in that
+drawing-room in Edwardes Square that they had made, back and front, in an
+L. Norah and I were in the long, narrow part at the back; you know how
+those little town rooms go when they're knocked into one--the fireplaces
+in the same wall and windows opposite each other, so that the back rakes
+the fireplace end of the front part.
+
+Viola and Jevons were by the fireplace in the front, she in her low chair
+and he stretched out on the rug at her feet. And we raked them.
+
+They didn't know they were observed. I think they'd made up their minds
+that when Norah and I were together we couldn't hear or see anything
+except ourselves.
+
+And so we heard Viola saying, "What do you do it for?"
+
+And Jimmy, "Oh, for the fun of the thing, I suppose. What does one do
+things for?"
+
+And she, "It'll be fine fun for me, won't it, when you've killed
+yourself? When you've burst the top of your head off like the kitchen
+boiler?"
+
+"I should have to run dry first," said Jevons.
+
+"Well, you will, boiling away seven--eight--nine hours a day for weeks on
+end. Nobody else does it."
+
+"Nobody else _can_ do it," said Jimmy arrogantly.
+
+"It's all very well; but if you don't burst your head open you'll get
+neuritis, or cramp. Look at that hand."
+
+"Which hand?"
+
+"Your right hand, silly." She took it and poised it from the wrist. "Look
+how it wobbles."
+
+He looked.
+
+"It does wobble a bit. Like a drunkard's. And I don't drink."
+
+He was interested in his hand.
+
+"You goose, where's the fun of letting your right hand go to pieces?"
+
+"Easy on. They won't amputate it," said Jimmy.
+
+That was in nineteen-nine. This is nineteen-fifteen. And only yesterday
+Norah asked me if I remembered what Jimmy said about his hand the night
+we were engaged.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yes, that night I was engaged to Norah Thesiger.
+
+I suppose it was our silence that made Viola and Jimmy aware of us at
+last, for presently I saw Jimmy sit up on the floor and take Viola's hand
+and squeeze it, and then they got up and very quietly and furtively they
+left the room.
+
+And the minute I found myself alone with Norah I proposed to her.
+
+I don't know if even then I should have had the courage to do it if I
+hadn't been driven to it by sheer terror. I forgot to say that I was in
+Edwardes Square for the weekend and that Norah was not staying with her
+sister this time, but with her uncle, General Thesiger, at Lancaster
+Gate. And for three days, ever since her arrival at Lancaster Gate, I had
+seen the possibility of losing her.
+
+Otherwise you would have said that if ever there was a spontaneous and
+unexpected performance, it was my proposal to Norah Thesiger.
+
+But no; it seemed that it had been arranged for me by Jevons, planned
+with his customary deliberation and calculation long ago. This may have
+been the reason why Norah said she wouldn't tell Viola and Jimmy about it
+herself; she'd rather I did.
+
+I thought: I shan't have to tell them till to-morrow. I had to take Norah
+to Lancaster Gate in a taxi, and I walked back across the Serpentine
+between Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, spinning out the time so that
+Viola and Jimmy might be in bed when I got to Edwardes Square.
+
+I found them sitting up for me in Jimmy's study.
+
+I dreaded telling them more than I can say. I don't know with what
+countenance a man can come and tell the woman he has loved (and proposed
+to three times running) that he has consoled himself with her younger
+sister. I wanted to avoid every appearance of a fatuous triumph in my
+success with Norah. And after sticking for four years to my vow of
+everlasting devotion to Mrs. Jevons I shrank from the confession of a new
+allegiance. On the other hand, I owed it to Norah to declare myself
+happy without any airs of deprecation and contrition. And I had certain
+obligations to the Truth. Why I should have supposed that the Truth
+should have been disagreeable to Mrs. Jevons Heaven only knows. I suppose
+these scruples are the last illusions of our egoism. Still, I think that
+only an impudent egoist like Jevons could have carried off such an
+embarrassment with any brilliance.
+
+As it happened it was taken out of my hands. Jimmy, who had foreseen the
+thing itself, foresaw also my predicament and provided for it. As I came
+into the room he said, "It's all right, old man. You haven't got to tell
+us. We know all about it."
+
+I looked at Viola. She was sitting on part of Jimmy's chair, with her arm
+round his shoulder.
+
+"Did Norah tell you, after all?" I said.
+
+Viola pushed out her chin at me and shook her head.
+
+"No, Furny dear, she didn't tell me a thing. It was your face."
+
+"Don't you believe her," Jimmy said. "Your face hasn't anything to do
+with it. Your face is a tomb of secrets--a beautiful, white tomb. And
+_you_ are all rectitude and discretion. We knew it ages ago."
+
+"How could you possibly know it, when I didn't?"
+
+"Because it's one of those things" (he twinkled) "that other people
+always do know."
+
+"Were we as obvious as all that?"
+
+"I didn't say _you_ were obvious. I said _It_ was."
+
+I sat down facing them, and I suppose I must have looked supremely
+foolish, for Viola began to laugh and Jevons went on twinkling, not in
+the least as if he saw a joke, but with a thoughtful and complacent air,
+as if he were turning over the result of some private speculation that
+had come off entirely to his satisfaction.
+
+Then she took pity on me.
+
+"He means it was bound to happen. It was the heaven-appointed thing. The
+first minute I saw you, Wally, I thought, 'What an adorable husband he'd
+make for Norah!' And Jimmy's trying to tell you that we've been hoping it
+would come and wanting it to come and waiting for it to come for the last
+year."
+
+"I'm trying to tell him," said Jimmy, "that we've been meaning it to
+come, and trying to make it come, and seeing it come for the last three
+years."
+
+This was a blow at the attitude of romantic devotion, and I had to defend
+it.
+
+"Do you believe that, Viola?" I said.
+
+"Of course I believe it if Jimmy says so."
+
+I sent her a look that was meant to say, "You ought to know better;" but
+it missed fire somehow. She went on swinging her feet and laughing softly
+at me over Jimmy's shoulder. She seemed, like Jimmy, to be contemplating
+some exquisite knowledge that she had. And at last she said:
+
+"Aren't you glad now that you didn't marry me?"
+
+I said, "What am I to say to that?"
+
+Jimmy got up and clapped me on the shoulder. "Never mind her," he said.
+"Tell the truth and shame the devil. Tell her you're thundering glad."
+
+At that she slid down from her perch and came round to me and patted me
+very gently on the head.
+
+"_I_ am, Wally. Jimmy, you're a beast."
+
+And she went out of the room. Jimmy said that nothing she had contributed
+to the discussion became her like her leaving it.
+
+She had left it to him.
+
+He got into his chair again and sat down to it.
+
+"Now, perhaps," he said, "you see how right I was."
+
+"When?"
+
+"The first time we ever spoke about it."
+
+"My dear Jimmy, I haven't spoken to anybody about it till to-night."
+
+"We spoke about it years ago," he said.
+
+"We couldn't possibly have spoken about it years ago."
+
+"At Bruges. Perhaps it was I who spoke. I tell you I saw it coming. Don't
+you remember I gave you six months?"
+
+"You were out there, anyhow. It's taken three and a half years."
+
+"Because you were such a duffer. You behaved as if you expected the poor
+child to propose to you herself. I've been trying to make you see it for
+the last three and a half years, and you wouldn't. There never was such
+a chap for not seeing what's under his nose."
+
+"Norah isn't under my nose; she's miles above it, and if it comes to
+that, I've _seen_ it for the last three years."
+
+He had tripped me up by the heels.
+
+"There you are--that brings it to the six months I gave you."
+
+"I didn't mean I was thinking of it then. How could I be?"
+
+"Of course you weren't thinking of it. But _she_ was."
+
+"Norah? Not she! A child of seventeen!"
+
+"I don't mean Norah. I mean Viola."
+
+"Viola?"
+
+"Yes. You didn't see what the unscrupulous minx was after. She was
+plotting it and planning it the first time you were at Canterbury. I got
+a letter from her at Bruges--I can't show it you--telling me not to worry
+about you--I _was_ worrying about you, though you were such a damn fool,
+if you don't mind my saying so. She said you'd got over it all right. She
+wouldn't be surprised if some day you married Norah.
+
+"So you see," he said, "you needn't bother about Viola. She knew you
+couldn't keep it up for ever."
+
+"Keep what up?"
+
+(I knew; but something in his tone or in his twinkle made me pretend I
+didn't.)
+
+"Your wonderful attitude," he said. "She meant you to marry Norah."
+
+"Why--on earth--should she have wanted that?"
+
+"Well--because I worried about you, and she wanted me to be happy. And
+because she worried about you, and wanted you to be happy. And because
+she worried about the Kid, and wanted her to be happy. And because she
+wanted the rest of them to be happy too."
+
+I said I didn't know what I'd done to be so happy.
+
+"You've done nothing. You don't owe it to yourself that you're happy. My
+dear fellow, you've been watched, and looked after, and protected for
+three and a half years with an incessant care. If you'd been left to
+yourself you'd have bungled the whole business. Either you wouldn't have
+proposed to her at all, or you'd have proposed three times running when
+it was too late."
+
+I pointed out to him that I hadn't proposed three times running, neither
+was I too late.
+
+"All the same," he said, "you wouldn't have thought of it if she hadn't
+gone to the Thesigers. And she wouldn't have gone to the Thesigers if
+Viola hadn't got the Thesigers to ask her. It was a put-up job. I tell
+you, my son, you've been guided and guarded. Why, you didn't even see
+that the child was grown up till I drew your attention to it."
+
+There was no use pretending I liked it. I didn't.
+
+I said, "Thank you. If a thing comes off it's your doing, and if it
+doesn't it's mine."
+
+He said it looked like that.
+
+When I saw Norah in the morning she asked me whether Jimmy had said he
+knew it was coming?
+
+I said he had.
+
+"And I suppose he thinks he made it come?"
+
+That, I said, was Jimmy's attitude.
+
+"Well, then," she said, "he didn't. You don't believe him, do you?"
+
+Did I? Not perhaps at the moment, and never at any time as Jimmy believed
+it himself. But I do think he meant it to happen. It was one of the moves
+in his difficult game. He couldn't afford to neglect any means of
+strengthening his position in his wife's family. When it came to
+acknowledging Jimmy his wife's family was divided. Portions of it,
+strange cousins whom I never met till after my marriage, refused to
+acknowledge him at all. At Lancaster Gate he was received coldly in
+accordance with the discreet policy by which the Thesigers had avoided
+the appearances of scandal. Down at Canterbury there were degrees and
+shades of recognition. Norah openly loved him. The Canon had what he
+called "a morbid liking for the fellow." Mildred and Victoria tolerated
+him. Millicent endured him as an infliction. Mrs. Thesiger concealed
+under the most beautiful manners and the most Christian charity an
+inveterate repugnance.
+
+I have forgotten Bertie. Bertie, who could generally be found at
+Lancaster Gate when he wasn't in his chambers in the Temple, was
+apathetic and amiably evasive. He took the line that Lancaster Gate took
+when he referred to his brother-in-law as a clever little beast.
+
+And to all these shades Jevons was acutely sensitive.
+
+I have known men (they were of the confraternity of letters) who declared
+that they could not understand why a man like Jevons, in Jevons's
+position, should have bothered his head for two minutes about his wife's
+family. They considered that Jevons's marriage was a disaster, not for
+the Thesigers, but for Jevons, and that his only safe and proper course
+was to leave the Thesigers alone. But it wasn't so easy to leave them
+alone when he had married into them; and to have left them would have
+been for Jevons a confession of failure. He might just as well have laid
+down his arms or pulled down the shutters of his shop. From the very
+beginning, ever since the day when he had met Reggie Thesiger, he
+conceived that the whole world of Thesigers had challenged him to hold
+his own in it, and he was too stubborn a fighter to retire on a
+challenge. Besides, he couldn't have retracted without taking Viola with
+him.
+
+And you must remember that he was thirty-two when he married her, and
+that he had behind him an unknown history of struggle and humiliation and
+defeat. The Thesigers stood for the whole world of things that he had
+missed, the world of admired refinements and beautiful amenities, that,
+without abating one atom of its refinement and amenity, had persistently
+kicked him out. Besides--and this was the pathetic part of it--he had an
+irrepressible affection for the Canterbury Thesigers, and it hungered and
+thirsted for recognition. It nourished itself in secret on any scraps
+that came its way. He met tolerance with grace, and any sort of kindness
+with passionate gratitude. I think he would have broken his neck to give
+Norah or the Canon or even Mrs. Thesiger anything they wanted. And the
+Canon and Mrs. Thesiger wanted Norah to marry me. It wouldn't become me
+to say what Norah wanted.
+
+Viola, in a serious moment, threw a light on it. (I had been dining in
+Edwardes Square on the evening of the day I came back from Canterbury
+after taking Norah down there.)
+
+"I suppose you don't know," she said, "that Mummy and Daddy fell in love
+with you first? Well, they did. They wanted you to marry me to keep me
+out of mischief, but more than anything they wanted you to marry Norah.
+You see, she's their favourite."
+
+And it seemed there was even more in it than that. They wanted to keep
+Norah out of mischief too. "Not," she said, "that Norah would ever have
+run off to Belgium, even with you." But that little adventure of Viola's
+had made them nervous. Norah was inclined to look down on the garrison;
+like Viola, she had declared in the most decided manner that she meant to
+strike out a line for herself; she wasn't going to follow Dorothy's and
+Gwinny's lead (did I say that the two married sisters lived abroad at
+their husbands' stations--Gwinny at Gibraltar, and Dorothy at Simla?),
+and that for lack of originality Mildred's engagement to Charlie Thesiger
+was "the limit."
+
+"It's a good thing, Wally," she said. "It'll knit us all tighter
+together. That's partly why we've wanted it so awfully. Do you know that
+if it hadn't been for you Norah wouldn't have been allowed to come and
+stay with us?"
+
+I said I was sure she was mistaken. Canon Thesiger--
+
+"Oh," she said, "it wasn't Daddy. He wouldn't have minded. It was Mummy.
+She never _could_ bear poor Jimmy."
+
+"But," she went on, "you're his friend. And he worked it for you. They
+can't get over those two things."
+
+I remember wondering whether deep down in her heart she meant that my
+marriage would knit her and Jimmy closer?
+
+I wondered whether Jimmy, in his wisdom, had calculated on that, too?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At that time I didn't realize the innocence that went with Jimmy's
+wisdom. I think I credited him with insight that I know now he never had.
+I know now that, even afterwards--at the very worst--he had no
+misgivings. All the Hampstead time, all through the Edwardes Square time
+he was happy. And afterwards--well--happiness wasn't the word for it; he
+lived in a sort of ecstasy. Which shows how little in those days she had
+let him see.
+
+It was in nineteen-ten, their last year in Edwardes Square, that the
+tension began. Norah and I were married in the autumn of nineteen-nine,
+and we were living in my flat in Brunswick Square. In what I made out
+during this period I had Norah to help me, and she had wonderful lights.
+
+I never could keep track of Jimmy's accelerating material progress, but
+the Year-Books tell me that his fourth novel came out in the spring of
+nineteen-nine, and his first successful play was produced in the summer
+of that year, and ran for the whole season and on through the winter, and
+I remember that in nineteen-ten he was attacking another novel and
+another play, which--But it's the attack that is the important thing, the
+thing that fixes nineteen-ten for me.
+
+You cannot go on attacking, for years on end, with concentrated and
+increasing violence, and not suffer for it. The first effects of Jimmy's
+appalling travail may have been beneficent, but its later workings were
+malign. There's no other word for it. In nineteen-ten Jimmy was beginning
+to show signs of exhaustion. Not of his creative energy or anything
+belonging to it, though he prophesied a falling off after Novel Three,
+and declared that he could detect it. Nobody else could have detected it.
+The exhaustion was in Jimmy himself, and more especially and fatally in
+the Jimmy who struggled against what he called "the damnable tendency to
+do the sort of thing your father does."
+
+He couldn't keep it up. He couldn't stand for ever the double strain of
+attacking and defending himself against his tendency. There's no doubt
+that when he was tired he got careless. I have known him come upstairs
+after dinner, entirely sober, but looking rather drunk, with his hair
+curling over his forehead and his tie crooked and the buttons of his
+irreproachable little waistcoat all undone. I have known him do the
+oddest things with chairs and get into postures inconceivable to ordinary
+men. I have known him drop his aitches for a whole evening because he was
+too dead beat to hang on to them. And Norah, going home with me, would
+say, "Poor Jimmy--he does get it very badly when he's tired."
+
+And I have had to see Viola's face while these things were happening.
+Sometimes, when he was too outrageous, she would look up and smile with
+the queerest little half-frightened wonder, and I would be reminded of
+the time when Jimmy had jaundice and she asked me if I thought he would
+stay that funny yellow colour all his life? It was as if she were asking
+me, Did I think he would keep on all his life doing these rather alarming
+things? Sometimes he would catch himself doing them and say, "See me do
+that? That's because I'm agitated." Or, "There's another aitch gone.
+Collar it, somebody." Or, "I suppose that's what Norah would call one of
+my sillysosms." Sometimes Viola would catch him at it and reprove him.
+And then he would simply throw the responsibility on the poor old
+Registrar down in Hertfordshire.
+
+I have heard him say to her with extreme sweetness and docility: "My dear
+child, if I'd had a father and mother like yours I shouldn't do these
+things." And I have heard him say almost with bitterness: "Does _that_
+shock you? Good Heavens, you should see my father!"
+
+But he took good care she shouldn't see him. I used to think this wasn't
+very nice of him. But what can a man do in a case so desperate? There
+were risks that even Jevons couldn't take. I used to think that he salved
+his conscience by making the Registrar an allowance that increased in
+proportion to his income and by going down into Hertfordshire regularly
+every three months to see him himself. I used to think that Jimmy's
+father must have admirable tact, because he never seemed to have inquired
+why Jimmy always came alone. But Jimmy said it wasn't tact. It was pure
+haughtiness. The old bird, he said, was as proud as a peacock with his
+tail up. I used to think it wasn't very nice of him to talk like that
+about his father. And I used to think it wasn't very nice of Viola never
+to go with Jimmy on his pilgrimages.
+
+I was with them once when she was seeing him off at Euston, and I said to
+her, "Do you never go with him to see the poor old man?"
+
+She turned to me. (I hadn't seen her look stern and fiery before.)
+
+"Wally," she said, "I suppose it's because you're so good that you always
+think other people aren't. That _poor old man_ was a perfect devil to
+Jimmy. I don't say that Jimmy always was an angel to him, but he's been
+pretty decent, considering. He's told me things I couldn't tell you; and
+there were things he couldn't tell me. He says he didn't believe in God
+the Father when he was little, just because he wanted to believe in God.
+He thought God couldn't be anything so frightful as a father.
+
+"That's why he's so awfully fond of Daddy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so it went on. She swung between slight shocks and passionate
+recoveries. One minute Jimmy's manners made her shudder all down her
+spine, and the next he would do some adorable thing that brought her to
+his feet. Half the time she pretended that things hadn't happened when
+they had. And when her flesh crept she had memories that lashed it.
+
+I used to wonder whether this oscillation would slacken or increase with
+time. Would she swing on a longer and more dangerous rhythm? Would she be
+flung backwards and forwards between fascination and repulsion?
+
+And I would catch myself up and answer my own words, "Of course not. The
+poor chap isn't as bad as all that."
+
+Then early in nineteen-ten Reggie Thesiger came home on leave from India.
+
+Looking back on it all now, I seem to see that until he came everything
+was going well. The oscillations, even if I didn't exaggerate them,
+couldn't have counted. Her heart was steady, and in her heart she adored
+her husband. There could be no doubt about it, she adored him. It was
+because she adored him that she suffered. Nobody can stand imperfection
+in their god.
+
+But then she adored Reggie too.
+
+She hadn't a misgiving. When Norah rushed to her with the news that
+Reggie had got his leave, she went wild and nearly strangled poor little
+Jimmy in her joy. She counted the weeks, the days, the hours till he
+landed. She argued with Norah as to which of them should have him first
+and longest when he came to town. Norah told me she didn't think he would
+stop long with _us_ if he could go to Viola. Viola was his favourite
+sister.
+
+Well, he didn't go to Viola at all. He went first to the Thesigers at
+Lancaster Gate. Then he came on to us.
+
+That was all right. We had to arrange our dates to suit the General.
+
+On the Sunday we dined at Lancaster Gate; Viola and Jevons were not
+there. Reggie had come up on the Friday for ten days, and he stayed with
+the General for the weekend.
+
+He said he could stay with us for the whole week if we could have him.
+
+We were out in the hall saying good-bye, and he was getting Norah's cloak
+for her. The hall was full of Thesigers and guests. I remember Norah
+saying, "We'd love to have you. But--we promised Vee-Vee to divide you
+with her."
+
+And I remember seeing Reggie's face stiffen over the collar of the cloak
+as he held it. He said he didn't want to be divided.
+
+It was so startling, she told me afterwards, that she lost her head. She
+said out loud, so that everybody heard her, "Not with Vee-Vee?" And
+everybody heard his answer:
+
+"Not with Jevons."
+
+Then he laughed.
+
+In spite of the laugh Norah was quite frightened. She asked me, going
+home in the taxi, what I thought it meant. I said I thought it meant that
+Reggie didn't particularly care about meeting Jimmy. She said, "Well,
+he'll have to meet him to-morrow night. I'm jolly glad we've asked them."
+
+She added pensively, "Reggie's quite changed. I suppose it's India."
+
+I knew she didn't suppose anything of the sort. She thought the General
+had been telling him things; and I must confess I thought so too. Here, I
+may say at once, we did that kindly and honourable gentleman a wrong.
+
+He came to us in great distress the next morning. He said Viola and
+Jevons were to have dined with them last night, only Reggie had declared
+he wouldn't have anything to do with Jevons. He didn't want to meet him
+if he could help it. He said, Couldn't they ask Viola without him? And
+they _had_ asked Viola without him, and Viola had refused to come.
+
+"And do you know" (he stared at us in a sort of helpless horror) "he
+hasn't been to see her yet."
+
+The poor General went away quite depressed. He lingered with me on the
+doorstep a moment. "I'm afraid, Furnival," he said, "Reggie's going to
+make it very awkward for us."
+
+He did make it awkward.
+
+It might have been discreet to have put off our dinner. But I knew that
+Norah wouldn't hear of it; all the more if Reggie was going to make it
+awkward. You don't suppose one Thesiger was going to knuckle under to
+another. It wasn't their way. They were loyal to the last degree, but
+loyalty was another matter. And if it came to that she was loyal to her
+sister.
+
+I shall never forget that dinner. I shall never forget Viola's coming in
+with Jevons behind her.
+
+She was, as I think I've said, a beautifully-made woman, with long limbs
+and superb shoulders, and a way of holding her small head high. Well, she
+came in (they were a little late) with her head higher than ever, and
+with a sweep of her limbs, as if her crushed draperies (she was all in
+white) were blown backward by a wind; her gauze scarf billowed behind her
+as if it were wings or sails and the wind filled it. She was like the
+Victory of Samothrace; she was like a guardian and avenging angel; she
+was like a ship in full sail breasting a sea. Up to her eyes she was
+everything that was ever splendid and courageous and defiant.
+
+But her eyes--there was a sort of scared grief in them.
+
+I had seen fright in her face once before, the day when she came into the
+room at Hampstead with Jevons behind her and saw Reggie there. I said to
+myself, "She always was afraid of Reggie." But that, for the second that
+it lasted, was sheer fright. This was different. There was anguish in it;
+and it was only in her eyes.
+
+And Jevons's entry, this time, was simultaneous. Little Jimmy came behind
+her, holding himself rather absurdly straight and breathing hard.
+
+And there was Reggie Thesiger waiting for them, standing by the hearth
+between Norah and me.
+
+Oh yes, India had changed him. Surely, I thought, it must be India that
+had made him so lean and stiff and hard. But he was handsomer even than
+he had been five years ago, and he looked taller, he was so formidably
+upright and well-built. (As a competitive exhibition Jimmy's straightness
+was pitiful. And yet, if his antagonist had been anybody but Reggie, it
+might have had a certain dignity.)
+
+I wondered, "_How_ is she going to greet him? Will she lower her flag and
+kiss him, or what?"
+
+She sailed up to Norah first and kissed her. She shook hands with me. She
+smiled at me (I don't know how she managed it). Then she turned to
+Reggie.
+
+She didn't lower her flag. She said, "Well, Reggie," as if they had met
+yesterday. There was no kissing or any anticipation of a kiss; they shook
+hands, not at arm's length, not in the least as if they had had a
+quarrel, but like well-bred people in the house of strangers. It was all
+beautifully done.
+
+Then it was Jimmy's turn. Reggie looked at him as if he wasn't there.
+
+If I could have run away with any decency I'd have run rather than face
+what came then. But the women--Heavens, how they stood to their guns!
+
+Norah said, "Reggie, I think you know your brother-in-law?" with an air
+of stating a platitude rather than of recalling him to a courtesy he had
+forgotten.
+
+"I don't think so," said Reggie.
+
+But he bowed. And Jimmy bowed. There was no handshaking, at arm's length
+or otherwise.
+
+Viola said, "You _do_ know him. You met him four years ago in my rooms at
+Hampstead."
+
+"Did I? I'm afraid I've forgotten."
+
+"You did meet, didn't you, Jimmy?"
+
+"I believe so," said Jimmy, with a quite admirable indifference.
+
+"Anyhow," said Norah sweetly, "you can't say you haven't _heard_ of him."
+
+She meant well, poor darling, but it was a bad shot. It missed its mark
+completely, and it drew down the enemy's fire.
+
+"I _have_ heard of Mr. Jevons," said Reggie, and he looked at Jimmy as if
+he realized for the first time that he was there, and resented it.
+
+Norah turned positively white. It was Viola who saved us.
+
+"Please don't, Norah. It's really awful for poor Jimmy now he's on all
+the buses and in the Tube?"
+
+She referred to the monstrous posters that advertised his play in black
+letters eighteen inches high on a scarlet ground.
+
+"How do you feel when you're in the Tube?" said Norah.
+
+"You feel," said Jimmy--he was sitting in one of his worst attitudes,
+with his legs stretched straight out before him and his feet tilted toes
+upwards. I noticed that Reggie couldn't bear to look at him--"you feel
+first of all as if everybody was looking at you; you feel a silly ass;
+then you feel as if everybody was looking at the posters; then you know
+they aren't looking at them. Then you leave off looking at them yourself.
+And if one does hit you in the eye you feel as if it referred to somebody
+else, and after that you don't feel anything more."
+
+It wasn't brilliant, but the wonder was he found anything to say at all.
+
+I was thankful when Pavitt came in to tell us that dinner was served. It
+delivered us from Jimmy's attitudes.
+
+When it came to dining at our small round table we saw how badly we had
+erred in not asking anybody else but Viola and Jimmy. A sixth, a woman
+(almost any woman would have done in the circumstances), a woman to talk
+to Reggie might have pulled us through. But with Reggie sitting beside
+Viola, with Jimmy opposite them by himself between me and Norah (the only
+possible arrangement) it was terrible.
+
+Reggie persisted in talking to Viola like a well-bred stranger. He
+persisted in ignoring Jevons.
+
+And Jimmy retaliated by ignoring _him_. There was nothing else for him
+to do. Only it wasn't one of the things he did well. Beside Reggie's
+accomplishment he looked mean and pitiful and a little vulgar. God
+forgive me for putting it down, but that is how he looked.
+
+And once or twice, under the strain of it, he dropped an aitch with the
+most disconcerting effect.
+
+I often wonder what Pavitt thought of that family party. He certainly
+served Viola as if he loved her, and Jimmy as if he was sorry for him,
+calling his attention to a dish or a wine which, he seemed to say, it
+would be a pity for him to miss--it might prove a consolation to him.
+
+Our agony became so unbearable that the women ended it when they could by
+leaving us at the stage of coffee and cigarettes. Then, with us three men
+the position became untenable, and Reggie found that he'd have to go out
+at nine; he had an appointment with a fellow. And at nine he went.
+
+Viola and Jimmy left us very soon after.
+
+She said, "It was dear of you to have us," not in the least humbly, but
+as if they had enjoyed it.
+
+Up to the very last she was magnificent, and even Jimmy played up well.
+In fact, when Reggie's perfection was no longer there to damage him he
+was rather fine.
+
+It was poor little Norah who broke down. I found her crying all by
+herself on the couch in my study when they'd gone.
+
+She said, "Wally, this is awful. It's _the_ most awful thing that could
+have happened."
+
+I said, "Oh, come--" and she persisted. "But it _is_. She adored Reggie.
+He used to adore her--and--you've seen him, how he was to-night. It'll
+kill her if he keeps it up."
+
+I said, "He won't keep it up."
+
+"Oh, won't he! You don't know Reggie."
+
+I said, "It's odd. He didn't seem to mind Jimmy so much the first day he
+met him."
+
+"Oh, my dear--he didn't mind, because he never could have dreamed she'd
+marry him."
+
+"He'll come round all right when he knows him," I said.
+
+She shook her head and made little dabs at her face with her
+pocket-handkerchief.
+
+"That's just it. He thinks he does know him. I mean he thinks he knows
+something. I'm sure he thinks it."
+
+"My dear child, however could he? He couldn't even have heard. If you
+mean that Belgian business, it was all over and done with four years ago.
+Have we any of us thought of it since?"
+
+"No--but I think he had an idea then. He guessed that there must be
+something. You see--we never told Vee-Vee, but--he thought it was awfully
+queer of her to go off--anywhere--just when he was sailing."
+
+"Well," I said, "it _was_ a bit odd. She must have been awfully gone on
+Jimmy."
+
+"She was."
+
+"Poor dear. She said she meant to burn her boats."
+
+"Don't you see--that was part of the burning. She had to break the hold
+that Reggie had on her. You don't know what it was like, Wally. She had
+to break it or she could never have married Jimmy at all. It was a
+toss-up between them; and Jimmy won."
+
+"Is it going to be a toss-up between them all over again, d'you think?" I
+said.
+
+"No. It's going to be war to the knife. They won't either of them give in
+as long as Reggie's got that idea in his head."
+
+"We must get it out of his head. Surely," I said, "we can do something."
+
+"No, we can't. There's no way of getting it out. It's no good trying to
+make a joke of it. You can't joke with Reggie past a certain point. And
+it's not as if you could give him a hint. You can't hint at these
+things."
+
+"What do you think he'll do?"
+
+"He won't do anything. He won't say anything. He'll just go on like this
+all the time, and she won't be able to bear it. It'll break her heart."
+
+Well, though I agreed with her, I still thought that something could be
+done. I tried to do it when Reggie got back that night after Norah had
+gone to bed. I couldn't of course assume that he had his idea. My plan
+was to present Jevons to him in a light that was incompatible with his
+idea. It was easy enough to say that Jevons might be rather startling,
+but that he was awfully decent and the soul of honour. The soul of honour
+covered it--absolutely ruled out his idea.
+
+He didn't contradict me. He just sat there smoking amicably, just saying
+every now and then that he couldn't stand him; he was sorry--I might be
+perfectly right and Jevons might be everything I said--only he couldn't
+stand him; and he wasn't going to. Nothing would induce him to stop with
+Jevons. He didn't want to have anything to do with the little beast.
+
+When I said, "I assure you, my dear fellow, it's all right," he only
+threw the onus of suspicion on me by replying suavely, "My dear fellow, I
+assure you I never said it wasn't."
+
+It was as if he really knew it wasn't, knew something that we didn't
+know, and was determined to keep his knowledge to himself.
+
+And when I'd finished he said, "The whole thing's a mystery to _me_. I
+thought she was going to marry you." And then--"How she can stick him I
+can't think. D'you mind, old man, if I go to bed? No, I don't want any
+whisky and soda, thanks."
+
+It was Pavitt, of all people, who threw a light on it when he brought the
+whisky.
+
+"Beg your pardon, sir," said Pavitt, "but I believe I never told you that
+the Captain called here one day when you was in Belgium."
+
+"Are you quite sure, Pavitt? He called the day I left."
+
+"Yes, sir, I remember his calling the day you left. It's only just come
+back to me that he called again, three days after, I think it was. I
+told him you was gone to Belgium, and he said that was all he wanted. He
+didn't leave no message, else I should have remembered. It was the young
+gentleman's likeness to Mrs. Jevons, sir, what fixed him in my mind."
+
+I told Reggie this the next day as an instance of Pavitt's wonderful
+memory. "Only," I said, "he forgot to tell me that you called."
+
+He smiled rather bitterly as if he remembered the incident well.
+
+"Oh, I called all right," he said. "I wanted to know where you were."
+
+After that Norah and I made it out between us. Not all at once, but bit
+by bit, as things occurred to us or as he suggested them.
+
+He must have begun to suspect something when the time went on and Viola
+didn't turn up. Only he thought it was I who was at the bottom of it.
+Perhaps, so long as he thought it was I, he had made up his mind that
+there could be no great harm in it. He had been all right with her down
+at Canterbury those last few days. Anyhow, he hadn't said anything.
+
+Then--when he heard that she had married Jevons--he had his idea. It
+wasn't necessary for him to have heard anything else. And then, even if
+he hadn't guessed it, there was Jimmy's book, the "Flemish Journal," to
+tell him she had been in Belgium with him. And he knew she didn't marry
+him till afterwards.
+
+And so, he thought things. If he didn't think them of Viola he thought
+them of Jevons. (Even on the most charitable assumption he would consider
+his sister's passion for Jimmy a piece of morbid perversity.) And anyhow,
+he was left with an appalling doubt.
+
+And he wasn't going to forgive either of them, ever.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+That we had made out something very like the truth of it I realized when
+I met Burton Withers. For eventually I did meet him. It was at the end of
+June, nineteen-ten, in the green room of the Crown Theatre on the
+hundredth night of Jimmy's play. That is what I remember it by.
+
+Norah and I were with Viola and Jimmy. Withers had come in with a friend,
+an important member of the cast, who was evidently under the impression
+that we had never met before, for he introduced him to us all round.
+Withers showed tact in not recognizing Viola or claiming the acquaintance
+he certainly had with Jevons. He had, in fact, a most reassuring air of
+starting again with a clean slate and no reminiscences. This was in the
+interval between the First and Second Acts. When the curtain rose on Act
+Two, I was alone in Jimmy's box. (Jimmy and Viola and Norah were trying
+the effect of the play from the stalls.) And at the next interval Withers
+came to me there. It was funny, he said, the way little Jevons had come
+on. He didn't suppose any of us had thought of _this_ four years ago when
+we had all met together in Bruges.
+
+I said, "Did we all meet together in Bruges?"
+
+"Well, if it wasn't in Ghent. Oh--of course it was at Ghent you and I
+met. You hadn't joined the others then."
+
+At first I was hopelessly mystified by these allusions. I couldn't think
+what point he was making for or where he would come out. He seemed to be
+trying uneasily to get somewhere. Then I saw that he had had it on his
+mind that when we had last met he had made a defamatory statement to me
+about the lady who had become my sister-in-law, and about a man who had
+become a celebrity (I knew Withers's little weakness for celebrities).
+And he was scared.
+
+I must have seemed a bit lost among his allusions, for he blurted it out.
+
+"D'you know, I've been most awfully sorry for chaffing you in that
+idiotic way--about--your sister-in-law. Silly sort of thing one says, you
+know. But of course you knew I was pulling your leg."
+
+I said, "My dear Withers, of course I knew you were."
+
+Of course I knew he was doing nothing of the sort, for Withers slandered
+right and left when it wasn't worth his while to grovel, and I had no
+doubt now that he believed his own dirty tale when he told it; but he had
+been impressed and thoroughly frightened, even at the time, by the
+calmness of my bluff, and the little beast was far more afraid of us than
+we ever could have been of him now. We could henceforth dismiss Withers
+from our minds. He was a "social climber" of the sort that would eat his
+own words if he thought they would do the smallest damage to his
+climbing.
+
+As for the ladies, General Thesiger's friends, I rather think the General
+had settled with them at the time.
+
+You might say we had nothing to fear from Reggie, if Reggie's
+silence--and his deafness--hadn't been more terrible than anything
+he could have heard or said.
+
+I suppose nineteen-ten ought to stand as the year of Tasker Jevons's
+great Play, the play that ran for a whole year after the hundredth night,
+that ran on and on as if it would never stop, that, when it was taken off
+the Crown stage to make room for its successor, still careered through
+the provinces and the United States. It seemed the year of Jimmy's utmost
+affluence. If he kept it up, we said, he'd be a millionaire before he
+died of it. But it wasn't conceivable that he could keep it up for long.
+We thought he'd never write another play like this one. There never would
+be another year like nineteen-ten.
+
+I believe that even Jimmy thought there'd never be another year like it,
+so far had he surpassed his own calculations, as it was.
+
+But for me nineteen-ten is the year of other things, the things that
+happened in the family, the year of Reggie's return and all the misery
+that came from it, the year of Viola's struggle--the agony of which we,
+Norah and I, were the helpless spectators. _She_ never said a word to us.
+It was Norah who conveyed to me the secret, intimate shock of it.
+
+That year Jimmy rained boxes and stalls and theatre-parties for his play
+on all the Thesigers (except Reggie) and on all their friends, and on
+Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands when they came back from Simla and
+Gibraltar (it was the year of their return too); but we stood behind the
+scenes of a tragedy that mercifully was hidden from Jimmy's eyes. It was
+the year when Mildred broke off her engagement to Charlie Thesiger. It
+was the year when our little girl, Viola, was born; the year when we
+moved from our Bloomsbury flat into the little house in Edwardes Square,
+taking over the end of the lease and all the fixtures and some of the
+furniture from Jimmy. Jimmy hadn't a child, and he had sworn that he
+never would have one; he was so afraid (and this fear was the only thing
+that disturbed his optimism), so horribly afraid that Viola might die.
+But he had outgrown the house in Edwardes Square. It was the year of his
+first really startling expansion.
+
+It was the year when he moved into the house in Mayfair.
+
+Why Mayfair we really couldn't think. He said he liked the sound of
+it; it made him feel as if he was in the country when he wasn't, and as
+if it was the month of May, when there never was any month of May in
+England; as if there were a maypole where the fountain is in Park Lane;
+and as if processions, and processions of horses, splendid stallions and
+brood-mares and thoroughbreds and hacks and great Suffolk punches with
+their manes and tails tied up with ribbons were coming past his house to
+the fair.
+
+He may have felt like that about it. I put no limits to Jimmy's
+imagination; but I suspected him of throwing out these airy fancies as a
+veil to cover the preposterous nature of his ambition.
+
+It was also the year when he began to talk about motor-cars and think
+about motor-cars and dream about motor-cars at night.
+
+And it was the year in which he and Viola went to the Riviera while the
+plumbers and painters were at work on the house in Green Street, Mayfair.
+They stayed away all autumn, and at the end of November they settled in.
+And at Christmas they gave their house-warming.
+
+It wasn't a large party--only a few friends of Viola's, and Jimmy's
+lawyer and his doctor and his agent, and a few picked members of the
+confraternity; the rest were Thesigers. If Jimmy had meant to give a
+demonstration proving that he could gather the whole of his wife's family
+round him at a pinch, he had all but succeeded. I suppose every available
+member had turned up that night, except Reggie. The General and his wife
+and daughters were there; and Charlie Thesiger and Bertie; and Canon and
+Mrs. Thesiger (they had come up from Canterbury on purpose, and were
+staying with the General); and Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands; and
+Victoria and Mildred, who stayed with Viola; and Millicent, who came to
+us; and a whole crowd of miscellaneous aunts and cousins; perhaps sixty
+altogether, counting outsiders.
+
+Norah and I had been away for weeks in the country and had only got back
+that afternoon, so we had not seen the house in Green Street since it had
+been furnished. It burst, it literally burst, on us, without the smallest
+warning or preparation.
+
+Like Jimmy's first novel, it was designed to startle and arrest, hitting
+you in the eye as you came in. The actual reception was held in the large
+hall, which had been formed by turning what had once been the dining-room
+loose into the passage and the stair-place.
+
+So far the architect had done his work well. After that he had been left
+to struggle with and interpret as he best could the baronial idea that
+had been imposed on him. The hall was panelled half-way in dark oak, and
+above the oak the walls were hung with a rough papering of old gold. But
+what hit you in the eye as you came in was the oak staircase that went up
+royally along the bottom wall. It had scarlet-and-gold Tudor roses on the
+flank of the balustrade, and at every third banister there was a shield
+picked out in scarlet and gold. And at the bottom of the balustrade and
+at the turn a little oak lion sat on his haunches and held up yet another
+shield (picked out in scarlet and gold) in his fore-paws. The bare oak
+planks of the upper floor made the ceiling, and there was an enormous
+Tudor rose in the middle of it, where other people might have had a
+chandelier, and little Tudor roses blazed at intervals all along the
+cornice. And there was a great stone hearth and chimney-piece, a Tudor
+chimney-piece, mullioned, with a shield carved in the centre and the
+motto: "_Dominus Defensor Domi_," and on either side the rose and the
+grill, the rose and the grill, alternately. There were andirons on the
+hearth and an immense log burning, and swords and daggers and suits of
+armour hung on the gold walls above the panelling.
+
+And I swear to you that the curtains and upholstery were in tapestry
+cloth, the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground. It was as if
+Jimmy had wanted to say to the Thesigers that if it came to being Tudor,
+he could be as Tudor as any of them, and more so. Thus deeply had he
+absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere.
+
+When she saw the suits of armour Norah squeezed my arm and breathed
+"Oh--my _darling_ Wally!"--in an ecstasy that was anguish. Poor Mildred's
+plump face turned as scarlet as the Tudor roses with an emotion that we
+could not fathom, but judged to be painful.
+
+We had come early with the idea of making ourselves useful, if necessary;
+but there was hardly anybody there yet, only two or three guests drinking
+coffee or champagne-cup at the long table under the windows, and Jimmy,
+who stood in the middle of his Tudor hall, talking to one of the
+confraternity, and rocking himself gently from his toes to his heels and
+from his heels to his toes again, as a sign that he was not in the least
+elated, but only at his ease.
+
+He was delighted to see us, and for quite three seconds he ceased his
+rocking and began to twinkle in a most natural and reassuring manner.
+Then I remember him scuttling away to greet another guest, and the
+_confrère_ gazing after him with affection and turning to us in a sort
+of grave enjoyment of the scene. I remember Viola coming up to us and her
+little baffling smile and her look--the look she was to have for long
+enough--of detachment from Jimmy and his Tudor hall. I remember the dark
+blue, half-transparent gown she wore that was certainly not Tudor, and
+her general air of being an uninvited and inappropriate guest, and how
+she conveyed us to the table to get drinks "all comfy" before the others
+came. And when Viola had drifted away, I remember Charlie Thesiger
+strolling up to us. The supercilious youth had been, getting a drink "all
+comfy" on his own account, and his little stiff moustache was still wet
+with Jimmy's champagne-cup above the atrocious smile he met us with.
+
+He asked us if we'd seen the drawing-room.
+
+We said we hadn't, and he advised us to go up and look at it at once,
+before anybody else did. "You can't see it properly," he said, "unless
+you're alone with it."
+
+I suppose we ought to have been grateful to Charlie for not letting us
+miss it, and it was perfectly true that the way to see it was to be alone
+with it; there would, indeed, have been a positive indecency in seeing it
+in any other way. He had spared our decency. And yet I think we hated him
+for having sent us there. It was as if he had sent us to look at
+something horrible, at an outrage, at violence done to shrinking,
+delicate things.
+
+We looked at it, and we looked at each other. We didn't speak, and I
+don't think either of us smiled. I remember Norah going behind me and
+closing the door swiftly, as she might have closed it on some horror that
+she and I had to deal with alone. I remember her saying then, "This is
+_too_ awful!" not in the least as if she meant what we were looking at,
+but as if she saw something invisible that lurked and loomed behind it,
+so that I asked her what she thought it meant.
+
+"It means," she said, "that Jimmy's done it all himself. He's had to do
+it all himself. She hasn't _cared_."
+
+I said, it looked as if _he_ hadn't cared.
+
+She moaned, "Oh, but he did--he did. He's cared so awfully. That's the
+dreadful part of it. You can see he has. Just look at those vases and
+those cabinets and things. And think of the money the poor thing must
+have spent on it!"
+
+"But," I said, "it's so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable.
+The old house was perfect. So, in its way, was the cottage."
+
+"I'm afraid that wasn't Jimmy's taste--it was Vee-Vee's. She did
+everything."
+
+"She told us _he_ did."
+
+"Poor darling--she wanted us to think he did."
+
+"He appreciated it, anyhow."
+
+"He'd appreciate anything if she did it."
+
+"Then," I said, "why should he break loose like this now?"
+
+"Because she hasn't cared. She hasn't cared a hang. She's left everything
+to him. And you can see, poor dear, how he's spread himself."
+
+Oh, yes, you could see. It was as if he had never had scope before, and
+now, with no limit to his opportunity, he had simply run amok. It wasn't
+that the things he had gathered round him in his orgy were not fine
+things. It was the awful way he'd mixed them, yielding incontinently to
+each solicitation as it came along. Dealers had been on the look-out for
+Jimmy to exploit his fury.
+
+In his Tudor hall he had been constrained to unity by a great idea. But
+not here. And reminiscences of the Canterbury drawing-room had suggested
+to him that you _could_ mix things. So, using a satinwood suite with
+tinted marqueterie and old rose upholsterings (he had succumbed to it in
+the first freshness of his innocence) as a base, he had added Boule
+cabinets and modern Indian tables in carved open-work to Adams cabinets
+and Renaissance tables in ebony inlaid with engraved ivory, and
+eighteenth-century gilded bergère chairs to old oak and Chippendale.
+Cloisonné and Sèvres stood side by side on the same shelf. He had an
+Aubusson carpet in the middle of the floor, and his Bokhara rugs at
+intervals down the sides. Norah was sitting on the emerald-green brocade
+of an Empire sofa, clutching the gilt sphinx head of the arm-end. It was
+a double room, and emerald-green curtains hung at the tall windows in the
+front and at the large stained-glass window at the back, and at the wide
+archway between. And an Algerian lamp swung from the back ceiling, and an
+Early Victorian glass chandelier from the front.
+
+"And the awfullest thing of all is," Norah was saying, "that he's done it
+to please her."
+
+"Don't believe her. That's the beautiful part of it."
+
+Viola had come in by the door of the back room and she was smiling at us.
+
+Yet, even as she smiled, she had that look of being detached, of not
+caring.
+
+We couldn't say anything--we were too miserable. She looked round the
+dreadful rooms as if she were trying to see them for the first time, as
+if some reverberation of the horror we had felt did penetrate to her in
+her remoteness. She smiled faintly.
+
+"What _does_ it matter," she said, "so long as it makes him happy? It
+would be sweet if you'd come down and help us now."
+
+We went down, and the house-warming began.
+
+It was Jimmy who told us what our business was. We were to stand by
+visitors, he said, as they came in and break the shock (he had observed
+it) of the Tudor hall. If we couldn't break it we must do what we could
+to help recovery. He had seen desperate cases yield to champagne-cup
+administered during the first paroxysm.
+
+We had a little trouble with some of the minor confraternity--their
+emotions were facile and champagne intensified them. They would ask where
+the throne-room was and when our host was going to be measured for his
+suit of armour, and what did we think he'd done with the family
+portraits?
+
+But the Thesigers (all except Charlie--and Charlie, Norah said, had no
+heart), the Thesigers offered an example of the most beautiful manners.
+I shall never forget the General's face as the suits of armour struck
+him--his sudden spasm of joy and the austere heroism that suppressed it.
+And the Canon--
+
+The Canon rose to even greater heights. We were a bit afraid that he
+would overdo it and look as if he were trying to show us how a Christian
+gentleman could bear such things as Jimmy's furnishings. But no. He
+behaved as though he saw nothing in the least unusual in his furnishings,
+as though Jimmy's Tudor hall and miscellaneous drawing-room were his
+natural background.
+
+But for sheer pluck and presence of mind not one of them could touch
+Jevons. He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above
+them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his
+atmosphere of deadly peril. He volplaned, he looped the loop. _His_
+behaviour was unsurpassable. For _his_ case, if you like, was desperate.
+I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room.
+He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger,
+not the quiver of an eyelash, had escaped him. And consider what it
+meant to him. In a furious climax of expenditure he had achieved the
+arresting spectacle of his house in Mayfair, and his first night, his
+house-warming, was turning under his eyes into a triumph for the
+Thesigers' manners and a failure for him. He had no illusions. Unless he
+did something to stop it, the whole thing would be one enormous and
+lamentable and expensive failure.
+
+He had to do something. And he did it. He left off his uneasy swagger and
+his rocking. He met the heroic and beautiful faces of the Thesigers with
+his engaging twinkle. He sought out and ministered to two young girls who
+had been brought there by the minor confraternity and were hiding in a
+corner on the point of hysteria. We heard him telling them that the
+throne-room was being built out over the scullery leads (he must have
+known what the minor confraternity had been up to), that in the great
+fireplace in his kitchen you could roast three journalists whole, and
+that the question of the family portraits was receiving his attention. He
+had a deal on with the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery for the
+purchase of the Holbein Henry the Eighth. By the time he had finished it
+was open to us to suppose that the house in Mayfair was his joke and not
+ours, that he had furnished it in this preposterous manner in order to be
+really and truly funny, and to keep himself and Viola in perfect and
+perpetual gaiety. It was as if he were trying to say to us, "None of you
+people--least of all the confraternity--knows how to live. Life isn't a
+calamity; it's a joke; and to live properly you should meet life in its
+own spirit; you should do exuberant and gay and gorgeous things, like
+me."
+
+And then when we had all come round, he rearranged all the furniture in
+his drawing-room for charades (showing no respect whatever for his
+satinwood suite); and after the charades he rolled up his Aubusson carpet
+and cleared the place for a dance that was ruin to his parquet floor.
+And we had supper; and then more dancing till four o'clock in the
+morning.
+
+Of the dancing I remember nothing but Viola whirling round and round, as
+it were for ever, in Charlie Thesiger's arms, and her dead-white face
+looking over his shoulder, as if she saw nothing, nothing whatever; as if
+she were detached even from the arms that held her.
+
+My last recollection is of Jimmy's face when Norah said to him, "Oh,
+Jimmy, I _love_ your dear little lions!"--and Jimmy's answer:
+
+"Little lions--yes--they make me feel tall and majestic."
+
+"He _is_ going it, isn't he?" said Charlie Thesiger.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At this point, when I look back over what I've written, it seems to me
+that I've done nothing but record changes so many and so marked that
+their history has no sort of continuity. But in reality it was not so. Up
+to December, nineteen-ten, there was no break, not even a dividing line.
+Compared with what happened then I am compelled to think of Viola's
+marriage, not as a risky experiment that had so far defeated prophecy,
+but as an entirely serene and happy thing. Between the moment when they
+set up that four-post bed in that absurd little house in Hampstead and
+the day of their leaving Edwardes Square behind them I cannot point to
+any time and say, "That was the beginning of it," or put my finger on an
+event and show the difference there.
+
+Unless it was Reggie's coming back.
+
+But the results of that didn't appear till later.
+
+Any difference I may have noted previously was an affair of shades, of
+delicate oscillations. There was no lapse without a recovery, no
+departure without a return.
+
+And here, at the end of nineteen-ten, I got a line drawn sharply on
+either side of a break I cannot bridge. The minute Jimmy moved into that
+house in Mayfair things began to go wrong.
+
+It was as if Jimmy, in his love of doing risky things, had cast, this
+time, a dreadful die.
+
+From that evening onward I watched them with anxiety. I do not know how
+far Jevons was aware that the house in Mayfair was a blunder; I think he
+wouldn't have acknowledged that it was a blunder at all. His own attitude
+to it was not in the least disturbed by his humorous perception of other
+people's. With his dexterity in adjustments he was quite capable of
+reconciling them, quite capable of enjoying the effect it had on nervous
+organisms while he himself took it seriously. It was, after all, his own
+achievement, and a very astonishing achievement too. He continued to
+respect it as the immense sign of his material prosperity, the
+advertisement, you may say, of his arrival. His business instinct would
+never have allowed him to repent of an advertisement.
+
+There _was_ this gross element in his enjoyment.
+
+And there was also the pure and charming happiness of a child that
+suddenly finds itself left, with boundless opportunity, to its own
+gorgeous caprice. You could no more blame Jevons for the bad taste of his
+drawing-room and his Tudor hall than you could blame a child for its
+joy in a treasure of tinsel and coloured glass.
+
+But when we asked ourselves where, in this outbreak of Jimmy's fantasy,
+did Viola come in, we had to own that she came in nowhere. Not only had
+she stood by without lifting a finger to interfere with its tempestuous
+course; not only had she submitted without a protest; she seemed to show
+no adequate sense of what had happened. Her detachment was the unnatural
+and dreadful thing.
+
+And this happiness of his was at Viola's mercy. It would last just so
+long as she could keep him from knowing that he had outraged the beauty,
+the fitness and the simplicity she loved. I thought how he had once
+boasted that he knew what she wanted, that he knew what she was thinking
+and feeling all the time. How could he have imagined that she wanted
+_this_? What was his knowledge worth if he didn't know what she would
+think and feel about it?
+
+Unless, indeed, she had lied to him. Lied from first to last,
+deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the
+pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and
+it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola
+had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside,
+where you would have thought she would have most wanted to plunge in; the
+calculation and the indifference both were so beyond her that you could
+only think one thing: she hated it; she hated the new turn his prosperity
+had taken; she almost hated him because of it; and her heart was broken
+because of Reggie, and it was hardening where it broke; she hated Reggie
+at moments; and she had moments of hating Jevons because he had come
+between them; and she was compounding with her conscience, punishing
+herself for all these hatreds and for a thousand secret criticisms and
+disloyalties and repugnances; avenging, as it were beforehand, all
+hatreds and criticisms, disloyalties and repugnances to come. For she saw
+it all now--how it was going to be. And she was trying to make up for it
+by giving Jimmy his own way in the things that, as she had said, "didn't
+matter."
+
+And if Jimmy's way was to surround her with pretentious silliness instead
+of beautiful simplicity, then she must rise above her surroundings. Her
+spirit, at any rate, must refuse to be surrounded.
+
+Her attitude was more lofty than you can imagine. As Norah had said,
+there would always be a Belfry--something high and unusual--in Viola's
+life. Well, she was going to live in the Belfry, that was all. And if she
+was to be perfectly safe in her Belfry, and Jimmy perfectly happy in his
+Tudor hall, he mustn't know that she was there.
+
+I don't know how she really put it to herself; I don't suppose she "put"
+it any way; but subconsciously, as they say, it must have been like that.
+Anyhow, her behaviour amounted to an evasion of Jimmy, and this
+particular evasion was sad enough when you consider that in the beginning
+it had been Jimmy who had taken her to look at the Belfry--who was the
+one man who could be trusted to take her, and that she would never have
+dreamed of setting off on such an adventure by herself, and that she
+wasn't fitted for it. In fact, I can't think of anybody less fit.
+
+It showed more than anything how the glamour must have worn off him.
+
+It had worn off even for us to whom he came each time with a comparative
+freshness. And if it hadn't worn off for his public and for the
+confraternity, it was simply because as an engineer of literature he was
+inexhaustible. He had so perfected his machinery that the turning out
+of novels and of plays had become with him a sort of automatic habit, and
+if there was any falling off in his quality he was right when he said
+that nobody but himself would find it out. He had got an infinite
+capacity for plagiarizing himself; and in his worst things he imitated
+his best so closely that he might well defy you to tell the difference.
+
+But you cannot work as he had worked for five years at a stretch and not
+suffer for it. And you cannot aim at material success as he had aimed,
+deliberately and continuously, for five years without becoming yourself a
+bit material. And you cannot be immersed and wallow in it as he wallowed
+without corruption.
+
+There's no doubt that for the next, two--three--four years he wallowed.
+He was so deep in that, even after Viola's illness that came in
+nineteen-thirteen and purged him somewhat, he continued to wallow. And we
+had to stand by while he was doing it and pretend that we weren't
+shocked. There was no good trying to give him a hand to help him out, he
+was so happy wallowing.
+
+I am far from blaming him. Personally, if it hadn't been for Viola, I
+should have liked to think that he was able to get all that ecstasy out
+of his sordid triumph. For it _was_ sordid. If it wasn't for Viola you
+could tick off each year with a note of his preposterously increasing
+income, and say that was all there was in it.
+
+I muddle up the first years of it. I know that in nineteen-eleven he
+brought out his fifth novel and his third play and that the run and
+the returns of both were astounding, even for him. I know that in
+nineteen-twelve he brought out two novels and two new plays that ran at
+the same time, and that he roped in Europe and the Colonies; and that his
+income rose into five figures. He couldn't help it. His business was a
+thing that had passed beyond his control. With infinite exertions he had
+set it spinning, and now it looked as if he had only to touch it now and
+then with his finger to keep it going. And if he did get a bit excited is
+it any wonder? There was the dreadful fascination of the thing that
+compelled him to watch it till its perpetual gyrations went to his head
+and made it reel.
+
+His figure seems to me to reel slightly as it moves through those rooms
+in the house in Green Street, and before the footlights as he answered
+calls, and across the banquet-halls of the "Ritz" or the "Criterion" or
+the "Savoy," when--about three times a year--he celebrated his triumphs.
+I see those years as a succession of banquets running indistinguishably
+into each other. I see him buying more and more furniture and
+superintending its disposal with excitement. He seems to me to have been
+always buying things. I've forgotten most of them except the things he
+bought for Viola--the jewellery that frightened her, the opera cloak that
+made her hysterical, the furs that had to be sent back again (you'd have
+thought he couldn't have gone wrong with furs, but he did), and the hats
+that even Jimmy owned it was impossible to wear. I can see his face
+saddened by these failures and a little puzzled, as if he couldn't
+conceive how his star should have gone back on him like that. I can see
+him, and I can see Viola, kneeling on the floor in his study and packing
+some beastly thing up in paper, tenderly, as if it had been the corpse of
+a beloved hope; and I can hear him saying (it was after the opera cloak
+and the hysterics), "Walter, you can monkey with a woman's 'eart, and you
+can ruin her immortal soul, but if you meddle with her clothes it's hell
+for both of you. Don't you do it, my boy."
+
+I remember scores of little things like that, things done and things said
+with an incorruptible sweetness and affection, but things accentuated
+with lapsed aitches and with gestures that only Jimmy was unaware of.
+Those years are marked for me more than anything by the awful increase
+in his solecisms. Their number, their enormity and frequency rose with
+his income, and for the best of reasons. It was as if, his object being
+gained, he could afford them. He was no longer on his guard. He had no
+longer any need to be. The strain was over--he relaxed, and in relaxation
+he fell back into his old habits.
+
+All those years we seem to have been looking on at the slow, slow process
+of his vulgarization. By nineteen-twelve the confraternity had begun to
+regard Tasker Jevons as an outrageous joke. And in nineteen-thirteen,
+when both his plays were still running, even his father-in-law said that
+he was a disgusting spectacle. And Reggie (he was Major Thesiger now,
+with a garrison appointment at Woolwich) Reggie kept as far away from him
+as ever.
+
+Sometimes I have thought that Viola's detachment helped his undoing. She
+wasn't there to pull him up or to cover his disasters; she had more and
+more the look of not being there at all.
+
+And Charlie Thesiger was always there. There with a most decided look of
+being up to something.
+
+Jevons didn't seem to mind him. You might have said that Charlie was
+another of the risks he took.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+In nineteen-thirteen Jimmy bought a motor-car.
+
+He was more excited about his motor-car than he had been about his
+house--any of his houses. Even Viola was interested and came rushing down
+from her Belfry when it arrived.
+
+He bought it at the end of January. A good, useful car that would shut or
+open and serve for town or country. But it was no good to them till
+April.
+
+For all February and March Viola was ill. She had been running down
+gradually for about two years, getting a little whiter and a little
+slenderer every month, and in the first week of February she got
+influenza and ignored it, and went out for a drive in the motor-car with
+a temperature of a hundred and four.
+
+Nineteen-thirteen stands out for me as the year of Viola's illness.
+
+It turned to pneumonia and she was dangerously ill for three weeks, in
+fact, she nearly died of it; and for more weeks than I can remember she
+lay about on sofas to which Jimmy and the nurse or one of us carried her
+from her bed. And in all that time Jimmy nursed and waited on her and sat
+up with her at night. If he slept it was with one eye and both ears open.
+And I never saw anybody as gentle as he was and as skilful with his hands
+and quiet. He didn't even breathe hard. And when she was convalescent and
+a little fretful and troublesome there wasn't anybody else who could
+manage her. The nurses would call him to feed her and give her her
+medicine and lift her. She couldn't bear anybody else to touch her.
+
+I remember one day when she had been moved from her bed to the couch for
+the first time and she was so weak, poor darling, that she cried. I
+remember her saying, "Jimmy, if you'll only put your hands on my forehead
+and keep them there."
+
+I think he must have sat for hours with his hands on her forehead.
+
+I doubt if he was ever away from her for more than a few minutes except
+when one of us came and dragged him out for a walk in the Park against
+his will. It was always for a walk in the Park--the same walk, through
+Stanhope Gate to the end of the Serpentine and back again, so that he
+could time it to a minute. He wouldn't look at his motor-car. I think he
+hated it. Anyhow, I know he lent it to us until she was well enough to go
+out in it again.
+
+She wasn't well enough till April. She never would have been well enough,
+she never would have been with us at all, the doctors and the nurses
+said, if it hadn't been for Jimmy. He swore that they were fools when
+they gave her up and said she couldn't live. He said he'd _make_ her
+live. And I believe he made her.
+
+He gave her till April to get well in; and when April came she did get
+well. And he took her away to the South of France, and to Switzerland
+when the months grew warmer (the doctor told him it was a risk, but he
+said he'd take it); he took her in the motor-car, and he brought her back
+in June, still slender but recovered.
+
+That illness of hers saved them for the time. It reinstated him. It
+improved him. He couldn't, you see, be devoted and vulgar at the same
+time. All lighter agitations and excitements might be dangerous to
+Jevons, but passion and great grief and grave anxiety ennobled him. He
+came back from Switzerland chastened and purified of all offence. Even
+Reggie couldn't have found a flaw in him.
+
+That had always been Jevons's way. Just when you had made up your mind
+that you couldn't bear him he would go and do something so beautiful that
+it made your heart ache. From the very fact that he was intolerable
+to-day you might be sure he'd be adorable to-morrow.
+
+And when we saw him the night he brought Viola home, moving quietly about
+the house, giving orders in that gentle voice that he had in reserve, we
+thought, Really, it will be all right now. Viola's passion for him had
+been near death so many times, and each time he had saved it.
+
+We hadn't allowed for the reaction--he was bound to feel it after three
+months' unnatural repression; we hadn't allowed for the reaction that
+Viola was bound to feel after three years' unnatural detachment; we
+hadn't allowed for the state of her nerves after her illness; there were
+all sorts of things we hadn't allowed for, and they all came at once;
+they burst out from under their covers one evening in June when Norah and
+I were dining in Green Street.
+
+It was one of Jimmy's gestures that began it. Viola had never been able
+to control his gestures; she had never been able to get used to them; and
+there were two in particular that made her wince still as she had winced
+in the beginning. She had contracted the habit of wincing in response to
+them. Whenever Jimmy jerked his thumb over his shoulder you saw her
+blink; and whenever he cracked his knuckles she shrank back. The blink
+followed the jerk, and the shrinking followed the cracking as the flash
+follows the snap of the trigger.
+
+I have never known Jimmy jerk as he jerked that evening. When Norah had
+no salad, when my glass was empty, when Viola wanted more potatoes, when
+he wanted more potatoes himself, Jimmy jerked his thumb. The butler
+seemed to have made it a point of honour to acknowledge no other signal.
+And every time it happened I noticed the increasing violence of Viola's
+reaction. What had once been a gentle flicker of the eyelashes was now a
+succession of spasms that left her eyebrows twisted.
+
+And at the fifth jerk she covered her eyes with her hands and cried out,
+"Jimmy, if you do that _once_ more I shall scream."
+
+Poor Jimmy asked innocently, "What did I do?"
+
+"You jerked your thumb. You jerked it five times, and I simply cannot
+bear it."
+
+"All right--_all_ right," said Jimmy. "I needn't jerk it again. It's
+quite easy not to."
+
+"I was afraid it wasn't," she sighed.
+
+I was thinking, "Whatever will she do if he cracks his knuckles?" and
+that very minute he cracked them. The butler, demoralized by Jimmy's
+methods, had gone out of the room just when he was wanted. That annoyed
+Jimmy. I have never known him produce such a detonation.
+
+Viola started as if he had hit her. But she said nothing this time.
+
+Jimmy didn't see her. He was looking over his shoulder to see whether the
+butler was or was not answering his summons. And then--I think that at
+one period of his life he must have been a little proud of his
+accomplishment--he did it again. He did it _crescendo, fortissimo,
+prestissimo, strabato and con molto expressione_; he played on his
+knuckles with a virtuosity of which I have never seen the like.
+
+The sheer technique of the performance ought to have disarmed her. (It
+enchanted Norah. But then Norah hadn't had an illness.) She flung a wild
+look round the room as if she called on treacherous heavenly powers to
+save her, then rose and very slowly, in silence and a matchless dignity,
+she walked out, past me, past Jimmy, past the returning butler, and down
+the passage and into the Tudor hall.
+
+"Well--I _am_ blowed," said Jevons.
+
+Norah put her hand on his arm.
+
+"You were wonderful, Jimmy dear," she said. "I could have listened to you
+for ever. So could Walter. But then, we haven't any nerves."
+
+"After all," said Jimmy, "what _did_ I do?"
+
+I said, "You made a most infernal noise, old chap, you know."
+
+"I say! _Come_--"
+
+We had heard the andirons go down with a clatter.
+
+That was how we knew she was in the Tudor hall.
+
+He found her there when he trotted out and took her some wine and a
+peach. He came back almost instantly.
+
+"It's all right," he said. "She's eating it."
+
+But it was very far from all right.
+
+All the prisoned storms and the secret agonies of years were loose that
+night, and they had their way with her.
+
+We found her dreadfully calm when we got back to her. She had peeled her
+peach and eaten it, and she had drunk her wine, and she was sitting by
+the great hearth where she had kicked down the andirons; she was sitting,
+I remember, on one of the Tudor chairs with the carved backs and the
+tapestry--the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground--sitting very
+upright, in her beautiful trailing gown that curled round her feet; and
+she was a little flushed (but that may have been the wine).
+
+Jimmy went and stood next her in front of his hearth, with his hands in
+his trouser pockets--I mean with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets,
+where he seemed to have put them to keep them out of mischief; and he
+twinkled as if he were still thinking of the andirons. And every now and
+then he glanced at his wife sideways out of his brilliant sapphire eyes,
+without moving his head a hair's-breadth.
+
+And none of us said anything.
+
+Then Jimmy rang for coffee, and that started her.
+
+She said, "Are you going to do any work to-night?"
+
+"No," said Jimmy, "I don't think so. Why?"
+
+"Because, if you don't want your study I'll sit in it."
+
+"All right." He said it vaguely. But he must have suspected something was
+up, for he turned his head round and looked at her straight; and again he
+said, "Why?"
+
+"Because," she said, "it's the only tolerable room in the house."
+
+He flushed faintly at this. "You mean," he said, "it's the only one I
+didn't bother about?"
+
+"I _said_ it was the only tolerable one."
+
+"I see." His flush went deep, and his mouth closed over his teeth.
+
+There was no doubt he saw.
+
+She had hurt him badly. It was quite a minute before he spoke again,
+and when he did speak you felt that he had yielded, in spite of
+himself, to an overpowering curiosity. He must--he seemed to be saying to
+himself--sift this mystery to the bottom.
+
+"D'you mean," he said, "that _this_ room doesn't--er--appeal to you?
+What's wrong with it?"
+
+"There's nothing wrong with it," she said, "if you like it."
+
+"Never mind whether I like it or not. It's detestable. _And_ the
+drawing-room?"
+
+She did not answer. I think she was ashamed of herself.
+
+"Even more so, I suppose. And--your boudoir?"
+
+(I've forgotten the boudoir. She hardly ever let any of us go into it. It
+was pretty awful.)
+
+"I do wish," she said, "you'd leave me alone. What _does_ it matter?"
+
+"Your boudoir," he went on, as if she hadn't said anything, "is, if
+possible, more detestable than the drawing-room."
+
+"I never said so."
+
+"Precisely. That's my grievance. Why, in Heaven's name, didn't you say
+so? Why did you tell me that you _liked_ all these abominations?"
+
+"Because they didn't matter."
+
+"Why lie about them if they didn't matter?"
+
+"I mean they didn't matter to me. They don't."
+
+"My dear child, what on earth do you suppose they matter to me? What made
+you think they mattered?"
+
+"The way you went on about them."
+
+"Oh--the way I go on--Well, if _that_ matters--"
+
+She rose. I think she had heard the tinkle of the coffee-cups in the
+corridor and wanted to put an end to what in any hands but Jimmy's would
+have been an unseemly altercation.
+
+"Will it matter if we go upstairs?"
+
+"No. Not a bit." He snapped and twinkled at the same time.
+
+She went, and Norah followed her.
+
+Jevons settled himself in an armchair. I saw how unperturbed and
+deliberate he was as he took his coffee from the tray, and with what an
+incorrigible air he jerked his thumb towards the staircase. I can still
+hear him call up the staircase in a magisterial voice, "The ladies are
+in the study, Parker." When we were alone he fell into meditation.
+
+It was apparently as the result of meditation that he said, "I suppose it
+is a bit crude, if you come to think of it. Only why couldn't she say so
+at the time?"
+
+I said I supposed she was afraid of hurting his feelings.
+
+"My feelings? How could I have any feelings about a blanketty
+drawing-room suite? Does she really think I'm such a fool that I can't
+live without lions on my staircase? I stuck the beastly things there
+because I thought she'd like 'em. If I thought she'd like a tame
+rhinoceros in her boudoir I'd have got her one, if I'd 'ad to go out and
+catch 'im and train 'im myself. If I thought _now_ that the only way to
+preserve her affection was to wear that suit of armour every night at
+dinner I'd wear it and glory in wearing it. There isn't any damned silly
+thing I wouldn't do and glory in."
+
+And then--"Her nerves must be in an awful state."
+
+He meditated again.
+
+"Tell you what--I'll get rid of this place. I'll let it go furnished for
+what it'll fetch. I'll only keep the things we had before--the things she
+liked. They _are_ prettier."
+
+He looked round him with his disenchanted eyes.
+
+"I can see it's all wrong, this sort of thing. It's in bad taste. Rotten
+bad taste. I suppose I must have been a bit excited about it at the
+time--I must have thought it was all right or I couldn't have stood it.
+
+"It's a phase I've gone through.
+
+"I can understand perfectly well how she feels about it.
+
+"Fact is, I hate the place myself--the whole beastly house I hate. I've
+hated it ever since she was ill in it. I can't get away from her illness.
+I shall always see her ill. She'll be ill again if we go on living in it.
+
+"I'm tired of the whole business--I'll let it to-morrow and take a house
+in the country.
+
+"You might go upstairs, old man, and see what she's doing."
+
+I went upstairs.
+
+She was sitting in one corner of the study with a book in her hand
+pretending to read. Norah was sitting in another corner with a book in
+her hand, pretending to read. I gathered that Norah had been talking to
+her sister. I took up a book and pretended to read too.
+
+Presently, when she thought we were absorbed, Viola got up and left us.
+Norah waited till the door had closed on her. Then she spoke.
+
+"Wally--it's more awful than we've ever imagined. I don't think she'll be
+able to stand it much longer."
+
+"Well," I said, "she won't have to stand it much longer. He's going to
+chuck the place. It's got on _his_ nerves, too. He understands exactly
+how she feels about it."
+
+"Let's hope he doesn't understand how she feels about--It isn't the
+place, Wally."
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"I'm most awfully afraid it's Jimmy."
+
+"Jimmy? You don't mean she doesn't care about him?"
+
+"Oh, no, she cares about him, and it's because she cares so that she
+can't stand him."
+
+"Well," I said, "whether she cares or not, it's rough on Jimmy."
+
+"It's rough on her. It's rough on both of them. It's getting rougher and
+rougher, and it's wearing her out."
+
+"Won't it wear him out too?"
+
+"N-no. Nothing will wear Jimmy out. He's indestructible. He'll wear her
+out."
+
+"He says he's going to take a house in the country. How do you think
+that'll answer?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I don't know, Walter. I don't really know. It sounds risky."
+
+"The whole thing," I said, "was risky from the start."
+
+"There are two things," she said, "that would save them--if Reggie were
+to come round. Or if Jimmy were to have an illness; and neither of them
+is in the least likely to happen."
+
+"There's a third thing," I said--"if Viola were to have a baby."
+
+"That isn't likely either. He'd never let her. He says it would kill her.
+It's pitiful, it's pitiful. Can't you see," she said, "that he adores
+her?"
+
+I said I didn't see what we were there for, and that it was time for us
+to go.
+
+As I followed her down the stairs that led to the Tudor hall she paused
+suddenly on the landing where a second lion marked the turn. She had her
+finger to her lip. We drew back. But not before I had looked down over
+the balustrade into the hall and seen Jimmy sitting on one of the thrones
+with the lilies of France, and Viola crouching beside him on the rug with
+her head hidden on his knee.
+
+He had his hands on her forehead and was saying, "It's all right. Do you
+suppose I don't understand?"
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+It was late in August before Jevons found a country house large enough,
+yet not too large, and old enough, yet not too old--he would have nothing
+that even remotely suggested the Tudor period. And in the intervals of
+looking for his house he wrote another novel and two more plays. There
+was a decided falling-off in all of them, and I think Jevons himself was
+a little nervous. He said he'd have to be careful next time or they'd
+find him out. Once he had settled the affair of the house he would set to
+work and strengthen the position which, after all, he hadn't lost.
+
+He had gained, if anything. Nineteen-thirteen stands as his year of
+maximum prosperity. Even the house in Mayfair justified itself when he
+let it, with all its principal rooms furnished, to an American railway
+magnate at a rent that enabled him to indulge the passion he had
+conceived for Amershott Old Grange.
+
+He used to say he would never have been happy again if he couldn't have
+had Amershott Old Grange. Everything about it seemed propitious. They had
+found it by a happy accident when they weren't looking for it, weren't
+thinking of it, when they were trying to get out of Sussex and back to
+London after a long day's motoring in search of houses. Nothing that
+Essex or Kent or Buckinghamshire (Hertfordshire was ruled out by the
+presence in it of the Registrar) or Surrey or Hampshire or Sussex, so
+far, could do had satisfied them, and Jevons was beginning to talk rather
+wildly about Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and Wilts, and even Devon
+and Cornwall, when they lost their way in the cross-country roads between
+Midhurst and Petworth and so came upon Amershott Old Grange. It was
+hidden behind an old rose-red brick wall in a lane, and it was only by
+standing up in the motorcar that they caught sight of its long line of
+red-tiled dormer windows. The very notice-board was hidden, staggering
+back in an ivy bush that topped the wall.
+
+"I won't have a house," said Jimmy, "that's a day older than Queen Anne."
+No more would Viola.
+
+And the Old Grange was not a day older than Queen Anne or a day younger.
+It was the most perfect specimen of a Queen Anne house you could have
+wished to see--the long, straight front, the slender door, the two
+storeys with their rows of straight, flat windows and the steep brows of
+the dormers over them. It was all rose-red brick and rose-red tiles, with
+roses and clematis bursting out in crimson and purple all over the front.
+It stood at right angles to the wall and to the lane, and there was a
+long grass-garden in front of it, with walls all round and herbaceous
+borders under the walls; and from the high postern door in the outer wall
+opening to the lane a wide flagged path went all the way in front of the
+house to the door in the inner wall that led into the kitchen garden and
+the orchard. Further down the lane were the doors of the courtyard at the
+back of the house where the outhouses and the stables and the dovecot
+were; and beyond the courtyard there was a paddock, and you would have
+thought that was enough. But, besides his Queen Anne house and his
+gardens and his orchard and his courtyard and his dovecot and his
+paddock, Jimmy had acquired ten acres of moorland, to say nothing of a
+belt of pinewood that ran the whole length of his estate behind the
+kitchen garden and the paddock and the moor. And the whole business of
+acquiring this property went without a hitch. He took it on the long
+tail-end of a lease from an impecunious landlord who couldn't afford to
+keep it up.
+
+He obtained possession by September and in the early spring of
+nineteen-fourteen he was settled in Amershott Old Grange.
+
+They furnished it as they had furnished the house in Edwardes Square,
+with the most complete return to beautiful simplicity.
+
+Jimmy polished off a short novel and a play between October and June, and
+kept himself going on the proceeds of his old novels, his old plays, and
+his old short stories collected in a volume. Then I think he must have
+sat down to wait events.
+
+For when we went down to stay with them we found him waiting. He was
+entirely prepared for certain contingencies. If anybody knew anything
+about English social conditions it was Tasker Jevons. He had calculated
+all the chances and provided for the ostracism that attends the inexpert
+invader of the country-side. He was aware that there were powers in and
+around Amershott that were not to be conciliated. The very fact that
+their territory lay so near the frontier (Amershott is only sixty-seven
+miles from London) kept them on their guard. To any good old county
+family, Tasker Jevons's celebrity was nothing, if it was not an added
+offence, and his opulence was less than nothing. In settling among them
+he ran the risk of being ignored. But when it came to ignoring, Jimmy
+considered that success lay with the party who got in first. So before he
+settled he took care to diffuse a sort of impression that the Tasker
+Jevonses were never at home to anybody, that it was not to be expected
+that a great novelist and playwright would have time for calling and
+being called on, even if he had the absurd inclination. He had one
+solitary introduction in the neighbourhood, and he worked it very
+adroitly, not to obtain other introductions, but to spread the rumour of
+retirement and exclusiveness.
+
+His arrival, preceded by this attractive legend, became an event. You
+couldn't even affect to overlook it. And if it was not possible for Jimmy
+to subdue his features to an expression of complete ignoring, he had got
+in so promptly with his attitude that it took the wind out of the sails
+of any people who were merely proposing to ignore.
+
+Then, having come amongst them as a shy recluse, Jimmy began instantly to
+focus attention on himself. He hadn't been six weeks in the county before
+he had become the most conspicuous object in it.
+
+I don't know how he did it; you never really caught him at it; and yet,
+when you came down to stay with him, you felt all the time that he was
+doing it; you felt a sort of shame (a shame that he couldn't feel) in
+seeing that he did it so perpetually and so well. He had a way of making
+his privacy a public thing. There was something positively indecent in
+his detachment; it advertised him as no possible immersion could have
+done. I've seen him lying out on his moor basking all by himself in the
+sun; I've seen him meditating all by himself in his pinewood; I've seen
+him sitting in his walled garden, with the apparatus of his business all
+about him, when you would have said that if ever a man's life was hidden
+and withdrawn it was Tasker Jevons's. And yet it wasn't. You knew it
+wasn't; and he knew that you knew. He knew that his gardener and his
+chauffeur and his butler and his cook and his housemaid and his
+parlourmaid knew that he was sitting in his garden writing, or meditating
+in his pinewood or basking on his moor in the sun, and that their
+knowledge penetrated to every house in the village, to every house in the
+county within a radius of twenty miles. And when he was not doing any of
+these prominently tranquil things he was tearing about the country in his
+motor-car.
+
+I have never seen anything like Jevons's motoring. It was in this new
+aspect of his that he was, I think, most remarkable. I say he made his
+privacy a public thing; but in the furious publicity of his motoring it
+was the other way round. He turned the public roads into a private track
+through paradise. I do not mean that he was a road-hog; far from it. He
+had the most exquisite manners of the road, He would slow down for a hen
+in the distance and upset himself into the ditch to avoid a rabbit. I
+have known him (with his first car) give a lift to any filthy tramp
+between Midhurst and Portsmouth. I mean that the act of motoring
+transported him; and he did these things instinctively, mechanically,
+without interruption to his rapture. Speed and the wind of speed, the air
+rushing by like a water-race as he ripped through it, the streaming past
+him of trees and hedges, the humming and throbbing of his engines, were
+ecstasy to Jimmy. He had learned to drive the thing, and his sense of
+power over it gave him the physical exaltation that he craved for. I
+believe that when he sat in his motor-car, driving it, he was filled,
+intoxicated, with the pride and splendour of life. He had power over
+everybody and everything that lay in his track, except other motor-cars;
+and he exulted in his knowledge that he could annihilate them and didn't.
+He enjoyed (voluptuously) his own mercy that spared them. Through his
+motor-car he attained such an extension of his personality that he became
+intolerable to other people and unrecognizable to himself.
+
+And yet I do not think that even at the height of his ecstasy he ever
+really forgot that he was Tasker Jevons, the great novelist and
+playwright, in his motor-car. When he drove you through Portsmouth or
+Chichester, or even through little Midhurst, you felt that he thrilled
+from head to foot with self-consciousness. He knew and had acute pleasure
+in knowing that people noticed him as he went by; that the tradesmen
+turned out of their shops to stare after him; and that everybody said,
+"See that chap? That's Tasker Jevons. He always drives his own car."
+
+He owned that he enjoyed it. I remember the first time we went down to
+stay with them (it was in May of nineteen-fourteen), when he was driving
+us through Midhurst from the station, how he said to us, "I'm glad I
+thought of living in the country. It makes me feel celebrated."
+
+We asked him if he hadn't ever felt it before; and he answered solemnly,
+"Never for a minute. Never, I mean, like I do down here. In London, if
+you do gather a crowd round you, you're swallowed up in it. Besides, you
+can't always gather a crowd. D'you suppose, if I were to drive down
+Piccadilly in this car--short of standing on my head--I could attract the
+attention I've attracted to-day? You saw those fellows come out and look
+at me? Well--they do that pretty nearly every time, Furnival.
+
+"No. London's no good. Too many houses--too many people--too many
+motor-cars. You can't stand out. What a man wants to set him off is
+landscape, Furny, landscape. You should see me on the goose-green at
+Amershott towards post-time."
+
+Well, I did see him on the goose-green towards post-time, and I saw what
+he meant. It was really as if I'd never seen him before properly.
+
+Heavens, how he stood out! It was as if a stage had been cleared for him,
+and for the figure he cut. He was quite right. You couldn't have done it
+in Piccadilly, or even in the suburbs. And he wasn't in his motor-car,
+mind you, then; he was simply strolling over from his house to post a
+letter in the village on the green, and I do not know how he contrived to
+infuse into so simple an act that subtle taint of advertisement. There
+was no necessity for him to post his own letters, he could easily have
+sent a servant. But I do believe he couldn't bear to miss the opportunity
+of being seen. When he passed the Vicarage, the Vicar and his wife and
+daughters were generally in their garden, and they turned to look at his
+passing, and he was exquisitely conscious of them. The villagers came out
+on to their doorsteps to look at him, and he was conscious of the
+villagers. The geese followed him in a long line across the common and
+stretched out their necks after him, and he was conscious of the geese.
+He enjoyed the publicity they gave him, and he said so.
+
+And I began to wonder whether the funny frankness that had so disarmed us
+was really as funny as it looked (the idea of disarmament, you see, was
+serious), whether he didn't say these things because he knew we saw him
+as he really was; because he saw himself as he really was, and couldn't
+bear it; because there was no escape for him unless he could make believe
+that he was in fun when he really wasn't.
+
+I do believe there was a time (any time before his Tudor period) when he
+_was_ in fun, pure fun; and even through the Tudor period his enjoyment
+of himself was innocent. But as I walked home with him across his moor
+that evening it was borne in upon me that Jimmy's innocence was gone.
+Living in the country had killed it. I had never perceived so definite a
+taint of vulgarity in him before.
+
+You would have thought it would have been all the other way, that living
+in the country would have made altogether for simplicity and purity. I
+believe that quite honestly he had thought it would, that he had come
+into the country to be purified and simplified, and to put himself right
+with Viola for ever. And the horrid irony of it was that the country
+didn't do any of these things to him; it complicated him, it saturated
+him with that taint I've mentioned, and instead of putting him right it
+showed him up. Quite horribly and cruelly it showed him up. I do not
+think there was a single weakness or a single secret meanness that he had
+that didn't suddenly rise up and stand out on the background of
+Amershott.
+
+All through that summer there, quite frankly, I detested Jevons. I
+believe that Norah came near detesting him, that she felt something very
+like contempt for him.
+
+And if Norah felt it you may imagine what Viola would feel.
+
+She was with us one evening (it was June, I think, and our second visit),
+when Jimmy showed most unmistakably the cloven hoof. We had come in from
+a long motor drive, and he had made at once, as he always did, for the
+silver plate in the hall where cards left by callers were put, if any
+callers came. I can see him now, breathing hard. I can see the glance he
+cast at the cards, and the little jerky curb he put on his excitement--he
+had the grace to be ashamed of it. And then I see him holding four cards
+in his hand, sober and quiet and flushed like a man who has triumphed
+solemnly. And I hear him read out the names: "Lord Amerley, Lady Amerley,
+Lady Octavia Amerley, the Honourable Frances Amerley. _That's_ all right.
+I gave them three months."
+
+And I see Viola look at him, taking in his figure in its motor-dress, and
+his face, with the foolish, weak elation he couldn't for the life of him
+keep out of it.
+
+Again I see him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity--and I
+don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there--very
+spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party
+they took us to.
+
+And later on--in the very beginning of July it must have been--I see him
+on his own lawn at his own garden-party, and--I didn't dream it this
+time--he was really dreadful. Instead of carrying it off with the levity
+that had so often saved him from perdition, there was that revolting
+triumph about him and an uneasy eagerness, as if he knew that his triumph
+wasn't quite complete. But the garden-party was, as he would have said,
+all right. They were all there, those people he had given three months
+to. He had pulled it off precisely as he had schemed and calculated.
+Those legends of his detachment and his hermit habits had been worked so
+as to excite a supreme curiosity--and it was being satisfied.
+
+And I cannot tell you whether he was really altered, or whether he had
+been like that all the time before Amershott had shown him up, and none
+of us had seen it except Viola.
+
+Oh no--it's impossible. He had altered. If he had been like this we must
+have seen it. What Viola had seen--if she had seen anything--was only the
+foreshadowing, the bare possibility of this.
+
+Charlie Thesiger was at that garden-party (he had retired from the
+service with the rank of Captain).
+
+And it was at the garden-party that I first noticed a change in his
+manner to his cousin's husband. He used to treat Jevons with a certain
+superciliousness, and with as much amusement, as much perception of his
+absurdity, as was possible for Charlie, who perceived so few things. Now
+I was struck with the correct young man's deference to his host. It was
+really as if it had at last dawned on Charlie that Jevons _was_ his host,
+and that he had other claims to distinction as well. The more dreadful
+Jimmy was, the more courteous Charlie showed himself to Jimmy. And this
+in spite of the fact that Jevons had a way of treating Charlie as if he
+didn't matter, as if for all recognizable purposes he wasn't there.
+
+When I spoke of this to Norah, she said that Viola had told him that if
+he couldn't be decent to Jimmy she wouldn't have him there.
+
+Well, there he was, hanging about Viola from morning till night; he had
+any amount of time on his hands now, and he spent most of it at
+Amershott. He was there when we weren't sometimes, so that we couldn't
+keep track of him. But his purposes ought to have been apparent to us. I
+think it was partly because he was aware of them himself that he went out
+of his way to be decent to Jimmy, almost as if he were sorry for him
+beforehand.
+
+For it was evident enough that Viola liked his being there, and liked to
+have him hanging round her. There was nothing about him that shocked or
+grated. I've no doubt he made himself entirely charming. His manners
+could be as beautiful as any of the Thesigers' when he chose, and they
+soothed her. I think she had ceased to feel them as a reproach to Jimmy.
+She had given up _his_ manners, poor dear, long ago, as a bad job. It was
+as if she had slaked her thirst for the unusual. Some secret and strong
+revulsion had thrown her back on the people and the things that she had
+been brought up amongst and that she had run away from. When Jimmy jarred
+on her she turned to Charlie for relief. And, after all, as Norah said,
+he was her cousin.
+
+I don't think we either of us saw anything more in it than that. Without
+some such reaction she must have surrendered to Amershott. She couldn't
+defend Jevons against that showing up. She couldn't defend herself
+against those revelations, she could only stand by and look on at his
+enormity and shudder. Unless she had put her dear eyes out she must have
+seen that in the country he was not only a bounder but a snob. And she
+must have writhed in feeling that to see him that way was to be a bit of
+a snob herself. She had accused herself of snobbishness long ago, before
+she married him, when, in order to marry him, she had burned her boats.
+
+What could she do? She couldn't put her eyes out. But I believe she would
+have been grateful to anybody who would have put them out for her.
+
+I can't tell whether she was always unhappy. I rather think she had liked
+Amershott, the house and the garden and the pinewood and the bit of moor,
+and I am certain that she liked motoring almost as much as Jimmy did at
+first. She could even take pleasure in Jimmy's power over the car when
+they were alone with it in the open country, when his pleasure had no
+taint in it. I've heard her say, when he wanted to run down to Chichester
+or Portsmouth, "Oh, for Heaven's sake, let's go somewhere where nobody
+can look at us!"
+
+She must have regarded the open country as the last refuge of his
+innocence. For her, more than for any of us, he had lost it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How far he really lost it we shall never know. Even now, with all my
+lights, with that intense country light fairly beating on him, I can
+wonder: Am I saying these things because I think them? Or because I
+believe I must have thought them then? And I cannot answer my own wonder.
+I remember how at Amershott, when I sat beside him in that car of his and
+watched his ecstasy, I used to pull myself up and say to myself, "You
+_know_ he isn't like that. Look at him--what woolly lamb could be more
+simple and innocent than he is now?" And if anybody had come to me and
+asked me if I didn't think that Jevons _was_ a little awful I should have
+said that if you were a little awful yourself you might think so, but not
+otherwise. My conscience has told me that as he became more successful I
+became more critical; it has even suggested that I may have been jealous
+of his success.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But that was in the days (they were comparatively innocent) of his first
+motor-car. Round that car there really is a light of romance and of
+adventure, a glamour that isn't at all the glamour of his opulence. In
+those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of
+pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income. In June, at
+any rate, he was still the master of his car and not--as we saw him later
+on--its servant. There never was anything like that first fury of his
+motoring.
+
+It couldn't last. He was wearing himself out. Those early excesses
+exhausted his capacity for pleasure, and when we came to stay with him in
+the last two weeks of July we found him apathetic about motoring.
+
+But not about motor-cars. As far as the cars went he had developed into
+an incurable motor-maniac. He was never tired of talking about
+carburetters, and tyres, and petrol, and garages and gear. He dreamed of
+these things at night. Every day he invented some extraordinary
+contrivance for increasing speed and lessening friction. He knew all that
+was to be known about the different kinds of cars; and he would roll
+their names on his tongue--Panhard and Fiat and Daimler and Mercédès and
+Rolls-Royce, as if the sound of them caressed him like music.
+
+And the first car which he had mastered--it was a comparatively cheap
+one, but it wouldn't be fair to say what kind it was, for the poor thing
+had gone to pieces under his hand in six months; he had served her, his
+chauffeur said, something cruel--that first car had been sold for a
+hundred and fifty pounds, and Viola was mourning for it when we came down
+in July.
+
+We couldn't think why she mourned, for he had bought another. We supposed
+that the new car had broken down, for we were met at Midhurst station by
+the local cab proprietor. But we were very soon to know that nothing
+had happened to the new car, and that something very serious indeed had
+happened to Jimmy.
+
+He had gone mad--you can only call it mad--over his new car.
+
+As soon as we had tea we were taken to see it where it stood in the
+coach-house that served as a garage.
+
+It was a magpie car--the first, Jimmy told me, that had appeared down in
+that part of the country--white, with black bonnet and black
+splashboards, and black leather hood and cushions; so black that its
+body, in the matchless purity of its whiteness, staggered you. Anybody,
+Jevons said, could have an all-white car, and it wouldn't be noticed any
+more than a common taxi-cab. But one magpie in a countless crowd of cars
+annihilated all the rest. Lemon colour was good and so was scarlet; but
+for effect--for sheer destruction to other automobilists--there was
+nothing like a white car with black points. It was, Jimmy said and
+Kendal, the chauffeur, said, a perfect car. From their tone you wondered
+what you had ever done that you should be allowed to approach and see it
+where it stood.
+
+Where it stood, I say. You couldn't see that car doing anything else. It
+stood like an immense idol in a temple; and it looked as if all its life
+it never had done anything else but stand in its perfection to be stared
+at. And by its air of self-consciousness, of majesty, of arrogant power
+in repose, you gathered that it knew it was there to be stared at. The
+thing was drawn up at the far end of the garage, where no breath could
+blow on it, over an open pit. You knew that Kendal, the chauffeur, went
+down on a ladder into the pit to examine the secret being of the car; you
+knew it and yet it was incredible. You refused to believe that an outrage
+to which common cars were subject ever had been or would be perpetrated
+on this holy one. You would have said that no spot of mud or dust or rain
+had ever lighted on it; it might have descended into the garage out of
+heaven for any sign of travel that it showed. It was surrounded by I
+know not what atmosphere of consecration and immunity.
+
+So that Norah's first question sounded like a profanity.
+
+"What speed is it?" she said.
+
+It might have been fancy, but I thought that Jevons's face underwent a
+change. I certainly saw Kendal the chauffeur looking at it.
+
+"Speed?" he said. "Speed? Well--you _can_ speed her up to sixty miles an
+hour if you want to." (He seemed to say, "If she ever is speeded up," or
+"You jolly well may want.")
+
+He ran his hand lovingly along the car's white flank as if it were alive
+and could respond to the caress.
+
+"She's a beauty," he said.
+
+The chauffeur looked at him again.
+
+"You won't want to knock her about like you did the last one, Mr.
+Jevons," he said.
+
+And Jimmy's face expressed a sort of horror.
+
+The chauffeur looked at us then, and, if you can wink without any motion
+of the eyelids, he winked. He saw, and he was trying to indicate to us,
+the state that Jevons had fallen into.
+
+It was infatuation; it was idolatry; it was the most extraordinary
+passion I have ever known a man otherwise sane to be possessed by. You
+would have said that that creature with the black-and-white body and the
+terrific bowels of machinery had some sinister and magic power over him.
+He loved it; he worshipped it; he was afraid of it. And when you think of
+how, as the chauffeur said, he had "served" the other car--
+
+Knock her about, indeed! He daren't take her out of the garage for a
+fifteen-mile run without agonies of apprehension. He never took her out
+at all unless he was certain that it wouldn't rain and that there
+wouldn't be any mud or any dust or any wind (I don't know what harm he
+thought the wind would do her). Instead of taking her out he would spend
+hours in the garage standing still and looking at her, stooping sometimes
+to examine her for a spot or a crack on her enamel, but always with
+reverence. I believe he never touched her without washing his hands
+first.
+
+We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn't been out in that car three
+times, though the weather was perfect. Jimmy never could see that it was
+perfect enough. If it hadn't rained for two days he was afraid of dust;
+if it did rain he was afraid of mud; what he wanted was one light shower
+to lay the dust; and when he got it he was afraid of another shower
+coming. And on hot days he was afraid the sun might do something. And he
+was afraid of _us_ all the time lest we should ask him to take the car
+out on a day that wouldn't do.
+
+I do not know how or why he had come to look on that car as his god. It
+wasn't, I do believe that it wasn't, because the thing was valuable,
+because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he
+had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a
+sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint
+of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering
+beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the
+remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of
+his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself:
+"Motor-cars are perishable things. I did for my first beloved by my
+excesses. Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from
+motoring." And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune
+out of Jimmy's abstinence.
+
+The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. (He too had come
+down for the last fortnight in July.) He was the only one of us who
+didn't protest, didn't clamour, didn't try to reason or to laugh Jimmy
+out of his insanity. And he went further. He refused to enter the car, to
+be taken in it on the few suitable days when Jimmy allowed it to go out.
+It was as if he were dominated by some scruple as morbid as his host's
+passion. We couldn't account for it at the time, for he liked motoring
+excessively, and he couldn't afford it.
+
+I've wondered since whether this wasn't the way Charlie settled with
+his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency. He could eat Jimmy's bread
+and drink his wine and stay for weeks under his roof, since his
+necessity--the necessity of seeing Viola--compelled him, but to profit by
+him to that extent, to make use of Jimmy's opulence, was beyond him. His
+conscience may have even said to him, "If he loves his motor-car, for
+God's sake let him have _that_, at any rate, to himself."
+
+And Viola seemed to share Charlie's scruple. She, too, shrank from using
+the new car. And I remember her saying to me one day as we crossed the
+courtyard and saw Jimmy, as usual, in the garage, worshipping his car,
+"I'm so glad he's got it. I think it makes him happier." As if she had
+confessed that it was all he _had_ got; that she was not able to make him
+happy any more; and as if, in some day of unhappiness that she saw
+coming, it would be a consolation to the poor chap. At any rate, as if
+she were not in the least jealous of the power it had over him.
+
+So, that July, Norah and I drove with Jimmy when the car, so to speak,
+let him drive it; and Viola walked through the woods and over the downs
+with Charlie Thesiger.
+
+We often wondered what they found to talk about.
+
+That wonder, of what Viola could see in Charlie, and how she could endure
+for so many hours the burden of his society, was all that Norah had
+allowed herself, so far, to express. If she felt any uneasiness she had
+not yet confided it to me. As for Jevons, he tolerated him as you only
+tolerate a thing that doesn't matter. I think honestly that to both of
+them, Charlie, in any serious connection with Viola, was as impossible as
+Jevons himself had been to her brother Reggie.
+
+So little did he take him seriously that at the very end of July he went
+up to London for the inside of the week (he went by train so as to save
+the car) while Charlie was still at the Old Grange.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the week of the international crisis, and European mobilization
+was occupying Jimmy's mind to the exclusion of other matters. Still, you
+could hardly suppose that it was the crisis that was taking him up to
+London. I remember thinking he had run away from Charlie Thesiger,
+because he bored him.
+
+He left on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, and he was to be back on Friday,
+the thirty-first, and Charlie was to leave with Norah and me and our
+nurse and Baby on the Monday following, when our fortnight was up.
+
+So on Friday afternoon I was a little astonished to find my
+sister-in-law, dressed in her town suit of white cloth, drinking tea at
+three o'clock before going up to London. She simply stated the fact that
+she was going up. Norah had said she might stay in our house and she
+hoped I wouldn't mind.
+
+When I suggested that it would surely be nicer for us all to go up
+together on Monday she looked at me with a certain long-suffering
+expression that she had for me at times, and said that wouldn't suit her,
+since she had got to go to-day. She was of course awfully sorry to leave
+us, but Norah understood, and Jimmy would look after us very well.
+
+No. She wasn't going up by Midhurst. She was going by Selham.
+
+She rose. I noticed the impatient energy of her little hands as they
+knotted her veil under her chin. I looked up her trains and found that
+there was none from Selham till four forty-five. I pointed out to her
+that there was no hurry; she had missed the two fifty-five, which had
+left Selham fifteen minutes ago, and she had an hour to spare even if the
+car took half an hour getting to the station. (The day was fine and there
+was no dust. Even Jimmy couldn't have objected to her taking the car.)
+
+But she said she hadn't missed the two fifty-five; she wasn't trying for
+it; and she wasn't going in the car; it would be wanted to meet Jimmy at
+Midhurst Station; and no--no--_no_--she didn't want a cab from Midhurst.
+She was going to walk.
+
+I said it was absurd for her to walk four miles on a hot day like this,
+and she replied that the day would be cool enough if only I'd keep quiet.
+(She was still long-suffering.)
+
+Then of course I said I'd walk with her.
+
+But that was too much for her, and she stamped her foot and said I'd do
+nothing of the kind. She didn't want anybody to walk with her.
+
+And when I inquired about her luggage--But I can't repeat what she said
+about her luggage!
+
+Then she softened suddenly, as her way was, and kissed Norah, and said I
+was a dear, and she was sorry for snapping my head off, but it was all
+right. Norah knew all about it. She'd explain.
+
+I can see her standing in the postern doorway and saying these things and
+then giving me her hand and holding mine tight, while she shook her head
+at me and smiled that little baffling smile that seemed to come up
+flickering from her depths of wisdom on purpose to put me in the wrong.
+
+"The trouble with you, Furny," she said, "is that you're much too good."
+
+She went; and we saw her tall, lithe figure swinging up the lane, past
+the courtyard and the paddock and the moor.
+
+Then Norah plucked me in by the coat-sleeve as if she thought we oughtn't
+to be looking at her. We shut the door on her flight and turned to each
+other where we stood on the flagged path before the house.
+
+"What does it mean?" I said.
+
+"It means that she's at the end of her tether."
+
+"The end--?" I think I must have gasped.
+
+"The very end. She can't stand it any longer."
+
+"But," I said, "she--she's got to stand it. After all--"
+
+"There's no good talking that way. She _can't_, and that settles it. I
+knew she couldn't, once she got beyond a certain point."
+
+"Do you mean to say," I said, "that she's going to leave him?"
+
+"I--don't--know. I believe--she's going to think about it."
+
+"But--it's out of the question. She mustn't think about it."
+
+"You can't stop her thinking, Wally. She's gone away to think about it
+sanely. It's the best thing she can do."
+
+"And you're helping her to get away?"
+
+She was silent for a moment.
+
+"I'm only helping her to think," she said.
+
+I was stern with her. "You're not. You're just helping her to bolt," I
+said. "You're conniving at her bolting. You've lent her our house."
+
+"Isn't it better she should come to us?"
+
+"No, it isn't better. I don't like it. And I won't have it. I won't have
+you mixed up in it. Do you understand?"
+
+"Dear Wally--there isn't anything to be mixed up in. We'll be back on
+Monday; then she'll only be staying with us."
+
+"And till then--?"
+
+"Till then--for Heaven's sake let the poor thing have peace for three
+days to think in."
+
+"That's all very well," I said, "but what are we to say to Jimmy when he
+comes back this afternoon?"
+
+"You say--you say she's tired of--of Amershott and wants three days in
+London to herself.--No, you don't. You don't say anything. You leave it
+to me. Vee-Vee said it was to be left to me."
+
+"And _I_ say I won't have you dragged into it. Good Heavens, have you any
+idea what you may be let in for, supposing--?"
+
+"Supposing what?"
+
+I couldn't say what. But I don't think I really had supposed
+anything--then.
+
+"You needn't suppose things," she said. "Vee-Vee would never let us in.
+Look here, Wally--you've got to trust me this time. I'm going to see
+Vee-Vee through, and I'm going to see Jimmy through; but I can't do it if
+you don't trust me. I can't do it if you interfere."
+
+I said I did trust her, and that God knew I didn't want to interfere, but
+was she quite sure she was doing a wise thing?
+
+She said, "Quite sure. Let's go and lie down in the pine-wood till
+tea-time. I wonder if Jimmy would mind us going into Midhurst with the
+car. We shouldn't hurt it, sitting in it."
+
+We lay out in the pine-wood till we heard the bell for tea, which we
+had ordered a little before four, in case Jevons should wire for the
+car to meet him by the early afternoon train that got to Midhurst at
+four-sixteen.
+
+The table was set as usual in the garden on the lawn in front of the
+house.
+
+By four o'clock no wire had come from Jevons; so we knew we needn't
+expect him till a later train. He nearly always came by Waterloo and
+Petersfield and was met at Midhurst, which gave him his public. But he
+might come, as Viola had gone, by Victoria and Horsham and be met
+at Selham.
+
+I remember saying, in a startling manner as the idea struck me,
+"Supposing he comes by Victoria?"
+
+And Norah said, "What if he does?"
+
+And I, "They might meet at Horsham."
+
+"Why shouldn't they?" she said. "You don't suppose he'll eat her for
+running up to town?"
+
+"He might," I said, "think it odd of her."
+
+"Not he. The beauty of Jimmy is that odd things don't seem odd to him. Do
+you know where Charlie is?"
+
+I didn't. We had finished tea before either of us had thought of him. We
+shouted to him through the open windows of the house, for Charlie had a
+habit of mooning about indoors till Viola was ready to walk with him.
+
+No answer came to our summons, but it brought Parker, the butler, out on
+to the lawn. He had a slightly surprised and slightly embarrassed look on
+his respectable and respectful face, no longer demoralized by Jimmy.
+
+"Were you looking for the Captain, sir?" he said.
+
+I said we were.
+
+Something grave and a little sorrowful came into Parker's embarrassed
+look.
+
+"Didn't you know he'd gone, sir?"
+
+I said I didn't even know he was going; and then I saw Norah looking at
+me.
+
+Parker was trying not to look at Norah. He began gathering up the
+tea-things as if to justify his presence and explain it.
+
+"When did he go?" I said as casually as I could.
+
+"Well, sir--the cab was ordered to catch the four thirty-five from
+Midhurst."
+
+Now the four thirty-five from Midhurst is the four forty-five from
+Selham, the train that Viola had gone by. We knew this; and Parker knew
+that we knew it. That was why, instead of stating outright that Captain
+Thesiger had gone by that train, he tried to soften the blow to us by
+saying that the cab had been ordered to catch it, and leaving it open to
+us to suppose that perhaps, after all, it might have missed it.
+
+"Did he say when he was coming back?" I asked, again casually.
+
+"He isn't coming back, sir," said Parker. "He's took his luggage with him
+and all."
+
+"Of course," said Norah. "He's gone to see what they're doing at the War
+Office. He said he would."
+
+But I knew and she knew and Parker knew he hadn't--or, if he had, it was
+only one of the things he had gone for. Because, if the War Office had
+been all that he had in his mind he would have told us, and Viola would
+have told us, and they would have gone openly together, instead of
+dodging about like two clumsy criminals, one at Midhurst and the other at
+Selham.
+
+When Parker had left (he did it very quickly) Norah got on her feet.
+
+She said, "Go and find Kendal and tell him to bring the car around at
+once."
+
+I asked her what she was going to do?
+
+"Do?" she flashed at me. She had changed all in a moment into a woman
+whom I did not know.
+
+"I'm going to fetch her back," she said. She had wriggled into her coat.
+"We'll overtake her before she gets to Selham, if you're quick."
+
+I looked at my watch. It was barely half-past four. Yes, if we were
+quick, if we started at once, if we let the new car rip we should
+overtake her on the road, or at the station before she could get into
+that train with Charlie Thesiger in it. I meant, and Norah's eyes meant,
+that we would stop her going with him, if we had to drag her from the
+platform.
+
+We ran to the garage to find Kendal. The new car, the superb black and
+white creature, stood in the middle of the courtyard, ready to start when
+Jimmy's wire came. So far it was all right.
+
+But we had reckoned without Kendal, the chauffeur.
+
+Kendal, absolved from the four-sixteen train at Midhurst, was at his tea
+in the servants' hall, and at my summons he came out slowly, munching as
+he came. He was visibly outraged at our intrusion on his sacred leisure.
+And when he was ordered to start at once for Selham, he refused. There
+was no train from Victoria, he said, between the four-four that Mr.
+Jevons hadn't come by and the five fifty-two. _If_, Kendal said, he did
+come by Victoria, and he always came by Waterloo.
+
+What was the sense, said Kendal, with his mouth full, of going to Selham
+when we hadn't got a wire?
+
+The sense of it, Norah told him, was that we had a message--an important
+message--for Mrs. Jevons, which she _must_ get before she started.
+
+At this Kendal left off munching and looked at my wife. Even in my
+eagerness I was struck by the singular intelligence of that look. There
+was nothing covert in it. On the contrary it was a most straightforward
+and transparent look. Kendal's knowledge--which might have sought cover
+if you had hunted it--had come out to meet ours on equal terms.
+
+It only lasted for the fraction of a second. Kendal repeated firmly, but
+this time respectfully, that she was Mr. Jevons's car and he couldn't
+take her out without Mr. Jevons's orders, for if he did Mr. Jevons would
+give him the sack.
+
+To which Norah replied that Mr. Jevons would give him the sack if he
+didn't, or if he made us miss that train by arguing. I told him sternly
+to look sharp. He looked it and we got off. I had begun to crank up the
+car myself while I spoke.
+
+But he had wasted three minutes of our valuable fifteen. Though on the
+open road we speeded up the car to her sixty miles an hour, we had to
+slow down in the narrow lanes. Once we were held up by a country cart,
+and once by cows in our track, and Norah was beside herself at each halt.
+
+As we careened into the station yard I thought that my wife would have
+hurled herself out of the car.
+
+The station-master stood by the booking-office door. He had an ominous
+air of leisure. And when he saw us coming he looked at his watch.
+
+He told us that we had missed the train by three minutes (the three
+minutes that Kendal had wasted).
+
+I had jumped out of the car and was telling Kendal that it was all his
+fault, and that if he'd done what he was told we should have caught the
+train, when he turned on me as only a chauffeur convicted of folly can
+turn.
+
+"Stand away from the car, sir," he shouted. He jerked her nose round with
+the savage energy of a chauffeur in the wrong; he seemed to impart his
+own fury to the car. She snorted and screamed as he backed her and drove
+her forward and backed her again.
+
+And again he shouted to me. "You get in, sir, if you don't want to be
+left be'ind."
+
+As he seemed to be animated chiefly by the fear of Jevons (whom, by the
+way, he adored), we could only suppose that his idea was to fly back to
+Amershott in time for Jimmy's wire.
+
+On the high road past the station he took the wrong turn.
+
+_I_ shouted then, "What do you think you're doing, you confounded fool?"
+
+"Ketch the London train at 'Orsham, sir," said Kendal. And he grinned.
+
+"You can't do it," we said.
+
+"I'll 'ave a try," said Kendal.
+
+His honour as a chauffeur was at stake. His blood was up. His knowledge
+had begun to work in him and he adored his master. He knew what he was
+trying to do.
+
+We could do it if we kept our heads; if we exceeded the speed limit; if
+we had luck; if we didn't break down; if neither the county constabulary
+nor the country traffic held us up.
+
+Kendal declared we could do it easily and allow for accidents. At Horsham
+Junction you have nearly half an hour to wait between the arrival of the
+Midhurst and Selham train and the departure of the London express. And
+the local trains take more than half an hour to get from Selham to
+Horsham. At a pinch you could speed the car up to the limit of the local
+train. And, as we had to allow for accidents, we did speed her up
+whenever we saw a clean track before us.
+
+The run to Selham was nothing to it. It was as if we were racing the
+train with its three minutes start, as if, positively, we might overtake
+it at any of the intermediate stations, as if it were in this hope that
+we dashed up the long white slope to Petworth.
+
+The heat of the day gathered over our heads and smouldered in the east.
+
+And as we ran I realized at last why we were running and what the race
+was and the hunt, and what our quarry. I remembered that other slower
+chase that was yet so keen and so agonizing; that hunting down of the
+same tender flesh and blood, over the Channel and across a foreign
+country. That was bad enough; but it was not like this. For then I was
+alone in my hunting of Viola; there was nobody but me, who loved her, to
+see her run to earth and caught crouching in her corner. That she would
+crouch, this time, and hide herself, I had no doubt. This hunt that I
+shared with her sister and her servant was abominable to me and shameful.
+And between the shame of that flight of hers and this flight there was no
+comparison. You don't go looking at belfries with Charlie Thesiger. I
+could not reconcile that enchanting and enchanted Viola of the garden of
+Bruges with this dreadful flying figure.
+
+I hated myself; I hated Kendal, the chauffeur, as I sat behind his tight,
+efficient body that quivered with the fury of the hunt. (To think that
+_his_ blood should be up and against Viola!) I hated the car that seemed
+more than ever a living thing, that breathed and snorted and vibrated
+with the same passion, and was endowed with this incredible speed and
+this superhuman power. With its black nose and white flanks, and its
+black hood and the black wings of its splash-boards, it was some terrible
+and sinister and malignant monster of prey hunting down Viola. Its body
+had been built, its engines had been forged, to hunt down Viola. The
+infernal thing had been invented to hunt down Viola.
+
+Somewhere between Petworth and Fittleworth Kendal stopped to water his
+engine. It was then that we noticed how the gathering heat was piled into
+a bank of cloud over the east. At the back of our necks we could feel a
+little hot puff of wind that came up from the west.
+
+"Shouldn't wonder if there was a storm," said Kendal. He added, with the
+ghost of a grin, "If Mr. Jevons sees that cloud, sir, he'll not wire to
+be met at Midhurst. He'd crawl home on his 'ands and knees first."
+
+He slipped into his seat and we dashed on.
+
+At Fittleworth, within a stone's-throw of the railway and the road, there
+is a patch of moor where the ground rises in a hillock. In July and
+August when the heather's out this hillock is a crimson landmark above
+the water meadows.
+
+When we came within sight of it Kendal suddenly slowed down, then jammed
+his brakes hard, and with an awful grinding and snorting the car came to
+a stand-still.
+
+Kendal stood up. He muttered something about being blowed. Then he
+turned.
+
+"Got the glasses there, sir?"
+
+I found the glasses, but I didn't give them to Kendal. I stood up too and
+looked through them.
+
+I couldn't see anything at first.
+
+"There, sir," said Kendal, pointing. "No. You're looking too much to the
+left. You got to get right o' thet sandy patch--against thet there clump
+of heather. Now d'you see, sir?"
+
+I did.
+
+Kendal had made out with the naked eye a figure, the figure of a woman,
+seated on the hillside, a white figure that showed plainly against the
+red background of the heather.
+
+"It's Mrs. Jevons, sir," he stated.
+
+It was.
+
+I could see her quite distinctly through the field-glasses. She was
+sitting on the clump of heather to the right of the sandy patch, settled
+and motionless, in the attitude of one who waited at her ease, with hours
+before her. And she was alone.
+
+We went on as far as we could towards the moor. Norah and I left the car
+and struck across the moor by the sandy track that led to the bare patch
+and the clump of heather.
+
+The seated figure must have been aware of us from the first moment of our
+approach. You couldn't miss that black and white car as it charged along
+the highway, or as it stood now, with its engines still humming, by the
+roadside. But the figure remained seated in its attitude of waiting. It
+waited while we crossed the moor; and as we climbed the hillock we became
+intensely aware of it and of its immobility.
+
+We saw its face fixed on us with an expression of tranquil patience and
+expectation. I may say that I felt an intolerable embarrassment before
+this quietness of the hunted thing that we had run to earth; especially
+as it was on me, and not Norah, that Viola's face was fixed as we came
+nearer.
+
+Then she smiled at me; there was neither conciliation nor defiance
+in her smile, but a sort of serene assurance and--yes, it was
+unmistakable--contempt.
+
+She said, "Whatever do you think you're doing _now_?"
+
+I said we might not know what we were doing, but we knew what we were
+going to do. We were going to take her back with us in the car.
+
+At that she asked us (but without any sign of perturbation) if we had got
+Jimmy there?
+
+Norah said No, our idea was to run back to Amershott before Jimmy got
+there.
+
+"Where were you running to when you saw me sitting up here?" she said.
+
+I said we'd meant to catch her at Selham but we missed the train and were
+trying to get to Horsham before the London train started.
+
+She was looking at me now with a sort of compassion, the tenderness of
+her contempt.
+
+"I see," she said. "You _were_ clever, weren't you?"
+
+She looked at her watch. "Well, as you _are_ here," she said, "I'd let
+you run me down to Horsham, if you want a run, only I can't very well use
+Jimmy's car."
+
+I think it was Norah who asked her what on earth she was doing at
+Fittleworth.
+
+"Can't you see," she said, "that I'm waiting for the next train?"
+
+"Did you walk here from Amershott, or what?" I said.
+
+She said, "Rather not. I was in the train."
+
+Then Norah said, "What happened?"
+
+It had dawned on us both how odd it was that Viola should be here,
+apparently alone, at Fittleworth. It was also odd how we were all
+ignoring Charlie. I believe I had a sort of idea that she had got him
+hidden somewhere in the landscape.
+
+Viola smiled a reminiscent smile. "If you _must_ know," she said, "what
+happened was that Charlie was in that train, too--he came bursting out on
+to the platform at Selham, awfully pleased with himself, because he'd
+picked my luggage up at Midhurst and bagged a corner seat for me, and
+made faces at people to keep them out."
+
+"Did you know he was going up to town?" I said.
+
+"No, of course I didn't. He didn't know it himself. There was no reason
+why he shouldn't go. And you'd have thought there was no reason why we
+shouldn't go together. He was all right till we got to Petworth. But
+after that he lost his head and made such an ass of himself that I had to
+get out here and make him go on by himself. Silly idiot!"
+
+We were sitting in the heather, one on each side of her, and I saw my
+wife slip her arm into hers and hug it to her.
+
+"Did _you_ know," she said, "that Charlie'd gone?"
+
+We didn't answer. We simply couldn't.
+
+And then Viola said, "Poor little Norah!"
+
+And she told her to run away for ten minutes while she talked to me.
+
+"Why poor little Norah?" I asked when we were alone.
+
+"Because," she said, "you frightened her."
+
+"I? Frightened her?"
+
+"Yes," she said. "You made her think I was going to run away with
+Charlie. There's no good trying to look as if you didn't. You're quite
+awful, Furny, in the things you think. You can't help it, I know. You're
+so good, so shockingly good, and you can't bear other people to be
+naughty. You thought I'd run away to Belgium with Jimmy and you came
+rushing after me and fetched me back. You thought I'd run away with
+Charlie and you came rushing--in your dreadful rectitude, and in Jimmy's
+motor-car that he won't let anybody look at. You'll have an awful time
+with Jimmy when you get back. It's going to rain, and there'll be mud on
+the car, and he'll dance with rage when he sees it. And he won't think
+it's any excuse if you tell him you thought I was running away with
+Charlie, and you took the car to fetch me back; he'll say you'd no
+business to think it and in any case you'd no business to take the car
+out. And poor Kendal will be sacked.
+
+"That's all you've done," she said, "by your fussy interference."
+
+She went on. "It wouldn't matter what you think about me--but it was
+beastly of you to go and make Norah think it."
+
+I said I didn't suppose either of us thought anything, except that since
+she was going up to town with the idea of leaving her husband, it was not
+desirable that she should go up with Charlie Thesiger.
+
+"Who could possibly have supposed," she said, "that Charlie would be such
+an ass?"
+
+I said I for one could.
+
+"Oh, you--haven't I told you you're always supposing things?"
+
+"Surely?" I said, "you must have seen--yourself--"
+
+She smiled. "My dear--I couldn't see anything but poor Jimmy."
+
+"And yet," I said, "you could think of leaving him?"
+
+She moaned. "You fool--you fool--that's _why_ I'm thinking of it."
+
+She pressed her hands to her eyes as if she shut back the sight of him.
+
+"You aren't thinking of it," I said. "You haven't left him. You've only
+been for a good long walk to Fittleworth, and we've come to fetch you
+back in the car."
+
+"Haven't I told you that I can't and won't use Jimmy's car?"
+
+"You can't use it to run away from him in; but you can very well use it
+to go back to him."
+
+"I'm not going back to him," she said. "Can't you see that I've burnt my
+boats?"
+
+"You may have burnt the old ones, Viola," I said. "But you can build
+new."
+
+"You must give me time, Wally. It'll take a long time. And you don't
+understand me. I _want_ to get away from Jimmy. That's why I'm going away
+now, while he isn't there. That's what I mean by burning my boats.
+If I go back to him--if I see him--I shall never get away. I shan't have
+the courage. I shall just crumple up with the first sight of him--with
+the first word he says--"
+
+"Why not," I said, "crumple up?"
+
+She lifted her head as I had seen her lift it before.
+
+"Because," she said, "I wish to be straight."
+
+I asked her if running away behind Jimmy's back was her idea of
+straightness? To which she replied that _my_ rectitude was excruciating
+and that I'd twist anything to a moral purpose, but it was twisting all
+the same. Couldn't I see that _the_ awful thing would be to come sneaking
+back and pretend to Jimmy that she hadn't run away from him?--If that was
+my idea of straightness she was sorry for me.
+
+I said, "My dear child, you must see that running away by yourself is one
+thing, and running away with Charlie Thesiger is another. It would be all
+very well if Charlie hadn't got into that train."
+
+She wanted to know what that mattered when she had got out of the train?
+I suggested that the people who saw Charlie get in hadn't seen her get
+out, and that she must look at the thing as it appeared to other people.
+
+"Look," I said, "at the facts. Mrs. Jevons walks to Selham Station for
+the London train. Captain Thesiger joins her there, presumably by
+pre-arrangement, leaving by Midhurst station so that they may not be seen
+going away together. She is, however, seen entering his compartment at
+Selham. At Fittleworth she is seized with prudence and with panic. She is
+seen getting out on to the platform. And she is seen two hours later
+following the Captain up to London by the next train."
+
+She seemed to be considering it.
+
+"How many people," she said, "know that Charlie was in that train? People
+that matter--I don't mean you and Norah."
+
+"Your butler, your parlourmaid, your housemaid, your cook, your
+gardener--by this time--and Baby's nurse--"
+
+("And Baby," she interrupted.)
+
+"--The guard of the train, the booking clerks and porters at Midhurst and
+Selham, and the station-masters at Midhurst and Selham and Petworth
+(probably) and Fittleworth. Quite a number of important people, to say
+nothing of Kendal, who is perhaps the most important of them all."
+
+"And who was it who brought Kendal into it?"
+
+I was silent.
+
+"Nobody but you, Furny, or a born fool, would have dreamed of bringing
+Kendal in."
+
+I said that a little reflection would show her that it was impossible to
+keep him out. To this she said, "Please go and find Norah. I want her."
+
+I found Norah. I warned her that Viola was going to be extremely
+difficult. She said it would be all right if I left Viola to her.
+
+As we approached, Viola turned to her sister with an air of outraged and
+long-suffering dignity.
+
+"Norah," she said. "I do wish you would make Wally see what an ass he's
+making of himself."
+
+My wife said, in her admirable, judicial way, "How an ass?"
+
+"Well--trying to make me go back and bringing Kendal out here to fetch
+me. He doesn't seem to see that if I do go back with him it'll be as good
+as proclaiming to everybody that I ran away with Charlie and was found
+out by my clever brother-in-law who tracked me down in my husband's
+motor-car and brought me back in it. Whereas, if I go quietly on to
+London, as I meant to and as everybody knows I meant to, it'll be all
+right."
+
+"It won't," I said, "as long as Charlie's there. It will be if you come
+home with us in the car now, and go up to town with Norah and me on
+Monday."
+
+"I've told you," she said wearily, "that I can't go back because I shall
+never get away if I do. And I _must_--I must--and I will."
+
+"Yes, dear, and you shall," my wife said, as if she were humouring
+somebody who was mad.
+
+But for a mad woman Viola, I must say, was extraordinarily lucid.
+
+"What excuse did you give to Kendal for following me in this way?"
+
+"We told him we had an important message to give you before you started."
+
+"Important message! That was pretty thin. I'd have thought of something
+cleverer than that if I'd been you. You _are_ a precious pair of
+conspirators. Can't you see that it's you--with your ridiculous
+suspicions--that have given me away?"
+
+Norah answered her.
+
+"Oh, Vee-Vee," she said, "we hadn't any suspicions. The message was to
+tell you that Charlie was in the train. We knew you didn't know it."
+
+To this Viola said coldly, "Walter didn't."
+
+I tried to reassure her, but she waved me away with her hands and
+implored me to "let her think."
+
+"Well," she said presently, "it isn't as bad as you've tried to make it,
+even with Kendal thrown in. You came rushing after me to give me a
+message, and you _have_ given me a message, and now you'll go and tell
+Kendal that it's all right, and thank him nicely for catching me up, and
+_you_ rush home again, and I go on quietly to London by the next train."
+
+"Yes, dear," said Norah. "And I'm going up with you while Wally rushes
+home and follows with Nurse and Baby and the luggage by the morning
+train."
+
+"That's all very well," said Viola, "but who explains to Jimmy?"
+
+"Oh," said my wife, "Wally does that. You can trust him. Besides you
+haven't got to explain things to Jimmy."
+
+Well, we settled it that way. It was the only possible solution. The more
+she thought of it, Viola said, the more she liked it. And she rubbed it
+into me that it was Norah's solution, and not mine.
+
+Her last words to me as I saw them off at Fittleworth Station were that I
+needn't worry. It was going to rain. And when poor Jimmy saw his car come
+in all splashed with rain and covered with mud--"It won't be me," she
+said, "you'll have to explain about."
+
+And it wasn't.
+
+The storm came down just as we were leaving Fittleworth, and we brought
+that car back in an awful state. You wouldn't have known it had ever been
+a black-and-white car. And Jevons (in a mackintosh) was waiting for me in
+the lane by the courtyard gates. He had caught the early train, but he
+had seen the storm coming and had walked up from Midhurst, and, as I say,
+he was waiting for us.
+
+Well--neither Viola nor Norah was with us, and the language, that Jimmy
+poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour
+of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the
+colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a
+gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly,
+a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur
+was prostrated with admiration.
+
+"When Mr. Jevons lays himself out to express himself, sir," he said
+to me as we retreated, "he pulls it off what you may call a bleedin'
+masterpiece."
+
+I tried to explain about Viola an hour later. But he wouldn't listen to
+me. That was all right, he said. He was going to ask us to take her for a
+month or so anyhow. It was getting a bit stuffy for her down here.
+
+Then he fixed me with "Did Thesiger go up with her?"
+
+There was no good trying to lie to Jevons, so I said that had been
+Thesiger's idea, but Viola hadn't cared much about having him, for she
+had got out at Fittleworth and taken Norah on with her.
+
+"I suppose the young ass tried to make love to her. He's fool enough for
+anything," said Jimmy. But he reverted. "I still can't see why you took
+the car out. Anybody but an idiot would have known it was going to rain."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+HIS BOOK
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+At this period, and even now when I go back to it, I am completely
+puzzled by Jevons. Here was a man who professed to understand his wife,
+to know what she was feeling and thinking in every moment of her
+existence; he would tell you that a man was a fool if he couldn't get the
+woman he wanted; and yet, having got her, he didn't seem to know in the
+most elementary way how to keep her. He didn't seem to care. He adored
+her, and yet he didn't seem to care. I believe he knew that she was
+leaving him, that she had left him; and yet, here he was, treating her
+departure as if it didn't matter, as if it were the most natural and
+reasonable thing in the world, and lashing himself into a fury about his
+wretched motor-car. And he was treating the dangerous element in the
+case, Charlie Thesiger, as if it didn't matter either; as if it didn't
+exist. He must have known we'd taken his car out to bring his wife
+back--he knew we wouldn't have touched the beastly thing for anything
+short of saving her life or his honour; and yet he had flown into a
+passion and sworn at his chauffeur because we'd taken it. He adored his
+wife and yet he behaved as if she were of no importance compared with the
+god he'd made of his motor-car.
+
+All that evening, I remember, he was absorbed in the solitary problem of
+how he could save his god from further outrages. He settled it towards
+midnight by saying that he'd buy another car that we could do what we
+damn-pleased with--a car that wouldn't matter--that you could take out in
+all weathers.
+
+"I'll not have that black-and-white car used as it was used this
+afternoon," he said. And after lashing himself up again he ended quite
+sweetly by saying, "It's my fault, Furny. I ought to have had two cars
+all along."
+
+I said it _would_ be a good plan, if a black-and-white car was only to be
+looked at.
+
+He admitted (with a recrudescence of his old childlike innocence) that he
+liked looking at it. I've no doubt he said it made him feel something,
+but I forget what.
+
+But when the morning came he wouldn't hear of my going. I was to stay out
+my fortnight. It was a fine day and the dust was laid; perhaps he could
+take me for a spin across the Downs to the coast or somewhere. He'd send
+Parker up to town to look after Nurse and Baby and the luggage. He didn't
+want, he said, to be left alone.
+
+Oh yes, it was plain to me that he didn't want to be left--that he
+couldn't bear it. He was trying to lure me to stay with him by holding
+out this prospect of a spin. I have since believed that he would have
+agreed to take his car out in almost any weather, if that had been the
+only way to keep me. He clung to me desperately, pathetically, as he had
+clung nine years ago at Bruges when Viola had left him there. He might,
+possibly, this time, have clung to anybody; he was so afraid of being
+left alone. I think he felt that loneliness here, in the vast, unfamiliar
+landscape that he had invaded, would be as bad as loneliness in Bruges.
+He would be abandoned, as he had been then, in a foreign country.
+
+So till Sunday morning I stayed with him.
+
+It was on my last evening, the evening of Saturday, August the first,
+that he spoke of Viola.
+
+He asked me if I thought that Norah and I could keep her with us, if
+necessary, for--he hesitated--for six months? (It was as if he had given
+her six months.) It would, he said, be better.
+
+I said that Norah would be delighted to keep her for any number of
+months. But did he think she'd stay?
+
+He said why shouldn't she stay? Of course she'd stay. She was awfully
+fond of us and it was the best thing she could do. And it would make it
+so much easier for him. He'd feel more comfortable as long as he knew she
+was with us.
+
+He spoke as if it were he and not Viola who was leaving.
+
+I said then that though we were glad to have her we couldn't, of course,
+accept any responsibility--
+
+He smiled slightly and asked, "For what?"
+
+I said, "Well--" And he answered his own question in the pause I made.
+
+"I suppose you mean for anything she may take it into her head to do?"
+
+I put it to him that Viola's movements were not always exactly
+calculable. She might take it into her head to do anything. I really
+couldn't answer for her.
+
+"_You_ can't," he said. "But _I_ can. She may go off and look at a belfry
+or two." (I should have said that "looking at the belfry" was a phrase
+the family had adopted for any queer thing that any of us might do.) "If
+there's a belfry anywhere to be seen you may depend upon it she'd want to
+look at it."
+
+"Whether," I said, "it's in a dangerous place or not?"
+
+"Whether it's in a dangerous place or not. But I'll trust you to keep her
+out of dangerous places. That's rather what I wanted to talk to you
+about."
+
+I protested. "There's no good talking about it. I've told you that's just
+precisely the responsibility I won't take. And I won't let Norah take it.
+If you think there's going to be any danger you must look after your own
+wife yourself."
+
+"My dear fellow, how can I look after her if I'm not here?"
+
+"You're as much here as I am," I said. "More so. And she's your wife, not
+mine."
+
+I can say now--there's no reason why I shouldn't; it would only amuse
+Jimmy if he were to see it written--I can say now that for one awful
+moment I suspected Jimmy of meditating an infidelity. Perhaps he was; but
+not as we count infidelity.
+
+He ignored what I took to be the essence of the thing.
+
+"We don't know," he said, "where any of us are going to be for the next
+four months--or the next four years. I know that _I_ jolly well shan't be
+here. What I want to propose is this: that you'll look after Viola and
+let her have your house when she wants to be in town; and that you have
+this house for yourself and Norah and Baby when you want to be in the
+country--just as if it was your own. There'll be that other motor-car you
+can have--as if it was your own. You can run up to town in it. And you'll
+probably find that the country will be the best place for you. It'll be
+much the best place for _them_, and the safest--if you aren't here."
+
+I couldn't see it even then. I said, "My dear chap, why shouldn't I be
+here? I certainly mean to be here."
+
+And he considered it and said, "I don't see why not. It's different for
+you. You've got a child and I haven't."
+
+I said I couldn't see what Baby had to do with it.
+
+And he replied that a young child was an infernal complication, and that
+he was jolly glad he hadn't got one. What Baby had to do with it was to
+keep me out of it.
+
+Then I asked him what on earth he was talking about.
+
+He said, "_I'm_ talking about the European conflagration. What are you?"
+
+He had been talking about it all the time, he had been thinking of
+nothing but the European conflagration for the last four days. It was the
+thing, he said, that he had prophesied nine years ago--didn't I remember?
+(Oh yes, I remembered; but then, he was always prophesying something.)
+Well then, here it was. And it had come, by God, at the very date he had
+given it.
+
+I can see him sitting there in his study at Amershott Old Grange. He was
+deadly quiet. Not a gesture came to disturb my sense of his tranquil
+triumph in the fulfilment of his prophecy. To say that he enjoyed the
+European conflagration because it had proved him so abundantly right
+would give a false impression of an extraordinary and complicated state
+of mind. There _was_ a sort of exaltation about him (his face positively
+shone, as if the European conflagration illuminated it from afar); but it
+was a holy and a sacred exaltation, pure from egoism, except that he saw
+himself--there's no doubt that already he did see himself--figuring.
+
+I remember saying, as lots of people were saying then, that I didn't
+suppose for a moment we should be dragged into it.
+
+"Dragged?" he said. "Dragged? We shall be in it without dragging--in the
+very thick."
+
+From the instant the Germans broke into Luxembourg--and he gave them
+twenty-four hours--we should be in it. We couldn't keep out with a rag of
+honour to our names. France, he declared, would be in to-day. He gave us,
+I _think_--but I do not like to say positively that he gave us--three
+days; he couldn't have been as dead right as all that.
+
+What struck me then as so extravagantly odd was, not that he had
+foreseen the war, and England's part in it, but that he should have
+seen himself there, in the thick--blazing away in the very middle of the
+conflagration. What on earth Jimmy conceived that _he_ should have to
+do with it I couldn't think. And all of a sudden I had a reminiscence of
+Jevons as I had seen him nine years ago, talking to Reggie Thesiger in
+Viola's rooms at Hampstead, prophesying war, and lamenting that he
+wouldn't be in it because he was an arrant coward.
+
+And as I looked at him again I saw that what made his face shine like
+that was the sweat that had broken out on it.
+
+Then he made a remark about Charlie Thesiger. Thesiger, he said, knew all
+about it. He had gone up--he supposed I knew that?--to offer his services
+to the War Office in the event of England's coming in.
+
+That Charlie had used the opportunity of going to make love to Jimmy's
+wife didn't seem to bother Jimmy in the least.
+
+Sunday, I remember, was a fine day, with all the dust laid, and Jimmy
+made himself lovable by running me up to London in his sacred car. He
+still clung--I could see that he clung--to the superstition of its
+sanctity.
+
+He left me at my door in Edwardes Square, which he refused to enter. I
+think he was afraid of seeing Viola. I thought at the time that this was
+because he was aware of her attitude; that he knew she was at the end of
+her tether, and that he wanted to be righteously fair, to give her time
+to think about leaving him, if she wanted to leave him; that he was
+behaving now as he had behaved at Bruges when he stood back and let me
+have my innings, and gave her her chance to free herself. And yet I was
+puzzled. Even he could hardly stand back to give Thesiger an innings. He
+_may_ have had an inkling. There may have been something of his queer,
+scrupulous tenderness in this avoidance of her; there may have been his
+reckless propensity to take the risk; but I am convinced that even then
+his main object was--like Viola--to burn his boats. He was afraid that if
+he were to see Viola again he wouldn't be able to go through with it. He
+may even have been glad that she had left him, because it had made his
+way easier.
+
+And so, when he had landed me at my door, he turned the black nose of his
+car round and ran out of Edwardes Square faster than he had run in; as if
+he were afraid that the place would catch and keep him.
+
+He didn't go back to Amershott. He stayed in London in one of his clubs
+(he had several now, besides the club in Dover Street), and I saw him
+sometimes. I didn't say anything to Viola about him. I didn't tell her he
+was in town. It was as if there had been some tacit understanding among
+the three of us; there must have been some tacit agreement between him
+and me.
+
+Sunday passed, and Monday somehow; and on Tuesday, the fourth, we were
+all holding our breaths under the tension of the Ultimatum.
+
+I have no doubt that in those three days I had some opinion of my own
+about the European conflagration, that I must have stared with my own
+eyes sometimes at the fate of Europe and the fate of England, that I must
+have felt _some_ horror and anxiety and excitement that was my own. But
+as I look back on it all I am aware chiefly of Jevons, of _his_ opinions,
+_his_ vision, _his_ horror and excitement. I seem to have spent the
+greater part of those three days with Jevons, and there are moments, in
+looking back, when he fills the scene. He is the largest and most
+prominent figure in the crowd that walked the streets with me on the
+evening of the Ultimatum, that waited with me outside Buckingham Palace,
+when London let itself loose in madness; he seems the only sane figure in
+that crowd or in the processions that moved for hours on end up and down
+Parliament Street, between Trafalgar Square and Palace Yard. It is as if
+I had stood alone with Jevons before the Mansion House at midnight when
+the Ultimatum was declared.
+
+And when I say that it was his horror and anxiety and excitement--and his
+defiance and exaltation, if you like--that I felt, I do not mean that
+Jevons talked about it. He was, for those three days, mostly silent. It
+is that I saw him consumed and burned up by the fever of patriotism and
+war, and that beside his passion any emotion I may have felt hardly
+counted.
+
+And every minute we expected to hear him say that he _liked_ the War
+because it made him feel manly. Norah and I pretended to each other that
+he would say it--it was our idea of a joke, God forgive us.
+
+It was on Wednesday, the fifth, very early in the morning, that he began
+trying to enlist. It was the first thing he did; and we thought _that_
+funny.
+
+We thought it so funny that even if he hadn't told us not to tell Viola
+we wouldn't have told her; we felt that it wouldn't have been quite fair
+to either of them.
+
+And none of the Thesigers, or anybody connected with the Thesigers, could
+take Jimmy seriously for one moment. With General Thesiger waiting to be
+sent to the Front, and Reggie Thesiger preparing to go, and Charlie
+Thesiger who might be called on any day, with Bertie and all his male
+cousins enlisting and pulling all the ropes they could lay their hands on
+to get their commissions, they hadn't time for Jimmy and his importunity.
+He _was_ importunate; and I'm afraid that in those weeks Jimmy didn't
+exist for them or any of us, except as a jest that lightened our labours
+now and then. They were so busy getting their kits that they couldn't
+even think of the fate of Europe.
+
+And Viola--what she was thinking and feeling God (or Jevons) only knew.
+She didn't tell us. But I was pretty sure that with Reggie starting for
+the front in two weeks it wasn't Jevons she was thinking of. I suspected
+that she wasn't far from feeling that secret hatred of Jimmy that had
+come to her once or twice before, when she had thought of Reggie.
+Remember that all this time, even after that illness of hers last year,
+when she and Reggie met they met as well-bred strangers. She had never
+lowered her flag or made one sign. She had just suffered in secret with
+the thought of Reggie biting deeper and deeper into her mind, till,
+wherever the memory of Reggie was there was a wound. And she had been ill
+of her wounds and had nearly died of them.
+
+And in those two weeks she had begun to look as if she were going to be
+ill again. It was bad enough for Norah and for all of them, but conceive
+what it must have been for her!
+
+And so we came to Reggie's last day and the night when he came to us to
+say good-bye.
+
+I think she must have written to him or made some sign. But I'm not sure.
+I only know that he was prepared for her; and that when she came into the
+room at the last minute, as he turned from Norah's arms, he closed on
+her, and that they held each other an instant--tight, like lovers--and
+that neither of them said a word.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After that the War must have seemed to her, as it seemed to all of us, to
+have wiped Jimmy out.
+
+Just at first we thought that this was the secret of Jimmy's agony, of
+his rushings round and round, and of his ceaseless manoeuvring. He knew
+that the War was going to wipe him out; he knew that the world had no use
+for his sort, the men who only wrote things. There was an end of his
+writing, of his novels and his short stories and his plays, and if he
+didn't look out and do something there would be an end of _him_. And he
+couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear to be reduced to inactivity and
+insignificance--to be wiped out. He wasn't going to be made an end of if
+he could help it. These were the things we said about him. What we saw,
+or thought we saw, was the revolt of his egoism. It didn't look quite
+sane.
+
+He was furious when he found out that, even if he enlisted, he couldn't
+buy a commission. He didn't seem to realize that there were things he
+couldn't buy. He was still more furious when he found that the Thesigers
+wouldn't help him. They _could_ help him, he declared, if they liked.
+Commissions were being given every day to the wrong people, by influence.
+
+Up till now, with his talk about commissions, he had been purely funny,
+and we had laughed at him. But when he found that he couldn't enlist,
+that they wouldn't have him, that he wasn't strong enough--they'd
+discovered a leaky valve in his heart or something--and that in any case
+he was too old, when he broke down as he tried to tell me this, he wasn't
+funny at all. He'd been to every recruiting station in London and his own
+county, and they all said the same thing. He was too old.
+
+This, he said, was where his beastly celebrity had gone back on him. He
+could very easily have lied about his age (he didn't look it), in fact,
+he _had_ lied about it freely, to every one of them; but his age was
+recorded against him in the Year-Books of his craft. And he couldn't lie
+about his heart, he didn't know it had a valve that leaked. He didn't
+believe it. He had given the man who examined it the lie; and he had gone
+to a heart-specialist to get the report (which he regarded as a libel)
+contradicted, and the heart-specialist had confirmed it, and told him he
+wasn't the first man who had come to him to get an opinion overruled. He
+said he was to keep quiet and avoid excitement. He mustn't dream of going
+to the front. I think the specialist must have been sorry for Jevons, for
+he went on to tell him that there were other ways in which he could serve
+his country. He seems to have talked a lot of rot about the pen being
+mightier than the sword, and to have advised Jimmy to "use his wonderful
+pen." And at that Jimmy seems to have broken from him in a passion.
+
+And here he was, in a passion still, ramping up and down that private
+room he had at his club, and saying, "Damn my powerful pen, Furny! Damn
+my powerful pen!" The whole system, he said, was rotten. He'd a good mind
+to expose it. He'd expose it in the papers. _That_ was the use he'd make
+of his powerful pen. See how they'd like _that_.
+
+I remember it because it was then that I laid before him my own problem.
+The _Daily Post_ had asked me if I'd go out as its War-Correspondent. I
+was to wire "Yes" or "No" in the next half-hour, and if I went I should
+have to start to-night.
+
+I said I didn't know what to do about it.
+
+He stared. "You don't know what to _do_?"
+
+I said: No. It wasn't so simple when you had a wife and child dependent
+on you. I didn't know whether I ought to take the risk.
+
+And then he said his memorable thing: "If you can take the risk of
+living--My God," he said, "if I only had your luck!"
+
+_His_ luck, I told him, was a dead certainty. There wasn't a paper that
+would refuse Tasker Jevons as War-Correspondent. He'd only got to
+volunteer. Why on earth, I asked him, didn't he?
+
+He became very grave. He seemed to be considering it.
+
+"No," he said, "no. That isn't quite good enough for me. I don't want to
+go out to the war to write about it. I want to do things.
+
+"Perhaps--if there's no other way--I may be driven to it."
+
+For a moment, then, I suspected him. I doubted his sincerity. He was
+making all this fuss about enlisting to cover up his cowardice. He must
+have known all the time they wouldn't take him. He was safe. But put
+before him a thing he could do--do better than anybody else--a thing that
+would take him into the thick and keep him there, if he wasn't killed,
+and he said, No, thank you. That wasn't quite good enough for him.
+
+I didn't believe in his "Perhaps--if there was no other way--he might be
+driven to it." I saw him driven to do anything he didn't mean to do!
+
+Meanwhile he drove _me_. Before I had seen him I hadn't really meant to
+take that job. He did something to me that changed my mind.
+
+That was how I went out to Belgium as a War-Correspondent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was out for a month. Then--I was in Ghent at the same old hotel in the
+Place d'Armes--I got a touch of malaria and had to come home, and the
+_Daily Post_ sent another man out instead of me.
+
+That was how I managed to see Jevons in what Norah called his second
+war-phase. He had been trying hard to get out with the Red Cross
+volunteers, and it had been even funnier, she said, and more pathetic,
+than his enlisting. I don't know what Viola thought of his war-phases;
+to Norah they were just that--funny and pathetic. To the other Thesigers
+he was purely offensive. They resented Jevons's trying to have anything
+to do with the war, as if it had been some sort of impertinent
+interference with their prerogative. His mother-in-law, I know, had no
+patience with him. His frantic efforts to get to the front were nothing,
+she declared, but a form of war-panic. It took some people like that. She
+said the only really cruel thing I had ever heard her say of him. She
+said he _looked_ panic-stricken. (He was lean and haggard by this time,
+and had a haunted look which may have been what she meant.) And well--if
+it wasn't panic that was the matter with him it was self-advertisement,
+and if I'd any regard for him or any influence with him I'd stop it. The
+little man was simply making himself ridiculous.
+
+I was staying in Canterbury with Norah for the weekend, and I heard all
+about it. He did seem to have been rather funny. He had begun with a
+scheme for taking out a Red Cross Motor Field Ambulance which he proposed
+to command in person. He had offered himself with his convoy first to the
+War Office, then to the Admiralty, then to the War Office again, and the
+War Office and the Admiralty kicked him out. Then he had gone round to
+each of the Red Cross Societies in turn, the American included. And they
+had all got their own schemes for Motor Field Ambulances, and didn't want
+his. What they _did_ want was his subscriptions and his powerful pen to
+support their schemes. And Jevons had said, "Damn my powerful pen!" to
+every one of them. As for subscriptions, he subscribed enormously to his
+own Motor Ambulance Corps. He had actually raised his unit, found his
+volunteers, his surgeons, his chauffeurs and his stretcher-bearers, he
+had bought and equipped a Motor Ambulance car, the one he had proposed to
+go with himself. And they took his subscriptions and his Ambulance Car
+and his volunteers; but they wouldn't take him; no, not at any price.
+They put one of his surgeons at the head of the thing instead of him and
+sent it out without him, and Jimmy had to see it go. But when they
+proposed that Jimmy should use his powerful pen to maintain it in the
+field, he swore that he would use it to expose the whole system. And when
+he found that the responsibility for rejecting his services rested with
+the War Office, he went down to the War Office and complained, and to the
+Admiralty and complained, and to the Home Office and complained. After
+that he seems to have visited all the Embassies in turn--the American,
+the French, the Belgian, and I suppose the Russian and the Japanese.
+
+When I asked the Thesigers what he was doing now they said they didn't
+know. They hadn't heard of him and his activities for quite a fortnight,
+and they didn't bother about him. They were too much wrapped up in
+Bertie and in Reggie, even if they hadn't been too busy--every one of
+them up to their necks in work for the Army or the hospitals. They
+admitted that he had sent them large subscriptions.
+
+It seemed to me, as far as I could make out, that Viola hadn't seen or
+heard of him since she had left Amershott. She was too busy and too much
+wrapped in Reggie to bother about him either; at least, it looked like
+it. She seems to have known in a vague way that he had talked about going
+to the front, but I didn't believe she thought he would ever get there.
+
+And he had lain low for a fortnight.
+
+When we had got back to London at noon on Tuesday, which was the end of
+Jimmy's fortnight, I found a wire from Amershott waiting for me. It had
+been sent that morning. It said: "Leaving to-morrow. Must see you urgent
+business. Can you come down this evening. JEVONS."
+
+I knew that he wouldn't send a wire like that without good reason; so I
+went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A light rain was falling when I reached Midhurst. A hired dog-cart met me
+at the station, so I gathered that Jimmy's mad passion for his motor-car
+had survived the war.
+
+And at Amershott everything seemed to have survived. If it had not been
+for troops on the high road, and for the stillness of the coverts, and
+for the recruiting posters stuck everywhere on the barn-doors, and for
+the strange figure of old Perrott driving the mail-cart from Midhurst to
+Amershott instead of his son, you wouldn't have known that the war had
+anything to do with England. And I expected to find Jimmy in his old
+Norfolk suit standing in the garage and looking with adoration at his
+motor-car.
+
+As I thought all this I smiled when Parker told me that Mr. Jevons was in
+the garage. Parker, I noticed, didn't smile.
+
+And in another minute it was Jevons who did all the smiling.
+
+I found him in the garage--no, I can't say I found him, for I didn't
+recognize him, but I heard his voice assuring me that it was he. He was
+in khaki; from head to foot, from his peaked military cap to his puttees
+he was in faultless, well-fitting khaki; even his shirt and his neck-tie
+were khaki. Jimmy's colours showed up wonderfully out of all that
+brownish, greyish, yellowish green. His flush fairly flamed, and his
+eyes, his eyes looked enormous and very bright--great chunks of dark
+sapphire his eyes were. They were twinkling at me.
+
+"It's me all right, old man," he said, and turned from me in his deep
+preoccupation. And as he turned I saw that he wore round his right arm a
+white brassard with a red cross on it.
+
+At the far end of the coach-house where the great black and white idol
+used to stand there was a khaki car with a huge red cross on a white
+square on its flank and on its khaki canvas hood. This was what his eyes
+turned to.
+
+"But--where's the black-and-white god?" I asked.
+
+"There she is," he said, "you're looking at her."
+
+"You haven't--"
+
+"Yes, I have. She's had her new coat on for the last three weeks. You
+couldn't take her out as she was, all black and white. She'd have been
+knocked to bits before we'd begun our job. So I had her painted. She's a
+good enough target for shell-fire as she is."
+
+"You don't mean," I said, "that you're going out?"
+
+"What else have I been meaning ever since there was a war?"
+
+"But--where are you going _to_?"
+
+"Belgium," he said. He added that it was the only blessed place he
+_could_ get to.
+
+"And what are you going to do when you get there?"
+
+He said he was going to scout for wounded, of course.
+
+And as he saw me still incredulous he told me how he'd managed it. He had
+gone every day for three weeks to the Belgian Legation and worried the
+Belgian Minister into a state of nervous prostration. And when the
+Minister was at his worst and was obliged to leave things a bit to his
+secretaries, he'd gone to the secretaries and worried _them_ till the
+First Secretary had given him his passport and a letter of introduction
+to the President of the Belgian Red Cross Society at Ghent. And he had
+gone to Ghent--went there last week--and he had seen the President and
+talked to him. He had talked for ten minutes before his services had been
+accepted by the Belgian Red Cross.
+
+And he was going out to-morrow.
+
+"It's just taken me six weeks to do it. I gave myself six weeks."
+
+Of course I congratulated him. But I couldn't realize it. The whole thing
+seemed incredible. Jevons in his khaki was incredible. The transformed
+motor-car was incredible, as a thing that Jevons was concerned with.
+Above all, it was incredible that he should have sacrificed his god.
+
+I couldn't believe it until Kendal, the chauffeur, turned up, also in
+khaki and with a Red Cross brassard on his right arm. Kendal was credible
+enough; he looked as if he had been going to the war all his life. It was
+evident that he was keen on the adventure. It was also evident that he
+adored Jevons more than ever. By watching Kendal in the act of adoration
+and keeping my eyes fixed on him I was able to take it in, and to assent
+to the statement that Jevons was going to the war.
+
+He was of course if Kendal said so.
+
+Kendal was asking me what I thought of the car.
+
+"She's not the beauty she was, sir," said Kendal. "I don't suppose Mr.
+Jevons will care much how he knocks her about now. And they do say the
+Belgium roads is fair destruction to cars."
+
+I said they were. I'd motored on them. Kendal looked at me as he might
+have looked at the survivor of a shattering experience. Then he looked at
+his car. He seemed to be seeing all the roads in Belgium in a hideous
+vision.
+
+Then he spoke. "Well, they may be bad roads, but Mr. Jevons isn't going
+to be done. He'll take out ten cars before 'e turns back. Ten cars, he
+will."
+
+Yes, yes, I might have known it. Was there ever anything Jevons had made
+up his mind to do and didn't? Had I ever known him turn back from any
+adventure that he had set out on? If he said he was going to the war,
+why couldn't I have known that he would go? The more incredible the thing
+was, the more likely he was to do it.
+
+When I said so he shook his head and said it wasn't really as likely as
+it looked.
+
+We were sitting together after dinner in his garden. Though it was the
+third week in September the nights were still warm. Without Viola, the
+stillness of the place was strange to me, almost uncanny, as if Viola
+were dead and had come back and was listening to us somewhere. I had just
+told him it was splendid of him going out like this, and he had smiled
+back at me and asked, "Like what?" And then I had said I might have known
+it; it was the sort of thing he would do.
+
+No, he went on, it wasn't likely. It had been touch and go, he had only
+just pulled it off by the skin of his teeth. It had given him more
+trouble than anything he'd ever tried for. It had bothered him more. It
+had bothered him most damnably.
+
+I thought he was referring to his struggles with the recruiting depots
+and the War Office and the Home Office and the Embassies and all the rest
+of it. And I said it _was_ pretty hard luck his own Ambulance Corps being
+sent out without him. But he said, No; it wasn't. He hadn't been very
+keen on the Ambulance Corps. He hadn't really wanted to go out with all
+that beastly crowd. This quick scouting game--by himself--was more in his
+line. All he regretted was the time he'd lost.
+
+Well, I said, anyhow he was a lucky beggar to have got what he wanted
+after six weeks.
+
+At that he looked at me suddenly and his face went all sharp and thin. Or
+else I hadn't noticed till then how sharp and thin it was. His flush had
+seemed to flood it and fill it out somehow, and his eyes struck your
+attention like two great flashes of energy. The flash had gone out now as
+he looked at me.
+
+I reminded him: "Haven't you always said you could get what you wanted?"
+
+"Oh yes, I've _said_ it, and I've done it. That's nothing. Any fool can
+do that. The great thing is to make yourself get what you don't want. I
+didn't _want_ to do this. I had to."
+
+"No. You wanted to enlist. But I'm not sure that from your point of view
+this isn't better."
+
+"Jolly lot you know," he said, "about my point of view."
+
+"Your idea," I explained, "of doing things on your own. Isn't that what
+you wanted?"
+
+He answered very slowly: "I don't think--it matters--what I wanted--or
+what I didn't want. It's enough--isn't it?--if I want to _now_--if I want
+it more than anything else?"
+
+I said, No, I didn't think it did matter.
+
+But I hadn't a notion what he meant. I didn't know that he was on the
+edge of a confession. I couldn't see that he was trying to tell me
+something about himself, and that I had started him off by telling him he
+was splendid. It was as if--then--he too had felt that Viola was there
+and listening to us, as if he were speaking to her and not to me.
+
+For the next thing he said was, "I want you to tell Viola about it. Tell
+her it's all right. Tell her I'm all right. See?"
+
+"But shan't you," I said, "be seeing her? Isn't she going to see you off
+or something?"
+
+He said, "No. Much better not. She wouldn't be content with seeing me
+off. She'd try to come out with me. She'd worry me to take her. And
+I'm not going to take her. She isn't to know I'm going till I've gone.
+And she isn't to know where I've gone to. I won't have her coming out
+to me. _You've_ got to see to that, Furny. You've got to stop her if
+she tries to get out. They're _all_ trying. You should just see the
+bitches--tumbling, and wriggling and scrabbling with their claws and
+crawling on their stomachs to get to the front--tearing each other's eyes
+out to get there first. And there are fellows that'll take them. They'll
+even take their wives.
+
+"Not me. Not much. I wouldn't let Viola cross in the same boat with that
+lot.
+
+"It ought to be put a stop to.
+
+"The place I'm going to--the things I'm going to see--and to do--aren't
+fit for women--aren't fit for women to come within ten miles of. Whatever
+you do, Furny--and I don't care what you do--you're not to let her get
+out."
+
+I suppose--I suppose I made him some sort of promise. He says I did. I
+don't remember.
+
+I _do_ remember telling him I thought it was a pity--if he meant to go
+out--that he hadn't seen Viola all this time.
+
+And I remember his answer. "I haven't seen her--all this time--_because_
+I meant to go out. I meant that nothing on this earth should stop me."
+
+"How do you know," I said, "that she'd have stopped you?"
+
+"How do I know? How do I know anything?--It's you who don't know. You
+don't know anything at all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, he went--like that--without telling any of them.
+
+I ran down on the car with him to Folkestone and saw him off on the boat
+to Ostend, he and Kendal, his chauffeur--he, as he pointed out to me,
+superior to Kendal only in the perfect fitting of his khaki. "Otherwise
+there isn't a pin to choose between us. Except," he said, "that Kendal
+doesn't funk it and I do."
+
+And with Kendal grinning from ear to ear over Mr. Jevons's delicious
+joke, and Jimmy waving his khaki cap in a final valediction, and Kendal's
+grin dying abruptly as he achieved the military salute he judged
+appropriate, we parted.
+
+Jimmy's last words to me, thrown over the gunwale, were, "Don't run after
+me, Furny. You won't catch me _this_ time."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Then I went back and told Viola about it. I took her into my library that
+had once been Jevons's study, where he had delivered the Grand Attack. I
+gave her a letter that Jevons had scribbled before lunch in the hotel at
+Folkestone. I suppose he had explained things in it.
+
+But as for me, or any power I had to break it to her, I might just as
+well have told her that he was dead.
+
+Except that perhaps then she wouldn't have turned on me.
+
+"You _knew_ this," she said, "you knew he was going and you never told
+me?"
+
+I said I had only known it last night--how could I have told her?
+
+She persisted. "You _knew_--at what time last night?"
+
+I hesitated and she drove it home.
+
+"You might have wired. It wasn't too late."
+
+I said it was, and that I didn't know that she didn't know till it was
+too late to wire.
+
+"Do you suppose," she said, "--if I'd known--that I should be _here_?"
+
+I couldn't tell her--she was so white under her wound and the shock of
+it--I couldn't tell her that she had given me no reason to suppose that
+she would be with him.
+
+And she went on. "Why couldn't you have wired in the morning, then? I
+could have caught that boat."
+
+"Because, my dear girl, he doesn't want you to go out."
+
+"It doesn't matter what he wants--or thinks he wants--I'm going.
+
+"And what's more," she said, "you've got to take me. That's all you've
+gained by trying to stop me."
+
+I replied that nothing would induce me to take her out, that I'd promised
+Jimmy she shouldn't go.
+
+She said that didn't matter. Jimmy'd know I couldn't keep a silly promise
+like that, and if I wouldn't take her she'd simply go by herself.
+
+I tried to explain to her very gently that her going--at all--was out of
+the question. She would do no good to anybody by going; she would annoy
+Jimmy most frightfully; untrained women were not wanted at the front.
+
+Untrained? She had got her certificate three days ago. What did I suppose
+she had wanted it for--if it wasn't to go out with Jimmy if he went?
+
+"You knew he was going, then?" I said.
+
+"I knew he wanted to go. But I didn't think he'd go so soon. I didn't
+really think he'd go at all. They told me I needn't worry, that he hadn't
+a chance."
+
+"Who told you?"
+
+"Oh, everybody. The General and Colonel Braithwaite and Charlie, and
+Bertie, and Reggie--at least he told Norah--and the people at the War
+Office and the Admiralty and the Embassies."
+
+"You _went_ to them? You went to the War Office?"
+
+"I went everywhere where he did, or as near as I could get. And they all
+told me the same thing--he hadn't a chance. Not the ghost of a chance. I
+really thought he hadn't. When you think of the men--men who can do
+things, who are dying to go and are being kept back--"
+
+"You were helping him to go?" I said. I saw a vision, or I tried to see
+it, a pathetic vision of Viola following poor Jimmy in his pursuit of
+secretaries and ambassadors, doing insane, impossible things to help him.
+
+And then I saw Viola herself. She was looking at me, with all her
+features tilted in that funny way she had.
+
+"Well--no," she said; "I wasn't exactly _helping_."
+
+"What _were_ you doing, then?"
+
+"I'm afraid I was trying to stop him."
+
+The sheer folly of it took my breath away.
+
+"Surely," I said, "if he hadn't the ghost of a chance, it wasn't
+necessary?"
+
+"Well--it _was_ necessary, you see. He's so awfully clever. He was very
+nearly off once or twice. Only we just managed to get in in time."
+
+"Who got in in time?"
+
+"Oh, it wasn't only me, Furny, it was all of us. We were all out trying
+to stop him--Charlie and Reggie and Uncle Billy--_he_ pulled all the
+ropes--we couldn't do much."
+
+"But what--what did General Thesiger do?"
+
+"He didn't 'do' anything. He hadn't got to. He just said things. Told
+them _about_ Jimmy."
+
+I don't know whether my face expressed horror or admiration. It must have
+been a sort of horror, for she began to excuse herself.
+
+"Why not? Why should poor little Jimmy go?"
+
+"Because he wants to. You'd no business to stop him when he wanted to
+go."
+
+"But--that was it. He didn't want to go. He only thought he _ought_ to
+go."
+
+"How," I said sternly, "do you know what he wanted?"
+
+"Because," she said, "he told Uncle Billy. He kept on saying he ought to
+go. And we told him he oughtn't. What earthly good can Jimmy do out
+there, with his poor little heart all dicky? He'll simply die of it. You
+don't suppose I'd have stopped him if I'd thought it was good for him to
+go? Or if I'd thought he really wanted to? We told him all that--Uncle
+Billy and I did--we told him straight that if he tried to get out we'd
+try and stop him."
+
+"Oh," I said, "you _told_ him. That's a different thing."
+
+"Things, Furny, always are different to what you think them. At least
+they're never half so nasty. Of course we told him. And of course he
+laughed in our faces. We thought we _had_ stopped him. But--he's slipped
+through our fingers.
+
+"We might," she said, "have known."
+
+I heard her say all that, though I wasn't listening. It comes back to me
+that she said it. It was dawning on me that in this queer business there
+were details, quite important details, that had escaped me. The war had
+taken up my attention to the exclusion of Viola's affairs. But it was
+evident that things had happened while I was away. I was thinking of
+something that she let out.
+
+"Look here," I said, "when you say you told him, do you mean that you and
+he have been seeing each other?"
+
+"Of course we've been seeing each other. Until he stopped it. He said he
+couldn't stand the strain."
+
+"And you?" I said. "Did you stand it?"
+
+She looked at me straight and hard.
+
+"You've no right to ask me that," she said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, perhaps I hadn't. And if I had owned frankly that I hadn't all
+might have been well. But, as it was, before I knew where we both were,
+we had quarrelled.
+
+Yes. I quarrelled with Viola; or she quarrelled with me; it really
+doesn't matter how you put it; and it shows the awful tension we must
+have been living in.
+
+When I heard her say that I had no right to ask her that question I
+answered that I thought I had.
+
+She said, "What right?"
+
+And I said if she would think a little she would see what right.
+
+And at that she fired up and the blaze was awful. We two were up there
+alone and she had me at her mercy. She held me in the blaze.
+
+"I suppose," she said, "I'm to think of your everlasting meddling with my
+affairs?"
+
+I pointed out that a charge of meddling came rather oddly from a lady who
+honoured me by staying in my house because she preferred it to her
+husband's.
+
+"You know perfectly well why I'm staying in your house; and if you don't,
+Norah does. I could have stayed with my father, for that matter."
+
+I said I thought that that was extremely doubtful--in the circumstances.
+
+I had her there, and she knew it, for she retired in bad order on an
+irrelevant point. She said I was no judge of the circumstances.
+
+I said peaceably that perhaps I wasn't, but that she must own that I had
+behaved as if I were. At any rate I'd given her the benefit of the doubt.
+
+She said, "You talk as if I'd been through the Divorce Court. Perhaps
+that's where you think I ought to be. The benefit of the doubt! You
+certainly _have_ given it me. It's been nothing but doubt with you,
+Walter, ever since I knew you. You always thought awful things about me.
+I know you have. I could _see_ you thinking them. You thought vile things
+about me, and vile things about Jimmy. You came rushing out to Belgium
+because you thought them. And the other day you thought the same thing of
+me and Charlie Thesiger, and you came rushing after me again and giving
+me away, and behaving so that everybody else would think me awful too."
+
+"My dear child, you owned yourself that Charlie--"
+
+"Oh--Charlie! As if he mattered! He was only being an ass--the war upset
+him, or something. I don't care what you think about Charlie--he doesn't
+either--but why you should go out of your way to think _me_ awful--"
+
+I said I thought we'd done with that.
+
+"No," she said, "we haven't done with it. I want to get to the bottom of
+it. What _makes_ you do these things? I believe you _want_ to make out
+that I'm horrid, just as you wanted to make out that poor little Jimmy
+was, when I went to him in Bruges."
+
+She went on. "I can understand _that_, because I did go to him, and I--I
+cared for him and you didn't like it. I can even understand your wanting
+_me_ to be horrid then, because it made it easier for you. I had the
+sense to see that that was all that was the matter with you _then_, so I
+didn't mind. But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can
+it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or horrid?"
+
+She had rushed on, carried away by her own passion, without seeing where
+she was going. I don't think she had seen, any more than I had, that for
+nine years I had been living behind a screen. A screen that had hidden me
+from myself. I don't think she saw even now when she came crashing into
+it.
+
+It was I who saw.
+
+The thing was down about my ears; and it wasn't the violence of its fall
+that terrified me; it was my own nakedness. I wasn't prepared to find
+myself morally undressed.
+
+I turned away from her. I began fiddling with my pens and papers. I
+trailed long slip-proofs under her eyes, pretending that I had work to
+do. But she saw through my pretences and her voice followed me.
+
+It was softer, though. It seemed to be pleading, as if she knew nothing
+about me and my screen.
+
+"What harm did I ever do you? Or poor Jimmy either? I didn't let you
+marry me. You ought to be grateful to Jimmy. At least he saved you from
+that."
+
+I said I thought we needn't drag her husband into it, and I haven't a
+notion what I meant. I had to say something, and if it sounded
+disagreeable, so much the better.
+
+And she said there I was again--thinking that I had to remind her that
+Jimmy _was_ her husband.
+
+"You certainly seem to have forgotten it," I said.
+
+"_He_ knows how much I've forgotten."
+
+With that last word she left me.
+
+I tried hard to shake the horror of it off. I remember I sat down to my
+proofs, and I suppose I tried to correct them. But all the time I heard
+Viola's voice saying, "I can understand your wanting me to be horrid
+_then_, because it made it easier for you.... But why on earth you should
+keep it up like this! What can it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or
+horrid?"
+
+It went on in my head till the words ceased to have any meaning. I had
+only a dreadful sense that I should remember them to-morrow, and that
+perhaps when to-morrow came I should know what they meant.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+And when to-morrow came the war took up my attention again, so that I
+actually forgot that Viola had said she was going out to it.
+
+She had let the subject drop abruptly. She didn't even refer to it when
+my friend the editor of the _Morning Standard_ rang me up the next day to
+ask me if I'd go out to Belgium as their Special Correspondent.
+
+He was charmingly frank about it. He told me that it was Tasker Jevons he
+wanted, and Tasker Jevons he had asked to go, but since he couldn't get
+him (and his powerful pen) why then, he'd had to fall back on me. Jevons,
+he said, had let him down pretty badly; he'd understood from Jevons that
+he was prepared to go for them at twelve hours' notice. And he'd given
+him twenty-four hours; and he'd found that he'd gone out there two days
+ago. Chucked them, my friend the editor supposed, for another paper.
+Could I, at twenty-three hours' notice, take his place?
+
+I said I could and I would, and I put him right about Jevons.
+
+And then I went to see about my motor-car.
+
+It was when Viola began to bother me about her passport that the fight
+began.
+
+First of all, she asked me what I was doing about a motor-car? I told her
+she needn't worry herself about my motor-car. It wasn't any concern of
+hers. She grinned at that and said, All right. What she really wanted was
+to consult me about her passport.
+
+And when I refused to be consulted about her passport, to hear a word
+about her passport or about her going, she walked straight out of the
+house into a passing taxi that took her to the Belgian Legation, where
+she saw that weak-minded secretary that Jevons had handled; and she came
+back in time for tea, very cheerful and dressed in a sort of khaki
+uniform she had ordered, with a tunic and knee-breeches and puttees and a
+Red Cross brassard on her right arm.
+
+She said it had been a very tight squeeze, but she'd worked it, down
+to her uniform, and it was all right, and if I'd had any difficulty with
+my motor people (I had had awful difficulty, but how she knew it I
+haven't to this day found out. Sometimes I think she'd worked that too;
+she knew the firm, and she wasn't Mrs. Tasker Jevons for nothing)--if
+I'd had any difficulty she could put that straight for me. She'd got
+_her_ car--Jimmy'd ordered it for Amershott and forgotten about it--and
+her chauffeur, and I could go in it with her if I liked.
+
+It was a better car than the one I'd had in Belgium before or, she said
+significantly, than the one I was going to take out with me. It was true
+that I didn't know anything about cars.
+
+Then Norah, my wife, stood up beside her sister, flagrantly partisan, and
+said, Couldn't I see it wasn't any use trying to stop her? She had me at
+every point. If I wouldn't take her she'd go by herself with the
+chauffeur.
+
+And when I said, How about my promises--my word of honour? Viola laughed.
+
+"Your honour's all right, Wally," she said. "You're not taking me out;
+I'm taking you."
+
+And very early in the morning we motored down to Folkestone to catch the
+midday boat for Ostend. And Norah came with us to see us off. If I'd
+given her the smallest encouragement she'd have come too. I _might_ take
+her, she said; it was beastly being left behind.
+
+I said, like a savage, that Belgium was no place for women. I'd take my
+sister-in-law there, but not my wife.
+
+I suppose the dressing-down I'd got from Viola two nights before had
+rankled. I must have felt that I was getting my own back that time, when
+I threw it up to her that she wasn't my wife.
+
+Norah, I said, had too much sense to want to go where she wasn't wanted.
+
+But Viola only laughed again and said, "Please remember that I'm taking
+you, not you me. And Norah wants to go as much as I do, and it isn't
+altogether on your account. You needn't think it. As for keeping her
+back, you couldn't do it if she meant to go. It's Baby that's keeping
+her, not you."
+
+And then she thanked God she hadn't got a child.
+
+And so, sparring and chaffing by turns, half in play and half in
+earnest--for a secret subterranean anger smouldered still in both of
+us--we got off. I remember at the last moment Norah--dear little
+Norah--telling her that she was not to bully me. She was to let me sit
+in the motor-car as much as I liked; and she was to see that I didn't
+get into any danger.
+
+Danger? Danger? As the great fans of the screws churned the harbour water
+into foam that the waves thinned and flattened out again till the green
+lane broadened between our track and the pier head where Norah stood, and
+the little, slender, dark blue figure became a dot on the pier and lost
+itself in the crowd of dots and disappeared, then, for the first time, it
+struck me that to be going off like this, alone, with Viola, was danger
+in itself.
+
+Because, the other night she had made me see myself as I really was--a
+man, not of an irreproachable rectitude, an immaculate purity (had I
+ever, had anybody ever really supposed that I was such a man?) but quite
+deplorably human, and blind--yes, my dear Viola, blind as any bat--and
+vulnerable, so vulnerable that I think you might have spared me, you
+might have had some pity.
+
+I found myself addressing her like that, in my heart, as I walked up and
+down, up and down the deck, not looking at her, but acutely aware of her,
+where she sat in her deck-chair, bundled up in her great khaki motor-coat
+and in the rugs I had wrapped round her.
+
+I resented the power she had over me to make me aware of her--at such a
+time, or at any time, for that matter. Here was I, a Special
+Correspondent, going out to the war; and there, on the other side of the
+Channel, _was_ the war; in the fields of France and of Flanders men were
+fighting, men were slaughtering each other every day by thousands. I was
+a man and I should have been thinking of those men; and here I was,
+compelled against my conscience and my will to think of this woman. She
+had come out with me against my conscience and my will, and against my
+judgment and my good taste and my honour and my common sense, against
+everything in me that I set most store by. I hadn't meant to take her
+with me, and she had made me take her.
+
+And when my common sense told me that she hadn't; that I wasn't taking
+her, and that she had as much right to be on the Ostend boat as I had, I
+still resented her being there. I still raged as I realized the power she
+had over me. She had always had it. She had had it the first day I ever
+saw her, when she had walked into my rooms against my orders, half an
+hour behind the time I had appointed, and had made herself my secretary
+against my will. She had had it when she used me as a stalking-horse
+to draw her brother's suspicions away from her and Jevons; she had had it
+when she drew me after her to Belgium, and when I followed her from
+Bruges to Canterbury at her bidding; she had had it when I married Norah
+(hadn't she told me, in the insolence of it, that she had meant that I
+should marry Norah?). She had had it, this malign power over me, the
+other night, and she had it now. She always would have it.
+
+It wasn't my fault, I told myself, if she compelled me to look at her,
+this time, as I passed her deck-chair.
+
+I looked at her, and she sent me a little sad interrogative smile that
+asked me why I walked the decks thus savagely and alone? And I paid no
+attention to her or to her smile. In the very arrogance of isolation I
+continued to walk the decks. I meant her to see that I _could_ be alone
+and savage if I liked.
+
+And when I looked at her again (she couldn't have _made_ me this time,
+for she was unaware of me, lost in some profound meditation of her own),
+when I looked at her again my anger and my resentment died with a sort of
+struggle and a pang.
+
+She had, after all, the grace of her ignorance and innocence. If she had
+had no pity on me, it was because she was as blind as she had said I was.
+She didn't, she couldn't see me as she had made me see myself. She didn't
+know that she had any power over me, or else she wouldn't have used her
+power; she was too honourable for that, too chivalrous. You could trust
+her to play the game until she threw it up and left it.
+
+And I passed again in my sullen tramping, and I looked at her for the
+third time, urged by the remorse that stung me. And this time she drew me
+so that I went over to her and sat by her. I looked at my watch, we had
+been two hours on board.
+
+I had left her two hours alone; and in those two hours she had suffered.
+Her face was set now in a sort of brooding fear and anguish; her
+breathing had a tremor in it, as if her heart dragged at her side. It was
+better, far better, that we should quarrel than she should suffer and sit
+quivering in silence and see frightful things.
+
+But I saw that she wasn't going to quarrel, she wasn't going to pitch
+into me; she wasn't going to assert herself and domineer over me just
+now. This agony of hers had made her gentle, so that she spoke to me as
+if she were sorry for me after all.
+
+"Are you tired," she said, "of tramping up and down?"
+
+"Horribly tired."
+
+"Put my rug round you if you're going to sit still. Norah wouldn't let
+you sit still without a rug."
+
+"Norah wouldn't let me do anything I shouldn't do."
+
+She smiled down at me, still sad, but with the least little flicker of
+irony on the top of her sadness. "Norah's job isn't very hard. You don't
+ever _want_ to do anything you shouldn't."
+
+"Oh--don't I?"
+
+"No, never. That's the pull you have over naughty people like me. You're
+so good."
+
+"It wasn't my goodness you were rubbing into me the other night."
+
+"Never mind the other night. It doesn't matter what I said the other
+night. Only what I'm saying now this minute has any importance. But it
+was your goodness, if it comes to that."
+
+"Queer sort of goodness." I was still, you see, a little stung.
+
+"All goodness," she said, "is queer, carried to that pitch. But you're a
+dear in spite of it. I won't bully you."
+
+We made the last part of the crossing on the highway of the sunset. The
+propeller lashed through crimson and fiery copper, and the white wake
+tossed on to the highway turned to rose and gold and its edges to purple.
+
+I had left her again and I called to her to look at this wonder of the
+sky and sea; but she shook her head at me. There was no need to call her.
+She had looked. I could see by her eyes that the intolerable beauty had
+brought Jevons back to her. He was there for her in all beauty and in all
+wonder.
+
+Then she called to _me_. "Wally, come here. I want to speak to you."
+
+I came.
+
+"You thought I was going to leave Jimmy. But I wasn't. _He_ knew I
+wasn't. Why, the first night I knew how impossible it was."
+
+I said, Yes. Of course it was impossible. And of course he knew.
+
+"I shan't mind if only we can get to him before anything happens."
+
+I said nothing would happen, and of course we should get to him.
+
+She was silent so long that I was startled when she said, "Wally--your
+nervous aren't _you_, are they?"
+
+I said, No. No. Of course they weren't.
+
+I knew what she was thinking. Out of the intolerable beauty she had seen
+Jimmy rise with all his gestures. She heard the cracking of his knuckles
+and saw the jerking of his thumb. And these things became tender and
+pathetic and dear to her as if he were dead.
+
+And she had seen herself shudder at them as if it had been another woman
+who shuddered, a strange and pitiless woman whom she hated.
+
+"It wouldn't matter so much if he had wanted to go," she said.
+
+"Why do you keep on saying that he didn't want to go?"
+
+"Because he said so. He said he was only going because he couldn't go."
+
+"I think you're doing him a great injustice. He told me he wanted to go;
+I've no doubt he did want to go--just like any other man."
+
+"Yes. To be just like any other man--_that's_ what he wanted. But he
+couldn't be. He isn't like any other man. And so it's worse for him.
+Can't you see that it's worse for him? It'll hurt him more."
+
+I said I didn't see it, and that she was absurd and morbid and utterly
+unreasonable, and that she was making Jimmy out unreasonable and morbid
+and absurd.
+
+She told me then I didn't understand either of them; and we were silent,
+as if we had quarrelled again, until we came in sight of the Flemish
+coast.
+
+We sailed into Ostend on the tail-end of the sunset. What was left of it
+was enough to keep up for us the intense moment of transfiguration, so
+that we didn't miss it. The long white Digue, the towers, the domes of
+the casinos and hotels, the high, flat fronts of the houses showed
+soaked in light, quivering with light. Ostend might have been some
+enchanted Eastern city. It was as if the heroic land faced us with the
+illusion of enchantment, to cover the desolation that lay beyond her
+dykes.
+
+And we who looked at it were still silent, not now as if we had
+quarrelled, but as if this beauty had made peace between us.
+
+Viola's face had changed. It reminded me in the oddest way of her brother
+Reggie's. I think that for the moment, while it lasted, she had forgotten
+Jimmy, she had forgotten her brother Reggie; she had touched the fringe
+of the immensity that had drawn them from her and swallowed them up. And
+in forgetting them she had forgotten her unhappy self.
+
+In Ostend, at any rate, I was to have no more of her brooding. We had no
+sooner landed than she became the adorable creature who had run away with
+Jevons nine years ago and led me that dance through the cities of
+Flanders. She showed the same wholehearted devotion to the adventure, the
+same innocence, the same tact in ignoring my state of mind. She seemed to
+be making terms with me as she had made them then, suggesting that if _I_
+would ignore a few things I should find her the most delightful companion
+in my travels. We must, she seemed to say, of course forget everything
+that she had said to me the other night or that I had said to her before
+or since; and, as she swung beside me in her khaki, her freedom and her
+freshness declared how admirably _she_ had forgotten. It wasn't as if we
+didn't know what we were really out for.
+
+Except that she was a maturer person--thirty-one and not twenty-two--I
+might have mistaken her for Viola Thesiger, my secretary, setting out, in
+defiance of all conventions, with little Jevons, to look for Belfries in
+Belgium, and taking the war, since there _was_ a war on, in her stride.
+
+And as I walked with her through the same streets where nine years ago I
+had hunted for her and Jevons, it struck me as a strange, unsettling
+thing that I should be taking her out to look for Jevons and at the same
+time playing precisely Jevons's part in the adventure. She too must have
+been aware of this oddness--for she stopped suddenly to say to me, "Do
+you remember when I ran away with Jimmy? Isn't it funny that I should be
+running away with you?"
+
+I said it was. Very funny indeed. And I wondered why she had drawn my
+attention to it just now? Did she want to make me judge by the
+transparent innocence of this running the not quite so transparent
+innocence of that? I think so. Remember, it was Reggie Thesiger's
+apparent doubt as to her innocence that had been at the bottom of all the
+trouble of the last five years. It accounted for her attack on me the
+other night. It was as if she had turned to say to me triumphantly, "Now,
+perhaps, when I'm running away with _your_ precious perfection, at last
+you understand?"
+
+We had some difficulty in finding quarters and Viola insisted on our
+staying in the Station Hotel, which had been bombarded by an aeroplane
+the night before. She pointed out that it was almost entirely empty. "And
+so," she said, "there won't be anybody to see us."
+
+It was as if she wished to remind me by how thin a thread _my_ reputation
+hung.
+
+The business of our passports kept us in Ostend the next morning. I had
+made up my mind there would be difficulty about Viola's military pass, I
+was even contemplating the possibility of her being sent back to England
+by the next boat; but no; she had forestalled obstruction, and the pocket
+of her khaki coat was stuffed with letters from the War Office, the
+British Red Cross, and the French and Belgian Embassies. In fact, there
+was one horrid moment at the depot when it looked as if the Special
+Correspondent would be smuggled through under Viola's protection.
+
+"You see, Furny," she said, "nobody's going to stop me. Nobody wants to
+stop me."
+
+At last we got off, and early in the afternoon we were in Bruges.
+
+We had run into the Market-Place before we knew where we were; and yonder
+in the street at the back of it was Viola's _pension_, and here on our
+right hand was Jimmy's hotel, and there, towering before us, was the
+Belfry. We looked at each other. And through the war and across nine
+years, it all came back to us.
+
+"The Belfry's still there," I said.
+
+"It always was." She said it a little sternly. But she had smiled at the
+allusion, all the same--the smile that had never been denied to it.
+
+We stayed an hour in Bruges and lunched there in Jimmy's hotel. The fat
+proprietor and his wife were still there and they remembered us. They
+remembered Jimmy. And they had seen him three days ago. Mr. Chevons had
+passed through Bruges in his Red Cross motor-car. They seemed uncertain
+whether Viola was Mrs. Chevons or Mrs. Furnival, and they addressed her
+indifferently as either. An awful indifference had come to them. Of the
+war they said, _"C'est triste, nest-ce pas?"_ We left them, sitting
+pallid and depressed behind the barricade of their bureau, gazing after
+us with the saddest of smiles.
+
+That hour in Bruges was a mistake; so was our lunching at Jimmy's hotel.
+It was too much for Viola. It brought Jimmy so horribly near to her. I
+don't know what she was thinking, but I am convinced that from the moment
+of our entering Bruges the poor child had made up her mind that Jimmy had
+been killed. The smile she had given to the Belfry was the last flicker
+of her self-control, and halfway through lunch the grey melancholy that
+Bruges had absorbed from Jimmy nine years ago came down on her, as nine
+years ago it had come down on me, and it swallowed her up. By the time
+the waiter brought the coffee she was done for. Her eyes stared, hard and
+hot, over the cup she tried to drink from. She couldn't drink because of
+the spasm in her throat.
+
+"Come," I said, "we must clear out of this."
+
+We cleared out.
+
+I too was invaded by the grey melancholy as we came to the bridge by the
+eastern gate where I had found Jevons that night leaning over and looking
+into the Canal. It was the sentry's sudden springing up to challenge us
+that saved me. I hoped that it would save Viola. She enjoyed the
+sentries.
+
+But not this time. Her nerves were all on edge and she showed some
+irritation at the delay. I felt then that I had to take her in hand.
+
+"My dear child," I said (we were running out on the road to Ghent now),
+"do you realize that there's a war?"
+
+She answered, "Yes, Wally, yes, I know there is."
+
+"Do you know that Antwerp's over there, a little way to the north? And
+that they've dragged up the big guns from Namur for the siege of
+Antwerp?"
+
+"Oh, Wally--_have_ they?"
+
+She turned her face to the north as if she thought she could see or hear
+the siege-guns.
+
+"But you _said_ Jimmy was in Ghent."
+
+"Jimmy," I said, "is probably in Ghent. If he isn't, he's in Antwerp. Do
+you know that the battlefields are down there--no--there--to the south,
+where I'm pointing? There's fighting going on there _now_."
+
+She said, "Yes, dear, I know, I know," very gently; and she put her hand
+on my knee, as if she recognized the war as my private tragedy and was
+sorry for me. Then she fell back to her brooding.
+
+Somewhere on the great flagged road between Bruges and Ecloo we met a
+straggling train of refugees--old men and women and children, bent double
+under their enormous bundles, making for Bruges and Ostend. They stared,
+not at us, but at the road in front of them, with a dreadful apathy, as
+we passed.
+
+"This," I said, "is what finishes _me_--every time I see it."
+
+She said nothing.
+
+"Do you realize," I said, "that those women and those little children are
+flying for their lives? That they've come, doubled up like that, for
+miles--from Termonde or Alost? That they've lost everything they ever
+had?" (I can hear my own voice beating out the horror of it in hard,
+cruel jerks.) "That their homes--their _homes_--are burned to ashes
+somewhere down there?"
+
+At my last jerk she turned.
+
+"No," she said. "I'm cold and hard and stupid, and I do _not_ realize it.
+Neither do you. If either of us realized it for two seconds we should be
+either cutting our throats in that ditch or going back to Ostend now with
+a load of those women and children, instead of tearing past them like
+devils in this damned car.
+
+"I can't realize anything till I know whether Jimmy's all right or not. I
+can't see anything, or feel anything, or think of anything but Jimmy.
+Bruges is Jimmy and Belgium is Jimmy and the whole war is Jimmy--to me.
+I don't care if you _are_ horrified. I can't help it if I _am_ callous.
+It is so. And you can't make it different."
+
+I remember saying quite abjectly that I was sorry--that I was only trying
+to turn her mind to other things as a relief.
+
+"I'm to turn my mind to _that_--as a relief!"
+
+She showed me a woman I was trying not to see, a woman who carried the
+bedding of her household on her back and dragged a four-year-old child by
+the hand. The child slipped to its knees at every other yard, and at
+every other yard was pulled up whimpering and dragged again--not with
+anger or any emotion whatever, but with a sickening repetition, as if its
+mother's arm was a mechanism set going to pull and drag.
+
+If ever there was a weathercock it was my sister-in-law. Without even
+pretending to consult me, she made Colville, the chauffeur, turn the car
+round. (He was _her_ chauffeur, after all, she said.)
+
+"I don't know," she said, "whether I realize that woman or not, or
+whether you do. But I'm going to take her into Bruges."
+
+And we took her. (Viola nursed the four-year-old child all the way.) We
+also took an old man and a young woman with a baby at her breast, and two
+small children. It was the only thing to be done, Viola said.
+
+It was nearly half-past five when we left Bruges the second time.
+
+"God only knows," I groaned, "what time we'll get to Ghent!"
+
+"He does," she said. "He knows perfectly well we shall get there by
+half-past seven."
+
+And we did.
+
+It was dark when we turned into the Place d'Armes and drew up before the
+long, grey Hôtel de la Poste. I jumped out and stood by the kerb to give
+Viola my hand.
+
+"But--" she said, "I _know_ this place."
+
+"You ought to."
+
+I don't know where she expected us to go. She still sat in the car as if
+held there by the shock of recognition. She ignored my outstretched hand.
+
+"You'd better take your things," she said at last, "if you want to get
+out here. I'm going on to look for Jimmy."
+
+I had then my first full sense of what I was in for. I saw that she was
+perfectly prepared to throw me over, to dump me down here or anywhere
+else and go on by herself with the car and the chauffeur that were, or
+ought to have been, mine.
+
+She didn't care if I was Special Correspondent to the _Morning Standard_,
+and she had that beastly chauffeur in her pocket all the time. (I
+discovered afterwards that she'd laid in food for him and hidden it in
+the locker under the front seat, so that they might be ready for any
+sort of adventure.) And yet in the very moment that I realized her
+disastrous obstinacy I found her intolerably pathetic.
+
+"If you want to look for Jimmy," I said, "you'd better get out too. He'll
+be here if he's anywhere in Ghent."
+
+But she was already on the kerb, brushing me aside. She had seen behind
+my back the approach of the concierge and she made for him.
+
+"Is Mr. Jevons in this hotel--Mr. Tasker Jevons?"
+
+Yes, Mr. Chevons was in the hotel. Madame would find him in the lounge.
+
+She had swept past him to the stair of the lounge, and I was following
+her discreetly when the proprietor dashed out of his bureau to intercept
+us. The lounge, he said, was reserved from seven till nine o'clock for
+the officers of the General Staff.
+
+Viola had paid no attention to the proprietor and was sweeping up the
+stair. I gave Jevons's name and explained that the lady was Mrs. Jevons.
+
+The proprietor, a portly and pompous Belgian, positively dissolved in
+smiles and bows and apologetic gestures. _Mille pardons, monsieur, mille
+pardons._ It would be _all_ right. Monsieur Chevons was dining with the
+officers of the General Staff.
+
+He did not know that Madame was expected. He was to reserve a room for
+Monsieur?
+
+I told him to reserve rooms for me and the chauffeur, and to consult Mr.
+Jevons about Madame. And I hurried up the stair after Viola.
+
+She was waiting for me at the turn, on the landing, by the wide archway
+of the lounge, where the great glass screen began that shut off the
+staircase. She stood back from the entrance, looking in, and smiling at
+what she saw. It was clear by her attitude and her absorption that
+something was happening in there.
+
+As I approached she made a sign to me and withdrew farther back and up
+the stair.
+
+"He's there," she whispered. "Over there. In that corner."
+
+For a moment we stood together on the stair, looking down through the
+glass screen into the lounge.
+
+The far end of the lounge had been turned into a dining-place for the
+officers of the Belgian General Staff. Most of the tables were cleared
+now and deserted. But from our place on the stair we had a clear view
+slantwise of one small table in the corner. And we saw Jimmy seated at
+that table.
+
+At least we made him out.
+
+All but Jimmy's head was hidden by the figures of a Belgian General and
+two Colonels. They had closed in on him (they were evidently all four at
+the end of their dinner); they had closed in on him in an access of
+emotion and enthusiasm. The General (the one who sat beside him) had his
+arm round Jimmy's shoulder; the two who sat facing him leaned towards
+Jimmy over half the table, and one grasped Jimmy's right hand in his; the
+other was making some sort of competitive demonstration. The disengaged
+arms of the three held up the glasses in which they were about to pledge
+him. And at the other end of the room a scattered group of soldiers rose
+to their feet and looked on smiling and signalling applause.
+
+What was happening down there was public homage to Jimmy.
+
+And in between the two dark Belgian uniforms that obscured him you could
+just see a bit of Jimmy's khaki, and from among the white and grizzled
+heads that pressed on him you saw Jimmy's face and Jimmy's flush and
+Jimmy's twinkle; his incredible, irrepressible twinkle. You could even
+see the tips of Jimmy's little front teeth trying to bite down his lip
+into some sort of composure. You could see that he was very shy and very
+modest; you could see that in spite of his shyness and his modesty he
+was frightfully pleased; but more than anything you could see that he was
+amused.
+
+Positively, positively, he had the air of not taking his Belgian officers
+very seriously.
+
+"We mustn't go down yet," said Viola, "or we'll spoil it."
+
+So we waited, looking at Jimmy through the screen, while the officers
+clinked their glasses and drank to him and called his name; and the group
+that looked on echoed it; and the waiters who had come in to see what was
+happening, repeated it among themselves.
+
+"_Vive l'Angleterre! Vive les Anglais! Vive Chevons! Chevons! Chevons!_"
+
+"I wonder," said Viola, "what Jimmy has been up to? You can take me to
+him."
+
+When we got to the table we found Jimmy trying to explain to the General
+and the two Colonels in execrable French that he didn't know what it was
+all about. _He_ hadn't done anything.
+
+Then he saw Viola.
+
+For one second, while he stared at her across the room, he appeared to be
+suffering from a violent shock. He was so visibly hit that the two men
+who had their backs to us turned round to see what it was that had
+affected him. His flush had gone suddenly and he was breathing hard, with
+his mouth a little open.
+
+I heard him saying something in French about his wife.
+
+He recovered, however, in a second, and disentangled himself from the
+General and the Colonels and from the dinner-table, and came forward.
+
+And as he came, I noticed something odd about him. He limped slightly.
+His khaki had a battered look; it was soiled and torn in places, and the
+Red Cross brassard on his sleeve was simply filthy.
+
+And he had only been out three days, mind you. He was only three days
+ahead of us. But he had lost no time.
+
+As they strolled up to each other and met midway in the big public room,
+in the fraction of time that passed before their hands touched I heard
+him draw a hard, quivering breath and let it out in a long sigh. That
+breath was a suppressed cry of trouble and of acquiescence.
+
+Then (I could have blessed him for it) he twinkled.
+
+Viola said, "What _have_ you been up to?"
+
+And Jimmy, "I say, I like that! What are _you_ doing here? Have you come
+to look at the Belfry?"
+
+"No. I've come to look at _you_!" She put her hand on his shoulder.
+
+He said, "That's a jolly rig-out you've got," and that was all.
+
+The General and the two Colonels came forward and were presented to Mrs.
+Jevons; and Mr. Walter Furnival ("one of our war-correspondents") was
+presented to the General and the two Colonels. They saluted Madame; they
+begged Madame to accept their profoundest congratulations; they regretted
+that Madame had not been present just now when they were drinking her
+husband's health.
+
+And the old General (the one with the white hair and imperial) informed
+her that Monsieur her husband had a very poor opinion of the Belgian
+Army.
+
+"He has saved the lives of three Belgian officers and I do not know _how_
+many Belgian soldiers--and he says that it is nothing!"
+
+And the stout, florid Colonel, who had been trying to look young and
+rakish ever since he had turned and caught sight of Viola, suggested that
+"Perhaps, if he had saved your British, he would not have said that it
+was nothing."
+
+And the lean, iron-grey Colonel with the ferocious moustache remarked in
+an austere, guttural voice, "_Il est impayable--lui!_"
+
+Jimmy had been offering cigarettes to them as if he thought that was the
+only thing that would stop them. Then the old white-haired General sat
+between Viola and him with his arm round Jimmy's shoulder and began
+again, so loudly that everybody in the room could hear him.
+
+"Your husband, Madame, is a man who does not know what fear is--who
+does not care what death is. For two nights and three days, Madame,
+he has been down there--at Alost and Termonde--under shell-fire.
+_Mais--un enfer, Madame!_ You would have thought he had been born under
+fire, your husband. _Ce n'est pas un homme, c'est un salamandre_.
+Bullets--mitrailleuse--shrapnel--it is no more to him than to go out in a
+shower of rain. When our men were scuttling, and shouted to him to get
+under shelter, what do you think he said?--'_Ouvrir une parapluie--ça ne
+vaut pas la peine_."
+
+There was a shout of laughter.
+
+"That," said Viola, "is the sort of thing he _would_ say. And please, I
+want to know what's the matter with his leg."
+
+I can see her now, sitting on that crimson velvet seat in the lounge and
+looking past the gesticulations of the General to Jevons, who was shaking
+his head at her as much as to say, "Don't you believe the old boy, he's a
+shocking story-teller."
+
+The old General seemed aware of her preoccupation, for he rose, murmuring
+affectionately, "_Mon petit Chevons_. I will not praise him to you,
+Madame. No doubt you know what he is."
+
+I can see her standing up there and giving her hand to the old General
+and trying to stiffen her face to say, "I know."
+
+Evidently she thought General Roubaix was too voluble to be entirely
+trustworthy, for, when he left us and Jimmy had gone out to see about our
+dinner, she addressed herself to the two Colonels.
+
+"Please tell me what my husband _really_ did."
+
+Both the Colonels tried to tell her; but it was the younger one with the
+moustache (the one who had said that Jimmy was _"impayable"_) who
+satisfied her.
+
+It was true, every bit of it. Jevons, it seemed, had been in the thick of
+the bombardment of Alost and in the fighting for the bridge at Termonde.
+His practice was to leave Kendal and the motor-car behind him in some
+place of shelter while he walked into the fire. Sometimes he took his
+Belgian stretcher-bearers with him, sometimes, when they didn't like the
+look of it, he went by himself. He didn't care, the Colonel said, _where_
+he went or how. If it was through rifle-fire or mitrailleuse he went on
+his hands and knees--he wriggled on his stomach. If it was shrapnel he
+took his chance. He had saved one of his three officers by carrying him
+straight out of his own battery, when the German guns had found its
+range; and he had driven his car, by himself, across a five-mile-long
+field, under a hailstorm of shrapnel, to get the other two.
+
+"You see," the Colonel expounded, "your husband has chosen the most
+dangerous of all field ambulance work. Those high-speed scouting cars,
+running low on the ground, can go where a big ambulance cannot. It is
+magnificent what he has done."
+
+When Jevons came back they could still hardly keep their eyes off him;
+they could hardly tear themselves away. It was "_À demain, Monsieur_,"
+and "_À demain, Colonel_" as if they had arranged another deadly tryst.
+
+"Well," said Jimmy, "how do you like them?"
+
+"Oh--they're dears," said Viola, "especially the one with the moustache.
+Do you know, they've told me everything except what's the matter with
+leg."
+
+"My leg?" said Jimmy. "A bit of shell barked it. I'm jolly glad it's my
+leg and not my hand."
+
+I was a little frightened when Viola left us alone after dinner. I
+thought he would pitch into me for bringing her. But he only said sadly,
+"You oughtn't to have brought her, Furny. But I suppose you couldn't stop
+her."
+
+I said, No, I couldn't stop her. But I hadn't brought her. She had
+brought me.
+
+We sat on till the lounge was open to the guests of the hotel. And when
+the war-correspondents began to drop in I saw that Jevons was uneasy.
+
+"D'you mind if I turn in, old man?" he said.
+
+I asked him if his wound was hurting him.
+
+He stooped and caressed it pensively.
+
+"No," he said. "Not a bit. I like my wound. It--it makes me feel manly."
+
+Presently he said good night and left me.
+
+I thought--yes, I certainly thought--that he exaggerated his limp a
+little as he crossed the room, and for a moment I wondered, "Is he
+playing up to the correspondents?"
+
+Then I saw that Viola stood in the doorway waiting for him and that she
+gave him her arm.
+
+And then through the glass screen I saw them going together up the stair.
+And I remembered the tale that he had told me nine years ago, how he had
+seen her standing there and looking down at him--half frightened--through
+the glass screen, and how he had said to me, "I couldn't. She was so
+helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I couldn't."
+
+It was the same room and the same glass screen and the same stair. And it
+was the same man. I knew him. I knew him. I had always known him. (Was
+there ever any risk he hadn't taken?) I had never, really, for one
+moment misunderstood.
+
+I certainly knew why he "liked" his wound.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+We had breakfast very early the next morning, for Jevons was under orders
+to start at eight o'clock for Termonde. We had a table reserved for us in
+a corner of the restaurant. The hotel was full of Belgian officers, and
+I found I was infinitely better off in attaching myself to Jevons than if
+I had joined the war-correspondents.
+
+Viola (I may say that her rig-out which Jevons had admired so much, the
+khaki tunic and breeches, made us terribly conspicuous) had come down in
+a contrite mood. I heard her telling Jevons that he must be kind to me,
+for I had had an awful time with her and I had been an angel.
+
+Well, I had had an awful time; I don't think I remember ever having had a
+worse time than the hours I had spent in her company since she had laid
+into me on Tuesday evening.
+
+But I had not been an angel; far from it. Looking back on those hours, I
+can see that I behaved to her like a perfect brute.
+
+She had her revenge. One of those revenges that are the more
+triumphant because they are unpremeditated. She had dished me as a
+war-correspondent.
+
+For I declare that from the moment when we found Jevons and his General
+in the hotel I became the victim of her miserable point of view. I could
+only see the war through Jevons, and as a part of Jevons; I might have
+said, like Viola, that to me Ghent was Jevons, and Belgium was Jevons,
+and the war was Jevons. I suppose I saw as much of the War from first to
+last as any Special Correspondent at the front, and I know, that, barring
+the Siege of Antwerp, the three weeks when Jimmy was in it were by no
+means the most important or the most thrilling weeks in the war; and of
+the one event, the Siege of Antwerp, I didn't see as much as I ought to
+have seen, being most terribly handicapped by Viola. And yet--perhaps
+a little because of Viola, but infinitely more because of Jevons--those
+three weeks stand out in my memory before the battles of the Aisne and
+Marne and the long fight for Calais. Because of Jevons I have made them
+figure, in the columns of the _Morning Standard_ and elsewhere, with a
+superior vividness; even now when I recall them I seem to have lived with
+Jevons in Flanders through long periods of time.
+
+I have the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of
+the _Morning Standard_, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are
+interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his
+performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written a very fine
+account of Melle, which I understand is a small village four and a-half
+miles from Ghent. But there are other events--the Fall of Antwerp, for
+instance."
+
+Well, we got the story of the Fall of Antwerp all right. But Jimmy wrote
+it for me. It was the last thing he did write.
+
+Yes: he had only three weeks of it, all told. He went out on Tuesday,
+September the twenty-second, and he came back on Tuesday, October the
+thirteenth. It was his infernal luck that he should have had no more of
+it.
+
+And yet, I don't know. I don't see how he could have held out much longer
+at his pitch of intensity. Three weeks would have been nothing to any
+other man. But Jevons could do more with three weeks than another man
+could do with a three years' campaign, and he contrived to crowd into his
+term the maximum of glory and of risk. And when it was all over it was
+less as if Fate had foiled him than as if he had "given" himself three
+weeks.
+
+But Jimmy was discontented, and every morning at breakfast we listened to
+the most extraordinary lamentations. His job, he said, wasn't at all the
+jolly thing it looked. For he was under orders the whole blessed time.
+He'd no more freedom, hadn't Jimmy, than that poor devil of a waiter.
+He'd got to go or to stay where a fussy old ram of a Colonel sent him. So
+here he was in Ghent, an open city, when he wanted to be in Antwerp. He
+hadn't been anywhere--anywhere at all. As for what he'd done, he couldn't
+see what the fuss was all about. He hadn't done anything. He'd seen a
+little fight in a turnip-field, and a little squabble for a bridge you
+could blow up to-day and build again to-morrow, and a little tin-pot town
+peppered. And look at the war! Just look at the war!
+
+And when we tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo,
+the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next
+week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There
+wouldn't be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said. "There
+won't be any Waterloo for another two years, if then."
+
+He wasn't always lugubrious. It was only when he thought that he was
+missing the Siege of Antwerp that his happiness was incomplete.
+
+It was on our third morning, when he rushed off joyously (to Quatrecht, I
+think), that I said to Viola, "You thought it would hurt him more than
+other people. You needn't have come out after him. You see how much it's
+hurting him."
+
+"I'm glad I came," she said. "I don't mind as long as I can see."
+
+"Do you remember him telling Reggie that he wouldn't be in the war
+because he was a coward? Don't you wish Reggie could see him now?"
+
+She didn't answer, and I saw that there was still a sting for her in
+Reggie's name. The war might have made her forgive him, but there were
+things that the war couldn't wipe out from her memory. And there was her
+own rather appalling injustice to Jimmy. I wondered whether she was
+thinking of how she had tried to stop his going to the front, and how she
+had said he didn't want to go.
+
+But I had to own that she had done the best thing for her peace of mind
+by coming out.
+
+_My_ peace of mind, I was told quite frankly, didn't matter. Jevons,
+though he admitted that I couldn't have stopped her coming out, made me
+responsible for her presence at the seat of war. The trouble was that she
+insisted on following him wherever he went. And as it wasn't to be
+expected that he would take her with him into the tight places that he
+managed to get into in his own car, I had to have her in mine. Not that
+Viola consented to my putting it that way. It was clear that she made
+herself mistress of the situation when she obtained possession of that
+car and manoeuvred (as I am convinced she did manoeuvre) for my own
+failure with the firm that supplied it. On our first morning in Ghent we
+came to what she called an understanding, when she rubbed it well into me
+that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out,
+and that the man was under her orders, not mine. If I liked to come with
+her, why, of course I could. Otherwise, I could go halves with one of the
+other correspondents in one of their cars. But she pointed out that I
+could hardly do better than come with her, for by simply following Jimmy
+I should get nearer to the firing-line than anybody else. (She had
+assumed that the firing-line was the goal of every war-correspondent's
+ambition.) I would find, she said, that it would work quite well.
+
+It did. It worked better than if I had gone halves with the other
+correspondents. For at this time war-correspondents were not greatly
+loved by the military authorities, and they were having considerable
+difficulty in getting near anything, and the time, Jimmy said, was
+coming when they would be cleared neck and crop out of Belgium. My astute
+sister-in-law had calculated on all this and on her own part in it.
+
+"If you'll only trust me, Wally," she said the first day we started, when
+all the correspondents in the hotel had turned out to see us off, "you'll
+find that I'm your Providence and not your curse. I can get you through
+where you'd never get yourself. Just look at those men how sick they
+are."
+
+I said I thought it would be only decent to take two or three of them
+with us. We had room.
+
+But Viola was firm. She said it would be most indecent. We should want
+all the room we had for our wounded.
+
+"Do you suppose I'm going to chivy Jimmy about without doing anything to
+help him? As for you, you've only to sit tight and do what you're told.
+You'll be all right as long as we follow Jimmy."
+
+And so we followed him. My God, what a chase! But Viola's little
+chauffeur was game and we followed. Though Jimmy had made elaborate
+arrangements for stopping his wife's progress at least two miles outside
+the danger-zone she always managed to get through. Sentries, colonels,
+army medical officers--she twisted them into coils round her little
+finger, and cast them from her and got through. And once through, we were
+really quite useful in transporting wounded. Jevons and I between us
+managed to keep her out of the actual firing-line by telling her she was
+in all of it there was; and when we were loaded up with wounded there was
+no difficulty in getting her away.
+
+And certainly it served my turn well enough. Though I was compelled to
+see the war through Jimmy, I saw the war.
+
+By the end of our first week Jimmy seemed to get used to being followed
+as a matter of course. We had followed him to Alost and Termonde and
+Quatrecht and Zele. When we weren't following him we were near him
+somewhere, working at the dressing-stations or among the refugees.
+
+Then he did a mean thing. He managed to get himself sent to Antwerp for
+three days. He sneaked off there by himself on the Sunday, and when we
+tried to follow him we were turned back at Saint Nicolas, just too late
+to see the British go through. He had worked it this time.
+
+When he got back from Antwerp at the end of his three days we knew that
+something had happened, something that he was keeping from us. It wasn't
+only the fate of Antwerp that was hanging over him, as it hung over all
+of us in that awful second week. It was as if he had seen something
+intimate and terrible that he couldn't talk about.
+
+That night after Viola had gone to her room he told me what had happened.
+He had seen Charlie Thesiger's regiment at Saint Nicolas on Sunday. And
+to-day--which was Tuesday--he had seen Charlie Thesiger. He had found him
+lying dangerously wounded in the British Hospital at Antwerp. That, he
+said, was what had kept him there. And he had brought him back with him
+to Ghent. He was in the Couvent de Saint Pierre.
+
+He thought, perhaps, it would be better not to tell Viola just yet.
+Charlie didn't know, he said, that she was here.
+
+The war was beginning to close round us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day (Wednesday) he announced that he was going to Zele; but he
+didn't, he really didn't want me to take Viola there. I could go by
+myself, of course, if I liked, though he didn't care about her being
+left.
+
+But we did go. Viola's blood was up, after what she called Jimmy's
+meanness, and there was no keeping her back.
+
+We were a little uncertain of our way, for following Jimmy as we did, or
+rather, following the direction Colville swore he had seen him start in,
+took us much too far to the north. We found ourselves on the Antwerp
+road, jammed in the traffic, and caught by a stream of refugees. We were
+obliged to turn back to Ghent to get our bearings, but the business of
+transporting women and children kept us on the Antwerp road all morning,
+and it was past two o'clock before we started for Zele.
+
+I remember this particular chase after Jimmy for many reasons. First, we
+lost our way and never got to Zele at all.
+
+Down in the south-east on the sky-line we saw a fleet of little clouds
+that seemed to be anchored to the earth, and every cloud of the fleet was
+the smoke from a burning village. West of the fleet was an enormous cloud
+blown by the wind across miles of sky.
+
+Viola was certain that the big cloud was Zele being burned to the ground,
+and that Jimmy would be burned with it.
+
+When I told her that it wasn't likely that Jimmy would stay in Zele when
+it was burning she said that I didn't know Jimmy, and anyhow it was there
+that she was going.
+
+Suddenly Viola sat up very straight.
+
+"Furny, is that guns I hear, or thunder?"
+
+I said it was guns. A deep and solemn booming came from before and behind
+us and on either side, east and west. We had rushed bang between the
+French and German batteries.
+
+The big cloud turned out to be smoke from a factory that the Belgians had
+set fire to themselves, and in following it we had gone miles from Zele.
+Now we followed the guns.
+
+We turned east and struck off south and found ourselves in the village of
+Baerlere. The lines of fire seemed suddenly to narrow in on us here.
+
+There was a clean path down the centre of the street, for men and horses
+stood back close under the housewalls on each side. The place was full of
+soldiers. One of them told us that we could get to Zele by going east
+through the village, but as the road was being shelled, he didn't advise
+us to try.
+
+We went down that clean middle of the street. We were safe enough as long
+as we ran between the houses; but the village very soon came to an end,
+and then, in the open road, we were in for it.
+
+The fields dropped away from us on each side, leaving us as naked to the
+German batteries as if we were running on a raised causeway. At the
+bottom of the fields to our right there was a line of willows, beyond the
+willows there was the river, and behind the river bank, on the further
+side, were the German lines.
+
+The grey smoke of their fire was still tangled in the willow-tops.
+
+Colville drew up under the lee of the last house in the village. He
+didn't like the look of that open road. Neither did I.
+
+"Go on," said Viola. "What are you stopping for?"
+
+The guns ceased firing for a moment and we rushed it.
+
+"I do wish," said Viola, "you'd tuck your arm in, Furny. It's your right
+arm and you're on the wrong side of the car."
+
+I asked her what made her think of my right arm just then.
+
+"Because it's the only part of himself that Jimmy ever thinks of," she
+said.
+
+There was about three-quarters of a mile of causeway and it ended in a
+little hamlet. And the hamlet--it had been knocked to bits before we got
+into it--the hamlet ended in a hillock of bricks and mortar.
+
+The road to Zele was completely blocked.
+
+"Well--" said Colville, "I _am_ blowed."
+
+"You've got to take it," said Viola.
+
+"Sorry, m'm. It can't be done. You want a motor traction with caterpillar
+wheels for this business."
+
+He was backing the car when a shell burst and buried itself in the place
+where we had stood.
+
+To my horror I saw that Viola had opened the door of the car and was
+getting out.
+
+"What on earth are you doing?" I said.
+
+"I'm going to walk to Zele."
+
+I pulled her back and held her down in her seat by main force. She was
+horribly strong. And as she struggled with me she said quietly, "It's all
+right. You two _must_ go back and I must go to Jimmy."
+
+I shouted to Colville, "Turn her round, can't you, and get out of this."
+
+He turned her. He drew up deftly under the shelter of a barn that still
+stood intact. Then he spoke.
+
+"Are you quite sure, sir, that Mr. Jevons is in that place? Because, sir,
+I heard Kendal say something this morning about their going to Antwerp."
+
+"Then why the devil didn't you say so?"
+
+"I didn't think of it, sir, until I saw Mrs. Jevons getting out."
+
+He added by way of afterthought, "Besides, I promised Kendal. You and
+Mrs. Jevons wasn't to know he was going on to Antwerp."
+
+Viola and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.
+
+Somewhere behind us from beyond the river a gun boomed and we took no
+notice of it. We went on laughing.
+
+"He's had us again," she said.
+
+"Yes. We've been done this time. Well--we'd better scoot."
+
+We made a rush for it between guns and got to Baerlere. Once we were out
+of the village and heading for the Ghent road we were safe.
+
+We were hardly out of sound of the guns when I heard Viola saying, "You
+know it really _was_ funny of Jimmy."
+
+I said, "He won't think it quite so funny when he hears what we've done."
+
+He didn't think it funny at all. He was furious when he heard what we'd
+done. He forbade Viola to follow him again. He threatened to sack
+Colville. He said he'd have me sent home to-morrow and kept there, and
+Viola should go with me.
+
+And when he'd finished he told us that Antwerp had fallen.
+
+That was how Jevons came to write the story of the Fall of Antwerp
+instead of me.
+
+Well, he didn't sack Colville; and he didn't get me packed off with the
+other war-correspondents who left Ghent in a body the next day. And he
+said nothing about sending Viola away. He did better than that. He told
+her he had brought Charlie Thesiger from Antwerp yesterday, and that her
+cousin was dying in the Couvent de Saint Pierre, and that perhaps it
+would be a bit easier for him if she were with him.
+
+We took her to the convent that morning. On the way there she asked Jimmy
+why he hadn't told her about Charlie yesterday. He said that up till
+midnight we weren't absolutely certain that Charlie wouldn't recover, and
+that she was safer with us in the hotel than she would be away from us in
+the convent.
+
+"My safety is to be considered before everything?" she said.
+
+He answered that it was surely enough for her if he risked it now.
+
+I can't think why she didn't see through him. I and Kendal and Colville
+knew perfectly well that he was taking her to the convent to be safe. I
+think he argued that if she had poor Charlie to look after it would keep
+her quiet, and she would be out of mischief till it was time for the
+Germans to march into Ghent.
+
+So we took her to him.
+
+We found him in a little whitewashed cell that one of the sisters had
+given up to him. He lay under a crucifix on the nun's narrow bed, which
+was too short for him, so that his naked feet showed through the blankets
+at the bottom. The naked feet of the Christ pointed downwards to his
+head.
+
+He had been shot through the lungs and was dying of pneumonia, sending
+out his breath in fierce, rapid jerks.
+
+He lay on his side with his back towards us, and his face was hidden from
+us as we came in.
+
+The sister who sat with him made a sign that said, "Oh yes, you can come
+in, all of you; it will make no difference."
+
+The cell was so small that Jevons and I had to draw back and let Viola go
+in by herself. We two stood in the doorway and looked in. After the first
+glance at the bed--it was enough for me--I looked, I couldn't help
+looking, at Viola, (Jevons, I noticed, kept his eyes fixed on the body of
+the dying man.) I heard her catch her breath in a sob before she could
+have seen him.
+
+He had slipped his blankets from his shoulder, and it was the sight of
+his back--under the half-open hospital shirt which showed the bandages
+and dressings of his wound--that upset her; his back that might have been
+any man's back, the innocent back that she had no memory of, that
+disguised and hid him from her and made him strange to her and utterly
+pathetic. And then, there was the back of his head, sunk like lead into
+his pillow. The cropped hair had begun to grow. You could see a little
+greyish tuft. You wouldn't have known that it was Charlie's head.
+
+She went slowly round the bed, taking care not to graze the feet that
+were stretched out to her. And then she saw him.
+
+She saw a deep purplish flush and glazed eyes that couldn't see her, and
+a greyish beard pointing on an unshaved jaw; and a mouth half open,
+jerking out its breath. She laid her left hand on his shoulder and with
+her right she held the limp hand that hung over the mattress.
+
+I heard her say in French, "If only he knew me--"
+
+And the nun, "Perhaps--at the end--he will know you."
+
+And we left her there with his hand in her right hand and her left hand
+on his shoulder. She was on her honour to stay with him till the end; but
+her eyes were fixed on Jevons, and they followed him as he went through
+the doorway of the cell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The very minute he had left her Jimmy made his bolt for Lokeren. He said
+he didn't want me; but I had seen Viola's eyes, and I said it would be
+safer. If I took Viola's car and Colville, she couldn't follow us.
+
+"She won't follow us," he said. "She can't leave him."
+
+We made the first bolt into Lokeren together; and we got out, each with a
+load of wounded, just as the Germans were coming in. He made his second
+bolt by himself and secretly, while Colville and I were lunching. We
+followed, and were stopped in a village two miles from Lokeren.
+
+A Belgian Red Cross man met us here and told us that Jevons had got
+through in spite of them, and they didn't in the least expect him to come
+back again. He shrugged his shoulders and seemed to be disgusted and
+annoyed with Jimmy rather than to admire him.
+
+We hung about in that village an interminable time. I do not remember its
+name, if I ever knew it; but I know and remember every house in it and
+every tree in the avenue at the turn of the grey road that led to
+Lokeren, and even now, in my worst dreams, I find myself in the little
+plantation at the end of the village on the left where the railway siding
+is, and where the trains came in loaded with wounded. I am always waiting
+for Jimmy and looking for Jimmy and not finding him. And at one point I
+always stumble over Viola's body. I find her lying wounded in a ditch
+that runs through the plantation. And when I find her I know that Jimmy
+is dead. And that frightens me--Jimmy's death, I mean, not Viola's body.
+I take Viola's body as a matter of course.
+
+It is an abominable dream.
+
+But even that dream is not more astonishing, and it is far less
+improbable than what I was to see. We were at the end of the village.
+Colville had drawn our car up in the middle of the street, and I was
+standing by him, when two Belgian soldiers rushed up to us, pointing up
+the road, and shouting to Colville to clear out of the way.
+
+I turned. Round the bend of the road where the avenue of trees was I saw
+a train of horses and gun-carriages careening with the curve, and a
+battery of Belgian artillery came charging down in full retreat. And now
+in the middle of the battery as if he were part of it and informed it
+with his energy and speed, and now in front of it as if he led it, and
+joyous as if he had turned its retreat into a victory, came Jimmy driving
+his car.
+
+The inside of the car was packed with wounded men; and, wedged up against
+Jimmy, and standing on the steps, and sitting on the bonnet, and hanging
+on wherever they could find a foothold and hang, were seven officers and
+soldiers of the Belgian Army.
+
+Kendal--bleeding profusely from a flesh wound on his forehead, but
+otherwise unhurt--sat inside among the wounded.
+
+It _had_ been a victory for Jimmy. He had advanced within fifty yards of
+the German lines, he had picked up two of his wounded from under their
+sentry's fire, and the rest of the men and the officers he had gathered
+on his way.
+
+We sent them all to Ghent with Colville.
+
+Before he left, Kendal implored us just to look at Mr. Jevons's car.
+
+Mr. Jevons's car was worth looking at. It had a hole in the back of it
+where a bullet had gone clean through and buried itself in the cushions.
+There were five bullet-holes in its hood. Its flank was scraped by a
+flying fragment of shell, the same that had tilted its right rear
+splash-board. Inside, its canvas covers and its rubber mat were stained
+with blood.
+
+Drawn up motionless in that village street and stared at, Jimmy's car had
+something of its old self-conscious air. It looked pleased, and at the
+same time surprised at itself.
+
+And while Jevons was dressing and bandaging his flesh-wound for him an
+idea struck Kendal and he grinned.
+
+"D'you remember the time, sir, when you wouldn't let her out if there was
+a spot of rain?"
+
+"I do," said Jevons.
+
+"And look at her now--not three weeks. What a life she's 'ad!"
+
+And when Kendal (he was as pleased as Punch with his bandage) when Kendal
+had climbed into Colville's car, Jimmy turned his round again; though the
+officers implored him to come on, for the Germans were on our backs. But
+Jimmy only jerked his thumb in the direction of Lokeren and made his
+third bolt. I scrambled in beside him as he started.
+
+I don't mind saying that I hated this adventure. It was one thing to go
+into Antwerp when the Germans were so busy storming it that they couldn't
+attend to you, and quite another thing to be alone with Jimmy on that
+horrid grey road with the Germans coming every minute round the turn of
+it.
+
+Jimmy explained that there was a wounded man hiding in a ditch about a
+mile from Lokeren, and he'd got to fetch him.
+
+We fetched him and another car-load without any misadventure.
+
+When we got back to our village we found a Field Ambulance there. Jimmy
+said, "I believe that's _my_ Field Ambulance." Presently he gave a start
+that made the car swerve as if he had run over a dog.
+
+"Well, I'm damned if there isn't Viola."
+
+Yes, there she was. She had come out with the Field Ambulance. And it
+_was_ Jimmy's Field Ambulance, the one that had been sent out without
+him. It had come on into Ghent from Antwerp yesterday, and Viola had
+found it.
+
+"This is too bad," said Jevons. "You ought to be looking after Charlie.
+Why _aren't_ you looking after him?"
+
+"Charlie," she said, "died three hours ago--at twelve o'clock."
+
+It wasn't five hours since we had left her with him in the nun's cell
+under the crucifix. I don't think I had realized it before, but now it
+came over me as a new and strange thing, how little he had mattered. Then
+it struck me that Jevons must have known it all the time.
+
+"I've done everything," she said, "that had to be done. And I've written
+to Aunt Matty and Uncle George--and Mildred."
+
+"Mildred?" I wondered.
+
+"Well--_yes_."
+
+Jevons and I had forgotten Mildred. We had forgotten her engagement to
+Charlie, though I suppose nobody knew better than we did why it had been
+broken off.
+
+To his father and mother and Mildred he _did_ matter.
+
+And perhaps he mattered to Viola, in a way; for she said she would have
+given anything to have saved him. He must have mattered to Jevons when he
+brought him from Antwerp and when we buried him in Ghent.
+
+And the cross on his grave reproves me, reminding me that to his country
+he mattered supremely, after all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Lokeren Jevons and I tried to come to terms with Viola.
+
+The conference took place upstairs in their bedroom, where we had
+withdrawn for greater privacy. Viola sat on the one chair and Jimmy and
+I on the bed. Jimmy did most of the talking.
+
+He said, "Look here, my dear child, if there wasn't a war on, I wouldn't
+stand in the way of your amusement for the world. And there's a great
+deal to be said for you. _I_ think you adorable in a tunic and breeches,
+and General Roubaix agrees with me, if Furny doesn't. We all think you
+heroic, and you are sometimes useful. But there isn't a thing you've done
+yet that a man can't do better--except getting Furny through the lines,
+and nobody wants Furny _in_ the lines. And when _you're_ in them you've a
+moral effect equal to about ten seventeen-inch guns. If the men see you
+hovering round their trenches they're so jumpy they can hardly hold their
+rifles. If Kendal sees you he's so jumpy he can hardly steer. Colville
+says he'd rather hang himself than go through another day like Baerlere.
+Furny all but lost his job on the _Morning Standard_ because he was told
+off to look after you when he ought to have gone to Antwerp--he _would_
+have lost it if I hadn't done his work for him. And you don't make things
+easier for _me_. Good God!--sometimes I don't know what I'm doing.
+
+"It isn't fair on us. It isn't fair."
+
+"It isn't fair on _me_," she said. "_I_'m jumpy when I'm kept back. You
+don't know what it's like, Jimmy. _Don't_ turn me back."
+
+And the poor child began to talk about her duty to the wounded, and that
+made him burst out again.
+
+"The wounded? If you think you're any more comfort to the wounded than
+you are to Furny and me I can tell you you're mistaken. There was a poor
+devil at Lokeren the other day with a bullet in his stomach who told me
+he didn't mind his wounds and he didn't mind the Germans; what worried
+him was the lady being there when he wasn't able to defend her."
+
+She tilted her chin at that and said she didn't want anybody to defend
+her.
+
+"Perhaps you don't, but what would you think of a man who didn't want to
+defend you? What would you think of Furny and me if we wanted you to be
+here?"
+
+"I should like you to want me," she said.
+
+"No, my dear child, you wouldn't. You don't know what you're saying."
+
+And then he said, "I know better than you do what you want. Men aren't
+made like that--if they _are_ men. You can't have it both ways." And he
+said something about chivalry that drove her back in sheer self-defence
+on a Feminist line. She said that nowadays women had chivalry too.
+
+"And _our_ chivalry is to go down before yours?"
+
+"Can't you have both?"
+
+"Not in war-time. _Your_ chivalry is to keep back and not make yourself a
+danger and a nuisance."
+
+"Come," she said, "what about Joan of Arc?" And that was too much for
+Jimmy. He jumped up off the bed and walked away from her and sat on the
+table as if it gave him some advantage.
+
+"No, no," he said. "I can't stand that rot. When you're a saint--or I'm a
+saint--you can talk about Joan of Arc. If you want to be Joan of Arc go
+and be it with some man who isn't your husband--who isn't in love with
+you. Perhaps _he_ won't mind. Go with Furny if you like, though it's
+rather hard on him."
+
+I said I thought he was rather hard on Viola--if he'd seen the poor child
+at Baerlere, flinging herself out of the car and proposing to climb over
+the ruins of several houses and walk by herself--under shell-fire--to
+Zele, because she thought he was there--
+
+Jimmy looked at her; and he did what he had done that night when he
+saw her coming towards him in the lounge. He sighed a long sigh of
+complicated anguish and satisfaction.
+
+She heard it and she understood it, and she said, "I can't help it if I
+am like that. You'll have to take the risk of me. Please go away, Furny."
+
+And I went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Norah has been reading what I've just written, and she tells me that
+there's a great deal about Jimmy's "joy" and his "adventure" and all
+that; and not one word about his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice.
+She says I don't give a serious impression of him. He might have gone
+out to the war just for fun, and that it isn't fair to him.
+
+I don't know whether it's fair or not. I write as he compels me to write.
+I find that I cannot separate his joy and his adventure from his duty and
+devotion and self-sacrifice; he didn't separate them himself. I don't
+even know that self-sacrifice is really the word for it; and the
+impression he gave me is just that--of going out for fun. It was the wild
+humour of his devotion that made it the spectacle it was.
+
+(She has told me that it's all right, so long as I recognize that it
+_was_ devotion.)
+
+After Lokeren I had no desire to go through the rest of the war with
+Jimmy. To be with Jimmy was destruction to your sense of values. I have
+got it firmly fixed in my head that the taking of Lokeren was an
+important affair.
+
+As for what Jimmy called the "tinpot bombardment of Melle" (there was
+nothing wrong with _his_ sense of values), I shall see it insanely, for
+ever and ever, as _the_ event of the war.
+
+And there is this to be said, that Lokeren filled the last gap in the
+line closing round Ghent, north, south and east, and drew it tighter. And
+Melle (only four and a-half miles away) was the last point in the German
+advance on Ghent. The taking of Melle would be a sign to us that the game
+was up.
+
+For three days Jimmy operated joyously in the village and over the
+leagues of turnip-fields that lay outside it.
+
+Of the first two days I remember an endless tramping over endless furrows
+that were ditches for the dead; an endless staggering under stretchers
+that dripped blood; an endless struggling with Viola to keep her under
+shelter of the walls; each of those acts seemed to be endless, though one
+gave place to the other, and it was only the firing that went on all the
+time, till even Jimmy complained once or twice that he was fed up with
+it.
+
+I remember that Jimmy's Field Ambulance played a great part in these
+adventures. I remember feeling a malicious satisfaction in the thought
+that at the same time it was compelled to witness _his_ performances. It
+couldn't miss him.
+
+I remember all these things; but of Melle itself I remember nothing but
+the Town Hall, with its double flight of steps up to its door, and the
+two tall stone pillars, one on each side of the door, and the Greek
+pediment above it; that and the little old Flemish house that stood back
+by itself on the other side of the road, and its white walls and its
+red-tiled roof, and the two green poplars in its garden, mounting guard.
+The house and its garden and its poplars are always vivid and still; they
+always appear to me as charged with mystery and significance and as
+connected in some secret way with Jimmy's fate.
+
+In the pauses of our movements the Field Ambulance and Jimmy's car and
+Viola's were always drawn up before the Town Hall, facing the little
+house.
+
+Then came Sunday, the eleventh, the third day of Melle, when Viola was
+left behind at Ghent.
+
+Jimmy had made her promise on her honour to be brave, _this_ time, and
+stay in the hotel and wait for orders.
+
+Colville stayed with her. They were to pack our things and be ready to
+leave at a minute's notice. Colville had secret orders that, if we were
+not back by midnight, he was to take Viola on to Bruges in his car, and
+wait for us there.
+
+For we knew now that we were in for it.
+
+And we knew that the war, which was coming closer and closer to the
+city, was coming closer to us. It had been Charlie Thesiger first,
+now it might be Reggie. At least, we knew that Reggie's regiment, the
+Third ----shires, had come up from Ostend the day before, that it was
+quartered somewhere between Ghent and Melle, and that it had been engaged
+at Quatrecht.
+
+Our own orders were to stick to Melle.
+
+I suppose from the way the ambulances were massed there that the end
+had been foreseen. That afternoon the battle began to sweep round from
+Quatrecht to Melle; and on our third journey out a rumour reached us
+at the barrier where the sentry stood guard. It was one of those
+preposterous rumours that run before disaster and are started God knows
+how when a retreat begins. I think it was the Belgian Red Cross men who
+spread it, for I heard the guide who went with Jimmy's Field Ambulance
+assuring him seriously that seven thousand British had been surrounded
+and cut to pieces on the road between Quatrecht and Melle. To be sure the
+number diminished with each repetition of the tale, dropping from seven
+thousand to seven hundred and from seven hundred to seventy. But in
+another hour we were bringing in the men of the ----shires.
+
+And towards the end of the day the real bombardment of Melle began, and
+on our last journey out we and Jimmy's Field Ambulance were in the thick
+of it.
+
+I can remember nothing of that bombardment but the three shells.
+
+The first ripped open the roof of the Town Hall and set fire to it.
+
+The second struck the Greek pediment and brought the whole front toppling
+into the street.
+
+Then, about five minutes after, there was the third shell.
+
+The light was going out of the sky, so that we saw the first shell like a
+sheet of curved lightning making for the village as we approached from
+the Ghent side. There was a deadly attraction about the thing that made
+you feel that it and you were the only objects in God's universe, and
+that you were about to be merged in each other. It looked as if it were
+rushing out of heaven straight for us, so that we were surprised when it
+apparently swerved aside and hit the Town Hall instead.
+
+(Jimmy and I were in the front of the car. Kendal, whose flesh wound was
+beginning to worry him, sat behind.)
+
+A battery of artillery charged past us, followed by the remnants of a
+French regiment on the run. Jimmy put more speed on. By the time we got
+into the village the Town Hall was spouting flame.
+
+Jimmy drew up his car about fifty yards away from it. The Field Ambulance
+had turned, and took its stand a little further away behind us, under the
+cover of the opposite walls. Its men began dragging out their stretchers.
+Kendal and I made ready with ours. The wounded were being brought out of
+every house they were in.
+
+A Belgian Colonel rode past us, trying to look unaware that he was
+retreating. He shouted to us to clear out of it. This was the only sign
+of interest that he showed.
+
+Somebody else came up to Jevons and told him that there were three or
+four wounded men somewhere inside the Town Hall, but that the place was
+on fire and it was absolutely impossible to get them out. He advised us
+to pick up the men who were lying in the street, and clear out.
+
+I saw Jevons nod his head as if he agreed and consented. I saw him get
+out of the car. And then I heard Kendal say, "Give us a hand, sir," and I
+turned to my stretchers.
+
+When I looked round again Jevons was running towards the Town Hall. The
+man who had told us to pick up our wounded and clear out was looking
+after him with a face of the most perfect horror.
+
+Kendal and I followed with the stretchers, and we saw Jevons run up the
+steps of the Town Hall. He turned at the top of the steps and waved to us
+to keep back.
+
+Then he went through the big doors between the pillars.
+
+There was a crash and a roar as if the whole building had fallen in. It
+was the top story plunging to the second floor. The upper half of the
+Town Hall was like a crate filled with blazing straw. The Greek pediment
+was the only solid thing that subsisted in that fire.
+
+Then the first floor was caught. It burned more slowly.
+
+Kendal and I and the ambulance men ran forward with the stretchers. And
+Jimmy came through the doors carrying a wounded Frenchman. He went in
+again and came out with another Frenchman.
+
+(The ground floor had begun to burn behind him.)
+
+He went in a third time and came out with Reggie Thesiger.
+
+He must have had to go further into the hall to find him, for it was a
+much longer business. We, Kendal and I, were down the street by the
+ambulance when they came out, and I didn't see that it was Reggie till I
+heard Kendal say, "Sir, that's Major Thesiger he's got!"
+
+Reggie's arm was round Jimmy's shoulder and Jimmy's arm was round
+Reggie's waist. He half carried, half supported him. He came out in the
+middle of a cloud of smoke that hid him. The smoke was followed by a
+burst of fire and another crash and roar as the ceiling of the first
+story plunged to the ground floor.
+
+With all this going on behind him Jevons paused on the top of the steps
+to readjust his burden to the descent. We heard afterwards that Reggie
+had said, "You'd better leave me, old man, and scoot. You can't do it."
+
+It didn't look as if he could. But as we went back to them we saw that
+Jevons had heaved Reggie over his shoulder and was carrying him down the
+steps. He came very carefully and slowly, so that we had reached the Town
+Hall before he had staggered to the last step.
+
+As we pressed closer to help him he told us to get back if we didn't want
+the whole damned place down on the top of us.
+
+We gave back and he followed us. I don't know how we got Reggie on to the
+stretcher--he had a piece of shell somewhere in his thigh--but we did it
+and ran with him to the ambulance. We had about a minute to do it in and
+no more.
+
+And then the second shell came.
+
+It hit the Greek pediment from behind, and we saw the two tall pillars
+that supported it stagger, snap like two sticks, and bend forwards,
+looking suddenly queer and corpulent in their fore-shortening; then they
+parted and fell, bringing down the whole front of the Town Hall.
+
+The Town Hall was spreading itself over the street, with a noise like a
+ship's coal going down the shute in a thunderstorm, as Reggie's stretcher
+slid home along its grooves in the ambulance. Kendal and I were inside
+for a second or two doing things for Reggie. The engine throbbed. The
+whole ambulance shook with its throbbing.
+
+In that second Jevons had run back to fetch his car, calling out to us to
+cut and he would overtake us. He had cranked up his engines and jumped in
+before Kendal could get down and go to his help. When we saw him start we
+started. There wasn't any time to lose.
+
+Kendal and I were sitting on the back steps of the ambulance, so that we
+kept him in sight. It was quite certain that he would overtake us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was running straight down the middle of the road when the third shell
+came.
+
+It burst on the ground behind him, on his right, a little to one side.
+Some of it must have struck the steering gear.
+
+The car plunged to the left. It climbed reeling to the top of a bank and
+paused there, then fell, front over back, into the ditch and lay there,
+belly uppermost, and its wheels whirling in the air.
+
+Jevons lay on his face, half in, half out of the ditch.
+
+He lay for about three seconds; then, as we ran to him, we saw him raise
+himself on his left arm and crawl out of the ditch; and when we reached
+him he was trying to stand.
+
+And he tried to smile at us. "You needn't look like that," he said. "I'm
+as right as rain." And then he tried to raise his right arm.
+
+You saw a khaki cuff, horribly stained. A red rag hung from it, a fringe
+that dripped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Reggie opened his eyes and turned his face towards the stretcher that
+slid into its grooves beside him.
+
+"That isn't--Jimmy--is it?" he said.
+
+I saw him move his left hand to find Jimmy's right. And I heard Jimmy
+saying again (in a weak voice this time) that he was as right as rain.
+
+We had got out of the range of the guns and the surgeons had done their
+business with bandages and splints. They had taken Reggie first, then
+Jimmy.
+
+And so, lying beside Reggie, on his own stretcher and in his own
+ambulance, he was brought back to Ghent.
+
+The military hospitals were full, so we took them to the Convent de Saint
+Pierre. And I went over to the Hôtel de la Poste to fetch Viola.
+
+I don't know what I said to her. I think I must have done what Jimmy told
+me and said they were all right. _She_ never said a word till we got to
+the Convent. (She told me afterwards that when she saw me coming in alone
+she had been sure that Jimmy was killed. She didn't know about Reggie
+yet, you see.)
+
+This part of it is all confused and horrible.
+
+We had to wait before we could see our surgeons at the Convent. The nuns
+took us into a little parlour and left us there.
+
+And I told her then what had happened. I can see her sitting in the nuns'
+parlour, looking out of the window as I told her; looking as if she
+wasn't listening. And I can hear my own voice. It sounded strange and
+affected, as if I had made it all up and didn't believe what I was
+telling her.
+
+"He saved Reggie's life--do you see? at the risk of his own.
+
+"At--the risk--of his own."
+
+And still she looked as if she wasn't listening. It didn't sound as if it
+had really happened.
+
+And I feel--now--as if I had taken hours to tell her.
+
+Then one of our men came to us. He drew back when he saw Mrs. Jevons, and
+I followed him to the doorway. He said they were busy with Major
+Thesiger. They hadn't started yet with Mr. Jevons.
+
+And then--ages afterwards--one of the surgeons came and called me out of
+the room. He said the Major would be all right. They'd got the bit of
+shell out. But--there was Jevons's hand. They'd have to take it off.
+They couldn't possibly save it. And it was going to be a beastly
+business. They'd run out of anaesthetics. Thesiger had had the last
+they'd got.
+
+Yes, of course it would have been better. But Jevons wouldn't hear of it.
+_He_ knew they were short and Thesiger didn't, and he'd insisted on their
+doing Thesiger first.
+
+It was an awful mistake, he said, because it would hurt Jevons ten times
+more than it would hurt anybody else. He thought that I had better get
+Mrs. Jevons out of that room; the ward where they were operating was next
+to it.
+
+I couldn't get her out of it.
+
+There were five minutes when I sat there and Viola crouched on the floor
+beside me with her face hidden on my knees and her hands grabbing me
+tighter and tighter.
+
+And the door opened and I saw two nuns looking in. I heard one say to
+another, "_C'est sa pauvre femme qui devient folle_." And the door closed
+on us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"All that fuss about a hand!" Jimmy had come out of his faint and was
+trying to restore Viola to a sense of proportion. If all the rest of him
+had been blown away, he said, by that confounded shell, and only his hand
+had been left, she might have had something to cry for.
+
+And yet she cried inconsolably for Jimmy's hand.
+
+God knows what memories came to her when she thought of it. I don't think
+she thought of it as the hand that had written masterpieces and flung
+them aside, that could steer a car straight through hell-fire, and that
+could nurse, and bind up wounds. I know I thought of all these obvious
+things. But she must have thought of the hand that she knew like her own
+hand, the hand with the firm, nervous fingers, and the three strong lines
+in the pinkish palm, the hand she adored and had shrunk from, whose
+gesture had been torture to her and whose touch was ecstasy, the hand
+that the surgeons had cut off and tossed into a basket to be cast out
+with the refuse of the wards.
+
+Not that either of us had much time for thinking of anything but how we
+could get out of Ghent before the Germans got into it. Viola said it
+would be quite easy. There was the ambulance, and there was _her_ car and
+there was Jimmy's car.
+
+I told her that Jimmy's god-like car was lying bottom upwards in a ditch
+between Ghent and Melle, an object half piteous, half obscene. She said
+it was a jolly good thing then that she'd brought hers. Perhaps it was.
+
+We had just got Jimmy and Reggie into their first sleep at six o'clock in
+the morning when the orders came for us to clear out.
+
+We cleared out in Viola's car, with Reggie on his stretcher and Jimmy
+(propped up with pillows) at his head, and Viola at his feet, and two
+wounded men in front with Colville, and Kendal and me standing one on
+each step. (Most of our luggage was on the Boulevard in front of the
+Convent where we had left it.)
+
+We went, as we had come, through Bruges. We drew up to rest in the Market
+Place under the Belfry.
+
+"You'd better look at it while you can, Viola," said Jevons. "You may
+never see it again."
+
+"I? I shall never see anything else," she said.
+
+We looked at the Belfry. It was as if, under that menace of destruction,
+we saw it for the first time.
+
+We _might_ have enjoyed that run back, Viola said; only somehow we
+didn't. Reggie was ill from his anesthetic all the way, and Jimmy's
+temperature went up with every mile, and we missed the boat at Ostend,
+and had to stay there all night; and Jimmy became delirious in the night
+and thought that he had left Viola behind in the Town Hall at Melle. And
+there was no room on the morning boat; and when we did get on board the
+Naval Transport at Dunkirk, Kendal took it into his head to be seasick
+till he nearly died.
+
+We had no peace till seven o'clock on Tuesday, when we got to Canterbury.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+I think I have said that Jevons made me suffer. He did. I can say that
+before those three weeks of his all my contacts with him were infected by
+the poison of my suffering. But all that was nothing to what he made me
+suffer since, what I suffer now when I remember the things I have said of
+him, the things I have thought and felt--my furtive belittling of him, my
+unwilling admiration, the doubt that I encouraged in the mean hope that
+it would become a certainty.
+
+I would give anything to be like the Canon or my wife, the only two of us
+whose conscience doesn't reproach them when they see Jimmy's right
+sleeve.
+
+I remember Norah saying to me once, "I shall be sorry for _you_ if you
+don't take care." Well, I am sorry for myself.
+
+But I am still sorrier for Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+I know there's a great deal to be said for her. I had wired to them from
+Dunkirk to tell them that Reggie was slightly wounded but recovering, and
+that the four of us would be in Canterbury that evening. It wasn't my
+fault if Reggie, being a British officer, was taken from us at Dover, and
+sent to a military hospital; but I admit I ought to have wired again to
+the Thesigers to inform them of the fact. I ought to have remembered that
+Reggie was more important to Mrs. Thesiger than Jevons, even if Jevons
+had done what Mrs. Thesiger didn't yet know he'd done.
+
+The maternal passion is a terrible thing. It has made women commit
+crimes. It made my mother-in-law push Viola from her on her threshold and
+turn on me as I was helping Jimmy out of the car. It made her say,
+"You've brought my son-in-law. What have you done with my son?"
+
+(To do her justice, she hadn't seen what had happened to Jimmy. Though he
+was tired and weak, he could still stand up and stagger along if you held
+him tight.)
+
+And the maternal passion is not more terrible than the passion that Viola
+had for Jevons. It made her say to her mother as the Canon and I brought
+Jimmy in (the dear old man had seen in an instant why he wore his coat
+slung loose over his right shoulder), "You can see what we're doing with
+my husband."
+
+And when we were all in the drawing-room and I was explaining gently that
+Reggie was all right, but that we'd _had_ to send him to the military
+hospital, it made her say, "If it wasn't for your son-in-law your son
+wouldn't be alive."
+
+God knows what thirst she satisfied, what bitterness she exhausted, what
+secret anguish she avenged.
+
+They were all there, the Thesiger women--they had come, you see, to meet
+Reggie--Victoria and Millicent and Mildred; and they heard her. But it
+was Mildred who _saw_. She spoke to her mother.
+
+"Can't you _see_?" she said.
+
+Viola was kneeling by the sofa where her father had made Jimmy lie, and
+she had unbuttoned and taken from him his heavy coat. She looked at me
+and said, "Please take them away somewhere and tell them. Jimmy _is_ so
+tired."
+
+I know that must seem awful. It _was_ awful to come back from the
+battlefields of Flanders, from sieges and sackings and slaughter, and see
+the women flashing fire at each other. And they were mother and daughter.
+But, you see, they were women. I know that the war should have purged
+them of their passions (perhaps it did purge them); but your lover is
+your lover and your son your son for all that.
+
+And it wasn't easy for Mrs. Thesiger to see how her son-in-law could
+have saved her son. I am not sure that she wouldn't have thought it
+presumption in Jevons to suppose that he could save anybody, let alone
+her son. There were people like the Thesigers from whom heroism was
+expected as a matter of course; and there were people like Jevons. You
+know what she said about his going to the front.
+
+When I had finished the tale--and I let her have the whole of it, from
+the first shell that hit the Town Hall to the bit of the third shell
+that hit Jimmy--she said, "You mean that if he hadn't gone back for his
+car--" She had broken down and was sobbing quietly, but you could see how
+her mind worked.
+
+I said, "I mean that if he hadn't gone back to the Town Hall to look for
+Reggie he wouldn't have been hit."
+
+Then I told her how they took Jimmy's hand off.
+
+I heard the Canon groan. Millicent and Victoria began to sob as their
+mother had sobbed. Mildred set her teeth firmly; and Mrs. Thesiger turned
+to me a queer, disordered face, and spoke.
+
+"They--they gave the anaesthetic to--Reggie?"
+
+"They did," I said. "Because Jimmy made them."
+
+Yes. I am very sorry for Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+She cried, softly, and with a great recovery of beauty and dignity, for
+about fifteen seconds (the Canon had gone back to Jevons); then she rose
+and addressed her daughter.
+
+"Mildred dear, I think Jimmy had better have Reggie's room."
+
+Then she went to him; and I am told that she kissed him for the first
+time. She kissed him as if he had been her son. (Poor Jimmy, I may say,
+was so tired that he didn't want to be kissed by anybody.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He still had Reggie's room six weeks later when I came back from France
+for a week-end. Reggie had recovered, and was with them for a fortnight's
+leave before he went out again.
+
+Norah and I went down on Saturday to see him. (His leave was up on Sunday
+night.)
+
+Without Reggie I don't think I should have realized Jevons in his final
+phase.
+
+He had been happy, I know, at Hampstead in the first two years of his
+marriage; he had been happy most of the time in Edwardes Square; even in
+Mayfair he had had moments; and Amershott had been, on the whole, an
+improvement on Mayfair. And he had lived through his three weeks in Ghent
+in a sort of ecstasy. And before that, all the time, there had been his
+work, which I am always forgetting, and his fame, when he didn't forget
+it.
+
+But there had always been something.
+
+At first it had been the Thesigers. As long as Mrs. Thesiger--as long
+as _one_ Thesiger--held out against him he had felt defeat. And then
+there had been Reggie's return and his appalling doubt. He had pretended
+not to see his doubt and not to mind it. And he had seen it, as he saw
+everything, and he had minded awfully. Then came Viola's illness, which
+you could put down to Reggie's doubt. And after that it had been Viola
+pretty nearly all the time. And even at Ghent, by the tortures of anxiety
+she had caused him, you may say that she had spoiled his ecstasy.
+
+And now, without any effort, or any calculation or foresight, by a
+stupendous accident, he had found happiness and peace and certainty. The
+thing was so consummately done, and so timed to the minute, that when you
+saw him there enjoying it, you could have sworn that he had played for it
+and pulled it off. It was as if he had said to himself, "Give me time,
+and I'll bring all these people round, even Mrs. Thesiger, even Reggie.
+I'll _make_ them love me. Wait, and you'll just see how I shall score."
+
+And there he was scoring.
+
+And it was as if he had said to himself long ago, "As for Viola, I know
+all about it. I know I do things that make the poor child shudder; but I
+can put that all right. I can make her forget it. I give myself three
+weeks." As if he said, "She thought she was going to leave me. I knew
+that, too, and I didn't care. She might have left me a thousand times and
+I should have brought her back."
+
+I used to think it pathetic that Jevons should have wanted Mrs. Thesiger
+to love him--that he should have wanted Reggie to. But I must say his
+pathos was avenged. _They_ were pathetic now. That big, hulking Major
+wasn't happy unless he was writing Jimmy's letters, or cutting up Jimmy's
+meat for him, or helping him in and out of his clothes. Mrs. Thesiger
+wasn't happy unless she was doing things for him. The Canon wasn't happy
+(though, like Norah, he had nothing on his conscience) and Mildred and
+Millicent and Victoria weren't happy, nor the Thesiger's friends in the
+Cathedral Close.
+
+And then--after they had made a hero of him for six weeks--on that
+Saturday night when we were all together in the Canon's library, Jevons
+made his confession.
+
+We had been, exchanging reminiscences. Something had made Viola think of
+Jimmy's General and the two Colonels at Ghent. She began telling the
+Canon how we had watched them through the glass screen, and how funny
+General Roubaix had looked with his arm round Jimmy's neck, and how he
+had said that Jimmy was a salamander, and that he didn't know what fear
+is.
+
+"Oh, _don't_ I!" said Jimmy.
+
+And that sent Reggie back to the day when he had first seen Jimmy.
+
+"Look here, old man, what made you say you were an arrant coward?"
+
+"Because," said Jimmy simply, "I am one. Dear old Roubaix was talking
+through his hat.
+
+"Not know what fear is! I know a good many things, but I don't know
+anything better than that. You can't tell me anything about fear I don't
+know.
+
+"You've no idea how I funked going out to the war. Yes--_funked_.
+
+"It wasn't any ordinary funk, mind you, the little, creepy feeling in
+your waist, and your tummy tumbling down, and your heart sort of
+fluttering over the place where it used to be. I believe you can get over
+_that_. And I never had that--ever, except once when I saw Viola in a
+place where she'd no business to be. It was something much worse. It--it
+was in my head--in my brain. A sort of madness. And it never let me
+alone. It was worse at night, and after I got up and began to go about in
+the morning--when my brain woke and remembered, but it was there all the
+time.
+
+"I saw things--horrors. And I heard them. I saw and heard the whole
+war. All the blessed time--all those infernal five weeks before I got
+out to it, I kept seeing horrors and hearing them. There was a lot of
+detail--realism wasn't in it--and it was all correct; because I verified
+it afterwards. Things _were_ just like that. Every morning when I got up
+I said to myself I'm going out to that damned war, but I wish to God
+somebody'd come and chloroform me before I get there. There were moments
+when I could have chloroformed myself. I felt as if it was the utter
+injustice of God that I--_I_--had to be mixed up in it.
+
+"Not know what fear is!
+
+"Just conceive," said Jimmy, "a man living like that, in abject,
+abominable terror, in black funk--keeping it up, all day and half the
+night, for five solid weeks--before he got there."
+
+"And when you did get there," said Reggie, "were you in a funk?"
+
+"Oh, well, you see, by the time I'd got there it had pretty well worn
+itself out. There wasn't any funk left to _be_ in."
+
+And when I saw Reggie look at him I knew he had scored again.
+
+Still, I wondered how it really stood with them; and whether Reggie
+had settled with his doubt, or whether sometimes, when you caught him
+looking at Jimmy, it had come over him again. The kind of virtue his
+brother-in-law had displayed in Flanders wouldn't help him, you see, to
+that particular solution. And with the Thesigers--when they took after
+their mother--things died hard.
+
+He must have felt that he had to settle it before he went.
+
+Viola told us what happened.
+
+It was his last evening, and the three were together in that room of
+Reggie's. He had just said that Viola wouldn't care how many Town Halls
+he was buried under, as long as Jimmy didn't go and dig him out. And
+then, suddenly, he went straight for it.
+
+"Jimmy," he said, "did you run away with my sister, or didn't you? I
+don't care whether you did or not, but--did you?"
+
+"No, I didn't," said Jimmy.
+
+"Then what the dickens," Reggie said, "were you doing together in
+Bruges?"
+
+"We were looking at the Belfry," said Jimmy.
+
+And Reggie shook his head. "That's beyond me," he said.
+
+"Yes," said Viola. "But it wasn't beyond Jimmy."
+
+That's the real story of Tasker Jevons and his wife.
+
+Don't ask me what would have happened to them if there hadn't been a war.
+
+I've tried to show you the sort of man he was. He knew his hour even
+before it found him. And you cannot separate him from his hour.
+
+
+
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+The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Belfry, by May Sinclair
+
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+
+
+
+Title: The Belfry
+
+Author: May Sinclair
+
+Release Date: November 21, 2004  [eBook #14106]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
+
+
+***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE BELFRY***
+
+
+E-text prepared by Suzanne Shell, Project Gutenberg Beginners Projects,
+Mary Meehan, and the Project Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team
+
+
+
+THE BELFRY
+
+by
+
+MAY SINCLAIR
+
+Author of the _Three Sisters_, etc.
+
+1916
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+BOOK I
+
+MY BOOK
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+
+Of course this story can't be published as it stands just yet. Not--if
+I'm to be decent--for another generation, because, thank Heaven, they're
+still alive. (They've had me there, as they've always had me everywhere.)
+How they managed it I can't think. I don't mean merely at the end, though
+that was stupendous, but how they ever managed it. It seems to me they
+must have taken _all_ the risks, always.
+
+I suppose if you asked him he'd say, "That's how." It was certainly the
+way they managed the business of living. Perhaps it's why they managed it
+on the whole so well. I remember how when I was shilly-shallying about
+that last job of mine he said, "Take it. Take it. If you can risk living
+at all, my dear fellow, you can risk that."
+
+And he added, "If I'd only _your_ luck!"
+
+Well, that's exactly what he did have. He had my luck, I mean the luck I
+ought to have had, all the time, from the beginning to the very end. But
+there is one thing he can't take from me, and that is the telling of this
+story. He can hold it up as long as he lives--as long as _she_ lives--as
+he has held up pretty nearly everything where I was concerned. But he
+can't take it from me. He doesn't "want" it. Even he with his infernal
+talent couldn't do anything with it. Unscrupulous as he was, and I assure
+you he'd stick at nothing (he'd "take" his mother's last agony if he
+"wanted" it badly enough), indecent as he was, he'd stick at that.
+
+I don't mean he couldn't take his wife, part of her, anyhow, at a pinch.
+And I don't mean he couldn't take himself, his own emotions, his own
+eccentricities, if he happened to want them, and his own meannesses, if
+nobody else's, so to speak, would do. But he couldn't and wouldn't take
+his own big things, particularly not that last thing.
+
+When I say that I can't publish this story yet as it stands, I'm not
+forgetting that I _have_ published the end of it already. But only in the
+way of business; to publish that sort of thing was what I went out for;
+it was all part of my Special Correspondent's job.
+
+And when you think that it was just touch and go--Why, if I hadn't bucked
+up and taken that job when he told me to I might have missed him. No
+amount of hearing about him would have been the same thing. I had to see
+him.
+
+What I wrote then doesn't count. I had to tell what I saw just after I
+had seen it. I had to take it as I saw it, a fragment snapped off from
+the rest of him, and dated October 11th, 1914, as if it didn't belong to
+him; as if he were only another splendid instance. And of course I had
+to leave _her_ out.
+
+Told like that, it didn't amount to much.
+
+This is the real telling.
+
+I must get away from the end, right back to the beginning.
+
+I suppose, to be accurate, the very beginning was the day I first met him
+in nineteen-six--no, nineteen-five it must have been. It was at
+Blackheath Football Ground, the last match of the season, when Woolwich
+Arsenal played East Kent and beat them by two goals and a try. He was
+there as a representative of the Press, "doing" the match for some
+sporting paper.
+
+He held me up at the barrier (yes, he held me up in the first moment of
+our acquaintance) while he fumbled for his pass. He had given the word
+"Press" with an exaggerated aplomb that showed he was young to his job,
+and the gate-keeper challenged him. It was, in fact, the exquisite
+self-consciousness of the little man that made me look at him. And he
+caught me looking at him; he blushed, caught himself blushing and smiled
+to himself with the most delicious appreciation of his own absurdity. And
+as he stood there fumbling, and holding me up while he argued with the
+gate-keeper, who didn't know him, I got his engaging twinkle. It was as
+if he looked at me and said, "See me swank just then? Funny, wasn't it?"
+
+He hung about on the edge of the crowd for a while with his hands in his
+pockets, sucking his little blond moustache and looking dreamy and rather
+incompetent. I was a full-blown journalist even then, and I remember
+feeling a sort of pity for his youth. He was so obviously on his maiden
+trip, and obviously, I fancied, doomed never to arrive in any port.
+
+Well--well; I came upon him afterwards at a crisis in the game. He was
+taking notes in shorthand with a sort of savagery between his tense and
+concentrated glares at the scrimmage that was then massed in the centre
+of the field. Woolwich Arsenal and East Kent, locked in each other's
+bodies, now struggled and writhed and butted like two immense beasts
+welded together by the impact of their battle, now swayed and quivered
+and snorted as one beast torn by a solitary and mysterious rage.
+
+Self-consciousness had vanished from my man. He stood, leaning forward
+with his legs a little apart. His boyish face was deeply flushed; he had
+sucked and bitten his blond moustache into a wisp; he was breathing
+heavily, with his mouth ajar; his very large and conspicuous blue eyes
+glittered with a sort of passion. (He wore those eyes in his odd little
+ugly face like some inappropriate decoration.)
+
+All these symptoms declared that he was "on." They made up a look that I
+was soon to know him by.
+
+I remember marvelling at his excitement.
+
+I remember also discussing the match with him as we went back to town. It
+must have been then that he began to tell me about himself: that his name
+was James Tasker Jevons; that he lived, or hoped to live, by going about
+the country and reporting the big cricket and football matches.
+
+At least he called it reporting. I shouldn't think there has ever been
+any reporting like it before or since.
+
+I told him I was out for my paper, the _Morning Standard_, too. Not
+exactly reporting, in _his_ sense (I little knew what _his_ sense was
+when I put it that way); and there left it. You see, I didn't want to rub
+it into the poor chap that the stranger he had been unfolding himself to
+so quaintly was a cut above his job.
+
+But he saw through it. I don't know how he managed to convey to me that
+my delicacy needn't suffer. Anyhow, he must have had some scruples of his
+own, since he waited for another context before remarking quietly that
+what I was doing now he would be doing in another six months. (And he
+was.) These things, he said, took time, and he gave himself six months.
+(Yes; in less than six months he was holding me up, again, in my own
+paper. I had to wait till he was "out" before I could get in.) He didn't
+seem to boast so much as to trace for my benefit the path of some natural
+force, some upward-tending, indestructible Energy that happened to be
+him.
+
+All this I remember. But I cannot remember by what stages we arrived at
+dining together, as we did that night in a little restaurant in Soho.
+Perhaps there were no stages; we may have simply leaped by one bound at
+that consummation. He had swung himself into my compartment as the train
+was leaving the platform at Blackheath; so I suppose it was destiny.
+After that I was tempted to conceive that he fastened on me as on
+something that he had need of; but I think it was rather that I fell to
+his mysterious attraction.
+
+While we dined he informed me further that he had been reporting football
+matches for six weeks. Before that he had been proof-reader for a firm of
+printers for about a year. Before that he had been a compositor. And
+before that again he had worked in an office with his father, who was
+Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths for some parish down in
+Hertfordshire. He chucked that because he found that the registration of
+births, marriages and deaths was spoiling his handwriting quite as much
+as his handwriting was spoiling the registration of births, marriages and
+deaths. (He was, he said, cultivating a careless, scholarly hand.) He
+liked his present job, because it took him out pretty often into the open
+air. Also he liked looking on at football matches and prize fights.
+
+He said it made him feel manly.
+
+You should have seen him sitting there and telling me these things in a
+gentle, throaty and rather thick voice with a cockney accent and a sort
+of tenor ring in it and a queer, humorous intonation that was like an
+audible twinkle, as if he saw himself as he thought I must see him,
+mainly in the light of absurdity. You should have seen his face, its thin
+cheeks, its vivid flush, its queer, inquisitive, contradictory nose that
+had a slender, high bridge and a tilted, pointed end in profile and
+three-quarters, and turned suddenly all broad and blunt in a full view;
+and his mouth that stood ajar with excitement, and even in moments of
+quiescence failed to hide the tips of two rather prominent white teeth
+pressed down on the lower lip. I don't say there was anything unmanly
+about Jevons's figure (he wasn't noticeably undersized), or about his
+mouth and jaw. I knew a great General with a mouth and jaw like that, and
+he was one of the handsomest figures in the Service. I'm not hinting at
+anything like effeminacy in Jevons, only at a certain oddity that really
+saved him. If he'd been handsome he'd have been dreadful. His flush, his
+decorative eyes, his dark eyebrows and eyelashes, his sleek, light brown
+hair, would have made him vulgar. As it was, his queerness gave them a
+sort of point.
+
+I dwell on these physical details because, afterwards, I found myself
+continually looking at him as if to see where his charm lay. To see, I
+suppose, what _she_ saw in him.
+
+If anybody had asked me that night what I saw in him myself beyond an
+ordinary little journalist "on the make," I don't suppose I could have
+told them. But there's no doubt that I felt his charm, or that night
+would have been the end instead of the beginning.
+
+We sat in the restaurant when he had done telling me about himself; I
+remember we sat quite a long time discussing an English writer--our
+contemporary--whom I rather considered I had discovered. In those days I
+used to apply him as an infallible test. Jevons had read every word of
+him; it was he, in fact, who brought him into the conversation. He
+confessed afterwards that he had done it on purpose. He had been testing
+_me_.
+
+Even so our acquaintance might have lapsed but for the thing that
+happened when the waiter came up with the bill. My share of it was three
+and twopence, and I found myself with only ninepence in my pocket. I had
+to borrow half a crown, from Jevons. You mayn't see anything very
+dreadful in that. I didn't at the time, and there wasn't. The dreadful
+thing was that I forgot to pay him back.
+
+Yes. Something happened that put Jevons and his half-crown out of my head
+for long enough. I forgot to pay him, and he had to go without his dinner
+for three nights in consequence. It was his last half-crown.
+
+He told me this as an immense joke, long afterwards.
+
+And Viola Thesiger cried.
+
+That crying of hers, that child-like softening and breaking down under
+him, in itself so unexpected (I didn't know she could do it), that
+sudden and innocent catastrophe, was the first sign to me that I was done
+for--wiped out. There wasn't any violence or any hysteria about it, only
+grief, only pity. It was an entirely simple, gentle and beautiful
+performance, and it took place in my rooms after Jevons had left us. But,
+as I say, this was long afterwards. The agony of my undoing was a
+horribly protracted affair.
+
+I needn't say that what happened--I mean the thing that made me forget
+all about Jevons and his half-crown--was Viola Thesiger.
+
+I had his address, but the next day--the day after the match--was Sunday,
+so I couldn't get the postal order I had meant to send him. And on Monday
+she walked into my rooms at ten in the morning.
+
+The appointment, I may remark, was for nine-thirty. I had fixed that
+early hour for it because I wanted to get it done with. I wasn't going to
+have my morning murdered with violence when it was two hours old; neither
+did I intend it to be poisoned by the thought of this interview hanging
+over me at the end.
+
+I had just sent for Pavitt, my man, and told him that if Miss Thesiger
+called he was on no account to let her in. He was to say that the
+appointment was for nine-thirty and that Mr. Furnival was now engaged.
+She would have to call again at three if she wished to see him. When
+engaging a typist it is as well to begin as you mean to go on, and I was
+anxious to let Miss Thesiger know at once that I was not a man who would
+stand any nonsense. I was abominably busy that morning.
+
+And Pavitt let her in. (It was the first time he had failed in this way.)
+He never explained or apologized for it afterwards. He seemed to think
+that when I had seen Miss Thesiger I would see, even more vividly than he
+did, how impossible it was to do otherwise, unless he had relinquished
+all claim to manhood and to chivalry. The look he sent me from the
+threshold as he retreated backwards, drawing the door upon himself like a
+screen and shutting me in alone with her, said very plainly, "You may
+curse, sir, and you may swear; but if you think you'll get out of it any
+better than I have you're mistaken."
+
+Yes: it was something more than her appearance and her manner, though
+they, in all conscience, were enough.
+
+I do not know what appearance and what manner, if any, are proper to a
+young woman calling on a young man at his rooms to seek employment. The
+mere situation may, for all I know, bristle with embarrassments. Anyhow,
+I can imagine that in some hands it might have moments, let us say, of
+extreme difficulty on either side. Miss Thesiger's appearance and her
+manner were perfect; but they didn't suggest by any sign or shade that
+she was a young woman seeking employment, that she was a young woman
+seeking anything; but rather that she was a young woman to whom all
+things naturally came.
+
+She approached me very slowly. Her adorable little salutation, with all
+its maturity, its gravity, was somehow essentially young. She was rather
+tall, and her figure had the same serious maturity in youth. She carried
+her small head high, and held her shoulders well back, so that she got a
+sort of squareness into the divine slope of them (people hadn't begun to
+slouch forward from the hips in those days), a squareness that agreed
+somehow with the character of her small face. I didn't know then whether
+it was a pretty face or not. I daresay it was a bit too odd and square
+for prettiness, and, as for beauty, that had all gone into the lines of
+her body (which _was_ beautiful, if you like). When you looked carefully,
+you got a little square, white forehead, and straight eyebrows of the
+same darkness as her hair, and very distinct on the white, and eyes also
+very dark and distinct, and fairly crystalline with youth; and a little
+white and very young nose that started straight and ended absurdly in a
+little soft knob that had a sort of kink in it; and a mouth which would
+have been too large for her face if it hadn't made room for itself by
+tilting up at the corners; and then a little square white chin and jaw;
+they were thrust forward, but so lightly and slenderly that it didn't
+matter. It doesn't sound--does it?--as if she could have been pretty, let
+alone beautiful; and yet--and yet she managed that little head of hers
+and that little odd face so as to give an impression of beauty or of
+prettiness. It was partly the oddness of the face and head, coming on the
+top of all that symmetry, that perfection, that made the total effect of
+her so bewildering. I can't find words for the total effect (I don't know
+that you ever got it all at once, and I certainly didn't get it then),
+and if I were to tell you that what struck me first about her was
+something perverse and wilful and defiant, this would be misleading.
+
+She smiled in her mature, perfunctory manner as she took the chair I gave
+her. She cast out her muff over my writing-table, and flung back the furs
+that covered her breast and shoulders, as if she had come to stay, as if
+it were four o'clock in the afternoon and I had asked her to tea for the
+first time.
+
+I remember saying, "That's right. I'm afraid this room is a bit warm,
+isn't it?"--as if she had done something uninvited and a little
+unexpected, and I wished to reassure her. As if, too, I desired to assert
+my position as the giver of assurances.
+
+(And it was I who needed them, not she.)
+
+She hadn't been in that room five minutes before she had created a
+situation; a situation that bristled with difficulty and danger.
+
+To begin with, she was so young. She couldn't have been, then, a day
+older than one-and-twenty. My first instinct (at least, I suppose it was
+my first) was to send her away; to tell her that I was afraid she
+wouldn't do, that she was too unpunctual, and that I had found, between
+nine-thirty and ten o'clock, somebody who would suit me rather better.
+Any lie I could think of, so long as I got out of it. So long as I got
+her out of it.
+
+I don't know how it was she so contrived to impress me as being in for
+something, some impetuous adventure, some enterprise of enormous
+uncertainty. It may have been because she looked so well-cared-for and
+expensive. I do not understand these matters, but her furs, and her
+tailor-made suit of dark cloth, and the little black velvet hat with the
+fur tail in it were not the sort of clothes I had hitherto seen worn by
+typists seeking for employment. So that I doubted whether financial
+necessity could have driven her to my door. Or else I had a premonition.
+She herself had none. She was guileless and unaware of taking any risks.
+And that, I think, was what disturbed me. The situation bristled because
+she so ignored all difficulty or danger.
+
+Please don't imagine that I regarded myself as dangerous or even
+difficult, or her as being, in any vulgar sense, out for adventure, or as
+balancing herself even for amusement on any perilous edge. It was not
+what she was _out_ for, it was, as I say, what she might possibly be in
+for; and what she would, in consequence, let me in for too. She made me
+feel responsible.
+
+"Let me see," I said; "it's typing, isn't it?"
+
+I began raking through drawers and pigeon-holes, pretending to find her
+letter and the sample of her work that she had sent me, though I knew all
+the time that they lay under my hand hidden by the blotter. I wanted to
+give myself time; I wanted to create the impression that I was old at
+this game; that I had to do with scores and scores of young women seeking
+employment; to make her realize the grim fact of competition; to saturate
+her with the idea that she was only one of scores and scores, all
+docketed and pigeon-holed, any one of whom might have superior qualities;
+when it would be easy enough to say, "I'm sorry, but the fact is, I
+rather think I've engaged somebody already."
+
+"Yes," she said, "it's typing. I can't do anything else. But if you want
+shorthand, I could learn it."
+
+This gave me an opening. "Well--I'm sorry--but the fact is--"
+
+"Did you like what I sent you?"
+
+That staggered me. I hadn't allowed for her voice. For a moment I
+wondered wildly what _had_ she sent me?
+
+"Oh, yes. I liked it. But--" I began it again.
+
+She leaned forward this time, peering under my elbow (the minx! I'm
+convinced she knew the infernal thing was there).
+
+"I see," she said. "You've lost it. Don't bother. I can do another. As
+long as you liked it, that's all right."
+
+I remember thinking violently: "It isn't all right. It's all wrong. And
+the more I like it (if I _do_ like it) the worse it's going to be." But
+all I said was, "You wrote from Canterbury, didn't you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+It was as if she challenged me with: "Why not? Why shouldn't one write
+from Canterbury?" And she stuck out her little chin as her eyes opened
+fire on me at close range.
+
+"Do you live there?" I said.
+
+"Yes." She corrected herself. "My people live there."
+
+"Oh! Because--in that case--I'm sorry--but--the fact is, I'm afraid--" I
+floundered, and she watched me floundering. Then I plunged. "I must have
+a typist who lives in London." (And I might have added "a typist who
+won't open fire on me at close range.")
+
+"But," she said, "I do--at least, I'm going to to-morrow evening."
+
+I must have sat staring then quite a long time, not at her, but at one of
+Roland Simpson's sketches on the wall in front of me.
+
+She followed, but not quite accurately, the direction of my thoughts.
+
+"If you want references, I can give you heaps. General Thesiger's my
+uncle. Why? Do you know him?"
+
+I had ceased staring. He was not the General I knew, but she had spoken a
+sufficiently distinguished name. I said as much.
+
+"Of course lots of people know him," she went on with a sort of radiant
+rapidity. "And he knows lots of people. But I wouldn't write to him if I
+were you. He'll only be rude, and ask you who the devil _you_ are.
+There's my father, Canon Thesiger. It's no good writing to him, either.
+It'll worry him. And there's--no, you mustn't bother the Archbishop. But
+there's the Dean. You might write to _him_! And there's Colonel
+Braithwaite and Mrs. Braithwaite. They're all dears. You might write to
+any of them. Only I'd much rather you didn't."
+
+"Why?" I said. I thought I was entitled to ask why.
+
+"Because," she said, "it'll only mean a lot more bother for me."
+
+I believe I meditated on this before I asked her, "Why should it?"
+
+"Because it isn't easy to get away and earn your own living in this
+country. And they'll try, poor dears, to stop me. And they can't."
+
+"If they don't," I said, "are you sure it won't mean a lot of bother for
+_them_?"
+
+"Not," she said gravely, "if they're left alone and not worried. It will,
+of course, if you go and write and stir them all up again."
+
+"I see. For the moment, then, they are placated?"
+
+"Rather." (I wondered on what grounds.) "We settled _that_ last night."
+
+"Then--" I said, "forgive my asking so many questions--your people know
+you had this appointment with me?"
+
+Her eyebrows took a little tortured twist in her pity for my stupidity.
+
+"Oh no. That would have upset them all for nothing. It doesn't do to
+worry them with silly details. You see, they don't know anything about
+you."
+
+It was exquisite, the innocence with which she brought it out.
+
+"But," I insisted, "that's rather my point. _You_ don't know anything
+about me either, do you?"
+
+"Yes, I do. I knew," she said, "the minute I came into the room. If it
+comes to that, you don't know anything about _me_."
+
+I said I did; I knew the minute _she_ came into the room. And she faced
+me with, "Well then, you see!" as if that settled it.
+
+I suppose it did settle it. I must have decided that since nobody could
+stop her, and I wasn't, after all, a villain, if she insisted on being
+somebody's typist, she had very much better be mine. You see, she was so
+young. I wanted to protect her. Not that there was anything helpless and
+pathetic about her, anything, except her innocence, that appealed to me
+for protection. On the contrary, she struck me as a creature of high
+courage and defiance. That, of course, was what constituted the danger.
+She would insist on taking risks. Presently I heard myself saying, "Yes,
+the Close, Canterbury. I've got that. But where am I to find you here?"
+
+She gave me an address that made me whistle.
+
+I asked her if she knew anything, anything whatever, about the people of
+the house?
+
+She said she didn't. She had chosen it because it had a nice green door,
+and there was an Angora cat on the door-step. A large orange cat with
+green eyes.
+
+Had she actually taken rooms there?
+
+No. But she had chosen them (I think she said because they had pretty
+chintz curtains.) She was going to take them _now_.
+
+She had her hand on the door. She was eager, like a child that has got
+off at last, after irritating delay.
+
+I closed the door against her precipitate flight. I said I thought we
+could settle that here, over the telephone.
+
+And I settled it.
+
+Having settled it, I sent Pavitt, my man, to get rooms for her that
+afternoon in Hampstead, with his sister-in-law, in a house overlooking
+the Heath. I said I couldn't promise her chintz curtains and a green door
+and an orange Angora cat with green eyes, but I thought she would be
+fairly comfortable with Mrs. Pavitt.
+
+She was.
+
+She told me a week later that the Hampstead rooms _had_ chintz curtains
+and there was a Persian kitten too. A blue Persian, with yellow eyes.
+
+There was. But I didn't tell her who put them there.
+
+The kitten alone (it was a pure-bred Persian) cost me three guineas; and
+to this day she thinks that Pavitt, who brought it to her, found it on
+the Heath.
+
+Yet, with all my precautions, there was trouble when Canterbury heard
+about my typist. (She had become my typist, though I had never said a
+word about engaging her.)
+
+This, of course, was owing to the criminal secrecy with which Viola
+conducted her affairs. The Minor Canon wrote to me as if I had seduced,
+or was about to seduce, his daughter. (He had upset himself by rushing up
+to take her back to Canterbury, and finding that she wouldn't go with
+him.) I think, in his excitement, he ordered me to give her up. He was a
+guileless and indeed a holy man; and it's always the guileless and the
+holy people who raise the uncleanest scandals. And Mrs. Thesiger wrote,
+and the General and the Dean; and I've no doubt the Archbishop would have
+written too, if I hadn't unearthed _my_ General at his club, and asked
+him if he knew the Thesigers, and found out that he did, and implored him
+to arrange the horrid business for me as best he could. I said he might
+tell them that if the girl had been left to them to look after her, she
+would have got into rooms in--I named the street, and testified to the
+sinister character of the house. And my General wrote and explained to
+the other General and to the Minor Canon what a thoroughly nice chap I
+was, and how lamentably they had misunderstood what I believed he was
+pleased to call my relations with Miss Thesiger. I'm not at all sure that
+he didn't even go farther and stick in a lot about my family, and suggest
+that I was eligible to the extent that, though my fortunes were still
+to make, I had (besides private means that enabled me to live in spite of
+journalism) considerable expectations (he knew an aunt of mine--better,
+it would seem, than I did). In short, that I was a thoroughly nice chap,
+and that the father of seven daughters (five unmarried) might do far
+worse than cultivate my acquaintance. He must have gone quite as far as
+that, or farther, otherwise I couldn't account for the peculiarly tender
+note that the Minor Canon put into the letter of apology that he wrote
+me, still less for the invitation I received by the same post from Mrs.
+Thesiger to spend Whitsuntide with them at Canterbury. (Viola had said
+she was going home for Whitsuntide.)
+
+Dear lady, she was herself the daughter of a Canon, and she had lived all
+her life in a cathedral close, and the atmosphere of a cathedral close
+may foster innocence, but I cannot think it could have been entirely
+responsible for the kind of indiscretion Mrs. Thesiger was guilty of.
+Neither do I think Mrs. Thesiger was entirely responsible herself. She is
+a nice woman, and I am sure she couldn't have written as she did unless
+my friend the General had led her to believe that there was some sort of
+an understanding between me and Viola. But still, for all she knew about
+me, I might have been a villain. Not perhaps the gross villain the Minor
+Canon took me for, but a villain in some profound and subtle way
+inappreciable to my friend the General.
+
+Well, of course I didn't spend Whitsuntide with the Thesigers at
+Canterbury. It would have been sheer waste of Viola. For the worst of all
+this confounded rumpus was that it made me put off proposing to Viola
+till she had forgotten all about it. She would never have listened to me
+while the trail of the scandal still lingered.
+
+In fact, it was only the marked coldness of my manner to her just then
+that saved me.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It saved me to suffer. I didn't know it was possible to suffer as she
+made me suffer--I mean as _they_ made me, between them.
+
+It didn't begin all at once. It didn't begin, really, for another three
+months, the end of those six months that Jevons had given himself. Not
+even then. Not, you may say, for a whole year; because he gave himself
+another six months as soon as he saw her. He was always giving himself
+these periods of time, as if, with his mania for taking risks, he was
+always having some prodigious bet on himself. I never knew a man back his
+own enterprises as he did.
+
+But until he turned up again I was happy. I say I, not we. I don't know
+whether Viola was happy or not, though she looked it. I had enough sense
+to see that her happiness, if she was happy, had nothing to do with me
+except in so far as I was the humble means, under Providence, of the
+definite escape from Canterbury.
+
+For I very soon saw what had been the matter with her. She was one of
+nine, the youngest but one of seven daughters. The Minor Canon had only
+been able to educate one of the seven properly, because he had had a son
+at Sandhurst, and the other was still reading for the Bar, which is
+pretty expensive too if you're as amiably stupid as Bertie Thesiger. (I
+mention Bertie because, though he doesn't come into this story, his
+stupidity and his amiability combined to tighten the situation
+considerably for Viola.) And Mrs. Thesiger had only been able to marry
+off two of her seven daughters. Of the others, one (the one who had been
+to Girton) was a High School teacher in Canterbury and she lived at home;
+one was a trained nurse and lived at home between cases; that left three
+girls living continually at home and, as Viola put it, eating their
+heads off.
+
+These were the circumstances which Viola (with some omissions) recited by
+way of justification for her revolt; the fact being that she would have
+revolted anyway. She was, as I have said, a creature of high courage and
+vitality and she was tied up much too tight in that Cathedral Close,
+besides being much too well fed; and she longed to do things. To do them
+with her hands and with her head. She was tired of playing tennis on the
+velvet lawns of the Canons' gardens; she was tired of calling on the
+Canons' wives and talking to their daughters. I am aware that Canterbury
+is a garrison town and that other resources, and other prospects, I
+suppose, were open to Viola. But Viola was tired of talking to the
+garrison. I think she would have been tired in any case, even if the
+garrison hadn't been bespoken, as it were, by her unmarried sisters. (It
+is, humanly speaking, impossible that, even in a garrison town, seven
+sisters will _all_ marry into the Service, as I fatuously supposed Mrs.
+Thesiger must have realized when she asked me to Canterbury.) It always
+bored Viola to do what her family did, and what her family, just because
+they did it, expected her to do. And somehow, in the long hours spent in
+the Cathedral Close, she had acquired a taste for what she called
+"literature," what she innocently believed to be literature. She was of
+an engaging innocence in this respect; so that typing authors'
+manuscripts appealed to her as a vocation that combined one of the
+highest forms of cerebral activity with I don't know what glamour of
+romantic adventure.
+
+Her enthusiasm, her veneration for the written word made her an admirable
+typist. But not all at once. To say that she brought to her really
+horrible task a respect, a meticulous devotion, would give you no idea of
+the child's attitude; it was a blind, savage superstition that would have
+been exasperating if it had not been so heart-rending. It cleared
+gradually until it became intelligent co-operation.
+
+I trained her for six months.
+
+I don't suppose I ever worked harder than I did in that first half year
+of her. I mean my output was never greater. For every blessed thing I
+wrote was an excuse for going to see her, or for her coming to see me. It
+was a perpetual journeying between my rooms in Brunswick Square, and her
+rooms in Hampstead overlooking the Heath. The more I wrote the more I saw
+of her.
+
+I trained her for six months--until Jevons was ready for her.
+
+When I tell you that she reverenced my performances you may imagine in
+what spirit she approached his.
+
+For their meeting, as for what happened afterwards, I alone am
+responsible. I brought it on myself. By sheer quixotic fuss and
+interference with what, after all, wasn't my affair. For little Jevons
+most decidedly was not. I might easily have let that sleeping dog lie. He
+certainly did sleep, in some obscure kennel of London; he had slept ever
+since I had left him at the door of that restaurant in Soho. He slept
+almost for the six months he had then given himself.
+
+And then, before (according to his own schedule) he was quite due, he
+appeared in the columns (in my columns) of the _Morning Standard_. I had
+almost forgotten his existence; but when I saw his name, James Tasker
+Jevons, stick out familiarly under the big headlines, I remembered that
+that name, on a card with an address, had been lying in my left-hand
+writing-table drawer all this time; I remembered that it was there
+because he had lent me half a crown, and that I had never paid him.
+Then he came back to me--he lived again.
+
+I sent him a postal order and an apology. I referred, very handsomely as
+I thought, to his cuckoo's nesting in my paper. (I informed him, in fact,
+that he "did it" better than I did); and because I had worked myself up
+to a pitch of affability and generosity, I asked him to come and see me
+at such time as he should be free. And because, also, I was indifferent
+and lazy and didn't want to be seriously bothered with him, instead of
+asking him to lunch or dine with me, I said I was generally free myself
+between four and five.
+
+Between four and five was an hour when Viola was very apt to come in.
+
+In the instant that followed the posting of that letter I saw what I had
+done. And I wrote to him the next day asking him to dinner, in order that
+he should not come in between four and five. For some weeks, whenever I
+fancied he was about due at four o'clock, I wrote and asked him to
+dinner. That was how I fastened him to me. There wasn't any sense in
+which he fastened on me. I wasn't by any means his only hope.
+
+I may say at once I was prostrated as any slave before his conversation.
+
+I shall never forget the radiance of his twinkle when he told me he had
+been sacked three weeks ago from the sporting paper that had provided him
+with his sole visible means of subsistence. It was his blessed (only he
+didn't call it blessed) style that had dished him: the suicidal _elan_
+that he brought to the business. He was warned, he said. He was aware
+that his existence as a reporter hung by the bare thread of statement
+(wearing thinner and thinner) on which he weaved his fantastic web. His
+editor told him he was engaged to report football, not to play it with
+the paper. But he couldn't help it. He had got, he said, the ensanguined
+habit. Still, I was not to imagine that he bungled things. He jolly well
+knew his way about. In his wildest flights there was a homing impulse; he
+was preparing a place for himself all the time (that it happened to be
+_my_ place didn't seem to afflict him in the least). Like St. Paul, he
+knew how to abound and he knew how to abstain. His abstinence, in fact,
+gave the measure of his abundance. He held himself in for five perilous
+weeks; and when he let himself rip again it was with a burst that landed
+him in the front page of the _Morning Standard_.
+
+What he sketched for me had no resemblance to the career of a peaceful
+man of letters. It was a hot race, a combat as bloody (his own word) as
+those contests of which he was the delighted eye-witness.
+
+He had come thin and worn out of the struggle, but you gathered that he
+had borne himself in it with coolness and deliberate caution. His phrases
+produced a false effect of vehemence and excitement. You saw that he had
+simply followed out a calculated scheme, not one step of which had
+miscarried. And you felt that his most passionate affairs would be
+conducted with the same formidable precision.
+
+I ought to have felt it. For we were precious soon in the thick of it--of
+his most passionate affair.
+
+I had dined him, I suppose, about three times, and I had lunched him
+twice. And I had had tea with him once in his bedroom. He was living in
+one room in a street off the Euston Road, and he called it his bedroom
+because it looked so much more that than anything else. I might have let
+it go at that. But I didn't. I had seen his bedroom. I took the liberty
+of inquiring into his finances. They were, he said, as yet undeveloped.
+He had a scheme of his own for improving them, but while it was maturing
+he was, he certainly _was_ open to offers of work. I got him some
+translation. (He was a fairly good French scholar.)
+
+Then--it was the fatality of the proceedings that impressed them on my
+memory--then (I forgot to say that at that time I was reader to a firm of
+publishers; these things are in themselves so inessential to this story)
+I turned over to him any books that came more into his province than
+mine. His province, I can tell you, was pretty extensive, too.
+
+He began by doing me the honour to consult me about any instances that
+seemed doubtful.
+
+And so--you see how carefully I had prepared his path for him--one
+afternoon he turned up at my rooms, uninvited, between four and five. He
+said he remembered I had told him I should be free at that hour.
+
+He remembered. Yes; I don't think Tasker Jevons ever forgot anything,
+anything likely to be useful to him, in his life.
+
+And he hadn't been with me ten minutes before Viola Thesiger came in.
+
+He was saying, "Why the Heaven-afflicted idiot" (his author) "should
+think it necessary--" when Viola came in.
+
+She came in, and suddenly I made up my mind that she was beautiful. I
+hadn't seen it before. I don't know why I saw it now. It may have been
+some turn of her small, squarish head that surprised me with subtle
+tendernesses and curves; or more likely it may have been her effect on
+him. I may have seen her with his eyes. I don't know--I don't know. I
+hardly like to think he saw anything in her I hadn't seen first.
+
+He stopped talking. They looked at each other. I introduced him. Not to
+have introduced him would have struck him as a slight.
+
+I ordered tea at once in the hope of hastening his departure. He had been
+curiously silent since she had come in.
+
+But he didn't go. He just sat there, saying nothing, but looking at her
+furtively now and again, and blinking, as if looking at her hurt him.
+Whenever she said anything he stared, with his mouth a little open,
+breathing heavily.
+
+She hadn't paid very much attention to him. Then, suddenly, as if
+intrigued by his silence, she said:
+
+"Who is the Heaven-afflicted idiot?"
+
+I said, "Ask Mr. Jevons."
+
+She did.
+
+Jevons didn't answer her. He simply looked at her and blinked. Then he
+looked away again.
+
+"Come," I said, "you might finish what you were going to say."
+
+"I don't know," he muttered, "that I was going to say anything--Oh
+yes--that thing you sent me. Why the silly blighter should suppose it's
+necessary to stick in a storm at sea when it's quite obvious he hasn't
+seen one--he talks about a brig when he means a bark, and from the way he
+navigates her you'd say the wind blew all ways at once in the Atlantic."
+
+I said it might for all I knew; and I asked him if he'd ever seen a storm
+at sea himself.
+
+It seemed he had. He'd been ordered a sea-voyage for his health after his
+spell of printing; and his uncle, who was a sea-captain, took him with
+him to Hong-Kong in his ship. And he had been all through a cyclone in
+the Pacific.
+
+I got him--with some difficulty, for he had become extremely shy--I got
+him to tell us about it.
+
+He did. And by the time he had finished with us we had all been through a
+cyclone in the Pacific.
+
+It was too much. The little beast could talk almost as well as he wrote.
+A fellow who can write like Tasker Jevons has no business to talk at all.
+
+Viola left soon after six. He had outstayed her. I went downstairs with
+her. When I came back to him he was still staring at the doorway she had
+passed through.
+
+"Who's that girl?" he said.
+
+I said she was my typist.
+
+He meditated, and brought out as the result: "Do you mind telling me how
+much she charges you?"
+
+I told him. He looked dejected.
+
+"I can't afford her," he said presently. "No. I can't possibly afford
+her. Not yet." He paused. "Do you mind giving me her address?"
+
+"I thought you said you couldn't afford her?"
+
+"I can't. Not yet. But I _will_ afford her. I will. I give myself
+another--" He stopped. His mouth fell ajar, and I saw his lips moving as
+he went through some inaudible calculation--"another six months."
+
+He hid his face in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair.
+Then, as if he conceived himself to be unobserved behind this shelter,
+he let himself go; and I became the witness of an agony, a passion, a
+self-abandoned nakedness, to the utter shedding of all reticences and
+decencies, with nothing but those thin hands and that hair between
+me and it.
+
+"I'll work," he said. "I'll work like a hundred bloody niggers. Like ten
+hundred thousand million sweated tailors in a stinking cellar. I'll
+pinch. I'll skimp and save. I'll deny myself butter. I'll wear celluloid
+collars and sell my dress-suit. My God! I'd sell the coat off my back and
+the shoes off my feet; I'd sell my own mother's body off her death-bed,
+and go without my dinner for nine months to see her again for five
+minutes. Just to see her for five minutes. Five (unprintable) little
+minutes that another man wouldn't know what to do with, wouldn't use for
+tying up a bootlace in."
+
+Pause.
+
+"I didn't know it hurt. I didn't know a girl's face could land you one
+like this, and her eyes jab you, and her voice turn round and round in
+your stomach like a circular saw. That's what it feels like. Exactly.
+
+"Dry up, you old Geyser, yourself. I'm getting it, not you. You'd spout
+if you'd had to sit tight with all the gas in the shop blazing away under
+you for the last hour. If you can turn it off at the meter, turn it. I
+can't. No, I won't have another cup of tea. And I won't get up and clear
+out, I'm going to sit here another five minutes. I'm not well, I tell
+you, and it relieves me to talk about it. I don't care if you don't
+listen. Or if you do. I'm past caring.
+
+"D'you notice that I didn't speak a word to her--not one blessed word the
+whole time? I should have choked if I'd tried to. I didn't want to look
+at her, to think of her. That's why I told that rotten story, just to
+keep myself going. What a blethering idiot she must have thought me! What
+a putrid ass! The sea--And _me_!
+
+"And the way she looked at me--"
+
+I said, "D'you mean to say, Jevons, it didn't happen?"
+
+And he groaned. "Oh, it _happened_ all right. I can't invent things to
+save my life.
+
+"God! It isn't even as if she was pretty. I could understand _that_."
+
+He grabbed his throat suddenly and began to cough.
+
+I tried to be kind to him. "Look here," I said, "old chap. I'm awfully
+sorry if it takes you this way. But it's no good."
+
+He turned on me coughing and choking. I cannot remember all he said or
+half the things he called me, but it was something like this: "You
+snivelling defective." (Cough) "You septic idiot." (Cough) "You poisonous
+and polluted ass." (Cough, cough, cough) "You scarlet imbecile." (I have
+to water down the increasing richness of his epithets.) "You last
+diminutive purple embryo of an epileptic stock, do you suppose I don't
+know that? No good? Of course it's no good--yet. I got to wait for
+another six months. And you can take it from me, if a fellow knows what
+he wants, and doesn't try to get it--doesn't know how to get it--in six
+months--and doesn't find out--_he_'s no good, if you like."
+
+These words didn't strike me at the time as having any personal
+application. He was to repeat them later on, however, in circumstances
+which I defy anybody to have foreseen.
+
+      *       *       *       *       *
+
+I cannot recall the precise phases of their remarkable friendship. I
+wasn't present at its earliest stages.
+
+I had my first intimation of its existence one evening in the winter of
+nineteen-five, when he dropped in on me to consult me, he said, about a
+rather delicate matter, in which I gathered there lurked for his
+inexperience the most frightful pitfalls of offence. That he should come
+to me in this spirit was evidence that a certain chastening had been
+going on in him.
+
+The delicate matter was this. He had given Miss Thesiger a lot of work,
+the typing of a whole book, in fact. And--he had immense difficulty in
+getting to this part of it--she had refused to take any payment. She had
+got it into her head that he was hard up. He had sent her a cheque three
+times, and three times she had returned it. She was as obstinate as a
+mule about it. And now she was saying that she had never meant him to pay
+her; she had done the whole thing out of friendship, which, of course,
+was very pretty of her, but it put him in a beastly position. He'd never
+been precisely in that position before and he didn't know what to do
+about it. He didn't want to offend her and yet he didn't see--did I?--how
+he could let her do it. It was, he said, all the wrong way about,
+according to his notions. And for the life of him he didn't know what to
+do. It might seem to me incredible that such virgin innocence as his
+should exist in a world where the rules for most sorts of conduct were
+fairly settled. He had lived all his life in an atmosphere of births,
+marriages and deaths, and he knew all the rules for the registration of
+them. And that was about all he did know. And it was the most infernally
+hard luck to be stumped like this at the very beginning, just when he
+wanted most awfully to do the right thing.
+
+Besides, it had knocked him all to bits--the sheer prettiness of it.
+
+He laid bare for me all the curious intricacies of a soul tortured by its
+own delicacy. There was agony in his eyes.
+
+If he were to take this kindness from a lady--would it, in my opinion, or
+would it not, be cricket?
+
+I didn't like to tell him that he had brought his agony on himself by his
+imprudence in employing a typist when he couldn't afford one. So I only
+said that, if I knew the lady, he would find her uncommonly hard to move.
+
+He hadn't any hope, he said, of moving her; but did I think that if he
+made her a present--say, the Collected Works of George Meredith, it would
+meet the case?
+
+I said it would meet the case all right, but that in my opinion it would
+spoil its prettiness. If Miss Thesiger didn't want to be paid in one way,
+she wouldn't at all care about being paid in another. Perhaps Miss
+Thesiger liked being pretty. Hadn't he better leave it at that, anyhow,
+for the present?
+
+You see I looked on Viola and Viola's behaviour as infinitely more my
+concern than his. I found myself replying for her as she would have
+wished me to reply, as if I could claim an intenser appreciation of her
+motives than was his, as if she and I were agreed about this question of
+helping Tasker Jevons and I were the custodian of her generosity.
+
+He said he supposed it wouldn't hurt him to leave it at that. It wasn't
+as if it wouldn't be all one in the long run. He gave himself three
+months.
+
+I supposed he meant to pay her in.
+
+Three weeks later I heard that Jevons was actually living up in Hampstead
+in the same house as Viola. I didn't hear it from Viola, but from my man,
+Pavitt, who had it from his sister-in-law. And what Pavitt came to tell
+me was that Mr. Jevons had been ill.
+
+I went up to Hampstead that afternoon to see him.
+
+I found him in a back room, at the top of the house, sitting by the fire
+in an easy-chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was as thin as a lath and his
+face was a bright yellow. The very whites of his eyes were yellow. I
+would have said you never saw a more miserable object, but that Jevons
+was not miserable. He was happy. And as far as his devastated condition
+would allow him, he looked happy. This face, yellow with jaundice, was
+doing its best to smile. The smile was a grimace, not an affair of
+the lips at all, but of the deep crescent lines drawn at right angles to
+them. Still, he was smiling. In a sort of ecstasy.
+
+He was smiling at Viola, who sat in the chair facing him on the other
+side of the hearth. She looked as if she had been there for ages. Also,
+as if she had been sitting up all night.
+
+She was smiling too, straight at Jevons. What I saw was the beatitude of
+his response.
+
+He tried to smile at me, too, as I came in, but the effort was a failure.
+He wasn't really a bit glad to see me. Viola got up and left me with him.
+I wasn't to stay with him for more than ten minutes, she said. It was the
+first day he had been allowed to sit up.
+
+I sat with him for fifteen minutes.
+
+He was lodged, as before, in one room; but its domestic character was
+disguised by many ingenious devices giving you the idea that it was
+nothing but his study.
+
+Well, there he was, haggard and yellow with jaundice, utterly pitiable as
+to his appearance and surroundings; and yet he looked at me in,
+positively, a sort of triumph, as much as to say, "Yes. Here I am. And
+you, with all your superior resources, haven't managed half so well."
+
+And I thought that he (not knowing Viola so well as I did) was suffering
+from a lamentable delusion.
+
+He said she had been awfully good to him. But it was rather hard luck on
+him, wasn't it, that he should have gone and turned this beastly colour?
+
+I said rather loftily I didn't suppose it mattered to Viola what colour
+he turned.
+
+(What _could_ it matter to her?)
+
+She came in presently and took me down to her sitting-room, and gave me
+tea. She owned to having sat up three nights with Jevons. She couldn't
+have believed it possible that anybody could be so ill. For three days
+and three nights the poor thing hadn't been able to keep anything
+down--not even a drop of water. But to-day she had been feeding him on
+the whites of eggs beaten up with brandy.
+
+She seemed to me to be obsessed with Jevons's illness, and I made her
+come out with me for ten minutes for a blow on the Heath. I tried to lead
+her mind to other things, and she listened politely. Then there was
+silence, and presently I felt her arm slide into mine (she had these
+adorable impulses of confidence).
+
+"Furny," she said, "what does jaundice come from?"
+
+I said it generally came from chill.
+
+She frowned, as if she were not satisfied with that explanation. And
+there was another silence. Then she began again:
+
+"Would being unhappy--very, _very_ unhappy--give it you?"
+
+I thought I saw how her mind was working and I advised her to put that
+idea out of her head. Happiness, I said, wouldn't be good for Jevons.
+
+She said, "Oh, _wouldn't_ it!" And, after prolonged meditation, "I wonder
+if he'll stay that funny yellow colour all his life."
+
+I found out from her that he had been living in that top room above hers
+for three weeks--ever since he had finished his book. It looked as if he
+had become frantic when he saw the end of his pretexts and occasions for
+meeting her, and had cast off all prudence and had followed her,
+determined to live under the same roof.
+
+I looked on it as a madness that possessed him.
+
+But that it should ever possess _her_--that was inconceivable.
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+He recovered.
+
+The brilliant orange of his jaundice faded to lemon, and the lemon to a
+sallow tint that cleared rapidly as it was flooded by his flush.
+
+I did not realize then what sources he was drawing on. Looking back on it
+all, I am amazed at my own stupidity. I was, of course, aware that Viola
+was sorry for him; but I might have known that a girl's pity was not a
+stimulant that would keep a man like Jevons going for very long. I am
+sure he would never have lowered himself by any appeal to it. Why, the
+bare idea of pity would have been intolerable to him, bursting, as he
+was, with vitality and invading with the courage and energy and genius of
+a conqueror a world that was not his.
+
+He laid before me very soon what I can only call his plan of campaign.
+Journalism with him was a purely defensive operation; but the novel and
+the short story were his attack. The work that Viola had typed for him
+was his first novel. He had dug himself in very securely that winter, and
+each paper that he had occupied and left behind him was a line of
+trenches that shifted nearer and nearer towards the desired territory. He
+didn't begin his assault on the public before he had secured his retreat.
+
+I know I am writing about a man whom many people still consider a great
+novelist and a great playwright. God knows I don't want to disparage him.
+But to me what he has written matters so little; it has no interest for
+me except as his vehicle, the vehicle in which he arrived; which brought
+him to his destination quicker perhaps than any other which he could have
+chosen. His talent was so adroit that he might have chosen almost any
+other; chance and a happy knack and a habit of observation determined his
+selection of the written word. Compared with the spectacle of his
+arrival, what he has written is neither here nor there. What I have
+written myself is neither here nor there. For the purposes of this
+history it counts only as the means which enabled me to witness the last
+act of his drama.
+
+That is why I say so much about his adventure, his campaign, his
+business, and so little about his books. In this I am adopting his own
+values, almost his own phrases. He wanted most awfully to arrive. How far
+he took himself seriously as a writer nobody will ever know. Viola was
+convinced, and always will be convinced, that he was a great genius.
+(There's no doubt he traded with her on her conviction. He wanted most
+awfully to arrive, but more than anything he wanted Viola.) Still, he was
+too clever, I think, ever to have quite convinced himself.
+
+His adventure, then, began with his reporting; his campaign with his
+journalism, and his earlier novels; his business was to follow later in
+the long period of peace and prosperity he saw ahead of him.
+
+His first novel, he told me, was calculated, deliberately, to startle and
+arrest; to hit the public, rather unpleasantly, in the eye. _That_, he
+said, was the way to be remembered. It wouldn't sell. He didn't want it
+to sell. What he wanted first was to gain a position; then to consolidate
+it; then to build. He talked like the consummate architect of his own
+fortunes.
+
+His second novel would be designed, deliberately, to counteract the
+disagreeable effects of his first.
+
+"Why," I asked, "counteract them?"
+
+Because, he said, if he went on being disagreeable, he'd alienate the
+very sections of the public he most wished to gain. His retirement was
+simply the preparation for the Grand Attack.
+
+It was in his third novel that he meant, still deliberately, to come into
+his kingdom and his power and his glory, for ever and ever, Amen. His
+third novel, he declared, would sell; and it would be his best. On that
+utterly secure and yet elevated basis he could build afterwards pretty
+much as he pleased. I asked him if it wasn't a mistake to put his best so
+early in the series? Wouldn't it be more effective if he worked up to it?
+But he said No. He'd thought of that. There wasn't anything he hadn't
+thought of. That third novel was to start his big sales. And the worst of
+a big sale was this, that when you'd caught your public you were bound to
+go on giving them the sort of thing you'd caught them with, therefore,
+he'd be jolly careful to start 'em with the sort of thing he happened to
+like himself, otherwise he'd have to spend the rest of his life knuckling
+under to them. He could get a cheaper glory if he chose to try for it;
+but a cheaper glory wouldn't satisfy him. That was why he decided to make
+for the highest point he could reach in the beginning, so that his very
+fallings-off would be glorious and would pay him as no gradual working up
+and up could possibly be made to pay. Besides, he wanted his glory and
+his pay quick. He couldn't afford to wait a month longer than his third
+novel. As for the different quality in the glory it would be years
+before anybody but himself could tell the difference, and by the time
+they spotted him he'd be at another game. A game in which he defied
+anybody to catch him out.
+
+He'd be writing plays.
+
+All this he told me, sitting in an arm-chair in my rooms, with his feet
+up on another chair, and smiling, smiling with one side of his mouth
+while with the other he smoked innumerable cigarettes. I can see his blue
+eyes twinkle still, through the cigarette smoke that obscured him. That
+night he had got down to solid business.
+
+It was quite clear that Jevons's business was the business of the
+speculator who loves the excitement of the risks he takes. I remember
+exhorting him to prudence. I said: "This isn't art, it's speculation.
+You're taking considerable risks, my friend."
+
+He took his cigarette out of his mouth, dispersed the smoke, and looked
+at me very straight and without a twinkle.
+
+"I've got to make money," he said, "and to make it soon. I should be
+taking worse risks if I didn't."
+
+It's marvellous how he has pulled it off. Just as he said, dates and all.
+For he named the dates for each stage of his advance.
+
+That was in March; about a week before Easter, nineteen-six.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day I went up to Hampstead towards teatime, to see how Viola was
+getting on. I didn't expect to see Jevons there, for he'd left. He told
+me in a burst of confidence he'd had to. He couldn't stand it. It was
+getting too risky. He was living now in rooms in Bernard Street, not far
+from mine.
+
+At Hampstead I was told that Miss Thesiger was out. She had gone for a
+walk on the Heath with Mr. Jevons, but they were coming in at half-past
+four for tea. If I'd step upstairs into the sitting-room I'd find her
+brother, Captain Thesiger, waiting there.
+
+I stepped upstairs and found Captain Thesiger. I was glad to find him,
+for I don't mind owning that by this time I was getting somewhat uneasy
+about Viola.
+
+It was all very well for Viola to nurse Jevons through his jaundice, she
+might have done that out of pure humanity; but she had no business to be
+going for walks with the little bounder. Even the charm of his
+conversation and his personality (and it _had_ a charm) couldn't
+conceal the fact that he was a little bounder. Why, in moments of
+excitement he had gestures that must have made her shudder all down her
+spine, and more than once I have known his aitches become fugitive,
+though, on the whole, I must say he was pretty careful. And Viola was
+letting herself in for him. In sheer innocence and recklessness she was
+letting herself in. I felt that if ever it should come to getting her out
+I would be glad of an ally. Now that I saw what Viola was capable of, I
+began to feel some sympathy with her people at Canterbury who had tried
+so ineffectually to hold her in.
+
+There was nothing ineffectual about Reggie Thesiger. I suppose he would
+have been impressive anyway from the sheer height and breadth of him, his
+visible and palpable perfection; but what "had" me was not his
+perfection, but the odd likeness to his sister which he combined, and in
+some mysterious way reconciled, with it. His face had taken over not only
+the dominant and defiant look of hers, exaggerated by his sheer virility;
+but it had the very tricks of her charm, even to the uptilted lines of
+her mouth; his little black moustache followed and gave accent to them. I
+said to myself: "Here is a young man who will not stand any nonsense."
+
+He greeted me with a joy that I could not account for all at once in an
+entire stranger, and it was mixed with a childlike and candid surprise. I
+wondered what I had done that he should be so glad to see me.
+
+His manner very soon left me in no doubt as to what I had done. I had
+brought the most intense relief to the Captain's innocent mind. I do not
+know by what subtle shades he managed to convey to me that, compared with
+the queer chap I so easily might have been, he found me distinctly
+agreeable. It was obvious that I existed for him only as the chap, the
+strange and legendary chap, that Viola had taken up with, and that in
+this capacity he, to his own amazement, approved of me. I gathered that,
+knowing his sister, he had feared the worst, and that the blessed relief
+of it was more than he could bear if he didn't let himself go a bit.
+
+He had quite evidently come, or had been sent, to see what Viola was up
+to. Possibly he may have had in his mind the extraordinary treatment I
+had received from his father, and he may have been anxious to atone.
+
+Any relief that I might have brought to Captain Thesiger was surpassed by
+the reassurance that I took from my first sight of him. It was as if I
+had instantly argued to myself: "This is the sort of thing that has
+produced Viola. This is the sort of man she has been brought up with.
+When Viola thinks of men it is this sort of man she is thinking of. It is
+therefore inconceivable that Tasker Jevons should exist for her otherwise
+than as a curious intellectual freak. Even _her_ perversity couldn't--no,
+it could not--fall so far from this familiar perfection." Though Captain
+Thesiger's perfection might not help me personally, it did dispose of
+little Jevons. Looking at him, I felt as if my uneasiness, you may say my
+jealousy, of Jevons (it almost amounted to that) had been an abominable
+insult to his sister.
+
+Reggie--he is my brother-in-law now, and I cannot go on calling him
+Captain Thesiger--Reggie was good enough to say that he had heard of me
+from his sister. His voice conveyed, without any vulgar implication, an
+acknowledgment of my right to be heard of from her--but, of course, he
+went on agreeably, he had heard of me in any case; he supposed everybody
+had. My celebrity was so immature that I should not have recognized this
+allusion to it if Reggie had not gone on even more genially. He said he
+liked awfully the things I did in the _Morning Standard_. Most especially
+and enthusiastically he liked my account of the big boxing match at
+Olympia. You could see it was written by a chap who knew what he was
+talking about.
+
+I had to confess that Tasker Jevons was the chap who wrote it. Reggie,
+quite prettily abashed, tried to recover himself and plunged further. He
+brought up from his memory one thing after another. And all his
+reminiscences were of Jevons. He had mixed us up hopelessly, as people
+did in those days. They knew I was associated with the _Morning
+Standard_, and that was all they knew about me; if they wanted to recall
+anything striking I had done, it was always Jevons they remembered. Poor
+Reggie was so inveterate in his blundering that after his fourth
+desperate effort he gave it up. His memory, he said, was rotten.
+
+I said, on the contrary, his memory for Jevons was perfect, and he looked
+at me charmingly and laughed.
+
+While he was laughing Viola came in. She had Jevons with her.
+
+It was evident that neither of them was prepared for Reggie Thesiger.
+They had let themselves in with a latch-key and come straight upstairs
+without encountering Mrs. Pavitt.
+
+At the sight of her brother Viola betrayed a feeling I should not have
+believed possible to her. For the first and I may say the last, time in
+my experience of her, I saw Viola show funk.
+
+It was the merest tremor of her tilted mouth, the flicker of an eyelash,
+an almost invisible veiling of her brilliant eyes; I do not think it
+would have been perceptible to anybody who watched her with a less tense
+anxiety than mine. But it was there, and it hurt me to see it.
+
+There was one person, only one person, in the world whom Viola was
+afraid of, and that was her brother Reggie. She was afraid of him because
+she loved him. He was the person in the world that she loved best,
+before--before the catastrophe. And this fear of hers that I alone saw
+(Reggie most certainly had not seen it) ought to have warned me if
+nothing else had.
+
+It probably would have warned me but for what she did next; but for her
+whole subsequent behaviour.
+
+She broke loose from Reggie, who had closed on her with a shout of
+"Hallo, Vee-Vee!" and an embrace; she broke loose from Reggie and turned
+to me, all laughing and rosy from his impact, with an outstretched hand
+and a voice that swept to me and rippled with a sort of nervous joy. And
+she said: "Oh, Wally, this _is_ nice of you! You'll stop for tea."
+
+Her mouth said that. But her eyes--they had grown suddenly pathetic--said
+a lot more. They said: "Don't go, Wally, _please_ don't go. Whatever you
+do, don't leave me alone with him." At least, I can see now that that's
+what they were saying. And even at the time I saw on her dear face the
+same blessed relief (at finding me there) that I had seen on Reggie's.
+
+Neither Reggie nor I, mind you, had seen Jevons yet (I am speaking of
+fractions of seconds of time); and he wasn't actually in the room; but
+Viola and I were aware of him outside. If he had not paused on the
+landing to dispose of his overcoat and his hat and his stick, their
+entrance would have been simultaneous.
+
+That pause saved them.
+
+His stick slipped and tumbled down on the landing with a clatter. We
+heard him prop it up again. Our eyes met. I'm afraid mine said: "What are
+you going to do _now_?"
+
+Then he came in and I saw the gallant Reggie take the shock of him. I
+don't suppose he had ever before met anything like Jevons--I mean really
+met him, at close quarters--in his life. But he was gallant, and he had
+his face well under control. Only the remotest, vanishing quiver and
+twinkle betrayed the extremity of his astonishment.
+
+Viola, with an admirable air of detachment from Jevons, introduced them.
+I don't know how she did it. It was as if, without any actual
+repudiation, she declined to hold herself responsible for Jevons'
+appearance; for the extraordinary little bow he made; for his jerky
+aplomb and for his "Glad to meet you, Captain." And for the rest, she
+just handed him over to her brother and trusted Reggie to be decent to
+him.
+
+I had wondered: Are they going to let on that they've been out together?
+She cannot--she cannot own up to that. But how are they going to get out
+of it, and will he betray her?
+
+I saw how they were going to get out of it. If they didn't say in as many
+words that they'd met on the doorstep they implied it in everything they
+said. They asked each other polite questions, all to the tune of: "What
+have you been doing since I last saw you?"--to convey the impression that
+they had met thus casually after a long interval. Jevons played up to her
+well, almost too well; so well, in fact, did he play, that not long
+afterwards I was to ask myself: Was this perfection the result of
+collusion? Had they anticipated just such a sudden, disconcerting
+encounter? Had they thought it all out and arranged with each other
+beforehand how they should behave? I don't know. I never cared to ask
+her.
+
+The game lasted some little time. I didn't like to see her driven to
+these shifts (I was afraid, in fact, they'd overdo it), and I came to her
+help by telling Jevons that Captain Thesiger was an enthusiastic admirer
+of his work; and Reggie burst in jubilantly--he was evidently glad to
+be able to meet Jevons on this happy ground--with: "Are you the chap who
+wrote those things I've been reading? I say, Vee-Vee, you might have told
+me."
+
+He fastened upon Jevons then and there. He started him off on the boxing
+match. There was very little about boxing that Reggie didn't know, but he
+appealed to Jevons with a charming deference as to an expert. The dear
+boy had a good deal of his sister's innocent veneration for the chaps who
+wrote the things they'd been reading, who could, that is to say, do
+something they couldn't do.
+
+And Jevons, once started on the boxing match, fairly let himself go. He
+careered over the field of sport, interrupting his own serious
+professional _elan_ with all sorts of childlike and spontaneous gambols.
+In some of his turns he was entirely lovable. It was clear that Reggie
+loved him as you love a strange little animal at play, or any vital
+object that diverts you. From his manner I gathered that, provided he
+were not committed to closer acquaintance with Jevons, he was willing
+enough to snatch the passing joy of him.
+
+I do not know by what transitions they slid together on to the Boer War.
+The Boer War happened to be Reggie's own ground. He had served in it. You
+would have said that Jevons had served in it too, to hear him. He traced
+the course of the entire campaign for Reggie's benefit. He showed him by
+what error each regrettable incident (as they called them then) had
+occurred, and by what strategy it might have been prevented.
+
+And Reggie--who had been there--listened respectfully to Jevons.
+
+Viola had lured me into a corner where only scraps of their conversation
+reached us from time to time. So I do not know whether it was in
+connection with the Boer War that Jevons began telling Reggie that
+journalism was a rotten game; that from birth he had been baulked of his
+ambition. He had wanted to be tall and handsome. He had wanted to be
+valorous and athletic. And here he was sent into the world undersized and
+not even passably good-looking. And what--he asked Reggie--_could_ he do
+with a physique like his?
+
+I remember Reggie telling Jevons his physique didn't matter a hang. He
+could be a war correspondent in the next war. I remember Jevons saying in
+an awful voice: That was just it. He couldn't be anything in the next
+war--and, by God, there was a big war coming--he gave it eight years--but
+he couldn't be in it. He was an arrant coward.
+
+That, he said, was his tragedy. His cowardice--his distaste for
+danger--his certainty that if any danger were ever to come near him he
+would funk.
+
+And I remember Reggie saying, "My dear fellow, if you've the courage to
+say so--" and Jevons beating off this consolation with a funny gesture of
+despair. And then his silence.
+
+It was as if suddenly, in the midst of his gambolling, little Jevons had
+fallen into an abyss. He sat there, at the bottom of the pit, staring at
+us in the misery of the damned.
+
+I looked at Viola. Her eyelids drooped; her head drooped. Her whole body
+drooped under the affliction of his stare, and she would not look at me.
+
+Reggie (he really _was_ decent) tried to turn it off. "I wouldn't worry,
+if I were you," he said. "Wait till the war comes."
+
+"Oh, it's coming all right," said little Jevons. "No fear."
+
+And as if he could no longer bear to contemplate his cowardice, he said
+good-bye to us and left. Reggie's eyes followed his dejected, retreating
+figure.
+
+"How quaint!" he said. "But he's a smart chap, anyway. And, mind you,
+he's right about that war."
+
+I said (Heaven knows why, except that I think I must have wanted Reggie's
+opinion of Jevons): "D'you think he's right about his own cowardice?"
+
+Reggie said, "Ask me another. You can't tell. I only know I've seen men
+look like that and talk like that before an engagement."
+
+Viola raised her head. Her voice came with the clear tremor of a bell:
+"And did they funk?"
+
+"They didn't run away, if that's what you mean. I daresay they felt like
+Jevons. I've felt like Jevons myself."
+
+Of course, knowing Jevons as I do now, I have sometimes fancied his talk
+about cowardice may have been mere bravado, the risk he took with Reggie.
+But here again I am not quite sure. I don't really know.
+
+I am, however, entirely enlightened as to the game Viola played with me
+that night.
+
+Jevons had stayed till half-past six. He had talked for two hours and a
+half. When I got up to go, Reggie suggested that his sister should come
+and dine with him somewhere in town and do a play afterwards.
+
+She said, All right. She was on. And Furny would come too.
+
+He said, of course I was coming too. That was what he had meant (it
+wasn't).
+
+And in the end I went. I say in the end--for of course I protested. It
+was his one evening with his sister. But Viola's poor eyes signalled to
+me and implored me: "Don't leave me alone with him, whatever you do." She
+wanted to put off the dreadful moment that must come when he would ask
+her: "Where on earth did you pick up that shocking little bounder?"
+
+But the question never came. To begin with, Reggie was so enthralled by
+the funny play we went to that he forgot all about Jevons. And then
+Viola's game, that started in the restaurant and went on all through
+dinner, began again and continued in the taxi after the play. And though
+Reggie was discretion itself, you could see that he had taken it for
+granted--and no wonder--that she and I were, well, on the brink of an
+engagement if we hadn't fallen in. As for Jevons, he simply couldn't
+have conceived him in that connection. To Reggie, Jevons was simply an
+amusing little scallywag who could write. That Viola should have taken
+Jevons seriously surpassed his imagination of the possible. So that she
+never was in any danger of discovery, and there was no need for her
+manoeuvres. He couldn't have so much as found out that she had gone for a
+walk with Jevons, because it wouldn't have entered his head that you
+could go for a walk with him. People didn't do these things.
+
+Besides, he never was alone with her that evening. She took good care of
+that. She insisted on dropping him at his hotel, which we passed on our
+way northwards. She actually said to him, "You must get out here.
+Furny'll see me home. I want to talk to him."
+
+And instead of talking to me, she sat leaning forward with her back half
+turned to me, staring through the window at nothing at all.
+
+That was how I came to propose to Viola in the taxi. I had been afraid to
+do it before. I wasn't going to do it at all unless I was sure of her.
+But it seemed to me that she had been trying all afternoon and all
+evening to tell me that I might be sure.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well--she wouldn't have me. She was most decided about it. I had no hope
+and no defence and no appeal from her decision. Unless I was prepared to
+be a bounder--and a fatuous bounder at that--I couldn't tell her that
+she had given me encouragement that almost amounted to invitation. To do
+her justice, until the dreadful moment in the taxi she hadn't known that
+she had given me anything. She confessed that she had been trying to
+convey to Reggie the impression that if her affections were engaged in
+any quarter it was in mine. She had been so absorbed in calculating the
+effect on Reggie that she had never considered the effect on me. She said
+she thought I knew what she was up to and that I was simply seeing her
+through. She spoke of Jevons as if he was a joke--a joke that might be
+disastrous if her family took it seriously. It might end in her recall
+from town. She intimated that there were limits even to Reggie's
+enjoyment of the absurd; she owned quite frankly that she was afraid of
+Reggie--afraid of what he might think of her and say to her; because, she
+said, she was so awfully fond of him. As for me, and what _I_ might
+think, it was open to me to regard her solitary stroll with Jevons as a
+funny escapade.
+
+I do not believe the poor child was trying to throw dust in my eyes. It
+was her own eyes she was throwing dust in. She didn't want to think of
+herself what she was afraid of Reggie thinking.
+
+As to the grounds of my rejection (I was determined to know them), she
+was clear enough in her own little mind. She liked me; she liked me
+immensely; she liked me better than anybody in the world but Reggie. She
+admired me; she admired everything I did; she thought me handsome; I was
+the nicest-looking man she knew, next to Reggie. But she didn't love me.
+
+"What's more, Furny," she said, "I can't think why I don't love you."
+
+I couldn't see her clearly and continuously in the taxi. The lamp-posts
+we passed on the way to Hampstead lit her up at short, regular intervals,
+and at short, regular intervals she faded and was withdrawn from me. And
+in the same intermittent way, her soul, as she was trying to show it to
+me, was illuminated and withdrawn.
+
+"I ought to love you," she went on. "I know I ought. It would be the very
+best thing I could do."
+
+The folly in me clutched at that admission and gave tongue. "If that's
+so," I said, "don't you think you could try to do what you ought?"
+
+The lamp-light fell on her then. She was smiling a little sad,
+wise smile. "No," she said. "No. I think that's _why_ I can't love
+you--because I ought."
+
+And then she went on to explain that what she had against me was my
+frightful rectitude.
+
+"You're too nice for me, Furny, much too nice. And ever so much too good.
+I simply couldn't live with integrity like yours." She paused and then
+turned to me full as we passed a lamp-post.
+
+"I suppose you know my people would like me to marry you?"
+
+I said a little irritably that I had no reason to suppose anything of the
+sort.
+
+"They would," she said. "Why, bless you, that's what they asked you down
+at Whitsuntide for! I don't mean that they said to each other: Let's ask
+him down and then he'll marry Viola. They wouldn't even think it--they're
+much too nice. Poor dears--they'd be horrified if they knew I knew it!
+But it was underneath their minds, you know, pushing them on all the
+time. I believe they sent Reggie up to have a look at you, though they
+don't know that either. They think they sent him to see what I was up to.
+You see, Furny dear, from their point of view you _are_ so eligible. And
+really, do you know, I think that's what's dished you--what's dished us
+both, if you like to put it that way. I'm sure you may."
+
+I said it didn't matter much what dished me or how I put it, provided I
+_was_ dished. But--was I?
+
+Oh yes! She left me in no doubt that I was dished. And I saw--I still
+see, and if anything more clearly--why.
+
+I was everything that Canterbury approved of. And Viola, in her young
+revolt, was up against everything of which Canterbury approved. Her
+people were dear people; they were charming people, well-bred people;
+they had unbroken traditions of beautiful behaviour. And they had tied
+her up too tight in their traditions; that was all. Viola would never
+marry anybody on whom Canterbury had set its seal.
+
+And seeing all that, I saw that I had missed her by a mere accident. It
+was my friend the General who had dished me when he testified to my
+entire eligibility. That's to say, it was my own fault. If I had let well
+alone; if I hadn't turned the General on to them, _I_ should have been
+in the highest degree ineligible; _I_ should have been a person of whom
+Canterbury most severely disapproved; when I've no doubt that Viola, out
+of sheer perversity, would have insisted on marrying me.
+
+She said as much. So far she saw into herself and no farther.
+
+The Northern Heights were favourable to this interview, for the taxi
+broke down in an attempt to scale East Heath Road, so that we walked the
+last few hundred yards together to her door.
+
+It was while we were walking that--stung by a sudden fear, a reminiscence
+of the afternoon--I asked her: Was there anybody else?
+
+No, she said, there wasn't. How could there be? Hadn't she told me she
+liked me better than anybody else, next to Reggie?
+
+"Are you sure?" I said. "Are you quite sure?"
+
+She stopped in the middle of the road and looked at me.
+
+"Of course," she said. "There _isn't_ anybody. Except poor, funny little
+Jevons. And you couldn't mean him."
+
+That was as near as we got to him then.
+
+But a week later--the week before Easter--he came to us suddenly in my
+rooms where Viola was correcting proofs for me.
+
+He had come to tell us of his good luck. His novel had been accepted.
+
+I was glad, of course. But Viola was more than glad. She was excited,
+agitated. She jumped up and said: "Oh, Jimmy!" (She called him Jimmy, and
+her voice told me that it was not for the first time.) "Jimmy! How
+simply spiffing!"
+
+And I saw him look at her with a grave and tender assurance, as a man
+looks at the woman he loves when he knows that the hour of his triumph is
+her hour.
+
+And I thought even then: It's nothing. It's only that she's glad the poor
+chap has pulled it off.
+
+Then she said: "Let's all go and dine somewhere together. You don't mind,
+Furny dear, do you? I'll take it home and sit up with it."
+
+Oh, I didn't mind. We all went somewhere and dined together. We went, for
+the sheer appropriateness of it, to that restaurant in Soho where I had
+dined with Jevons for the first time. That was how it happened--what did
+happen, I mean, afterwards, in my rooms where Jevons had left us.
+
+We had gone back there for coffee and cigarettes. (Canterbury wouldn't
+have approved of this.)
+
+He had said good night to us when he turned on the threshold with his
+reminiscence. The restaurant in Soho had aroused it.
+
+"I say, Furnival, do you remember that half-crown you borrowed from me?"
+
+I said I did. And that to remind me of it now was a joke in very
+questionable taste.
+
+He said, "You never really knew the joke. I kept it from you most
+carefully. That little orgy of ours had just about cleared me out and the
+half-crown was my last half-crown. I had to go without any dinner for
+three days."
+
+I mumbled something about his not meaning it.
+
+He said, "Of course I meant it. Why, my dear chap, that's the joke!"
+
+He stood there in the doorway, rocking with laughter. Then he saw our
+faces.
+
+"I say, I wouldn't have told you if I'd thought it would harrow you like
+that. Thought you'd think it funny. It _is_ funny."
+
+I said, "No, my dear fellow, it's just missed being funny."
+
+I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him from the room. (I had seen
+Viola's face and I didn't want him to see it.) I led him gently
+downstairs with a hand still on his shoulder. He was a little grieved at
+giving pain when he had hoped to give pleasure.
+
+At the bottom of the stairs he turned and looked at me with his
+ungovernable twinkle. "It _was_ funny," he said. "But it wasn't half so
+funny, Furnival, as your face."
+
+I found Viola sitting at my writing-table, with her arms flung out over
+it and her head bowed on them. And she was crying--crying with little
+soft sobs. I've said that I didn't think she could do it. And I didn't.
+She wasn't the sort that cries. I'm convinced she hadn't cried like this
+for years, perhaps never since she was a child.
+
+I put my arms round her as if she had been a child; I held her soft,
+warm, quivering body close to mine; I wiped her tears away with her
+pocket-handkerchief. And like a child she abandoned herself to my--to my
+rectitude. She trusted in it utterly. I might have been her brother
+Reggie.
+
+I said: "You mustn't mind. He was only rotting us." And she said: "He
+wasn't. It was true. He told me that six months ago he was starving."
+
+I said: "Vee-Vee, if he _was_, you mustn't think about him. You mustn't,
+really."
+
+Then she drew away from me and dried her eyes herself, carefully and
+efficiently, and said in a calm and measured voice: "I'm not thinking
+about him."
+
+I went on as if I hadn't heard her: "You mustn't be sorry for him. Jevons
+is quite clever enough to take care of himself. He isn't a bit pathetic.
+You mustn't let him get at you that way."
+
+She raised her head with her old, high defiance. "He isn't trying to get
+at me. I'm not sorry for him--any more than he's sorry for himself."
+
+I said, "You don't know. You're just a dear little ostrich hiding its
+head in the sand."
+
+"No," she said. "No. I'm not a fool, Furny. Even an ostrich isn't such a
+fool as it looks. It doesn't imagine for a moment that it isn't seen. It
+hides its head because it knows it's going to be caught, anyway, and it's
+afraid of seeing what's going to catch it."
+
+I asked her then, Was _she_ afraid?
+
+She was standing beside me now, leaning back against my writing-table.
+Her two hands clutched the edge of it. Her eyes had a far-seeing, candid
+gaze.
+
+"I'm not afraid," she said, "of anything outside me. Only of things
+inside me--sometimes."
+
+"What sort of things?"
+
+She smiled, the queerest little, far-off smile.
+
+"Oh, funny things--things you wouldn't understand, Furny."
+
+To that I said, "I wish you'd marry me, Viola."
+
+She shrugged her shoulders and said, so did she, and it was much worse
+for her than it was for me. And then: "Do you know, Reggie liked you
+immensely. He told me so."
+
+I said it would be more to the point if _she_ did. But since she didn't,
+since she couldn't marry me, I wished--"I wish," I said, "you'd go back
+to Canterbury and marry some nice man like Reggie."
+
+"Can't you see," she cried, "that I shall never marry a nice man like
+Reggie?"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+The next thing that happened was that she went off with Jevons.
+
+At least, to all appearances she went off with him. They were in Belgium,
+at Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent and Bruges again together. I found them
+at Bruges after having tracked them through all the other places.
+
+It was Captain Thesiger who started me. Reggie (whose family seemed to
+employ him chiefly to find out what Viola was up to) had called at my
+rooms after Easter to ask me if I could give him his sister's address.
+He said they hadn't got it at Hampstead, where he had been to see her,
+and they didn't know where she was staying. They thought it was in the
+country somewhere, and that she wouldn't be very long away, as she told
+them not to forward any letters. He thought I might possibly have her
+address.
+
+I told him that I hadn't, and that I didn't know how to get it, either.
+
+He said, "It's a rotten habit she's got of sloping off like this without
+telling you." It wouldn't matter, only his regiment was ordered off to
+India. He was sailing next week. She was to have come down to Canterbury
+for Easter and she hadn't. If he only knew the people she was stopping
+with--if he'd any idea of the town or the village or the county, he'd try
+and find her. But she might be in the Hebrides for all he knew.
+
+I said I was sorry I couldn't help. All I knew was she had gone into the
+country (I didn't know it, but I assumed the knowledge for her
+protection). She had told me she might be going (she had), and I didn't
+think she'd be away for more than a day or two. I was pretty sure she'd
+be back before he sailed.
+
+I'd no reason, you see, to suppose she wouldn't be. Anyhow, I satisfied
+him.
+
+I marvel now at the ease with which I did it. But he was used to Viola's
+casual behaviour; and the monstrous improbability of the thing she had
+done this time was her cover. Who in the world would have dreamed that
+she would go off with Jevons? I don't really know that I dreamed it
+myself at the moment. I may be mixing up with my first vague dread the
+certainty that came later. But sometimes I wonder why Reggie didn't
+suspect _me_. I suppose my rectitude that had dished me with Viola saved
+me with her brother.
+
+He took me to lunch with him at his club, and went off quite happily
+afterwards to the Army and Navy Stores to see about his kit.
+
+I went straight to Jevons's rooms in Bernard Street. Jevons was away. Had
+been away since Easter. His landlady couldn't give me his address. He
+hadn't told them where he was going to, and they rather thought he was
+abroad. His letters were all forwarded to his publishers. _They_ might
+give me his address.
+
+I went to his publishers. They wouldn't give me his address. They weren't
+allowed to give addresses, but they would forward any letters to Mr.
+Jevons. I said I was a friend of Mr. Jevons's. Could they at least tell
+me whether he was or was not in England? They said that when they had
+last heard from him he was not.
+
+Then I went down to Fleet Street, to his editor, my editor. He couldn't
+give me Jevons's address because he hadn't got it. He rang up the office.
+In the office they rather thought Jevons was in Belgium. They'd had a
+manuscript from him posted at Ostend. They looked up the date. It was
+three days ago.
+
+I sailed that night for Ostend.
+
+Of course I had no business to follow Jevons. He had a perfect right to
+travel--to travel anywhere he liked, without interference from anybody.
+And in fixing on a time to travel in, nothing was more likely than with
+his mania upon him he would choose a time that had become valueless to
+him--a time that he had no other use for, the time when Viola Thesiger
+was away. The poverty of his resources was such that he couldn't afford
+to waste any opportunity of seeing her. So that I really could not have
+given any satisfactory answer if I had been asked why I had jumped to the
+preposterous conclusion that, because they were away at the same time,
+they were away together. It ought to have been as inconceivable to me as
+it was to Reggie. I can only say that in following him I acted on an
+intimation that amounted to certainty, founded on I know not what
+underground flashes of illumination and secret fear.
+
+I must have trusted to more flashes in pursing his trail. For when I
+reached Folkestone there wasn't any trail at all. My only clue was that
+three days ago Jevona had posted a manuscript at Ostend. He might not be
+in Belgium at all. He might be in Holland or in France or Germany by this
+time.
+
+When we got to Ostend I made systematic inquiries at the Post Office and
+at all probable hotels. At the eleventh hotel (a very humble one) I heard
+that a "Mr. Chevons" had stayed there one night, three nights ago. No, he
+had nobody with him. He had left no address. They didn't know where he
+was going on to. I found out under another rubric that Englishmen never
+came to this hotel. There was no point in making a separate search for
+Viola; if my intuition held good, all I had to do was to find out where
+Jevons was.
+
+I went on to Bruges. Why, I cannot tell you. I had never heard either
+Viola or Jevons say they would like to see Bruges. But Bruges was the
+sort of place that people did like to see.
+
+No trace of Jevons or of Viola in Bruges.
+
+I went on to Antwerp (it was another of the likely places), and then, in
+sheer desperation, to Ghent.
+
+And in Ghent, in a certain hotel in the _Place d'Armes_, I ran up against
+Burton Withers, the man who used to be on the old _Dispatch_, and the
+very last person I could have wished to see. I didn't ask him if he'd
+seen Jevons; I didn't mention Jevons; but before we'd parted he had told
+me that, by the way, he'd come across Jevons in Bruges. He was going
+about with my typist, Miss Thesiger. They were staying in the same hotel.
+
+I tried to say as casually as I could that Miss Thesiger had wired to me
+that she was staying in that hotel with her people.
+
+The little bounder then intimated that when he saw Miss Thesiger her
+people were less conspicuous than Jevons.
+
+I replied that that was probably the reason why they'd asked me to join
+them when I'd seen Ghent.
+
+Withers advised me to go on seeing Ghent if I wanted to be popular.
+They--Jevons and Miss Thesiger--didn't look at all as if they wanted to
+be seen, much less joined.
+
+He had the air of knowing a good deal more than he cared to tell me; but
+then he always had that air; you may say he lived on it.
+
+I asked him presently (in a suitable context) whether he was going back
+soon; and to my relief I learned that he had only just come out--for his
+paper--and was going on into Germany through Brussels. He wouldn't be
+back in England for another three weeks or more.
+
+He wouldn't be back, I reflected, to tell what he knew or what he didn't
+know, till Reggie Thesiger had sailed.
+
+I got rid of the little beast on the first likely pretext, having dealt
+with him so urbanely that he couldn't possibly think he had told me
+anything I saw reason to believe and therefore to resent.
+
+Then I went back to Bruges.
+
+This time my quest was fairly easy. I didn't know what hotel Jevons
+was staying in; but I did know the sort of hotel that Withers stayed
+in when he was travelling for his paper. My errand was narrowed down to
+three or four (good, but not too good), and the first I struck in the
+Market-Place was Withers's hotel. It was one of those that three days ago
+had known nothing of Jevons.
+
+I inquired this time for Withers and was told that he had left that
+morning. I engaged a room and strolled out into the Market-Place. I
+visited the Cathedral, the Belfry, and the Beguinage, in the hope of
+coming suddenly across Viola and Jevons.
+
+I did not come across them in any of those places; but I was not very
+earnest about the search. I was so sure that if Withers had not lied to
+me they would presently come across me at their hotel. I meant that it
+should be that way, if possible: that they should come across me in a
+place where they could not evade me. God only knows what I meant to say
+to them when they had found me.
+
+As I entered the hotel again I saw the proprietor's wife make a sign to
+her husband. They conferred together, and sent the _concierge_ upstairs
+after me. He wanted to know if I was the gentleman who had inquired the
+other day for Mr. Chevons, because, if I was, Mr. Chevons had arrived the
+day before yesterday and was staying in the hotel.
+
+There was no doubt about it; his name, James Tasker Jevons, was in the
+visitors' list.
+
+Viola's was not.
+
+From the enthusiasm of the fat proprietor and his wife you would have
+supposed that Jevons and I had roamed the habitable globe for months in
+search of one another; and that Jevons, at any rate, would be overpowered
+with joy when he found that I was here. They said nothing about Viola.
+
+And before I could ask myself what earthly motive Withers could have had
+for lying to me, I concluded that he _had_ lied.
+
+Or perhaps--it was more than likely--he had been mistaken.
+
+Jevons, I said to myself, was bound to turn up at dinner. If Viola was in
+Bruges, Viola would probably be with him. I chose a table by the door
+behind a screen, where I could see everybody as they came in without
+being seen first of all by anybody.
+
+Jevons didn't turn up for dinner.
+
+I found him later on in the evening, on the bridge outside the eastern
+gate of the city. He stood motionless and alone, leaning over the parapet
+and looking into the water. Away beyond the Canal a long dyke of mist
+dammed back the flooding moonlight, and the things around Jevons--the
+trees, the water, the bridge, the gate and its twin turrets--were
+indistinct. But the man was so poured out and emptied into his posture
+that I could see his dejection, his despair. The posture ought to have
+disarmed me, but it didn't.
+
+He moved away as he saw me coming, then, recognizing me, he stood his
+ground. It was as if almost he were relieved to see me.
+
+"Oh, it's you, is it?" he said.
+
+I asked him who he thought it was, and he said he thought it was that
+little beast Withers.
+
+I said, "I daresay you did. I saw Withers this morning."
+
+He said quite calmly he supposed that was why I was here.
+
+I said I had been here before I had seen Withers.
+
+"I see," he said. "He's told you."
+
+I said Withers had told me nothing I didn't know.
+
+"You didn't know anything," he said. "You simply came here to find out."
+
+I said: Yes, that was what I had come for.
+
+"Well," he went on; "there isn't much to find out. She's here. And I'm
+here. And Withers saw us yesterday. As he told you."
+
+He spoke in the tired, toneless voice of a man stating for the
+thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact. He knew that I
+had tracked him down, but he didn't resent it. I felt more than ever that
+this encounter was in some way a relief to him; things, he almost
+intimated, might have been so much worse. I didn't know then that his
+calmness was the measure of his trust in me.
+
+"The really beastly thing," he said, "was Withers seeing us."
+
+I answered that the really beastly thing was his being there; his having
+brought her there; and that it would give me pleasure to pitch him over
+the canal bridge, only that the canal water was too clean for him.
+
+He said, "The canal water is filthy. But it isn't filthier than--it isn't
+half so filthy as your imagination. Your imagination, Furnival, is like
+the main sewer of this city."
+
+He said it without any sort of passion, in his voice of utter weariness,
+as if he was worn-out with struggling against imaginations such as mine.
+
+"But," he went on, "even your imagination isn't as obscene as Withers's.
+You may as well tell me what he said to you about Miss Thesiger."
+
+"He said that she--that you were staying together in the same hotel."
+
+"Why shouldn't we? It's a pretty big hotel. Do you mind my going back to
+it?"
+
+I said grimly that I was going back to it myself. I wasn't going to let
+Jevons out of my sight. I felt as if I had taken him into custody.
+
+We went back.
+
+We didn't speak till we came into the Market-Place. Then Jevons said
+quietly:
+
+"As it happens, we aren't staying together in that damned hotel. I'm
+staying in it by myself. We were dining there and having breakfast when
+Withers spotted us. You don't suppose she'd let me take her to the same
+hotel, do you? I got a room for her in a boarding-house. Kept by some
+ladies."
+
+"What do you mean by bringing her here at all? If," I said, "you _did_
+bring her."
+
+He meditated as if he too wondered what he had meant by it.
+
+"I brought her all right. That's to say, I made her come."
+
+"You mean you didn't bring her? She followed you?"
+
+(I _had_ to know what they had done, how they had arranged it.)
+
+We stood for a moment in the middle of the vast foreign Market-Place,
+talking in voices whose softness veiled our hostility.
+
+He answered with a little spurt of anger. "You can't call it following.
+She came."
+
+"Don't prevaricate," I said. "She came because you made her come. I'm not
+going to ask you why you made her. It's obvious."
+
+"Is it?" he said. "I wish I knew why. I wish to God I knew."
+
+"Don't talk rot," I said. "You knew all right. And she didn't."
+
+He looked at me. Standing there in the lighted Marketplace, under the
+shadow of the monument, he looked at me with shining, tragic eyes.
+
+"No, Furnival," he said. "Before God I didn't know. Neither of us knew.
+But I know now. And I'm going to-morrow."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He stuck to it that he was going. He seemed to think that his going would
+make it all right. He had just realized--he had only just, after six days
+of it, mind you, realized--that he had compromised her. I said I supposed
+he realized it after Withers had seen them?
+
+He said, No, it had come over him before that. Neither of them really
+cared a damn about Withers. Who was going to care what a beast like
+Withers thought or said? It had come over him that he oughtn't to have
+brought her here. He wished he'd hung himself before he'd thought
+of it, but the fact was that he didn't think. He just felt when he got
+out here himself that it would be a jolly thing for her to come too; it
+would do her good to cut everything--all the mimsy tosh she'd been
+brought up in and hated--to get out of it all--just to do one splendid
+bunk. That, he said, was all it amounted to.
+
+We talked it over, sitting up in his little bedroom under the roof, the
+cheapest room in the hotel. You may wonder how I could have endured to
+talk to him instead of wringing his horrid little neck for him; but there
+wasn't anything else to be done. After all, it wouldn't have done Viola
+or me any good if I had wrung his neck. It was, in fact, to save
+precisely that sort of violent scandal that I had come out here. I had
+realized so well what wringing Jevons's neck would mean to Viola that I
+was determined to get at him before Reggie Thesiger could.
+
+Besides I doubt very much if you could have wrung the neck of anybody so
+abjectly penitent as Jevons was that evening. I felt as if I were shut up
+with a criminal in the condemned cell, and Jevons no doubt felt as if
+he had murdered Viola.
+
+And yet, sitting there on his bed, leaning forward with his head in his
+hands and his eyes staring, staring at the horror he had raised round
+her, he asserted persistently his innocence.
+
+"Practically," he said, "I brought her out to look at Bruges--the
+Belfry."
+
+I said: "Good God! Couldn't she look at the Belfry without _you_?"
+
+He shook his head and replied very gravely: "Not in the same way,
+Furnival. Not in the same way. It wouldn't have been the same thing at
+all."
+
+"You mean it wouldn't have been the same for you, you little bounder."
+
+"It wouldn't have been the same thing for _her_. I wasn't thinking only
+of myself. Who does?"
+
+It was as if he had said: "Who that loves as I love thinks only of
+himself?" But I missed that. I was too angry.
+
+At least I suppose I was too angry. I must have been. Jevons's offence
+was unspeakable, or seemed so. He had outraged all decencies. He had done
+_me_ about the worst injury that one man can do to another--at any rate,
+I wasn't sure that he hadn't. How could I have been sure! Every
+appearance was against him. Even his funny candour left me with a ghastly
+doubt. It was preposterous, his candour. His innocence was preposterous.
+But it is impossible to write about this singular adventure as it must
+have appeared to me at the time. I am saturated with Jevons's point of
+view. I have had to live so long with his innocence and I have forgiven
+him so thoroughly any wrong he ever did to me. All this is bound to
+colour my record and confuse me. I have impression upon impression of
+Jevons piled in my memory; I cannot dig down deep enough to recover the
+original; I cannot get back to that anger of mine, that passion of
+violent integrity, that simple abhorrence of Jevons that I must have
+felt.
+
+He didn't care a rap about me and my abhorrence. He asked me what I
+thought I was doing when I came out here? He simply smiled when I told
+him I'd come out to send Viola back to her people before Reggie Thesiger
+got hold of him and thrashed him within an inch of his life, not because
+I in the least objected to his being thrashed within an inch of his
+life--far from it--but because advertisement in these affairs was
+undesirable. I didn't want Viola's family or anybody else to know about
+this instance. It was to be hushed up on her account and on their account
+alone.
+
+He replied pensively (almost too pensively) that he had supposed that was
+the line I would take. It was his little meditative pose that made me
+call him a thundering scallywag and accuse him of having calculated on
+the line that would be taken.
+
+He said quietly, "The word thundering is singularly inappropriate.
+There's nothing thundering about me. I haven't calculated anything. As
+for hushing it up, I'm hushing it up myself, thank you. Haven't I told
+you I'm going to-morrow? Can't you see that I'm packing?"
+
+He had evidently been trying to pack.
+
+"And what," I asked, "is Miss Thesiger doing?"
+
+"She's staying on here by herself a bit. In the _pension_. As if she'd
+come by herself."
+
+He seemed entirely satisfied with his plan.
+
+I said, "Look here, Jevons, that won't do. It's no good _your_ going.
+You've been seen here. You're supposed to be staying in this hotel
+together. If you go and she stays--in that _pension_--you've deserted
+her. You've seduced her. You're tired of her--in five days--and you've
+left her."
+
+"You don't suppose I have _really_?" said Jevons.
+
+"I don't suppose anything. I don't know what you've done. I don't think
+I want to know. That's what it'll look like. Do, for God's sake, remember
+you've been _seen_."
+
+He gathered a portion of his cheek into his mouth and sucked it.
+
+"I suppose," he said, "it _would_ look like that."
+
+I said of course it would. And he asked me then, quite humbly, what I
+thought he'd better do.
+
+I said I thought he'd better do exactly what I told him. He was to stay
+here till Captain Thesiger had sailed for India (I wasn't going to let
+him get back to England till Reggie was out of it). Miss Thesiger was to
+go back to her people to-morrow, and he was not to see her or write to
+her before she went.
+
+He asked me was I thinking of taking her back myself?
+
+I said I wasn't. Miss Thesiger had behaved as if she had disappeared.
+There was no good in my behaving as if she had disappeared with _me_.
+
+That seemed to pacify him.
+
+I said I should take her to Ostend to-morrow and put her on board the
+boat. I could see that he didn't at all care about this part of the
+programme, but his intelligence accepted the whole as the best thing that
+could be done in the circumstances.
+
+Then I left him to his misery and went round to the _pension_ to see
+Viola.
+
+All my instincts revolted against what I had to do.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+She has since told me that I did it beautifully. I don't, of course,
+believe her, and it doesn't matter. The wonder is how I did it at all.
+
+To begin with I was afraid of seeing her, because I conceived that she
+would be afraid of seeing me. I felt as if I had hunted her down and
+caught her in a trap. I didn't want the bright, defiant creature to
+crouch and flinch before me in her corner. And, as I tried to realize
+our encounter, that was how I saw her--crouching and flinching in a
+corner. It wouldn't have been quite so awful if the man had been any
+other man but Jevons. I could not imagine a worse position for a girl
+like Viola Thesiger than to be caught running off to Belgium, or
+anywhere, with Jevons, and told to leave him and go home. Put brutally,
+that was what I had to tell her.
+
+The only way to do it was to ignore the unspeakable element in the
+affair--to ignore Jevons. To behave as if I'd never heard of him; as if
+she were just travelling in Belgium on her own account and staying in
+Bruges alone.
+
+And that--if she had only let me--was what I tried to do.
+
+I remember vividly everything that passed in that interview, but I do not
+know how to reproduce it, how to give anything like an impression of the
+marvellous thing it was, or that it turned into under her hands. It
+ought, you see, to have been so ugly, so humiliating, so absolutely
+intolerable for both of us. And it wasn't. She took it from me, at the
+end, and held it up, as it were a little way out of my grasp; and before
+I knew where I was, with some sudden twist or turn she had brought beauty
+out of it. Clear and exquisite beauty.
+
+I found her in her room at the _pension_. It was at the back, on the
+ground floor; and had long windows opening into a little high-walled
+garden. The room, I remember, was rather dingy and stuffed up with
+furniture. Large Flemish pieces, bureaus, chests and cabinets stood
+against the walls. There was a bed behind the door; she had put her
+travelling-rug over it. And there was a washstand in an alcove with a
+curtain hung across it; and some of her coats and gowns hung behind
+another curtain in a corner, and some were on hooks on the door. And her
+little trunk was on the floor by the foot of the bed. And her shoes stood
+by the stove.
+
+Somehow, when I saw these things--especially the shoes--my heart melted
+inside me with a tenderness that was infinitely more painful than the
+rather austere disapproval of her which I had relied on for support.
+
+I was prepared, as I said, for a cowed and frightened Viola, or for Viola
+in a mood at least in keeping with the poignant and somewhat humbling
+pathos of her surroundings; but not for the Viola I found.
+
+The _garcon_ of the _pension_ closed the door of this room in my face as
+he went in with my card to inquire whether she would receive me. I
+thought, "If she refuses I shall have to insist; and that will be
+unpleasant."
+
+But she didn't refuse. On the other side of the door I heard a subdued,
+but curiously reassuring cry.
+
+She had been sitting outside the open window. Her chair was on the
+flagged path of the garden. As I came in she had risen and was standing
+in the window, with the intense blue darkness of the garden behind her
+and the light of the room on her face. She was smiling in a serene and
+candid joy. For one second I imagined that she had not read the name on
+the card and that she thought I was Jevons. And then I must have looked
+away quite steadily so as not to see her shock of recognition; for her
+voice recalled me.
+
+"Wally--how ripping! However _did_ you get here?"
+
+I don't know what I said. I probably didn't say anything. The sheer
+surprise of it so staggered me that I must have muttered or grunted or
+choked instead. But I know I took her hand and did my best to smile back
+at her with the stiff mouth she noticed later.
+
+She went on: "I _am_ glad to see you. Have you had any dinner?"
+
+I said I had.
+
+"Then," she said, "let's sit in the garden."
+
+I took her hat off a chair and stuck it on a bust on the bureau (Viola
+laughed). I set the chair on the flagged path of the garden.
+
+"Have you had coffee?" she said then.
+
+I had.
+
+"So have I. But I haven't had it in the garden. We'll have some more."
+
+I rang for coffee.
+
+We sat down and faced each other. She was smiling again as if the delight
+of seeing me fairly bubbled out of her. One thing struck me then, that at
+this rate it would be easy enough to ignore Jevons. In fact, if Jevons
+hadn't given Viola away just now I should have thought that she _was_
+travelling in Belgium on her own account and that his being here in the
+same town with her was a coincidence, an accident. I could have got over
+Withers and his story.
+
+Then she said, "Have you come across Mr. Jevons yet? He's here."
+
+I answered, with what I knew to be a very stiff mouth, "We're staying in
+the same hotel."
+
+"You might have brought him along with you," she said.
+
+I said I didn't want to bring him along with me.
+
+She raised her eyebrows in delicate reproof of my rudeness and said, "Why
+not?"
+
+"Because," I said, "I want to talk to you."
+
+"Oh--" I don't think I imagined the faint embarrassment in her tone. But
+it was very faint.
+
+"_And_" I went on, "I don't want to talk about Jevons."
+
+She looked at me then steadily. The look held me, then defied me to pass
+beyond a certain limit. I understood now the terms of our encounter. As
+long as I met her on the ground of a friendship that recognized and
+included Jevons she was glad to treat with me; but any attitude that
+repudiated Jevons, or merely ignored him, was a hostile attitude that she
+was prepared to resent.
+
+"What has he done?" she said.
+
+"I don't know what he's done." I paused. "Why drag in Jevons?"
+
+"Because," she said, "it's his last night. He's going to-morrow."
+
+I said, "And it's my first night. And as it happens he isn't going
+to-morrow. He's arranged to stay here another fortnight."
+
+Her face softened. "Then it's all right," she said.
+
+I had to dash her down from _that_ ground and I did it at once.
+
+I said, "I saw your brother the other day."
+
+I could see her face darken then with a flush of pain. We were sitting
+close to the window, and the light from the room inside showed me all the
+changes of her face.
+
+She asked, "What day?"
+
+"Let me see. This is Friday. It must have been Monday. I came over that
+night, as soon as I'd seen him."
+
+"What did you go and see him for?"
+
+"I didn't go. He came to see me."
+
+She looked at me again, if possible, more steadily than before, but
+without defiance. It was as if she were measuring the extent of my
+loyalty before she committed herself again to speech.
+
+"Why did he come?" she asked presently.
+
+"He wanted to know if I knew where you were."
+
+"You didn't know," she said.
+
+"I didn't or I wouldn't have lost three days in looking for you. But I
+made a good shot, anyhow, when I came to Bruges."
+
+Even in her anguish--for she was in anguish--she smiled at the wonder of
+my shot.
+
+"What made you think of Bruges?"
+
+"I don't know."
+
+I couldn't tell her what had made me think of it. I couldn't tell her
+that I had tracked her down through Jevons. I was going to keep him out
+of it, if she would only let me. But she wouldn't.
+
+"I suppose," she meditated gently, "he must have told you."
+
+I answered quite sternly this time, to impress on her the propriety of
+keeping Jevons out of it:
+
+"He didn't tell me anything."
+
+"Then"--she was still puzzled--"what made you come?"
+
+"You."
+
+"Me?"
+
+"Your brother, if you like."
+
+"He should have come himself."
+
+"That," I said, "is what I'm trying to prevent. He doesn't know
+you're here. I want to get you back to England before he does know.
+Besides--he's sailing for India next week."
+
+Then she broke down; that's to say, she lowered her flags. Her head sank
+to her breast; her eyes stared at the stone path; their lids reddened and
+swelled with the springing of tears that would not fall.
+
+"Didn't you know?" I said.
+
+"I suppose I must have known--once."
+
+Up till this moment she had not said one word, she had not made one sign,
+that had really given her away. And nothing could have given her away
+more completely than the thing she had said now. She had confessed to a
+passion so dominating and so blind as to be unaware of anything but
+itself. It was not so much that it had swept before it all the codes and
+traditions she had been brought up in--codes and traditions might well
+have been nothing to Viola--it had struck at her strongest affection and
+her memory. She adored her brother. He was sailing for India next week;
+she must have known it; and she had forgotten it.
+
+Her confession was not made to me (she had forgotten _my_ existence
+utterly); it was made to herself--the old self that had adored Reggie;
+that at this evocation of him arose and sat in judgment on the strange,
+perverted, monstrous self that could forget him. I've called it a
+confession; but it wasn't a confession. It was a cry, a muttering,
+rather, of secret, agonized discovery.
+
+"He wants to see you before he goes," I said.
+
+Her eyelids spilled their tears at that; but only those they had
+gathered; no more came. Her self-control was admirable.
+
+"It's all right," I said. "You've heaps of time. I'm going to take you to
+Ostend in the morning. You'll be in Canterbury to-morrow night."
+
+"Is that what you came for?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"It was awfully nice of you."
+
+"There was nothing else," I said, "to do."
+
+"You're coming with me to Canterbury." She stated it.
+
+"No, my dear child," I said, "I am not. You don't want them to think you
+went to Bruges with _me_."
+
+This was by implication a reference to Jevons. It was as near as I had
+let myself get to him.
+
+She said, "What are you going to do, then?"
+
+"I'm going to put you on the boat at Ostend, and then I'm coming back
+here."
+
+It must have been at this point that the _garcon_ brought the coffee. For
+I remember our sitting out there and drinking it amicably until the aroma
+of it gave Viola an idea.
+
+"What time shall we have to start to-morrow?"
+
+I said, "First thing in the morning."
+
+"Then," she said, "it does seem a pity not to send for Jimmy."
+
+I could see now that there was some deadly purpose in her persistence.
+But this time I couldn't bear it, and I lost my temper.
+
+I said, "Send for him. Send for him, if you can't live ten minutes
+without him."
+
+I was sorry even at the time; I have been ashamed since. For, so far from
+resenting my abominable rudeness--as, under any conclusion, she had a
+perfect right to--she merely said, "I'm only thinking that if I've got to
+go so soon to-morrow it'll be horribly lonely for him over there."
+
+"He doesn't expect to see you. We arranged all that."
+
+She pondered it, still with that curious absence of resentment. It was as
+if, recognizing the danger of the situation, she submitted to any steps,
+however disagreeable, that were necessary for her safety. It was clear
+that she trusted me; less clear that she trusted Jevons.
+
+One thing remained mysterious to her.
+
+"What are you coming back here for?" she asked.
+
+I let her have it straight: "To look after Jevons."
+
+"What do you suppose he'd do?"
+
+"He might get into England before your brother got out of it."
+
+She smiled. _"What do you suppose, then, Reggie'd do?"_
+
+I said I knew what I'd do if I were Reggie.
+
+She smiled again. "I see. You're saving him from Reggie."
+
+"I'm not thinking of him, I can assure you."
+
+At that she said, "Dear Wally, so you think you're saving me."
+
+"I'm trying to," I said. "As far as your people are concerned. You don't
+want them to know you've been here. If you'll only leave it to me, they
+won't know."
+
+"I'm not going to lie about it. I shall tell them if they ask me."
+
+"Not Reggie," I said.
+
+"Yes, Reggie. If he asks me. Reggie's the very last person I should think
+of lying to."
+
+It was this attitude of hers that first shook me in my conclusions. For
+I'm afraid I'd come to certain very definite conclusions.
+
+Why, I asked her, hadn't she told them before she came?
+
+"Because," she said, "there's no use worrying them. They'd have tried to
+stop me. You can't imagine what an awful fuss they'd have made. I daresay
+I might never have got off at all."
+
+What I couldn't understand was her attitude. I mean I couldn't reconcile
+the secrecy she had practised with her amazing frankness now.
+
+Her manner was supremely assured.
+
+It wasn't, mind you, the brazen assurance of a woman who has been found
+out and flings up the game; it was a curiously tranquil and patient
+candour, with something mysterious about it, as if she had knowledge that
+I couldn't have, and bore with me through all my ignorance and
+blundering. In fact, from beginning to end, except for the one moment
+when I upset her by telling her about Reggie's sailing, she showed an
+extraordinary tranquillity.
+
+But as I couldn't understand her I simply said, "I wish you hadn't got
+off."
+
+She said in that same quiet way, "I had to."
+
+"Because," I said, "he made you."
+
+Since she had dragged Jevons in she should have him in. I wasn't going to
+keep him out now to spare her. I had a right to know the truth. She had
+shaken my conclusions. She had left me in a doubt more unbearable than
+any certainty, and I considered that I had a right to know. I was
+determined to know now and end it. That shows that I must have trusted
+her; that I knew she wouldn't lie to me.
+
+"But," she said, with the least perceptible surprise, "he didn't make
+me."
+
+"He told me he did."
+
+"He told you?--What did he say exactly?"
+
+"He said--if you must know--that he hadn't brought you, but that he had
+made you come."
+
+"He didn't. He didn't really. But supposing he had--what then?"
+
+"You _want_ me to tell you what I think of it?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"I think it was a beastly thing to make you do. He couldn't have done
+it--you _know_ he couldn't have done it--if he hadn't been a bit of a
+blackguard."
+
+I was going to say, "as well as a bounder"; but I didn't want to rub that
+in. I judged that when the poor child came to her senses her cup would be
+full enough without my pouring.
+
+"But, you see," she said, still peaceably, "he didn't do it. He only
+_said_ he did. That was his niceness. He wanted to save me."
+
+"My dear child, if it's saving you to bring you out here without your
+people knowing anything about it, and to let you be seen with him
+everywhere--"
+
+"He didn't bring me. He said he wished I could come with him. And I said
+I wished I could. I almost asked him to take me; and he said he couldn't.
+Then he went off by himself. He was all right till he got to Bruges. Then
+he wrote and said that the beauty of it hurt him, that it was awful being
+here without me, and that he was coming back at the end of the week
+without seeing any more of it, because he couldn't bear to know what I
+was missing. He was going to keep the other places till we could see them
+together. So I wired to say I was coming, and I came."
+
+"What did you do it for, Viola?"
+
+"Wally, I asked myself that as soon as I got into the train. And it
+wasn't till I was half across the Channel that I knew why."
+
+She stopped and stared as if at the wonder of herself explained.
+
+"I did it to burn my boats."
+
+I suppose _I_ stared at that. For she expounded:
+
+"To make it impossible to go back."
+
+I said, "My dear child, that was very reckless of you."
+
+She said she wanted to be reckless. I asked her if it didn't occur to her
+that some day she might want her boats?
+
+She said: No. It was just her boats that she was afraid of. She didn't
+really want them. She didn't want--really--to go back.
+
+Then she looked at me and said, "You know Jimmy wants to marry me." And
+then, "Did you know?"
+
+I said I was not in Jevons's confidence, but I had guessed as much. I
+said, "Do you want to marry him?"
+
+She said, "Yes. I want to marry him more than anything. I don't want to
+marry anybody else. I never shall marry anybody else. Most of me wants to
+marry Jimmy. But there's a little bit of me that doesn't. It's mean and
+snobbish--and dreadful, and it's afraid to marry him. And, you see, if I
+were to go to my people and say, 'I'm not going to marry Mr. Furnival;
+I'm going to marry Mr. Jevons,' and I were to show Jimmy to them, they'd
+all get up and side with that horrid and shameful little bit of me.
+Reggie would, too. It wouldn't be in the least horrid or snobbish of
+them, you know, because they wouldn't know what Jimmy's really like.
+They're just very fastidious and correct. But it's simply awful of me,
+because I do know."
+
+"It isn't awful. It simply means that he isn't your sort. _You_'re
+fastidious and correct. You _can't_ marry him, and you know it. You won't
+be able to bear it. He'll make you shudder all down your spine."
+
+"All that doesn't prevent my caring for him. I care for him more than for
+anything on earth, even Reggie. That's why I've burned my boats. So that
+I may have what I care for without their tearing me to pieces over it."
+
+So far was I from understanding her that it struck me that what she was
+telling me was as ugly a thing as could be told in words; that she was
+confessing that, being too weak to stand up against her family, she had
+deliberately compromised herself with Jevons so that she might marry him
+without their opposition; just as I was sure that Jevons had compromised
+her so that he could marry her without opposition from herself.
+
+"But--what you are saying is horrible," I said. "I don't believe you know
+how horrible it is."
+
+So far was she from understanding _me_ that she answered: "Yes, it is
+horrible. But it was only a little bit of me. And it's all over. Burned
+away, Wally. I burned it when I burned my boats. Don't think of me as if
+I were really like that."
+
+You see? We had been talking about different things. My mind had been
+fastened on an external incident, ugly in itself, ugly in its apparent
+purpose, ugly in its consequences, ugly every way you looked at it. Hers
+had been concentrated on the event that had happened in her soul, an
+event to her altogether beautiful--the destruction of the cowardice that
+would have brought her back, that shrank from taking the risk that her
+soul dared.
+
+This, she seemed to say, is how I deal with cowardice.
+
+That she had compromised herself by dealing with it in this way had
+simply never occurred to her. It couldn't. She didn't know and wouldn't
+have believed it possible that people did these things.
+
+What had frightened her, she said, was Jimmy's saying that about keeping
+the other places till they could see them together. He meant, you see,
+till they were married. It brought it so home to her. And it brought home
+to her what it meant to him. Because he couldn't afford to marry yet for
+ages.
+
+If she'd gone back, she said, it would have been so cruel to him. And it
+would have been so cruel to herself, too.
+
+Then she told me what they had done together. Heavens! How she must have
+trusted him. She joined him here in Bruges. And they'd gone to Antwerp,
+then to Ghent, then back to Bruges. (I had followed close on their
+traces, a day behind them at each city.)
+
+And it had all been so beautiful. She simply couldn't tell me how
+beautiful it had been. It was as if she had never seen anything properly
+before.
+
+Jimmy had made her see things. "I can understand," she said, "what he
+meant when he said that the beauty of this place hurt him. It hurts
+_me_."
+
+I reminded her that Jimmy had said it hurt him because she wasn't there.
+
+She looked up and smiled. "He isn't here _now_, Furny."
+
+I took her to Ostend first thing in the morning and saw her on to the
+boat. I advised her to remove the foreign labels from her trunk at Dover,
+and to contrive so that she shouldn't be seen arriving by the up platform
+at Canterbury.
+
+"Oh," she said. "You have to take _some_ risk!"
+
+We were on the gangway, saying good-bye. And from the boat's gunwale she
+flung me buoyantly, "If I'm caught I'll say it was _you_ I went off with.
+They won't mind that half so much."
+
+I went back to Bruges the same day and found Jevons disconsolate where I
+had left him in his hotel. I took him to Brussels in the hope of finding
+Withers there and confusing him in his ideas. We didn't find him. He had
+gone on into Germany, carrying with him his impression of Viola and
+Jevons staying together at Bruges in the same hotel.
+
+It was at Bruges that I said to Jevons, "By the way, Miss Thesiger says
+you _didn't_ make her come. She proposed coming herself."
+
+He flushed furiously and denied it. "Of course I made her come. It wasn't
+likely she'd propose a thing like that."
+
+His chivalry was up in arms to defend her. But I could see also that his
+vanity wasn't going to relinquish the manly role of having made her come
+to him.
+
+Well, I suppose in a sense he _had_ made her.
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+We didn't stay in Brussels more than a day or two. Jevons didn't like it.
+He had become sentimentally attached to Bruges, and he wasn't happy till
+I took him back there. I can't say he was exactly happy then except in so
+far as he may have enjoyed his own suicidal gloom. I wasn't very happy
+either. All my recollections of Bruges are poisoned by Jevons's gloom and
+by my own miserable business of looking after him and seeing that he
+didn't walk gloomily into any of the canals. As for seeing Bruges, I
+don't know to this day whether the Belfry is beautiful or not. I only
+know that it stood there in the grey sky like an immense monument to the
+melancholy of Jevons. He made me horribly uneasy. I thought every day
+that if he didn't walk into a canal he'd have another fit of jaundice.
+
+He seemed to be suffering chiefly from remorse, and oddly enough it was
+this remorse of his that gave me the measure of his essential innocence,
+as if Viola hadn't given it me already.
+
+It was in his dejection that he showed his tact. He had, for our
+remarkable circumstances, the right manner. If Jevons had been jaunty; if
+he had tried to brazen it out, I should have hated him. As it was, his
+misery might be poisonous, but it was most disarming. So was his trust
+in me. He realized that he had got Viola into the devil of a mess, and he
+looked, intelligently, to me to get her out of it. And with the same
+confiding simplicity he put himself into my hands now. The adventure had
+shaken his nerve and he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some
+supremely foolish thing like following Viola to Canterbury. I believe he
+would have consented to stay in Bruges long after the term I had imposed
+if I had told him it was necessary.
+
+I said I took him to Brussels and brought him back to Bruges. He
+submitted to be brought and taken; to be banged about in trains and
+omnibuses, to be fetched and carried like a parcel. He let me feel in the
+most touching manner that my presence was a comfort to him, while he
+recognized that his might be anything but a comfort to me. I know I had
+nothing to do with Jevons's melancholy. The fat proprietor and his wife
+(who smiled at us by way of encouragement in our passages to and fro
+before their bureau), these thralls of Jevons's odd fascination, had
+confided to me that he had been much worse the day before I came. The
+poor gentleman could neither eat nor sleep; other guests in the hotel had
+come upon him wandering by himself at strange hours on the quays. (There
+were a good many English in Bruges that spring.)
+
+I was greatly relieved by these disclosures; they testified to the fact
+that Jevons, at any rate on Viola's last day, had been seen very much by
+himself.
+
+We had not spoken of Viola since the day when I had come back from Ostend
+after seeing her off. I can't recall much of what we did talk about, but
+I remember that Jevons's remarks were always interesting, and that in his
+lucid intervals he laid himself out to be amusing. In one respect only he
+had deteriorated. Jevons's strong language was no longer strong. It came,
+if it came at all, in brief spurts, never with the passionate rush, the
+gorgeous colour, the sustained crescendo of his first runnings. It was a
+thing of feeble _cliches_ that might have passed in any drawing-room.
+
+We didn't, then, talk about Viola. But I know that he heard from her and
+that I didn't.
+
+The first week of Jevons's fortnight was up when I got a wire from
+Canterbury. It said: "Reggie sailed yesterday. Trouble. Can you come
+Canterbury at once. Viola."
+
+Of course the word that stuck out of it was "Trouble." For the rest it
+was ambiguous. I couldn't tell, neither could Jevons, whether the trouble
+was connected somehow with Reggie's sailing, or whether in announcing his
+departure she meant to intimate that Jevons might now return to England;
+the coast was clear. Jevons, I may say, took this view of it and I did
+not. It was I and not Jevons who was asked to come at once. Jevons, for
+Viola's present purposes, was ignored.
+
+With his usual intelligence he saw my point. We made out that the message
+suggested trouble with Viola's family, and he agreed heartily that he was
+not precisely the person to deal with that.
+
+Oh yes, he trusted me. He gave me his word of honour that he would stay
+in Bruges until I either sent for him or came back to fetch him.
+
+Before I left I had a straight talk with him.
+
+I pointed out to him (what he said he knew as well as I did) that on the
+most lenient view of his case he had compromised Miss Thesiger very
+seriously. But, I said, he would have had to have compromised her more
+seriously still before her people would consent to her marrying him. He
+must see that, with what he had done, by stopping short of what he
+might have done, he had made himself, if anything, more unacceptable
+than he was to begin with. She might--she probably would in her present
+mood--insist on marrying him without their consent. On the other hand,
+she just mightn't. And it wasn't as if he could afford to marry her at
+once, while her present mood was on.
+
+He said, No. But in six months he could afford it. He gave himself six
+months.
+
+I said, Anything might happen in six months. Miss Thesiger's present mood
+(which, I put it to him, was very much made up of old Flemish glamour)
+might change. And if it did, it was just conceivable that she might marry
+_me_. He was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if he got the chance. _I_
+was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if _I_ got the chance. At the
+present most of the chances, I owned, were in his favour. But there was
+just the off-chance in mine.
+
+And that off-chance, I told him plainly, I meant to make the most of. I
+wouldn't be human if I didn't. I wasn't taking any unfair advantage of
+him, considering the tremendous innings he had had in Flanders, with the
+Flemish atmosphere to help him. If I could make any running in
+Canterbury, with the Canterbury atmosphere to help _me_ (he owned very
+handsomely that it would help me, that I'd be "in it" quite beautifully)
+why, I'd make it.
+
+Had he anything to say?
+
+He looked at me very straight, with just the least perceptible twinkle,
+and he said, "All right, old man, cut in, and take your chance. I'll risk
+it."
+
+I got to Canterbury in the early evening and went straight from my
+Fifteenth Century hotel to the Thesigers' house in the Close. I spotted
+it at once. It was all old red brick and grey stone like the Tudor houses
+in John's and Margaret's Quad.
+
+I asked for Miss Viola Thesiger and was shown into the Canon's library.
+To my great relief the Canon wasn't in his library. It looked out on to a
+perfect garden with a thick green lawn, and an old red-brick wall, very
+high, all round it, and tall elms topping the wall, and long beds of
+wallflowers and tulips blazing away underneath it. I said to myself, "If
+I want atmosphere I've got it. Bruges is nothing to the Thesigers' garden
+in Canterbury Close." I'd time to take it all in, for Viola kept me
+waiting.
+
+I was glad of the peace of the garden, for I'd taken in more atmosphere
+than I wanted already as I came through the house. You went upstairs to
+the Canon's library, and along a narrow black-oak corridor. And in
+passing I was aware of a peculiar quietness everywhere. It wasn't simply
+the quietness and laziness of the Cathedral Close. It was something in
+the house. I felt it as I crossed the threshold and the hall. It was the
+sum of slight but definite impressions: the sudden silence of voices
+that were talking somewhere when I came in; the shutting of a door that
+stood ajar; the withdrawal of footsteps approaching on the landing.
+
+It was as if there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank
+and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker
+called in to help them to bury their dead.
+
+The trouble was strictly confined to the Thesigers' house. From the
+tennis-lawns under the high walls of other gardens there came shouts of
+girls and of young men at play.
+
+Presently Viola came to me. She held her head if anything higher than
+usual, and the expression of her face was out of keeping with the trouble
+in the air. But as she came nearer I saw that this gay face was white,
+its tissue had a sort of sick smoothness, and there were dark smears
+under her eyes.
+
+The poor child had paid her tribute to the Trouble.
+
+She said, "It _is_ good of you to come. Did you mind awfully?"
+
+I said, of course I didn't. She smiled again, the little white, blank
+smile she had for me in those days, and I asked her what had happened.
+
+She said, "Everything's happened. It's been awful."
+
+Her smile took on significance--the whole wild irony of disaster. Then
+she said, "They know."
+
+"All of them? Your brother?"
+
+"No. Not Reggie. He got away in time. They won't tell him. They won't
+even tell Bertie. They'll never talk about it. But they know."
+
+I said, "Supposing they _do_ know--as long as other people don't--"
+
+"But, Wally, that's just it. Everybody does know."
+
+I couldn't take her quite seriously yet. I asked her: Was it the labels?
+and she said, No, she'd picked all the foreign ones off at Dover, and she
+got the Dover ones off in the cab coming home, and she'd had Heaven's own
+luck at the station, nobody'd seen her on the up platform, and her people
+thought she'd come from London. Of course they all asked her where she'd
+been, and she told them she wasn't going to let on just yet, that it
+wasn't good for them to know too much, and that if they behaved
+themselves they'd know some day. She meant to tell them as soon as ever
+Reggie'd gone. "Really and truly, Wally, I meant to tell them."
+
+"And do you know," she said, "they thought I was rotting them, that I'd
+been in some stuffy place in the country all the time."
+
+"Then how on earth," I said, "did they find out?"
+
+"They didn't. They never do find out things. They heard--last night.
+Somebody saw us."
+
+"Withers?" I said. I'd thought of Withers at once. But he didn't seem
+likely. He wasn't back yet.
+
+"No. Not Withers. Some women who knew my uncle, General Thesiger. They
+were in your hotel in Bruges, and they knew some other women staying in
+the _pension_. They saw my name in the visitors' book and it excited
+them. It all comes, you see, of my uncle being so beastly distinguished,
+so that they _had_ to say they knew him. And then of course the other
+people chipped in and told them all they knew about _me_. Can't you see
+them doing it?"
+
+I could indeed.
+
+"I never thought the _pension_ was a good scheme," she said; "but poor
+Jimmy _would_ make me go to it. He said it was safe. You see how safe it
+was."
+
+I wasn't quite clear yet as to where Jevons came in.
+
+"You say these people saw you. You mean they saw you and Jevons?"
+
+She smiled more than ever. "No, Wally. It was _you_ they saw."
+
+I don't know whether I was glad or sorry. I believe I was both. I was
+glad that Jevons--the ugly element--was disposed of. I was sorry--sorry,
+indeed, is hardly the word for what I felt--when I thought of the
+impression Viola's family had of me _now_; of the terms on which I should
+be received into it if I were received into it at all. I couldn't clear
+myself entirely, you see, without dragging in Jevons, and for Viola's
+sake Jevons had at any cost to be suppressed.
+
+"What on earth," I said, "must your people think of me?"
+
+She said surprisingly, "They think you a perfect dear."
+
+"What, for carrying you off to Belgium? That's what I seem to have done.
+I don't quite see how I'm to get out of it unless we can persuade them
+that we met by accident."
+
+"Oh," she said, "_I_ got you out of it all right."
+
+I asked her, "How?"
+
+She said, "I told them the truth. I said it wasn't you; it was Jimmy."
+
+"What did you do that for?"
+
+"Because it _was_ Jimmy I went off with. You're all right. They _know_
+it's Jimmy."
+
+I groaned. "That's precisely what I've been trying to prevent them
+knowing."
+
+"They know that, _too_. I told them that you came out to look for
+me--like a lamb, to save me--and that you made me come back. They
+think that was dear of you."
+
+She paused on it with a tenderness that touched me.
+
+"You see," she said, "I've saved you."
+
+I could only say, "My dear child--have you saved _yourself_?"
+
+She was visibly troubled.
+
+"I think--I _think_ they believe me. They say they do. But they don't
+understand. That's why I sent for you. I want you to make them see."
+
+"Make them see what?" I said. (It was clumsy of me.)
+
+"What it really was," she said.
+
+I asked her if they knew I was there. She said, Yes, they were coming in
+to see me.
+
+"They want to see you. They want to know."
+
+I saw then what my work was to be. I was not only to witness to her
+innocence and Jevons's--if they doubted it; I was to show them what she
+had shown me in the garden at Bruges, the beauty of the whole thing as it
+appeared to her. I was to show them Jevons's beauty.
+
+Well, I thought, it'll take some showing.
+
+"Do they," I asked her, "at all realize Jevons?"
+
+"Yes. They asked me if he was the man Reggie met at my rooms. Of course I
+had to say he was. It's almost a pity Reggie met him. That's what's
+frightened them. You see, he only saw the funny part of him."
+
+(I could imagine what Reggie's description of the funny part of Jevons
+had been.)
+
+I said she was asking me to do a rather difficult thing.
+
+She said, "Yes. And I've made it worse by telling them I'm going to marry
+Jimmy."
+
+"And I'm to persuade them that that's the best thing you can do, am I?"
+
+She said, Yes--if I could do that--
+
+I said I couldn't. I couldn't persuade myself. How could I, when I was
+convinced that the best thing she could do was to marry _me_?
+
+She said she'd forgotten that and that I could leave the marrying part of
+it to her. "It's about Bruges," she said, "that I want you to tell them."
+
+"I can't very well if they don't ask me," I expounded.
+
+"Oh, but," she said, "they _will_ ask you. At least Daddy will."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was at this point (when, I must say, we had thrashed it out pretty
+thoroughly) that Mrs. Thesiger came in. Viola left me to her.
+
+I noticed that, except for the moment of Viola's formal introduction of
+me, neither of them spoke to or looked at the other.
+
+I have said that Mrs. Thesiger was a charming woman. I may have said
+other things that imply she was not so charming; those things, if I
+really said them, I take back, now that I have come to my first meeting
+with her. When I recall that ten minutes--it didn't last longer--I cannot
+think of her as otherwise than perfect. It took perfection, of a sort, to
+deal creditably with the situation. Nothing could well have been more
+painful for Mrs. Thesiger. I, an utter stranger, was supposed to know all
+about her daughter, to know more than she or any of them knew. I held the
+secret of those dubious seven days in Belgium. That the days would be
+dubious I must have known when I set out to bring Viola back from
+Belgium. I must, the poor lady probably said to herself, have known
+Viola. And my knowledge of her, so dreadful and so intimate, was a thing
+she was afraid of; she didn't want to come too near it. But it was also a
+thing that must be exceedingly painful to me. She conceived that I would
+dread her approach every bit as much as she dreaded mine.
+
+And so--and so Mrs. Thesiger ignored my knowledge; she ignored the
+situation. Beautifully and consistently, from the beginning to the end of
+my stay in Canterbury, she ignored it.
+
+She had come in now to bring me her invitation, and her husband's
+invitation, to stay. Her husband, she said, expected me. He was out; he
+had had to go to a Diocesan Meeting--but it would be over by now, the
+tiresome meeting, and he would be here in a few minutes.
+
+I protested. I had taken rooms at my Fifteenth Century hotel.
+
+She insisted. They could make that all right. They knew the hotel-keeper.
+He was used to having people taken from him at the last minute. They
+would send round for my things. My room was waiting for me.
+
+I said, Really?--But they were too kind--
+
+She said, No. It was the least they could do.
+
+This, with its faint suggestion of indebtedness, was as near as she got
+to the situation.
+
+She must have sighted it in the distance, for she slanted away from it
+with a perilous and graceful sweep. She had heard so much about me from
+her daughter. She had wanted to make my acquaintance. She was glad of
+this opportunity--
+
+(We smiled at each other to show that there was nothing to wince at in
+her phrase.)
+
+I said I was glad of it too, and what a charming garden they had.
+
+Wasn't it? And did I know Canterbury? I wished I did. Well--I would know
+it now. And if I didn't mind ringing the bell the butler would fetch my
+things over from the "Tabard." And so on, charmingly, till the Canon came
+in and relieved her.
+
+She had done very well.
+
+He, dear, charming man, did the same thing, and did it even better.
+That's to say, he had a beautiful voice and he was happier in his
+phrases. He could ignore with the greater ease because he wouldn't have
+to keep it up so long.
+
+He kept it up till dinner-time. Only now and then his kind, keen look at
+me told me that he was going to have it out with me, and that he was
+measuring the man with whom he would have to do.
+
+But before dinner they had taken me to my room. They hoped I wouldn't
+mind having Bertie's room. The house was full; all the girls were at
+home, so they had had to give me Bertie's room.
+
+As I dressed in Bertie's room (the drawback of it was that it looked bang
+out on to the Cathedral Tower and was fairly raked by the chimes), with
+the Cathedral Tower before my eyes and the Cathedral chimes in my ears,
+and Canon Thesiger's beautiful voice and Mrs. Thesiger's beautiful face
+and the beautiful manners of both of them in my memory, it came over me
+with renewed conviction that Jevons was impossible; that Viola's people
+knew and felt he was impossible; that Viola knew and felt he was
+impossible herself; and that in the face of all this impossibility I had
+a chance. Bruges might back Jevons, but Canterbury would never back him;
+whereas it was quite evident that Canterbury was backing me.
+
+I was in the drawing-room ten minutes before dinner-time. They were
+all there: the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and their five unmarried
+daughters--Victoria, the eldest, Millicent, the High School teacher,
+Mildred, the nurse, Viola, the youngest but one, and Norah, the youngest.
+
+They were all there, the whole seven of them. And they were all silent
+until I appeared. As I went down the stairs and through the hall I
+noticed that the door was open and that no sounds came through it. I
+caught sight of Viola standing by the window with her back to her family;
+the others sat or stood in attitudes averted from her and from each
+other.
+
+When they heard me they all stirred and began talking. And as I came into
+the room I found the girls drawn together (even Viola had turned from her
+window).
+
+I see them now: Canon Thesiger standing on the hearthrug, looking
+handsome; and Mrs. Thesiger beside him, looking handsome, too, in grey
+silk and a little flushed. I hadn't realized in our first meeting _how_
+handsome they both were, and how brilliantly unlike. He was well-built,
+slender, aquiline, clean-cut and clean-shaven; he had thin, beautiful
+lips that he held in stiffly; he had dark eyes like his son Reggie's, and
+dark hair parted correctly in the middle, hair that waved. He had tried
+to depress and subdue it by hard brushing with a wet brush, but it
+continued to wave in spite of him, and the crests of the waves were
+silver, which accentuated them.
+
+Mrs. Thesiger was tall and at the same time plump. She was fair and
+blue-eyed and still delicately florid; she had perfect little features,
+with mutinous upward curves in the plumpness. I say mutinous, because
+Mrs. Thesiger's way of being handsome was in revolt against her
+husband's. Her light-brown hair waved, too, and to a discreet extent she
+encouraged its waving. This sounds as if Mrs. Thesiger's appearance was
+frivolous. But it was not. All these florid plumpnesses and the upward
+curves were held in tight, like Canon Thesiger's mouth. Their intentions
+were denied and frustrated, the original design was altered to harmonize
+with his. Herein you saw the superior restraint, the superior plasticity,
+the superior _art_ of Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+It was all very well for him to be correct when his features were formed
+that way, but this was the very triumph of correctness.
+
+And she was, if anything, braver than her husband. He could only just
+smile with his stiff lip; she could laugh over the business of presenting
+me to the four unmarried daughters whom (she emphasized it) I _didn't_
+know.
+
+And they--the four daughters--I'm not sure that they weren't the most
+gallant of this gallant family.
+
+I suppose that it was the violent dissimilarity in their parents' beauty
+that had produced the engaging irregularity of their features. Not one of
+those five little faces was correct. Victoria's had tried hard for
+correctness in her father's manner, but her mother's irrepressible
+plumpness had made her miss it, poor girl, just as (I was soon to learn)
+she had missed everything.
+
+Millicent's face, the face of the one who had been at Girton, hadn't
+tried for it; it had achieved a plainness I admired because it was oddly
+like Viola's face, only that Millicent was sallow and thin and dry and
+wore pince-nez.
+
+Mildred, the nurse, was frankly plump and fair and florid like her
+mother; her face would have been pretty if her father's nose hadn't
+stepped in and struggled with her mother's and so spoilt it for her.
+
+Norah, the youngest, was pretty--and odd. She was Viola all over again,
+but more slender and coloured differently, coloured all wrong. I didn't
+take to Norah all at once. I wasn't prepared for a Viola with blue eyes
+and pink cheeks and light hair, and the figure of a young foal. Besides,
+her hair was outrageous; it waved too much; it was all crinkles, and she
+hadn't found out yet how to keep it tidy.
+
+She told me afterwards it was "up" that evening for the first time. When
+it came to her turn, she said: "There are such a dreadful lot of us,
+aren't there?"
+
+There certainly was. And as I looked at them I thought: Viola has done an
+irreparable injury to her family, to all these charming people. She has
+hurt her father and mother in their beauty and their dignity and their
+honour. As for her sisters, she has ruined what they are much too
+well-bred to call their "chances." The story of the going off to Belgium
+with Jevons is spreading through the Close, and through the High School
+where Millicent teaches, and through the garrison. They will try to hush
+it up, but they won't be able to; it will reach Chatham and Dover. If
+they go up to town it will follow them there. Wherever they go it will
+ultimately follow them. She has struck at the solidarity of the family.
+To be sure, it was the solidarity of the family that drove her to strike
+at it. But if you were to tell Canon and Mrs. Thesiger that they had
+driven her, that they had tied her up too tight, they wouldn't see it.
+They would say: "We never stopped her going off to London. But that
+wasn't enough for her. She must go off to Belgium with that man Jevons.
+She must ruin us."
+
+And Viola knew that she had ruined them.
+
+And there they were, all holding themselves well, and all well
+dressed--the two youngest in white, the elders in light colours on a
+scale that deepened to Victoria's old rose. I remember them, even to what
+they wore and the pathos of their wearing it; they stood out so against
+the black panelling of the old room. It was full of oak chests and
+bureaus and Chinese cabinets, and Madonnas in Italian frames, and red and
+white ivory chessmen, and little bookcases with books in white vellum
+with scarlet title-pieces, and family portraits, and saints in triptychs
+on golden backgrounds, and murderous assegais and the skins and horns of
+animals. And the leaves of the old elms stuffed up the low, mullioned
+windows looking on the garden.
+
+And somehow you were aware of great streams of empire and of race,
+streams of august tradition; of sanctity and heroism and honour, and
+beautiful looks and gentle ways and breeding, all meeting there.
+
+I looked at the Thesigers and I looked at all these things, and I thought
+again of Jevons--of Jevons as absolutely impossible. You may say it was
+pure snobbishness to think of him in that way, and I daresay it was; but
+there wasn't any other way.
+
+It wasn't their tradition, you see, that appealed to me so much as their
+behaviour. I don't think I ever met people who knew so well how to
+behave.
+
+They kept it up. All evening they behaved like people under some heavy
+calamity which they ignored for the comfort of their guest and for their
+own dignity. And yet, even if I hadn't known of their calamity, I must
+have felt it in the air. They knew that I knew it; but that was all the
+more reason why they should ignore it; they wanted to remove from me the
+oppression of my knowledge.
+
+During dinner, perhaps, you felt the tension of the catastrophe; any
+guest who knew as much as I did was bound to be aware of it. It was in
+little sudden, momentary silences, in the hushed voices and half-scared
+movements of the butler and the parlourmaid, in the stiffness of the
+Canon's lip, and in some shade of the elder girls' manner to Viola.
+
+I remember how, in one of those silences, Norah, who sat facing me,
+leaned forward and addressed me. She said, "Mr. Furnival, you've come
+from Belgium, haven't you? Do tell me about it! I can't get a word out of
+Viola."
+
+I supposed they hadn't told Norah. They had spared the youngest. She was
+only seventeen.
+
+The butler and the parlourmaid, standing rigid by the sideboard, looked
+at each other in their fright. Mrs. Thesiger saw them and flushed. But
+Canon Thesiger, who had his back to them, observed that Belgium was a
+large order, and that Mr. Furnival would have to tell her about it
+afterwards.
+
+But there was never any afterwards for Norah. She said, "I believe
+there's a joke about Belgium, and that Mr. Furnival's in it."
+
+Viola laughed. It was, on the whole, the best thing she could do. If I'd
+giggled, too, it might have helped, but I didn't dare to, sitting there
+beside Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+The Canon pushed a dish of chocolates in front of his youngest daughter
+to keep her quiet, and then plunged like a hero into the tendencies of
+modern music, which he deplored. He asked my opinion of Richard Strauss,
+a composer of whom he was profoundly ignorant. Scarlatti and Corelli
+tided us over dessert, and Purcell floated us tenderly into the
+drawing-room and coffee. After coffee the Canon took me into the library
+(he said) for a smoke.
+
+I could see by the fuss he made about his cigarettes that he was nervous,
+staving off the moment.
+
+It came with the silence of the first cigarette. There were no
+transitions. He simply settled himself a little deeper into his chair and
+said, "I'm a little anxious about that girl of mine."
+
+I said, "_Are_ you, sir?" as if I were surprised.
+
+"Well"--he was evidently trying to steer between his decision to ignore
+and his desire for knowledge--"you see, she's rather reckless and
+impulsive."
+
+I agreed. She was--a little.
+
+"More than a little, I'm afraid. Do you know anything of this man Jevons
+she talks about?"
+
+That was masterly of the Canon, the subtle suggestion that Viola did no
+more than talk about Jevons, the still more subtle implication that if
+she _could_ talk about him all was well.
+
+I said that Jevons was a very decent fellow, and added that Captain
+Thesiger had met him.
+
+It was mean of me to shovel the responsibility on to Reggie, but I wanted
+to gain time, too.
+
+The Canon remembered that Reggie had said something. And then suddenly he
+discarded subtlety and told me straight out that Reggie had said Jevons
+was a bit of a bounder, and he supposed he was.
+
+I could see him watching me, trying to break down my defences.
+
+I dodged him with "These things are comparative," and he floored me with
+a sudden thrust:
+
+"No, my dear boy, they are _not_."
+
+He meditated. "What sort of age is he?"
+
+I told him, "About thirty-one or two."
+
+"Ah!"
+
+And then: Did I know anything about the young man's morals?
+
+I assured him I had never heard a word against them.
+
+He looked at me keenly and I remembered the words of Withers which I
+_had_ heard. Still, I knew nothing against Jevons's morals, and I said
+they were all right for all I knew.
+
+"Never mind what you _know_," he answered. "What do you think?"
+
+I said I thought that Jevons had as clean a record as any man I knew.
+
+"You mean," he said, "these things are comparative?"
+
+I said I meant I only wished my morals were as clean. (I went as far as
+that for Viola--to save her. Besides, there was Jevons to be thought of.
+I was there to take a fair advantage of him, not an unfair one.)
+
+He took another look at me that seemed to satisfy him, for he said:
+"Thank you. That's all I want to know."
+
+We smoked in silence. Presently we went into the drawing-room "for a
+little music." Victoria played. The Canon and Mildred and Norah sang.
+Millicent went upstairs to prepare a lecture.
+
+When the music was over Viola and Mildred and Norah and I went into the
+garden, and very soon Mildred and Norah drifted back into the house again
+and left me with Viola.
+
+She began at once, "Well--did you make him understand?"
+
+I said I hadn't had much opportunity.
+
+Did he ask me about Bruges? No, but he had asked me about Jevons. I told
+her more or less how I had answered, and she said it was dear of me.
+
+"But it's no use telling them anything about _me_, Wally."
+
+I asked her, Had they said much?
+
+She said, "No. It's what they think. Or rather, what they don't think.
+They'll never think the same of me again. And they'll never trust me."
+
+I said, Come, it wasn't so bad as all that.
+
+But she stuck to it.
+
+"There!" she said. "Didn't I tell you?"
+
+Mrs. Thesiger from the drawing-room window was calling to us to come in.
+The grass was damp.
+
+"They won't trust me even with you."
+
+I thought: "Poor little Viola--she's burned her boats with a vengeance."
+
+Presently it was Bertie's room again, and moonlight, and the Cathedral
+chimes. They kept me awake all night.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Of course I hadn't made them understand. How could I? The peculiar
+awfulness of their calamity was that they knew so little about it. They
+didn't know, after all, what had happened at Bruges; they didn't know
+what lengths Viola had gone to. And though they evidently thought that I
+knew, that wasn't any good to them. They couldn't ask me what had
+happened at Bruges. They couldn't cross-question me about Viola's
+"lengths." I couldn't tell them that, according to my lights, nothing
+_had_ happened, that Viola's lengths were not likely to be very long.
+Besides, even if I had come with the proofs of her innocence in my
+hands, and removed their private sorrow, that wouldn't have repaired
+their public wrong. Nobody was going to believe in Viola's innocence.
+Appearances were dead against her.
+
+It was awful for them every way they looked at it; awful if she married
+Jevons just because she had to; awful even if she hadn't to, so long as
+people thought she had; awful if she married him for any reason; more
+awful if she didn't marry him at all. And supposing she married him. They
+might go on ignoring for ever and ever, but who else would, with that
+marriage staring them in the face and perpetuating the disgraceful
+memory?
+
+It struck me that Viola herself must see that there was only one way in
+which I could make them understand, only one thing that I could do for
+her, and that I had come to do it.
+
+The next morning I asked Canon Thesiger if he could give me half an hour.
+He gave it with a sort of sad alacrity. I didn't anticipate the smallest
+difficulty with him or with any of Viola's family. They seemed to be
+looking to me pathetically to save them. I had every reason to know that
+my one chance was good, and that poor Jevons, with all his chances,
+wasn't anywhere. In fact, I found in that half-hour with the Canon that
+my very fairness to Jevons had worked against him to abase him, while it
+raised me several points in the Canon's estimation. He had seen what I
+had been driving at. The cleaner I made out Jevons's record to be, the
+better I succeeded in shielding Viola. He expressed in the most moving
+terms his admiration of my moral beauty.
+
+And yet (I suppose I must have overdone it) it was my moral beauty that
+dished me with the Canon. I had reckoned, you see, without his, without
+Mrs. Thesiger's.
+
+I told him straight out that if he and Mrs. Thesiger would allow me, I
+meant to ask Viola to marry me. His lip stiffened.
+
+I said I hoped it wouldn't be a violent shock to them--they must have had
+some idea of what I had come for.
+
+He said, Yes. They had been afraid I had come for that.
+
+And then--oh, it was a terrible half-hour!
+
+They had been afraid, and they had talked it over. He didn't tell me all
+they'd said, but I could imagine most of it: how they had seen that my
+marrying Viola was the one way out for them, the one way out for her, and
+how it had occurred to them that perhaps I didn't know what I was doing,
+and how they had decided--dear, simple, honourable people--that it would
+be very wrong to deceive me, and that in any case they had no right to
+accept so great a sacrifice, even if it _was_ the one way out. I daresay
+they said to each other that they couldn't put such a burden on an
+innocent young man; it was their child's doing and they must bear the
+whole ghastly ruin and shame of it themselves. They even went further.
+What Jevons had done to Viola (they'd made up their minds about him) was
+devil's work. What Viola had done to them was in some way the
+expression--the very singular and unintelligible and bizarre
+expression--of God's will. It was the cross they had to bear. God, I
+suppose, knew the kind of cross that would hurt them most.
+
+A great deal of this he did say to me. He said it very simply, without
+phrases.
+
+Nothing, he said, would have pleased them better than that I should marry
+Viola. But--he didn't think that he could let me do it. If I had only
+come to him three weeks ago--
+
+He hadn't been able--naturally--to talk about it last night. He had hoped
+he wouldn't have to say anything about it at all, but I had forced him.
+
+It couldn't have been worse if I'd seen him about to put a knife into his
+breast. I tried to stop him, but he would do it, he _would_ put the knife
+in.
+
+"We don't know," he said, "what may have occurred at Bruges."
+
+"Nothing occurred," I said, "nothing that you need mind."
+
+He said, "That's what the child tells me."
+
+And I, "Surely, sir, you believe her word?"
+
+Of course--of course he believed her word. Viola, he said, might keep the
+truth from them if (he smiled in spite of himself) if she thought it
+would not be good for them to know it. But she had never told them an
+untruth. Never. She was--essentially--truthful.
+
+"Only," he said, "we don't know what she may have been driven to. She may
+have been trying to shield that man Jevons."
+
+I said I was convinced that, technically, Jevons was innocent. It looked
+as if he had been criminally reckless and inconsiderate; but he seemed to
+have honestly thought that there was no harm in Viola's joining him in
+Bruges.
+
+But the Canon didn't want to know what Jevons had thought, honestly or
+otherwise. Or what Viola had thought. "It's what they've done," he said.
+"You can't get over it."
+
+I said what they'd done didn't amount to more than, looking at the
+Belfry. I could very easily get over that.
+
+He said that I was an Israelite indeed. But the world wasn't all
+Belfries, and we must look at it like men of the world.
+
+"They travelled together, Furnival. They travelled together."
+
+I said, "Yes. And it wasn't till they'd got to Bruges the second time
+that Jevons realized that they never ought to. As soon as he did realize
+it, he cleared out."
+
+He did that too late, the Canon insisted. It was no good my trying to
+shield Jevons. It wasn't easy to believe that Jevons was as innocent as
+Viola, and, as nobody was going to believe it, the injury the brute had
+done her was irreparable.
+
+"Not," I said, "if she marries me."
+
+He said, "My dear boy, supposing--supposing it isn't all as innocent as
+you think? You can't marry her."
+
+I said that made no difference. It was all the more reason.
+
+All the more reason, he insisted, for her marrying Jevons.
+
+That, he said, was what they'd have to go into.
+
+But there I took a high stand. I said it was for me to go into it, and if
+I didn't, why should they? If I believed in Viola, surely they might? If
+I knew that she could do nothing and feel nothing that was not beautiful,
+wasn't my knowledge good enough for them? I said, "I shall go to her at
+once and ask her to marry me."
+
+He got up and laid his hand on my arm. "No," he said. "Not at once. Wait.
+Far better wait."
+
+I asked him, "How long?"
+
+He said, "Till she's had time to get over him."
+
+Mrs. Thesiger (I had half an hour with her, too) said the same thing.
+"Wait," she said, "at any rate, another week."
+
+She had given her, as Jevons would have said, a week.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I waited.
+
+I stayed with the Thesigers a week. In fact, I stayed ten days. I got
+used to the chimes and slept through them. I played chess with Mrs.
+Thesiger; I played golf and tennis with the girls and the young
+subalterns of the garrison; I played violent hockey with Mildred and
+Norah; I walked with Viola and Victoria; I tried to talk to Millicent
+(Millicent, I must own, was a bit beyond me); I played tennis again
+(singles) against Norah, who was bent on beating me. We all went for
+picnics with the subalterns into Romney Marshes and visited Winchelsea
+and Rye. And in between I was taken by Canon and Mrs. Thesiger to lunch
+or dinner or tea in the other Canons' houses, and was introduced to the
+Dean and the Archbishop. I attended the Cathedral services to an extent
+that provoked Viola to denounce me as a humbug.
+
+I told her I did it in order to look at the finest spectacle of defiance
+I had ever seen--the Canon in his stall in the chancel singing the solo
+in the anthem with his beautiful voice, in the very teeth of disaster, as
+if nothing had happened.
+
+She said, "Daddy is beautiful, isn't he? He had a sore throat for a
+fortnight after Aunt Vicky died. And he thinks this is far worse, but he
+won't go back on me. So he sings."
+
+I was sitting with her in the garden on the Sunday evening. I said to
+her, "Viola, you were caught with the beauty of Bruges. Why can't you see
+the beauty of all this?"
+
+She looked at me with her great dark eyes (they were very young and
+brilliant), and she answered, "Dear Walter, I've been seeing the beauty
+of it all my life."
+
+I was seeing it for the first time.
+
+I made the most of it, of the Canterbury atmosphere. I sank into it and
+felt it sinking into me. I was, as Jevons had said I should be, "in it."
+
+And, as I made my running, I thought with some remorse of that
+unfortunate one, languishing in Bruges on his parole. But Canterbury
+would have been no use to Jevons if he had been there.
+
+There's no doubt that I did something for the Thesigers in those ten
+days. I had effaced Jevons's legend. I had even effaced my own legend
+(for the scandal, if you remember, had begun with me). And the Thesigers
+were tackling their catastrophe with dignity and courage and, I think,
+considerable success. By having me there, by being charming to me, by
+presenting me openly and honourably to all their friends, they gave
+slander the most effective answer. People asked each other: Was it likely
+that the Thesigers would receive young Furnival with open arms if young
+Furnival had been the man they'd heard about?
+
+At the end of my week the whole seven of them were almost merry. (I may
+say Norah, the youngest, had been merry all the time.) My visit lapped
+over into another week.
+
+At the end of ten days my relations with Canon and Mrs. Thesiger became
+so intimate that we could discuss the situation. They could even smile
+when I reminded them that there was one good thing about it--Canterbury
+didn't, and _couldn't_, realize Jevons.
+
+They hoped devoutly that it never would.
+
+And they thought it wouldn't. By this time, poor darlings, they believed
+that I had saved them; that Jevons was an illness and that Viola had got
+over him; that I had cured Viola of Jevons.
+
+I believed it myself. She had avoided me most of the time; she had left
+me to her sisters, particularly the youngest, Norah. And when I was alone
+with her she was silent and embarrassed. I thought: "She is beginning to
+be afraid of me. And that is an excellent sign."
+
+The night before I left Canterbury I asked her, for the third time, to
+marry me.
+
+She said, "I know why you're asking me, and it's dear of you. But it's no
+good. It can't be done. Not even that way."
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+
+The next day I went back to Bruges to release Jevons from his parole.
+
+I found him sitting tight in his hotel in the Market-Place, waiting my
+return with composure.
+
+He had recovered in my absence and had been making the best of his
+internment. He had written a series of articles on "The Old Cities of
+Flanders." He worked them up afterwards into that little masterpiece of
+his, "My Flemish Journal," which gave him his European celebrity (it must
+have made delightful reading for the Thesigers). There was no delay, no
+reverse, no calamity that Jevons couldn't turn into use and profit as it
+came. Yes, I know, and into charm and beauty. Viola Thesiger lives in his
+"Flemish Journal" with an enduring beauty and charm.
+
+I said I was sorry for keeping him shut up in Bruges so long. He said it
+didn't matter a bit. He had been very busy.
+
+I thought it was his articles and his book (he had been dreaming of it)
+that had made Jevons so happy. But I was mistaken.
+
+We spent half the night in talking, sitting up in my big room on the
+first floor for the sake of space and air.
+
+Jevons went straight to the point by asking me how I had got on at
+Canterbury.
+
+I felt that I owed him a perfect frankness in return for the liberties I
+had taken with him, so I told him how I had got on.
+
+He said, "I'm not going to pretend to be astonished. But you can't say I
+didn't play fair. I gave you your innings, didn't I?"
+
+I said I'd had them, anyhow. We'd leave it at that.
+
+He said, No. We couldn't leave it at that. He'd _given_ me my innings. He
+could have stopped my having them any minute, but he'd made up his mind I
+should have them. So that nobody should say afterwards he hadn't played
+fair.
+
+I remember perfectly everything that Jevons said to me that night. I am
+putting it all down so that it may be clear that what the Thesigers
+called the beauty of my behaviour was nothing to the beauty of his. Think
+of him, shut up there in his hotel in Bruges, giving me my innings, when
+he could have struck in and won the game without waiting those horrible
+ten days.
+
+Well, I suppose he knew that he had it in his hands all the time.
+
+"You see," he went on, "I knew you'd got one chance, and I meant you to
+have it. I meant you to make the most of it. There are things, Furnival,
+I haven't got the hang of--yet--little, little things like breeding and
+good looks, where you might get the pull of me still if you had a free
+hand.
+
+"Well, I gave you a free hand.
+
+"You needn't thank me. I wasn't thinking of you so much. I was thinking
+of Viola. I wanted to be perfectly fair to _her_. If there _was_ a chance
+of her liking you better than she liked me, and being happier with you, I
+wanted her to have her chance. I wanted, you see, to be rather more than
+fair. If I was going to win this game I was going to win it hands over,
+not just to sneak in on a doubtful point. I wanted Viola to know what she
+was doing. I wanted her to see exactly what she was giving up if she
+married me--to go home and see it all over again in case she had
+forgotten.
+
+"And of course I was thinking of myself too. I'm an egoist. For my own
+sake I wanted her to be quite sure she hadn't any sort of hankering after
+you."
+
+I said if it was any comfort to him he could be. Viola hadn't any
+hankering after me at all. This--if he cared to know it--was the third
+time that I had proposed to her and been turned down.
+
+He said he _did_ care to know it, very much. It was most important.
+
+"I," he said, "have never proposed to her at all.
+
+"That," he went on, "is just the one risk I wouldn't take.
+
+"And there," he explained, "is where I've scored. I knew that Viola is
+obstinate, and that if she starts by turning you down she'll keep it up
+out of sheer cussedness.
+
+"So I never let her start. Women," he generalized, "admire success. If I
+were to give you your innings all over again, Furnival--and I will if you
+like--you couldn't make anything of them with those three howlers to your
+account. There isn't any record of failure against _me_. Good God! D'you
+suppose _I_'d be such a damn fool as to muff it three times with the same
+woman? Not me!"
+
+I said he needn't rub it in.
+
+He said he was rubbing it in for my good, so that I shouldn't go and do
+the same thing next time.
+
+"Because--_now_ we're coming to the point--there will be a next time for
+you, Furnival. That's why I don't even pretend to be sorry for you.
+There'll be other women. But there aren't any next times for me, and
+there aren't any other women. This--I mean _she_--was my one chance. It
+was pretty jumpy work, I can tell you, sitting tight and gambling with it
+for ten blasted days. Any other man would have gone clean off his chump
+with worrying over it. There've been times when I've felt like it myself.
+It was infernal--when you think what I stood to lose."
+
+I said that was all rot. It was his beastly egoism. He didn't stand to
+lose more than I did.
+
+He said it wasn't a question of more or less. And it wasn't his egoism.
+It was his sweetness and his heart-rending humility. He'd stood to lose
+everything. He'd be done for if Viola wouldn't have him. He couldn't look
+at any other woman after her. And he put it to me: What other woman would
+look at him? Whereas my resources were practically inexhaustible. Almost
+any nice woman would know that I would give her what she wanted. And
+almost any nice woman would give me what I wanted, too. When I insisted
+that I didn't see it, he said I'd see it shortly. He gave me six months.
+
+Viola, he declared, would never have given me what I wanted. I could
+never give her what she wanted. And he could.
+
+He said he admitted that it was odd that he should be able to succeed
+where I failed; but so it was, and he went on to expound to me all the
+reasons for my failure.
+
+"To begin with, you're not her sort; or, rather, you're too much her
+sort. You with your integrity are one of the beautiful works of God, and
+she's been used to that sort of beauty all her life and she's tired of
+it. But she isn't used to me. She never will be. She's never seen
+anything in the least like me before, and she never will see anything
+quite like me again as long as she lives. I'm the queer, unexpected thing
+she wants and always will want.
+
+"But let that pass.
+
+"You couldn't get her because you didn't give your mind to it. You didn't
+know how to get her and you didn't try to find out. You set about it the
+wrong way. I told you ages ago that a man's a fool if he wants a thing
+and doesn't find out how to get it. You should have begun by trying to
+find out something about _her_. But you didn't try. With all your
+opportunities you haven't found out anything. You don't know the least
+thing about her. You don't know what she wants, you don't know what she's
+thinking, or what she's feeling, or what she'll do--how she'll behave if
+you propose to her three times running. She's told you things and you
+haven't understood them or tried to understand. Because the whole blessed
+time you were thinking about yourself, or what she was thinking about
+you, or was going to think. Whereas I haven't been thinking about
+anything but her--I've been studying her straight on end for ten months
+and I've found out a little bit about her. At any rate, I jolly well know
+what she wants and I jolly well know how to give it her.
+
+"You see, I was determined to get her, and I left no stone unturned. I
+took trouble."
+
+I suggested that _I_'d taken trouble enough in all conscience. He
+laughed.
+
+"_You_ only took trouble to get her away, old man, when she wanted to be
+here with me. What do you suppose I brought her here for? Would _you_
+have ever thought of letting her come with you? Of giving her what she
+wanted to that extent? Not you! You'd only have thought of shutting her
+up and protecting her for your own wretched sake--which was the last
+thing she wanted. She'd had about enough of that."
+
+I replied that certainly I should have thought of protecting a young girl
+before everything else; that it never would have occurred to me to
+compromise her in order to marry her--even if I did find I couldn't marry
+her in any other way.
+
+I had hit him there. He was quiet for a little while after it. I didn't
+look at him--I didn't want to look at him--but I could feel him there,
+breathing hard from the shock of it, with his mouth a little open.
+
+Presently he took the thing up again. He went on, placably, quietly
+explaining. "I thought of protecting her too. Only I wasn't such an idiot
+as to think of it before everything else."
+
+"No. You were clever enough to think of it afterwards--when you'd got
+what you wanted. When you had compromised her."
+
+"I suppose you mean there was only one thing I wanted? There, Furnival,
+you lie."
+
+I said I only meant that she _was_ compromised. At any rate, that was
+what it looked like to her people and to everybody to whom it mattered.
+
+"If you will persist in taking the ugliest view of it, of course it'll
+look like that. I can't help how it looks to a set of old ladies and
+clergymen in Canterbury. Come to that, it matters a damned sight more to
+_me_ than it can to any of you people."
+
+I said he wouldn't say so if he knew how he had made them suffer.
+
+He laughed out at that.
+
+"Suffer? They haven't suffered a quarter as much as I have. Not a
+hundredth part as much. They've suffered thinking of themselves--of their
+precious respectability. I've suffered thinking of _her_.
+
+"Suffer? I've been through all _that_. It wasn't right, Furnival, it
+wasn't right for anybody to have to go through what I did. But I've come
+out of it. You've been pretty hard on me with your infernal virtue; but
+if you think you can make me suffer more, you can't. I'm past it."
+
+I said I was sorry if I seemed too hard on him. But it would be well if
+he tried to look at his really very outrageous behaviour as it was bound
+to appear to other people.
+
+"You admit, then," he said, "that it appears more outrageous than it is?"
+
+I said, "You see, my dear fellow, I don't yet know what it is."
+
+He asked me if I'd like to know what it was? And I told him that,
+certainly, some sort of an account was owing and that he'd better perhaps
+make a clean breast of it while he was about it.
+
+Well--he made his clean breast.
+
+He confessed that the sting of a great deal that I had said to him was in
+its truth. I needn't be frightened. Nothing had happened. Nothing beyond
+what I knew. But--there was a point, he said, when everything might have.
+When he had meant that it should happen.
+
+He hadn't meant it at first. Nothing had been further from him when he
+let her come to Bruges. He had meant nothing--nothing beyond looking at
+the Belfry. He had thought--as she did--that it would be quite possible
+to be content with looking at the Belfry. That was where the damned folly
+of the thing had come in. They began to be aware of the folly when they
+found themselves going together to Antwerp. He wasn't aware even then of
+what he meant. But he knew what he meant when he left Antwerp and took
+her to Ghent.
+
+Because he _did_ take her there. He meant--_then_--exactly what Viola's
+father and her brother and her uncles and her male cousins would mean if
+they took a woman to Ghent.
+
+"I meant," he said, "to compromise her. But--here's where you went
+wrong--I didn't mean to compromise her in order to marry her. I didn't
+mean to marry her at all. There was a moment when I thought that marrying
+me--tying herself up to me for ever--was a risk I ought not to let her
+take. I thought--I thought I could make her happy without all that awful
+risk. It seemed to me that after the risk we _had_ taken we had a right
+to happiness. Certainly _she_ had. And I thought she thought the same.
+
+"So I took her to Ghent.
+
+"I say I thought she knew what I meant when I took her.
+
+"I ought to tell you that we _did_ have rooms in the same hotel in
+Antwerp and Ghent. There weren't any English there that mattered--nobody
+that either of us knew.
+
+"But when I'd got her to Ghent I couldn't--I don't know how it was--but
+it came over me that I couldn't--I hadn't the courage. I think I found
+out that she was afraid or something. We'd taken rooms in that hotel
+you were in in the _Place d'Armes_. We were sitting together in the
+lounge--you know that big lounge on the first floor with the glass
+partition in it along the staircase--you can see people through it going
+up and down stairs. She'd got up suddenly and stuck out her hand and said
+good night. And there was a look in her eyes--Fright, a sort of fright.
+
+"I saw her through the glass going up the stair. When she got to the
+landing I saw her turn her head over her shoulder and look down into the
+lounge, to make sure I was still there.
+
+"She looked so helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I
+couldn't.
+
+"No.
+
+"I took her back to Bruges the next morning and put her in the _pension_
+with those women."
+
+I thought of the irony of it.
+
+If Jevons had really been the blackguard he seemed we could have hushed
+it up. If he hadn't repented, if he hadn't taken her back to Bruges and
+put her in the _pension_ with those women, ten to one Withers wouldn't
+have seen them and General Thesiger's friends wouldn't have heard of
+them. I should have got her quietly away from Ghent without Canterbury
+being a bit the wiser.
+
+But I didn't tell Jevons that. I hadn't the heart to.
+
+We stayed three days longer in Bruges. There were still some odd corners
+of the city that he hadn't had time to look up.
+
+Jevons was very kind to me all those three days.
+
+After we got back to England Jevons's affairs picked up and went forward
+with a rush. His novel came out at the end of May. In June he was made
+sub-editor of _Sport_, and thus acquired a settled income. And one
+morning in July I got a letter from Viola written at Quimpol in Brittany:
+
+"MY DEAR WALTER:
+
+"I married Jimmy five days ago. Nobody but Norah knew anything about it
+till it was all over. But I wrote and told Daddy before we left England.
+I'm afraid he's had a sore throat ever since. I wish you'd go down to
+Canterbury and tell them that it's all right and that I'm ever so happy.
+There really isn't any reason why Daddy shouldn't sing.
+
+"As Norah says: 'It's his not singing that gives the show away.' Yours
+ever,
+
+"V. J."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK II
+
+HER BOOK
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+
+I did not go down to Canterbury all at once. I was vowed, of course, to
+Mrs. Jevons's everlasting service (I think I've succeeded in making
+_that_ clear), but I could not--under the whacking blow of her marriage I
+could _not_ do as she asked me then and there. The reminiscences of
+Canterbury were poignant. I had to have a little time to recover in. And
+in those first terrible weeks I didn't see why Jevons should have all the
+amusement and I all the hard work and the suffering. I knew that Jevons
+had suffered, too--quite horribly--but his anguish, after all, was a
+thing of the past; while mine, in full career, devastated the present and
+the future. I had done my best for them, and I could not share Viola's
+view that it was my business to go on whitewashing Jevons for ever. There
+was a limit, at any rate, to the number of coats I could contract to put
+on him.
+
+So I waited. I waited till they came back from their half honeymoon in
+Brittany (a fortnight was all the editor of _Sport_ could spare to his
+subordinate). Then at her invitation I went up to Hampstead to see them.
+
+They had found an old four-roomed cottage that had once been a
+labourer's. It was whitewashed (Viola was fond of whitewash), and all the
+wood-work was painted green, and there was a strip of green garden in
+front with a green paling round it.
+
+A furniture van that you could have packed the house in stood in the
+Grove outside it, and big, burly men in white aprons were taking
+furniture out of the van and dumping it down in the garden. Some of it
+wouldn't go in at the gate and had to be lifted over the palings.
+
+Jevons in an old Norfolk suit and with his hair rumpled was standing on a
+ten-foot plot of grass contemplating a bed-tester and four bed-posts that
+leaned up against the palings in the embrace of a bedstead turned upon
+its side, and Viola in the upper window was contemplating Jevons.
+
+He called to her, "Have you measured?" And she answered, "Yes. He says it
+can't be done. Oh, there's Furny!"
+
+Jevons turned to me with a smile addressed to the bed-tester rather than
+to me. Viola came down to us followed by a tall stout carpenter, visibly
+her slave.
+
+The carpenter was saying: "That there room is out by a good four
+inches--by a good four inches 'tis. An' the way you've got to look at
+it is this, m'm. Not as this 'ere tester is too 'igh fer that ceilin',
+but how as that there ceilin' is too low fer this tester."
+
+"Quite so," said Jevons. "And in that case you've got to raise the
+ceiling four inches."
+
+"No, sir," said the carpenter (he spoke severely to Jevons). "You 'ave
+_not_. If I take you off a two inch from each leg of that there bedstead,
+and a two inch from each of them there postsis, it'll be the same as if
+the builder 'e raised you the ceilin' a four inch."
+
+"By Jove," said Jevons. "So it will."
+
+"Ay, and it'll corst you somethin' like four shillin', instead of p'raps
+a matter of forty pound. W'en it comes to tamperin' with ceilin's, you
+never know where you are."
+
+"I don't know where I am now," said Jevons, "but it might be better to
+leave the ceiling alone. They haven't started tampering, have they?"
+
+"No, sir. They have not."
+
+Viola ordered the carpenter to go into the study again and measure for
+those bookshelves. He was her slave and he went.
+
+"Jimmy's been going on like that all day," she said. "He's taken up hours
+of that man's time. We shall never get him out of the house."
+
+"I don't want to get him out of the house," said Jevons. "I'm awfully
+happy with him."
+
+He was happy (like a child) with everything, with his house and his
+garden and his furniture, his oak chests and the dresser and the bureau,
+above all he was happy with his bed-tester. He said be had never slept
+under a bed-tester in his life, and he was dying to know what it would be
+like--to lie there with hundreds of dear little, shy little chintz
+rosebuds squinting down at you.
+
+"You'll not lay under them rosebuds, not for a twenty-four hour--"
+
+The carpenter had come back to us. He treated Jevons exactly like a
+child.
+
+"That tester can't be set up to-night. Not unless, as I say, you squeeges
+of it jam tight between the ceilin' and the floor. An' _then_ you'll 'ave
+to prise the ceilin' up every time you moves of it, else you'll start
+them postsis all a twistin' and a rockin', an' 'ow'll you feel then?"
+
+Jevons said he felt frightened to death as it was, and the carpenter
+could have it his own way provided he didn't hurt the little rosebuds or
+frighten _them_; and the carpenter sighed and said that the study was ten
+by thirteen and would take a hundred and sixteen feet of bookshelves.
+
+"Let's go and look at the study," said Viola. And we went and looked at
+it. And the carpenter came up and looked at _us_. And the foreman and the
+other men came in with furniture and things out of the garden, and _they_
+looked at us. There wasn't one really large and heavy piece of furniture
+except the four-post bed and the tester, and they treated the whole thing
+as a joke, as a funny game they were helping two small children to play
+at. And when Viola and Jevons ought to have been telling the men what
+things were to go into which room and where, they ran back into the
+garden to see what flowers they would plant in it and where.
+
+Then they took me to look all over the house. It was an absurd house. Of
+its four rooms there was one in front that served as a dining-room and a
+drawing-room and a boudoir for Viola, and there was a kitchen at the
+back, and a bedroom over the front room, and Jevons's study was over the
+kitchen. Viola said there were six rooms if you counted the pantry and
+the bathroom, and they were going to put a settee in Jimmy's study that
+would turn into a bed when anybody came to stay. And Mrs. Pavitt knew
+a nice woman who would come in and scrub for them, and sleep in the
+kitchen when they weren't there.
+
+They showed me the little bits of furniture they'd got. Jevons had a
+passion for beautiful old things, for old rosewood bureaus and chests of
+drawers with brass handles. She pointed out the brass handles.
+
+I felt that the poor child was showing me her absurd house and telling me
+all these things because there wasn't and there hadn't been, and perhaps
+there never would be anybody else to tell them to. I thought of the
+mother and the four sisters down at Canterbury and of the other two who
+were married, who had been married so differently. There was something
+queer, something wrong about it all. I believe the very workmen felt that
+it was so and were sorry for her.
+
+When they had all gone away at six o'clock Jevons and I took our coats
+off and settled down for three solid hours to the serious work of moving
+furniture, while Viola tried to find the china, to wash it, and sorted
+all the linen and the blankets. And at nine o'clock we dined on bacon
+that Jevons fried over the gas-stove in the kitchen and cocoa that Viola
+and I made in a white-and-pink jug we found in the bath; it was a buxom,
+wide-pouting jug with an expression that Jevons said reminded him of his
+mother's sister who had brought him up. He said that jug was all that
+Viola would be allowed to see of his relations.
+
+I was left with Viola in the kitchen to wash up while Jevons finished
+what he called his man's job upstairs.
+
+She took advantage of his absence to implore me to go down to Canterbury
+and make it right for her with her people. She said they'd believe
+anything I told them and there wasn't anything they wouldn't do for me.
+
+"Tell them," she said, "that Jimmy's going to be so horribly celebrated
+that they'll look perfect asses if they don't acknowledge him."
+
+I owned there was something in it. She said there was everything in it.
+And I promised her I'd go and do what I could.
+
+Then I went upstairs to help Jevons to finish his man's job. I found him
+in the bedroom, making up a bed on the floor. The carpenter had taken
+away the bedstead and the posts and left him nothing but the mattress and
+the tester with its roof of rosebud chintz. He had propped the tester up
+against the wall where he said he could see it last thing before he went
+to sleep and first thing when he woke up.
+
+The room was very hot, for he'd lit the gas fire to air the sheets and
+things. He had thought of everything. He had even thought of hanging
+Viola's nightgown over the back of a chair before the fire, and setting
+her slippers ready for her feet. He had laid her brush and comb on the
+little rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles, in the recess. He
+had unpacked her little trunk and put her things away all folded in the
+big rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles. He had hung the rosebud
+chintz curtains at the window and fitted its rosebud chintz cover on
+the low chair by the fire. And now he was kneeling on the floor, tucking
+in the blankets and smoothing the pillow for her head. His mouth was just
+a little open. And he was smiling.
+
+You couldn't hate him.
+
+He said he'd come and see me off at the Tube Station. But he didn't
+start. He began walking about, opening drawers and looking at things.
+
+Presently he gave a cry of joy. He had found what he was looking for, a
+rosebud chintz coverlet. He spread it on the bed and said, "There!" He
+brought in an old Persian rug (small but very beautiful) from the landing
+and spread it on the floor by the mattress and said, "That's a bit of all
+right." And he told me he was going to beeswax the floor to-morrow. There
+was nothing to beat oak-stain and beeswax for a floor.
+
+He stood there gazing. He was so pleased with his work that he couldn't
+tear himself away.
+
+He said, "The joke is that she thinks she's going to find this room
+looking like a Jew pawnbroker's shop when, she turns in, and that she'll
+have the time of her life putting it straight for _me_."
+
+Then he took my arm and led me away, shutting the door carefully, so that
+nothing, he said, should break the shock of her surprise.
+
+But there was one drop of bitterness in his cup--"If only I could have
+set up that tester!"
+
+I said he'd had quite enough excitement for one day and that he really
+must leave something for to-morrow.
+
+On our way to the Tube Station I told him that I was going down to
+Canterbury in a day or two. I told him what I was going for. He had been
+so happy thinking about his house and his furniture and Viola that I
+don't believe he'd ever thought about the Thesigers. At the word
+"Canterbury" he thrust out his lower jaw so that the tips of his little
+white teeth were covered (they always disappeared when he was angry).
+
+He said: "Tell that old sinner I don't care a copper damn whether he
+recognizes _me_ or not. What I can't stand and won't stand is the slur
+he's putting on my wife."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And that is more or less what I did tell him.
+
+I wired to the Canon to let him know I was coming, and he replied by
+asking me to stay for the week-end.
+
+I found the family diminished. Mildred had gone to a case; Millicent was
+away for her Midsummer holiday; only Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and Norah
+and Victoria were left. They had the air of survivors of an appalling
+disaster. The Canon and Mrs. Thesiger were aged by about ten years; poor
+Victoria looked tired and haggard; even Norah was depressed. You felt
+that the trouble in the house was irreparable this time. They had held
+their heads up against the scandal that was supposed to have occurred in
+Belgium; they couldn't realize it; it was the sort of thing that occurred
+to other people, not to them. And, after all, they didn't _know_ that it
+had occurred. But the scandal of a _mesalliance_ which really had
+occurred in England three weeks ago was well within their range, and
+it had crushed them. It wasn't, as Jevons cynically maintained, that they
+objected to a _mesalliance_--any _mesalliance_--more than to the other
+thing; I think they had never really believed in the other thing, and
+this marriage, so far from effacing it, had rubbed it in, had made it
+appear publicly as if, after all, it might have been so. It was not only
+excessively disagreeable to them in itself, but it left them in that
+ghastly doubt.
+
+And this time they couldn't look to me to save them.
+
+Still it was evident that they looked to me for something. I was tackled
+by each one of them in turn. The Canon wanted to know if I had anything
+to tell him. Mrs. Thesiger wondered whether Viola would have enough to
+live on. Victoria, in the absence of her parents, took me into a corner
+to inquire under her breath, "Is he really very awful?" Norah--she had
+known all about it; they hadn't spared her, they hadn't kept it from her;
+you couldn't keep anything from Norah; she had got it all out of Viola
+the day before I came down the first time--Norah told me I'd have to make
+her father ask them down. She took Jevons's view that it was the Canon
+who was causing all the scandal now (only she called it fuss). There
+never would have been any if Mummy and Daddy had had the sense to take it
+properly and treat it as a joke. Nobody who knew Viola could take it as
+anything else.
+
+"But," she said, "if Daddy goes about pulling a long face and keeping up
+his sore throat over it, everybody'll think there must be something in
+it. I could have got it all right for them in a jiffy if they'd left it
+to me."
+
+"What would you have done, then?" I was really anxious to know.
+
+"Oh, I'd have run round telling everybody about it--as a joke. A
+thundering good joke. If they'd turned me on to it in time I could have
+easily overtaken those shocking old cats who got in first. As it is," she
+said, "I've stopped a lot of it--though Daddy doesn't know it--just that
+way. You should have seen me with the Colonel and the Dean! But if
+somebody doesn't stop Daddy he'll go and mess it all up again. Don't you
+remember how he dished my game at dinner the first night you were here?"
+
+Yes. I remembered. It came back to me, that startling indiscretion at
+the dinner-table which was, after all, so deliciously discreet. Knowing
+Norah as I know her now, I wouldn't mind betting that Jevons owes his
+position, in Canterbury (and he has one) to-day far more to his youngest
+sister-in-law's manoeuvres with the Dean and Chapter than to my handling
+of his case--No; I'm forgetting what he does owe that to. Let's say,
+then, his position in Canterbury yesterday--a year ago.
+
+Well, I had an hour's talk with the Canon.
+
+There was some awkwardness in having to point out to a man of his beauty
+and dignity that his duty lay in any other direction than the one he was
+so plainly heading for. I put it on the grounds of pity. I pleaded for
+Viola, I said she was unhappy.
+
+He replied that that was not the account she had given of herself.
+
+I said, Perhaps not. But if she wasn't unhappy now she very soon would be
+if he persisted in refusing to acknowledge them.
+
+But his lip went stiffer and stiffer. He was too unhappy himself to be
+got at that way. So I took him on the ground of expediency. I said after
+all Jevons was his son-in-law. He couldn't go on ignoring Jevons. I used
+Viola's argument. He wasn't dealing with an ordinary man. In a few years'
+time Tasker Jevons would be so celebrated that it would be absurd to
+pretend to ignore him.
+
+The Canon stuck to it that he didn't care how celebrated the fellow was.
+
+I said, "You can't keep it up for ever. You'll have to recognize him in
+the end. You don't want to cut the poor chap while he's struggling and
+accept him when he rolls, as he probably will roll."
+
+The Canon said he wasn't going to accept him at all. He said that Jevons
+rolling would he if anything more odious than Jevons as he was. He
+couldn't forget what had happened. And that was the end of it.
+
+I told him that it hadn't happened; but that to repudiate Jevons was the
+way to make everybody think it had. And whether it had happened or not,
+he must surely want other people to forget it. And once start the
+abominable impression, Jevons's celebrity would cause it to be remembered
+for ever, or at any rate for this generation. Whereas he could put a stop
+to the whole thing at once by behaving as if nothing had happened. He had
+only got to ask them down next week.
+
+"Does _he_ want to be asked down?"
+
+I said, No, he didn't. I told him what Jevons had said--that he didn't
+care whether he was recognized or not, but that he "couldn't stand the
+slur that was being put upon his wife."
+
+I saw him wince at that.
+
+"That's how it strikes him?" he said.
+
+I answered that that was how it would strike most people.
+
+"_I'm_ putting the slur on my daughter, am I?"
+
+I was pitiless. I said, Certainly he was. If he persisted.
+
+Then, after telling me that I had hit him hard, he fell back on another
+line of defence. He owed it to his priesthood not to condone his
+daughter's conduct.
+
+"All the more--all the more, Furnival, if she _is_ my daughter."
+
+I said he owed it to his priesthood to stand up for an innocent girl,
+even if she _was_ his daughter. I couldn't see anything in it but her
+innocence--her amazing innocence. I only wished I had his chance of
+proving it.
+
+He shook his head. "That's it, my dear fellow. We can't prove it."
+
+I said at least we could believe in it and act on our belief.
+
+He said it was all very well for me. I was prejudiced.
+
+"My sort of prejudice," I said, "might work the other way."
+
+"You must have been afraid, or you wouldn't have gone out to bring her
+back."
+
+"Jevons was afraid himself, for that matter. When things got dangerous he
+took her back to Bruges and put her in a _pension_ to be safe from him."
+
+He looked up sharply.
+
+"She never told me that--that he took her there to be safe from him."
+
+"I don't suppose she knew. She was as innocent as all that."
+
+"And how do _you_ know?"
+
+"Because he told me so."
+
+I gave him something of what Jevons had told me, but not all.
+
+"That," said the Canon, "seems to make him more credible."
+
+I pictured for him the night of Jevons's remorse.
+
+He said, "That's the best thing I've heard about him yet. You believe
+him?"
+
+I said, "Yes. The man is extremely sensitive and almost insanely frank."
+
+I let it sink in. Presently he owned that it was the platonic version of
+the affair that--as a man of the world--he had found it so hard to
+swallow--"All that nonsense, you know, about the Belfry."
+
+He meditated a while. Then he began to ask questions:
+
+"Where does he come from? Who are his people? What do they do?"
+
+I said his father was a Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in a
+village somewhere in Hertfordshire.
+
+And then: "Is he--is he _very_ impossible?"
+
+I said, No. Only from their point of view a little improbable.
+
+He didn't press it.
+
+"Well," he said, "it looks as if he was inevitable. I suppose we've got
+to make the best of him. What do you want me to do?"
+
+I said I wanted him to ask them down. Very soon.
+
+He said, "All right, Furnival. I'll ask them down next week. But if I do
+you must stop on and see me through. I won't be left alone with him."
+
+I stopped on, playing chess with the Canon and lawn tennis with Norah,
+who was more than ever determined to beat me.
+
+And on Tuesday of the next week they came down.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The whitewashing of Jevons had not been an easy matter. It took such a
+lot of coats to make a satisfactory job of him. And it was not a job I
+would have chosen. But I was serving Mrs. Jevons, and if my service had
+demanded miracles I should have had to have worked them somewhere, that
+was all. And perhaps it was a miracle to have turned Jevons out as a
+morally presentable person according to the requirements of a Cathedral
+Close.
+
+But up to that Tuesday afternoon in August my private grievance against
+Jevons remained what it had been. In his absence--even while I
+whitewashed him--I could not extend a Christian forgiveness and
+forbearance to Jevons, any more than Mrs. Thesiger could. I think I hated
+Jevons. I ought to have hated him--by every glorious and manly code,
+pagan or barbarous, I ought to have hated him. And I did--every minute
+that he wasn't there. He had made me a figure of preposterous suffering.
+Because of him I trailed a fatuous tragedy through the Thesigers' house
+and over the green lawns of the Close, under the eyes of the young
+subalterns and of Victoria and Norah. (Canon and Mrs. Thesiger I didn't
+mind so much.) It mattered nothing that they were all extremely kind to
+me, since my suffering was responsible for their kindness and Jevons was
+responsible for my suffering.
+
+Well, on that Tuesday he arrived. He was asked for a week and he stayed
+three days; and in those three days I had forgiven him everything for the
+sake of his performance.
+
+He arrived in the middle of a tennis-party.
+
+The Thesigers hadn't meant to have a party. The subalterns must have
+known that he was coming and turned up simply to look at him. (I wondered
+afterwards whether Norah could have told them. She was dangerously demure
+that afternoon.)
+
+I ought to have said that for the last two days the Canon had been
+preparing himself for Jevons by reading him. He had ordered--in defiance
+of his political principles--the _Morning Standard_, and I had found him
+reading Jevons's novel and surrounded by numbers of the _Blue Review_,
+which, if you remember, published the best of Jevons's earlier work. He
+had no difficulty in getting hold of them; his youngest daughter had been
+able to supply him with more Jevons than he wanted. In fact, in the study
+of Tasker Jevons the Canon was weeks behind the rest of his acquaintance.
+There was hardly a family in Canterbury of any education in which Tasker
+Jevons was not by this time a household word. The garrison club library
+had bought him in quantities. The bookseller in the precincts did not
+stock him (he was not allowed to); but he could order him for you, and
+did. And the book-sellers in the High Street displayed him in their
+windows by the half-dozen.
+
+I have forgotten, in the blaze of his later fame, that (apart from this
+purely local reputation) he passed in the provinces as a fair-sized
+celebrity even then. Only, as Jevons judged himself at every stage with
+accuracy, he hadn't begun to take himself at all seriously yet.
+
+So he arrived in a perfect simplicity, without any of that rather dubious
+aplomb with which he tried to carry off his celebrity when it really
+came.
+
+It was very nasty for him.
+
+He had to come out of the house, following Viola and her mother all
+the way to the far end of the lawn, where the Canon was ready for him
+with a face which, try as he would--and he tried his hardest--he could
+not unstiffen. It must be said of the Canon that he nothing common
+did or mean upon that memorable scene; but he had--as Jevons said
+afterwards--rather too much the air of walking up to the gun's mouth and
+calling on us to observe how beautifully a Christian could die.
+
+And there was Victoria standing beside the Canon and holding herself
+well, and Colonel and Mrs. Braithwaite beside Victoria, trying to look as
+if there was nothing unusual about Jevons or the situation. There was
+Norah at the tennis-net quivering with excitement, and (by the time
+Jevons had caught up with his convoy) there was Mrs. Thesiger alongside
+the others, turned round to present him, and watching him as he came on.
+Viola had turned and was looking at him too. And there were the
+subalterns at the tennis-net with Norah, doing unnecessary things to the
+net and trying _not_ to look at him.
+
+I wondered: How on earth will he carry it off? How is he going to get
+across that tennis-ground?
+
+He was getting across it somehow, holding himself not quite so well as
+Victoria or the subalterns, but still holding himself, coming on, a
+little flushed and twinkling and self-conscious, but coming.
+
+The situation was, for him, most horrible; but it was worse for Viola. I
+wondered: Is she shivering all down her spine? Is she going to flinch?
+Why _will_ she _look_ at the poor chap?
+
+And then I saw. She was looking at him with a little tender smile, a
+smile that helped him across, that said: "Come on. Come on. It's
+difficult, I know, but you're doing it beautifully."
+
+Well, so he was. He was doing it more beautifully than the Canon or any
+of them. For that group on the lawn were like a rather eager rescue
+party, holding out hands to a struggling swimmer in the social surf. They
+expected him to struggle and he didn't. He landed himself in the middle
+of them with an adroitness that put them in the wrong. What's more, he
+held his own when he got there. He looked about as different from any of
+the men on that tennis-ground as a man well could look. He looked odd;
+and that saved him. They with their distinction had not achieved absolute
+difference from each other. His difference from all of them was so
+absolute that it was a sort of distinction in itself.
+
+As soon as he got there Norah came up with the subalterns in tow. She
+made a little friendly rush at him. She said, "I'm Norah, the youngest. I
+expect Viola's told you about me. She's told me lots about _you_."
+
+She meant well, dear child. But she overdid it. She hadn't allowed--none
+of us except Viola had allowed--for his appalling sensitiveness. The poor
+chap told me afterwards that he could bear up against the Canon's stiff
+face and what he called Mrs. Thesiger's ladylike refinements of
+repudiation, and the poker that Victoria had swallowed, but that that
+kid's kindness, coming on the top of it all, floored him. He took her
+hand (I think he squeezed it), and his mouth opened, but he couldn't
+speak; he just breathed hard and flushed furiously; and his eyes looked
+as if he were going to cry. But of course he didn't cry. He was, he said,
+far too much afraid of the subalterns.
+
+It was a good thing, perhaps, after all, that it took him that way. His
+emotion made him quiet and subdued; it toned him down, so that he started
+well from the very beginning.
+
+After tea he recovered and talked to the Colonel and the subalterns while
+the rest of us listened. He said, I remember, that the building of
+Dreadnoughts was of more importance to the country than Disestablishment.
+And even more important than the building of Dreadnoughts was the
+building of submarines. The submarine was the ship of the future. There
+should be, he said, at least fifty submarines for every Dreadnought
+turned out.
+
+That made them all sit up. (It was not a platitude in nineteen-six, but a
+prophecy.) The Colonel and the subalterns hung on his words; and when the
+Canon saw them hanging, his mouth began to relax a little of its own
+accord. In his first hour Jevons had scored, notably.
+
+It was as if he had said to himself, "I'll bring these people round, see
+if I don't. I give myself an hour."
+
+Dinner passed without any misadventure, but you could see that he was
+careful. Also you could see by his twinkle that he was amusing himself by
+his own precautions, as if, again, he had said to himself, "They're all
+expecting me to make noises over my soup, and they'll be disappointed. I
+just won't make any."
+
+We had coffee in the garden afterwards. And it was then that the Canon
+asked him what his politics were?
+
+Jevons said he had no politics. Or rather, he had a great many politics.
+He was a sort of Socialist in time of peace and a red-hot Imperialist in
+time of war, and a Tory for purposes of Tariff Reform, and a Liberal when
+it came to Home Rule.
+
+And when the Canon objected that you couldn't run a Government on those
+lines, little Jevons told him that that was precisely how Governments
+were run. It was a fallacy to suppose that Oppositions didn't rule.
+
+And again he scored. He did it all with a twinkling, dimpling urbanity
+and deprecation, as if the Canon had been a beautiful lady he was paying
+court to, as if he thought it was rather a pity that beauty should lower
+itself to talk politics; but since he insisted on politics, he should
+have them; as if, in short, he loved the Canon, but didn't take him very
+seriously.
+
+Yes; he certainly scored. He gave Viola no cause to flinch.
+
+That evening comes back to me by bits. It must have been that evening
+that the Canon walked round the garden with me. I see him walking round
+and round, with Norah hanging on to his arm, teasing him and chattering.
+I hear her crying out suddenly with no relevance, "Hasn't he got stunning
+eyes, Daddy?" and the Canon saying that Jevons's eyes would look better
+in a pair of earrings than in Jevons's head, and her answering, "Wouldn't
+I like to wear them!" I see his little mock shiver (as if he felt that it
+was those great chunks of unsuitable sapphire that had charmed Viola
+across the Channel), and Norah's funny face as she said, "Oh, come, he
+isn't half bad."
+
+That night he called me into the library when they had all gone to bed.
+Clearly he wanted to know how it had gone off--how he, in particular, had
+behaved. I assured him that his behaviour had been perfect. And I asked
+him what he thought of Jevons?
+
+He said, "Well--he might be worse. He might be much, much worse. He's a
+clever chap. Where does he get it all from?"
+
+But I noticed that the next day he shut himself up in his library
+all morning, was silent at lunch, and never emerged properly till
+dinner-time. Mrs. Thesiger also fought shy of her son-in-law.
+
+Norah and Victoria took him by turns that day. I noticed that he got on
+very well with Norah. She knocked balls over the net for him all morning.
+(He couldn't play, but professed a great eagerness to learn.) In the
+afternoon Victoria took him to look at the Cathedral and the old quarters
+of the town. In the evening, after dinner, we all sat out in the garden.
+Canon and Mrs. Thesiger soon left us; Victoria followed them; and Viola
+and Norah and Jevons and I sat on till long after dark.
+
+Viola and Norah, I remember, sat close together on the long seat under
+the elm tree. Jevons was on the other side of Viola. I sat on a cushion
+at her feet.
+
+The night had a rhythm in it. Stillness and peace. The Cathedral chimes.
+Stillness and peace again. And there was a smell of cut lawn grass with
+dew on it from the ground, and of roses from the borders, and of lichen
+and moss and crumbling mortar from the walls. Sometimes these smells
+pierced the peace like sound; and sometimes they gathered close and
+wrapped us like warmth.
+
+Then Jevons spoke.
+
+"All this," he said, "is very beautiful. Very beautiful indeed."
+
+And Viola sighed.
+
+"Yes, Yes," she said. "I suppose it _is_ beautiful."
+
+"You _know_ it is," he said.
+
+"I know all right. But I don't think I can see it as you do. I've been
+shut up in it so long. It's all this that you've taken me out of."
+
+"It's all this," he said, "that's made you what you are."
+
+"It isn't. This isn't really me. It's just Them. I'm what I've made
+myself. I'm what you've made me. I'm uglier than they are. I'm uglier
+than anything here, but I'm much, much more alive."
+
+"You surely don't suggest," said Jevons, "that I've made you uglier?"
+
+"You've made me stronger and cleverer and bigger--ever so much bigger
+than I was."
+
+"Much better in every way," I said, "than your youngest sister here,
+hasn't he?"
+
+"Poor little Norah! I didn't mean that--you beast--Furny!--Of course I
+didn't. Jimmy--what _did_ I mean?"
+
+He said nothing. But I heard an inarticulate murmur, and I saw that in
+the darkness his arm went round her and drew her closer.
+
+And that, God forgive him, was his heaviest score up till now.
+
+In two days he had absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere. He was in it. In
+it as I wasn't and couldn't be.
+
+And the next day Canon and Mrs. Thesiger took him in hand by turns. The
+Canon showed him the town all over again all morning. And in the
+afternoon Mrs. Thesiger showed him the Cathedral all over again; and took
+him with her to the service. And all dinner-time Jevons was very pensive
+and subdued.
+
+After dinner the Canon talked to Jevons about his novel. (He had retired
+into his library all afternoon in order to finish it.) He asked him why
+he had chosen an ugly subject when he might have found a beautiful one?
+
+And Jevons was more pensive than ever. He said, "Well--that's a
+question--"
+
+He couldn't tell the Canon why he'd chosen it. He couldn't disclose to
+him his plan of campaign.
+
+"You see, sir, I haven't seen many beautiful things."
+
+He still pondered. Then he said, very slowly, as if he dragged it
+out of himself with difficulty, "That book was written--written in my
+head--before I knew my wife."
+
+You could literally see his score running up. By nine o'clock the Canon
+and Mrs. Thesiger had roped him into their game of whist.
+
+I sat out with Viola and Norah in the garden, when Norah told us that she
+thought Jimmy was a dear. She was the only one of them that called him
+Jimmy.
+
+About ten o'clock next morning Viola came to me and asked me to go up to
+Jimmy, in his room. He wanted to speak to me.
+
+I found him packing, packing with a sort of precise and concentrated
+fury.
+
+He was going. Going up to town. He had torn through Canterbury, eaten his
+way through Canterbury, through the beauty and peace of it; he had
+absorbed and assimilated it in three days. And he had had enough. If he
+stayed in it another hour the beauty and the peace of it would kill him.
+The Canon's beauty was, he said, adorable; so was Mrs. Thesiger's.
+
+"But if I stay here I shall ruin it. I can't," he said, "go on giving
+that dear old clergyman clergyman's sore throat. I frighten him so that
+he can't sing. He doesn't know what to do with me, or say to me. He
+doesn't know what to call me. He can't call me Jevons, and he won't
+call me Jimmy, and he knows it would be ridiculous to call me James.
+Besides, he agitates me and makes me drop my aitches.
+
+"So I've had a wire. You'll explain to him the sort of wire I've had."
+
+"And Viola?" I said. "Is she going too?"
+
+"No. Viola's going to stay till our week's up. By that time she'll be
+bored stiff and longing to get back to me."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He went, and I'm not at all sure that he didn't score by going.
+
+And that night and the next and the next I thought of little Jevons alone
+in his little house in Hampstead, lying all by himself in his four-post
+bed between his rosebud chintz curtains and under his rosebud chintz
+tester, and saying to himself that he had scored.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+The Thesigers lived to be grateful to me for reconciling them to Jevons,
+if it was I who reconciled them. I don't think Mrs. Thesiger ever really
+forgave him, ever really liked him till the end; but the Canon very soon
+owned to a surreptitious regard for him. Luckily he acquired it while
+Jevons was still struggling, otherwise I do not think I could have saved
+their faces.
+
+In the first year of his marriage Jevons made them see how right I was
+when I told them it would be impossible to ignore him. In the second year
+they saw that he had only just given them time to come round before it
+was too late. The minute he became prosperous it would have been too
+late, much too late for their dignity and beauty. And yet they couldn't
+very well have gone on repudiating Viola for ever. A year would have seen
+them through that attitude. And Jevons's great _coup_ had come off in
+the year he "gave" it; so that if they had been left to themselves their
+revulsion of tenderness must have coincided with his prosperity. They
+would have had every appearance of having surrendered to his income.
+
+And they would have missed the spectacle of his struggle.
+
+I believe it was his struggle, the doggedness, the heroism, the wild
+humour that he put into it that brought them round. They didn't like his
+early celebrity and they deplored the cause of it--his first novel.
+
+That book justified everything that Jevons had said of it. It did
+startle. It did arrest. It _was_ unpleasant. So vividly and powerfully
+unpleasant that it nailed your eyes to it and kept them there. It made a
+break and a stain in your memory.
+
+When I say it was unpleasant I mean, and he meant, not that it was
+unclean, but that it was brutal. I shall have written this tale to very
+little purpose if it isn't transparent that Jevons's mind, Jevons's whole
+nature was scrupulously clean. Even his brutality was not spontaneous.
+He broke his neck to get it. You could see him putting his tongue out as
+he laboured the brutality. You could see him sweating as he went over it
+again, removing all the marks of labour, making for his effect of
+sincerity and gorgeous simplicity and ease.
+
+I've said it's doubtful how far Jevons took himself seriously. He
+certainly had no illusions as to the nature of his success. But whenever
+I come to this side of him I feel myself untrustworthy. I cannot see him
+properly. I am prejudiced by knowing him so well. I daresay if I hadn't
+known him, if he hadn't been so frank in his disclosures, if he hadn't
+explained so many times the deliberate calculations of his method, I
+should think him a great novelist. I daresay to a generation that knows
+nothing about him or his disclosures or his method he will seem a great
+novelist again. I daresay he _is_ a great novelist. I don't know.
+
+Anyhow there were three great stages in his career: the Slow Advance; the
+Grand Attack; and Victory. (He had been advancing slowly ever since the
+day I met him on the football-ground at Blackheath).
+
+All these stages are marked for me by the increasing size and splendour
+of the houses that he occupied in turn; the four-roomed cottage at
+Hampstead; the little house in Edwardes Square; the large house in
+Mayfair; the still larger country house he acquired last of all. And the
+Jevons I like to think of is the Jevons of the little whitewashed
+cottage, of the whitewashed rooms, the one sitting-room where we dined;
+the kitchen at the back where we cooked and washed up; the absurd little
+bedroom in the front where the four-post bed was set up like a tent with
+its curtains and its tester; the study at the back where Jevons worked
+and Norah Thesiger slept when she came to stay. I remember Jevons darting
+from the kitchen and the dining-room with steaming dishes in his hands;
+Jevons with a pipe in his mouth and his feet on the chimney-piece,
+talking, talking, talking about anything--Dreadnoughts, submarines, the
+War (he had given it nine years now)--from nine till eleven, and then
+flinging himself out of his chair to turn the settee into a bed for the
+Kiddy. Whatever he was saying or doing, in the middle of a calculation,
+he would break off at eleven and drag sheets and blankets out of a
+coffin-like box under the settee and make up the Kiddy's little bed for
+her, because Kiddies must on no account be allowed to sit up late at
+night. I remember Viola and Norah coming in to help and Jevons shooing
+them away. And Norah would come back again and put her head round the
+door and look at him where he knelt on the floor absurdly, tucking in
+blankets and breathing hard as he tucked. And she would say, "Look at
+him. Isn't he sweet?" as if Jevons had been a rabbit or a guinea-pig, and
+go away again.
+
+Somehow I always see him like that, making beds, stooping over something,
+doing something for one of them or for me.
+
+Sometimes they would burst in on him suddenly in his bedmaking and throw
+pillows at him, or it might be sponges, and there would be madness: two
+girls running amok and little Jevons flying before them through the
+house and squealing in his excitement. Once he went out to post a letter
+in the Grove before midnight and they locked him out and looked at him
+from the window of the front bedroom and defied him to enter, and he
+skipped round to the back and climbed up by the water-butt on to the
+drainpipe of the bathroom, and from the drainpipe, perilously, in through
+the window of his study, where they found him putting hair-brushes in
+Norah's bed.
+
+After the drainpipe adventure (when they saw how game he was) they
+sobered down. I think it was that night that Norah said, "We mustn't
+_kill_ Jimmy. That would never do."
+
+And there would be theatre-parties when Jimmy had tickets given him, and
+eighteenpenny dinners at the "Petit Riche," going and returning by the
+Hampstead Tube.
+
+It seems to me that Norah must have stayed a great deal with them at
+Hampstead, and yet she couldn't have; they were only two years in the
+little four-roomed house. Anyhow, we were all immensely happy in those
+two years; even I was happy. Jevons I know was--and Viola. Viola had
+never been so happy in her life. She cooked: she washed up with Jimmy to
+help her; she mended his clothes and made her own; she did his
+typewriting; she took down his articles in shorthand and typed them; and
+through all his funny little social lapses she adored him.
+
+When you think of it, poverty and close quarters for two years, and the
+menace of some of those lapses hanging over her all the time--it was a
+pretty severe test. You would have said that if she could stand that she
+could stand anything, and she certainly stood it.
+
+But Jimmy hadn't begun yet to unbend. He was still on the defensive,
+holding himself in, every nerve strung up to the Grand Attack. This
+tension affected his behaviour. He knew his danger. He knew there were
+certain gestures that he must restrain, and he restrained them; there
+were certain things he did with spoons and forks and table napkins that
+would wreck him if he were caught doing them, and in those two years he
+kept a very sharp look-out. You would have thought that this life, on the
+edge of an abyss, with full knowledge of his danger, would have made him
+nervous and produced the very disaster that he dreaded. But no. Jevons
+was a fighting man, and he rose to these crises and prevailed. You felt
+that for him the real test would come when he was prosperous, when the
+strain was taken off him and he let himself go.
+
+Meanwhile it was terrifying to see him balancing himself on the edge.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+They moved into the Edwardes Square house in the September quarter
+of nineteen-eight. This was the year of the weeks of consolidation,
+his second novel and his "Journal," that were to precede the Grand
+Attack. The novel did exactly what he said it would. It did counteract
+the effect its predecessor; and the "Journal" gave him a place in
+_Belles-Lettres_ where he was safe from the legend of his own brutality.
+
+But it strained his relations with the Thesigers for the time being. The
+Rosalind of the "Journal" is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful
+to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said
+to have travelled together before they were married. Her figure moves
+through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an
+adorable innocence and naivete, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the
+Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy
+and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender
+than the Viola he knew. You couldn't say she wasn't charming. The Canon
+couldn't say it; what he did say was that Jevons should have kept her out
+of it. Jevons's defence was that if he had kept her out of it there
+wouldn't have been any book.
+
+But he never did it again. Having once for all drawn her portrait as a
+young girl, he left it, as if he would have kept her youth immortal. You
+will not find any woman of his novels who suggests even a fugitive
+likeness to the Viola he married.
+
+The house in Edwardes Square stands for the second period: the period of
+sober energy that led up to the Grand Attack. It was also the period of
+deliberate yet vehement refinement. Jevons was determined at all cost to
+be refined. And at considerable cost, with white-painted panelling
+throughout, with blue-and-white Chinese vases here and there, and more
+and more Bokhara rugs everywhere, and tussore silk curtains in the
+windows and every stick of furniture chosen for its premeditated
+chastity, the little brown house was made to serve him as a holy
+standard. He said he had only got to live up to it and he would be all
+right.
+
+And so, in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his
+surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the
+diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers
+laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at
+the back. I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his
+beginnings, how he did it so well. Of course he gave Viola a free hand,
+he let her have what she wanted; but when I complimented her on any
+result she let me know at once that it was Jimmy's doing. She was
+pathetically anxious that I should see that he knew how. She let me know,
+too, the secret of his passionate absorption in gardens and interiors,
+lest I should think it argued any unmanliness in him.
+
+I remember so well her showing me that house in Edwardes Square. I had
+called one afternoon when I had known that Jevons wasn't there. I had
+left him at his club in Dover Street. (He had a club in Dover Street now;
+it was my club; I had put him up for it. He enjoyed his club as he
+enjoyed everything else that he had acquired by conquest; his membership
+marked another step in his advance, another strip of alien territory
+gained. And he had chosen this club, he said, because most of the members
+had retired, to cultivate adipose tissue on pensions, and they made him
+feel adolescent and slender and energetic.) I had left him in the library
+writing letters (he said he found a voluptuous pleasure in writing
+letters on the club paper under that irreproachable address), and I
+rushed off in a taxi to Viola in Edwardes Square.
+
+She was very glad to see me, and she gave me tea, poured out of an
+early eighteenth-century silver teapot, in beautiful old blue-and-white
+Chinese teacups. She wore one of those absurd narrow coats with tails
+that made women look like long, slender birds that year, and she had done
+something unexpected with her hair; it was curls, curls, curls all over,
+the way they did it then, and she sat on a wine-coloured sofa with a
+wine-coloured rug at her feet.
+
+She began straight away by talking about Jimmy's last book, the
+"Journal."
+
+"Don't you see _now_," she said, "why I went out to him, and how
+beautiful it all was?"
+
+I asked her did she think I'd ever doubted? She said: "No. But Daddy
+hates the book. So does Mummy. They all hate it except Norah and me. I'm
+glad he wrote it. I'm glad he put me into it. I never knew I was so nice,
+did you?"
+
+"Oh, come," I said, "surely I always knew?"
+
+But she didn't pay any attention to me. She didn't care to know what I
+thought or what I knew. She wasn't thinking of me or of herself. She was
+defending Jimmy with little jerky, stabbing thrusts of defiance. You
+could see that the smallest criticism of him made her suffer; that she
+was capable of infinite suffering where Jimmy was concerned. Also you saw
+that she would have to suffer, and that she knew it, and that it was this
+suffering that she repulsed and thrust from her with her stabs. He was
+making a tender place in her mind that might some day become a wound.
+
+"You know I did," I insisted--I think, to turn her mind from him.
+
+She looked at me gravely before she smiled.
+
+"Nobody but Jimmy really thinks me nice. Nobody but Jimmy knows how nice
+I _am_."
+
+And then she showed me the house.
+
+I praised some detail that Jevons had devised (not that there was much
+detail; it was all extremely simple). And I believe she saw criticism of
+Jimmy in that.
+
+"I know it looks as if he cared a lot about this sort of thing. And I
+daresay you think it's silly of him. But he doesn't really care."
+
+"It certainly looks," I said, "as if he cared about something."
+
+"It's me he cares about," she said.
+
+"And do you care about--this sort of thing, Viola?"
+
+"I care about his caring. But I was every bit as happy in that little
+four-roomed house, if that's what you mean."
+
+"Aren't you glad to have more room to move about in?"
+
+"I'm glad to have room for Daddy and Mummy when they come to stay."
+
+It was as if she had said, "If you think I'm glad to have room to get
+away from him you're mistaken."
+
+And there was another impression that she gave me. It was also as if she
+wanted to warn me not to form the habit of coming to see her when she was
+alone. I should gain nothing by it. If I insisted on seeing her alone I
+should get Jimmy, Jimmy, all the time.
+
+I didn't try to see her again alone.
+
+But I saw her often. Jevons was always asking me there. He made a point
+of it whenever they had what Viola called "anybody interesting." By this
+she meant somebody belonging to the confraternity of letters. Jevons had
+a sort of idea that I liked meeting these people and that it did me good.
+The house in Edwardes Square might have become a haunt of Jimmy's
+_confreres_ if Jimmy had had time to attend to them and if he hadn't been
+so deliberately exclusive. He was trying for the best--not for the great
+names so much as for the great achievements, and they were few. And there
+were one or two of them who rejected Jevons.
+
+And then you had to reckon with Mrs. Jevons's rejections. She was as
+fastidious in her way as he was in his; and besides, she guarded him, so
+that the circle around him was rather tight and small.
+
+Oh, he was faithful; he kept me in it; he gave me of his best; and if he
+could have made me shine I should have blazed among them all.
+
+It doesn't matter now which of them I met there. Jevons was charming to
+them all. He set them blazing. I don't think he cared much whether _he_
+blazed or not, but if he felt like it he could make a bigger blaze than
+any of them. He enjoyed them; he enjoyed them vastly, violently. Having
+once acquired the taste, he couldn't have lived without the intellectual
+excitement they gave him. But except for that, for the stimulus, the
+release of energy, it's surprising how little they really counted for
+him.
+
+And so it's not those evenings and that brilliance that I remember.
+
+In the house in Edwardes Square I seem to have been always meeting Norah
+Thesiger. Now that they had a room to put her in, she would be there for
+months at a time. And whenever she was there they would be sure to ask
+me. If Jevons didn't, Viola did.
+
+There was that summer, too, when Norah and Mildred came together with
+Charlie Thesiger, their cousin, who was engaged to Mildred. Charlie was
+then a lieutenant in the South Kent Hussars. He was a large young man,
+correct, handsome, rather supercilious and rather stupid. He seemed to
+fill the house in Edwardes Square when he was in it.
+
+He doesn't matter. At least, he didn't matter then. God knows he never
+really mattered, poor boy, at any time. But he is important. He fixes
+things for me. He brings me to the incident of June, nineteen-nine.
+
+It was a very slight incident. It wouldn't be worth recording except that
+it stood for others like itself, a whole crowd. And it was of such slight
+things that Viola's torments were to be made.
+
+We were at dinner in the little dining-room looking on the flagged court,
+a party of six: Viola at the head of the round table, with her back to
+the light; Jevons at the foot, facing her, with the light full on him;
+Charlie Thesiger was on Viola's right, I was on her left, facing him.
+Norah sat next to me on Jevons's right, and Mildred sat next to Charlie
+on Jevons's left, facing Norah. We were all so close together that it
+would be difficult for one of us to have missed anything that happened or
+was said. And Viola, with the light behind her, commanded us all.
+
+She had been very gay. I don't suppose Charlie felt anything strained
+about her gaiety--he was not observant--but I did, and I put it down to
+Charlie's presence, to the rather flat correctness that made Jevons stand
+out. Another thing I noticed was that, in labouring for refinement in his
+surroundings, Jevons hadn't allowed for the effect of contrast. It hadn't
+occurred to him that an interior that harmonized with Viola would be
+damaging to him. And it was. Just how damaging I hadn't realized until
+to-night (which shows how careful he must have been at Canterbury). He
+didn't stand out. He burst out. He never sank into his background for a
+single minute. You had to be aware of him all the time.
+
+And yet in a party of the confraternity you were not aware of him like
+this. For then he blazed; and in the flare he made you didn't notice
+whether he tilted his soup-plate the right way or not, or care if he
+couldn't use his table napkin or his pocket-handkerchief and look you
+square in the face at the same time. Neither did you notice these things
+if you were alone with him or if only Norah and Viola were there. He was
+happy with us, and happiness was becoming to him, and he had all sorts of
+endearing ways that would have disarmed us. And then there's no doubt
+that Viola protected him. She watched over him; she smoothed his social
+path for him; she removed his worst pitfalls; she ran, as it were, to
+pick him up before he fell. He didn't know she was watching him; neither,
+I think, did she. It was a blind instinct with her to help him. And Norah
+and I helped him too. And as he wasn't nervous with us everything went
+well. But when strangers got into our party it was different. Viola
+couldn't attend to him properly; and if the stranger happened to be
+rather stupid, like Charlie Thesiger, Jevons didn't blaze and so cover
+himself; he got bored; and when he was bored he got jumpy; and it was
+when he got jumpy that he did things.
+
+And Charlie was getting on his nerves.
+
+Still, everything went well until the table was cleared for dessert; and
+there was no reason why everything shouldn't have gone well even then.
+Viola had guarded against his most inveterate failing--a habit of
+stretching for things across the table--by putting everything he wanted
+within his reach. Within Jevons's reach to-night was a little dish
+containing among other things chocolate nougat. And he was fond of
+nougat. He was fond also of chaffing Norah. And he was not prepared to
+forego one amusement for the other. And Norah had taken a mean advantage
+of him. She had timed a provocation at the moment when for any other man
+retort would have been impossible; and she hadn't reckoned with Jevons's
+ingenuity of resource.
+
+I am not going to say what he did. It wouldn't be fair to him. It was a
+little thing, but you couldn't pretend for one moment that you hadn't
+seen it, any more than Jevons could do anything to cover the fantastic
+horror of it. We simply sat and stiffened; all but Norah, who burst out
+laughing in Jimmy's face.
+
+Mildred, trying to help him, made matters worse by asking for a peach
+when she had got a large one on her plate. Charlie Thesiger looked down
+his nose. I don't know where I looked, but I know that I was conscious
+of Viola's face and of the flush that darkened it to the tip of her chin
+and the roots of her hair. And I could feel the shudder down her back
+passing into mine.
+
+After all, Viola did cover it. She lit a little Roman lamp they had and
+sent it travelling down the table with the cigarette-box. Then she got up
+and went to Jevons and stooped over his shoulder and took the little dish
+from him.
+
+"If anybody wants any more chocolates," she said, "they must come
+upstairs for them."
+
+"She won't trust me with them," said Jevons. (He _had_ a nerve.)
+
+Viola trailed off upstairs with her dish, and Mildred and Charlie
+followed her.
+
+Norah and I held watch with Jevons, who leaned back in his chair and
+smoked and rubbed the forefinger of his right hand--the innocent
+instrument (may I say it?) of his crime--with his table napkin, and
+contemplated Norah in a drowsy imperturbability.
+
+"Did I do anything?" he said presently.
+
+Norah put her hand on his arm and stroked it.
+
+"No, Jimmy dear," she said, "of course you didn't."
+
+It was then that I was aware for the first time of the beauty of Norah's
+face. Norah's, not Viola's. Up till then I could never see anything but
+Viola's face in it, coloured wrong, so that it rather worried me to look
+at it, I resented the everlasting reminder of that likeness under that
+perverse and disconcerting difference. If her eyes hadn't been so blue
+and her cheeks so pink; if only her hair had been a little darker and if
+it hadn't crinkled--
+
+Now, as I looked at her, I wondered how anybody could think she was
+like Viola. There was only her forehead and the odd turn of her jaw and
+nose--her profile, if you like, was Viola's--but (when she wasn't
+laughing) Norah's full face had something that Viola's hadn't and never
+would have. I had caught it now and then and couldn't make up my mind
+what it was. Now I saw that it was a sort of wisdom, a look of soberness
+and goodness that I couldn't quite account for.
+
+Then Jevons explained it for me.
+
+"The Kiddy's growing up," he said (he said it to himself). "She'll be
+twenty to-morrow. She won't throw wet sponges at me any more."
+
+That was it. Norah was growing up. Her soft face was setting and the
+expression I had noticed had come to stay.
+
+Presently Jevons got up. He said he had work to do.
+
+"The Grand Attack, Furnival, the Grand Attack!"
+
+And he left us together.
+
+Norah looked after him.
+
+"Poor little Jimmy," she said. "I don't think he ever did a _bad_ thing
+in his life."
+
+And then, with what seemed a daring irrelevance, "I wish Charlie wasn't
+here. I can't think why Viola ever asked him."
+
+"Why shouldn't she?"
+
+"Because he's bad for Jimmy. He puts him in the wrong."
+
+I'm afraid I laughed a little brutally at the extravagance of this.
+
+"Well," she said. "I can't bear him to suffer."
+
+"You've got a very tender little heart, haven't you?" I said.
+
+"It isn't half as tender as Viola's. But I've got more common sense."
+
+"Then why," I said, "did you laugh at Jimmy just now?"
+
+"That's why. Because it was the best thing you could do. He doesn't mind
+it half so much when you laugh at him. It's people looking down their
+noses, like Charlie, that he minds. It must be awful for the poor little
+chap, when you come to think of it, living on the edge, never knowing
+when he's going to do something that'll make Viola's blood run cold."
+
+"It must be still more awful for Viola."
+
+To that she said, "It isn't. You don't know how Viola feels about Jimmy.
+None of my people do. They simply don't understand it."
+
+"Oh, come," I said, "they've accepted it, haven't they?"
+
+"They've accepted it _because_ they don't understand her. They say they
+never know what she'll do next, and Jimmy's come as a sort of relief to
+them. They thought she might do something much worse. You see, she isn't
+a bit like any of us. If she wants to do a thing she'll do it, no matter
+what it is. She wanted to go to Bruges with Jimmy and look at the Belfry,
+and she did it like a shot. What they can't see is that she'll never
+_want_ to do anything wrong, so she'll never do it. They can't see that
+there was just as much Belfry as Jimmy in it. There always will be a
+Belfry in Viola's life, and when she hears the bells going she'll run off
+to see. And Jimmy's the only man who'll ever take her to a Belfry.
+
+"She's all right. Because she knows that Jimmy's really ten times more
+refined than any of us. His little soul's all made of beautiful clean
+white silk. But Viola can't go on telling people how beautiful he is.
+They've got to see it for themselves.
+
+"I wish _you_ could see it as she does. I wish you could see how she
+feels about it--"
+
+"My dear Norah," I said, "I've been trying for three years to see as
+Viola sees, and feel as Viola feels. But how can I? I'm not Viola."
+
+"But," she said, "you _do_ understand her. If I thought you didn't--if I
+thought that you could go back on her--and if you go back on Jimmy you go
+back on _her_--"
+
+"Well?"
+
+"Well, I don't think I could ever speak to you again."
+
+"My dear child," I said, "you're absurd. I haven't gone back on either of
+them. Won't it do if I see Jimmy as _you_ see him?"
+
+"Ye-es," she said. "But--I wonder if you do."
+
+"Norah," I said then, "I wonder if Viola's as sorry for him as you are. I
+hope she isn't."
+
+"She isn't, then. She isn't sorry for him a bit. No more am I. You'll
+make me sorry for _you_ if you don't take care."
+
+When we went to say good night to Jevons we found Viola sitting on the
+arm of his chair with the little dish in her hand, feeding him with
+chocolate nougat. Her posture was one of supple contrition, and we heard
+her say:
+
+"Cheer up, Jimmy. It doesn't really matter what you do. Nobody would ever
+take you for more than four years old."
+
+Yes. Norah, the youngest, was the one who had grown up.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+Norah has often told me that I exaggerated the importance of the Nougat
+Incident; that my weakness is a tendency to dwell with a morbid
+concentration on small, inessential details. When I tell her that if I
+succeed in surviving Jimmy I shall write his biography, she tilts her
+chin and says I'm the last person who should attempt it.
+
+"Between us," she says, "we might manage it. But if you're left to
+yourself you'll make him _all_ nougat."
+
+When I retort that if _she_ were left to _her_self she'd eliminate the
+very things that make him the engaging animal he is, and remind her that
+a straw will show the way the wind's blowing, she asks me, "Did any big
+wind ever blow a straw before it all the way?"
+
+Well, perhaps I _am_ the very last person--he made me the last person by
+what he did to me--but when it comes to exaggeration I haven't attached
+more importance to the Nougat Incident than Jevons did himself. Why, when
+he shut himself up in his study that night, instead of hurling himself
+forward in the Grand Attack, he must have sat with his head in his hands
+brooding over it and wondering what he'd done; he must have gone straight
+upstairs to ask Viola what he'd done, or there'd have been no earthly
+sense in what we heard her saying. The detail may have been small, but it
+was not inessential when it could turn Tasker Jevons from the Grand
+Attack as he was turned that night.
+
+I tell you, and Jevons would tell you, it is of such small things that
+tragedies are made--the bitterest, the most insidious.
+
+And when Jevons did finally hurl himself, when he shut himself up,
+morning after morning and night after night, to labour violently on his
+greatest work, though (for just as long as he was actually engaged) he
+might be staving off his tragedy, he was nevertheless precipitating the
+event. You may say that when you get him there in his study on his
+battlefield you are among the big forces at once; but the interesting
+thing is that those big forces by their very expenditure released a whole
+crowd of little, infinitely little ones that, in their turn, in their
+miniature explosion, worked for his destruction. Jevons, struggling with
+his social disabilities, was like a giant devoured by microscopically
+minute organisms over whose generation he had no control.
+
+And the greater the man, mind you, the greater the tragedy.
+
+Still, for those two years in Edwardes Square, he staved it off. It was
+the very violence of his labour, the prodigious front of the battle he
+delivered, that saved him. Then there was his victory, his Third Novel,
+that for the time threw all minor happenings into the background.
+
+He was right again in his forecast. It _was_ his best work, and (I use
+his own phrase) it did the trick.
+
+When it came, the Grand Attack (which was bolder even than his first
+assault) carried, you may say, the whole position, after demolishing at
+one stroke the enemy's defences. For he had enemies. He was the sort of
+man who does have them. He didn't _make_ them, at least, not
+deliberately, he couldn't have been bothered to make them; but he drew
+them; they seemed to rise out of the ground after every one of his
+appearances.
+
+Well, they couldn't say he hadn't done it this time.
+
+_Done_ it. There's no good trying to express such a phenomenon as Jevons
+in terms of literature. You can only think about him in terms of action,
+every book of his being an onslaught by which he laid his public low.
+
+And this time he had conquered America.
+
+Don't ask me how many thousands he made by it. I've forgotten. They've
+melted into the tens of thousands that he made before he had finished.
+Even in the years of the Grand Attack he was making his old father an
+allowance and investing large sums in case of accidents. (He had been
+putting by even in the Hampstead days.) How he did it I can't think,
+though he has tried to explain it to me more than once. The whole thing
+for him was as obvious as any business transaction (he had the sort of
+mind for which business transactions _are_ obvious). He had studied
+the public he set out to capture. He presented the life it knew--the
+moving, changing, fantastically adventurous life of the middle classes.
+Until Jevons rushed on them and forced their eyes open, you may say at
+the point of the bayonet, the middle classes didn't know they were moving
+and changing and being adventurous. Nobody knew. It was Jevons's
+discovery.
+
+Then, as he pointed out, there were innumerable discretions in his
+valour. He knew to a hairbreadth how far he might go, and he went no
+farther. He respected existing prejudices because they existed. He didn't
+ask awkward questions; he didn't raise problems; he had the British
+capacity for doing serious things with an air of not taking himself
+seriously and frivolous things with an astounding gravity.
+
+"You can do anything, Furnival," he said, "if you're only funny enough."
+
+Norah tells me that that really _is_ his secret.
+
+But, he said, the whole thing was as calculable as any successful deal on
+the Stock Exchange. When you asked him: "Then why can't other people do
+it?" he said: "God knows why. They must be precious fools if they want to
+do it and don't find out how. _I_'ve had to find out."
+
+For one year--the last year in Edwardes Square--he enjoyed pure fame. And
+he _did_ enjoy it--I think he enjoyed everything--like a child with a
+mechanical toy, or a girl with a new gown, playing with it and trying it
+on by snatches when he could spare half an hour from his appalling toil.
+
+Heavens, how he worked that year! With a hard, punctual passion, a
+multiplied energy, like five financiers engaged on five separate
+transactions. After victory in the campaign he had settled down to
+business and the works of peace. There was the business of the short
+story; the business of the monograph; the business of the magazine
+article and the newspaper column, and the speculations that developed
+into the immense business of his plays. (I've forgotten how much he
+netted by his first curtain-raiser.) That's five.
+
+As I look back on him he seems to have torn through his stages at an
+incredible pace. There are several that I haven't counted, so suddenly
+did he leave them behind him: the stage when he was literary adviser to a
+firm of publishers, who wouldn't believe him when he said the thing was
+calculable; the stage when he ceased to be sub-editor of _Sport_ and
+became editor, an appointment so lucrative that you may judge the risk he
+took when he abandoned it. And in between there was his stage of cruelty,
+when he did reviewing. It was a brief stage, but he contrived to strew
+the field with the reputations he had slaughtered (Viola used to plead
+with him for certain authors, like Queen Philippa for the burghers of
+Calais), until his job was taken from him in the interests of humanity.
+
+Now--I am speaking in the light of my later knowledge--the first effect
+of these prodigious and passionate labours was beneficent, and I
+shouldn't wonder if Jevons, who had calculated everything to a nicety,
+hadn't allowed for this too. To say nothing of the peculiar purity of his
+earlier fame, which set him in a place apart and assured beyond all
+possible depreciation, so long as he elected to stay there, the very
+conditions of his business saved him. He enjoyed in those two desperate
+years the immunities of a recluse. The results were prominently before
+the public, but Jimmy wasn't. His study was literally his sanctuary.
+Sitting there nearly all day and half the night, he was removed from the
+world's observation at the precise moment when it became inimical. I
+don't mean the observation of the confraternity of letters, which was and
+always had been kindly to his personality, and had taken little or no
+notice of his disabilities; I mean the observation of the world he
+married into, for which disabilities like Jimmy's count.
+
+He was also removed from Viola's observation at a time when I think,
+almost unconsciously, she was beginning to criticize him. When he came to
+her out of his sanctuary he came with its consecration on him. And then
+there was the appeal he made to her tenderness. If the shudders down her
+back began they were checked by the spectacle of his exhaustion. She
+couldn't shudder at the tired conqueror when he flung himself on the
+floor beside her and laid his head in her lap.
+
+I've seen her with him like that--once, one evening when Norah was
+with them, and I had turned in after dinner; it was upstairs in that
+drawing-room in Edwardes Square that they had made, back and front, in an
+L. Norah and I were in the long, narrow part at the back; you know how
+those little town rooms go when they're knocked into one--the fireplaces
+in the same wall and windows opposite each other, so that the back rakes
+the fireplace end of the front part.
+
+Viola and Jevons were by the fireplace in the front, she in her low chair
+and he stretched out on the rug at her feet. And we raked them.
+
+They didn't know they were observed. I think they'd made up their minds
+that when Norah and I were together we couldn't hear or see anything
+except ourselves.
+
+And so we heard Viola saying, "What do you do it for?"
+
+And Jimmy, "Oh, for the fun of the thing, I suppose. What does one do
+things for?"
+
+And she, "It'll be fine fun for me, won't it, when you've killed
+yourself? When you've burst the top of your head off like the kitchen
+boiler?"
+
+"I should have to run dry first," said Jevons.
+
+"Well, you will, boiling away seven--eight--nine hours a day for weeks on
+end. Nobody else does it."
+
+"Nobody else _can_ do it," said Jimmy arrogantly.
+
+"It's all very well; but if you don't burst your head open you'll get
+neuritis, or cramp. Look at that hand."
+
+"Which hand?"
+
+"Your right hand, silly." She took it and poised it from the wrist. "Look
+how it wobbles."
+
+He looked.
+
+"It does wobble a bit. Like a drunkard's. And I don't drink."
+
+He was interested in his hand.
+
+"You goose, where's the fun of letting your right hand go to pieces?"
+
+"Easy on. They won't amputate it," said Jimmy.
+
+That was in nineteen-nine. This is nineteen-fifteen. And only yesterday
+Norah asked me if I remembered what Jimmy said about his hand the night
+we were engaged.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Yes, that night I was engaged to Norah Thesiger.
+
+I suppose it was our silence that made Viola and Jimmy aware of us at
+last, for presently I saw Jimmy sit up on the floor and take Viola's hand
+and squeeze it, and then they got up and very quietly and furtively they
+left the room.
+
+And the minute I found myself alone with Norah I proposed to her.
+
+I don't know if even then I should have had the courage to do it if I
+hadn't been driven to it by sheer terror. I forgot to say that I was in
+Edwardes Square for the weekend and that Norah was not staying with her
+sister this time, but with her uncle, General Thesiger, at Lancaster
+Gate. And for three days, ever since her arrival at Lancaster Gate, I had
+seen the possibility of losing her.
+
+Otherwise you would have said that if ever there was a spontaneous and
+unexpected performance, it was my proposal to Norah Thesiger.
+
+But no; it seemed that it had been arranged for me by Jevons, planned
+with his customary deliberation and calculation long ago. This may have
+been the reason why Norah said she wouldn't tell Viola and Jimmy about it
+herself; she'd rather I did.
+
+I thought: I shan't have to tell them till to-morrow. I had to take Norah
+to Lancaster Gate in a taxi, and I walked back across the Serpentine
+between Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, spinning out the time so that
+Viola and Jimmy might be in bed when I got to Edwardes Square.
+
+I found them sitting up for me in Jimmy's study.
+
+I dreaded telling them more than I can say. I don't know with what
+countenance a man can come and tell the woman he has loved (and proposed
+to three times running) that he has consoled himself with her younger
+sister. I wanted to avoid every appearance of a fatuous triumph in my
+success with Norah. And after sticking for four years to my vow of
+everlasting devotion to Mrs. Jevons I shrank from the confession of a new
+allegiance. On the other hand, I owed it to Norah to declare myself
+happy without any airs of deprecation and contrition. And I had certain
+obligations to the Truth. Why I should have supposed that the Truth
+should have been disagreeable to Mrs. Jevons Heaven only knows. I suppose
+these scruples are the last illusions of our egoism. Still, I think that
+only an impudent egoist like Jevons could have carried off such an
+embarrassment with any brilliance.
+
+As it happened it was taken out of my hands. Jimmy, who had foreseen the
+thing itself, foresaw also my predicament and provided for it. As I came
+into the room he said, "It's all right, old man. You haven't got to tell
+us. We know all about it."
+
+I looked at Viola. She was sitting on part of Jimmy's chair, with her arm
+round his shoulder.
+
+"Did Norah tell you, after all?" I said.
+
+Viola pushed out her chin at me and shook her head.
+
+"No, Furny dear, she didn't tell me a thing. It was your face."
+
+"Don't you believe her," Jimmy said. "Your face hasn't anything to do
+with it. Your face is a tomb of secrets--a beautiful, white tomb. And
+_you_ are all rectitude and discretion. We knew it ages ago."
+
+"How could you possibly know it, when I didn't?"
+
+"Because it's one of those things" (he twinkled) "that other people
+always do know."
+
+"Were we as obvious as all that?"
+
+"I didn't say _you_ were obvious. I said _It_ was."
+
+I sat down facing them, and I suppose I must have looked supremely
+foolish, for Viola began to laugh and Jevons went on twinkling, not in
+the least as if he saw a joke, but with a thoughtful and complacent air,
+as if he were turning over the result of some private speculation that
+had come off entirely to his satisfaction.
+
+Then she took pity on me.
+
+"He means it was bound to happen. It was the heaven-appointed thing. The
+first minute I saw you, Wally, I thought, 'What an adorable husband he'd
+make for Norah!' And Jimmy's trying to tell you that we've been hoping it
+would come and wanting it to come and waiting for it to come for the last
+year."
+
+"I'm trying to tell him," said Jimmy, "that we've been meaning it to
+come, and trying to make it come, and seeing it come for the last three
+years."
+
+This was a blow at the attitude of romantic devotion, and I had to defend
+it.
+
+"Do you believe that, Viola?" I said.
+
+"Of course I believe it if Jimmy says so."
+
+I sent her a look that was meant to say, "You ought to know better;" but
+it missed fire somehow. She went on swinging her feet and laughing softly
+at me over Jimmy's shoulder. She seemed, like Jimmy, to be contemplating
+some exquisite knowledge that she had. And at last she said:
+
+"Aren't you glad now that you didn't marry me?"
+
+I said, "What am I to say to that?"
+
+Jimmy got up and clapped me on the shoulder. "Never mind her," he said.
+"Tell the truth and shame the devil. Tell her you're thundering glad."
+
+At that she slid down from her perch and came round to me and patted me
+very gently on the head.
+
+"_I_ am, Wally. Jimmy, you're a beast."
+
+And she went out of the room. Jimmy said that nothing she had contributed
+to the discussion became her like her leaving it.
+
+She had left it to him.
+
+He got into his chair again and sat down to it.
+
+"Now, perhaps," he said, "you see how right I was."
+
+"When?"
+
+"The first time we ever spoke about it."
+
+"My dear Jimmy, I haven't spoken to anybody about it till to-night."
+
+"We spoke about it years ago," he said.
+
+"We couldn't possibly have spoken about it years ago."
+
+"At Bruges. Perhaps it was I who spoke. I tell you I saw it coming. Don't
+you remember I gave you six months?"
+
+"You were out there, anyhow. It's taken three and a half years."
+
+"Because you were such a duffer. You behaved as if you expected the poor
+child to propose to you herself. I've been trying to make you see it for
+the last three and a half years, and you wouldn't. There never was such
+a chap for not seeing what's under his nose."
+
+"Norah isn't under my nose; she's miles above it, and if it comes to
+that, I've _seen_ it for the last three years."
+
+He had tripped me up by the heels.
+
+"There you are--that brings it to the six months I gave you."
+
+"I didn't mean I was thinking of it then. How could I be?"
+
+"Of course you weren't thinking of it. But _she_ was."
+
+"Norah? Not she! A child of seventeen!"
+
+"I don't mean Norah. I mean Viola."
+
+"Viola?"
+
+"Yes. You didn't see what the unscrupulous minx was after. She was
+plotting it and planning it the first time you were at Canterbury. I got
+a letter from her at Bruges--I can't show it you--telling me not to worry
+about you--I _was_ worrying about you, though you were such a damn fool,
+if you don't mind my saying so. She said you'd got over it all right. She
+wouldn't be surprised if some day you married Norah.
+
+"So you see," he said, "you needn't bother about Viola. She knew you
+couldn't keep it up for ever."
+
+"Keep what up?"
+
+(I knew; but something in his tone or in his twinkle made me pretend I
+didn't.)
+
+"Your wonderful attitude," he said. "She meant you to marry Norah."
+
+"Why--on earth--should she have wanted that?"
+
+"Well--because I worried about you, and she wanted me to be happy. And
+because she worried about you, and wanted you to be happy. And because
+she worried about the Kid, and wanted her to be happy. And because she
+wanted the rest of them to be happy too."
+
+I said I didn't know what I'd done to be so happy.
+
+"You've done nothing. You don't owe it to yourself that you're happy. My
+dear fellow, you've been watched, and looked after, and protected for
+three and a half years with an incessant care. If you'd been left to
+yourself you'd have bungled the whole business. Either you wouldn't have
+proposed to her at all, or you'd have proposed three times running when
+it was too late."
+
+I pointed out to him that I hadn't proposed three times running, neither
+was I too late.
+
+"All the same," he said, "you wouldn't have thought of it if she hadn't
+gone to the Thesigers. And she wouldn't have gone to the Thesigers if
+Viola hadn't got the Thesigers to ask her. It was a put-up job. I tell
+you, my son, you've been guided and guarded. Why, you didn't even see
+that the child was grown up till I drew your attention to it."
+
+There was no use pretending I liked it. I didn't.
+
+I said, "Thank you. If a thing comes off it's your doing, and if it
+doesn't it's mine."
+
+He said it looked like that.
+
+When I saw Norah in the morning she asked me whether Jimmy had said he
+knew it was coming?
+
+I said he had.
+
+"And I suppose he thinks he made it come?"
+
+That, I said, was Jimmy's attitude.
+
+"Well, then," she said, "he didn't. You don't believe him, do you?"
+
+Did I? Not perhaps at the moment, and never at any time as Jimmy believed
+it himself. But I do think he meant it to happen. It was one of the moves
+in his difficult game. He couldn't afford to neglect any means of
+strengthening his position in his wife's family. When it came to
+acknowledging Jimmy his wife's family was divided. Portions of it,
+strange cousins whom I never met till after my marriage, refused to
+acknowledge him at all. At Lancaster Gate he was received coldly in
+accordance with the discreet policy by which the Thesigers had avoided
+the appearances of scandal. Down at Canterbury there were degrees and
+shades of recognition. Norah openly loved him. The Canon had what he
+called "a morbid liking for the fellow." Mildred and Victoria tolerated
+him. Millicent endured him as an infliction. Mrs. Thesiger concealed
+under the most beautiful manners and the most Christian charity an
+inveterate repugnance.
+
+I have forgotten Bertie. Bertie, who could generally be found at
+Lancaster Gate when he wasn't in his chambers in the Temple, was
+apathetic and amiably evasive. He took the line that Lancaster Gate took
+when he referred to his brother-in-law as a clever little beast.
+
+And to all these shades Jevons was acutely sensitive.
+
+I have known men (they were of the confraternity of letters) who declared
+that they could not understand why a man like Jevons, in Jevons's
+position, should have bothered his head for two minutes about his wife's
+family. They considered that Jevons's marriage was a disaster, not for
+the Thesigers, but for Jevons, and that his only safe and proper course
+was to leave the Thesigers alone. But it wasn't so easy to leave them
+alone when he had married into them; and to have left them would have
+been for Jevons a confession of failure. He might just as well have laid
+down his arms or pulled down the shutters of his shop. From the very
+beginning, ever since the day when he had met Reggie Thesiger, he
+conceived that the whole world of Thesigers had challenged him to hold
+his own in it, and he was too stubborn a fighter to retire on a
+challenge. Besides, he couldn't have retracted without taking Viola with
+him.
+
+And you must remember that he was thirty-two when he married her, and
+that he had behind him an unknown history of struggle and humiliation and
+defeat. The Thesigers stood for the whole world of things that he had
+missed, the world of admired refinements and beautiful amenities, that,
+without abating one atom of its refinement and amenity, had persistently
+kicked him out. Besides--and this was the pathetic part of it--he had an
+irrepressible affection for the Canterbury Thesigers, and it hungered and
+thirsted for recognition. It nourished itself in secret on any scraps
+that came its way. He met tolerance with grace, and any sort of kindness
+with passionate gratitude. I think he would have broken his neck to give
+Norah or the Canon or even Mrs. Thesiger anything they wanted. And the
+Canon and Mrs. Thesiger wanted Norah to marry me. It wouldn't become me
+to say what Norah wanted.
+
+Viola, in a serious moment, threw a light on it. (I had been dining in
+Edwardes Square on the evening of the day I came back from Canterbury
+after taking Norah down there.)
+
+"I suppose you don't know," she said, "that Mummy and Daddy fell in love
+with you first? Well, they did. They wanted you to marry me to keep me
+out of mischief, but more than anything they wanted you to marry Norah.
+You see, she's their favourite."
+
+And it seemed there was even more in it than that. They wanted to keep
+Norah out of mischief too. "Not," she said, "that Norah would ever have
+run off to Belgium, even with you." But that little adventure of Viola's
+had made them nervous. Norah was inclined to look down on the garrison;
+like Viola, she had declared in the most decided manner that she meant to
+strike out a line for herself; she wasn't going to follow Dorothy's and
+Gwinny's lead (did I say that the two married sisters lived abroad at
+their husbands' stations--Gwinny at Gibraltar, and Dorothy at Simla?),
+and that for lack of originality Mildred's engagement to Charlie Thesiger
+was "the limit."
+
+"It's a good thing, Wally," she said. "It'll knit us all tighter
+together. That's partly why we've wanted it so awfully. Do you know that
+if it hadn't been for you Norah wouldn't have been allowed to come and
+stay with us?"
+
+I said I was sure she was mistaken. Canon Thesiger--
+
+"Oh," she said, "it wasn't Daddy. He wouldn't have minded. It was Mummy.
+She never _could_ bear poor Jimmy."
+
+"But," she went on, "you're his friend. And he worked it for you. They
+can't get over those two things."
+
+I remember wondering whether deep down in her heart she meant that my
+marriage would knit her and Jimmy closer?
+
+I wondered whether Jimmy, in his wisdom, had calculated on that, too?
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At that time I didn't realize the innocence that went with Jimmy's
+wisdom. I think I credited him with insight that I know now he never had.
+I know now that, even afterwards--at the very worst--he had no
+misgivings. All the Hampstead time, all through the Edwardes Square time
+he was happy. And afterwards--well--happiness wasn't the word for it; he
+lived in a sort of ecstasy. Which shows how little in those days she had
+let him see.
+
+It was in nineteen-ten, their last year in Edwardes Square, that the
+tension began. Norah and I were married in the autumn of nineteen-nine,
+and we were living in my flat in Brunswick Square. In what I made out
+during this period I had Norah to help me, and she had wonderful lights.
+
+I never could keep track of Jimmy's accelerating material progress, but
+the Year-Books tell me that his fourth novel came out in the spring of
+nineteen-nine, and his first successful play was produced in the summer
+of that year, and ran for the whole season and on through the winter, and
+I remember that in nineteen-ten he was attacking another novel and
+another play, which--But it's the attack that is the important thing, the
+thing that fixes nineteen-ten for me.
+
+You cannot go on attacking, for years on end, with concentrated and
+increasing violence, and not suffer for it. The first effects of Jimmy's
+appalling travail may have been beneficent, but its later workings were
+malign. There's no other word for it. In nineteen-ten Jimmy was beginning
+to show signs of exhaustion. Not of his creative energy or anything
+belonging to it, though he prophesied a falling off after Novel Three,
+and declared that he could detect it. Nobody else could have detected it.
+The exhaustion was in Jimmy himself, and more especially and fatally in
+the Jimmy who struggled against what he called "the damnable tendency to
+do the sort of thing your father does."
+
+He couldn't keep it up. He couldn't stand for ever the double strain of
+attacking and defending himself against his tendency. There's no doubt
+that when he was tired he got careless. I have known him come upstairs
+after dinner, entirely sober, but looking rather drunk, with his hair
+curling over his forehead and his tie crooked and the buttons of his
+irreproachable little waistcoat all undone. I have known him do the
+oddest things with chairs and get into postures inconceivable to ordinary
+men. I have known him drop his aitches for a whole evening because he was
+too dead beat to hang on to them. And Norah, going home with me, would
+say, "Poor Jimmy--he does get it very badly when he's tired."
+
+And I have had to see Viola's face while these things were happening.
+Sometimes, when he was too outrageous, she would look up and smile with
+the queerest little half-frightened wonder, and I would be reminded of
+the time when Jimmy had jaundice and she asked me if I thought he would
+stay that funny yellow colour all his life? It was as if she were asking
+me, Did I think he would keep on all his life doing these rather alarming
+things? Sometimes he would catch himself doing them and say, "See me do
+that? That's because I'm agitated." Or, "There's another aitch gone.
+Collar it, somebody." Or, "I suppose that's what Norah would call one of
+my sillysosms." Sometimes Viola would catch him at it and reprove him.
+And then he would simply throw the responsibility on the poor old
+Registrar down in Hertfordshire.
+
+I have heard him say to her with extreme sweetness and docility: "My dear
+child, if I'd had a father and mother like yours I shouldn't do these
+things." And I have heard him say almost with bitterness: "Does _that_
+shock you? Good Heavens, you should see my father!"
+
+But he took good care she shouldn't see him. I used to think this wasn't
+very nice of him. But what can a man do in a case so desperate? There
+were risks that even Jevons couldn't take. I used to think that he salved
+his conscience by making the Registrar an allowance that increased in
+proportion to his income and by going down into Hertfordshire regularly
+every three months to see him himself. I used to think that Jimmy's
+father must have admirable tact, because he never seemed to have inquired
+why Jimmy always came alone. But Jimmy said it wasn't tact. It was pure
+haughtiness. The old bird, he said, was as proud as a peacock with his
+tail up. I used to think it wasn't very nice of him to talk like that
+about his father. And I used to think it wasn't very nice of Viola never
+to go with Jimmy on his pilgrimages.
+
+I was with them once when she was seeing him off at Euston, and I said to
+her, "Do you never go with him to see the poor old man?"
+
+She turned to me. (I hadn't seen her look stern and fiery before.)
+
+"Wally," she said, "I suppose it's because you're so good that you always
+think other people aren't. That _poor old man_ was a perfect devil to
+Jimmy. I don't say that Jimmy always was an angel to him, but he's been
+pretty decent, considering. He's told me things I couldn't tell you; and
+there were things he couldn't tell me. He says he didn't believe in God
+the Father when he was little, just because he wanted to believe in God.
+He thought God couldn't be anything so frightful as a father.
+
+"That's why he's so awfully fond of Daddy."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+And so it went on. She swung between slight shocks and passionate
+recoveries. One minute Jimmy's manners made her shudder all down her
+spine, and the next he would do some adorable thing that brought her to
+his feet. Half the time she pretended that things hadn't happened when
+they had. And when her flesh crept she had memories that lashed it.
+
+I used to wonder whether this oscillation would slacken or increase with
+time. Would she swing on a longer and more dangerous rhythm? Would she be
+flung backwards and forwards between fascination and repulsion?
+
+And I would catch myself up and answer my own words, "Of course not. The
+poor chap isn't as bad as all that."
+
+Then early in nineteen-ten Reggie Thesiger came home on leave from India.
+
+Looking back on it all now, I seem to see that until he came everything
+was going well. The oscillations, even if I didn't exaggerate them,
+couldn't have counted. Her heart was steady, and in her heart she adored
+her husband. There could be no doubt about it, she adored him. It was
+because she adored him that she suffered. Nobody can stand imperfection
+in their god.
+
+But then she adored Reggie too.
+
+She hadn't a misgiving. When Norah rushed to her with the news that
+Reggie had got his leave, she went wild and nearly strangled poor little
+Jimmy in her joy. She counted the weeks, the days, the hours till he
+landed. She argued with Norah as to which of them should have him first
+and longest when he came to town. Norah told me she didn't think he would
+stop long with _us_ if he could go to Viola. Viola was his favourite
+sister.
+
+Well, he didn't go to Viola at all. He went first to the Thesigers at
+Lancaster Gate. Then he came on to us.
+
+That was all right. We had to arrange our dates to suit the General.
+
+On the Sunday we dined at Lancaster Gate; Viola and Jevons were not
+there. Reggie had come up on the Friday for ten days, and he stayed with
+the General for the weekend.
+
+He said he could stay with us for the whole week if we could have him.
+
+We were out in the hall saying good-bye, and he was getting Norah's cloak
+for her. The hall was full of Thesigers and guests. I remember Norah
+saying, "We'd love to have you. But--we promised Vee-Vee to divide you
+with her."
+
+And I remember seeing Reggie's face stiffen over the collar of the cloak
+as he held it. He said he didn't want to be divided.
+
+It was so startling, she told me afterwards, that she lost her head. She
+said out loud, so that everybody heard her, "Not with Vee-Vee?" And
+everybody heard his answer:
+
+"Not with Jevons."
+
+Then he laughed.
+
+In spite of the laugh Norah was quite frightened. She asked me, going
+home in the taxi, what I thought it meant. I said I thought it meant that
+Reggie didn't particularly care about meeting Jimmy. She said, "Well,
+he'll have to meet him to-morrow night. I'm jolly glad we've asked them."
+
+She added pensively, "Reggie's quite changed. I suppose it's India."
+
+I knew she didn't suppose anything of the sort. She thought the General
+had been telling him things; and I must confess I thought so too. Here, I
+may say at once, we did that kindly and honourable gentleman a wrong.
+
+He came to us in great distress the next morning. He said Viola and
+Jevons were to have dined with them last night, only Reggie had declared
+he wouldn't have anything to do with Jevons. He didn't want to meet him
+if he could help it. He said, Couldn't they ask Viola without him? And
+they _had_ asked Viola without him, and Viola had refused to come.
+
+"And do you know" (he stared at us in a sort of helpless horror) "he
+hasn't been to see her yet."
+
+The poor General went away quite depressed. He lingered with me on the
+doorstep a moment. "I'm afraid, Furnival," he said, "Reggie's going to
+make it very awkward for us."
+
+He did make it awkward.
+
+It might have been discreet to have put off our dinner. But I knew that
+Norah wouldn't hear of it; all the more if Reggie was going to make it
+awkward. You don't suppose one Thesiger was going to knuckle under to
+another. It wasn't their way. They were loyal to the last degree, but
+loyalty was another matter. And if it came to that she was loyal to her
+sister.
+
+I shall never forget that dinner. I shall never forget Viola's coming in
+with Jevons behind her.
+
+She was, as I think I've said, a beautifully-made woman, with long limbs
+and superb shoulders, and a way of holding her small head high. Well, she
+came in (they were a little late) with her head higher than ever, and
+with a sweep of her limbs, as if her crushed draperies (she was all in
+white) were blown backward by a wind; her gauze scarf billowed behind her
+as if it were wings or sails and the wind filled it. She was like the
+Victory of Samothrace; she was like a guardian and avenging angel; she
+was like a ship in full sail breasting a sea. Up to her eyes she was
+everything that was ever splendid and courageous and defiant.
+
+But her eyes--there was a sort of scared grief in them.
+
+I had seen fright in her face once before, the day when she came into the
+room at Hampstead with Jevons behind her and saw Reggie there. I said to
+myself, "She always was afraid of Reggie." But that, for the second that
+it lasted, was sheer fright. This was different. There was anguish in it;
+and it was only in her eyes.
+
+And Jevons's entry, this time, was simultaneous. Little Jimmy came behind
+her, holding himself rather absurdly straight and breathing hard.
+
+And there was Reggie Thesiger waiting for them, standing by the hearth
+between Norah and me.
+
+Oh yes, India had changed him. Surely, I thought, it must be India that
+had made him so lean and stiff and hard. But he was handsomer even than
+he had been five years ago, and he looked taller, he was so formidably
+upright and well-built. (As a competitive exhibition Jimmy's straightness
+was pitiful. And yet, if his antagonist had been anybody but Reggie, it
+might have had a certain dignity.)
+
+I wondered, "_How_ is she going to greet him? Will she lower her flag and
+kiss him, or what?"
+
+She sailed up to Norah first and kissed her. She shook hands with me. She
+smiled at me (I don't know how she managed it). Then she turned to
+Reggie.
+
+She didn't lower her flag. She said, "Well, Reggie," as if they had met
+yesterday. There was no kissing or any anticipation of a kiss; they shook
+hands, not at arm's length, not in the least as if they had had a
+quarrel, but like well-bred people in the house of strangers. It was all
+beautifully done.
+
+Then it was Jimmy's turn. Reggie looked at him as if he wasn't there.
+
+If I could have run away with any decency I'd have run rather than face
+what came then. But the women--Heavens, how they stood to their guns!
+
+Norah said, "Reggie, I think you know your brother-in-law?" with an air
+of stating a platitude rather than of recalling him to a courtesy he had
+forgotten.
+
+"I don't think so," said Reggie.
+
+But he bowed. And Jimmy bowed. There was no handshaking, at arm's length
+or otherwise.
+
+Viola said, "You _do_ know him. You met him four years ago in my rooms at
+Hampstead."
+
+"Did I? I'm afraid I've forgotten."
+
+"You did meet, didn't you, Jimmy?"
+
+"I believe so," said Jimmy, with a quite admirable indifference.
+
+"Anyhow," said Norah sweetly, "you can't say you haven't _heard_ of him."
+
+She meant well, poor darling, but it was a bad shot. It missed its mark
+completely, and it drew down the enemy's fire.
+
+"I _have_ heard of Mr. Jevons," said Reggie, and he looked at Jimmy as if
+he realized for the first time that he was there, and resented it.
+
+Norah turned positively white. It was Viola who saved us.
+
+"Please don't, Norah. It's really awful for poor Jimmy now he's on all
+the buses and in the Tube?"
+
+She referred to the monstrous posters that advertised his play in black
+letters eighteen inches high on a scarlet ground.
+
+"How do you feel when you're in the Tube?" said Norah.
+
+"You feel," said Jimmy--he was sitting in one of his worst attitudes,
+with his legs stretched straight out before him and his feet tilted toes
+upwards. I noticed that Reggie couldn't bear to look at him--"you feel
+first of all as if everybody was looking at you; you feel a silly ass;
+then you feel as if everybody was looking at the posters; then you know
+they aren't looking at them. Then you leave off looking at them yourself.
+And if one does hit you in the eye you feel as if it referred to somebody
+else, and after that you don't feel anything more."
+
+It wasn't brilliant, but the wonder was he found anything to say at all.
+
+I was thankful when Pavitt came in to tell us that dinner was served. It
+delivered us from Jimmy's attitudes.
+
+When it came to dining at our small round table we saw how badly we had
+erred in not asking anybody else but Viola and Jimmy. A sixth, a woman
+(almost any woman would have done in the circumstances), a woman to talk
+to Reggie might have pulled us through. But with Reggie sitting beside
+Viola, with Jimmy opposite them by himself between me and Norah (the only
+possible arrangement) it was terrible.
+
+Reggie persisted in talking to Viola like a well-bred stranger. He
+persisted in ignoring Jevons.
+
+And Jimmy retaliated by ignoring _him_. There was nothing else for him
+to do. Only it wasn't one of the things he did well. Beside Reggie's
+accomplishment he looked mean and pitiful and a little vulgar. God
+forgive me for putting it down, but that is how he looked.
+
+And once or twice, under the strain of it, he dropped an aitch with the
+most disconcerting effect.
+
+I often wonder what Pavitt thought of that family party. He certainly
+served Viola as if he loved her, and Jimmy as if he was sorry for him,
+calling his attention to a dish or a wine which, he seemed to say, it
+would be a pity for him to miss--it might prove a consolation to him.
+
+Our agony became so unbearable that the women ended it when they could by
+leaving us at the stage of coffee and cigarettes. Then, with us three men
+the position became untenable, and Reggie found that he'd have to go out
+at nine; he had an appointment with a fellow. And at nine he went.
+
+Viola and Jimmy left us very soon after.
+
+She said, "It was dear of you to have us," not in the least humbly, but
+as if they had enjoyed it.
+
+Up to the very last she was magnificent, and even Jimmy played up well.
+In fact, when Reggie's perfection was no longer there to damage him he
+was rather fine.
+
+It was poor little Norah who broke down. I found her crying all by
+herself on the couch in my study when they'd gone.
+
+She said, "Wally, this is awful. It's _the_ most awful thing that could
+have happened."
+
+I said, "Oh, come--" and she persisted. "But it _is_. She adored Reggie.
+He used to adore her--and--you've seen him, how he was to-night. It'll
+kill her if he keeps it up."
+
+I said, "He won't keep it up."
+
+"Oh, won't he! You don't know Reggie."
+
+I said, "It's odd. He didn't seem to mind Jimmy so much the first day he
+met him."
+
+"Oh, my dear--he didn't mind, because he never could have dreamed she'd
+marry him."
+
+"He'll come round all right when he knows him," I said.
+
+She shook her head and made little dabs at her face with her
+pocket-handkerchief.
+
+"That's just it. He thinks he does know him. I mean he thinks he knows
+something. I'm sure he thinks it."
+
+"My dear child, however could he? He couldn't even have heard. If you
+mean that Belgian business, it was all over and done with four years ago.
+Have we any of us thought of it since?"
+
+"No--but I think he had an idea then. He guessed that there must be
+something. You see--we never told Vee-Vee, but--he thought it was awfully
+queer of her to go off--anywhere--just when he was sailing."
+
+"Well," I said, "it _was_ a bit odd. She must have been awfully gone on
+Jimmy."
+
+"She was."
+
+"Poor dear. She said she meant to burn her boats."
+
+"Don't you see--that was part of the burning. She had to break the hold
+that Reggie had on her. You don't know what it was like, Wally. She had
+to break it or she could never have married Jimmy at all. It was a
+toss-up between them; and Jimmy won."
+
+"Is it going to be a toss-up between them all over again, d'you think?" I
+said.
+
+"No. It's going to be war to the knife. They won't either of them give in
+as long as Reggie's got that idea in his head."
+
+"We must get it out of his head. Surely," I said, "we can do something."
+
+"No, we can't. There's no way of getting it out. It's no good trying to
+make a joke of it. You can't joke with Reggie past a certain point. And
+it's not as if you could give him a hint. You can't hint at these
+things."
+
+"What do you think he'll do?"
+
+"He won't do anything. He won't say anything. He'll just go on like this
+all the time, and she won't be able to bear it. It'll break her heart."
+
+Well, though I agreed with her, I still thought that something could be
+done. I tried to do it when Reggie got back that night after Norah had
+gone to bed. I couldn't of course assume that he had his idea. My plan
+was to present Jevons to him in a light that was incompatible with his
+idea. It was easy enough to say that Jevons might be rather startling,
+but that he was awfully decent and the soul of honour. The soul of honour
+covered it--absolutely ruled out his idea.
+
+He didn't contradict me. He just sat there smoking amicably, just saying
+every now and then that he couldn't stand him; he was sorry--I might be
+perfectly right and Jevons might be everything I said--only he couldn't
+stand him; and he wasn't going to. Nothing would induce him to stop with
+Jevons. He didn't want to have anything to do with the little beast.
+
+When I said, "I assure you, my dear fellow, it's all right," he only
+threw the onus of suspicion on me by replying suavely, "My dear fellow, I
+assure you I never said it wasn't."
+
+It was as if he really knew it wasn't, knew something that we didn't
+know, and was determined to keep his knowledge to himself.
+
+And when I'd finished he said, "The whole thing's a mystery to _me_. I
+thought she was going to marry you." And then--"How she can stick him I
+can't think. D'you mind, old man, if I go to bed? No, I don't want any
+whisky and soda, thanks."
+
+It was Pavitt, of all people, who threw a light on it when he brought the
+whisky.
+
+"Beg your pardon, sir," said Pavitt, "but I believe I never told you that
+the Captain called here one day when you was in Belgium."
+
+"Are you quite sure, Pavitt? He called the day I left."
+
+"Yes, sir, I remember his calling the day you left. It's only just come
+back to me that he called again, three days after, I think it was. I
+told him you was gone to Belgium, and he said that was all he wanted. He
+didn't leave no message, else I should have remembered. It was the young
+gentleman's likeness to Mrs. Jevons, sir, what fixed him in my mind."
+
+I told Reggie this the next day as an instance of Pavitt's wonderful
+memory. "Only," I said, "he forgot to tell me that you called."
+
+He smiled rather bitterly as if he remembered the incident well.
+
+"Oh, I called all right," he said. "I wanted to know where you were."
+
+After that Norah and I made it out between us. Not all at once, but bit
+by bit, as things occurred to us or as he suggested them.
+
+He must have begun to suspect something when the time went on and Viola
+didn't turn up. Only he thought it was I who was at the bottom of it.
+Perhaps, so long as he thought it was I, he had made up his mind that
+there could be no great harm in it. He had been all right with her down
+at Canterbury those last few days. Anyhow, he hadn't said anything.
+
+Then--when he heard that she had married Jevons--he had his idea. It
+wasn't necessary for him to have heard anything else. And then, even if
+he hadn't guessed it, there was Jimmy's book, the "Flemish Journal," to
+tell him she had been in Belgium with him. And he knew she didn't marry
+him till afterwards.
+
+And so, he thought things. If he didn't think them of Viola he thought
+them of Jevons. (Even on the most charitable assumption he would consider
+his sister's passion for Jimmy a piece of morbid perversity.) And anyhow,
+he was left with an appalling doubt.
+
+And he wasn't going to forgive either of them, ever.
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+That we had made out something very like the truth of it I realized when
+I met Burton Withers. For eventually I did meet him. It was at the end of
+June, nineteen-ten, in the green room of the Crown Theatre on the
+hundredth night of Jimmy's play. That is what I remember it by.
+
+Norah and I were with Viola and Jimmy. Withers had come in with a friend,
+an important member of the cast, who was evidently under the impression
+that we had never met before, for he introduced him to us all round.
+Withers showed tact in not recognizing Viola or claiming the acquaintance
+he certainly had with Jevons. He had, in fact, a most reassuring air of
+starting again with a clean slate and no reminiscences. This was in the
+interval between the First and Second Acts. When the curtain rose on Act
+Two, I was alone in Jimmy's box. (Jimmy and Viola and Norah were trying
+the effect of the play from the stalls.) And at the next interval Withers
+came to me there. It was funny, he said, the way little Jevons had come
+on. He didn't suppose any of us had thought of _this_ four years ago when
+we had all met together in Bruges.
+
+I said, "Did we all meet together in Bruges?"
+
+"Well, if it wasn't in Ghent. Oh--of course it was at Ghent you and I
+met. You hadn't joined the others then."
+
+At first I was hopelessly mystified by these allusions. I couldn't think
+what point he was making for or where he would come out. He seemed to be
+trying uneasily to get somewhere. Then I saw that he had had it on his
+mind that when we had last met he had made a defamatory statement to me
+about the lady who had become my sister-in-law, and about a man who had
+become a celebrity (I knew Withers's little weakness for celebrities).
+And he was scared.
+
+I must have seemed a bit lost among his allusions, for he blurted it out.
+
+"D'you know, I've been most awfully sorry for chaffing you in that
+idiotic way--about--your sister-in-law. Silly sort of thing one says, you
+know. But of course you knew I was pulling your leg."
+
+I said, "My dear Withers, of course I knew you were."
+
+Of course I knew he was doing nothing of the sort, for Withers slandered
+right and left when it wasn't worth his while to grovel, and I had no
+doubt now that he believed his own dirty tale when he told it; but he had
+been impressed and thoroughly frightened, even at the time, by the
+calmness of my bluff, and the little beast was far more afraid of us than
+we ever could have been of him now. We could henceforth dismiss Withers
+from our minds. He was a "social climber" of the sort that would eat his
+own words if he thought they would do the smallest damage to his
+climbing.
+
+As for the ladies, General Thesiger's friends, I rather think the General
+had settled with them at the time.
+
+You might say we had nothing to fear from Reggie, if Reggie's
+silence--and his deafness--hadn't been more terrible than anything
+he could have heard or said.
+
+I suppose nineteen-ten ought to stand as the year of Tasker Jevons's
+great Play, the play that ran for a whole year after the hundredth night,
+that ran on and on as if it would never stop, that, when it was taken off
+the Crown stage to make room for its successor, still careered through
+the provinces and the United States. It seemed the year of Jimmy's utmost
+affluence. If he kept it up, we said, he'd be a millionaire before he
+died of it. But it wasn't conceivable that he could keep it up for long.
+We thought he'd never write another play like this one. There never would
+be another year like nineteen-ten.
+
+I believe that even Jimmy thought there'd never be another year like it,
+so far had he surpassed his own calculations, as it was.
+
+But for me nineteen-ten is the year of other things, the things that
+happened in the family, the year of Reggie's return and all the misery
+that came from it, the year of Viola's struggle--the agony of which we,
+Norah and I, were the helpless spectators. _She_ never said a word to us.
+It was Norah who conveyed to me the secret, intimate shock of it.
+
+That year Jimmy rained boxes and stalls and theatre-parties for his play
+on all the Thesigers (except Reggie) and on all their friends, and on
+Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands when they came back from Simla and
+Gibraltar (it was the year of their return too); but we stood behind the
+scenes of a tragedy that mercifully was hidden from Jimmy's eyes. It was
+the year when Mildred broke off her engagement to Charlie Thesiger. It
+was the year when our little girl, Viola, was born; the year when we
+moved from our Bloomsbury flat into the little house in Edwardes Square,
+taking over the end of the lease and all the fixtures and some of the
+furniture from Jimmy. Jimmy hadn't a child, and he had sworn that he
+never would have one; he was so afraid (and this fear was the only thing
+that disturbed his optimism), so horribly afraid that Viola might die.
+But he had outgrown the house in Edwardes Square. It was the year of his
+first really startling expansion.
+
+It was the year when he moved into the house in Mayfair.
+
+Why Mayfair we really couldn't think. He said he liked the sound of
+it; it made him feel as if he was in the country when he wasn't, and as
+if it was the month of May, when there never was any month of May in
+England; as if there were a maypole where the fountain is in Park Lane;
+and as if processions, and processions of horses, splendid stallions and
+brood-mares and thoroughbreds and hacks and great Suffolk punches with
+their manes and tails tied up with ribbons were coming past his house to
+the fair.
+
+He may have felt like that about it. I put no limits to Jimmy's
+imagination; but I suspected him of throwing out these airy fancies as a
+veil to cover the preposterous nature of his ambition.
+
+It was also the year when he began to talk about motor-cars and think
+about motor-cars and dream about motor-cars at night.
+
+And it was the year in which he and Viola went to the Riviera while the
+plumbers and painters were at work on the house in Green Street, Mayfair.
+They stayed away all autumn, and at the end of November they settled in.
+And at Christmas they gave their house-warming.
+
+It wasn't a large party--only a few friends of Viola's, and Jimmy's
+lawyer and his doctor and his agent, and a few picked members of the
+confraternity; the rest were Thesigers. If Jimmy had meant to give a
+demonstration proving that he could gather the whole of his wife's family
+round him at a pinch, he had all but succeeded. I suppose every available
+member had turned up that night, except Reggie. The General and his wife
+and daughters were there; and Charlie Thesiger and Bertie; and Canon and
+Mrs. Thesiger (they had come up from Canterbury on purpose, and were
+staying with the General); and Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands; and
+Victoria and Mildred, who stayed with Viola; and Millicent, who came to
+us; and a whole crowd of miscellaneous aunts and cousins; perhaps sixty
+altogether, counting outsiders.
+
+Norah and I had been away for weeks in the country and had only got back
+that afternoon, so we had not seen the house in Green Street since it had
+been furnished. It burst, it literally burst, on us, without the smallest
+warning or preparation.
+
+Like Jimmy's first novel, it was designed to startle and arrest, hitting
+you in the eye as you came in. The actual reception was held in the large
+hall, which had been formed by turning what had once been the dining-room
+loose into the passage and the stair-place.
+
+So far the architect had done his work well. After that he had been left
+to struggle with and interpret as he best could the baronial idea that
+had been imposed on him. The hall was panelled half-way in dark oak, and
+above the oak the walls were hung with a rough papering of old gold. But
+what hit you in the eye as you came in was the oak staircase that went up
+royally along the bottom wall. It had scarlet-and-gold Tudor roses on the
+flank of the balustrade, and at every third banister there was a shield
+picked out in scarlet and gold. And at the bottom of the balustrade and
+at the turn a little oak lion sat on his haunches and held up yet another
+shield (picked out in scarlet and gold) in his fore-paws. The bare oak
+planks of the upper floor made the ceiling, and there was an enormous
+Tudor rose in the middle of it, where other people might have had a
+chandelier, and little Tudor roses blazed at intervals all along the
+cornice. And there was a great stone hearth and chimney-piece, a Tudor
+chimney-piece, mullioned, with a shield carved in the centre and the
+motto: "_Dominus Defensor Domi_," and on either side the rose and the
+grill, the rose and the grill, alternately. There were andirons on the
+hearth and an immense log burning, and swords and daggers and suits of
+armour hung on the gold walls above the panelling.
+
+And I swear to you that the curtains and upholstery were in tapestry
+cloth, the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground. It was as if
+Jimmy had wanted to say to the Thesigers that if it came to being Tudor,
+he could be as Tudor as any of them, and more so. Thus deeply had he
+absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere.
+
+When she saw the suits of armour Norah squeezed my arm and breathed
+"Oh--my _darling_ Wally!"--in an ecstasy that was anguish. Poor Mildred's
+plump face turned as scarlet as the Tudor roses with an emotion that we
+could not fathom, but judged to be painful.
+
+We had come early with the idea of making ourselves useful, if necessary;
+but there was hardly anybody there yet, only two or three guests drinking
+coffee or champagne-cup at the long table under the windows, and Jimmy,
+who stood in the middle of his Tudor hall, talking to one of the
+confraternity, and rocking himself gently from his toes to his heels and
+from his heels to his toes again, as a sign that he was not in the least
+elated, but only at his ease.
+
+He was delighted to see us, and for quite three seconds he ceased his
+rocking and began to twinkle in a most natural and reassuring manner.
+Then I remember him scuttling away to greet another guest, and the
+_confrere_ gazing after him with affection and turning to us in a sort
+of grave enjoyment of the scene. I remember Viola coming up to us and her
+little baffling smile and her look--the look she was to have for long
+enough--of detachment from Jimmy and his Tudor hall. I remember the dark
+blue, half-transparent gown she wore that was certainly not Tudor, and
+her general air of being an uninvited and inappropriate guest, and how
+she conveyed us to the table to get drinks "all comfy" before the others
+came. And when Viola had drifted away, I remember Charlie Thesiger
+strolling up to us. The supercilious youth had been, getting a drink "all
+comfy" on his own account, and his little stiff moustache was still wet
+with Jimmy's champagne-cup above the atrocious smile he met us with.
+
+He asked us if we'd seen the drawing-room.
+
+We said we hadn't, and he advised us to go up and look at it at once,
+before anybody else did. "You can't see it properly," he said, "unless
+you're alone with it."
+
+I suppose we ought to have been grateful to Charlie for not letting us
+miss it, and it was perfectly true that the way to see it was to be alone
+with it; there would, indeed, have been a positive indecency in seeing it
+in any other way. He had spared our decency. And yet I think we hated him
+for having sent us there. It was as if he had sent us to look at
+something horrible, at an outrage, at violence done to shrinking,
+delicate things.
+
+We looked at it, and we looked at each other. We didn't speak, and I
+don't think either of us smiled. I remember Norah going behind me and
+closing the door swiftly, as she might have closed it on some horror that
+she and I had to deal with alone. I remember her saying then, "This is
+_too_ awful!" not in the least as if she meant what we were looking at,
+but as if she saw something invisible that lurked and loomed behind it,
+so that I asked her what she thought it meant.
+
+"It means," she said, "that Jimmy's done it all himself. He's had to do
+it all himself. She hasn't _cared_."
+
+I said, it looked as if _he_ hadn't cared.
+
+She moaned, "Oh, but he did--he did. He's cared so awfully. That's the
+dreadful part of it. You can see he has. Just look at those vases and
+those cabinets and things. And think of the money the poor thing must
+have spent on it!"
+
+"But," I said, "it's so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable.
+The old house was perfect. So, in its way, was the cottage."
+
+"I'm afraid that wasn't Jimmy's taste--it was Vee-Vee's. She did
+everything."
+
+"She told us _he_ did."
+
+"Poor darling--she wanted us to think he did."
+
+"He appreciated it, anyhow."
+
+"He'd appreciate anything if she did it."
+
+"Then," I said, "why should he break loose like this now?"
+
+"Because she hasn't cared. She hasn't cared a hang. She's left everything
+to him. And you can see, poor dear, how he's spread himself."
+
+Oh, yes, you could see. It was as if he had never had scope before, and
+now, with no limit to his opportunity, he had simply run amok. It wasn't
+that the things he had gathered round him in his orgy were not fine
+things. It was the awful way he'd mixed them, yielding incontinently to
+each solicitation as it came along. Dealers had been on the look-out for
+Jimmy to exploit his fury.
+
+In his Tudor hall he had been constrained to unity by a great idea. But
+not here. And reminiscences of the Canterbury drawing-room had suggested
+to him that you _could_ mix things. So, using a satinwood suite with
+tinted marqueterie and old rose upholsterings (he had succumbed to it in
+the first freshness of his innocence) as a base, he had added Boule
+cabinets and modern Indian tables in carved open-work to Adams cabinets
+and Renaissance tables in ebony inlaid with engraved ivory, and
+eighteenth-century gilded bergere chairs to old oak and Chippendale.
+Cloisonne and Sevres stood side by side on the same shelf. He had an
+Aubusson carpet in the middle of the floor, and his Bokhara rugs at
+intervals down the sides. Norah was sitting on the emerald-green brocade
+of an Empire sofa, clutching the gilt sphinx head of the arm-end. It was
+a double room, and emerald-green curtains hung at the tall windows in the
+front and at the large stained-glass window at the back, and at the wide
+archway between. And an Algerian lamp swung from the back ceiling, and an
+Early Victorian glass chandelier from the front.
+
+"And the awfullest thing of all is," Norah was saying, "that he's done it
+to please her."
+
+"Don't believe her. That's the beautiful part of it."
+
+Viola had come in by the door of the back room and she was smiling at us.
+
+Yet, even as she smiled, she had that look of being detached, of not
+caring.
+
+We couldn't say anything--we were too miserable. She looked round the
+dreadful rooms as if she were trying to see them for the first time, as
+if some reverberation of the horror we had felt did penetrate to her in
+her remoteness. She smiled faintly.
+
+"What _does_ it matter," she said, "so long as it makes him happy? It
+would be sweet if you'd come down and help us now."
+
+We went down, and the house-warming began.
+
+It was Jimmy who told us what our business was. We were to stand by
+visitors, he said, as they came in and break the shock (he had observed
+it) of the Tudor hall. If we couldn't break it we must do what we could
+to help recovery. He had seen desperate cases yield to champagne-cup
+administered during the first paroxysm.
+
+We had a little trouble with some of the minor confraternity--their
+emotions were facile and champagne intensified them. They would ask where
+the throne-room was and when our host was going to be measured for his
+suit of armour, and what did we think he'd done with the family
+portraits?
+
+But the Thesigers (all except Charlie--and Charlie, Norah said, had no
+heart), the Thesigers offered an example of the most beautiful manners.
+I shall never forget the General's face as the suits of armour struck
+him--his sudden spasm of joy and the austere heroism that suppressed it.
+And the Canon--
+
+The Canon rose to even greater heights. We were a bit afraid that he
+would overdo it and look as if he were trying to show us how a Christian
+gentleman could bear such things as Jimmy's furnishings. But no. He
+behaved as though he saw nothing in the least unusual in his furnishings,
+as though Jimmy's Tudor hall and miscellaneous drawing-room were his
+natural background.
+
+But for sheer pluck and presence of mind not one of them could touch
+Jevons. He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above
+them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his
+atmosphere of deadly peril. He volplaned, he looped the loop. _His_
+behaviour was unsurpassable. For _his_ case, if you like, was desperate.
+I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room.
+He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger,
+not the quiver of an eyelash, had escaped him. And consider what it
+meant to him. In a furious climax of expenditure he had achieved the
+arresting spectacle of his house in Mayfair, and his first night, his
+house-warming, was turning under his eyes into a triumph for the
+Thesigers' manners and a failure for him. He had no illusions. Unless he
+did something to stop it, the whole thing would be one enormous and
+lamentable and expensive failure.
+
+He had to do something. And he did it. He left off his uneasy swagger and
+his rocking. He met the heroic and beautiful faces of the Thesigers with
+his engaging twinkle. He sought out and ministered to two young girls who
+had been brought there by the minor confraternity and were hiding in a
+corner on the point of hysteria. We heard him telling them that the
+throne-room was being built out over the scullery leads (he must have
+known what the minor confraternity had been up to), that in the great
+fireplace in his kitchen you could roast three journalists whole, and
+that the question of the family portraits was receiving his attention. He
+had a deal on with the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery for the
+purchase of the Holbein Henry the Eighth. By the time he had finished it
+was open to us to suppose that the house in Mayfair was his joke and not
+ours, that he had furnished it in this preposterous manner in order to be
+really and truly funny, and to keep himself and Viola in perfect and
+perpetual gaiety. It was as if he were trying to say to us, "None of you
+people--least of all the confraternity--knows how to live. Life isn't a
+calamity; it's a joke; and to live properly you should meet life in its
+own spirit; you should do exuberant and gay and gorgeous things, like
+me."
+
+And then when we had all come round, he rearranged all the furniture in
+his drawing-room for charades (showing no respect whatever for his
+satinwood suite); and after the charades he rolled up his Aubusson carpet
+and cleared the place for a dance that was ruin to his parquet floor.
+And we had supper; and then more dancing till four o'clock in the
+morning.
+
+Of the dancing I remember nothing but Viola whirling round and round, as
+it were for ever, in Charlie Thesiger's arms, and her dead-white face
+looking over his shoulder, as if she saw nothing, nothing whatever; as if
+she were detached even from the arms that held her.
+
+My last recollection is of Jimmy's face when Norah said to him, "Oh,
+Jimmy, I _love_ your dear little lions!"--and Jimmy's answer:
+
+"Little lions--yes--they make me feel tall and majestic."
+
+"He _is_ going it, isn't he?" said Charlie Thesiger.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+At this point, when I look back over what I've written, it seems to me
+that I've done nothing but record changes so many and so marked that
+their history has no sort of continuity. But in reality it was not so. Up
+to December, nineteen-ten, there was no break, not even a dividing line.
+Compared with what happened then I am compelled to think of Viola's
+marriage, not as a risky experiment that had so far defeated prophecy,
+but as an entirely serene and happy thing. Between the moment when they
+set up that four-post bed in that absurd little house in Hampstead and
+the day of their leaving Edwardes Square behind them I cannot point to
+any time and say, "That was the beginning of it," or put my finger on an
+event and show the difference there.
+
+Unless it was Reggie's coming back.
+
+But the results of that didn't appear till later.
+
+Any difference I may have noted previously was an affair of shades, of
+delicate oscillations. There was no lapse without a recovery, no
+departure without a return.
+
+And here, at the end of nineteen-ten, I got a line drawn sharply on
+either side of a break I cannot bridge. The minute Jimmy moved into that
+house in Mayfair things began to go wrong.
+
+It was as if Jimmy, in his love of doing risky things, had cast, this
+time, a dreadful die.
+
+From that evening onward I watched them with anxiety. I do not know how
+far Jevons was aware that the house in Mayfair was a blunder; I think he
+wouldn't have acknowledged that it was a blunder at all. His own attitude
+to it was not in the least disturbed by his humorous perception of other
+people's. With his dexterity in adjustments he was quite capable of
+reconciling them, quite capable of enjoying the effect it had on nervous
+organisms while he himself took it seriously. It was, after all, his own
+achievement, and a very astonishing achievement too. He continued to
+respect it as the immense sign of his material prosperity, the
+advertisement, you may say, of his arrival. His business instinct would
+never have allowed him to repent of an advertisement.
+
+There _was_ this gross element in his enjoyment.
+
+And there was also the pure and charming happiness of a child that
+suddenly finds itself left, with boundless opportunity, to its own
+gorgeous caprice. You could no more blame Jevons for the bad taste of his
+drawing-room and his Tudor hall than you could blame a child for its
+joy in a treasure of tinsel and coloured glass.
+
+But when we asked ourselves where, in this outbreak of Jimmy's fantasy,
+did Viola come in, we had to own that she came in nowhere. Not only had
+she stood by without lifting a finger to interfere with its tempestuous
+course; not only had she submitted without a protest; she seemed to show
+no adequate sense of what had happened. Her detachment was the unnatural
+and dreadful thing.
+
+And this happiness of his was at Viola's mercy. It would last just so
+long as she could keep him from knowing that he had outraged the beauty,
+the fitness and the simplicity she loved. I thought how he had once
+boasted that he knew what she wanted, that he knew what she was thinking
+and feeling all the time. How could he have imagined that she wanted
+_this_? What was his knowledge worth if he didn't know what she would
+think and feel about it?
+
+Unless, indeed, she had lied to him. Lied from first to last,
+deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the
+pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and
+it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola
+had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside,
+where you would have thought she would have most wanted to plunge in; the
+calculation and the indifference both were so beyond her that you could
+only think one thing: she hated it; she hated the new turn his prosperity
+had taken; she almost hated him because of it; and her heart was broken
+because of Reggie, and it was hardening where it broke; she hated Reggie
+at moments; and she had moments of hating Jevons because he had come
+between them; and she was compounding with her conscience, punishing
+herself for all these hatreds and for a thousand secret criticisms and
+disloyalties and repugnances; avenging, as it were beforehand, all
+hatreds and criticisms, disloyalties and repugnances to come. For she saw
+it all now--how it was going to be. And she was trying to make up for it
+by giving Jimmy his own way in the things that, as she had said, "didn't
+matter."
+
+And if Jimmy's way was to surround her with pretentious silliness instead
+of beautiful simplicity, then she must rise above her surroundings. Her
+spirit, at any rate, must refuse to be surrounded.
+
+Her attitude was more lofty than you can imagine. As Norah had said,
+there would always be a Belfry--something high and unusual--in Viola's
+life. Well, she was going to live in the Belfry, that was all. And if she
+was to be perfectly safe in her Belfry, and Jimmy perfectly happy in his
+Tudor hall, he mustn't know that she was there.
+
+I don't know how she really put it to herself; I don't suppose she "put"
+it any way; but subconsciously, as they say, it must have been like that.
+Anyhow, her behaviour amounted to an evasion of Jimmy, and this
+particular evasion was sad enough when you consider that in the beginning
+it had been Jimmy who had taken her to look at the Belfry--who was the
+one man who could be trusted to take her, and that she would never have
+dreamed of setting off on such an adventure by herself, and that she
+wasn't fitted for it. In fact, I can't think of anybody less fit.
+
+It showed more than anything how the glamour must have worn off him.
+
+It had worn off even for us to whom he came each time with a comparative
+freshness. And if it hadn't worn off for his public and for the
+confraternity, it was simply because as an engineer of literature he was
+inexhaustible. He had so perfected his machinery that the turning out
+of novels and of plays had become with him a sort of automatic habit, and
+if there was any falling off in his quality he was right when he said
+that nobody but himself would find it out. He had got an infinite
+capacity for plagiarizing himself; and in his worst things he imitated
+his best so closely that he might well defy you to tell the difference.
+
+But you cannot work as he had worked for five years at a stretch and not
+suffer for it. And you cannot aim at material success as he had aimed,
+deliberately and continuously, for five years without becoming yourself a
+bit material. And you cannot be immersed and wallow in it as he wallowed
+without corruption.
+
+There's no doubt that for the next, two--three--four years he wallowed.
+He was so deep in that, even after Viola's illness that came in
+nineteen-thirteen and purged him somewhat, he continued to wallow. And we
+had to stand by while he was doing it and pretend that we weren't
+shocked. There was no good trying to give him a hand to help him out, he
+was so happy wallowing.
+
+I am far from blaming him. Personally, if it hadn't been for Viola, I
+should have liked to think that he was able to get all that ecstasy out
+of his sordid triumph. For it _was_ sordid. If it wasn't for Viola you
+could tick off each year with a note of his preposterously increasing
+income, and say that was all there was in it.
+
+I muddle up the first years of it. I know that in nineteen-eleven he
+brought out his fifth novel and his third play and that the run and
+the returns of both were astounding, even for him. I know that in
+nineteen-twelve he brought out two novels and two new plays that ran at
+the same time, and that he roped in Europe and the Colonies; and that his
+income rose into five figures. He couldn't help it. His business was a
+thing that had passed beyond his control. With infinite exertions he had
+set it spinning, and now it looked as if he had only to touch it now and
+then with his finger to keep it going. And if he did get a bit excited is
+it any wonder? There was the dreadful fascination of the thing that
+compelled him to watch it till its perpetual gyrations went to his head
+and made it reel.
+
+His figure seems to me to reel slightly as it moves through those rooms
+in the house in Green Street, and before the footlights as he answered
+calls, and across the banquet-halls of the "Ritz" or the "Criterion" or
+the "Savoy," when--about three times a year--he celebrated his triumphs.
+I see those years as a succession of banquets running indistinguishably
+into each other. I see him buying more and more furniture and
+superintending its disposal with excitement. He seems to me to have been
+always buying things. I've forgotten most of them except the things he
+bought for Viola--the jewellery that frightened her, the opera cloak that
+made her hysterical, the furs that had to be sent back again (you'd have
+thought he couldn't have gone wrong with furs, but he did), and the hats
+that even Jimmy owned it was impossible to wear. I can see his face
+saddened by these failures and a little puzzled, as if he couldn't
+conceive how his star should have gone back on him like that. I can see
+him, and I can see Viola, kneeling on the floor in his study and packing
+some beastly thing up in paper, tenderly, as if it had been the corpse of
+a beloved hope; and I can hear him saying (it was after the opera cloak
+and the hysterics), "Walter, you can monkey with a woman's 'eart, and you
+can ruin her immortal soul, but if you meddle with her clothes it's hell
+for both of you. Don't you do it, my boy."
+
+I remember scores of little things like that, things done and things said
+with an incorruptible sweetness and affection, but things accentuated
+with lapsed aitches and with gestures that only Jimmy was unaware of.
+Those years are marked for me more than anything by the awful increase
+in his solecisms. Their number, their enormity and frequency rose with
+his income, and for the best of reasons. It was as if, his object being
+gained, he could afford them. He was no longer on his guard. He had no
+longer any need to be. The strain was over--he relaxed, and in relaxation
+he fell back into his old habits.
+
+All those years we seem to have been looking on at the slow, slow process
+of his vulgarization. By nineteen-twelve the confraternity had begun to
+regard Tasker Jevons as an outrageous joke. And in nineteen-thirteen,
+when both his plays were still running, even his father-in-law said that
+he was a disgusting spectacle. And Reggie (he was Major Thesiger now,
+with a garrison appointment at Woolwich) Reggie kept as far away from him
+as ever.
+
+Sometimes I have thought that Viola's detachment helped his undoing. She
+wasn't there to pull him up or to cover his disasters; she had more and
+more the look of not being there at all.
+
+And Charlie Thesiger was always there. There with a most decided look of
+being up to something.
+
+Jevons didn't seem to mind him. You might have said that Charlie was
+another of the risks he took.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+In nineteen-thirteen Jimmy bought a motor-car.
+
+He was more excited about his motor-car than he had been about his
+house--any of his houses. Even Viola was interested and came rushing down
+from her Belfry when it arrived.
+
+He bought it at the end of January. A good, useful car that would shut or
+open and serve for town or country. But it was no good to them till
+April.
+
+For all February and March Viola was ill. She had been running down
+gradually for about two years, getting a little whiter and a little
+slenderer every month, and in the first week of February she got
+influenza and ignored it, and went out for a drive in the motor-car with
+a temperature of a hundred and four.
+
+Nineteen-thirteen stands out for me as the year of Viola's illness.
+
+It turned to pneumonia and she was dangerously ill for three weeks, in
+fact, she nearly died of it; and for more weeks than I can remember she
+lay about on sofas to which Jimmy and the nurse or one of us carried her
+from her bed. And in all that time Jimmy nursed and waited on her and sat
+up with her at night. If he slept it was with one eye and both ears open.
+And I never saw anybody as gentle as he was and as skilful with his hands
+and quiet. He didn't even breathe hard. And when she was convalescent and
+a little fretful and troublesome there wasn't anybody else who could
+manage her. The nurses would call him to feed her and give her her
+medicine and lift her. She couldn't bear anybody else to touch her.
+
+I remember one day when she had been moved from her bed to the couch for
+the first time and she was so weak, poor darling, that she cried. I
+remember her saying, "Jimmy, if you'll only put your hands on my forehead
+and keep them there."
+
+I think he must have sat for hours with his hands on her forehead.
+
+I doubt if he was ever away from her for more than a few minutes except
+when one of us came and dragged him out for a walk in the Park against
+his will. It was always for a walk in the Park--the same walk, through
+Stanhope Gate to the end of the Serpentine and back again, so that he
+could time it to a minute. He wouldn't look at his motor-car. I think he
+hated it. Anyhow, I know he lent it to us until she was well enough to go
+out in it again.
+
+She wasn't well enough till April. She never would have been well enough,
+she never would have been with us at all, the doctors and the nurses
+said, if it hadn't been for Jimmy. He swore that they were fools when
+they gave her up and said she couldn't live. He said he'd _make_ her
+live. And I believe he made her.
+
+He gave her till April to get well in; and when April came she did get
+well. And he took her away to the South of France, and to Switzerland
+when the months grew warmer (the doctor told him it was a risk, but he
+said he'd take it); he took her in the motor-car, and he brought her back
+in June, still slender but recovered.
+
+That illness of hers saved them for the time. It reinstated him. It
+improved him. He couldn't, you see, be devoted and vulgar at the same
+time. All lighter agitations and excitements might be dangerous to
+Jevons, but passion and great grief and grave anxiety ennobled him. He
+came back from Switzerland chastened and purified of all offence. Even
+Reggie couldn't have found a flaw in him.
+
+That had always been Jevons's way. Just when you had made up your mind
+that you couldn't bear him he would go and do something so beautiful that
+it made your heart ache. From the very fact that he was intolerable
+to-day you might be sure he'd be adorable to-morrow.
+
+And when we saw him the night he brought Viola home, moving quietly about
+the house, giving orders in that gentle voice that he had in reserve, we
+thought, Really, it will be all right now. Viola's passion for him had
+been near death so many times, and each time he had saved it.
+
+We hadn't allowed for the reaction--he was bound to feel it after three
+months' unnatural repression; we hadn't allowed for the reaction that
+Viola was bound to feel after three years' unnatural detachment; we
+hadn't allowed for the state of her nerves after her illness; there were
+all sorts of things we hadn't allowed for, and they all came at once;
+they burst out from under their covers one evening in June when Norah and
+I were dining in Green Street.
+
+It was one of Jimmy's gestures that began it. Viola had never been able
+to control his gestures; she had never been able to get used to them; and
+there were two in particular that made her wince still as she had winced
+in the beginning. She had contracted the habit of wincing in response to
+them. Whenever Jimmy jerked his thumb over his shoulder you saw her
+blink; and whenever he cracked his knuckles she shrank back. The blink
+followed the jerk, and the shrinking followed the cracking as the flash
+follows the snap of the trigger.
+
+I have never known Jimmy jerk as he jerked that evening. When Norah had
+no salad, when my glass was empty, when Viola wanted more potatoes, when
+he wanted more potatoes himself, Jimmy jerked his thumb. The butler
+seemed to have made it a point of honour to acknowledge no other signal.
+And every time it happened I noticed the increasing violence of Viola's
+reaction. What had once been a gentle flicker of the eyelashes was now a
+succession of spasms that left her eyebrows twisted.
+
+And at the fifth jerk she covered her eyes with her hands and cried out,
+"Jimmy, if you do that _once_ more I shall scream."
+
+Poor Jimmy asked innocently, "What did I do?"
+
+"You jerked your thumb. You jerked it five times, and I simply cannot
+bear it."
+
+"All right--_all_ right," said Jimmy. "I needn't jerk it again. It's
+quite easy not to."
+
+"I was afraid it wasn't," she sighed.
+
+I was thinking, "Whatever will she do if he cracks his knuckles?" and
+that very minute he cracked them. The butler, demoralized by Jimmy's
+methods, had gone out of the room just when he was wanted. That annoyed
+Jimmy. I have never known him produce such a detonation.
+
+Viola started as if he had hit her. But she said nothing this time.
+
+Jimmy didn't see her. He was looking over his shoulder to see whether the
+butler was or was not answering his summons. And then--I think that at
+one period of his life he must have been a little proud of his
+accomplishment--he did it again. He did it _crescendo, fortissimo,
+prestissimo, strabato and con molto expressione_; he played on his
+knuckles with a virtuosity of which I have never seen the like.
+
+The sheer technique of the performance ought to have disarmed her. (It
+enchanted Norah. But then Norah hadn't had an illness.) She flung a wild
+look round the room as if she called on treacherous heavenly powers to
+save her, then rose and very slowly, in silence and a matchless dignity,
+she walked out, past me, past Jimmy, past the returning butler, and down
+the passage and into the Tudor hall.
+
+"Well--I _am_ blowed," said Jevons.
+
+Norah put her hand on his arm.
+
+"You were wonderful, Jimmy dear," she said. "I could have listened to you
+for ever. So could Walter. But then, we haven't any nerves."
+
+"After all," said Jimmy, "what _did_ I do?"
+
+I said, "You made a most infernal noise, old chap, you know."
+
+"I say! _Come_--"
+
+We had heard the andirons go down with a clatter.
+
+That was how we knew she was in the Tudor hall.
+
+He found her there when he trotted out and took her some wine and a
+peach. He came back almost instantly.
+
+"It's all right," he said. "She's eating it."
+
+But it was very far from all right.
+
+All the prisoned storms and the secret agonies of years were loose that
+night, and they had their way with her.
+
+We found her dreadfully calm when we got back to her. She had peeled her
+peach and eaten it, and she had drunk her wine, and she was sitting by
+the great hearth where she had kicked down the andirons; she was sitting,
+I remember, on one of the Tudor chairs with the carved backs and the
+tapestry--the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground--sitting very
+upright, in her beautiful trailing gown that curled round her feet; and
+she was a little flushed (but that may have been the wine).
+
+Jimmy went and stood next her in front of his hearth, with his hands in
+his trouser pockets--I mean with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets,
+where he seemed to have put them to keep them out of mischief; and he
+twinkled as if he were still thinking of the andirons. And every now and
+then he glanced at his wife sideways out of his brilliant sapphire eyes,
+without moving his head a hair's-breadth.
+
+And none of us said anything.
+
+Then Jimmy rang for coffee, and that started her.
+
+She said, "Are you going to do any work to-night?"
+
+"No," said Jimmy, "I don't think so. Why?"
+
+"Because, if you don't want your study I'll sit in it."
+
+"All right." He said it vaguely. But he must have suspected something was
+up, for he turned his head round and looked at her straight; and again he
+said, "Why?"
+
+"Because," she said, "it's the only tolerable room in the house."
+
+He flushed faintly at this. "You mean," he said, "it's the only one I
+didn't bother about?"
+
+"I _said_ it was the only tolerable one."
+
+"I see." His flush went deep, and his mouth closed over his teeth.
+
+There was no doubt he saw.
+
+She had hurt him badly. It was quite a minute before he spoke again,
+and when he did speak you felt that he had yielded, in spite of
+himself, to an overpowering curiosity. He must--he seemed to be saying to
+himself--sift this mystery to the bottom.
+
+"D'you mean," he said, "that _this_ room doesn't--er--appeal to you?
+What's wrong with it?"
+
+"There's nothing wrong with it," she said, "if you like it."
+
+"Never mind whether I like it or not. It's detestable. _And_ the
+drawing-room?"
+
+She did not answer. I think she was ashamed of herself.
+
+"Even more so, I suppose. And--your boudoir?"
+
+(I've forgotten the boudoir. She hardly ever let any of us go into it. It
+was pretty awful.)
+
+"I do wish," she said, "you'd leave me alone. What _does_ it matter?"
+
+"Your boudoir," he went on, as if she hadn't said anything, "is, if
+possible, more detestable than the drawing-room."
+
+"I never said so."
+
+"Precisely. That's my grievance. Why, in Heaven's name, didn't you say
+so? Why did you tell me that you _liked_ all these abominations?"
+
+"Because they didn't matter."
+
+"Why lie about them if they didn't matter?"
+
+"I mean they didn't matter to me. They don't."
+
+"My dear child, what on earth do you suppose they matter to me? What made
+you think they mattered?"
+
+"The way you went on about them."
+
+"Oh--the way I go on--Well, if _that_ matters--"
+
+She rose. I think she had heard the tinkle of the coffee-cups in the
+corridor and wanted to put an end to what in any hands but Jimmy's would
+have been an unseemly altercation.
+
+"Will it matter if we go upstairs?"
+
+"No. Not a bit." He snapped and twinkled at the same time.
+
+She went, and Norah followed her.
+
+Jevons settled himself in an armchair. I saw how unperturbed and
+deliberate he was as he took his coffee from the tray, and with what an
+incorrigible air he jerked his thumb towards the staircase. I can still
+hear him call up the staircase in a magisterial voice, "The ladies are
+in the study, Parker." When we were alone he fell into meditation.
+
+It was apparently as the result of meditation that he said, "I suppose it
+is a bit crude, if you come to think of it. Only why couldn't she say so
+at the time?"
+
+I said I supposed she was afraid of hurting his feelings.
+
+"My feelings? How could I have any feelings about a blanketty
+drawing-room suite? Does she really think I'm such a fool that I can't
+live without lions on my staircase? I stuck the beastly things there
+because I thought she'd like 'em. If I thought she'd like a tame
+rhinoceros in her boudoir I'd have got her one, if I'd 'ad to go out and
+catch 'im and train 'im myself. If I thought _now_ that the only way to
+preserve her affection was to wear that suit of armour every night at
+dinner I'd wear it and glory in wearing it. There isn't any damned silly
+thing I wouldn't do and glory in."
+
+And then--"Her nerves must be in an awful state."
+
+He meditated again.
+
+"Tell you what--I'll get rid of this place. I'll let it go furnished for
+what it'll fetch. I'll only keep the things we had before--the things she
+liked. They _are_ prettier."
+
+He looked round him with his disenchanted eyes.
+
+"I can see it's all wrong, this sort of thing. It's in bad taste. Rotten
+bad taste. I suppose I must have been a bit excited about it at the
+time--I must have thought it was all right or I couldn't have stood it.
+
+"It's a phase I've gone through.
+
+"I can understand perfectly well how she feels about it.
+
+"Fact is, I hate the place myself--the whole beastly house I hate. I've
+hated it ever since she was ill in it. I can't get away from her illness.
+I shall always see her ill. She'll be ill again if we go on living in it.
+
+"I'm tired of the whole business--I'll let it to-morrow and take a house
+in the country.
+
+"You might go upstairs, old man, and see what she's doing."
+
+I went upstairs.
+
+She was sitting in one corner of the study with a book in her hand
+pretending to read. Norah was sitting in another corner with a book in
+her hand, pretending to read. I gathered that Norah had been talking to
+her sister. I took up a book and pretended to read too.
+
+Presently, when she thought we were absorbed, Viola got up and left us.
+Norah waited till the door had closed on her. Then she spoke.
+
+"Wally--it's more awful than we've ever imagined. I don't think she'll be
+able to stand it much longer."
+
+"Well," I said, "she won't have to stand it much longer. He's going to
+chuck the place. It's got on _his_ nerves, too. He understands exactly
+how she feels about it."
+
+"Let's hope he doesn't understand how she feels about--It isn't the
+place, Wally."
+
+"What is it, then?"
+
+"I'm most awfully afraid it's Jimmy."
+
+"Jimmy? You don't mean she doesn't care about him?"
+
+"Oh, no, she cares about him, and it's because she cares so that she
+can't stand him."
+
+"Well," I said, "whether she cares or not, it's rough on Jimmy."
+
+"It's rough on her. It's rough on both of them. It's getting rougher and
+rougher, and it's wearing her out."
+
+"Won't it wear him out too?"
+
+"N-no. Nothing will wear Jimmy out. He's indestructible. He'll wear her
+out."
+
+"He says he's going to take a house in the country. How do you think
+that'll answer?"
+
+She shook her head.
+
+"I don't know, Walter. I don't really know. It sounds risky."
+
+"The whole thing," I said, "was risky from the start."
+
+"There are two things," she said, "that would save them--if Reggie were
+to come round. Or if Jimmy were to have an illness; and neither of them
+is in the least likely to happen."
+
+"There's a third thing," I said--"if Viola were to have a baby."
+
+"That isn't likely either. He'd never let her. He says it would kill her.
+It's pitiful, it's pitiful. Can't you see," she said, "that he adores
+her?"
+
+I said I didn't see what we were there for, and that it was time for us
+to go.
+
+As I followed her down the stairs that led to the Tudor hall she paused
+suddenly on the landing where a second lion marked the turn. She had her
+finger to her lip. We drew back. But not before I had looked down over
+the balustrade into the hall and seen Jimmy sitting on one of the thrones
+with the lilies of France, and Viola crouching beside him on the rug with
+her head hidden on his knee.
+
+He had his hands on her forehead and was saying, "It's all right. Do you
+suppose I don't understand?"
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+It was late in August before Jevons found a country house large enough,
+yet not too large, and old enough, yet not too old--he would have nothing
+that even remotely suggested the Tudor period. And in the intervals of
+looking for his house he wrote another novel and two more plays. There
+was a decided falling-off in all of them, and I think Jevons himself was
+a little nervous. He said he'd have to be careful next time or they'd
+find him out. Once he had settled the affair of the house he would set to
+work and strengthen the position which, after all, he hadn't lost.
+
+He had gained, if anything. Nineteen-thirteen stands as his year of
+maximum prosperity. Even the house in Mayfair justified itself when he
+let it, with all its principal rooms furnished, to an American railway
+magnate at a rent that enabled him to indulge the passion he had
+conceived for Amershott Old Grange.
+
+He used to say he would never have been happy again if he couldn't have
+had Amershott Old Grange. Everything about it seemed propitious. They had
+found it by a happy accident when they weren't looking for it, weren't
+thinking of it, when they were trying to get out of Sussex and back to
+London after a long day's motoring in search of houses. Nothing that
+Essex or Kent or Buckinghamshire (Hertfordshire was ruled out by the
+presence in it of the Registrar) or Surrey or Hampshire or Sussex, so
+far, could do had satisfied them, and Jevons was beginning to talk rather
+wildly about Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and Wilts, and even Devon
+and Cornwall, when they lost their way in the cross-country roads between
+Midhurst and Petworth and so came upon Amershott Old Grange. It was
+hidden behind an old rose-red brick wall in a lane, and it was only by
+standing up in the motorcar that they caught sight of its long line of
+red-tiled dormer windows. The very notice-board was hidden, staggering
+back in an ivy bush that topped the wall.
+
+"I won't have a house," said Jimmy, "that's a day older than Queen Anne."
+No more would Viola.
+
+And the Old Grange was not a day older than Queen Anne or a day younger.
+It was the most perfect specimen of a Queen Anne house you could have
+wished to see--the long, straight front, the slender door, the two
+storeys with their rows of straight, flat windows and the steep brows of
+the dormers over them. It was all rose-red brick and rose-red tiles, with
+roses and clematis bursting out in crimson and purple all over the front.
+It stood at right angles to the wall and to the lane, and there was a
+long grass-garden in front of it, with walls all round and herbaceous
+borders under the walls; and from the high postern door in the outer wall
+opening to the lane a wide flagged path went all the way in front of the
+house to the door in the inner wall that led into the kitchen garden and
+the orchard. Further down the lane were the doors of the courtyard at the
+back of the house where the outhouses and the stables and the dovecot
+were; and beyond the courtyard there was a paddock, and you would have
+thought that was enough. But, besides his Queen Anne house and his
+gardens and his orchard and his courtyard and his dovecot and his
+paddock, Jimmy had acquired ten acres of moorland, to say nothing of a
+belt of pinewood that ran the whole length of his estate behind the
+kitchen garden and the paddock and the moor. And the whole business of
+acquiring this property went without a hitch. He took it on the long
+tail-end of a lease from an impecunious landlord who couldn't afford to
+keep it up.
+
+He obtained possession by September and in the early spring of
+nineteen-fourteen he was settled in Amershott Old Grange.
+
+They furnished it as they had furnished the house in Edwardes Square,
+with the most complete return to beautiful simplicity.
+
+Jimmy polished off a short novel and a play between October and June, and
+kept himself going on the proceeds of his old novels, his old plays, and
+his old short stories collected in a volume. Then I think he must have
+sat down to wait events.
+
+For when we went down to stay with them we found him waiting. He was
+entirely prepared for certain contingencies. If anybody knew anything
+about English social conditions it was Tasker Jevons. He had calculated
+all the chances and provided for the ostracism that attends the inexpert
+invader of the country-side. He was aware that there were powers in and
+around Amershott that were not to be conciliated. The very fact that
+their territory lay so near the frontier (Amershott is only sixty-seven
+miles from London) kept them on their guard. To any good old county
+family, Tasker Jevons's celebrity was nothing, if it was not an added
+offence, and his opulence was less than nothing. In settling among them
+he ran the risk of being ignored. But when it came to ignoring, Jimmy
+considered that success lay with the party who got in first. So before he
+settled he took care to diffuse a sort of impression that the Tasker
+Jevonses were never at home to anybody, that it was not to be expected
+that a great novelist and playwright would have time for calling and
+being called on, even if he had the absurd inclination. He had one
+solitary introduction in the neighbourhood, and he worked it very
+adroitly, not to obtain other introductions, but to spread the rumour of
+retirement and exclusiveness.
+
+His arrival, preceded by this attractive legend, became an event. You
+couldn't even affect to overlook it. And if it was not possible for Jimmy
+to subdue his features to an expression of complete ignoring, he had got
+in so promptly with his attitude that it took the wind out of the sails
+of any people who were merely proposing to ignore.
+
+Then, having come amongst them as a shy recluse, Jimmy began instantly to
+focus attention on himself. He hadn't been six weeks in the county before
+he had become the most conspicuous object in it.
+
+I don't know how he did it; you never really caught him at it; and yet,
+when you came down to stay with him, you felt all the time that he was
+doing it; you felt a sort of shame (a shame that he couldn't feel) in
+seeing that he did it so perpetually and so well. He had a way of making
+his privacy a public thing. There was something positively indecent in
+his detachment; it advertised him as no possible immersion could have
+done. I've seen him lying out on his moor basking all by himself in the
+sun; I've seen him meditating all by himself in his pinewood; I've seen
+him sitting in his walled garden, with the apparatus of his business all
+about him, when you would have said that if ever a man's life was hidden
+and withdrawn it was Tasker Jevons's. And yet it wasn't. You knew it
+wasn't; and he knew that you knew. He knew that his gardener and his
+chauffeur and his butler and his cook and his housemaid and his
+parlourmaid knew that he was sitting in his garden writing, or meditating
+in his pinewood or basking on his moor in the sun, and that their
+knowledge penetrated to every house in the village, to every house in the
+county within a radius of twenty miles. And when he was not doing any of
+these prominently tranquil things he was tearing about the country in his
+motor-car.
+
+I have never seen anything like Jevons's motoring. It was in this new
+aspect of his that he was, I think, most remarkable. I say he made his
+privacy a public thing; but in the furious publicity of his motoring it
+was the other way round. He turned the public roads into a private track
+through paradise. I do not mean that he was a road-hog; far from it. He
+had the most exquisite manners of the road, He would slow down for a hen
+in the distance and upset himself into the ditch to avoid a rabbit. I
+have known him (with his first car) give a lift to any filthy tramp
+between Midhurst and Portsmouth. I mean that the act of motoring
+transported him; and he did these things instinctively, mechanically,
+without interruption to his rapture. Speed and the wind of speed, the air
+rushing by like a water-race as he ripped through it, the streaming past
+him of trees and hedges, the humming and throbbing of his engines, were
+ecstasy to Jimmy. He had learned to drive the thing, and his sense of
+power over it gave him the physical exaltation that he craved for. I
+believe that when he sat in his motor-car, driving it, he was filled,
+intoxicated, with the pride and splendour of life. He had power over
+everybody and everything that lay in his track, except other motor-cars;
+and he exulted in his knowledge that he could annihilate them and didn't.
+He enjoyed (voluptuously) his own mercy that spared them. Through his
+motor-car he attained such an extension of his personality that he became
+intolerable to other people and unrecognizable to himself.
+
+And yet I do not think that even at the height of his ecstasy he ever
+really forgot that he was Tasker Jevons, the great novelist and
+playwright, in his motor-car. When he drove you through Portsmouth or
+Chichester, or even through little Midhurst, you felt that he thrilled
+from head to foot with self-consciousness. He knew and had acute pleasure
+in knowing that people noticed him as he went by; that the tradesmen
+turned out of their shops to stare after him; and that everybody said,
+"See that chap? That's Tasker Jevons. He always drives his own car."
+
+He owned that he enjoyed it. I remember the first time we went down to
+stay with them (it was in May of nineteen-fourteen), when he was driving
+us through Midhurst from the station, how he said to us, "I'm glad I
+thought of living in the country. It makes me feel celebrated."
+
+We asked him if he hadn't ever felt it before; and he answered solemnly,
+"Never for a minute. Never, I mean, like I do down here. In London, if
+you do gather a crowd round you, you're swallowed up in it. Besides, you
+can't always gather a crowd. D'you suppose, if I were to drive down
+Piccadilly in this car--short of standing on my head--I could attract the
+attention I've attracted to-day? You saw those fellows come out and look
+at me? Well--they do that pretty nearly every time, Furnival.
+
+"No. London's no good. Too many houses--too many people--too many
+motor-cars. You can't stand out. What a man wants to set him off is
+landscape, Furny, landscape. You should see me on the goose-green at
+Amershott towards post-time."
+
+Well, I did see him on the goose-green towards post-time, and I saw what
+he meant. It was really as if I'd never seen him before properly.
+
+Heavens, how he stood out! It was as if a stage had been cleared for him,
+and for the figure he cut. He was quite right. You couldn't have done it
+in Piccadilly, or even in the suburbs. And he wasn't in his motor-car,
+mind you, then; he was simply strolling over from his house to post a
+letter in the village on the green, and I do not know how he contrived to
+infuse into so simple an act that subtle taint of advertisement. There
+was no necessity for him to post his own letters, he could easily have
+sent a servant. But I do believe he couldn't bear to miss the opportunity
+of being seen. When he passed the Vicarage, the Vicar and his wife and
+daughters were generally in their garden, and they turned to look at his
+passing, and he was exquisitely conscious of them. The villagers came out
+on to their doorsteps to look at him, and he was conscious of the
+villagers. The geese followed him in a long line across the common and
+stretched out their necks after him, and he was conscious of the geese.
+He enjoyed the publicity they gave him, and he said so.
+
+And I began to wonder whether the funny frankness that had so disarmed us
+was really as funny as it looked (the idea of disarmament, you see, was
+serious), whether he didn't say these things because he knew we saw him
+as he really was; because he saw himself as he really was, and couldn't
+bear it; because there was no escape for him unless he could make believe
+that he was in fun when he really wasn't.
+
+I do believe there was a time (any time before his Tudor period) when he
+_was_ in fun, pure fun; and even through the Tudor period his enjoyment
+of himself was innocent. But as I walked home with him across his moor
+that evening it was borne in upon me that Jimmy's innocence was gone.
+Living in the country had killed it. I had never perceived so definite a
+taint of vulgarity in him before.
+
+You would have thought it would have been all the other way, that living
+in the country would have made altogether for simplicity and purity. I
+believe that quite honestly he had thought it would, that he had come
+into the country to be purified and simplified, and to put himself right
+with Viola for ever. And the horrid irony of it was that the country
+didn't do any of these things to him; it complicated him, it saturated
+him with that taint I've mentioned, and instead of putting him right it
+showed him up. Quite horribly and cruelly it showed him up. I do not
+think there was a single weakness or a single secret meanness that he had
+that didn't suddenly rise up and stand out on the background of
+Amershott.
+
+All through that summer there, quite frankly, I detested Jevons. I
+believe that Norah came near detesting him, that she felt something very
+like contempt for him.
+
+And if Norah felt it you may imagine what Viola would feel.
+
+She was with us one evening (it was June, I think, and our second visit),
+when Jimmy showed most unmistakably the cloven hoof. We had come in from
+a long motor drive, and he had made at once, as he always did, for the
+silver plate in the hall where cards left by callers were put, if any
+callers came. I can see him now, breathing hard. I can see the glance he
+cast at the cards, and the little jerky curb he put on his excitement--he
+had the grace to be ashamed of it. And then I see him holding four cards
+in his hand, sober and quiet and flushed like a man who has triumphed
+solemnly. And I hear him read out the names: "Lord Amerley, Lady Amerley,
+Lady Octavia Amerley, the Honourable Frances Amerley. _That's_ all right.
+I gave them three months."
+
+And I see Viola look at him, taking in his figure in its motor-dress, and
+his face, with the foolish, weak elation he couldn't for the life of him
+keep out of it.
+
+Again I see him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity--and I
+don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there--very
+spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party
+they took us to.
+
+And later on--in the very beginning of July it must have been--I see him
+on his own lawn at his own garden-party, and--I didn't dream it this
+time--he was really dreadful. Instead of carrying it off with the levity
+that had so often saved him from perdition, there was that revolting
+triumph about him and an uneasy eagerness, as if he knew that his triumph
+wasn't quite complete. But the garden-party was, as he would have said,
+all right. They were all there, those people he had given three months
+to. He had pulled it off precisely as he had schemed and calculated.
+Those legends of his detachment and his hermit habits had been worked so
+as to excite a supreme curiosity--and it was being satisfied.
+
+And I cannot tell you whether he was really altered, or whether he had
+been like that all the time before Amershott had shown him up, and none
+of us had seen it except Viola.
+
+Oh no--it's impossible. He had altered. If he had been like this we must
+have seen it. What Viola had seen--if she had seen anything--was only the
+foreshadowing, the bare possibility of this.
+
+Charlie Thesiger was at that garden-party (he had retired from the
+service with the rank of Captain).
+
+And it was at the garden-party that I first noticed a change in his
+manner to his cousin's husband. He used to treat Jevons with a certain
+superciliousness, and with as much amusement, as much perception of his
+absurdity, as was possible for Charlie, who perceived so few things. Now
+I was struck with the correct young man's deference to his host. It was
+really as if it had at last dawned on Charlie that Jevons _was_ his host,
+and that he had other claims to distinction as well. The more dreadful
+Jimmy was, the more courteous Charlie showed himself to Jimmy. And this
+in spite of the fact that Jevons had a way of treating Charlie as if he
+didn't matter, as if for all recognizable purposes he wasn't there.
+
+When I spoke of this to Norah, she said that Viola had told him that if
+he couldn't be decent to Jimmy she wouldn't have him there.
+
+Well, there he was, hanging about Viola from morning till night; he had
+any amount of time on his hands now, and he spent most of it at
+Amershott. He was there when we weren't sometimes, so that we couldn't
+keep track of him. But his purposes ought to have been apparent to us. I
+think it was partly because he was aware of them himself that he went out
+of his way to be decent to Jimmy, almost as if he were sorry for him
+beforehand.
+
+For it was evident enough that Viola liked his being there, and liked to
+have him hanging round her. There was nothing about him that shocked or
+grated. I've no doubt he made himself entirely charming. His manners
+could be as beautiful as any of the Thesigers' when he chose, and they
+soothed her. I think she had ceased to feel them as a reproach to Jimmy.
+She had given up _his_ manners, poor dear, long ago, as a bad job. It was
+as if she had slaked her thirst for the unusual. Some secret and strong
+revulsion had thrown her back on the people and the things that she had
+been brought up amongst and that she had run away from. When Jimmy jarred
+on her she turned to Charlie for relief. And, after all, as Norah said,
+he was her cousin.
+
+I don't think we either of us saw anything more in it than that. Without
+some such reaction she must have surrendered to Amershott. She couldn't
+defend Jevons against that showing up. She couldn't defend herself
+against those revelations, she could only stand by and look on at his
+enormity and shudder. Unless she had put her dear eyes out she must have
+seen that in the country he was not only a bounder but a snob. And she
+must have writhed in feeling that to see him that way was to be a bit of
+a snob herself. She had accused herself of snobbishness long ago, before
+she married him, when, in order to marry him, she had burned her boats.
+
+What could she do? She couldn't put her eyes out. But I believe she would
+have been grateful to anybody who would have put them out for her.
+
+I can't tell whether she was always unhappy. I rather think she had liked
+Amershott, the house and the garden and the pinewood and the bit of moor,
+and I am certain that she liked motoring almost as much as Jimmy did at
+first. She could even take pleasure in Jimmy's power over the car when
+they were alone with it in the open country, when his pleasure had no
+taint in it. I've heard her say, when he wanted to run down to Chichester
+or Portsmouth, "Oh, for Heaven's sake, let's go somewhere where nobody
+can look at us!"
+
+She must have regarded the open country as the last refuge of his
+innocence. For her, more than for any of us, he had lost it.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+How far he really lost it we shall never know. Even now, with all my
+lights, with that intense country light fairly beating on him, I can
+wonder: Am I saying these things because I think them? Or because I
+believe I must have thought them then? And I cannot answer my own wonder.
+I remember how at Amershott, when I sat beside him in that car of his and
+watched his ecstasy, I used to pull myself up and say to myself, "You
+_know_ he isn't like that. Look at him--what woolly lamb could be more
+simple and innocent than he is now?" And if anybody had come to me and
+asked me if I didn't think that Jevons _was_ a little awful I should have
+said that if you were a little awful yourself you might think so, but not
+otherwise. My conscience has told me that as he became more successful I
+became more critical; it has even suggested that I may have been jealous
+of his success.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+But that was in the days (they were comparatively innocent) of his first
+motor-car. Round that car there really is a light of romance and of
+adventure, a glamour that isn't at all the glamour of his opulence. In
+those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of
+pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income. In June, at
+any rate, he was still the master of his car and not--as we saw him later
+on--its servant. There never was anything like that first fury of his
+motoring.
+
+It couldn't last. He was wearing himself out. Those early excesses
+exhausted his capacity for pleasure, and when we came to stay with him in
+the last two weeks of July we found him apathetic about motoring.
+
+But not about motor-cars. As far as the cars went he had developed into
+an incurable motor-maniac. He was never tired of talking about
+carburetters, and tyres, and petrol, and garages and gear. He dreamed of
+these things at night. Every day he invented some extraordinary
+contrivance for increasing speed and lessening friction. He knew all that
+was to be known about the different kinds of cars; and he would roll
+their names on his tongue--Panhard and Fiat and Daimler and Mercedes and
+Rolls-Royce, as if the sound of them caressed him like music.
+
+And the first car which he had mastered--it was a comparatively cheap
+one, but it wouldn't be fair to say what kind it was, for the poor thing
+had gone to pieces under his hand in six months; he had served her, his
+chauffeur said, something cruel--that first car had been sold for a
+hundred and fifty pounds, and Viola was mourning for it when we came down
+in July.
+
+We couldn't think why she mourned, for he had bought another. We supposed
+that the new car had broken down, for we were met at Midhurst station by
+the local cab proprietor. But we were very soon to know that nothing
+had happened to the new car, and that something very serious indeed had
+happened to Jimmy.
+
+He had gone mad--you can only call it mad--over his new car.
+
+As soon as we had tea we were taken to see it where it stood in the
+coach-house that served as a garage.
+
+It was a magpie car--the first, Jimmy told me, that had appeared down in
+that part of the country--white, with black bonnet and black
+splashboards, and black leather hood and cushions; so black that its
+body, in the matchless purity of its whiteness, staggered you. Anybody,
+Jevons said, could have an all-white car, and it wouldn't be noticed any
+more than a common taxi-cab. But one magpie in a countless crowd of cars
+annihilated all the rest. Lemon colour was good and so was scarlet; but
+for effect--for sheer destruction to other automobilists--there was
+nothing like a white car with black points. It was, Jimmy said and
+Kendal, the chauffeur, said, a perfect car. From their tone you wondered
+what you had ever done that you should be allowed to approach and see it
+where it stood.
+
+Where it stood, I say. You couldn't see that car doing anything else. It
+stood like an immense idol in a temple; and it looked as if all its life
+it never had done anything else but stand in its perfection to be stared
+at. And by its air of self-consciousness, of majesty, of arrogant power
+in repose, you gathered that it knew it was there to be stared at. The
+thing was drawn up at the far end of the garage, where no breath could
+blow on it, over an open pit. You knew that Kendal, the chauffeur, went
+down on a ladder into the pit to examine the secret being of the car; you
+knew it and yet it was incredible. You refused to believe that an outrage
+to which common cars were subject ever had been or would be perpetrated
+on this holy one. You would have said that no spot of mud or dust or rain
+had ever lighted on it; it might have descended into the garage out of
+heaven for any sign of travel that it showed. It was surrounded by I
+know not what atmosphere of consecration and immunity.
+
+So that Norah's first question sounded like a profanity.
+
+"What speed is it?" she said.
+
+It might have been fancy, but I thought that Jevons's face underwent a
+change. I certainly saw Kendal the chauffeur looking at it.
+
+"Speed?" he said. "Speed? Well--you _can_ speed her up to sixty miles an
+hour if you want to." (He seemed to say, "If she ever is speeded up," or
+"You jolly well may want.")
+
+He ran his hand lovingly along the car's white flank as if it were alive
+and could respond to the caress.
+
+"She's a beauty," he said.
+
+The chauffeur looked at him again.
+
+"You won't want to knock her about like you did the last one, Mr.
+Jevons," he said.
+
+And Jimmy's face expressed a sort of horror.
+
+The chauffeur looked at us then, and, if you can wink without any motion
+of the eyelids, he winked. He saw, and he was trying to indicate to us,
+the state that Jevons had fallen into.
+
+It was infatuation; it was idolatry; it was the most extraordinary
+passion I have ever known a man otherwise sane to be possessed by. You
+would have said that that creature with the black-and-white body and the
+terrific bowels of machinery had some sinister and magic power over him.
+He loved it; he worshipped it; he was afraid of it. And when you think of
+how, as the chauffeur said, he had "served" the other car--
+
+Knock her about, indeed! He daren't take her out of the garage for a
+fifteen-mile run without agonies of apprehension. He never took her out
+at all unless he was certain that it wouldn't rain and that there
+wouldn't be any mud or any dust or any wind (I don't know what harm he
+thought the wind would do her). Instead of taking her out he would spend
+hours in the garage standing still and looking at her, stooping sometimes
+to examine her for a spot or a crack on her enamel, but always with
+reverence. I believe he never touched her without washing his hands
+first.
+
+We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn't been out in that car three
+times, though the weather was perfect. Jimmy never could see that it was
+perfect enough. If it hadn't rained for two days he was afraid of dust;
+if it did rain he was afraid of mud; what he wanted was one light shower
+to lay the dust; and when he got it he was afraid of another shower
+coming. And on hot days he was afraid the sun might do something. And he
+was afraid of _us_ all the time lest we should ask him to take the car
+out on a day that wouldn't do.
+
+I do not know how or why he had come to look on that car as his god. It
+wasn't, I do believe that it wasn't, because the thing was valuable,
+because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he
+had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a
+sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint
+of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering
+beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the
+remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of
+his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself:
+"Motor-cars are perishable things. I did for my first beloved by my
+excesses. Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from
+motoring." And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune
+out of Jimmy's abstinence.
+
+The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. (He too had come
+down for the last fortnight in July.) He was the only one of us who
+didn't protest, didn't clamour, didn't try to reason or to laugh Jimmy
+out of his insanity. And he went further. He refused to enter the car, to
+be taken in it on the few suitable days when Jimmy allowed it to go out.
+It was as if he were dominated by some scruple as morbid as his host's
+passion. We couldn't account for it at the time, for he liked motoring
+excessively, and he couldn't afford it.
+
+I've wondered since whether this wasn't the way Charlie settled with
+his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency. He could eat Jimmy's bread
+and drink his wine and stay for weeks under his roof, since his
+necessity--the necessity of seeing Viola--compelled him, but to profit by
+him to that extent, to make use of Jimmy's opulence, was beyond him. His
+conscience may have even said to him, "If he loves his motor-car, for
+God's sake let him have _that_, at any rate, to himself."
+
+And Viola seemed to share Charlie's scruple. She, too, shrank from using
+the new car. And I remember her saying to me one day as we crossed the
+courtyard and saw Jimmy, as usual, in the garage, worshipping his car,
+"I'm so glad he's got it. I think it makes him happier." As if she had
+confessed that it was all he _had_ got; that she was not able to make him
+happy any more; and as if, in some day of unhappiness that she saw
+coming, it would be a consolation to the poor chap. At any rate, as if
+she were not in the least jealous of the power it had over him.
+
+So, that July, Norah and I drove with Jimmy when the car, so to speak,
+let him drive it; and Viola walked through the woods and over the downs
+with Charlie Thesiger.
+
+We often wondered what they found to talk about.
+
+That wonder, of what Viola could see in Charlie, and how she could endure
+for so many hours the burden of his society, was all that Norah had
+allowed herself, so far, to express. If she felt any uneasiness she had
+not yet confided it to me. As for Jevons, he tolerated him as you only
+tolerate a thing that doesn't matter. I think honestly that to both of
+them, Charlie, in any serious connection with Viola, was as impossible as
+Jevons himself had been to her brother Reggie.
+
+So little did he take him seriously that at the very end of July he went
+up to London for the inside of the week (he went by train so as to save
+the car) while Charlie was still at the Old Grange.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It was the week of the international crisis, and European mobilization
+was occupying Jimmy's mind to the exclusion of other matters. Still, you
+could hardly suppose that it was the crisis that was taking him up to
+London. I remember thinking he had run away from Charlie Thesiger,
+because he bored him.
+
+He left on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, and he was to be back on Friday,
+the thirty-first, and Charlie was to leave with Norah and me and our
+nurse and Baby on the Monday following, when our fortnight was up.
+
+So on Friday afternoon I was a little astonished to find my
+sister-in-law, dressed in her town suit of white cloth, drinking tea at
+three o'clock before going up to London. She simply stated the fact that
+she was going up. Norah had said she might stay in our house and she
+hoped I wouldn't mind.
+
+When I suggested that it would surely be nicer for us all to go up
+together on Monday she looked at me with a certain long-suffering
+expression that she had for me at times, and said that wouldn't suit her,
+since she had got to go to-day. She was of course awfully sorry to leave
+us, but Norah understood, and Jimmy would look after us very well.
+
+No. She wasn't going up by Midhurst. She was going by Selham.
+
+She rose. I noticed the impatient energy of her little hands as they
+knotted her veil under her chin. I looked up her trains and found that
+there was none from Selham till four forty-five. I pointed out to her
+that there was no hurry; she had missed the two fifty-five, which had
+left Selham fifteen minutes ago, and she had an hour to spare even if the
+car took half an hour getting to the station. (The day was fine and there
+was no dust. Even Jimmy couldn't have objected to her taking the car.)
+
+But she said she hadn't missed the two fifty-five; she wasn't trying for
+it; and she wasn't going in the car; it would be wanted to meet Jimmy at
+Midhurst Station; and no--no--_no_--she didn't want a cab from Midhurst.
+She was going to walk.
+
+I said it was absurd for her to walk four miles on a hot day like this,
+and she replied that the day would be cool enough if only I'd keep quiet.
+(She was still long-suffering.)
+
+Then of course I said I'd walk with her.
+
+But that was too much for her, and she stamped her foot and said I'd do
+nothing of the kind. She didn't want anybody to walk with her.
+
+And when I inquired about her luggage--But I can't repeat what she said
+about her luggage!
+
+Then she softened suddenly, as her way was, and kissed Norah, and said I
+was a dear, and she was sorry for snapping my head off, but it was all
+right. Norah knew all about it. She'd explain.
+
+I can see her standing in the postern doorway and saying these things and
+then giving me her hand and holding mine tight, while she shook her head
+at me and smiled that little baffling smile that seemed to come up
+flickering from her depths of wisdom on purpose to put me in the wrong.
+
+"The trouble with you, Furny," she said, "is that you're much too good."
+
+She went; and we saw her tall, lithe figure swinging up the lane, past
+the courtyard and the paddock and the moor.
+
+Then Norah plucked me in by the coat-sleeve as if she thought we oughtn't
+to be looking at her. We shut the door on her flight and turned to each
+other where we stood on the flagged path before the house.
+
+"What does it mean?" I said.
+
+"It means that she's at the end of her tether."
+
+"The end--?" I think I must have gasped.
+
+"The very end. She can't stand it any longer."
+
+"But," I said, "she--she's got to stand it. After all--"
+
+"There's no good talking that way. She _can't_, and that settles it. I
+knew she couldn't, once she got beyond a certain point."
+
+"Do you mean to say," I said, "that she's going to leave him?"
+
+"I--don't--know. I believe--she's going to think about it."
+
+"But--it's out of the question. She mustn't think about it."
+
+"You can't stop her thinking, Wally. She's gone away to think about it
+sanely. It's the best thing she can do."
+
+"And you're helping her to get away?"
+
+She was silent for a moment.
+
+"I'm only helping her to think," she said.
+
+I was stern with her. "You're not. You're just helping her to bolt," I
+said. "You're conniving at her bolting. You've lent her our house."
+
+"Isn't it better she should come to us?"
+
+"No, it isn't better. I don't like it. And I won't have it. I won't have
+you mixed up in it. Do you understand?"
+
+"Dear Wally--there isn't anything to be mixed up in. We'll be back on
+Monday; then she'll only be staying with us."
+
+"And till then--?"
+
+"Till then--for Heaven's sake let the poor thing have peace for three
+days to think in."
+
+"That's all very well," I said, "but what are we to say to Jimmy when he
+comes back this afternoon?"
+
+"You say--you say she's tired of--of Amershott and wants three days in
+London to herself.--No, you don't. You don't say anything. You leave it
+to me. Vee-Vee said it was to be left to me."
+
+"And _I_ say I won't have you dragged into it. Good Heavens, have you any
+idea what you may be let in for, supposing--?"
+
+"Supposing what?"
+
+I couldn't say what. But I don't think I really had supposed
+anything--then.
+
+"You needn't suppose things," she said. "Vee-Vee would never let us in.
+Look here, Wally--you've got to trust me this time. I'm going to see
+Vee-Vee through, and I'm going to see Jimmy through; but I can't do it if
+you don't trust me. I can't do it if you interfere."
+
+I said I did trust her, and that God knew I didn't want to interfere, but
+was she quite sure she was doing a wise thing?
+
+She said, "Quite sure. Let's go and lie down in the pine-wood till
+tea-time. I wonder if Jimmy would mind us going into Midhurst with the
+car. We shouldn't hurt it, sitting in it."
+
+We lay out in the pine-wood till we heard the bell for tea, which we
+had ordered a little before four, in case Jevons should wire for the
+car to meet him by the early afternoon train that got to Midhurst at
+four-sixteen.
+
+The table was set as usual in the garden on the lawn in front of the
+house.
+
+By four o'clock no wire had come from Jevons; so we knew we needn't
+expect him till a later train. He nearly always came by Waterloo and
+Petersfield and was met at Midhurst, which gave him his public. But he
+might come, as Viola had gone, by Victoria and Horsham and be met
+at Selham.
+
+I remember saying, in a startling manner as the idea struck me,
+"Supposing he comes by Victoria?"
+
+And Norah said, "What if he does?"
+
+And I, "They might meet at Horsham."
+
+"Why shouldn't they?" she said. "You don't suppose he'll eat her for
+running up to town?"
+
+"He might," I said, "think it odd of her."
+
+"Not he. The beauty of Jimmy is that odd things don't seem odd to him. Do
+you know where Charlie is?"
+
+I didn't. We had finished tea before either of us had thought of him. We
+shouted to him through the open windows of the house, for Charlie had a
+habit of mooning about indoors till Viola was ready to walk with him.
+
+No answer came to our summons, but it brought Parker, the butler, out on
+to the lawn. He had a slightly surprised and slightly embarrassed look on
+his respectable and respectful face, no longer demoralized by Jimmy.
+
+"Were you looking for the Captain, sir?" he said.
+
+I said we were.
+
+Something grave and a little sorrowful came into Parker's embarrassed
+look.
+
+"Didn't you know he'd gone, sir?"
+
+I said I didn't even know he was going; and then I saw Norah looking at
+me.
+
+Parker was trying not to look at Norah. He began gathering up the
+tea-things as if to justify his presence and explain it.
+
+"When did he go?" I said as casually as I could.
+
+"Well, sir--the cab was ordered to catch the four thirty-five from
+Midhurst."
+
+Now the four thirty-five from Midhurst is the four forty-five from
+Selham, the train that Viola had gone by. We knew this; and Parker knew
+that we knew it. That was why, instead of stating outright that Captain
+Thesiger had gone by that train, he tried to soften the blow to us by
+saying that the cab had been ordered to catch it, and leaving it open to
+us to suppose that perhaps, after all, it might have missed it.
+
+"Did he say when he was coming back?" I asked, again casually.
+
+"He isn't coming back, sir," said Parker. "He's took his luggage with him
+and all."
+
+"Of course," said Norah. "He's gone to see what they're doing at the War
+Office. He said he would."
+
+But I knew and she knew and Parker knew he hadn't--or, if he had, it was
+only one of the things he had gone for. Because, if the War Office had
+been all that he had in his mind he would have told us, and Viola would
+have told us, and they would have gone openly together, instead of
+dodging about like two clumsy criminals, one at Midhurst and the other at
+Selham.
+
+When Parker had left (he did it very quickly) Norah got on her feet.
+
+She said, "Go and find Kendal and tell him to bring the car around at
+once."
+
+I asked her what she was going to do?
+
+"Do?" she flashed at me. She had changed all in a moment into a woman
+whom I did not know.
+
+"I'm going to fetch her back," she said. She had wriggled into her coat.
+"We'll overtake her before she gets to Selham, if you're quick."
+
+I looked at my watch. It was barely half-past four. Yes, if we were
+quick, if we started at once, if we let the new car rip we should
+overtake her on the road, or at the station before she could get into
+that train with Charlie Thesiger in it. I meant, and Norah's eyes meant,
+that we would stop her going with him, if we had to drag her from the
+platform.
+
+We ran to the garage to find Kendal. The new car, the superb black and
+white creature, stood in the middle of the courtyard, ready to start when
+Jimmy's wire came. So far it was all right.
+
+But we had reckoned without Kendal, the chauffeur.
+
+Kendal, absolved from the four-sixteen train at Midhurst, was at his tea
+in the servants' hall, and at my summons he came out slowly, munching as
+he came. He was visibly outraged at our intrusion on his sacred leisure.
+And when he was ordered to start at once for Selham, he refused. There
+was no train from Victoria, he said, between the four-four that Mr.
+Jevons hadn't come by and the five fifty-two. _If_, Kendal said, he did
+come by Victoria, and he always came by Waterloo.
+
+What was the sense, said Kendal, with his mouth full, of going to Selham
+when we hadn't got a wire?
+
+The sense of it, Norah told him, was that we had a message--an important
+message--for Mrs. Jevons, which she _must_ get before she started.
+
+At this Kendal left off munching and looked at my wife. Even in my
+eagerness I was struck by the singular intelligence of that look. There
+was nothing covert in it. On the contrary it was a most straightforward
+and transparent look. Kendal's knowledge--which might have sought cover
+if you had hunted it--had come out to meet ours on equal terms.
+
+It only lasted for the fraction of a second. Kendal repeated firmly, but
+this time respectfully, that she was Mr. Jevons's car and he couldn't
+take her out without Mr. Jevons's orders, for if he did Mr. Jevons would
+give him the sack.
+
+To which Norah replied that Mr. Jevons would give him the sack if he
+didn't, or if he made us miss that train by arguing. I told him sternly
+to look sharp. He looked it and we got off. I had begun to crank up the
+car myself while I spoke.
+
+But he had wasted three minutes of our valuable fifteen. Though on the
+open road we speeded up the car to her sixty miles an hour, we had to
+slow down in the narrow lanes. Once we were held up by a country cart,
+and once by cows in our track, and Norah was beside herself at each halt.
+
+As we careened into the station yard I thought that my wife would have
+hurled herself out of the car.
+
+The station-master stood by the booking-office door. He had an ominous
+air of leisure. And when he saw us coming he looked at his watch.
+
+He told us that we had missed the train by three minutes (the three
+minutes that Kendal had wasted).
+
+I had jumped out of the car and was telling Kendal that it was all his
+fault, and that if he'd done what he was told we should have caught the
+train, when he turned on me as only a chauffeur convicted of folly can
+turn.
+
+"Stand away from the car, sir," he shouted. He jerked her nose round with
+the savage energy of a chauffeur in the wrong; he seemed to impart his
+own fury to the car. She snorted and screamed as he backed her and drove
+her forward and backed her again.
+
+And again he shouted to me. "You get in, sir, if you don't want to be
+left be'ind."
+
+As he seemed to be animated chiefly by the fear of Jevons (whom, by the
+way, he adored), we could only suppose that his idea was to fly back to
+Amershott in time for Jimmy's wire.
+
+On the high road past the station he took the wrong turn.
+
+_I_ shouted then, "What do you think you're doing, you confounded fool?"
+
+"Ketch the London train at 'Orsham, sir," said Kendal. And he grinned.
+
+"You can't do it," we said.
+
+"I'll 'ave a try," said Kendal.
+
+His honour as a chauffeur was at stake. His blood was up. His knowledge
+had begun to work in him and he adored his master. He knew what he was
+trying to do.
+
+We could do it if we kept our heads; if we exceeded the speed limit; if
+we had luck; if we didn't break down; if neither the county constabulary
+nor the country traffic held us up.
+
+Kendal declared we could do it easily and allow for accidents. At Horsham
+Junction you have nearly half an hour to wait between the arrival of the
+Midhurst and Selham train and the departure of the London express. And
+the local trains take more than half an hour to get from Selham to
+Horsham. At a pinch you could speed the car up to the limit of the local
+train. And, as we had to allow for accidents, we did speed her up
+whenever we saw a clean track before us.
+
+The run to Selham was nothing to it. It was as if we were racing the
+train with its three minutes start, as if, positively, we might overtake
+it at any of the intermediate stations, as if it were in this hope that
+we dashed up the long white slope to Petworth.
+
+The heat of the day gathered over our heads and smouldered in the east.
+
+And as we ran I realized at last why we were running and what the race
+was and the hunt, and what our quarry. I remembered that other slower
+chase that was yet so keen and so agonizing; that hunting down of the
+same tender flesh and blood, over the Channel and across a foreign
+country. That was bad enough; but it was not like this. For then I was
+alone in my hunting of Viola; there was nobody but me, who loved her, to
+see her run to earth and caught crouching in her corner. That she would
+crouch, this time, and hide herself, I had no doubt. This hunt that I
+shared with her sister and her servant was abominable to me and shameful.
+And between the shame of that flight of hers and this flight there was no
+comparison. You don't go looking at belfries with Charlie Thesiger. I
+could not reconcile that enchanting and enchanted Viola of the garden of
+Bruges with this dreadful flying figure.
+
+I hated myself; I hated Kendal, the chauffeur, as I sat behind his tight,
+efficient body that quivered with the fury of the hunt. (To think that
+_his_ blood should be up and against Viola!) I hated the car that seemed
+more than ever a living thing, that breathed and snorted and vibrated
+with the same passion, and was endowed with this incredible speed and
+this superhuman power. With its black nose and white flanks, and its
+black hood and the black wings of its splash-boards, it was some terrible
+and sinister and malignant monster of prey hunting down Viola. Its body
+had been built, its engines had been forged, to hunt down Viola. The
+infernal thing had been invented to hunt down Viola.
+
+Somewhere between Petworth and Fittleworth Kendal stopped to water his
+engine. It was then that we noticed how the gathering heat was piled into
+a bank of cloud over the east. At the back of our necks we could feel a
+little hot puff of wind that came up from the west.
+
+"Shouldn't wonder if there was a storm," said Kendal. He added, with the
+ghost of a grin, "If Mr. Jevons sees that cloud, sir, he'll not wire to
+be met at Midhurst. He'd crawl home on his 'ands and knees first."
+
+He slipped into his seat and we dashed on.
+
+At Fittleworth, within a stone's-throw of the railway and the road, there
+is a patch of moor where the ground rises in a hillock. In July and
+August when the heather's out this hillock is a crimson landmark above
+the water meadows.
+
+When we came within sight of it Kendal suddenly slowed down, then jammed
+his brakes hard, and with an awful grinding and snorting the car came to
+a stand-still.
+
+Kendal stood up. He muttered something about being blowed. Then he
+turned.
+
+"Got the glasses there, sir?"
+
+I found the glasses, but I didn't give them to Kendal. I stood up too and
+looked through them.
+
+I couldn't see anything at first.
+
+"There, sir," said Kendal, pointing. "No. You're looking too much to the
+left. You got to get right o' thet sandy patch--against thet there clump
+of heather. Now d'you see, sir?"
+
+I did.
+
+Kendal had made out with the naked eye a figure, the figure of a woman,
+seated on the hillside, a white figure that showed plainly against the
+red background of the heather.
+
+"It's Mrs. Jevons, sir," he stated.
+
+It was.
+
+I could see her quite distinctly through the field-glasses. She was
+sitting on the clump of heather to the right of the sandy patch, settled
+and motionless, in the attitude of one who waited at her ease, with hours
+before her. And she was alone.
+
+We went on as far as we could towards the moor. Norah and I left the car
+and struck across the moor by the sandy track that led to the bare patch
+and the clump of heather.
+
+The seated figure must have been aware of us from the first moment of our
+approach. You couldn't miss that black and white car as it charged along
+the highway, or as it stood now, with its engines still humming, by the
+roadside. But the figure remained seated in its attitude of waiting. It
+waited while we crossed the moor; and as we climbed the hillock we became
+intensely aware of it and of its immobility.
+
+We saw its face fixed on us with an expression of tranquil patience and
+expectation. I may say that I felt an intolerable embarrassment before
+this quietness of the hunted thing that we had run to earth; especially
+as it was on me, and not Norah, that Viola's face was fixed as we came
+nearer.
+
+Then she smiled at me; there was neither conciliation nor defiance
+in her smile, but a sort of serene assurance and--yes, it was
+unmistakable--contempt.
+
+She said, "Whatever do you think you're doing _now_?"
+
+I said we might not know what we were doing, but we knew what we were
+going to do. We were going to take her back with us in the car.
+
+At that she asked us (but without any sign of perturbation) if we had got
+Jimmy there?
+
+Norah said No, our idea was to run back to Amershott before Jimmy got
+there.
+
+"Where were you running to when you saw me sitting up here?" she said.
+
+I said we'd meant to catch her at Selham but we missed the train and were
+trying to get to Horsham before the London train started.
+
+She was looking at me now with a sort of compassion, the tenderness of
+her contempt.
+
+"I see," she said. "You _were_ clever, weren't you?"
+
+She looked at her watch. "Well, as you _are_ here," she said, "I'd let
+you run me down to Horsham, if you want a run, only I can't very well use
+Jimmy's car."
+
+I think it was Norah who asked her what on earth she was doing at
+Fittleworth.
+
+"Can't you see," she said, "that I'm waiting for the next train?"
+
+"Did you walk here from Amershott, or what?" I said.
+
+She said, "Rather not. I was in the train."
+
+Then Norah said, "What happened?"
+
+It had dawned on us both how odd it was that Viola should be here,
+apparently alone, at Fittleworth. It was also odd how we were all
+ignoring Charlie. I believe I had a sort of idea that she had got him
+hidden somewhere in the landscape.
+
+Viola smiled a reminiscent smile. "If you _must_ know," she said, "what
+happened was that Charlie was in that train, too--he came bursting out on
+to the platform at Selham, awfully pleased with himself, because he'd
+picked my luggage up at Midhurst and bagged a corner seat for me, and
+made faces at people to keep them out."
+
+"Did you know he was going up to town?" I said.
+
+"No, of course I didn't. He didn't know it himself. There was no reason
+why he shouldn't go. And you'd have thought there was no reason why we
+shouldn't go together. He was all right till we got to Petworth. But
+after that he lost his head and made such an ass of himself that I had to
+get out here and make him go on by himself. Silly idiot!"
+
+We were sitting in the heather, one on each side of her, and I saw my
+wife slip her arm into hers and hug it to her.
+
+"Did _you_ know," she said, "that Charlie'd gone?"
+
+We didn't answer. We simply couldn't.
+
+And then Viola said, "Poor little Norah!"
+
+And she told her to run away for ten minutes while she talked to me.
+
+"Why poor little Norah?" I asked when we were alone.
+
+"Because," she said, "you frightened her."
+
+"I? Frightened her?"
+
+"Yes," she said. "You made her think I was going to run away with
+Charlie. There's no good trying to look as if you didn't. You're quite
+awful, Furny, in the things you think. You can't help it, I know. You're
+so good, so shockingly good, and you can't bear other people to be
+naughty. You thought I'd run away to Belgium with Jimmy and you came
+rushing after me and fetched me back. You thought I'd run away with
+Charlie and you came rushing--in your dreadful rectitude, and in Jimmy's
+motor-car that he won't let anybody look at. You'll have an awful time
+with Jimmy when you get back. It's going to rain, and there'll be mud on
+the car, and he'll dance with rage when he sees it. And he won't think
+it's any excuse if you tell him you thought I was running away with
+Charlie, and you took the car to fetch me back; he'll say you'd no
+business to think it and in any case you'd no business to take the car
+out. And poor Kendal will be sacked.
+
+"That's all you've done," she said, "by your fussy interference."
+
+She went on. "It wouldn't matter what you think about me--but it was
+beastly of you to go and make Norah think it."
+
+I said I didn't suppose either of us thought anything, except that since
+she was going up to town with the idea of leaving her husband, it was not
+desirable that she should go up with Charlie Thesiger.
+
+"Who could possibly have supposed," she said, "that Charlie would be such
+an ass?"
+
+I said I for one could.
+
+"Oh, you--haven't I told you you're always supposing things?"
+
+"Surely?" I said, "you must have seen--yourself--"
+
+She smiled. "My dear--I couldn't see anything but poor Jimmy."
+
+"And yet," I said, "you could think of leaving him?"
+
+She moaned. "You fool--you fool--that's _why_ I'm thinking of it."
+
+She pressed her hands to her eyes as if she shut back the sight of him.
+
+"You aren't thinking of it," I said. "You haven't left him. You've only
+been for a good long walk to Fittleworth, and we've come to fetch you
+back in the car."
+
+"Haven't I told you that I can't and won't use Jimmy's car?"
+
+"You can't use it to run away from him in; but you can very well use it
+to go back to him."
+
+"I'm not going back to him," she said. "Can't you see that I've burnt my
+boats?"
+
+"You may have burnt the old ones, Viola," I said. "But you can build
+new."
+
+"You must give me time, Wally. It'll take a long time. And you don't
+understand me. I _want_ to get away from Jimmy. That's why I'm going away
+now, while he isn't there. That's what I mean by burning my boats.
+If I go back to him--if I see him--I shall never get away. I shan't have
+the courage. I shall just crumple up with the first sight of him--with
+the first word he says--"
+
+"Why not," I said, "crumple up?"
+
+She lifted her head as I had seen her lift it before.
+
+"Because," she said, "I wish to be straight."
+
+I asked her if running away behind Jimmy's back was her idea of
+straightness? To which she replied that _my_ rectitude was excruciating
+and that I'd twist anything to a moral purpose, but it was twisting all
+the same. Couldn't I see that _the_ awful thing would be to come sneaking
+back and pretend to Jimmy that she hadn't run away from him?--If that was
+my idea of straightness she was sorry for me.
+
+I said, "My dear child, you must see that running away by yourself is one
+thing, and running away with Charlie Thesiger is another. It would be all
+very well if Charlie hadn't got into that train."
+
+She wanted to know what that mattered when she had got out of the train?
+I suggested that the people who saw Charlie get in hadn't seen her get
+out, and that she must look at the thing as it appeared to other people.
+
+"Look," I said, "at the facts. Mrs. Jevons walks to Selham Station for
+the London train. Captain Thesiger joins her there, presumably by
+pre-arrangement, leaving by Midhurst station so that they may not be seen
+going away together. She is, however, seen entering his compartment at
+Selham. At Fittleworth she is seized with prudence and with panic. She is
+seen getting out on to the platform. And she is seen two hours later
+following the Captain up to London by the next train."
+
+She seemed to be considering it.
+
+"How many people," she said, "know that Charlie was in that train? People
+that matter--I don't mean you and Norah."
+
+"Your butler, your parlourmaid, your housemaid, your cook, your
+gardener--by this time--and Baby's nurse--"
+
+("And Baby," she interrupted.)
+
+"--The guard of the train, the booking clerks and porters at Midhurst and
+Selham, and the station-masters at Midhurst and Selham and Petworth
+(probably) and Fittleworth. Quite a number of important people, to say
+nothing of Kendal, who is perhaps the most important of them all."
+
+"And who was it who brought Kendal into it?"
+
+I was silent.
+
+"Nobody but you, Furny, or a born fool, would have dreamed of bringing
+Kendal in."
+
+I said that a little reflection would show her that it was impossible to
+keep him out. To this she said, "Please go and find Norah. I want her."
+
+I found Norah. I warned her that Viola was going to be extremely
+difficult. She said it would be all right if I left Viola to her.
+
+As we approached, Viola turned to her sister with an air of outraged and
+long-suffering dignity.
+
+"Norah," she said. "I do wish you would make Wally see what an ass he's
+making of himself."
+
+My wife said, in her admirable, judicial way, "How an ass?"
+
+"Well--trying to make me go back and bringing Kendal out here to fetch
+me. He doesn't seem to see that if I do go back with him it'll be as good
+as proclaiming to everybody that I ran away with Charlie and was found
+out by my clever brother-in-law who tracked me down in my husband's
+motor-car and brought me back in it. Whereas, if I go quietly on to
+London, as I meant to and as everybody knows I meant to, it'll be all
+right."
+
+"It won't," I said, "as long as Charlie's there. It will be if you come
+home with us in the car now, and go up to town with Norah and me on
+Monday."
+
+"I've told you," she said wearily, "that I can't go back because I shall
+never get away if I do. And I _must_--I must--and I will."
+
+"Yes, dear, and you shall," my wife said, as if she were humouring
+somebody who was mad.
+
+But for a mad woman Viola, I must say, was extraordinarily lucid.
+
+"What excuse did you give to Kendal for following me in this way?"
+
+"We told him we had an important message to give you before you started."
+
+"Important message! That was pretty thin. I'd have thought of something
+cleverer than that if I'd been you. You _are_ a precious pair of
+conspirators. Can't you see that it's you--with your ridiculous
+suspicions--that have given me away?"
+
+Norah answered her.
+
+"Oh, Vee-Vee," she said, "we hadn't any suspicions. The message was to
+tell you that Charlie was in the train. We knew you didn't know it."
+
+To this Viola said coldly, "Walter didn't."
+
+I tried to reassure her, but she waved me away with her hands and
+implored me to "let her think."
+
+"Well," she said presently, "it isn't as bad as you've tried to make it,
+even with Kendal thrown in. You came rushing after me to give me a
+message, and you _have_ given me a message, and now you'll go and tell
+Kendal that it's all right, and thank him nicely for catching me up, and
+_you_ rush home again, and I go on quietly to London by the next train."
+
+"Yes, dear," said Norah. "And I'm going up with you while Wally rushes
+home and follows with Nurse and Baby and the luggage by the morning
+train."
+
+"That's all very well," said Viola, "but who explains to Jimmy?"
+
+"Oh," said my wife, "Wally does that. You can trust him. Besides you
+haven't got to explain things to Jimmy."
+
+Well, we settled it that way. It was the only possible solution. The more
+she thought of it, Viola said, the more she liked it. And she rubbed it
+into me that it was Norah's solution, and not mine.
+
+Her last words to me as I saw them off at Fittleworth Station were that I
+needn't worry. It was going to rain. And when poor Jimmy saw his car come
+in all splashed with rain and covered with mud--"It won't be me," she
+said, "you'll have to explain about."
+
+And it wasn't.
+
+The storm came down just as we were leaving Fittleworth, and we brought
+that car back in an awful state. You wouldn't have known it had ever been
+a black-and-white car. And Jevons (in a mackintosh) was waiting for me in
+the lane by the courtyard gates. He had caught the early train, but he
+had seen the storm coming and had walked up from Midhurst, and, as I say,
+he was waiting for us.
+
+Well--neither Viola nor Norah was with us, and the language, that Jimmy
+poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour
+of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the
+colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a
+gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly,
+a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur
+was prostrated with admiration.
+
+"When Mr. Jevons lays himself out to express himself, sir," he said
+to me as we retreated, "he pulls it off what you may call a bleedin'
+masterpiece."
+
+I tried to explain about Viola an hour later. But he wouldn't listen to
+me. That was all right, he said. He was going to ask us to take her for a
+month or so anyhow. It was getting a bit stuffy for her down here.
+
+Then he fixed me with "Did Thesiger go up with her?"
+
+There was no good trying to lie to Jevons, so I said that had been
+Thesiger's idea, but Viola hadn't cared much about having him, for she
+had got out at Fittleworth and taken Norah on with her.
+
+"I suppose the young ass tried to make love to her. He's fool enough for
+anything," said Jimmy. But he reverted. "I still can't see why you took
+the car out. Anybody but an idiot would have known it was going to rain."
+
+
+
+
+BOOK III
+
+HIS BOOK
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+
+At this period, and even now when I go back to it, I am completely
+puzzled by Jevons. Here was a man who professed to understand his wife,
+to know what she was feeling and thinking in every moment of her
+existence; he would tell you that a man was a fool if he couldn't get the
+woman he wanted; and yet, having got her, he didn't seem to know in the
+most elementary way how to keep her. He didn't seem to care. He adored
+her, and yet he didn't seem to care. I believe he knew that she was
+leaving him, that she had left him; and yet, here he was, treating her
+departure as if it didn't matter, as if it were the most natural and
+reasonable thing in the world, and lashing himself into a fury about his
+wretched motor-car. And he was treating the dangerous element in the
+case, Charlie Thesiger, as if it didn't matter either; as if it didn't
+exist. He must have known we'd taken his car out to bring his wife
+back--he knew we wouldn't have touched the beastly thing for anything
+short of saving her life or his honour; and yet he had flown into a
+passion and sworn at his chauffeur because we'd taken it. He adored his
+wife and yet he behaved as if she were of no importance compared with the
+god he'd made of his motor-car.
+
+All that evening, I remember, he was absorbed in the solitary problem of
+how he could save his god from further outrages. He settled it towards
+midnight by saying that he'd buy another car that we could do what we
+damn-pleased with--a car that wouldn't matter--that you could take out in
+all weathers.
+
+"I'll not have that black-and-white car used as it was used this
+afternoon," he said. And after lashing himself up again he ended quite
+sweetly by saying, "It's my fault, Furny. I ought to have had two cars
+all along."
+
+I said it _would_ be a good plan, if a black-and-white car was only to be
+looked at.
+
+He admitted (with a recrudescence of his old childlike innocence) that he
+liked looking at it. I've no doubt he said it made him feel something,
+but I forget what.
+
+But when the morning came he wouldn't hear of my going. I was to stay out
+my fortnight. It was a fine day and the dust was laid; perhaps he could
+take me for a spin across the Downs to the coast or somewhere. He'd send
+Parker up to town to look after Nurse and Baby and the luggage. He didn't
+want, he said, to be left alone.
+
+Oh yes, it was plain to me that he didn't want to be left--that he
+couldn't bear it. He was trying to lure me to stay with him by holding
+out this prospect of a spin. I have since believed that he would have
+agreed to take his car out in almost any weather, if that had been the
+only way to keep me. He clung to me desperately, pathetically, as he had
+clung nine years ago at Bruges when Viola had left him there. He might,
+possibly, this time, have clung to anybody; he was so afraid of being
+left alone. I think he felt that loneliness here, in the vast, unfamiliar
+landscape that he had invaded, would be as bad as loneliness in Bruges.
+He would be abandoned, as he had been then, in a foreign country.
+
+So till Sunday morning I stayed with him.
+
+It was on my last evening, the evening of Saturday, August the first,
+that he spoke of Viola.
+
+He asked me if I thought that Norah and I could keep her with us, if
+necessary, for--he hesitated--for six months? (It was as if he had given
+her six months.) It would, he said, be better.
+
+I said that Norah would be delighted to keep her for any number of
+months. But did he think she'd stay?
+
+He said why shouldn't she stay? Of course she'd stay. She was awfully
+fond of us and it was the best thing she could do. And it would make it
+so much easier for him. He'd feel more comfortable as long as he knew she
+was with us.
+
+He spoke as if it were he and not Viola who was leaving.
+
+I said then that though we were glad to have her we couldn't, of course,
+accept any responsibility--
+
+He smiled slightly and asked, "For what?"
+
+I said, "Well--" And he answered his own question in the pause I made.
+
+"I suppose you mean for anything she may take it into her head to do?"
+
+I put it to him that Viola's movements were not always exactly
+calculable. She might take it into her head to do anything. I really
+couldn't answer for her.
+
+"_You_ can't," he said. "But _I_ can. She may go off and look at a belfry
+or two." (I should have said that "looking at the belfry" was a phrase
+the family had adopted for any queer thing that any of us might do.) "If
+there's a belfry anywhere to be seen you may depend upon it she'd want to
+look at it."
+
+"Whether," I said, "it's in a dangerous place or not?"
+
+"Whether it's in a dangerous place or not. But I'll trust you to keep her
+out of dangerous places. That's rather what I wanted to talk to you
+about."
+
+I protested. "There's no good talking about it. I've told you that's just
+precisely the responsibility I won't take. And I won't let Norah take it.
+If you think there's going to be any danger you must look after your own
+wife yourself."
+
+"My dear fellow, how can I look after her if I'm not here?"
+
+"You're as much here as I am," I said. "More so. And she's your wife, not
+mine."
+
+I can say now--there's no reason why I shouldn't; it would only amuse
+Jimmy if he were to see it written--I can say now that for one awful
+moment I suspected Jimmy of meditating an infidelity. Perhaps he was; but
+not as we count infidelity.
+
+He ignored what I took to be the essence of the thing.
+
+"We don't know," he said, "where any of us are going to be for the next
+four months--or the next four years. I know that _I_ jolly well shan't be
+here. What I want to propose is this: that you'll look after Viola and
+let her have your house when she wants to be in town; and that you have
+this house for yourself and Norah and Baby when you want to be in the
+country--just as if it was your own. There'll be that other motor-car you
+can have--as if it was your own. You can run up to town in it. And you'll
+probably find that the country will be the best place for you. It'll be
+much the best place for _them_, and the safest--if you aren't here."
+
+I couldn't see it even then. I said, "My dear chap, why shouldn't I be
+here? I certainly mean to be here."
+
+And he considered it and said, "I don't see why not. It's different for
+you. You've got a child and I haven't."
+
+I said I couldn't see what Baby had to do with it.
+
+And he replied that a young child was an infernal complication, and that
+he was jolly glad he hadn't got one. What Baby had to do with it was to
+keep me out of it.
+
+Then I asked him what on earth he was talking about.
+
+He said, "_I'm_ talking about the European conflagration. What are you?"
+
+He had been talking about it all the time, he had been thinking of
+nothing but the European conflagration for the last four days. It was the
+thing, he said, that he had prophesied nine years ago--didn't I remember?
+(Oh yes, I remembered; but then, he was always prophesying something.)
+Well then, here it was. And it had come, by God, at the very date he had
+given it.
+
+I can see him sitting there in his study at Amershott Old Grange. He was
+deadly quiet. Not a gesture came to disturb my sense of his tranquil
+triumph in the fulfilment of his prophecy. To say that he enjoyed the
+European conflagration because it had proved him so abundantly right
+would give a false impression of an extraordinary and complicated state
+of mind. There _was_ a sort of exaltation about him (his face positively
+shone, as if the European conflagration illuminated it from afar); but it
+was a holy and a sacred exaltation, pure from egoism, except that he saw
+himself--there's no doubt that already he did see himself--figuring.
+
+I remember saying, as lots of people were saying then, that I didn't
+suppose for a moment we should be dragged into it.
+
+"Dragged?" he said. "Dragged? We shall be in it without dragging--in the
+very thick."
+
+From the instant the Germans broke into Luxembourg--and he gave them
+twenty-four hours--we should be in it. We couldn't keep out with a rag of
+honour to our names. France, he declared, would be in to-day. He gave us,
+I _think_--but I do not like to say positively that he gave us--three
+days; he couldn't have been as dead right as all that.
+
+What struck me then as so extravagantly odd was, not that he had
+foreseen the war, and England's part in it, but that he should have
+seen himself there, in the thick--blazing away in the very middle of the
+conflagration. What on earth Jimmy conceived that _he_ should have to
+do with it I couldn't think. And all of a sudden I had a reminiscence of
+Jevons as I had seen him nine years ago, talking to Reggie Thesiger in
+Viola's rooms at Hampstead, prophesying war, and lamenting that he
+wouldn't be in it because he was an arrant coward.
+
+And as I looked at him again I saw that what made his face shine like
+that was the sweat that had broken out on it.
+
+Then he made a remark about Charlie Thesiger. Thesiger, he said, knew all
+about it. He had gone up--he supposed I knew that?--to offer his services
+to the War Office in the event of England's coming in.
+
+That Charlie had used the opportunity of going to make love to Jimmy's
+wife didn't seem to bother Jimmy in the least.
+
+Sunday, I remember, was a fine day, with all the dust laid, and Jimmy
+made himself lovable by running me up to London in his sacred car. He
+still clung--I could see that he clung--to the superstition of its
+sanctity.
+
+He left me at my door in Edwardes Square, which he refused to enter. I
+think he was afraid of seeing Viola. I thought at the time that this was
+because he was aware of her attitude; that he knew she was at the end of
+her tether, and that he wanted to be righteously fair, to give her time
+to think about leaving him, if she wanted to leave him; that he was
+behaving now as he had behaved at Bruges when he stood back and let me
+have my innings, and gave her her chance to free herself. And yet I was
+puzzled. Even he could hardly stand back to give Thesiger an innings. He
+_may_ have had an inkling. There may have been something of his queer,
+scrupulous tenderness in this avoidance of her; there may have been his
+reckless propensity to take the risk; but I am convinced that even then
+his main object was--like Viola--to burn his boats. He was afraid that if
+he were to see Viola again he wouldn't be able to go through with it. He
+may even have been glad that she had left him, because it had made his
+way easier.
+
+And so, when he had landed me at my door, he turned the black nose of his
+car round and ran out of Edwardes Square faster than he had run in; as if
+he were afraid that the place would catch and keep him.
+
+He didn't go back to Amershott. He stayed in London in one of his clubs
+(he had several now, besides the club in Dover Street), and I saw him
+sometimes. I didn't say anything to Viola about him. I didn't tell her he
+was in town. It was as if there had been some tacit understanding among
+the three of us; there must have been some tacit agreement between him
+and me.
+
+Sunday passed, and Monday somehow; and on Tuesday, the fourth, we were
+all holding our breaths under the tension of the Ultimatum.
+
+I have no doubt that in those three days I had some opinion of my own
+about the European conflagration, that I must have stared with my own
+eyes sometimes at the fate of Europe and the fate of England, that I must
+have felt _some_ horror and anxiety and excitement that was my own. But
+as I look back on it all I am aware chiefly of Jevons, of _his_ opinions,
+_his_ vision, _his_ horror and excitement. I seem to have spent the
+greater part of those three days with Jevons, and there are moments, in
+looking back, when he fills the scene. He is the largest and most
+prominent figure in the crowd that walked the streets with me on the
+evening of the Ultimatum, that waited with me outside Buckingham Palace,
+when London let itself loose in madness; he seems the only sane figure in
+that crowd or in the processions that moved for hours on end up and down
+Parliament Street, between Trafalgar Square and Palace Yard. It is as if
+I had stood alone with Jevons before the Mansion House at midnight when
+the Ultimatum was declared.
+
+And when I say that it was his horror and anxiety and excitement--and his
+defiance and exaltation, if you like--that I felt, I do not mean that
+Jevons talked about it. He was, for those three days, mostly silent. It
+is that I saw him consumed and burned up by the fever of patriotism and
+war, and that beside his passion any emotion I may have felt hardly
+counted.
+
+And every minute we expected to hear him say that he _liked_ the War
+because it made him feel manly. Norah and I pretended to each other that
+he would say it--it was our idea of a joke, God forgive us.
+
+It was on Wednesday, the fifth, very early in the morning, that he began
+trying to enlist. It was the first thing he did; and we thought _that_
+funny.
+
+We thought it so funny that even if he hadn't told us not to tell Viola
+we wouldn't have told her; we felt that it wouldn't have been quite fair
+to either of them.
+
+And none of the Thesigers, or anybody connected with the Thesigers, could
+take Jimmy seriously for one moment. With General Thesiger waiting to be
+sent to the Front, and Reggie Thesiger preparing to go, and Charlie
+Thesiger who might be called on any day, with Bertie and all his male
+cousins enlisting and pulling all the ropes they could lay their hands on
+to get their commissions, they hadn't time for Jimmy and his importunity.
+He _was_ importunate; and I'm afraid that in those weeks Jimmy didn't
+exist for them or any of us, except as a jest that lightened our labours
+now and then. They were so busy getting their kits that they couldn't
+even think of the fate of Europe.
+
+And Viola--what she was thinking and feeling God (or Jevons) only knew.
+She didn't tell us. But I was pretty sure that with Reggie starting for
+the front in two weeks it wasn't Jevons she was thinking of. I suspected
+that she wasn't far from feeling that secret hatred of Jimmy that had
+come to her once or twice before, when she had thought of Reggie.
+Remember that all this time, even after that illness of hers last year,
+when she and Reggie met they met as well-bred strangers. She had never
+lowered her flag or made one sign. She had just suffered in secret with
+the thought of Reggie biting deeper and deeper into her mind, till,
+wherever the memory of Reggie was there was a wound. And she had been ill
+of her wounds and had nearly died of them.
+
+And in those two weeks she had begun to look as if she were going to be
+ill again. It was bad enough for Norah and for all of them, but conceive
+what it must have been for her!
+
+And so we came to Reggie's last day and the night when he came to us to
+say good-bye.
+
+I think she must have written to him or made some sign. But I'm not sure.
+I only know that he was prepared for her; and that when she came into the
+room at the last minute, as he turned from Norah's arms, he closed on
+her, and that they held each other an instant--tight, like lovers--and
+that neither of them said a word.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After that the War must have seemed to her, as it seemed to all of us, to
+have wiped Jimmy out.
+
+Just at first we thought that this was the secret of Jimmy's agony, of
+his rushings round and round, and of his ceaseless manoeuvring. He knew
+that the War was going to wipe him out; he knew that the world had no use
+for his sort, the men who only wrote things. There was an end of his
+writing, of his novels and his short stories and his plays, and if he
+didn't look out and do something there would be an end of _him_. And he
+couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear to be reduced to inactivity and
+insignificance--to be wiped out. He wasn't going to be made an end of if
+he could help it. These were the things we said about him. What we saw,
+or thought we saw, was the revolt of his egoism. It didn't look quite
+sane.
+
+He was furious when he found out that, even if he enlisted, he couldn't
+buy a commission. He didn't seem to realize that there were things he
+couldn't buy. He was still more furious when he found that the Thesigers
+wouldn't help him. They _could_ help him, he declared, if they liked.
+Commissions were being given every day to the wrong people, by influence.
+
+Up till now, with his talk about commissions, he had been purely funny,
+and we had laughed at him. But when he found that he couldn't enlist,
+that they wouldn't have him, that he wasn't strong enough--they'd
+discovered a leaky valve in his heart or something--and that in any case
+he was too old, when he broke down as he tried to tell me this, he wasn't
+funny at all. He'd been to every recruiting station in London and his own
+county, and they all said the same thing. He was too old.
+
+This, he said, was where his beastly celebrity had gone back on him. He
+could very easily have lied about his age (he didn't look it), in fact,
+he _had_ lied about it freely, to every one of them; but his age was
+recorded against him in the Year-Books of his craft. And he couldn't lie
+about his heart, he didn't know it had a valve that leaked. He didn't
+believe it. He had given the man who examined it the lie; and he had gone
+to a heart-specialist to get the report (which he regarded as a libel)
+contradicted, and the heart-specialist had confirmed it, and told him he
+wasn't the first man who had come to him to get an opinion overruled. He
+said he was to keep quiet and avoid excitement. He mustn't dream of going
+to the front. I think the specialist must have been sorry for Jevons, for
+he went on to tell him that there were other ways in which he could serve
+his country. He seems to have talked a lot of rot about the pen being
+mightier than the sword, and to have advised Jimmy to "use his wonderful
+pen." And at that Jimmy seems to have broken from him in a passion.
+
+And here he was, in a passion still, ramping up and down that private
+room he had at his club, and saying, "Damn my powerful pen, Furny! Damn
+my powerful pen!" The whole system, he said, was rotten. He'd a good mind
+to expose it. He'd expose it in the papers. _That_ was the use he'd make
+of his powerful pen. See how they'd like _that_.
+
+I remember it because it was then that I laid before him my own problem.
+The _Daily Post_ had asked me if I'd go out as its War-Correspondent. I
+was to wire "Yes" or "No" in the next half-hour, and if I went I should
+have to start to-night.
+
+I said I didn't know what to do about it.
+
+He stared. "You don't know what to _do_?"
+
+I said: No. It wasn't so simple when you had a wife and child dependent
+on you. I didn't know whether I ought to take the risk.
+
+And then he said his memorable thing: "If you can take the risk of
+living--My God," he said, "if I only had your luck!"
+
+_His_ luck, I told him, was a dead certainty. There wasn't a paper that
+would refuse Tasker Jevons as War-Correspondent. He'd only got to
+volunteer. Why on earth, I asked him, didn't he?
+
+He became very grave. He seemed to be considering it.
+
+"No," he said, "no. That isn't quite good enough for me. I don't want to
+go out to the war to write about it. I want to do things.
+
+"Perhaps--if there's no other way--I may be driven to it."
+
+For a moment, then, I suspected him. I doubted his sincerity. He was
+making all this fuss about enlisting to cover up his cowardice. He must
+have known all the time they wouldn't take him. He was safe. But put
+before him a thing he could do--do better than anybody else--a thing that
+would take him into the thick and keep him there, if he wasn't killed,
+and he said, No, thank you. That wasn't quite good enough for him.
+
+I didn't believe in his "Perhaps--if there was no other way--he might be
+driven to it." I saw him driven to do anything he didn't mean to do!
+
+Meanwhile he drove _me_. Before I had seen him I hadn't really meant to
+take that job. He did something to me that changed my mind.
+
+That was how I went out to Belgium as a War-Correspondent.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+I was out for a month. Then--I was in Ghent at the same old hotel in the
+Place d'Armes--I got a touch of malaria and had to come home, and the
+_Daily Post_ sent another man out instead of me.
+
+That was how I managed to see Jevons in what Norah called his second
+war-phase. He had been trying hard to get out with the Red Cross
+volunteers, and it had been even funnier, she said, and more pathetic,
+than his enlisting. I don't know what Viola thought of his war-phases;
+to Norah they were just that--funny and pathetic. To the other Thesigers
+he was purely offensive. They resented Jevons's trying to have anything
+to do with the war, as if it had been some sort of impertinent
+interference with their prerogative. His mother-in-law, I know, had no
+patience with him. His frantic efforts to get to the front were nothing,
+she declared, but a form of war-panic. It took some people like that. She
+said the only really cruel thing I had ever heard her say of him. She
+said he _looked_ panic-stricken. (He was lean and haggard by this time,
+and had a haunted look which may have been what she meant.) And well--if
+it wasn't panic that was the matter with him it was self-advertisement,
+and if I'd any regard for him or any influence with him I'd stop it. The
+little man was simply making himself ridiculous.
+
+I was staying in Canterbury with Norah for the weekend, and I heard all
+about it. He did seem to have been rather funny. He had begun with a
+scheme for taking out a Red Cross Motor Field Ambulance which he proposed
+to command in person. He had offered himself with his convoy first to the
+War Office, then to the Admiralty, then to the War Office again, and the
+War Office and the Admiralty kicked him out. Then he had gone round to
+each of the Red Cross Societies in turn, the American included. And they
+had all got their own schemes for Motor Field Ambulances, and didn't want
+his. What they _did_ want was his subscriptions and his powerful pen to
+support their schemes. And Jevons had said, "Damn my powerful pen!" to
+every one of them. As for subscriptions, he subscribed enormously to his
+own Motor Ambulance Corps. He had actually raised his unit, found his
+volunteers, his surgeons, his chauffeurs and his stretcher-bearers, he
+had bought and equipped a Motor Ambulance car, the one he had proposed to
+go with himself. And they took his subscriptions and his Ambulance Car
+and his volunteers; but they wouldn't take him; no, not at any price.
+They put one of his surgeons at the head of the thing instead of him and
+sent it out without him, and Jimmy had to see it go. But when they
+proposed that Jimmy should use his powerful pen to maintain it in the
+field, he swore that he would use it to expose the whole system. And when
+he found that the responsibility for rejecting his services rested with
+the War Office, he went down to the War Office and complained, and to the
+Admiralty and complained, and to the Home Office and complained. After
+that he seems to have visited all the Embassies in turn--the American,
+the French, the Belgian, and I suppose the Russian and the Japanese.
+
+When I asked the Thesigers what he was doing now they said they didn't
+know. They hadn't heard of him and his activities for quite a fortnight,
+and they didn't bother about him. They were too much wrapped up in
+Bertie and in Reggie, even if they hadn't been too busy--every one of
+them up to their necks in work for the Army or the hospitals. They
+admitted that he had sent them large subscriptions.
+
+It seemed to me, as far as I could make out, that Viola hadn't seen or
+heard of him since she had left Amershott. She was too busy and too much
+wrapped in Reggie to bother about him either; at least, it looked like
+it. She seems to have known in a vague way that he had talked about going
+to the front, but I didn't believe she thought he would ever get there.
+
+And he had lain low for a fortnight.
+
+When we had got back to London at noon on Tuesday, which was the end of
+Jimmy's fortnight, I found a wire from Amershott waiting for me. It had
+been sent that morning. It said: "Leaving to-morrow. Must see you urgent
+business. Can you come down this evening. JEVONS."
+
+I knew that he wouldn't send a wire like that without good reason; so I
+went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+A light rain was falling when I reached Midhurst. A hired dog-cart met me
+at the station, so I gathered that Jimmy's mad passion for his motor-car
+had survived the war.
+
+And at Amershott everything seemed to have survived. If it had not been
+for troops on the high road, and for the stillness of the coverts, and
+for the recruiting posters stuck everywhere on the barn-doors, and for
+the strange figure of old Perrott driving the mail-cart from Midhurst to
+Amershott instead of his son, you wouldn't have known that the war had
+anything to do with England. And I expected to find Jimmy in his old
+Norfolk suit standing in the garage and looking with adoration at his
+motor-car.
+
+As I thought all this I smiled when Parker told me that Mr. Jevons was in
+the garage. Parker, I noticed, didn't smile.
+
+And in another minute it was Jevons who did all the smiling.
+
+I found him in the garage--no, I can't say I found him, for I didn't
+recognize him, but I heard his voice assuring me that it was he. He was
+in khaki; from head to foot, from his peaked military cap to his puttees
+he was in faultless, well-fitting khaki; even his shirt and his neck-tie
+were khaki. Jimmy's colours showed up wonderfully out of all that
+brownish, greyish, yellowish green. His flush fairly flamed, and his
+eyes, his eyes looked enormous and very bright--great chunks of dark
+sapphire his eyes were. They were twinkling at me.
+
+"It's me all right, old man," he said, and turned from me in his deep
+preoccupation. And as he turned I saw that he wore round his right arm a
+white brassard with a red cross on it.
+
+At the far end of the coach-house where the great black and white idol
+used to stand there was a khaki car with a huge red cross on a white
+square on its flank and on its khaki canvas hood. This was what his eyes
+turned to.
+
+"But--where's the black-and-white god?" I asked.
+
+"There she is," he said, "you're looking at her."
+
+"You haven't--"
+
+"Yes, I have. She's had her new coat on for the last three weeks. You
+couldn't take her out as she was, all black and white. She'd have been
+knocked to bits before we'd begun our job. So I had her painted. She's a
+good enough target for shell-fire as she is."
+
+"You don't mean," I said, "that you're going out?"
+
+"What else have I been meaning ever since there was a war?"
+
+"But--where are you going _to_?"
+
+"Belgium," he said. He added that it was the only blessed place he
+_could_ get to.
+
+"And what are you going to do when you get there?"
+
+He said he was going to scout for wounded, of course.
+
+And as he saw me still incredulous he told me how he'd managed it. He had
+gone every day for three weeks to the Belgian Legation and worried the
+Belgian Minister into a state of nervous prostration. And when the
+Minister was at his worst and was obliged to leave things a bit to his
+secretaries, he'd gone to the secretaries and worried _them_ till the
+First Secretary had given him his passport and a letter of introduction
+to the President of the Belgian Red Cross Society at Ghent. And he had
+gone to Ghent--went there last week--and he had seen the President and
+talked to him. He had talked for ten minutes before his services had been
+accepted by the Belgian Red Cross.
+
+And he was going out to-morrow.
+
+"It's just taken me six weeks to do it. I gave myself six weeks."
+
+Of course I congratulated him. But I couldn't realize it. The whole thing
+seemed incredible. Jevons in his khaki was incredible. The transformed
+motor-car was incredible, as a thing that Jevons was concerned with.
+Above all, it was incredible that he should have sacrificed his god.
+
+I couldn't believe it until Kendal, the chauffeur, turned up, also in
+khaki and with a Red Cross brassard on his right arm. Kendal was credible
+enough; he looked as if he had been going to the war all his life. It was
+evident that he was keen on the adventure. It was also evident that he
+adored Jevons more than ever. By watching Kendal in the act of adoration
+and keeping my eyes fixed on him I was able to take it in, and to assent
+to the statement that Jevons was going to the war.
+
+He was of course if Kendal said so.
+
+Kendal was asking me what I thought of the car.
+
+"She's not the beauty she was, sir," said Kendal. "I don't suppose Mr.
+Jevons will care much how he knocks her about now. And they do say the
+Belgium roads is fair destruction to cars."
+
+I said they were. I'd motored on them. Kendal looked at me as he might
+have looked at the survivor of a shattering experience. Then he looked at
+his car. He seemed to be seeing all the roads in Belgium in a hideous
+vision.
+
+Then he spoke. "Well, they may be bad roads, but Mr. Jevons isn't going
+to be done. He'll take out ten cars before 'e turns back. Ten cars, he
+will."
+
+Yes, yes, I might have known it. Was there ever anything Jevons had made
+up his mind to do and didn't? Had I ever known him turn back from any
+adventure that he had set out on? If he said he was going to the war,
+why couldn't I have known that he would go? The more incredible the thing
+was, the more likely he was to do it.
+
+When I said so he shook his head and said it wasn't really as likely as
+it looked.
+
+We were sitting together after dinner in his garden. Though it was the
+third week in September the nights were still warm. Without Viola, the
+stillness of the place was strange to me, almost uncanny, as if Viola
+were dead and had come back and was listening to us somewhere. I had just
+told him it was splendid of him going out like this, and he had smiled
+back at me and asked, "Like what?" And then I had said I might have known
+it; it was the sort of thing he would do.
+
+No, he went on, it wasn't likely. It had been touch and go, he had only
+just pulled it off by the skin of his teeth. It had given him more
+trouble than anything he'd ever tried for. It had bothered him more. It
+had bothered him most damnably.
+
+I thought he was referring to his struggles with the recruiting depots
+and the War Office and the Home Office and the Embassies and all the rest
+of it. And I said it _was_ pretty hard luck his own Ambulance Corps being
+sent out without him. But he said, No; it wasn't. He hadn't been very
+keen on the Ambulance Corps. He hadn't really wanted to go out with all
+that beastly crowd. This quick scouting game--by himself--was more in his
+line. All he regretted was the time he'd lost.
+
+Well, I said, anyhow he was a lucky beggar to have got what he wanted
+after six weeks.
+
+At that he looked at me suddenly and his face went all sharp and thin. Or
+else I hadn't noticed till then how sharp and thin it was. His flush had
+seemed to flood it and fill it out somehow, and his eyes struck your
+attention like two great flashes of energy. The flash had gone out now as
+he looked at me.
+
+I reminded him: "Haven't you always said you could get what you wanted?"
+
+"Oh yes, I've _said_ it, and I've done it. That's nothing. Any fool can
+do that. The great thing is to make yourself get what you don't want. I
+didn't _want_ to do this. I had to."
+
+"No. You wanted to enlist. But I'm not sure that from your point of view
+this isn't better."
+
+"Jolly lot you know," he said, "about my point of view."
+
+"Your idea," I explained, "of doing things on your own. Isn't that what
+you wanted?"
+
+He answered very slowly: "I don't think--it matters--what I wanted--or
+what I didn't want. It's enough--isn't it?--if I want to _now_--if I want
+it more than anything else?"
+
+I said, No, I didn't think it did matter.
+
+But I hadn't a notion what he meant. I didn't know that he was on the
+edge of a confession. I couldn't see that he was trying to tell me
+something about himself, and that I had started him off by telling him he
+was splendid. It was as if--then--he too had felt that Viola was there
+and listening to us, as if he were speaking to her and not to me.
+
+For the next thing he said was, "I want you to tell Viola about it. Tell
+her it's all right. Tell her I'm all right. See?"
+
+"But shan't you," I said, "be seeing her? Isn't she going to see you off
+or something?"
+
+He said, "No. Much better not. She wouldn't be content with seeing me
+off. She'd try to come out with me. She'd worry me to take her. And
+I'm not going to take her. She isn't to know I'm going till I've gone.
+And she isn't to know where I've gone to. I won't have her coming out
+to me. _You've_ got to see to that, Furny. You've got to stop her if
+she tries to get out. They're _all_ trying. You should just see the
+bitches--tumbling, and wriggling and scrabbling with their claws and
+crawling on their stomachs to get to the front--tearing each other's eyes
+out to get there first. And there are fellows that'll take them. They'll
+even take their wives.
+
+"Not me. Not much. I wouldn't let Viola cross in the same boat with that
+lot.
+
+"It ought to be put a stop to.
+
+"The place I'm going to--the things I'm going to see--and to do--aren't
+fit for women--aren't fit for women to come within ten miles of. Whatever
+you do, Furny--and I don't care what you do--you're not to let her get
+out."
+
+I suppose--I suppose I made him some sort of promise. He says I did. I
+don't remember.
+
+I _do_ remember telling him I thought it was a pity--if he meant to go
+out--that he hadn't seen Viola all this time.
+
+And I remember his answer. "I haven't seen her--all this time--_because_
+I meant to go out. I meant that nothing on this earth should stop me."
+
+"How do you know," I said, "that she'd have stopped you?"
+
+"How do I know? How do I know anything?--It's you who don't know. You
+don't know anything at all."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, he went--like that--without telling any of them.
+
+I ran down on the car with him to Folkestone and saw him off on the boat
+to Ostend, he and Kendal, his chauffeur--he, as he pointed out to me,
+superior to Kendal only in the perfect fitting of his khaki. "Otherwise
+there isn't a pin to choose between us. Except," he said, "that Kendal
+doesn't funk it and I do."
+
+And with Kendal grinning from ear to ear over Mr. Jevons's delicious
+joke, and Jimmy waving his khaki cap in a final valediction, and Kendal's
+grin dying abruptly as he achieved the military salute he judged
+appropriate, we parted.
+
+Jimmy's last words to me, thrown over the gunwale, were, "Don't run after
+me, Furny. You won't catch me _this_ time."
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+
+Then I went back and told Viola about it. I took her into my library that
+had once been Jevons's study, where he had delivered the Grand Attack. I
+gave her a letter that Jevons had scribbled before lunch in the hotel at
+Folkestone. I suppose he had explained things in it.
+
+But as for me, or any power I had to break it to her, I might just as
+well have told her that he was dead.
+
+Except that perhaps then she wouldn't have turned on me.
+
+"You _knew_ this," she said, "you knew he was going and you never told
+me?"
+
+I said I had only known it last night--how could I have told her?
+
+She persisted. "You _knew_--at what time last night?"
+
+I hesitated and she drove it home.
+
+"You might have wired. It wasn't too late."
+
+I said it was, and that I didn't know that she didn't know till it was
+too late to wire.
+
+"Do you suppose," she said, "--if I'd known--that I should be _here_?"
+
+I couldn't tell her--she was so white under her wound and the shock of
+it--I couldn't tell her that she had given me no reason to suppose that
+she would be with him.
+
+And she went on. "Why couldn't you have wired in the morning, then? I
+could have caught that boat."
+
+"Because, my dear girl, he doesn't want you to go out."
+
+"It doesn't matter what he wants--or thinks he wants--I'm going.
+
+"And what's more," she said, "you've got to take me. That's all you've
+gained by trying to stop me."
+
+I replied that nothing would induce me to take her out, that I'd promised
+Jimmy she shouldn't go.
+
+She said that didn't matter. Jimmy'd know I couldn't keep a silly promise
+like that, and if I wouldn't take her she'd simply go by herself.
+
+I tried to explain to her very gently that her going--at all--was out of
+the question. She would do no good to anybody by going; she would annoy
+Jimmy most frightfully; untrained women were not wanted at the front.
+
+Untrained? She had got her certificate three days ago. What did I suppose
+she had wanted it for--if it wasn't to go out with Jimmy if he went?
+
+"You knew he was going, then?" I said.
+
+"I knew he wanted to go. But I didn't think he'd go so soon. I didn't
+really think he'd go at all. They told me I needn't worry, that he hadn't
+a chance."
+
+"Who told you?"
+
+"Oh, everybody. The General and Colonel Braithwaite and Charlie, and
+Bertie, and Reggie--at least he told Norah--and the people at the War
+Office and the Admiralty and the Embassies."
+
+"You _went_ to them? You went to the War Office?"
+
+"I went everywhere where he did, or as near as I could get. And they all
+told me the same thing--he hadn't a chance. Not the ghost of a chance. I
+really thought he hadn't. When you think of the men--men who can do
+things, who are dying to go and are being kept back--"
+
+"You were helping him to go?" I said. I saw a vision, or I tried to see
+it, a pathetic vision of Viola following poor Jimmy in his pursuit of
+secretaries and ambassadors, doing insane, impossible things to help him.
+
+And then I saw Viola herself. She was looking at me, with all her
+features tilted in that funny way she had.
+
+"Well--no," she said; "I wasn't exactly _helping_."
+
+"What _were_ you doing, then?"
+
+"I'm afraid I was trying to stop him."
+
+The sheer folly of it took my breath away.
+
+"Surely," I said, "if he hadn't the ghost of a chance, it wasn't
+necessary?"
+
+"Well--it _was_ necessary, you see. He's so awfully clever. He was very
+nearly off once or twice. Only we just managed to get in in time."
+
+"Who got in in time?"
+
+"Oh, it wasn't only me, Furny, it was all of us. We were all out trying
+to stop him--Charlie and Reggie and Uncle Billy--_he_ pulled all the
+ropes--we couldn't do much."
+
+"But what--what did General Thesiger do?"
+
+"He didn't 'do' anything. He hadn't got to. He just said things. Told
+them _about_ Jimmy."
+
+I don't know whether my face expressed horror or admiration. It must have
+been a sort of horror, for she began to excuse herself.
+
+"Why not? Why should poor little Jimmy go?"
+
+"Because he wants to. You'd no business to stop him when he wanted to
+go."
+
+"But--that was it. He didn't want to go. He only thought he _ought_ to
+go."
+
+"How," I said sternly, "do you know what he wanted?"
+
+"Because," she said, "he told Uncle Billy. He kept on saying he ought to
+go. And we told him he oughtn't. What earthly good can Jimmy do out
+there, with his poor little heart all dicky? He'll simply die of it. You
+don't suppose I'd have stopped him if I'd thought it was good for him to
+go? Or if I'd thought he really wanted to? We told him all that--Uncle
+Billy and I did--we told him straight that if he tried to get out we'd
+try and stop him."
+
+"Oh," I said, "you _told_ him. That's a different thing."
+
+"Things, Furny, always are different to what you think them. At least
+they're never half so nasty. Of course we told him. And of course he
+laughed in our faces. We thought we _had_ stopped him. But--he's slipped
+through our fingers.
+
+"We might," she said, "have known."
+
+I heard her say all that, though I wasn't listening. It comes back to me
+that she said it. It was dawning on me that in this queer business there
+were details, quite important details, that had escaped me. The war had
+taken up my attention to the exclusion of Viola's affairs. But it was
+evident that things had happened while I was away. I was thinking of
+something that she let out.
+
+"Look here," I said, "when you say you told him, do you mean that you and
+he have been seeing each other?"
+
+"Of course we've been seeing each other. Until he stopped it. He said he
+couldn't stand the strain."
+
+"And you?" I said. "Did you stand it?"
+
+She looked at me straight and hard.
+
+"You've no right to ask me that," she said.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Well, perhaps I hadn't. And if I had owned frankly that I hadn't all
+might have been well. But, as it was, before I knew where we both were,
+we had quarrelled.
+
+Yes. I quarrelled with Viola; or she quarrelled with me; it really
+doesn't matter how you put it; and it shows the awful tension we must
+have been living in.
+
+When I heard her say that I had no right to ask her that question I
+answered that I thought I had.
+
+She said, "What right?"
+
+And I said if she would think a little she would see what right.
+
+And at that she fired up and the blaze was awful. We two were up there
+alone and she had me at her mercy. She held me in the blaze.
+
+"I suppose," she said, "I'm to think of your everlasting meddling with my
+affairs?"
+
+I pointed out that a charge of meddling came rather oddly from a lady who
+honoured me by staying in my house because she preferred it to her
+husband's.
+
+"You know perfectly well why I'm staying in your house; and if you don't,
+Norah does. I could have stayed with my father, for that matter."
+
+I said I thought that that was extremely doubtful--in the circumstances.
+
+I had her there, and she knew it, for she retired in bad order on an
+irrelevant point. She said I was no judge of the circumstances.
+
+I said peaceably that perhaps I wasn't, but that she must own that I had
+behaved as if I were. At any rate I'd given her the benefit of the doubt.
+
+She said, "You talk as if I'd been through the Divorce Court. Perhaps
+that's where you think I ought to be. The benefit of the doubt! You
+certainly _have_ given it me. It's been nothing but doubt with you,
+Walter, ever since I knew you. You always thought awful things about me.
+I know you have. I could _see_ you thinking them. You thought vile things
+about me, and vile things about Jimmy. You came rushing out to Belgium
+because you thought them. And the other day you thought the same thing of
+me and Charlie Thesiger, and you came rushing after me again and giving
+me away, and behaving so that everybody else would think me awful too."
+
+"My dear child, you owned yourself that Charlie--"
+
+"Oh--Charlie! As if he mattered! He was only being an ass--the war upset
+him, or something. I don't care what you think about Charlie--he doesn't
+either--but why you should go out of your way to think _me_ awful--"
+
+I said I thought we'd done with that.
+
+"No," she said, "we haven't done with it. I want to get to the bottom of
+it. What _makes_ you do these things? I believe you _want_ to make out
+that I'm horrid, just as you wanted to make out that poor little Jimmy
+was, when I went to him in Bruges."
+
+She went on. "I can understand _that_, because I did go to him, and I--I
+cared for him and you didn't like it. I can even understand your wanting
+_me_ to be horrid then, because it made it easier for you. I had the
+sense to see that that was all that was the matter with you _then_, so I
+didn't mind. But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can
+it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or horrid?"
+
+She had rushed on, carried away by her own passion, without seeing where
+she was going. I don't think she had seen, any more than I had, that for
+nine years I had been living behind a screen. A screen that had hidden me
+from myself. I don't think she saw even now when she came crashing into
+it.
+
+It was I who saw.
+
+The thing was down about my ears; and it wasn't the violence of its fall
+that terrified me; it was my own nakedness. I wasn't prepared to find
+myself morally undressed.
+
+I turned away from her. I began fiddling with my pens and papers. I
+trailed long slip-proofs under her eyes, pretending that I had work to
+do. But she saw through my pretences and her voice followed me.
+
+It was softer, though. It seemed to be pleading, as if she knew nothing
+about me and my screen.
+
+"What harm did I ever do you? Or poor Jimmy either? I didn't let you
+marry me. You ought to be grateful to Jimmy. At least he saved you from
+that."
+
+I said I thought we needn't drag her husband into it, and I haven't a
+notion what I meant. I had to say something, and if it sounded
+disagreeable, so much the better.
+
+And she said there I was again--thinking that I had to remind her that
+Jimmy _was_ her husband.
+
+"You certainly seem to have forgotten it," I said.
+
+"_He_ knows how much I've forgotten."
+
+With that last word she left me.
+
+I tried hard to shake the horror of it off. I remember I sat down to my
+proofs, and I suppose I tried to correct them. But all the time I heard
+Viola's voice saying, "I can understand your wanting me to be horrid
+_then_, because it made it easier for you.... But why on earth you should
+keep it up like this! What can it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or
+horrid?"
+
+It went on in my head till the words ceased to have any meaning. I had
+only a dreadful sense that I should remember them to-morrow, and that
+perhaps when to-morrow came I should know what they meant.
+
+      *      *      *      *      *
+
+And when to-morrow came the war took up my attention again, so that I
+actually forgot that Viola had said she was going out to it.
+
+She had let the subject drop abruptly. She didn't even refer to it when
+my friend the editor of the _Morning Standard_ rang me up the next day to
+ask me if I'd go out to Belgium as their Special Correspondent.
+
+He was charmingly frank about it. He told me that it was Tasker Jevons he
+wanted, and Tasker Jevons he had asked to go, but since he couldn't get
+him (and his powerful pen) why then, he'd had to fall back on me. Jevons,
+he said, had let him down pretty badly; he'd understood from Jevons that
+he was prepared to go for them at twelve hours' notice. And he'd given
+him twenty-four hours; and he'd found that he'd gone out there two days
+ago. Chucked them, my friend the editor supposed, for another paper.
+Could I, at twenty-three hours' notice, take his place?
+
+I said I could and I would, and I put him right about Jevons.
+
+And then I went to see about my motor-car.
+
+It was when Viola began to bother me about her passport that the fight
+began.
+
+First of all, she asked me what I was doing about a motor-car? I told her
+she needn't worry herself about my motor-car. It wasn't any concern of
+hers. She grinned at that and said, All right. What she really wanted was
+to consult me about her passport.
+
+And when I refused to be consulted about her passport, to hear a word
+about her passport or about her going, she walked straight out of the
+house into a passing taxi that took her to the Belgian Legation, where
+she saw that weak-minded secretary that Jevons had handled; and she came
+back in time for tea, very cheerful and dressed in a sort of khaki
+uniform she had ordered, with a tunic and knee-breeches and puttees and a
+Red Cross brassard on her right arm.
+
+She said it had been a very tight squeeze, but she'd worked it, down
+to her uniform, and it was all right, and if I'd had any difficulty with
+my motor people (I had had awful difficulty, but how she knew it I
+haven't to this day found out. Sometimes I think she'd worked that too;
+she knew the firm, and she wasn't Mrs. Tasker Jevons for nothing)--if
+I'd had any difficulty she could put that straight for me. She'd got
+_her_ car--Jimmy'd ordered it for Amershott and forgotten about it--and
+her chauffeur, and I could go in it with her if I liked.
+
+It was a better car than the one I'd had in Belgium before or, she said
+significantly, than the one I was going to take out with me. It was true
+that I didn't know anything about cars.
+
+Then Norah, my wife, stood up beside her sister, flagrantly partisan, and
+said, Couldn't I see it wasn't any use trying to stop her? She had me at
+every point. If I wouldn't take her she'd go by herself with the
+chauffeur.
+
+And when I said, How about my promises--my word of honour? Viola laughed.
+
+"Your honour's all right, Wally," she said. "You're not taking me out;
+I'm taking you."
+
+And very early in the morning we motored down to Folkestone to catch the
+midday boat for Ostend. And Norah came with us to see us off. If I'd
+given her the smallest encouragement she'd have come too. I _might_ take
+her, she said; it was beastly being left behind.
+
+I said, like a savage, that Belgium was no place for women. I'd take my
+sister-in-law there, but not my wife.
+
+I suppose the dressing-down I'd got from Viola two nights before had
+rankled. I must have felt that I was getting my own back that time, when
+I threw it up to her that she wasn't my wife.
+
+Norah, I said, had too much sense to want to go where she wasn't wanted.
+
+But Viola only laughed again and said, "Please remember that I'm taking
+you, not you me. And Norah wants to go as much as I do, and it isn't
+altogether on your account. You needn't think it. As for keeping her
+back, you couldn't do it if she meant to go. It's Baby that's keeping
+her, not you."
+
+And then she thanked God she hadn't got a child.
+
+And so, sparring and chaffing by turns, half in play and half in
+earnest--for a secret subterranean anger smouldered still in both of
+us--we got off. I remember at the last moment Norah--dear little
+Norah--telling her that she was not to bully me. She was to let me sit
+in the motor-car as much as I liked; and she was to see that I didn't
+get into any danger.
+
+Danger? Danger? As the great fans of the screws churned the harbour water
+into foam that the waves thinned and flattened out again till the green
+lane broadened between our track and the pier head where Norah stood, and
+the little, slender, dark blue figure became a dot on the pier and lost
+itself in the crowd of dots and disappeared, then, for the first time, it
+struck me that to be going off like this, alone, with Viola, was danger
+in itself.
+
+Because, the other night she had made me see myself as I really was--a
+man, not of an irreproachable rectitude, an immaculate purity (had I
+ever, had anybody ever really supposed that I was such a man?) but quite
+deplorably human, and blind--yes, my dear Viola, blind as any bat--and
+vulnerable, so vulnerable that I think you might have spared me, you
+might have had some pity.
+
+I found myself addressing her like that, in my heart, as I walked up and
+down, up and down the deck, not looking at her, but acutely aware of her,
+where she sat in her deck-chair, bundled up in her great khaki motor-coat
+and in the rugs I had wrapped round her.
+
+I resented the power she had over me to make me aware of her--at such a
+time, or at any time, for that matter. Here was I, a Special
+Correspondent, going out to the war; and there, on the other side of the
+Channel, _was_ the war; in the fields of France and of Flanders men were
+fighting, men were slaughtering each other every day by thousands. I was
+a man and I should have been thinking of those men; and here I was,
+compelled against my conscience and my will to think of this woman. She
+had come out with me against my conscience and my will, and against my
+judgment and my good taste and my honour and my common sense, against
+everything in me that I set most store by. I hadn't meant to take her
+with me, and she had made me take her.
+
+And when my common sense told me that she hadn't; that I wasn't taking
+her, and that she had as much right to be on the Ostend boat as I had, I
+still resented her being there. I still raged as I realized the power she
+had over me. She had always had it. She had had it the first day I ever
+saw her, when she had walked into my rooms against my orders, half an
+hour behind the time I had appointed, and had made herself my secretary
+against my will. She had had it when she used me as a stalking-horse
+to draw her brother's suspicions away from her and Jevons; she had had it
+when she drew me after her to Belgium, and when I followed her from
+Bruges to Canterbury at her bidding; she had had it when I married Norah
+(hadn't she told me, in the insolence of it, that she had meant that I
+should marry Norah?). She had had it, this malign power over me, the
+other night, and she had it now. She always would have it.
+
+It wasn't my fault, I told myself, if she compelled me to look at her,
+this time, as I passed her deck-chair.
+
+I looked at her, and she sent me a little sad interrogative smile that
+asked me why I walked the decks thus savagely and alone? And I paid no
+attention to her or to her smile. In the very arrogance of isolation I
+continued to walk the decks. I meant her to see that I _could_ be alone
+and savage if I liked.
+
+And when I looked at her again (she couldn't have _made_ me this time,
+for she was unaware of me, lost in some profound meditation of her own),
+when I looked at her again my anger and my resentment died with a sort of
+struggle and a pang.
+
+She had, after all, the grace of her ignorance and innocence. If she had
+had no pity on me, it was because she was as blind as she had said I was.
+She didn't, she couldn't see me as she had made me see myself. She didn't
+know that she had any power over me, or else she wouldn't have used her
+power; she was too honourable for that, too chivalrous. You could trust
+her to play the game until she threw it up and left it.
+
+And I passed again in my sullen tramping, and I looked at her for the
+third time, urged by the remorse that stung me. And this time she drew me
+so that I went over to her and sat by her. I looked at my watch, we had
+been two hours on board.
+
+I had left her two hours alone; and in those two hours she had suffered.
+Her face was set now in a sort of brooding fear and anguish; her
+breathing had a tremor in it, as if her heart dragged at her side. It was
+better, far better, that we should quarrel than she should suffer and sit
+quivering in silence and see frightful things.
+
+But I saw that she wasn't going to quarrel, she wasn't going to pitch
+into me; she wasn't going to assert herself and domineer over me just
+now. This agony of hers had made her gentle, so that she spoke to me as
+if she were sorry for me after all.
+
+"Are you tired," she said, "of tramping up and down?"
+
+"Horribly tired."
+
+"Put my rug round you if you're going to sit still. Norah wouldn't let
+you sit still without a rug."
+
+"Norah wouldn't let me do anything I shouldn't do."
+
+She smiled down at me, still sad, but with the least little flicker of
+irony on the top of her sadness. "Norah's job isn't very hard. You don't
+ever _want_ to do anything you shouldn't."
+
+"Oh--don't I?"
+
+"No, never. That's the pull you have over naughty people like me. You're
+so good."
+
+"It wasn't my goodness you were rubbing into me the other night."
+
+"Never mind the other night. It doesn't matter what I said the other
+night. Only what I'm saying now this minute has any importance. But it
+was your goodness, if it comes to that."
+
+"Queer sort of goodness." I was still, you see, a little stung.
+
+"All goodness," she said, "is queer, carried to that pitch. But you're a
+dear in spite of it. I won't bully you."
+
+We made the last part of the crossing on the highway of the sunset. The
+propeller lashed through crimson and fiery copper, and the white wake
+tossed on to the highway turned to rose and gold and its edges to purple.
+
+I had left her again and I called to her to look at this wonder of the
+sky and sea; but she shook her head at me. There was no need to call her.
+She had looked. I could see by her eyes that the intolerable beauty had
+brought Jevons back to her. He was there for her in all beauty and in all
+wonder.
+
+Then she called to _me_. "Wally, come here. I want to speak to you."
+
+I came.
+
+"You thought I was going to leave Jimmy. But I wasn't. _He_ knew I
+wasn't. Why, the first night I knew how impossible it was."
+
+I said, Yes. Of course it was impossible. And of course he knew.
+
+"I shan't mind if only we can get to him before anything happens."
+
+I said nothing would happen, and of course we should get to him.
+
+She was silent so long that I was startled when she said, "Wally--your
+nervous aren't _you_, are they?"
+
+I said, No. No. Of course they weren't.
+
+I knew what she was thinking. Out of the intolerable beauty she had seen
+Jimmy rise with all his gestures. She heard the cracking of his knuckles
+and saw the jerking of his thumb. And these things became tender and
+pathetic and dear to her as if he were dead.
+
+And she had seen herself shudder at them as if it had been another woman
+who shuddered, a strange and pitiless woman whom she hated.
+
+"It wouldn't matter so much if he had wanted to go," she said.
+
+"Why do you keep on saying that he didn't want to go?"
+
+"Because he said so. He said he was only going because he couldn't go."
+
+"I think you're doing him a great injustice. He told me he wanted to go;
+I've no doubt he did want to go--just like any other man."
+
+"Yes. To be just like any other man--_that's_ what he wanted. But he
+couldn't be. He isn't like any other man. And so it's worse for him.
+Can't you see that it's worse for him? It'll hurt him more."
+
+I said I didn't see it, and that she was absurd and morbid and utterly
+unreasonable, and that she was making Jimmy out unreasonable and morbid
+and absurd.
+
+She told me then I didn't understand either of them; and we were silent,
+as if we had quarrelled again, until we came in sight of the Flemish
+coast.
+
+We sailed into Ostend on the tail-end of the sunset. What was left of it
+was enough to keep up for us the intense moment of transfiguration, so
+that we didn't miss it. The long white Digue, the towers, the domes of
+the casinos and hotels, the high, flat fronts of the houses showed
+soaked in light, quivering with light. Ostend might have been some
+enchanted Eastern city. It was as if the heroic land faced us with the
+illusion of enchantment, to cover the desolation that lay beyond her
+dykes.
+
+And we who looked at it were still silent, not now as if we had
+quarrelled, but as if this beauty had made peace between us.
+
+Viola's face had changed. It reminded me in the oddest way of her brother
+Reggie's. I think that for the moment, while it lasted, she had forgotten
+Jimmy, she had forgotten her brother Reggie; she had touched the fringe
+of the immensity that had drawn them from her and swallowed them up. And
+in forgetting them she had forgotten her unhappy self.
+
+In Ostend, at any rate, I was to have no more of her brooding. We had no
+sooner landed than she became the adorable creature who had run away with
+Jevons nine years ago and led me that dance through the cities of
+Flanders. She showed the same wholehearted devotion to the adventure, the
+same innocence, the same tact in ignoring my state of mind. She seemed to
+be making terms with me as she had made them then, suggesting that if _I_
+would ignore a few things I should find her the most delightful companion
+in my travels. We must, she seemed to say, of course forget everything
+that she had said to me the other night or that I had said to her before
+or since; and, as she swung beside me in her khaki, her freedom and her
+freshness declared how admirably _she_ had forgotten. It wasn't as if we
+didn't know what we were really out for.
+
+Except that she was a maturer person--thirty-one and not twenty-two--I
+might have mistaken her for Viola Thesiger, my secretary, setting out, in
+defiance of all conventions, with little Jevons, to look for Belfries in
+Belgium, and taking the war, since there _was_ a war on, in her stride.
+
+And as I walked with her through the same streets where nine years ago I
+had hunted for her and Jevons, it struck me as a strange, unsettling
+thing that I should be taking her out to look for Jevons and at the same
+time playing precisely Jevons's part in the adventure. She too must have
+been aware of this oddness--for she stopped suddenly to say to me, "Do
+you remember when I ran away with Jimmy? Isn't it funny that I should be
+running away with you?"
+
+I said it was. Very funny indeed. And I wondered why she had drawn my
+attention to it just now? Did she want to make me judge by the
+transparent innocence of this running the not quite so transparent
+innocence of that? I think so. Remember, it was Reggie Thesiger's
+apparent doubt as to her innocence that had been at the bottom of all the
+trouble of the last five years. It accounted for her attack on me the
+other night. It was as if she had turned to say to me triumphantly, "Now,
+perhaps, when I'm running away with _your_ precious perfection, at last
+you understand?"
+
+We had some difficulty in finding quarters and Viola insisted on our
+staying in the Station Hotel, which had been bombarded by an aeroplane
+the night before. She pointed out that it was almost entirely empty. "And
+so," she said, "there won't be anybody to see us."
+
+It was as if she wished to remind me by how thin a thread _my_ reputation
+hung.
+
+The business of our passports kept us in Ostend the next morning. I had
+made up my mind there would be difficulty about Viola's military pass, I
+was even contemplating the possibility of her being sent back to England
+by the next boat; but no; she had forestalled obstruction, and the pocket
+of her khaki coat was stuffed with letters from the War Office, the
+British Red Cross, and the French and Belgian Embassies. In fact, there
+was one horrid moment at the depot when it looked as if the Special
+Correspondent would be smuggled through under Viola's protection.
+
+"You see, Furny," she said, "nobody's going to stop me. Nobody wants to
+stop me."
+
+At last we got off, and early in the afternoon we were in Bruges.
+
+We had run into the Market-Place before we knew where we were; and yonder
+in the street at the back of it was Viola's _pension_, and here on our
+right hand was Jimmy's hotel, and there, towering before us, was the
+Belfry. We looked at each other. And through the war and across nine
+years, it all came back to us.
+
+"The Belfry's still there," I said.
+
+"It always was." She said it a little sternly. But she had smiled at the
+allusion, all the same--the smile that had never been denied to it.
+
+We stayed an hour in Bruges and lunched there in Jimmy's hotel. The fat
+proprietor and his wife were still there and they remembered us. They
+remembered Jimmy. And they had seen him three days ago. Mr. Chevons had
+passed through Bruges in his Red Cross motor-car. They seemed uncertain
+whether Viola was Mrs. Chevons or Mrs. Furnival, and they addressed her
+indifferently as either. An awful indifference had come to them. Of the
+war they said, _"C'est triste, nest-ce pas?"_ We left them, sitting
+pallid and depressed behind the barricade of their bureau, gazing after
+us with the saddest of smiles.
+
+That hour in Bruges was a mistake; so was our lunching at Jimmy's hotel.
+It was too much for Viola. It brought Jimmy so horribly near to her. I
+don't know what she was thinking, but I am convinced that from the moment
+of our entering Bruges the poor child had made up her mind that Jimmy had
+been killed. The smile she had given to the Belfry was the last flicker
+of her self-control, and halfway through lunch the grey melancholy that
+Bruges had absorbed from Jimmy nine years ago came down on her, as nine
+years ago it had come down on me, and it swallowed her up. By the time
+the waiter brought the coffee she was done for. Her eyes stared, hard and
+hot, over the cup she tried to drink from. She couldn't drink because of
+the spasm in her throat.
+
+"Come," I said, "we must clear out of this."
+
+We cleared out.
+
+I too was invaded by the grey melancholy as we came to the bridge by the
+eastern gate where I had found Jevons that night leaning over and looking
+into the Canal. It was the sentry's sudden springing up to challenge us
+that saved me. I hoped that it would save Viola. She enjoyed the
+sentries.
+
+But not this time. Her nerves were all on edge and she showed some
+irritation at the delay. I felt then that I had to take her in hand.
+
+"My dear child," I said (we were running out on the road to Ghent now),
+"do you realize that there's a war?"
+
+She answered, "Yes, Wally, yes, I know there is."
+
+"Do you know that Antwerp's over there, a little way to the north? And
+that they've dragged up the big guns from Namur for the siege of
+Antwerp?"
+
+"Oh, Wally--_have_ they?"
+
+She turned her face to the north as if she thought she could see or hear
+the siege-guns.
+
+"But you _said_ Jimmy was in Ghent."
+
+"Jimmy," I said, "is probably in Ghent. If he isn't, he's in Antwerp. Do
+you know that the battlefields are down there--no--there--to the south,
+where I'm pointing? There's fighting going on there _now_."
+
+She said, "Yes, dear, I know, I know," very gently; and she put her hand
+on my knee, as if she recognized the war as my private tragedy and was
+sorry for me. Then she fell back to her brooding.
+
+Somewhere on the great flagged road between Bruges and Ecloo we met a
+straggling train of refugees--old men and women and children, bent double
+under their enormous bundles, making for Bruges and Ostend. They stared,
+not at us, but at the road in front of them, with a dreadful apathy, as
+we passed.
+
+"This," I said, "is what finishes _me_--every time I see it."
+
+She said nothing.
+
+"Do you realize," I said, "that those women and those little children are
+flying for their lives? That they've come, doubled up like that, for
+miles--from Termonde or Alost? That they've lost everything they ever
+had?" (I can hear my own voice beating out the horror of it in hard,
+cruel jerks.) "That their homes--their _homes_--are burned to ashes
+somewhere down there?"
+
+At my last jerk she turned.
+
+"No," she said. "I'm cold and hard and stupid, and I do _not_ realize it.
+Neither do you. If either of us realized it for two seconds we should be
+either cutting our throats in that ditch or going back to Ostend now with
+a load of those women and children, instead of tearing past them like
+devils in this damned car.
+
+"I can't realize anything till I know whether Jimmy's all right or not. I
+can't see anything, or feel anything, or think of anything but Jimmy.
+Bruges is Jimmy and Belgium is Jimmy and the whole war is Jimmy--to me.
+I don't care if you _are_ horrified. I can't help it if I _am_ callous.
+It is so. And you can't make it different."
+
+I remember saying quite abjectly that I was sorry--that I was only trying
+to turn her mind to other things as a relief.
+
+"I'm to turn my mind to _that_--as a relief!"
+
+She showed me a woman I was trying not to see, a woman who carried the
+bedding of her household on her back and dragged a four-year-old child by
+the hand. The child slipped to its knees at every other yard, and at
+every other yard was pulled up whimpering and dragged again--not with
+anger or any emotion whatever, but with a sickening repetition, as if its
+mother's arm was a mechanism set going to pull and drag.
+
+If ever there was a weathercock it was my sister-in-law. Without even
+pretending to consult me, she made Colville, the chauffeur, turn the car
+round. (He was _her_ chauffeur, after all, she said.)
+
+"I don't know," she said, "whether I realize that woman or not, or
+whether you do. But I'm going to take her into Bruges."
+
+And we took her. (Viola nursed the four-year-old child all the way.) We
+also took an old man and a young woman with a baby at her breast, and two
+small children. It was the only thing to be done, Viola said.
+
+It was nearly half-past five when we left Bruges the second time.
+
+"God only knows," I groaned, "what time we'll get to Ghent!"
+
+"He does," she said. "He knows perfectly well we shall get there by
+half-past seven."
+
+And we did.
+
+It was dark when we turned into the Place d'Armes and drew up before the
+long, grey Hotel de la Poste. I jumped out and stood by the kerb to give
+Viola my hand.
+
+"But--" she said, "I _know_ this place."
+
+"You ought to."
+
+I don't know where she expected us to go. She still sat in the car as if
+held there by the shock of recognition. She ignored my outstretched hand.
+
+"You'd better take your things," she said at last, "if you want to get
+out here. I'm going on to look for Jimmy."
+
+I had then my first full sense of what I was in for. I saw that she was
+perfectly prepared to throw me over, to dump me down here or anywhere
+else and go on by herself with the car and the chauffeur that were, or
+ought to have been, mine.
+
+She didn't care if I was Special Correspondent to the _Morning Standard_,
+and she had that beastly chauffeur in her pocket all the time. (I
+discovered afterwards that she'd laid in food for him and hidden it in
+the locker under the front seat, so that they might be ready for any
+sort of adventure.) And yet in the very moment that I realized her
+disastrous obstinacy I found her intolerably pathetic.
+
+"If you want to look for Jimmy," I said, "you'd better get out too. He'll
+be here if he's anywhere in Ghent."
+
+But she was already on the kerb, brushing me aside. She had seen behind
+my back the approach of the concierge and she made for him.
+
+"Is Mr. Jevons in this hotel--Mr. Tasker Jevons?"
+
+Yes, Mr. Chevons was in the hotel. Madame would find him in the lounge.
+
+She had swept past him to the stair of the lounge, and I was following
+her discreetly when the proprietor dashed out of his bureau to intercept
+us. The lounge, he said, was reserved from seven till nine o'clock for
+the officers of the General Staff.
+
+Viola had paid no attention to the proprietor and was sweeping up the
+stair. I gave Jevons's name and explained that the lady was Mrs. Jevons.
+
+The proprietor, a portly and pompous Belgian, positively dissolved in
+smiles and bows and apologetic gestures. _Mille pardons, monsieur, mille
+pardons._ It would be _all_ right. Monsieur Chevons was dining with the
+officers of the General Staff.
+
+He did not know that Madame was expected. He was to reserve a room for
+Monsieur?
+
+I told him to reserve rooms for me and the chauffeur, and to consult Mr.
+Jevons about Madame. And I hurried up the stair after Viola.
+
+She was waiting for me at the turn, on the landing, by the wide archway
+of the lounge, where the great glass screen began that shut off the
+staircase. She stood back from the entrance, looking in, and smiling at
+what she saw. It was clear by her attitude and her absorption that
+something was happening in there.
+
+As I approached she made a sign to me and withdrew farther back and up
+the stair.
+
+"He's there," she whispered. "Over there. In that corner."
+
+For a moment we stood together on the stair, looking down through the
+glass screen into the lounge.
+
+The far end of the lounge had been turned into a dining-place for the
+officers of the Belgian General Staff. Most of the tables were cleared
+now and deserted. But from our place on the stair we had a clear view
+slantwise of one small table in the corner. And we saw Jimmy seated at
+that table.
+
+At least we made him out.
+
+All but Jimmy's head was hidden by the figures of a Belgian General and
+two Colonels. They had closed in on him (they were evidently all four at
+the end of their dinner); they had closed in on him in an access of
+emotion and enthusiasm. The General (the one who sat beside him) had his
+arm round Jimmy's shoulder; the two who sat facing him leaned towards
+Jimmy over half the table, and one grasped Jimmy's right hand in his; the
+other was making some sort of competitive demonstration. The disengaged
+arms of the three held up the glasses in which they were about to pledge
+him. And at the other end of the room a scattered group of soldiers rose
+to their feet and looked on smiling and signalling applause.
+
+What was happening down there was public homage to Jimmy.
+
+And in between the two dark Belgian uniforms that obscured him you could
+just see a bit of Jimmy's khaki, and from among the white and grizzled
+heads that pressed on him you saw Jimmy's face and Jimmy's flush and
+Jimmy's twinkle; his incredible, irrepressible twinkle. You could even
+see the tips of Jimmy's little front teeth trying to bite down his lip
+into some sort of composure. You could see that he was very shy and very
+modest; you could see that in spite of his shyness and his modesty he
+was frightfully pleased; but more than anything you could see that he was
+amused.
+
+Positively, positively, he had the air of not taking his Belgian officers
+very seriously.
+
+"We mustn't go down yet," said Viola, "or we'll spoil it."
+
+So we waited, looking at Jimmy through the screen, while the officers
+clinked their glasses and drank to him and called his name; and the group
+that looked on echoed it; and the waiters who had come in to see what was
+happening, repeated it among themselves.
+
+"_Vive l'Angleterre! Vive les Anglais! Vive Chevons! Chevons! Chevons!_"
+
+"I wonder," said Viola, "what Jimmy has been up to? You can take me to
+him."
+
+When we got to the table we found Jimmy trying to explain to the General
+and the two Colonels in execrable French that he didn't know what it was
+all about. _He_ hadn't done anything.
+
+Then he saw Viola.
+
+For one second, while he stared at her across the room, he appeared to be
+suffering from a violent shock. He was so visibly hit that the two men
+who had their backs to us turned round to see what it was that had
+affected him. His flush had gone suddenly and he was breathing hard, with
+his mouth a little open.
+
+I heard him saying something in French about his wife.
+
+He recovered, however, in a second, and disentangled himself from the
+General and the Colonels and from the dinner-table, and came forward.
+
+And as he came, I noticed something odd about him. He limped slightly.
+His khaki had a battered look; it was soiled and torn in places, and the
+Red Cross brassard on his sleeve was simply filthy.
+
+And he had only been out three days, mind you. He was only three days
+ahead of us. But he had lost no time.
+
+As they strolled up to each other and met midway in the big public room,
+in the fraction of time that passed before their hands touched I heard
+him draw a hard, quivering breath and let it out in a long sigh. That
+breath was a suppressed cry of trouble and of acquiescence.
+
+Then (I could have blessed him for it) he twinkled.
+
+Viola said, "What _have_ you been up to?"
+
+And Jimmy, "I say, I like that! What are _you_ doing here? Have you come
+to look at the Belfry?"
+
+"No. I've come to look at _you_!" She put her hand on his shoulder.
+
+He said, "That's a jolly rig-out you've got," and that was all.
+
+The General and the two Colonels came forward and were presented to Mrs.
+Jevons; and Mr. Walter Furnival ("one of our war-correspondents") was
+presented to the General and the two Colonels. They saluted Madame; they
+begged Madame to accept their profoundest congratulations; they regretted
+that Madame had not been present just now when they were drinking her
+husband's health.
+
+And the old General (the one with the white hair and imperial) informed
+her that Monsieur her husband had a very poor opinion of the Belgian
+Army.
+
+"He has saved the lives of three Belgian officers and I do not know _how_
+many Belgian soldiers--and he says that it is nothing!"
+
+And the stout, florid Colonel, who had been trying to look young and
+rakish ever since he had turned and caught sight of Viola, suggested that
+"Perhaps, if he had saved your British, he would not have said that it
+was nothing."
+
+And the lean, iron-grey Colonel with the ferocious moustache remarked in
+an austere, guttural voice, "_Il est impayable--lui!_"
+
+Jimmy had been offering cigarettes to them as if he thought that was the
+only thing that would stop them. Then the old white-haired General sat
+between Viola and him with his arm round Jimmy's shoulder and began
+again, so loudly that everybody in the room could hear him.
+
+"Your husband, Madame, is a man who does not know what fear is--who
+does not care what death is. For two nights and three days, Madame,
+he has been down there--at Alost and Termonde--under shell-fire.
+_Mais--un enfer, Madame!_ You would have thought he had been born under
+fire, your husband. _Ce n'est pas un homme, c'est un salamandre_.
+Bullets--mitrailleuse--shrapnel--it is no more to him than to go out in a
+shower of rain. When our men were scuttling, and shouted to him to get
+under shelter, what do you think he said?--'_Ouvrir une parapluie--ca ne
+vaut pas la peine_."
+
+There was a shout of laughter.
+
+"That," said Viola, "is the sort of thing he _would_ say. And please, I
+want to know what's the matter with his leg."
+
+I can see her now, sitting on that crimson velvet seat in the lounge and
+looking past the gesticulations of the General to Jevons, who was shaking
+his head at her as much as to say, "Don't you believe the old boy, he's a
+shocking story-teller."
+
+The old General seemed aware of her preoccupation, for he rose, murmuring
+affectionately, "_Mon petit Chevons_. I will not praise him to you,
+Madame. No doubt you know what he is."
+
+I can see her standing up there and giving her hand to the old General
+and trying to stiffen her face to say, "I know."
+
+Evidently she thought General Roubaix was too voluble to be entirely
+trustworthy, for, when he left us and Jimmy had gone out to see about our
+dinner, she addressed herself to the two Colonels.
+
+"Please tell me what my husband _really_ did."
+
+Both the Colonels tried to tell her; but it was the younger one with the
+moustache (the one who had said that Jimmy was _"impayable"_) who
+satisfied her.
+
+It was true, every bit of it. Jevons, it seemed, had been in the thick of
+the bombardment of Alost and in the fighting for the bridge at Termonde.
+His practice was to leave Kendal and the motor-car behind him in some
+place of shelter while he walked into the fire. Sometimes he took his
+Belgian stretcher-bearers with him, sometimes, when they didn't like the
+look of it, he went by himself. He didn't care, the Colonel said, _where_
+he went or how. If it was through rifle-fire or mitrailleuse he went on
+his hands and knees--he wriggled on his stomach. If it was shrapnel he
+took his chance. He had saved one of his three officers by carrying him
+straight out of his own battery, when the German guns had found its
+range; and he had driven his car, by himself, across a five-mile-long
+field, under a hailstorm of shrapnel, to get the other two.
+
+"You see," the Colonel expounded, "your husband has chosen the most
+dangerous of all field ambulance work. Those high-speed scouting cars,
+running low on the ground, can go where a big ambulance cannot. It is
+magnificent what he has done."
+
+When Jevons came back they could still hardly keep their eyes off him;
+they could hardly tear themselves away. It was "_A demain, Monsieur_,"
+and "_A demain, Colonel_" as if they had arranged another deadly tryst.
+
+"Well," said Jimmy, "how do you like them?"
+
+"Oh--they're dears," said Viola, "especially the one with the moustache.
+Do you know, they've told me everything except what's the matter with
+leg."
+
+"My leg?" said Jimmy. "A bit of shell barked it. I'm jolly glad it's my
+leg and not my hand."
+
+I was a little frightened when Viola left us alone after dinner. I
+thought he would pitch into me for bringing her. But he only said sadly,
+"You oughtn't to have brought her, Furny. But I suppose you couldn't stop
+her."
+
+I said, No, I couldn't stop her. But I hadn't brought her. She had
+brought me.
+
+We sat on till the lounge was open to the guests of the hotel. And when
+the war-correspondents began to drop in I saw that Jevons was uneasy.
+
+"D'you mind if I turn in, old man?" he said.
+
+I asked him if his wound was hurting him.
+
+He stooped and caressed it pensively.
+
+"No," he said. "Not a bit. I like my wound. It--it makes me feel manly."
+
+Presently he said good night and left me.
+
+I thought--yes, I certainly thought--that he exaggerated his limp a
+little as he crossed the room, and for a moment I wondered, "Is he
+playing up to the correspondents?"
+
+Then I saw that Viola stood in the doorway waiting for him and that she
+gave him her arm.
+
+And then through the glass screen I saw them going together up the stair.
+And I remembered the tale that he had told me nine years ago, how he had
+seen her standing there and looking down at him--half frightened--through
+the glass screen, and how he had said to me, "I couldn't. She was so
+helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I couldn't."
+
+It was the same room and the same glass screen and the same stair. And it
+was the same man. I knew him. I knew him. I had always known him. (Was
+there ever any risk he hadn't taken?) I had never, really, for one
+moment misunderstood.
+
+I certainly knew why he "liked" his wound.
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+
+We had breakfast very early the next morning, for Jevons was under orders
+to start at eight o'clock for Termonde. We had a table reserved for us in
+a corner of the restaurant. The hotel was full of Belgian officers, and
+I found I was infinitely better off in attaching myself to Jevons than if
+I had joined the war-correspondents.
+
+Viola (I may say that her rig-out which Jevons had admired so much, the
+khaki tunic and breeches, made us terribly conspicuous) had come down in
+a contrite mood. I heard her telling Jevons that he must be kind to me,
+for I had had an awful time with her and I had been an angel.
+
+Well, I had had an awful time; I don't think I remember ever having had a
+worse time than the hours I had spent in her company since she had laid
+into me on Tuesday evening.
+
+But I had not been an angel; far from it. Looking back on those hours, I
+can see that I behaved to her like a perfect brute.
+
+She had her revenge. One of those revenges that are the more
+triumphant because they are unpremeditated. She had dished me as a
+war-correspondent.
+
+For I declare that from the moment when we found Jevons and his General
+in the hotel I became the victim of her miserable point of view. I could
+only see the war through Jevons, and as a part of Jevons; I might have
+said, like Viola, that to me Ghent was Jevons, and Belgium was Jevons,
+and the war was Jevons. I suppose I saw as much of the War from first to
+last as any Special Correspondent at the front, and I know, that, barring
+the Siege of Antwerp, the three weeks when Jimmy was in it were by no
+means the most important or the most thrilling weeks in the war; and of
+the one event, the Siege of Antwerp, I didn't see as much as I ought to
+have seen, being most terribly handicapped by Viola. And yet--perhaps
+a little because of Viola, but infinitely more because of Jevons--those
+three weeks stand out in my memory before the battles of the Aisne and
+Marne and the long fight for Calais. Because of Jevons I have made them
+figure, in the columns of the _Morning Standard_ and elsewhere, with a
+superior vividness; even now when I recall them I seem to have lived with
+Jevons in Flanders through long periods of time.
+
+I have the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of
+the _Morning Standard_, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are
+interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his
+performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written a very fine
+account of Melle, which I understand is a small village four and a-half
+miles from Ghent. But there are other events--the Fall of Antwerp, for
+instance."
+
+Well, we got the story of the Fall of Antwerp all right. But Jimmy wrote
+it for me. It was the last thing he did write.
+
+Yes: he had only three weeks of it, all told. He went out on Tuesday,
+September the twenty-second, and he came back on Tuesday, October the
+thirteenth. It was his infernal luck that he should have had no more of
+it.
+
+And yet, I don't know. I don't see how he could have held out much longer
+at his pitch of intensity. Three weeks would have been nothing to any
+other man. But Jevons could do more with three weeks than another man
+could do with a three years' campaign, and he contrived to crowd into his
+term the maximum of glory and of risk. And when it was all over it was
+less as if Fate had foiled him than as if he had "given" himself three
+weeks.
+
+But Jimmy was discontented, and every morning at breakfast we listened to
+the most extraordinary lamentations. His job, he said, wasn't at all the
+jolly thing it looked. For he was under orders the whole blessed time.
+He'd no more freedom, hadn't Jimmy, than that poor devil of a waiter.
+He'd got to go or to stay where a fussy old ram of a Colonel sent him. So
+here he was in Ghent, an open city, when he wanted to be in Antwerp. He
+hadn't been anywhere--anywhere at all. As for what he'd done, he couldn't
+see what the fuss was all about. He hadn't done anything. He'd seen a
+little fight in a turnip-field, and a little squabble for a bridge you
+could blow up to-day and build again to-morrow, and a little tin-pot town
+peppered. And look at the war! Just look at the war!
+
+And when we tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo,
+the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next
+week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There
+wouldn't be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said. "There
+won't be any Waterloo for another two years, if then."
+
+He wasn't always lugubrious. It was only when he thought that he was
+missing the Siege of Antwerp that his happiness was incomplete.
+
+It was on our third morning, when he rushed off joyously (to Quatrecht, I
+think), that I said to Viola, "You thought it would hurt him more than
+other people. You needn't have come out after him. You see how much it's
+hurting him."
+
+"I'm glad I came," she said. "I don't mind as long as I can see."
+
+"Do you remember him telling Reggie that he wouldn't be in the war
+because he was a coward? Don't you wish Reggie could see him now?"
+
+She didn't answer, and I saw that there was still a sting for her in
+Reggie's name. The war might have made her forgive him, but there were
+things that the war couldn't wipe out from her memory. And there was her
+own rather appalling injustice to Jimmy. I wondered whether she was
+thinking of how she had tried to stop his going to the front, and how she
+had said he didn't want to go.
+
+But I had to own that she had done the best thing for her peace of mind
+by coming out.
+
+_My_ peace of mind, I was told quite frankly, didn't matter. Jevons,
+though he admitted that I couldn't have stopped her coming out, made me
+responsible for her presence at the seat of war. The trouble was that she
+insisted on following him wherever he went. And as it wasn't to be
+expected that he would take her with him into the tight places that he
+managed to get into in his own car, I had to have her in mine. Not that
+Viola consented to my putting it that way. It was clear that she made
+herself mistress of the situation when she obtained possession of that
+car and manoeuvred (as I am convinced she did manoeuvre) for my own
+failure with the firm that supplied it. On our first morning in Ghent we
+came to what she called an understanding, when she rubbed it well into me
+that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out,
+and that the man was under her orders, not mine. If I liked to come with
+her, why, of course I could. Otherwise, I could go halves with one of the
+other correspondents in one of their cars. But she pointed out that I
+could hardly do better than come with her, for by simply following Jimmy
+I should get nearer to the firing-line than anybody else. (She had
+assumed that the firing-line was the goal of every war-correspondent's
+ambition.) I would find, she said, that it would work quite well.
+
+It did. It worked better than if I had gone halves with the other
+correspondents. For at this time war-correspondents were not greatly
+loved by the military authorities, and they were having considerable
+difficulty in getting near anything, and the time, Jimmy said, was
+coming when they would be cleared neck and crop out of Belgium. My astute
+sister-in-law had calculated on all this and on her own part in it.
+
+"If you'll only trust me, Wally," she said the first day we started, when
+all the correspondents in the hotel had turned out to see us off, "you'll
+find that I'm your Providence and not your curse. I can get you through
+where you'd never get yourself. Just look at those men how sick they
+are."
+
+I said I thought it would be only decent to take two or three of them
+with us. We had room.
+
+But Viola was firm. She said it would be most indecent. We should want
+all the room we had for our wounded.
+
+"Do you suppose I'm going to chivy Jimmy about without doing anything to
+help him? As for you, you've only to sit tight and do what you're told.
+You'll be all right as long as we follow Jimmy."
+
+And so we followed him. My God, what a chase! But Viola's little
+chauffeur was game and we followed. Though Jimmy had made elaborate
+arrangements for stopping his wife's progress at least two miles outside
+the danger-zone she always managed to get through. Sentries, colonels,
+army medical officers--she twisted them into coils round her little
+finger, and cast them from her and got through. And once through, we were
+really quite useful in transporting wounded. Jevons and I between us
+managed to keep her out of the actual firing-line by telling her she was
+in all of it there was; and when we were loaded up with wounded there was
+no difficulty in getting her away.
+
+And certainly it served my turn well enough. Though I was compelled to
+see the war through Jimmy, I saw the war.
+
+By the end of our first week Jimmy seemed to get used to being followed
+as a matter of course. We had followed him to Alost and Termonde and
+Quatrecht and Zele. When we weren't following him we were near him
+somewhere, working at the dressing-stations or among the refugees.
+
+Then he did a mean thing. He managed to get himself sent to Antwerp for
+three days. He sneaked off there by himself on the Sunday, and when we
+tried to follow him we were turned back at Saint Nicolas, just too late
+to see the British go through. He had worked it this time.
+
+When he got back from Antwerp at the end of his three days we knew that
+something had happened, something that he was keeping from us. It wasn't
+only the fate of Antwerp that was hanging over him, as it hung over all
+of us in that awful second week. It was as if he had seen something
+intimate and terrible that he couldn't talk about.
+
+That night after Viola had gone to her room he told me what had happened.
+He had seen Charlie Thesiger's regiment at Saint Nicolas on Sunday. And
+to-day--which was Tuesday--he had seen Charlie Thesiger. He had found him
+lying dangerously wounded in the British Hospital at Antwerp. That, he
+said, was what had kept him there. And he had brought him back with him
+to Ghent. He was in the Couvent de Saint Pierre.
+
+He thought, perhaps, it would be better not to tell Viola just yet.
+Charlie didn't know, he said, that she was here.
+
+The war was beginning to close round us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The next day (Wednesday) he announced that he was going to Zele; but he
+didn't, he really didn't want me to take Viola there. I could go by
+myself, of course, if I liked, though he didn't care about her being
+left.
+
+But we did go. Viola's blood was up, after what she called Jimmy's
+meanness, and there was no keeping her back.
+
+We were a little uncertain of our way, for following Jimmy as we did, or
+rather, following the direction Colville swore he had seen him start in,
+took us much too far to the north. We found ourselves on the Antwerp
+road, jammed in the traffic, and caught by a stream of refugees. We were
+obliged to turn back to Ghent to get our bearings, but the business of
+transporting women and children kept us on the Antwerp road all morning,
+and it was past two o'clock before we started for Zele.
+
+I remember this particular chase after Jimmy for many reasons. First, we
+lost our way and never got to Zele at all.
+
+Down in the south-east on the sky-line we saw a fleet of little clouds
+that seemed to be anchored to the earth, and every cloud of the fleet was
+the smoke from a burning village. West of the fleet was an enormous cloud
+blown by the wind across miles of sky.
+
+Viola was certain that the big cloud was Zele being burned to the ground,
+and that Jimmy would be burned with it.
+
+When I told her that it wasn't likely that Jimmy would stay in Zele when
+it was burning she said that I didn't know Jimmy, and anyhow it was there
+that she was going.
+
+Suddenly Viola sat up very straight.
+
+"Furny, is that guns I hear, or thunder?"
+
+I said it was guns. A deep and solemn booming came from before and behind
+us and on either side, east and west. We had rushed bang between the
+French and German batteries.
+
+The big cloud turned out to be smoke from a factory that the Belgians had
+set fire to themselves, and in following it we had gone miles from Zele.
+Now we followed the guns.
+
+We turned east and struck off south and found ourselves in the village of
+Baerlere. The lines of fire seemed suddenly to narrow in on us here.
+
+There was a clean path down the centre of the street, for men and horses
+stood back close under the housewalls on each side. The place was full of
+soldiers. One of them told us that we could get to Zele by going east
+through the village, but as the road was being shelled, he didn't advise
+us to try.
+
+We went down that clean middle of the street. We were safe enough as long
+as we ran between the houses; but the village very soon came to an end,
+and then, in the open road, we were in for it.
+
+The fields dropped away from us on each side, leaving us as naked to the
+German batteries as if we were running on a raised causeway. At the
+bottom of the fields to our right there was a line of willows, beyond the
+willows there was the river, and behind the river bank, on the further
+side, were the German lines.
+
+The grey smoke of their fire was still tangled in the willow-tops.
+
+Colville drew up under the lee of the last house in the village. He
+didn't like the look of that open road. Neither did I.
+
+"Go on," said Viola. "What are you stopping for?"
+
+The guns ceased firing for a moment and we rushed it.
+
+"I do wish," said Viola, "you'd tuck your arm in, Furny. It's your right
+arm and you're on the wrong side of the car."
+
+I asked her what made her think of my right arm just then.
+
+"Because it's the only part of himself that Jimmy ever thinks of," she
+said.
+
+There was about three-quarters of a mile of causeway and it ended in a
+little hamlet. And the hamlet--it had been knocked to bits before we got
+into it--the hamlet ended in a hillock of bricks and mortar.
+
+The road to Zele was completely blocked.
+
+"Well--" said Colville, "I _am_ blowed."
+
+"You've got to take it," said Viola.
+
+"Sorry, m'm. It can't be done. You want a motor traction with caterpillar
+wheels for this business."
+
+He was backing the car when a shell burst and buried itself in the place
+where we had stood.
+
+To my horror I saw that Viola had opened the door of the car and was
+getting out.
+
+"What on earth are you doing?" I said.
+
+"I'm going to walk to Zele."
+
+I pulled her back and held her down in her seat by main force. She was
+horribly strong. And as she struggled with me she said quietly, "It's all
+right. You two _must_ go back and I must go to Jimmy."
+
+I shouted to Colville, "Turn her round, can't you, and get out of this."
+
+He turned her. He drew up deftly under the shelter of a barn that still
+stood intact. Then he spoke.
+
+"Are you quite sure, sir, that Mr. Jevons is in that place? Because, sir,
+I heard Kendal say something this morning about their going to Antwerp."
+
+"Then why the devil didn't you say so?"
+
+"I didn't think of it, sir, until I saw Mrs. Jevons getting out."
+
+He added by way of afterthought, "Besides, I promised Kendal. You and
+Mrs. Jevons wasn't to know he was going on to Antwerp."
+
+Viola and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.
+
+Somewhere behind us from beyond the river a gun boomed and we took no
+notice of it. We went on laughing.
+
+"He's had us again," she said.
+
+"Yes. We've been done this time. Well--we'd better scoot."
+
+We made a rush for it between guns and got to Baerlere. Once we were out
+of the village and heading for the Ghent road we were safe.
+
+We were hardly out of sound of the guns when I heard Viola saying, "You
+know it really _was_ funny of Jimmy."
+
+I said, "He won't think it quite so funny when he hears what we've done."
+
+He didn't think it funny at all. He was furious when he heard what we'd
+done. He forbade Viola to follow him again. He threatened to sack
+Colville. He said he'd have me sent home to-morrow and kept there, and
+Viola should go with me.
+
+And when he'd finished he told us that Antwerp had fallen.
+
+That was how Jevons came to write the story of the Fall of Antwerp
+instead of me.
+
+Well, he didn't sack Colville; and he didn't get me packed off with the
+other war-correspondents who left Ghent in a body the next day. And he
+said nothing about sending Viola away. He did better than that. He told
+her he had brought Charlie Thesiger from Antwerp yesterday, and that her
+cousin was dying in the Couvent de Saint Pierre, and that perhaps it
+would be a bit easier for him if she were with him.
+
+We took her to the convent that morning. On the way there she asked Jimmy
+why he hadn't told her about Charlie yesterday. He said that up till
+midnight we weren't absolutely certain that Charlie wouldn't recover, and
+that she was safer with us in the hotel than she would be away from us in
+the convent.
+
+"My safety is to be considered before everything?" she said.
+
+He answered that it was surely enough for her if he risked it now.
+
+I can't think why she didn't see through him. I and Kendal and Colville
+knew perfectly well that he was taking her to the convent to be safe. I
+think he argued that if she had poor Charlie to look after it would keep
+her quiet, and she would be out of mischief till it was time for the
+Germans to march into Ghent.
+
+So we took her to him.
+
+We found him in a little whitewashed cell that one of the sisters had
+given up to him. He lay under a crucifix on the nun's narrow bed, which
+was too short for him, so that his naked feet showed through the blankets
+at the bottom. The naked feet of the Christ pointed downwards to his
+head.
+
+He had been shot through the lungs and was dying of pneumonia, sending
+out his breath in fierce, rapid jerks.
+
+He lay on his side with his back towards us, and his face was hidden from
+us as we came in.
+
+The sister who sat with him made a sign that said, "Oh yes, you can come
+in, all of you; it will make no difference."
+
+The cell was so small that Jevons and I had to draw back and let Viola go
+in by herself. We two stood in the doorway and looked in. After the first
+glance at the bed--it was enough for me--I looked, I couldn't help
+looking, at Viola, (Jevons, I noticed, kept his eyes fixed on the body of
+the dying man.) I heard her catch her breath in a sob before she could
+have seen him.
+
+He had slipped his blankets from his shoulder, and it was the sight of
+his back--under the half-open hospital shirt which showed the bandages
+and dressings of his wound--that upset her; his back that might have been
+any man's back, the innocent back that she had no memory of, that
+disguised and hid him from her and made him strange to her and utterly
+pathetic. And then, there was the back of his head, sunk like lead into
+his pillow. The cropped hair had begun to grow. You could see a little
+greyish tuft. You wouldn't have known that it was Charlie's head.
+
+She went slowly round the bed, taking care not to graze the feet that
+were stretched out to her. And then she saw him.
+
+She saw a deep purplish flush and glazed eyes that couldn't see her, and
+a greyish beard pointing on an unshaved jaw; and a mouth half open,
+jerking out its breath. She laid her left hand on his shoulder and with
+her right she held the limp hand that hung over the mattress.
+
+I heard her say in French, "If only he knew me--"
+
+And the nun, "Perhaps--at the end--he will know you."
+
+And we left her there with his hand in her right hand and her left hand
+on his shoulder. She was on her honour to stay with him till the end; but
+her eyes were fixed on Jevons, and they followed him as he went through
+the doorway of the cell.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The very minute he had left her Jimmy made his bolt for Lokeren. He said
+he didn't want me; but I had seen Viola's eyes, and I said it would be
+safer. If I took Viola's car and Colville, she couldn't follow us.
+
+"She won't follow us," he said. "She can't leave him."
+
+We made the first bolt into Lokeren together; and we got out, each with a
+load of wounded, just as the Germans were coming in. He made his second
+bolt by himself and secretly, while Colville and I were lunching. We
+followed, and were stopped in a village two miles from Lokeren.
+
+A Belgian Red Cross man met us here and told us that Jevons had got
+through in spite of them, and they didn't in the least expect him to come
+back again. He shrugged his shoulders and seemed to be disgusted and
+annoyed with Jimmy rather than to admire him.
+
+We hung about in that village an interminable time. I do not remember its
+name, if I ever knew it; but I know and remember every house in it and
+every tree in the avenue at the turn of the grey road that led to
+Lokeren, and even now, in my worst dreams, I find myself in the little
+plantation at the end of the village on the left where the railway siding
+is, and where the trains came in loaded with wounded. I am always waiting
+for Jimmy and looking for Jimmy and not finding him. And at one point I
+always stumble over Viola's body. I find her lying wounded in a ditch
+that runs through the plantation. And when I find her I know that Jimmy
+is dead. And that frightens me--Jimmy's death, I mean, not Viola's body.
+I take Viola's body as a matter of course.
+
+It is an abominable dream.
+
+But even that dream is not more astonishing, and it is far less
+improbable than what I was to see. We were at the end of the village.
+Colville had drawn our car up in the middle of the street, and I was
+standing by him, when two Belgian soldiers rushed up to us, pointing up
+the road, and shouting to Colville to clear out of the way.
+
+I turned. Round the bend of the road where the avenue of trees was I saw
+a train of horses and gun-carriages careening with the curve, and a
+battery of Belgian artillery came charging down in full retreat. And now
+in the middle of the battery as if he were part of it and informed it
+with his energy and speed, and now in front of it as if he led it, and
+joyous as if he had turned its retreat into a victory, came Jimmy driving
+his car.
+
+The inside of the car was packed with wounded men; and, wedged up against
+Jimmy, and standing on the steps, and sitting on the bonnet, and hanging
+on wherever they could find a foothold and hang, were seven officers and
+soldiers of the Belgian Army.
+
+Kendal--bleeding profusely from a flesh wound on his forehead, but
+otherwise unhurt--sat inside among the wounded.
+
+It _had_ been a victory for Jimmy. He had advanced within fifty yards of
+the German lines, he had picked up two of his wounded from under their
+sentry's fire, and the rest of the men and the officers he had gathered
+on his way.
+
+We sent them all to Ghent with Colville.
+
+Before he left, Kendal implored us just to look at Mr. Jevons's car.
+
+Mr. Jevons's car was worth looking at. It had a hole in the back of it
+where a bullet had gone clean through and buried itself in the cushions.
+There were five bullet-holes in its hood. Its flank was scraped by a
+flying fragment of shell, the same that had tilted its right rear
+splash-board. Inside, its canvas covers and its rubber mat were stained
+with blood.
+
+Drawn up motionless in that village street and stared at, Jimmy's car had
+something of its old self-conscious air. It looked pleased, and at the
+same time surprised at itself.
+
+And while Jevons was dressing and bandaging his flesh-wound for him an
+idea struck Kendal and he grinned.
+
+"D'you remember the time, sir, when you wouldn't let her out if there was
+a spot of rain?"
+
+"I do," said Jevons.
+
+"And look at her now--not three weeks. What a life she's 'ad!"
+
+And when Kendal (he was as pleased as Punch with his bandage) when Kendal
+had climbed into Colville's car, Jimmy turned his round again; though the
+officers implored him to come on, for the Germans were on our backs. But
+Jimmy only jerked his thumb in the direction of Lokeren and made his
+third bolt. I scrambled in beside him as he started.
+
+I don't mind saying that I hated this adventure. It was one thing to go
+into Antwerp when the Germans were so busy storming it that they couldn't
+attend to you, and quite another thing to be alone with Jimmy on that
+horrid grey road with the Germans coming every minute round the turn of
+it.
+
+Jimmy explained that there was a wounded man hiding in a ditch about a
+mile from Lokeren, and he'd got to fetch him.
+
+We fetched him and another car-load without any misadventure.
+
+When we got back to our village we found a Field Ambulance there. Jimmy
+said, "I believe that's _my_ Field Ambulance." Presently he gave a start
+that made the car swerve as if he had run over a dog.
+
+"Well, I'm damned if there isn't Viola."
+
+Yes, there she was. She had come out with the Field Ambulance. And it
+_was_ Jimmy's Field Ambulance, the one that had been sent out without
+him. It had come on into Ghent from Antwerp yesterday, and Viola had
+found it.
+
+"This is too bad," said Jevons. "You ought to be looking after Charlie.
+Why _aren't_ you looking after him?"
+
+"Charlie," she said, "died three hours ago--at twelve o'clock."
+
+It wasn't five hours since we had left her with him in the nun's cell
+under the crucifix. I don't think I had realized it before, but now it
+came over me as a new and strange thing, how little he had mattered. Then
+it struck me that Jevons must have known it all the time.
+
+"I've done everything," she said, "that had to be done. And I've written
+to Aunt Matty and Uncle George--and Mildred."
+
+"Mildred?" I wondered.
+
+"Well--_yes_."
+
+Jevons and I had forgotten Mildred. We had forgotten her engagement to
+Charlie, though I suppose nobody knew better than we did why it had been
+broken off.
+
+To his father and mother and Mildred he _did_ matter.
+
+And perhaps he mattered to Viola, in a way; for she said she would have
+given anything to have saved him. He must have mattered to Jevons when he
+brought him from Antwerp and when we buried him in Ghent.
+
+And the cross on his grave reproves me, reminding me that to his country
+he mattered supremely, after all.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+After Lokeren Jevons and I tried to come to terms with Viola.
+
+The conference took place upstairs in their bedroom, where we had
+withdrawn for greater privacy. Viola sat on the one chair and Jimmy and
+I on the bed. Jimmy did most of the talking.
+
+He said, "Look here, my dear child, if there wasn't a war on, I wouldn't
+stand in the way of your amusement for the world. And there's a great
+deal to be said for you. _I_ think you adorable in a tunic and breeches,
+and General Roubaix agrees with me, if Furny doesn't. We all think you
+heroic, and you are sometimes useful. But there isn't a thing you've done
+yet that a man can't do better--except getting Furny through the lines,
+and nobody wants Furny _in_ the lines. And when _you're_ in them you've a
+moral effect equal to about ten seventeen-inch guns. If the men see you
+hovering round their trenches they're so jumpy they can hardly hold their
+rifles. If Kendal sees you he's so jumpy he can hardly steer. Colville
+says he'd rather hang himself than go through another day like Baerlere.
+Furny all but lost his job on the _Morning Standard_ because he was told
+off to look after you when he ought to have gone to Antwerp--he _would_
+have lost it if I hadn't done his work for him. And you don't make things
+easier for _me_. Good God!--sometimes I don't know what I'm doing.
+
+"It isn't fair on us. It isn't fair."
+
+"It isn't fair on _me_," she said. "_I_'m jumpy when I'm kept back. You
+don't know what it's like, Jimmy. _Don't_ turn me back."
+
+And the poor child began to talk about her duty to the wounded, and that
+made him burst out again.
+
+"The wounded? If you think you're any more comfort to the wounded than
+you are to Furny and me I can tell you you're mistaken. There was a poor
+devil at Lokeren the other day with a bullet in his stomach who told me
+he didn't mind his wounds and he didn't mind the Germans; what worried
+him was the lady being there when he wasn't able to defend her."
+
+She tilted her chin at that and said she didn't want anybody to defend
+her.
+
+"Perhaps you don't, but what would you think of a man who didn't want to
+defend you? What would you think of Furny and me if we wanted you to be
+here?"
+
+"I should like you to want me," she said.
+
+"No, my dear child, you wouldn't. You don't know what you're saying."
+
+And then he said, "I know better than you do what you want. Men aren't
+made like that--if they _are_ men. You can't have it both ways." And he
+said something about chivalry that drove her back in sheer self-defence
+on a Feminist line. She said that nowadays women had chivalry too.
+
+"And _our_ chivalry is to go down before yours?"
+
+"Can't you have both?"
+
+"Not in war-time. _Your_ chivalry is to keep back and not make yourself a
+danger and a nuisance."
+
+"Come," she said, "what about Joan of Arc?" And that was too much for
+Jimmy. He jumped up off the bed and walked away from her and sat on the
+table as if it gave him some advantage.
+
+"No, no," he said. "I can't stand that rot. When you're a saint--or I'm a
+saint--you can talk about Joan of Arc. If you want to be Joan of Arc go
+and be it with some man who isn't your husband--who isn't in love with
+you. Perhaps _he_ won't mind. Go with Furny if you like, though it's
+rather hard on him."
+
+I said I thought he was rather hard on Viola--if he'd seen the poor child
+at Baerlere, flinging herself out of the car and proposing to climb over
+the ruins of several houses and walk by herself--under shell-fire--to
+Zele, because she thought he was there--
+
+Jimmy looked at her; and he did what he had done that night when he
+saw her coming towards him in the lounge. He sighed a long sigh of
+complicated anguish and satisfaction.
+
+She heard it and she understood it, and she said, "I can't help it if I
+am like that. You'll have to take the risk of me. Please go away, Furny."
+
+And I went.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Norah has been reading what I've just written, and she tells me that
+there's a great deal about Jimmy's "joy" and his "adventure" and all
+that; and not one word about his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice.
+She says I don't give a serious impression of him. He might have gone
+out to the war just for fun, and that it isn't fair to him.
+
+I don't know whether it's fair or not. I write as he compels me to write.
+I find that I cannot separate his joy and his adventure from his duty and
+devotion and self-sacrifice; he didn't separate them himself. I don't
+even know that self-sacrifice is really the word for it; and the
+impression he gave me is just that--of going out for fun. It was the wild
+humour of his devotion that made it the spectacle it was.
+
+(She has told me that it's all right, so long as I recognize that it
+_was_ devotion.)
+
+After Lokeren I had no desire to go through the rest of the war with
+Jimmy. To be with Jimmy was destruction to your sense of values. I have
+got it firmly fixed in my head that the taking of Lokeren was an
+important affair.
+
+As for what Jimmy called the "tinpot bombardment of Melle" (there was
+nothing wrong with _his_ sense of values), I shall see it insanely, for
+ever and ever, as _the_ event of the war.
+
+And there is this to be said, that Lokeren filled the last gap in the
+line closing round Ghent, north, south and east, and drew it tighter. And
+Melle (only four and a-half miles away) was the last point in the German
+advance on Ghent. The taking of Melle would be a sign to us that the game
+was up.
+
+For three days Jimmy operated joyously in the village and over the
+leagues of turnip-fields that lay outside it.
+
+Of the first two days I remember an endless tramping over endless furrows
+that were ditches for the dead; an endless staggering under stretchers
+that dripped blood; an endless struggling with Viola to keep her under
+shelter of the walls; each of those acts seemed to be endless, though one
+gave place to the other, and it was only the firing that went on all the
+time, till even Jimmy complained once or twice that he was fed up with
+it.
+
+I remember that Jimmy's Field Ambulance played a great part in these
+adventures. I remember feeling a malicious satisfaction in the thought
+that at the same time it was compelled to witness _his_ performances. It
+couldn't miss him.
+
+I remember all these things; but of Melle itself I remember nothing but
+the Town Hall, with its double flight of steps up to its door, and the
+two tall stone pillars, one on each side of the door, and the Greek
+pediment above it; that and the little old Flemish house that stood back
+by itself on the other side of the road, and its white walls and its
+red-tiled roof, and the two green poplars in its garden, mounting guard.
+The house and its garden and its poplars are always vivid and still; they
+always appear to me as charged with mystery and significance and as
+connected in some secret way with Jimmy's fate.
+
+In the pauses of our movements the Field Ambulance and Jimmy's car and
+Viola's were always drawn up before the Town Hall, facing the little
+house.
+
+Then came Sunday, the eleventh, the third day of Melle, when Viola was
+left behind at Ghent.
+
+Jimmy had made her promise on her honour to be brave, _this_ time, and
+stay in the hotel and wait for orders.
+
+Colville stayed with her. They were to pack our things and be ready to
+leave at a minute's notice. Colville had secret orders that, if we were
+not back by midnight, he was to take Viola on to Bruges in his car, and
+wait for us there.
+
+For we knew now that we were in for it.
+
+And we knew that the war, which was coming closer and closer to the
+city, was coming closer to us. It had been Charlie Thesiger first,
+now it might be Reggie. At least, we knew that Reggie's regiment, the
+Third ----shires, had come up from Ostend the day before, that it was
+quartered somewhere between Ghent and Melle, and that it had been engaged
+at Quatrecht.
+
+Our own orders were to stick to Melle.
+
+I suppose from the way the ambulances were massed there that the end
+had been foreseen. That afternoon the battle began to sweep round from
+Quatrecht to Melle; and on our third journey out a rumour reached us
+at the barrier where the sentry stood guard. It was one of those
+preposterous rumours that run before disaster and are started God knows
+how when a retreat begins. I think it was the Belgian Red Cross men who
+spread it, for I heard the guide who went with Jimmy's Field Ambulance
+assuring him seriously that seven thousand British had been surrounded
+and cut to pieces on the road between Quatrecht and Melle. To be sure the
+number diminished with each repetition of the tale, dropping from seven
+thousand to seven hundred and from seven hundred to seventy. But in
+another hour we were bringing in the men of the ----shires.
+
+And towards the end of the day the real bombardment of Melle began, and
+on our last journey out we and Jimmy's Field Ambulance were in the thick
+of it.
+
+I can remember nothing of that bombardment but the three shells.
+
+The first ripped open the roof of the Town Hall and set fire to it.
+
+The second struck the Greek pediment and brought the whole front toppling
+into the street.
+
+Then, about five minutes after, there was the third shell.
+
+The light was going out of the sky, so that we saw the first shell like a
+sheet of curved lightning making for the village as we approached from
+the Ghent side. There was a deadly attraction about the thing that made
+you feel that it and you were the only objects in God's universe, and
+that you were about to be merged in each other. It looked as if it were
+rushing out of heaven straight for us, so that we were surprised when it
+apparently swerved aside and hit the Town Hall instead.
+
+(Jimmy and I were in the front of the car. Kendal, whose flesh wound was
+beginning to worry him, sat behind.)
+
+A battery of artillery charged past us, followed by the remnants of a
+French regiment on the run. Jimmy put more speed on. By the time we got
+into the village the Town Hall was spouting flame.
+
+Jimmy drew up his car about fifty yards away from it. The Field Ambulance
+had turned, and took its stand a little further away behind us, under the
+cover of the opposite walls. Its men began dragging out their stretchers.
+Kendal and I made ready with ours. The wounded were being brought out of
+every house they were in.
+
+A Belgian Colonel rode past us, trying to look unaware that he was
+retreating. He shouted to us to clear out of it. This was the only sign
+of interest that he showed.
+
+Somebody else came up to Jevons and told him that there were three or
+four wounded men somewhere inside the Town Hall, but that the place was
+on fire and it was absolutely impossible to get them out. He advised us
+to pick up the men who were lying in the street, and clear out.
+
+I saw Jevons nod his head as if he agreed and consented. I saw him get
+out of the car. And then I heard Kendal say, "Give us a hand, sir," and I
+turned to my stretchers.
+
+When I looked round again Jevons was running towards the Town Hall. The
+man who had told us to pick up our wounded and clear out was looking
+after him with a face of the most perfect horror.
+
+Kendal and I followed with the stretchers, and we saw Jevons run up the
+steps of the Town Hall. He turned at the top of the steps and waved to us
+to keep back.
+
+Then he went through the big doors between the pillars.
+
+There was a crash and a roar as if the whole building had fallen in. It
+was the top story plunging to the second floor. The upper half of the
+Town Hall was like a crate filled with blazing straw. The Greek pediment
+was the only solid thing that subsisted in that fire.
+
+Then the first floor was caught. It burned more slowly.
+
+Kendal and I and the ambulance men ran forward with the stretchers. And
+Jimmy came through the doors carrying a wounded Frenchman. He went in
+again and came out with another Frenchman.
+
+(The ground floor had begun to burn behind him.)
+
+He went in a third time and came out with Reggie Thesiger.
+
+He must have had to go further into the hall to find him, for it was a
+much longer business. We, Kendal and I, were down the street by the
+ambulance when they came out, and I didn't see that it was Reggie till I
+heard Kendal say, "Sir, that's Major Thesiger he's got!"
+
+Reggie's arm was round Jimmy's shoulder and Jimmy's arm was round
+Reggie's waist. He half carried, half supported him. He came out in the
+middle of a cloud of smoke that hid him. The smoke was followed by a
+burst of fire and another crash and roar as the ceiling of the first
+story plunged to the ground floor.
+
+With all this going on behind him Jevons paused on the top of the steps
+to readjust his burden to the descent. We heard afterwards that Reggie
+had said, "You'd better leave me, old man, and scoot. You can't do it."
+
+It didn't look as if he could. But as we went back to them we saw that
+Jevons had heaved Reggie over his shoulder and was carrying him down the
+steps. He came very carefully and slowly, so that we had reached the Town
+Hall before he had staggered to the last step.
+
+As we pressed closer to help him he told us to get back if we didn't want
+the whole damned place down on the top of us.
+
+We gave back and he followed us. I don't know how we got Reggie on to the
+stretcher--he had a piece of shell somewhere in his thigh--but we did it
+and ran with him to the ambulance. We had about a minute to do it in and
+no more.
+
+And then the second shell came.
+
+It hit the Greek pediment from behind, and we saw the two tall pillars
+that supported it stagger, snap like two sticks, and bend forwards,
+looking suddenly queer and corpulent in their fore-shortening; then they
+parted and fell, bringing down the whole front of the Town Hall.
+
+The Town Hall was spreading itself over the street, with a noise like a
+ship's coal going down the shute in a thunderstorm, as Reggie's stretcher
+slid home along its grooves in the ambulance. Kendal and I were inside
+for a second or two doing things for Reggie. The engine throbbed. The
+whole ambulance shook with its throbbing.
+
+In that second Jevons had run back to fetch his car, calling out to us to
+cut and he would overtake us. He had cranked up his engines and jumped in
+before Kendal could get down and go to his help. When we saw him start we
+started. There wasn't any time to lose.
+
+Kendal and I were sitting on the back steps of the ambulance, so that we
+kept him in sight. It was quite certain that he would overtake us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He was running straight down the middle of the road when the third shell
+came.
+
+It burst on the ground behind him, on his right, a little to one side.
+Some of it must have struck the steering gear.
+
+The car plunged to the left. It climbed reeling to the top of a bank and
+paused there, then fell, front over back, into the ditch and lay there,
+belly uppermost, and its wheels whirling in the air.
+
+Jevons lay on his face, half in, half out of the ditch.
+
+He lay for about three seconds; then, as we ran to him, we saw him raise
+himself on his left arm and crawl out of the ditch; and when we reached
+him he was trying to stand.
+
+And he tried to smile at us. "You needn't look like that," he said. "I'm
+as right as rain." And then he tried to raise his right arm.
+
+You saw a khaki cuff, horribly stained. A red rag hung from it, a fringe
+that dripped.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Reggie opened his eyes and turned his face towards the stretcher that
+slid into its grooves beside him.
+
+"That isn't--Jimmy--is it?" he said.
+
+I saw him move his left hand to find Jimmy's right. And I heard Jimmy
+saying again (in a weak voice this time) that he was as right as rain.
+
+We had got out of the range of the guns and the surgeons had done their
+business with bandages and splints. They had taken Reggie first, then
+Jimmy.
+
+And so, lying beside Reggie, on his own stretcher and in his own
+ambulance, he was brought back to Ghent.
+
+The military hospitals were full, so we took them to the Convent de Saint
+Pierre. And I went over to the Hotel de la Poste to fetch Viola.
+
+I don't know what I said to her. I think I must have done what Jimmy told
+me and said they were all right. _She_ never said a word till we got to
+the Convent. (She told me afterwards that when she saw me coming in alone
+she had been sure that Jimmy was killed. She didn't know about Reggie
+yet, you see.)
+
+This part of it is all confused and horrible.
+
+We had to wait before we could see our surgeons at the Convent. The nuns
+took us into a little parlour and left us there.
+
+And I told her then what had happened. I can see her sitting in the nuns'
+parlour, looking out of the window as I told her; looking as if she
+wasn't listening. And I can hear my own voice. It sounded strange and
+affected, as if I had made it all up and didn't believe what I was
+telling her.
+
+"He saved Reggie's life--do you see? at the risk of his own.
+
+"At--the risk--of his own."
+
+And still she looked as if she wasn't listening. It didn't sound as if it
+had really happened.
+
+And I feel--now--as if I had taken hours to tell her.
+
+Then one of our men came to us. He drew back when he saw Mrs. Jevons, and
+I followed him to the doorway. He said they were busy with Major
+Thesiger. They hadn't started yet with Mr. Jevons.
+
+And then--ages afterwards--one of the surgeons came and called me out of
+the room. He said the Major would be all right. They'd got the bit of
+shell out. But--there was Jevons's hand. They'd have to take it off.
+They couldn't possibly save it. And it was going to be a beastly
+business. They'd run out of anaesthetics. Thesiger had had the last
+they'd got.
+
+Yes, of course it would have been better. But Jevons wouldn't hear of it.
+_He_ knew they were short and Thesiger didn't, and he'd insisted on their
+doing Thesiger first.
+
+It was an awful mistake, he said, because it would hurt Jevons ten times
+more than it would hurt anybody else. He thought that I had better get
+Mrs. Jevons out of that room; the ward where they were operating was next
+to it.
+
+I couldn't get her out of it.
+
+There were five minutes when I sat there and Viola crouched on the floor
+beside me with her face hidden on my knees and her hands grabbing me
+tighter and tighter.
+
+And the door opened and I saw two nuns looking in. I heard one say to
+another, "_C'est sa pauvre femme qui devient folle_." And the door closed
+on us.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+"All that fuss about a hand!" Jimmy had come out of his faint and was
+trying to restore Viola to a sense of proportion. If all the rest of him
+had been blown away, he said, by that confounded shell, and only his hand
+had been left, she might have had something to cry for.
+
+And yet she cried inconsolably for Jimmy's hand.
+
+God knows what memories came to her when she thought of it. I don't think
+she thought of it as the hand that had written masterpieces and flung
+them aside, that could steer a car straight through hell-fire, and that
+could nurse, and bind up wounds. I know I thought of all these obvious
+things. But she must have thought of the hand that she knew like her own
+hand, the hand with the firm, nervous fingers, and the three strong lines
+in the pinkish palm, the hand she adored and had shrunk from, whose
+gesture had been torture to her and whose touch was ecstasy, the hand
+that the surgeons had cut off and tossed into a basket to be cast out
+with the refuse of the wards.
+
+Not that either of us had much time for thinking of anything but how we
+could get out of Ghent before the Germans got into it. Viola said it
+would be quite easy. There was the ambulance, and there was _her_ car and
+there was Jimmy's car.
+
+I told her that Jimmy's god-like car was lying bottom upwards in a ditch
+between Ghent and Melle, an object half piteous, half obscene. She said
+it was a jolly good thing then that she'd brought hers. Perhaps it was.
+
+We had just got Jimmy and Reggie into their first sleep at six o'clock in
+the morning when the orders came for us to clear out.
+
+We cleared out in Viola's car, with Reggie on his stretcher and Jimmy
+(propped up with pillows) at his head, and Viola at his feet, and two
+wounded men in front with Colville, and Kendal and me standing one on
+each step. (Most of our luggage was on the Boulevard in front of the
+Convent where we had left it.)
+
+We went, as we had come, through Bruges. We drew up to rest in the Market
+Place under the Belfry.
+
+"You'd better look at it while you can, Viola," said Jevons. "You may
+never see it again."
+
+"I? I shall never see anything else," she said.
+
+We looked at the Belfry. It was as if, under that menace of destruction,
+we saw it for the first time.
+
+We _might_ have enjoyed that run back, Viola said; only somehow we
+didn't. Reggie was ill from his anesthetic all the way, and Jimmy's
+temperature went up with every mile, and we missed the boat at Ostend,
+and had to stay there all night; and Jimmy became delirious in the night
+and thought that he had left Viola behind in the Town Hall at Melle. And
+there was no room on the morning boat; and when we did get on board the
+Naval Transport at Dunkirk, Kendal took it into his head to be seasick
+till he nearly died.
+
+We had no peace till seven o'clock on Tuesday, when we got to Canterbury.
+
+
+
+
+XV
+
+
+I think I have said that Jevons made me suffer. He did. I can say that
+before those three weeks of his all my contacts with him were infected by
+the poison of my suffering. But all that was nothing to what he made me
+suffer since, what I suffer now when I remember the things I have said of
+him, the things I have thought and felt--my furtive belittling of him, my
+unwilling admiration, the doubt that I encouraged in the mean hope that
+it would become a certainty.
+
+I would give anything to be like the Canon or my wife, the only two of us
+whose conscience doesn't reproach them when they see Jimmy's right
+sleeve.
+
+I remember Norah saying to me once, "I shall be sorry for _you_ if you
+don't take care." Well, I am sorry for myself.
+
+But I am still sorrier for Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+I know there's a great deal to be said for her. I had wired to them from
+Dunkirk to tell them that Reggie was slightly wounded but recovering, and
+that the four of us would be in Canterbury that evening. It wasn't my
+fault if Reggie, being a British officer, was taken from us at Dover, and
+sent to a military hospital; but I admit I ought to have wired again to
+the Thesigers to inform them of the fact. I ought to have remembered that
+Reggie was more important to Mrs. Thesiger than Jevons, even if Jevons
+had done what Mrs. Thesiger didn't yet know he'd done.
+
+The maternal passion is a terrible thing. It has made women commit
+crimes. It made my mother-in-law push Viola from her on her threshold and
+turn on me as I was helping Jimmy out of the car. It made her say,
+"You've brought my son-in-law. What have you done with my son?"
+
+(To do her justice, she hadn't seen what had happened to Jimmy. Though he
+was tired and weak, he could still stand up and stagger along if you held
+him tight.)
+
+And the maternal passion is not more terrible than the passion that Viola
+had for Jevons. It made her say to her mother as the Canon and I brought
+Jimmy in (the dear old man had seen in an instant why he wore his coat
+slung loose over his right shoulder), "You can see what we're doing with
+my husband."
+
+And when we were all in the drawing-room and I was explaining gently that
+Reggie was all right, but that we'd _had_ to send him to the military
+hospital, it made her say, "If it wasn't for your son-in-law your son
+wouldn't be alive."
+
+God knows what thirst she satisfied, what bitterness she exhausted, what
+secret anguish she avenged.
+
+They were all there, the Thesiger women--they had come, you see, to meet
+Reggie--Victoria and Millicent and Mildred; and they heard her. But it
+was Mildred who _saw_. She spoke to her mother.
+
+"Can't you _see_?" she said.
+
+Viola was kneeling by the sofa where her father had made Jimmy lie, and
+she had unbuttoned and taken from him his heavy coat. She looked at me
+and said, "Please take them away somewhere and tell them. Jimmy _is_ so
+tired."
+
+I know that must seem awful. It _was_ awful to come back from the
+battlefields of Flanders, from sieges and sackings and slaughter, and see
+the women flashing fire at each other. And they were mother and daughter.
+But, you see, they were women. I know that the war should have purged
+them of their passions (perhaps it did purge them); but your lover is
+your lover and your son your son for all that.
+
+And it wasn't easy for Mrs. Thesiger to see how her son-in-law could
+have saved her son. I am not sure that she wouldn't have thought it
+presumption in Jevons to suppose that he could save anybody, let alone
+her son. There were people like the Thesigers from whom heroism was
+expected as a matter of course; and there were people like Jevons. You
+know what she said about his going to the front.
+
+When I had finished the tale--and I let her have the whole of it, from
+the first shell that hit the Town Hall to the bit of the third shell
+that hit Jimmy--she said, "You mean that if he hadn't gone back for his
+car--" She had broken down and was sobbing quietly, but you could see how
+her mind worked.
+
+I said, "I mean that if he hadn't gone back to the Town Hall to look for
+Reggie he wouldn't have been hit."
+
+Then I told her how they took Jimmy's hand off.
+
+I heard the Canon groan. Millicent and Victoria began to sob as their
+mother had sobbed. Mildred set her teeth firmly; and Mrs. Thesiger turned
+to me a queer, disordered face, and spoke.
+
+"They--they gave the anaesthetic to--Reggie?"
+
+"They did," I said. "Because Jimmy made them."
+
+Yes. I am very sorry for Mrs. Thesiger.
+
+She cried, softly, and with a great recovery of beauty and dignity, for
+about fifteen seconds (the Canon had gone back to Jevons); then she rose
+and addressed her daughter.
+
+"Mildred dear, I think Jimmy had better have Reggie's room."
+
+Then she went to him; and I am told that she kissed him for the first
+time. She kissed him as if he had been her son. (Poor Jimmy, I may say,
+was so tired that he didn't want to be kissed by anybody.)
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+He still had Reggie's room six weeks later when I came back from France
+for a week-end. Reggie had recovered, and was with them for a fortnight's
+leave before he went out again.
+
+Norah and I went down on Saturday to see him. (His leave was up on Sunday
+night.)
+
+Without Reggie I don't think I should have realized Jevons in his final
+phase.
+
+He had been happy, I know, at Hampstead in the first two years of his
+marriage; he had been happy most of the time in Edwardes Square; even in
+Mayfair he had had moments; and Amershott had been, on the whole, an
+improvement on Mayfair. And he had lived through his three weeks in Ghent
+in a sort of ecstasy. And before that, all the time, there had been his
+work, which I am always forgetting, and his fame, when he didn't forget
+it.
+
+But there had always been something.
+
+At first it had been the Thesigers. As long as Mrs. Thesiger--as long
+as _one_ Thesiger--held out against him he had felt defeat. And then
+there had been Reggie's return and his appalling doubt. He had pretended
+not to see his doubt and not to mind it. And he had seen it, as he saw
+everything, and he had minded awfully. Then came Viola's illness, which
+you could put down to Reggie's doubt. And after that it had been Viola
+pretty nearly all the time. And even at Ghent, by the tortures of anxiety
+she had caused him, you may say that she had spoiled his ecstasy.
+
+And now, without any effort, or any calculation or foresight, by a
+stupendous accident, he had found happiness and peace and certainty. The
+thing was so consummately done, and so timed to the minute, that when you
+saw him there enjoying it, you could have sworn that he had played for it
+and pulled it off. It was as if he had said to himself, "Give me time,
+and I'll bring all these people round, even Mrs. Thesiger, even Reggie.
+I'll _make_ them love me. Wait, and you'll just see how I shall score."
+
+And there he was scoring.
+
+And it was as if he had said to himself long ago, "As for Viola, I know
+all about it. I know I do things that make the poor child shudder; but I
+can put that all right. I can make her forget it. I give myself three
+weeks." As if he said, "She thought she was going to leave me. I knew
+that, too, and I didn't care. She might have left me a thousand times and
+I should have brought her back."
+
+I used to think it pathetic that Jevons should have wanted Mrs. Thesiger
+to love him--that he should have wanted Reggie to. But I must say his
+pathos was avenged. _They_ were pathetic now. That big, hulking Major
+wasn't happy unless he was writing Jimmy's letters, or cutting up Jimmy's
+meat for him, or helping him in and out of his clothes. Mrs. Thesiger
+wasn't happy unless she was doing things for him. The Canon wasn't happy
+(though, like Norah, he had nothing on his conscience) and Mildred and
+Millicent and Victoria weren't happy, nor the Thesiger's friends in the
+Cathedral Close.
+
+And then--after they had made a hero of him for six weeks--on that
+Saturday night when we were all together in the Canon's library, Jevons
+made his confession.
+
+We had been, exchanging reminiscences. Something had made Viola think of
+Jimmy's General and the two Colonels at Ghent. She began telling the
+Canon how we had watched them through the glass screen, and how funny
+General Roubaix had looked with his arm round Jimmy's neck, and how he
+had said that Jimmy was a salamander, and that he didn't know what fear
+is.
+
+"Oh, _don't_ I!" said Jimmy.
+
+And that sent Reggie back to the day when he had first seen Jimmy.
+
+"Look here, old man, what made you say you were an arrant coward?"
+
+"Because," said Jimmy simply, "I am one. Dear old Roubaix was talking
+through his hat.
+
+"Not know what fear is! I know a good many things, but I don't know
+anything better than that. You can't tell me anything about fear I don't
+know.
+
+"You've no idea how I funked going out to the war. Yes--_funked_.
+
+"It wasn't any ordinary funk, mind you, the little, creepy feeling in
+your waist, and your tummy tumbling down, and your heart sort of
+fluttering over the place where it used to be. I believe you can get over
+_that_. And I never had that--ever, except once when I saw Viola in a
+place where she'd no business to be. It was something much worse. It--it
+was in my head--in my brain. A sort of madness. And it never let me
+alone. It was worse at night, and after I got up and began to go about in
+the morning--when my brain woke and remembered, but it was there all the
+time.
+
+"I saw things--horrors. And I heard them. I saw and heard the whole
+war. All the blessed time--all those infernal five weeks before I got
+out to it, I kept seeing horrors and hearing them. There was a lot of
+detail--realism wasn't in it--and it was all correct; because I verified
+it afterwards. Things _were_ just like that. Every morning when I got up
+I said to myself I'm going out to that damned war, but I wish to God
+somebody'd come and chloroform me before I get there. There were moments
+when I could have chloroformed myself. I felt as if it was the utter
+injustice of God that I--_I_--had to be mixed up in it.
+
+"Not know what fear is!
+
+"Just conceive," said Jimmy, "a man living like that, in abject,
+abominable terror, in black funk--keeping it up, all day and half the
+night, for five solid weeks--before he got there."
+
+"And when you did get there," said Reggie, "were you in a funk?"
+
+"Oh, well, you see, by the time I'd got there it had pretty well worn
+itself out. There wasn't any funk left to _be_ in."
+
+And when I saw Reggie look at him I knew he had scored again.
+
+Still, I wondered how it really stood with them; and whether Reggie
+had settled with his doubt, or whether sometimes, when you caught him
+looking at Jimmy, it had come over him again. The kind of virtue his
+brother-in-law had displayed in Flanders wouldn't help him, you see, to
+that particular solution. And with the Thesigers--when they took after
+their mother--things died hard.
+
+He must have felt that he had to settle it before he went.
+
+Viola told us what happened.
+
+It was his last evening, and the three were together in that room of
+Reggie's. He had just said that Viola wouldn't care how many Town Halls
+he was buried under, as long as Jimmy didn't go and dig him out. And
+then, suddenly, he went straight for it.
+
+"Jimmy," he said, "did you run away with my sister, or didn't you? I
+don't care whether you did or not, but--did you?"
+
+"No, I didn't," said Jimmy.
+
+"Then what the dickens," Reggie said, "were you doing together in
+Bruges?"
+
+"We were looking at the Belfry," said Jimmy.
+
+And Reggie shook his head. "That's beyond me," he said.
+
+"Yes," said Viola. "But it wasn't beyond Jimmy."
+
+That's the real story of Tasker Jevons and his wife.
+
+Don't ask me what would have happened to them if there hadn't been a war.
+
+I've tried to show you the sort of man he was. He knew his hour even
+before it found him. And you cannot separate him from his hour.
+
+
+
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