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.