Then--when he heard that she had married Jevons--he had his idea. It

wasn't necessary for him to have heard anything else. And then, even if

he hadn't guessed it, there was Jimmy's book, the "Flemish Journal," to

tell him she had been in Belgium with him. And he knew she didn't marry

him till afterwards.

And so, he thought things. If he didn't think them of Viola he thought

them of Jevons. (Even on the most charitable assumption he would consider

his sister's passion for Jimmy a piece of morbid perversity.) And anyhow,

he was left with an appalling doubt.

And he wasn't going to forgive either of them, ever.

IX

That we had made out something very like the truth of it I realized when

I met Burton Withers. For eventually I did meet him. It was at the end of

June, nineteen-ten, in the green room of the Crown Theatre on the

hundredth night of Jimmy's play. That is what I remember it by.

Norah and I were with Viola and Jimmy. Withers had come in with a friend,

an important member of the cast, who was evidently under the impression

that we had never met before, for he introduced him to us all round.

Withers showed tact in not recognizing Viola or claiming the acquaintance

he certainly had with Jevons. He had, in fact, a most reassuring air of

starting again with a clean slate and no reminiscences. This was in the

interval between the First and Second Acts. When the curtain rose on Act

Two, I was alone in Jimmy's box. (Jimmy and Viola and Norah were trying

the effect of the play from the stalls.) And at the next interval Withers

came to me there. It was funny, he said, the way little Jevons had come

on. He didn't suppose any of us had thought of _this_ four years ago when

we had all met together in Bruges.

I said, "Did we all meet together in Bruges?"

"Well, if it wasn't in Ghent. Oh--of course it was at Ghent you and I

met. You hadn't joined the others then."

At first I was hopelessly mystified by these allusions. I couldn't think

what point he was making for or where he would come out. He seemed to be

trying uneasily to get somewhere. Then I saw that he had had it on his

mind that when we had last met he had made a defamatory statement to me

about the lady who had become my sister-in-law, and about a man who had

become a celebrity (I knew Withers's little weakness for celebrities).

And he was scared.

I must have seemed a bit lost among his allusions, for he blurted it out.

"D'you know, I've been most awfully sorry for chaffing you in that

idiotic way--about--your sister-in-law. Silly sort of thing one says, you

know. But of course you knew I was pulling your leg."

I said, "My dear Withers, of course I knew you were."

Of course I knew he was doing nothing of the sort, for Withers slandered

right and left when it wasn't worth his while to grovel, and I had no

doubt now that he believed his own dirty tale when he told it; but he had

been impressed and thoroughly frightened, even at the time, by the

calmness of my bluff, and the little beast was far more afraid of us than

we ever could have been of him now. We could henceforth dismiss Withers

from our minds. He was a "social climber" of the sort that would eat his

own words if he thought they would do the smallest damage to his

climbing.

As for the ladies, General Thesiger's friends, I rather think the General

had settled with them at the time.

You might say we had nothing to fear from Reggie, if Reggie's

silence--and his deafness--hadn't been more terrible than anything

he could have heard or said.

I suppose nineteen-ten ought to stand as the year of Tasker Jevons's

great Play, the play that ran for a whole year after the hundredth night,

that ran on and on as if it would never stop, that, when it was taken off

the Crown stage to make room for its successor, still careered through

the provinces and the United States. It seemed the year of Jimmy's utmost

affluence. If he kept it up, we said, he'd be a millionaire before he

died of it. But it wasn't conceivable that he could keep it up for long.

We thought he'd never write another play like this one. There never would

be another year like nineteen-ten.

I believe that even Jimmy thought there'd never be another year like it,

so far had he surpassed his own calculations, as it was.

But for me nineteen-ten is the year of other things, the things that

happened in the family, the year of Reggie's return and all the misery

that came from it, the year of Viola's struggle--the agony of which we,

Norah and I, were the helpless spectators. _She_ never said a word to us.

It was Norah who conveyed to me the secret, intimate shock of it.

That year Jimmy rained boxes and stalls and theatre-parties for his play

on all the Thesigers (except Reggie) and on all their friends, and on

Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands when they came back from Simla and

Gibraltar (it was the year of their return too); but we stood behind the

scenes of a tragedy that mercifully was hidden from Jimmy's eyes. It was

the year when Mildred broke off her engagement to Charlie Thesiger. It

was the year when our little girl, Viola, was born; the year when we

moved from our Bloomsbury flat into the little house in Edwardes Square,

taking over the end of the lease and all the fixtures and some of the

furniture from Jimmy. Jimmy hadn't a child, and he had sworn that he

never would have one; he was so afraid (and this fear was the only thing

that disturbed his optimism), so horribly afraid that Viola might die.

But he had outgrown the house in Edwardes Square. It was the year of his

first really startling expansion.

It was the year when he moved into the house in Mayfair.

Why Mayfair we really couldn't think. He said he liked the sound of

it; it made him feel as if he was in the country when he wasn't, and as

if it was the month of May, when there never was any month of May in

England; as if there were a maypole where the fountain is in Park Lane;

and as if processions, and processions of horses, splendid stallions and

brood-mares and thoroughbreds and hacks and great Suffolk punches with

their manes and tails tied up with ribbons were coming past his house to

the fair.

He may have felt like that about it. I put no limits to Jimmy's

imagination; but I suspected him of throwing out these airy fancies as a

veil to cover the preposterous nature of his ambition.

It was also the year when he began to talk about motor-cars and think

about motor-cars and dream about motor-cars at night.

And it was the year in which he and Viola went to the Riviera while the

plumbers and painters were at work on the house in Green Street, Mayfair.

They stayed away all autumn, and at the end of November they settled in.

And at Christmas they gave their house-warming.

It wasn't a large party--only a few friends of Viola's, and Jimmy's

lawyer and his doctor and his agent, and a few picked members of the

confraternity; the rest were Thesigers. If Jimmy had meant to give a

demonstration proving that he could gather the whole of his wife's family

round him at a pinch, he had all but succeeded. I suppose every available

member had turned up that night, except Reggie. The General and his wife

and daughters were there; and Charlie Thesiger and Bertie; and Canon and

Mrs. Thesiger (they had come up from Canterbury on purpose, and were

staying with the General); and Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands; and

Victoria and Mildred, who stayed with Viola; and Millicent, who came to

us; and a whole crowd of miscellaneous aunts and cousins; perhaps sixty

altogether, counting outsiders.

Norah and I had been away for weeks in the country and had only got back

that afternoon, so we had not seen the house in Green Street since it had

been furnished. It burst, it literally burst, on us, without the smallest

warning or preparation.

Like Jimmy's first novel, it was designed to startle and arrest, hitting

you in the eye as you came in. The actual reception was held in the large

hall, which had been formed by turning what had once been the dining-room

loose into the passage and the stair-place.

So far the architect had done his work well. After that he had been left

to struggle with and interpret as he best could the baronial idea that

had been imposed on him. The hall was panelled half-way in dark oak, and

above the oak the walls were hung with a rough papering of old gold. But

what hit you in the eye as you came in was the oak staircase that went up

royally along the bottom wall. It had scarlet-and-gold Tudor roses on the

flank of the balustrade, and at every third banister there was a shield

picked out in scarlet and gold. And at the bottom of the balustrade and

at the turn a little oak lion sat on his haunches and held up yet another

shield (picked out in scarlet and gold) in his fore-paws. The bare oak

planks of the upper floor made the ceiling, and there was an enormous

Tudor rose in the middle of it, where other people might have had a

chandelier, and little Tudor roses blazed at intervals all along the

cornice. And there was a great stone hearth and chimney-piece, a Tudor

chimney-piece, mullioned, with a shield carved in the centre and the

motto: "_Dominus Defensor Domi_," and on either side the rose and the

grill, the rose and the grill, alternately. There were andirons on the

hearth and an immense log burning, and swords and daggers and suits of

armour hung on the gold walls above the panelling.

And I swear to you that the curtains and upholstery were in tapestry

cloth, the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground. It was as if

Jimmy had wanted to say to the Thesigers that if it came to being Tudor,

he could be as Tudor as any of them, and more so. Thus deeply had he

absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere.

When she saw the suits of armour Norah squeezed my arm and breathed

"Oh--my _darling_ Wally!"--in an ecstasy that was anguish. Poor Mildred's

plump face turned as scarlet as the Tudor roses with an emotion that we

could not fathom, but judged to be painful.

We had come early with the idea of making ourselves useful, if necessary;

but there was hardly anybody there yet, only two or three guests drinking

coffee or champagne-cup at the long table under the windows, and Jimmy,

who stood in the middle of his Tudor hall, talking to one of the

confraternity, and rocking himself gently from his toes to his heels and

from his heels to his toes again, as a sign that he was not in the least

elated, but only at his ease.

He was delighted to see us, and for quite three seconds he ceased his

rocking and began to twinkle in a most natural and reassuring manner.

Then I remember him scuttling away to greet another guest, and the

_confrère_ gazing after him with affection and turning to us in a sort

of grave enjoyment of the scene. I remember Viola coming up to us and her

little baffling smile and her look--the look she was to have for long

enough--of detachment from Jimmy and his Tudor hall. I remember the dark

blue, half-transparent gown she wore that was certainly not Tudor, and

her general air of being an uninvited and inappropriate guest, and how

she conveyed us to the table to get drinks "all comfy" before the others

came. And when Viola had drifted away, I remember Charlie Thesiger

strolling up to us. The supercilious youth had been, getting a drink "all

comfy" on his own account, and his little stiff moustache was still wet

with Jimmy's champagne-cup above the atrocious smile he met us with.

He asked us if we'd seen the drawing-room.

We said we hadn't, and he advised us to go up and look at it at once,

before anybody else did. "You can't see it properly," he said, "unless

you're alone with it."

I suppose we ought to have been grateful to Charlie for not letting us

miss it, and it was perfectly true that the way to see it was to be alone

with it; there would, indeed, have been a positive indecency in seeing it

in any other way. He had spared our decency. And yet I think we hated him

for having sent us there. It was as if he had sent us to look at

something horrible, at an outrage, at violence done to shrinking,

delicate things.

We looked at it, and we looked at each other. We didn't speak, and I

don't think either of us smiled. I remember Norah going behind me and

closing the door swiftly, as she might have closed it on some horror that

she and I had to deal with alone. I remember her saying then, "This is

_too_ awful!" not in the least as if she meant what we were looking at,

but as if she saw something invisible that lurked and loomed behind it,

so that I asked her what she thought it meant.

"It means," she said, "that Jimmy's done it all himself. He's had to do

it all himself. She hasn't _cared_."

I said, it looked as if _he_ hadn't cared.

She moaned, "Oh, but he did--he did. He's cared so awfully. That's the

dreadful part of it. You can see he has. Just look at those vases and

those cabinets and things. And think of the money the poor thing must

have spent on it!"

"But," I said, "it's so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable.

The old house was perfect. So, in its way, was the cottage."

"I'm afraid that wasn't Jimmy's taste--it was Vee-Vee's. She did

everything."

"She told us _he_ did."

"Poor darling--she wanted us to think he did."

"He appreciated it, anyhow."

"He'd appreciate anything if she did it."

"Then," I said, "why should he break loose like this now?"

"Because she hasn't cared. She hasn't cared a hang. She's left everything

to him. And you can see, poor dear, how he's spread himself."

Oh, yes, you could see. It was as if he had never had scope before, and

now, with no limit to his opportunity, he had simply run amok. It wasn't

that the things he had gathered round him in his orgy were not fine

things. It was the awful way he'd mixed them, yielding incontinently to

each solicitation as it came along. Dealers had been on the look-out for

Jimmy to exploit his fury.

In his Tudor hall he had been constrained to unity by a great idea. But

not here. And reminiscences of the Canterbury drawing-room had suggested

to him that you _could_ mix things. So, using a satinwood suite with

tinted marqueterie and old rose upholsterings (he had succumbed to it in

the first freshness of his innocence) as a base, he had added Boule

cabinets and modern Indian tables in carved open-work to Adams cabinets

and Renaissance tables in ebony inlaid with engraved ivory, and

eighteenth-century gilded bergère chairs to old oak and Chippendale.

Cloisonné and Sèvres stood side by side on the same shelf. He had an

Aubusson carpet in the middle of the floor, and his Bokhara rugs at

intervals down the sides. Norah was sitting on the emerald-green brocade

of an Empire sofa, clutching the gilt sphinx head of the arm-end. It was

a double room, and emerald-green curtains hung at the tall windows in the

front and at the large stained-glass window at the back, and at the wide

archway between. And an Algerian lamp swung from the back ceiling, and an

Early Victorian glass chandelier from the front.

"And the awfullest thing of all is," Norah was saying, "that he's done it

to please her."

"Don't believe her. That's the beautiful part of it."

Viola had come in by the door of the back room and she was smiling at us.

Yet, even as she smiled, she had that look of being detached, of not

caring.

We couldn't say anything--we were too miserable. She looked round the

dreadful rooms as if she were trying to see them for the first time, as

if some reverberation of the horror we had felt did penetrate to her in

her remoteness. She smiled faintly.

"What _does_ it matter," she said, "so long as it makes him happy? It

would be sweet if you'd come down and help us now."

We went down, and the house-warming began.

It was Jimmy who told us what our business was. We were to stand by

visitors, he said, as they came in and break the shock (he had observed

it) of the Tudor hall. If we couldn't break it we must do what we could

to help recovery. He had seen desperate cases yield to champagne-cup

administered during the first paroxysm.

We had a little trouble with some of the minor confraternity--their

emotions were facile and champagne intensified them. They would ask where

the throne-room was and when our host was going to be measured for his

suit of armour, and what did we think he'd done with the family

portraits?

But the Thesigers (all except Charlie--and Charlie, Norah said, had no

heart), the Thesigers offered an example of the most beautiful manners.

I shall never forget the General's face as the suits of armour struck

him--his sudden spasm of joy and the austere heroism that suppressed it.

And the Canon--

The Canon rose to even greater heights. We were a bit afraid that he

would overdo it and look as if he were trying to show us how a Christian

gentleman could bear such things as Jimmy's furnishings. But no. He

behaved as though he saw nothing in the least unusual in his furnishings,

as though Jimmy's Tudor hall and miscellaneous drawing-room were his

natural background.

But for sheer pluck and presence of mind not one of them could touch

Jevons. He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above

them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his

atmosphere of deadly peril. He volplaned, he looped the loop. _His_

behaviour was unsurpassable. For _his_ case, if you like, was desperate.

I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room.

He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger,

not the quiver of an eyelash, had escaped him. And consider what it

meant to him. In a furious climax of expenditure he had achieved the

arresting spectacle of his house in Mayfair, and his first night, his

house-warming, was turning under his eyes into a triumph for the

Thesigers' manners and a failure for him. He had no illusions. Unless he

did something to stop it, the whole thing would be one enormous and

lamentable and expensive failure.

He had to do something. And he did it. He left off his uneasy swagger and

his rocking. He met the heroic and beautiful faces of the Thesigers with

his engaging twinkle. He sought out and ministered to two young girls who

had been brought there by the minor confraternity and were hiding in a

corner on the point of hysteria. We heard him telling them that the

throne-room was being built out over the scullery leads (he must have

known what the minor confraternity had been up to), that in the great

fireplace in his kitchen you could roast three journalists whole, and

that the question of the family portraits was receiving his attention. He

had a deal on with the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery for the

purchase of the Holbein Henry the Eighth. By the time he had finished it

was open to us to suppose that the house in Mayfair was his joke and not

ours, that he had furnished it in this preposterous manner in order to be

really and truly funny, and to keep himself and Viola in perfect and

perpetual gaiety. It was as if he were trying to say to us, "None of you

people--least of all the confraternity--knows how to live. Life isn't a

calamity; it's a joke; and to live properly you should meet life in its

own spirit; you should do exuberant and gay and gorgeous things, like

me."

And then when we had all come round, he rearranged all the furniture in

his drawing-room for charades (showing no respect whatever for his

satinwood suite); and after the charades he rolled up his Aubusson carpet

and cleared the place for a dance that was ruin to his parquet floor.

And we had supper; and then more dancing till four o'clock in the

morning.

Of the dancing I remember nothing but Viola whirling round and round, as

it were for ever, in Charlie Thesiger's arms, and her dead-white face

looking over his shoulder, as if she saw nothing, nothing whatever; as if

she were detached even from the arms that held her.

My last recollection is of Jimmy's face when Norah said to him, "Oh,

Jimmy, I _love_ your dear little lions!"--and Jimmy's answer:

"Little lions--yes--they make me feel tall and majestic."

"He _is_ going it, isn't he?" said Charlie Thesiger.

* * * * *

At this point, when I look back over what I've written, it seems to me

that I've done nothing but record changes so many and so marked that

their history has no sort of continuity. But in reality it was not so. Up

to December, nineteen-ten, there was no break, not even a dividing line.

Compared with what happened then I am compelled to think of Viola's

marriage, not as a risky experiment that had so far defeated prophecy,

but as an entirely serene and happy thing. Between the moment when they

set up that four-post bed in that absurd little house in Hampstead and

the day of their leaving Edwardes Square behind them I cannot point to

any time and say, "That was the beginning of it," or put my finger on an

event and show the difference there.

Unless it was Reggie's coming back.

But the results of that didn't appear till later.

Any difference I may have noted previously was an affair of shades, of

delicate oscillations. There was no lapse without a recovery, no

departure without a return.

And here, at the end of nineteen-ten, I got a line drawn sharply on

either side of a break I cannot bridge. The minute Jimmy moved into that

house in Mayfair things began to go wrong.

It was as if Jimmy, in his love of doing risky things, had cast, this

time, a dreadful die.

From that evening onward I watched them with anxiety. I do not know how

far Jevons was aware that the house in Mayfair was a blunder; I think he

wouldn't have acknowledged that it was a blunder at all. His own attitude

to it was not in the least disturbed by his humorous perception of other

people's. With his dexterity in adjustments he was quite capable of

reconciling them, quite capable of enjoying the effect it had on nervous

organisms while he himself took it seriously. It was, after all, his own

achievement, and a very astonishing achievement too. He continued to

respect it as the immense sign of his material prosperity, the

advertisement, you may say, of his arrival. His business instinct would

never have allowed him to repent of an advertisement.

There _was_ this gross element in his enjoyment.

And there was also the pure and charming happiness of a child that

suddenly finds itself left, with boundless opportunity, to its own

gorgeous caprice. You could no more blame Jevons for the bad taste of his

drawing-room and his Tudor hall than you could blame a child for its

joy in a treasure of tinsel and coloured glass.

But when we asked ourselves where, in this outbreak of Jimmy's fantasy,

did Viola come in, we had to own that she came in nowhere. Not only had

she stood by without lifting a finger to interfere with its tempestuous

course; not only had she submitted without a protest; she seemed to show

no adequate sense of what had happened. Her detachment was the unnatural

and dreadful thing.

And this happiness of his was at Viola's mercy. It would last just so

long as she could keep him from knowing that he had outraged the beauty,

the fitness and the simplicity she loved. I thought how he had once

boasted that he knew what she wanted, that he knew what she was thinking

and feeling all the time. How could he have imagined that she wanted

_this_? What was his knowledge worth if he didn't know what she would

think and feel about it?

Unless, indeed, she had lied to him. Lied from first to last,

deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the

pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and

it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola

had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside,

where you would have thought she would have most wanted to plunge in; the

calculation and the indifference both were so beyond her that you could

only think one thing: she hated it; she hated the new turn his prosperity

had taken; she almost hated him because of it; and her heart was broken

because of Reggie, and it was hardening where it broke; she hated Reggie

at moments; and she had moments of hating Jevons because he had come

between them; and she was compounding with her conscience, punishing

herself for all these hatreds and for a thousand secret criticisms and

disloyalties and repugnances; avenging, as it were beforehand, all

hatreds and criticisms, disloyalties and repugnances to come. For she saw

it all now--how it was going to be. And she was trying to make up for it

by giving Jimmy his own way in the things that, as she had said, "didn't

matter."

And if Jimmy's way was to surround her with pretentious silliness instead

of beautiful simplicity, then she must rise above her surroundings. Her

spirit, at any rate, must refuse to be surrounded.

Her attitude was more lofty than you can imagine. As Norah had said,

there would always be a Belfry--something high and unusual--in Viola's

life. Well, she was going to live in the Belfry, that was all. And if she

was to be perfectly safe in her Belfry, and Jimmy perfectly happy in his

Tudor hall, he mustn't know that she was there.

I don't know how she really put it to herself; I don't suppose she "put"

it any way; but subconsciously, as they say, it must have been like that.

Anyhow, her behaviour amounted to an evasion of Jimmy, and this

particular evasion was sad enough when you consider that in the beginning

it had been Jimmy who had taken her to look at the Belfry--who was the

one man who could be trusted to take her, and that she would never have

dreamed of setting off on such an adventure by herself, and that she

wasn't fitted for it. In fact, I can't think of anybody less fit.

It showed more than anything how the glamour must have worn off him.

It had worn off even for us to whom he came each time with a comparative

freshness. And if it hadn't worn off for his public and for the

confraternity, it was simply because as an engineer of literature he was

inexhaustible. He had so perfected his machinery that the turning out

of novels and of plays had become with him a sort of automatic habit, and

if there was any falling off in his quality he was right when he said

that nobody but himself would find it out. He had got an infinite

capacity for plagiarizing himself; and in his worst things he imitated

his best so closely that he might well defy you to tell the difference.

But you cannot work as he had worked for five years at a stretch and not

suffer for it. And you cannot aim at material success as he had aimed,

deliberately and continuously, for five years without becoming yourself a

bit material. And you cannot be immersed and wallow in it as he wallowed

without corruption.

There's no doubt that for the next, two--three--four years he wallowed.

He was so deep in that, even after Viola's illness that came in

nineteen-thirteen and purged him somewhat, he continued to wallow. And we

had to stand by while he was doing it and pretend that we weren't

shocked. There was no good trying to give him a hand to help him out, he

was so happy wallowing.

I am far from blaming him. Personally, if it hadn't been for Viola, I

should have liked to think that he was able to get all that ecstasy out

of his sordid triumph. For it _was_ sordid. If it wasn't for Viola you

could tick off each year with a note of his preposterously increasing

income, and say that was all there was in it.

I muddle up the first years of it. I know that in nineteen-eleven he

brought out his fifth novel and his third play and that the run and

the returns of both were astounding, even for him. I know that in

nineteen-twelve he brought out two novels and two new plays that ran at

the same time, and that he roped in Europe and the Colonies; and that his

income rose into five figures. He couldn't help it. His business was a

thing that had passed beyond his control. With infinite exertions he had

set it spinning, and now it looked as if he had only to touch it now and

then with his finger to keep it going. And if he did get a bit excited is

it any wonder? There was the dreadful fascination of the thing that

compelled him to watch it till its perpetual gyrations went to his head

and made it reel.

His figure seems to me to reel slightly as it moves through those rooms

in the house in Green Street, and before the footlights as he answered

calls, and across the banquet-halls of the "Ritz" or the "Criterion" or

the "Savoy," when--about three times a year--he celebrated his triumphs.

I see those years as a succession of banquets running indistinguishably

into each other. I see him buying more and more furniture and

superintending its disposal with excitement. He seems to me to have been

always buying things. I've forgotten most of them except the things he

bought for Viola--the jewellery that frightened her, the opera cloak that

made her hysterical, the furs that had to be sent back again (you'd have

thought he couldn't have gone wrong with furs, but he did), and the hats

that even Jimmy owned it was impossible to wear. I can see his face

saddened by these failures and a little puzzled, as if he couldn't

conceive how his star should have gone back on him like that. I can see

him, and I can see Viola, kneeling on the floor in his study and packing

some beastly thing up in paper, tenderly, as if it had been the corpse of

a beloved hope; and I can hear him saying (it was after the opera cloak

and the hysterics), "Walter, you can monkey with a woman's 'eart, and you

can ruin her immortal soul, but if you meddle with her clothes it's hell

for both of you. Don't you do it, my boy."

I remember scores of little things like that, things done and things said

with an incorruptible sweetness and affection, but things accentuated

with lapsed aitches and with gestures that only Jimmy was unaware of.

Those years are marked for me more than anything by the awful increase

in his solecisms. Their number, their enormity and frequency rose with

his income, and for the best of reasons. It was as if, his object being

gained, he could afford them. He was no longer on his guard. He had no

longer any need to be. The strain was over--he relaxed, and in relaxation

he fell back into his old habits.

All those years we seem to have been looking on at the slow, slow process

of his vulgarization. By nineteen-twelve the confraternity had begun to

regard Tasker Jevons as an outrageous joke. And in nineteen-thirteen,

when both his plays were still running, even his father-in-law said that

he was a disgusting spectacle. And Reggie (he was Major Thesiger now,

with a garrison appointment at Woolwich) Reggie kept as far away from him

as ever.

Sometimes I have thought that Viola's detachment helped his undoing. She

wasn't there to pull him up or to cover his disasters; she had more and

more the look of not being there at all.

And Charlie Thesiger was always there. There with a most decided look of

being up to something.

Jevons didn't seem to mind him. You might have said that Charlie was

another of the risks he took.

X

In nineteen-thirteen Jimmy bought a motor-car.

He was more excited about his motor-car than he had been about his

house--any of his houses. Even Viola was interested and came rushing down

from her Belfry when it arrived.

He bought it at the end of January. A good, useful car that would shut or

open and serve for town or country. But it was no good to them till

April.

For all February and March Viola was ill. She had been running down

gradually for about two years, getting a little whiter and a little

slenderer every month, and in the first week of February she got

influenza and ignored it, and went out for a drive in the motor-car with

a temperature of a hundred and four.

Nineteen-thirteen stands out for me as the year of Viola's illness.

It turned to pneumonia and she was dangerously ill for three weeks, in

fact, she nearly died of it; and for more weeks than I can remember she

lay about on sofas to which Jimmy and the nurse or one of us carried her

from her bed. And in all that time Jimmy nursed and waited on her and sat

up with her at night. If he slept it was with one eye and both ears open.

And I never saw anybody as gentle as he was and as skilful with his hands

and quiet. He didn't even breathe hard. And when she was convalescent and

a little fretful and troublesome there wasn't anybody else who could

manage her. The nurses would call him to feed her and give her her

medicine and lift her. She couldn't bear anybody else to touch her.

I remember one day when she had been moved from her bed to the couch for

the first time and she was so weak, poor darling, that she cried. I

remember her saying, "Jimmy, if you'll only put your hands on my forehead

and keep them there."

I think he must have sat for hours with his hands on her forehead.

I doubt if he was ever away from her for more than a few minutes except

when one of us came and dragged him out for a walk in the Park against

his will. It was always for a walk in the Park--the same walk, through

Stanhope Gate to the end of the Serpentine and back again, so that he

could time it to a minute. He wouldn't look at his motor-car. I think he

hated it. Anyhow, I know he lent it to us until she was well enough to go

out in it again.

She wasn't well enough till April. She never would have been well enough,

she never would have been with us at all, the doctors and the nurses

said, if it hadn't been for Jimmy. He swore that they were fools when

they gave her up and said she couldn't live. He said he'd _make_ her

live. And I believe he made her.

He gave her till April to get well in; and when April came she did get

well. And he took her away to the South of France, and to Switzerland

when the months grew warmer (the doctor told him it was a risk, but he

said he'd take it); he took her in the motor-car, and he brought her back

in June, still slender but recovered.

That illness of hers saved them for the time. It reinstated him. It

improved him. He couldn't, you see, be devoted and vulgar at the same

time. All lighter agitations and excitements might be dangerous to

Jevons, but passion and great grief and grave anxiety ennobled him. He

came back from Switzerland chastened and purified of all offence. Even

Reggie couldn't have found a flaw in him.

That had always been Jevons's way. Just when you had made up your mind

that you couldn't bear him he would go and do something so beautiful that

it made your heart ache. From the very fact that he was intolerable

to-day you might be sure he'd be adorable to-morrow.

And when we saw him the night he brought Viola home, moving quietly about

the house, giving orders in that gentle voice that he had in reserve, we

thought, Really, it will be all right now. Viola's passion for him had

been near death so many times, and each time he had saved it.

We hadn't allowed for the reaction--he was bound to feel it after three

months' unnatural repression; we hadn't allowed for the reaction that

Viola was bound to feel after three years' unnatural detachment; we

hadn't allowed for the state of her nerves after her illness; there were

all sorts of things we hadn't allowed for, and they all came at once;

they burst out from under their covers one evening in June when Norah and

I were dining in Green Street.

It was one of Jimmy's gestures that began it. Viola had never been able

to control his gestures; she had never been able to get used to them; and

there were two in particular that made her wince still as she had winced

in the beginning. She had contracted the habit of wincing in response to

them. Whenever Jimmy jerked his thumb over his shoulder you saw her

blink; and whenever he cracked his knuckles she shrank back. The blink

followed the jerk, and the shrinking followed the cracking as the flash

follows the snap of the trigger.

I have never known Jimmy jerk as he jerked that evening. When Norah had

no salad, when my glass was empty, when Viola wanted more potatoes, when

he wanted more potatoes himself, Jimmy jerked his thumb. The butler

seemed to have made it a point of honour to acknowledge no other signal.

And every time it happened I noticed the increasing violence of Viola's

reaction. What had once been a gentle flicker of the eyelashes was now a

succession of spasms that left her eyebrows twisted.

And at the fifth jerk she covered her eyes with her hands and cried out,

"Jimmy, if you do that _once_ more I shall scream."

Poor Jimmy asked innocently, "What did I do?"

"You jerked your thumb. You jerked it five times, and I simply cannot

bear it."

"All right--_all_ right," said Jimmy. "I needn't jerk it again. It's

quite easy not to."

"I was afraid it wasn't," she sighed.

I was thinking, "Whatever will she do if he cracks his knuckles?" and

that very minute he cracked them. The butler, demoralized by Jimmy's

methods, had gone out of the room just when he was wanted. That annoyed

Jimmy. I have never known him produce such a detonation.

Viola started as if he had hit her. But she said nothing this time.

Jimmy didn't see her. He was looking over his shoulder to see whether the

butler was or was not answering his summons. And then--I think that at

one period of his life he must have been a little proud of his

accomplishment--he did it again. He did it _crescendo, fortissimo,

prestissimo, strabato and con molto expressione_; he played on his

knuckles with a virtuosity of which I have never seen the like.

The sheer technique of the performance ought to have disarmed her. (It

enchanted Norah. But then Norah hadn't had an illness.) She flung a wild

look round the room as if she called on treacherous heavenly powers to

save her, then rose and very slowly, in silence and a matchless dignity,

she walked out, past me, past Jimmy, past the returning butler, and down

the passage and into the Tudor hall.

"Well--I _am_ blowed," said Jevons.

Norah put her hand on his arm.

"You were wonderful, Jimmy dear," she said. "I could have listened to you

for ever. So could Walter. But then, we haven't any nerves."

"After all," said Jimmy, "what _did_ I do?"

I said, "You made a most infernal noise, old chap, you know."

"I say! _Come_--"

We had heard the andirons go down with a clatter.

That was how we knew she was in the Tudor hall.

He found her there when he trotted out and took her some wine and a

peach. He came back almost instantly.

"It's all right," he said. "She's eating it."

But it was very far from all right.

All the prisoned storms and the secret agonies of years were loose that

night, and they had their way with her.

We found her dreadfully calm when we got back to her. She had peeled her

peach and eaten it, and she had drunk her wine, and she was sitting by

the great hearth where she had kicked down the andirons; she was sitting,

I remember, on one of the Tudor chairs with the carved backs and the

tapestry--the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground--sitting very

upright, in her beautiful trailing gown that curled round her feet; and

she was a little flushed (but that may have been the wine).

Jimmy went and stood next her in front of his hearth, with his hands in

his trouser pockets--I mean with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets,

where he seemed to have put them to keep them out of mischief; and he

twinkled as if he were still thinking of the andirons. And every now and

then he glanced at his wife sideways out of his brilliant sapphire eyes,

without moving his head a hair's-breadth.

And none of us said anything.

Then Jimmy rang for coffee, and that started her.

She said, "Are you going to do any work to-night?"

"No," said Jimmy, "I don't think so. Why?"

"Because, if you don't want your study I'll sit in it."

"All right." He said it vaguely. But he must have suspected something was

up, for he turned his head round and looked at her straight; and again he

said, "Why?"

"Because," she said, "it's the only tolerable room in the house."

He flushed faintly at this. "You mean," he said, "it's the only one I

didn't bother about?"

"I _said_ it was the only tolerable one."

"I see." His flush went deep, and his mouth closed over his teeth.

There was no doubt he saw.

She had hurt him badly. It was quite a minute before he spoke again,

and when he did speak you felt that he had yielded, in spite of

himself, to an overpowering curiosity. He must--he seemed to be saying to

himself--sift this mystery to the bottom.

"D'you mean," he said, "that _this_ room doesn't--er--appeal to you?

What's wrong with it?"

"There's nothing wrong with it," she said, "if you like it."

"Never mind whether I like it or not. It's detestable. _And_ the

drawing-room?"

She did not answer. I think she was ashamed of herself.

"Even more so, I suppose. And--your boudoir?"

(I've forgotten the boudoir. She hardly ever let any of us go into it. It

was pretty awful.)

"I do wish," she said, "you'd leave me alone. What _does_ it matter?"

"Your boudoir," he went on, as if she hadn't said anything, "is, if

possible, more detestable than the drawing-room."

"I never said so."

"Precisely. That's my grievance. Why, in Heaven's name, didn't you say

so? Why did you tell me that you _liked_ all these abominations?"

"Because they didn't matter."

"Why lie about them if they didn't matter?"

"I mean they didn't matter to me. They don't."

"My dear child, what on earth do you suppose they matter to me? What made

you think they mattered?"

"The way you went on about them."

"Oh--the way I go on--Well, if _that_ matters--"

She rose. I think she had heard the tinkle of the coffee-cups in the

corridor and wanted to put an end to what in any hands but Jimmy's would

have been an unseemly altercation.

"Will it matter if we go upstairs?"

"No. Not a bit." He snapped and twinkled at the same time.

She went, and Norah followed her.

Jevons settled himself in an armchair. I saw how unperturbed and

deliberate he was as he took his coffee from the tray, and with what an

incorrigible air he jerked his thumb towards the staircase. I can still

hear him call up the staircase in a magisterial voice, "The ladies are

in the study, Parker." When we were alone he fell into meditation.

It was apparently as the result of meditation that he said, "I suppose it

is a bit crude, if you come to think of it. Only why couldn't she say so

at the time?"

I said I supposed she was afraid of hurting his feelings.

"My feelings? How could I have any feelings about a blanketty

drawing-room suite? Does she really think I'm such a fool that I can't

live without lions on my staircase? I stuck the beastly things there

because I thought she'd like 'em. If I thought she'd like a tame

rhinoceros in her boudoir I'd have got her one, if I'd 'ad to go out and

catch 'im and train 'im myself. If I thought _now_ that the only way to

preserve her affection was to wear that suit of armour every night at

dinner I'd wear it and glory in wearing it. There isn't any damned silly

thing I wouldn't do and glory in."

And then--"Her nerves must be in an awful state."

He meditated again.

"Tell you what--I'll get rid of this place. I'll let it go furnished for

what it'll fetch. I'll only keep the things we had before--the things she

liked. They _are_ prettier."

He looked round him with his disenchanted eyes.

"I can see it's all wrong, this sort of thing. It's in bad taste. Rotten

bad taste. I suppose I must have been a bit excited about it at the

time--I must have thought it was all right or I couldn't have stood it.

"It's a phase I've gone through.

"I can understand perfectly well how she feels about it.

"Fact is, I hate the place myself--the whole beastly house I hate. I've

hated it ever since she was ill in it. I can't get away from her illness.

I shall always see her ill. She'll be ill again if we go on living in it.

"I'm tired of the whole business--I'll let it to-morrow and take a house

in the country.

"You might go upstairs, old man, and see what she's doing."

I went upstairs.

She was sitting in one corner of the study with a book in her hand

pretending to read. Norah was sitting in another corner with a book in

her hand, pretending to read. I gathered that Norah had been talking to

her sister. I took up a book and pretended to read too.

Presently, when she thought we were absorbed, Viola got up and left us.

Norah waited till the door had closed on her. Then she spoke.

"Wally--it's more awful than we've ever imagined. I don't think she'll be

able to stand it much longer."

"Well," I said, "she won't have to stand it much longer. He's going to

chuck the place. It's got on _his_ nerves, too. He understands exactly

how she feels about it."

"Let's hope he doesn't understand how she feels about--It isn't the

place, Wally."

"What is it, then?"

"I'm most awfully afraid it's Jimmy."

"Jimmy? You don't mean she doesn't care about him?"

"Oh, no, she cares about him, and it's because she cares so that she

can't stand him."

"Well," I said, "whether she cares or not, it's rough on Jimmy."

"It's rough on her. It's rough on both of them. It's getting rougher and

rougher, and it's wearing her out."

"Won't it wear him out too?"

"N-no. Nothing will wear Jimmy out. He's indestructible. He'll wear her

out."

"He says he's going to take a house in the country. How do you think

that'll answer?"

She shook her head.

"I don't know, Walter. I don't really know. It sounds risky."

"The whole thing," I said, "was risky from the start."

"There are two things," she said, "that would save them--if Reggie were

to come round. Or if Jimmy were to have an illness; and neither of them

is in the least likely to happen."

"There's a third thing," I said--"if Viola were to have a baby."

"That isn't likely either. He'd never let her. He says it would kill her.

It's pitiful, it's pitiful. Can't you see," she said, "that he adores

her?"

I said I didn't see what we were there for, and that it was time for us

to go.

As I followed her down the stairs that led to the Tudor hall she paused

suddenly on the landing where a second lion marked the turn. She had her

finger to her lip. We drew back. But not before I had looked down over

the balustrade into the hall and seen Jimmy sitting on one of the thrones

with the lilies of France, and Viola crouching beside him on the rug with

her head hidden on his knee.

He had his hands on her forehead and was saying, "It's all right. Do you

suppose I don't understand?"

XI

It was late in August before Jevons found a country house large enough,

yet not too large, and old enough, yet not too old--he would have nothing

that even remotely suggested the Tudor period. And in the intervals of

looking for his house he wrote another novel and two more plays. There

was a decided falling-off in all of them, and I think Jevons himself was

a little nervous. He said he'd have to be careful next time or they'd

find him out. Once he had settled the affair of the house he would set to

work and strengthen the position which, after all, he hadn't lost.

He had gained, if anything. Nineteen-thirteen stands as his year of

maximum prosperity. Even the house in Mayfair justified itself when he

let it, with all its principal rooms furnished, to an American railway

magnate at a rent that enabled him to indulge the passion he had

conceived for Amershott Old Grange.

He used to say he would never have been happy again if he couldn't have

had Amershott Old Grange. Everything about it seemed propitious. They had

found it by a happy accident when they weren't looking for it, weren't

thinking of it, when they were trying to get out of Sussex and back to

London after a long day's motoring in search of houses. Nothing that

Essex or Kent or Buckinghamshire (Hertfordshire was ruled out by the

presence in it of the Registrar) or Surrey or Hampshire or Sussex, so

far, could do had satisfied them, and Jevons was beginning to talk rather

wildly about Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and Wilts, and even Devon

and Cornwall, when they lost their way in the cross-country roads between

Midhurst and Petworth and so came upon Amershott Old Grange. It was

hidden behind an old rose-red brick wall in a lane, and it was only by

standing up in the motorcar that they caught sight of its long line of

red-tiled dormer windows. The very notice-board was hidden, staggering

back in an ivy bush that topped the wall.

"I won't have a house," said Jimmy, "that's a day older than Queen Anne."

No more would Viola.

And the Old Grange was not a day older than Queen Anne or a day younger.

It was the most perfect specimen of a Queen Anne house you could have

wished to see--the long, straight front, the slender door, the two

storeys with their rows of straight, flat windows and the steep brows of

the dormers over them. It was all rose-red brick and rose-red tiles, with

roses and clematis bursting out in crimson and purple all over the front.

It stood at right angles to the wall and to the lane, and there was a

long grass-garden in front of it, with walls all round and herbaceous

borders under the walls; and from the high postern door in the outer wall

opening to the lane a wide flagged path went all the way in front of the

house to the door in the inner wall that led into the kitchen garden and

the orchard. Further down the lane were the doors of the courtyard at the

back of the house where the outhouses and the stables and the dovecot

were; and beyond the courtyard there was a paddock, and you would have

thought that was enough. But, besides his Queen Anne house and his

gardens and his orchard and his courtyard and his dovecot and his

paddock, Jimmy had acquired ten acres of moorland, to say nothing of a

belt of pinewood that ran the whole length of his estate behind the

kitchen garden and the paddock and the moor. And the whole business of

acquiring this property went without a hitch. He took it on the long

tail-end of a lease from an impecunious landlord who couldn't afford to

keep it up.

He obtained possession by September and in the early spring of

nineteen-fourteen he was settled in Amershott Old Grange.

They furnished it as they had furnished the house in Edwardes Square,

with the most complete return to beautiful simplicity.

Jimmy polished off a short novel and a play between October and June, and

kept himself going on the proceeds of his old novels, his old plays, and

his old short stories collected in a volume. Then I think he must have

sat down to wait events.

For when we went down to stay with them we found him waiting. He was

entirely prepared for certain contingencies. If anybody knew anything

about English social conditions it was Tasker Jevons. He had calculated

all the chances and provided for the ostracism that attends the inexpert

invader of the country-side. He was aware that there were powers in and

around Amershott that were not to be conciliated. The very fact that

their territory lay so near the frontier (Amershott is only sixty-seven

miles from London) kept them on their guard. To any good old county

family, Tasker Jevons's celebrity was nothing, if it was not an added

offence, and his opulence was less than nothing. In settling among them

he ran the risk of being ignored. But when it came to ignoring, Jimmy

considered that success lay with the party who got in first. So before he

settled he took care to diffuse a sort of impression that the Tasker

Jevonses were never at home to anybody, that it was not to be expected

that a great novelist and playwright would have time for calling and

being called on, even if he had the absurd inclination. He had one

solitary introduction in the neighbourhood, and he worked it very

adroitly, not to obtain other introductions, but to spread the rumour of

retirement and exclusiveness.

His arrival, preceded by this attractive legend, became an event. You

couldn't even affect to overlook it. And if it was not possible for Jimmy

to subdue his features to an expression of complete ignoring, he had got

in so promptly with his attitude that it took the wind out of the sails

of any people who were merely proposing to ignore.

Then, having come amongst them as a shy recluse, Jimmy began instantly to

focus attention on himself. He hadn't been six weeks in the county before

he had become the most conspicuous object in it.

I don't know how he did it; you never really caught him at it; and yet,

when you came down to stay with him, you felt all the time that he was

doing it; you felt a sort of shame (a shame that he couldn't feel) in

seeing that he did it so perpetually and so well. He had a way of making

his privacy a public thing. There was something positively indecent in

his detachment; it advertised him as no possible immersion could have

done. I've seen him lying out on his moor basking all by himself in the

sun; I've seen him meditating all by himself in his pinewood; I've seen

him sitting in his walled garden, with the apparatus of his business all

about him, when you would have said that if ever a man's life was hidden

and withdrawn it was Tasker Jevons's. And yet it wasn't. You knew it

wasn't; and he knew that you knew. He knew that his gardener and his

chauffeur and his butler and his cook and his housemaid and his

parlourmaid knew that he was sitting in his garden writing, or meditating

in his pinewood or basking on his moor in the sun, and that their

knowledge penetrated to every house in the village, to every house in the

county within a radius of twenty miles. And when he was not doing any of

these prominently tranquil things he was tearing about the country in his

motor-car.

I have never seen anything like Jevons's motoring. It was in this new

aspect of his that he was, I think, most remarkable. I say he made his

privacy a public thing; but in the furious publicity of his motoring it

was the other way round. He turned the public roads into a private track

through paradise. I do not mean that he was a road-hog; far from it. He

had the most exquisite manners of the road, He would slow down for a hen

in the distance and upset himself into the ditch to avoid a rabbit. I

have known him (with his first car) give a lift to any filthy tramp

between Midhurst and Portsmouth. I mean that the act of motoring

transported him; and he did these things instinctively, mechanically,

without interruption to his rapture. Speed and the wind of speed, the air

rushing by like a water-race as he ripped through it, the streaming past

him of trees and hedges, the humming and throbbing of his engines, were

ecstasy to Jimmy. He had learned to drive the thing, and his sense of

power over it gave him the physical exaltation that he craved for. I

believe that when he sat in his motor-car, driving it, he was filled,

intoxicated, with the pride and splendour of life. He had power over

everybody and everything that lay in his track, except other motor-cars;

and he exulted in his knowledge that he could annihilate them and didn't.

He enjoyed (voluptuously) his own mercy that spared them. Through his

motor-car he attained such an extension of his personality that he became

intolerable to other people and unrecognizable to himself.

And yet I do not think that even at the height of his ecstasy he ever

really forgot that he was Tasker Jevons, the great novelist and

playwright, in his motor-car. When he drove you through Portsmouth or

Chichester, or even through little Midhurst, you felt that he thrilled

from head to foot with self-consciousness. He knew and had acute pleasure

in knowing that people noticed him as he went by; that the tradesmen

turned out of their shops to stare after him; and that everybody said,

"See that chap? That's Tasker Jevons. He always drives his own car."

He owned that he enjoyed it. I remember the first time we went down to

stay with them (it was in May of nineteen-fourteen), when he was driving

us through Midhurst from the station, how he said to us, "I'm glad I

thought of living in the country. It makes me feel celebrated."

We asked him if he hadn't ever felt it before; and he answered solemnly,

"Never for a minute. Never, I mean, like I do down here. In London, if

you do gather a crowd round you, you're swallowed up in it. Besides, you

can't always gather a crowd. D'you suppose, if I were to drive down

Piccadilly in this car--short of standing on my head--I could attract the

attention I've attracted to-day? You saw those fellows come out and look

at me? Well--they do that pretty nearly every time, Furnival.

"No. London's no good. Too many houses--too many people--too many

motor-cars. You can't stand out. What a man wants to set him off is

landscape, Furny, landscape. You should see me on the goose-green at

Amershott towards post-time."

Well, I did see him on the goose-green towards post-time, and I saw what

he meant. It was really as if I'd never seen him before properly.

Heavens, how he stood out! It was as if a stage had been cleared for him,

and for the figure he cut. He was quite right. You couldn't have done it

in Piccadilly, or even in the suburbs. And he wasn't in his motor-car,

mind you, then; he was simply strolling over from his house to post a

letter in the village on the green, and I do not know how he contrived to

infuse into so simple an act that subtle taint of advertisement. There

was no necessity for him to post his own letters, he could easily have

sent a servant. But I do believe he couldn't bear to miss the opportunity

of being seen. When he passed the Vicarage, the Vicar and his wife and

daughters were generally in their garden, and they turned to look at his

passing, and he was exquisitely conscious of them. The villagers came out

on to their doorsteps to look at him, and he was conscious of the

villagers. The geese followed him in a long line across the common and

stretched out their necks after him, and he was conscious of the geese.

He enjoyed the publicity they gave him, and he said so.

And I began to wonder whether the funny frankness that had so disarmed us

was really as funny as it looked (the idea of disarmament, you see, was

serious), whether he didn't say these things because he knew we saw him

as he really was; because he saw himself as he really was, and couldn't

bear it; because there was no escape for him unless he could make believe

that he was in fun when he really wasn't.

I do believe there was a time (any time before his Tudor period) when he

_was_ in fun, pure fun; and even through the Tudor period his enjoyment

of himself was innocent. But as I walked home with him across his moor

that evening it was borne in upon me that Jimmy's innocence was gone.

Living in the country had killed it. I had never perceived so definite a

taint of vulgarity in him before.

You would have thought it would have been all the other way, that living

in the country would have made altogether for simplicity and purity. I

believe that quite honestly he had thought it would, that he had come

into the country to be purified and simplified, and to put himself right

with Viola for ever. And the horrid irony of it was that the country

didn't do any of these things to him; it complicated him, it saturated

him with that taint I've mentioned, and instead of putting him right it

showed him up. Quite horribly and cruelly it showed him up. I do not

think there was a single weakness or a single secret meanness that he had

that didn't suddenly rise up and stand out on the background of

Amershott.

All through that summer there, quite frankly, I detested Jevons. I

believe that Norah came near detesting him, that she felt something very

like contempt for him.

And if Norah felt it you may imagine what Viola would feel.

She was with us one evening (it was June, I think, and our second visit),

when Jimmy showed most unmistakably the cloven hoof. We had come in from

a long motor drive, and he had made at once, as he always did, for the

silver plate in the hall where cards left by callers were put, if any

callers came. I can see him now, breathing hard. I can see the glance he

cast at the cards, and the little jerky curb he put on his excitement--he

had the grace to be ashamed of it. And then I see him holding four cards

in his hand, sober and quiet and flushed like a man who has triumphed

solemnly. And I hear him read out the names: "Lord Amerley, Lady Amerley,

Lady Octavia Amerley, the Honourable Frances Amerley. _That's_ all right.

I gave them three months."

And I see Viola look at him, taking in his figure in its motor-dress, and

his face, with the foolish, weak elation he couldn't for the life of him

keep out of it.

Again I see him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity--and I

don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there--very

spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party

they took us to.

And later on--in the very beginning of July it must have been--I see him

on his own lawn at his own garden-party, and--I didn't dream it this

time--he was really dreadful. Instead of carrying it off with the levity

that had so often saved him from perdition, there was that revolting

triumph about him and an uneasy eagerness, as if he knew that his triumph

wasn't quite complete. But the garden-party was, as he would have said,

all right. They were all there, those people he had given three months

to. He had pulled it off precisely as he had schemed and calculated.

Those legends of his detachment and his hermit habits had been worked so

as to excite a supreme curiosity--and it was being satisfied.

And I cannot tell you whether he was really altered, or whether he had

been like that all the time before Amershott had shown him up, and none

of us had seen it except Viola.

Oh no--it's impossible. He had altered. If he had been like this we must

have seen it. What Viola had seen--if she had seen anything--was only the

foreshadowing, the bare possibility of this.

Charlie Thesiger was at that garden-party (he had retired from the

service with the rank of Captain).

And it was at the garden-party that I first noticed a change in his

manner to his cousin's husband. He used to treat Jevons with a certain

superciliousness, and with as much amusement, as much perception of his

absurdity, as was possible for Charlie, who perceived so few things. Now

I was struck with the correct young man's deference to his host. It was

really as if it had at last dawned on Charlie that Jevons _was_ his host,

and that he had other claims to distinction as well. The more dreadful

Jimmy was, the more courteous Charlie showed himself to Jimmy. And this

in spite of the fact that Jevons had a way of treating Charlie as if he

didn't matter, as if for all recognizable purposes he wasn't there.

When I spoke of this to Norah, she said that Viola had told him that if

he couldn't be decent to Jimmy she wouldn't have him there.

Well, there he was, hanging about Viola from morning till night; he had

any amount of time on his hands now, and he spent most of it at

Amershott. He was there when we weren't sometimes, so that we couldn't

keep track of him. But his purposes ought to have been apparent to us. I

think it was partly because he was aware of them himself that he went out

of his way to be decent to Jimmy, almost as if he were sorry for him

beforehand.

For it was evident enough that Viola liked his being there, and liked to

have him hanging round her. There was nothing about him that shocked or

grated. I've no doubt he made himself entirely charming. His manners

could be as beautiful as any of the Thesigers' when he chose, and they

soothed her. I think she had ceased to feel them as a reproach to Jimmy.

She had given up _his_ manners, poor dear, long ago, as a bad job. It was

as if she had slaked her thirst for the unusual. Some secret and strong

revulsion had thrown her back on the people and the things that she had

been brought up amongst and that she had run away from. When Jimmy jarred

on her she turned to Charlie for relief. And, after all, as Norah said,

he was her cousin.

I don't think we either of us saw anything more in it than that. Without

some such reaction she must have surrendered to Amershott. She couldn't

defend Jevons against that showing up. She couldn't defend herself

against those revelations, she could only stand by and look on at his

enormity and shudder. Unless she had put her dear eyes out she must have

seen that in the country he was not only a bounder but a snob. And she

must have writhed in feeling that to see him that way was to be a bit of

a snob herself. She had accused herself of snobbishness long ago, before

she married him, when, in order to marry him, she had burned her boats.

What could she do? She couldn't put her eyes out. But I believe she would

have been grateful to anybody who would have put them out for her.

I can't tell whether she was always unhappy. I rather think she had liked

Amershott, the house and the garden and the pinewood and the bit of moor,

and I am certain that she liked motoring almost as much as Jimmy did at

first. She could even take pleasure in Jimmy's power over the car when

they were alone with it in the open country, when his pleasure had no

taint in it. I've heard her say, when he wanted to run down to Chichester

or Portsmouth, "Oh, for Heaven's sake, let's go somewhere where nobody

can look at us!"

She must have regarded the open country as the last refuge of his

innocence. For her, more than for any of us, he had lost it.

* * * * *

How far he really lost it we shall never know. Even now, with all my

lights, with that intense country light fairly beating on him, I can

wonder: Am I saying these things because I think them? Or because I

believe I must have thought them then? And I cannot answer my own wonder.

I remember how at Amershott, when I sat beside him in that car of his and

watched his ecstasy, I used to pull myself up and say to myself, "You

_know_ he isn't like that. Look at him--what woolly lamb could be more

simple and innocent than he is now?" And if anybody had come to me and

asked me if I didn't think that Jevons _was_ a little awful I should have

said that if you were a little awful yourself you might think so, but not

otherwise. My conscience has told me that as he became more successful I

became more critical; it has even suggested that I may have been jealous

of his success.

* * * * *

But that was in the days (they were comparatively innocent) of his first

motor-car. Round that car there really is a light of romance and of

adventure, a glamour that isn't at all the glamour of his opulence. In

those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of

pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income. In June, at

any rate, he was still the master of his car and not--as we saw him later

on--its servant. There never was anything like that first fury of his

motoring.

It couldn't last. He was wearing himself out. Those early excesses

exhausted his capacity for pleasure, and when we came to stay with him in

the last two weeks of July we found him apathetic about motoring.

But not about motor-cars. As far as the cars went he had developed into

an incurable motor-maniac. He was never tired of talking about

carburetters, and tyres, and petrol, and garages and gear. He dreamed of

these things at night. Every day he invented some extraordinary

contrivance for increasing speed and lessening friction. He knew all that

was to be known about the different kinds of cars; and he would roll

their names on his tongue--Panhard and Fiat and Daimler and Mercédès and

Rolls-Royce, as if the sound of them caressed him like music.

And the first car which he had mastered--it was a comparatively cheap

one, but it wouldn't be fair to say what kind it was, for the poor thing

had gone to pieces under his hand in six months; he had served her, his

chauffeur said, something cruel--that first car had been sold for a

hundred and fifty pounds, and Viola was mourning for it when we came down

in July.

We couldn't think why she mourned, for he had bought another. We supposed

that the new car had broken down, for we were met at Midhurst station by

the local cab proprietor. But we were very soon to know that nothing

had happened to the new car, and that something very serious indeed had

happened to Jimmy.

He had gone mad--you can only call it mad--over his new car.

As soon as we had tea we were taken to see it where it stood in the

coach-house that served as a garage.

It was a magpie car--the first, Jimmy told me, that had appeared down in

that part of the country--white, with black bonnet and black

splashboards, and black leather hood and cushions; so black that its

body, in the matchless purity of its whiteness, staggered you. Anybody,

Jevons said, could have an all-white car, and it wouldn't be noticed any

more than a common taxi-cab. But one magpie in a countless crowd of cars

annihilated all the rest. Lemon colour was good and so was scarlet; but

for effect--for sheer destruction to other automobilists--there was

nothing like a white car with black points. It was, Jimmy said and

Kendal, the chauffeur, said, a perfect car. From their tone you wondered

what you had ever done that you should be allowed to approach and see it

where it stood.

Where it stood, I say. You couldn't see that car doing anything else. It

stood like an immense idol in a temple; and it looked as if all its life

it never had done anything else but stand in its perfection to be stared

at. And by its air of self-consciousness, of majesty, of arrogant power

in repose, you gathered that it knew it was there to be stared at. The

thing was drawn up at the far end of the garage, where no breath could

blow on it, over an open pit. You knew that Kendal, the chauffeur, went

down on a ladder into the pit to examine the secret being of the car; you

knew it and yet it was incredible. You refused to believe that an outrage

to which common cars were subject ever had been or would be perpetrated

on this holy one. You would have said that no spot of mud or dust or rain

had ever lighted on it; it might have descended into the garage out of

heaven for any sign of travel that it showed. It was surrounded by I

know not what atmosphere of consecration and immunity.

So that Norah's first question sounded like a profanity.

"What speed is it?" she said.

It might have been fancy, but I thought that Jevons's face underwent a

change. I certainly saw Kendal the chauffeur looking at it.

"Speed?" he said. "Speed? Well--you _can_ speed her up to sixty miles an

hour if you want to." (He seemed to say, "If she ever is speeded up," or

"You jolly well may want.")

He ran his hand lovingly along the car's white flank as if it were alive

and could respond to the caress.

"She's a beauty," he said.

The chauffeur looked at him again.

"You won't want to knock her about like you did the last one, Mr.

Jevons," he said.

And Jimmy's face expressed a sort of horror.

The chauffeur looked at us then, and, if you can wink without any motion

of the eyelids, he winked. He saw, and he was trying to indicate to us,

the state that Jevons had fallen into.

It was infatuation; it was idolatry; it was the most extraordinary

passion I have ever known a man otherwise sane to be possessed by. You

would have said that that creature with the black-and-white body and the

terrific bowels of machinery had some sinister and magic power over him.

He loved it; he worshipped it; he was afraid of it. And when you think of

how, as the chauffeur said, he had "served" the other car--

Knock her about, indeed! He daren't take her out of the garage for a

fifteen-mile run without agonies of apprehension. He never took her out

at all unless he was certain that it wouldn't rain and that there

wouldn't be any mud or any dust or any wind (I don't know what harm he

thought the wind would do her). Instead of taking her out he would spend

hours in the garage standing still and looking at her, stooping sometimes

to examine her for a spot or a crack on her enamel, but always with

reverence. I believe he never touched her without washing his hands

first.

We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn't been out in that car three

times, though the weather was perfect. Jimmy never could see that it was

perfect enough. If it hadn't rained for two days he was afraid of dust;

if it did rain he was afraid of mud; what he wanted was one light shower

to lay the dust; and when he got it he was afraid of another shower

coming. And on hot days he was afraid the sun might do something. And he

was afraid of _us_ all the time lest we should ask him to take the car

out on a day that wouldn't do.

I do not know how or why he had come to look on that car as his god. It

wasn't, I do believe that it wasn't, because the thing was valuable,

because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he

had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a

sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint

of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering

beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the

remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of

his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself:

"Motor-cars are perishable things. I did for my first beloved by my

excesses. Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from

motoring." And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune

out of Jimmy's abstinence.

The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. (He too had come

down for the last fortnight in July.) He was the only one of us who

didn't protest, didn't clamour, didn't try to reason or to laugh Jimmy

out of his insanity. And he went further. He refused to enter the car, to

be taken in it on the few suitable days when Jimmy allowed it to go out.

It was as if he were dominated by some scruple as morbid as his host's

passion. We couldn't account for it at the time, for he liked motoring

excessively, and he couldn't afford it.

I've wondered since whether this wasn't the way Charlie settled with

his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency. He could eat Jimmy's bread

and drink his wine and stay for weeks under his roof, since his

necessity--the necessity of seeing Viola--compelled him, but to profit by

him to that extent, to make use of Jimmy's opulence, was beyond him. His

conscience may have even said to him, "If he loves his motor-car, for

God's sake let him have _that_, at any rate, to himself."

And Viola seemed to share Charlie's scruple. She, too, shrank from using

the new car. And I remember her saying to me one day as we crossed the

courtyard and saw Jimmy, as usual, in the garage, worshipping his car,

"I'm so glad he's got it. I think it makes him happier." As if she had

confessed that it was all he _had_ got; that she was not able to make him

happy any more; and as if, in some day of unhappiness that she saw

coming, it would be a consolation to the poor chap. At any rate, as if

she were not in the least jealous of the power it had over him.

So, that July, Norah and I drove with Jimmy when the car, so to speak,

let him drive it; and Viola walked through the woods and over the downs

with Charlie Thesiger.

We often wondered what they found to talk about.

That wonder, of what Viola could see in Charlie, and how she could endure

for so many hours the burden of his society, was all that Norah had

allowed herself, so far, to express. If she felt any uneasiness she had

not yet confided it to me. As for Jevons, he tolerated him as you only

tolerate a thing that doesn't matter. I think honestly that to both of

them, Charlie, in any serious connection with Viola, was as impossible as

Jevons himself had been to her brother Reggie.

So little did he take him seriously that at the very end of July he went

up to London for the inside of the week (he went by train so as to save

the car) while Charlie was still at the Old Grange.

* * * * *

It was the week of the international crisis, and European mobilization

was occupying Jimmy's mind to the exclusion of other matters. Still, you

could hardly suppose that it was the crisis that was taking him up to

London. I remember thinking he had run away from Charlie Thesiger,

because he bored him.

He left on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, and he was to be back on Friday,

the thirty-first, and Charlie was to leave with Norah and me and our

nurse and Baby on the Monday following, when our fortnight was up.

So on Friday afternoon I was a little astonished to find my

sister-in-law, dressed in her town suit of white cloth, drinking tea at

three o'clock before going up to London. She simply stated the fact that

she was going up. Norah had said she might stay in our house and she

hoped I wouldn't mind.

When I suggested that it would surely be nicer for us all to go up

together on Monday she looked at me with a certain long-suffering

expression that she had for me at times, and said that wouldn't suit her,

since she had got to go to-day. She was of course awfully sorry to leave

us, but Norah understood, and Jimmy would look after us very well.

No. She wasn't going up by Midhurst. She was going by Selham.

She rose. I noticed the impatient energy of her little hands as they

knotted her veil under her chin. I looked up her trains and found that

there was none from Selham till four forty-five. I pointed out to her

that there was no hurry; she had missed the two fifty-five, which had

left Selham fifteen minutes ago, and she had an hour to spare even if the

car took half an hour getting to the station. (The day was fine and there

was no dust. Even Jimmy couldn't have objected to her taking the car.)

But she said she hadn't missed the two fifty-five; she wasn't trying for

it; and she wasn't going in the car; it would be wanted to meet Jimmy at

Midhurst Station; and no--no--_no_--she didn't want a cab from Midhurst.

She was going to walk.

I said it was absurd for her to walk four miles on a hot day like this,

and she replied that the day would be cool enough if only I'd keep quiet.

(She was still long-suffering.)

Then of course I said I'd walk with her.

But that was too much for her, and she stamped her foot and said I'd do

nothing of the kind. She didn't want anybody to walk with her.

And when I inquired about her luggage--But I can't repeat what she said

about her luggage!

Then she softened suddenly, as her way was, and kissed Norah, and said I

was a dear, and she was sorry for snapping my head off, but it was all

right. Norah knew all about it. She'd explain.

I can see her standing in the postern doorway and saying these things and

then giving me her hand and holding mine tight, while she shook her head

at me and smiled that little baffling smile that seemed to come up

flickering from her depths of wisdom on purpose to put me in the wrong.

"The trouble with you, Furny," she said, "is that you're much too good."

She went; and we saw her tall, lithe figure swinging up the lane, past

the courtyard and the paddock and the moor.

Then Norah plucked me in by the coat-sleeve as if she thought we oughtn't

to be looking at her. We shut the door on her flight and turned to each

other where we stood on the flagged path before the house.

"What does it mean?" I said.

"It means that she's at the end of her tether."

"The end--?" I think I must have gasped.

"The very end. She can't stand it any longer."

"But," I said, "she--she's got to stand it. After all--"

"There's no good talking that way. She _can't_, and that settles it. I

knew she couldn't, once she got beyond a certain point."

"Do you mean to say," I said, "that she's going to leave him?"

"I--don't--know. I believe--she's going to think about it."

"But--it's out of the question. She mustn't think about it."

"You can't stop her thinking, Wally. She's gone away to think about it

sanely. It's the best thing she can do."

"And you're helping her to get away?"

She was silent for a moment.

"I'm only helping her to think," she said.

I was stern with her. "You're not. You're just helping her to bolt," I

said. "You're conniving at her bolting. You've lent her our house."

"Isn't it better she should come to us?"

"No, it isn't better. I don't like it. And I won't have it. I won't have

you mixed up in it. Do you understand?"

"Dear Wally--there isn't anything to be mixed up in. We'll be back on

Monday; then she'll only be staying with us."

"And till then--?"

"Till then--for Heaven's sake let the poor thing have peace for three

days to think in."

"That's all very well," I said, "but what are we to say to Jimmy when he

comes back this afternoon?"

"You say--you say she's tired of--of Amershott and wants three days in

London to herself.--No, you don't. You don't say anything. You leave it

to me. Vee-Vee said it was to be left to me."

"And _I_ say I won't have you dragged into it. Good Heavens, have you any

idea what you may be let in for, supposing--?"

"Supposing what?"

I couldn't say what. But I don't think I really had supposed

anything--then.

"You needn't suppose things," she said. "Vee-Vee would never let us in.

Look here, Wally--you've got to trust me this time. I'm going to see

Vee-Vee through, and I'm going to see Jimmy through; but I can't do it if

you don't trust me. I can't do it if you interfere."

I said I did trust her, and that God knew I didn't want to interfere, but

was she quite sure she was doing a wise thing?

She said, "Quite sure. Let's go and lie down in the pine-wood till

tea-time. I wonder if Jimmy would mind us going into Midhurst with the

car. We shouldn't hurt it, sitting in it."

We lay out in the pine-wood till we heard the bell for tea, which we

had ordered a little before four, in case Jevons should wire for the

car to meet him by the early afternoon train that got to Midhurst at

four-sixteen.

The table was set as usual in the garden on the lawn in front of the

house.

By four o'clock no wire had come from Jevons; so we knew we needn't

expect him till a later train. He nearly always came by Waterloo and

Petersfield and was met at Midhurst, which gave him his public. But he

might come, as Viola had gone, by Victoria and Horsham and be met

at Selham.

I remember saying, in a startling manner as the idea struck me,

"Supposing he comes by Victoria?"

And Norah said, "What if he does?"

And I, "They might meet at Horsham."

"Why shouldn't they?" she said. "You don't suppose he'll eat her for

running up to town?"

"He might," I said, "think it odd of her."

"Not he. The beauty of Jimmy is that odd things don't seem odd to him. Do

you know where Charlie is?"

I didn't. We had finished tea before either of us had thought of him. We

shouted to him through the open windows of the house, for Charlie had a

habit of mooning about indoors till Viola was ready to walk with him.

No answer came to our summons, but it brought Parker, the butler, out on

to the lawn. He had a slightly surprised and slightly embarrassed look on

his respectable and respectful face, no longer demoralized by Jimmy.

"Were you looking for the Captain, sir?" he said.

I said we were.

Something grave and a little sorrowful came into Parker's embarrassed

look.

"Didn't you know he'd gone, sir?"

I said I didn't even know he was going; and then I saw Norah looking at

me.

Parker was trying not to look at Norah. He began gathering up the

tea-things as if to justify his presence and explain it.

"When did he go?" I said as casually as I could.

"Well, sir--the cab was ordered to catch the four thirty-five from

Midhurst."

Now the four thirty-five from Midhurst is the four forty-five from

Selham, the train that Viola had gone by. We knew this; and Parker knew

that we knew it. That was why, instead of stating outright that Captain

Thesiger had gone by that train, he tried to soften the blow to us by

saying that the cab had been ordered to catch it, and leaving it open to

us to suppose that perhaps, after all, it might have missed it.

"Did he say when he was coming back?" I asked, again casually.

"He isn't coming back, sir," said Parker. "He's took his luggage with him

and all."

"Of course," said Norah. "He's gone to see what they're doing at the War

Office. He said he would."

But I knew and she knew and Parker knew he hadn't--or, if he had, it was

only one of the things he had gone for. Because, if the War Office had

been all that he had in his mind he would have told us, and Viola would

have told us, and they would have gone openly together, instead of

dodging about like two clumsy criminals, one at Midhurst and the other at

Selham.

When Parker had left (he did it very quickly) Norah got on her feet.

She said, "Go and find Kendal and tell him to bring the car around at

once."

I asked her what she was going to do?

"Do?" she flashed at me. She had changed all in a moment into a woman

whom I did not know.

"I'm going to fetch her back," she said. She had wriggled into her coat.

"We'll overtake her before she gets to Selham, if you're quick."

I looked at my watch. It was barely half-past four. Yes, if we were

quick, if we started at once, if we let the new car rip we should

overtake her on the road, or at the station before she could get into

that train with Charlie Thesiger in it. I meant, and Norah's eyes meant,

that we would stop her going with him, if we had to drag her from the

platform.

We ran to the garage to find Kendal. The new car, the superb black and

white creature, stood in the middle of the courtyard, ready to start when

Jimmy's wire came. So far it was all right.

But we had reckoned without Kendal, the chauffeur.

Kendal, absolved from the four-sixteen train at Midhurst, was at his tea

in the servants' hall, and at my summons he came out slowly, munching as

he came. He was visibly outraged at our intrusion on his sacred leisure.

And when he was ordered to start at once for Selham, he refused. There

was no train from Victoria, he said, between the four-four that Mr.

Jevons hadn't come by and the five fifty-two. _If_, Kendal said, he did

come by Victoria, and he always came by Waterloo.

What was the sense, said Kendal, with his mouth full, of going to Selham

when we hadn't got a wire?

The sense of it, Norah told him, was that we had a message--an important

message--for Mrs. Jevons, which she _must_ get before she started.

At this Kendal left off munching and looked at my wife. Even in my

eagerness I was struck by the singular intelligence of that look. There

was nothing covert in it. On the contrary it was a most straightforward

and transparent look. Kendal's knowledge--which might have sought cover

if you had hunted it--had come out to meet ours on equal terms.

It only lasted for the fraction of a second. Kendal repeated firmly, but

this time respectfully, that she was Mr. Jevons's car and he couldn't

take her out without Mr. Jevons's orders, for if he did Mr. Jevons would

give him the sack.

To which Norah replied that Mr. Jevons would give him the sack if he

didn't, or if he made us miss that train by arguing. I told him sternly

to look sharp. He looked it and we got off. I had begun to crank up the

car myself while I spoke.

But he had wasted three minutes of our valuable fifteen. Though on the

open road we speeded up the car to her sixty miles an hour, we had to

slow down in the narrow lanes. Once we were held up by a country cart,

and once by cows in our track, and Norah was beside herself at each halt.

As we careened into the station yard I thought that my wife would have

hurled herself out of the car.

The station-master stood by the booking-office door. He had an ominous

air of leisure. And when he saw us coming he looked at his watch.

He told us that we had missed the train by three minutes (the three

minutes that Kendal had wasted).

I had jumped out of the car and was telling Kendal that it was all his

fault, and that if he'd done what he was told we should have caught the

train, when he turned on me as only a chauffeur convicted of folly can

turn.

"Stand away from the car, sir," he shouted. He jerked her nose round with

the savage energy of a chauffeur in the wrong; he seemed to impart his

own fury to the car. She snorted and screamed as he backed her and drove

her forward and backed her again.

And again he shouted to me. "You get in, sir, if you don't want to be

left be'ind."

As he seemed to be animated chiefly by the fear of Jevons (whom, by the

way, he adored), we could only suppose that his idea was to fly back to

Amershott in time for Jimmy's wire.

On the high road past the station he took the wrong turn.

_I_ shouted then, "What do you think you're doing, you confounded fool?"

"Ketch the London train at 'Orsham, sir," said Kendal. And he grinned.

"You can't do it," we said.

"I'll 'ave a try," said Kendal.

His honour as a chauffeur was at stake. His blood was up. His knowledge

had begun to work in him and he adored his master. He knew what he was

trying to do.

We could do it if we kept our heads; if we exceeded the speed limit; if

we had luck; if we didn't break down; if neither the county constabulary

nor the country traffic held us up.

Kendal declared we could do it easily and allow for accidents. At Horsham

Junction you have nearly half an hour to wait between the arrival of the

Midhurst and Selham train and the departure of the London express. And

the local trains take more than half an hour to get from Selham to

Horsham. At a pinch you could speed the car up to the limit of the local

train. And, as we had to allow for accidents, we did speed her up

whenever we saw a clean track before us.

The run to Selham was nothing to it. It was as if we were racing the

train with its three minutes start, as if, positively, we might overtake

it at any of the intermediate stations, as if it were in this hope that

we dashed up the long white slope to Petworth.

The heat of the day gathered over our heads and smouldered in the east.

And as we ran I realized at last why we were running and what the race

was and the hunt, and what our quarry. I remembered that other slower

chase that was yet so keen and so agonizing; that hunting down of the

same tender flesh and blood, over the Channel and across a foreign

country. That was bad enough; but it was not like this. For then I was

alone in my hunting of Viola; there was nobody but me, who loved her, to

see her run to earth and caught crouching in her corner. That she would

crouch, this time, and hide herself, I had no doubt. This hunt that I

shared with her sister and her servant was abominable to me and shameful.

And between the shame of that flight of hers and this flight there was no

comparison. You don't go looking at belfries with Charlie Thesiger. I

could not reconcile that enchanting and enchanted Viola of the garden of

Bruges with this dreadful flying figure.

I hated myself; I hated Kendal, the chauffeur, as I sat behind his tight,

efficient body that quivered with the fury of the hunt. (To think that

_his_ blood should be up and against Viola!) I hated the car that seemed

more than ever a living thing, that breathed and snorted and vibrated

with the same passion, and was endowed with this incredible speed and

this superhuman power. With its black nose and white flanks, and its

black hood and the black wings of its splash-boards, it was some terrible

and sinister and malignant monster of prey hunting down Viola. Its body

had been built, its engines had been forged, to hunt down Viola. The

infernal thing had been invented to hunt down Viola.

Somewhere between Petworth and Fittleworth Kendal stopped to water his

engine. It was then that we noticed how the gathering heat was piled into

a bank of cloud over the east. At the back of our necks we could feel a

little hot puff of wind that came up from the west.

"Shouldn't wonder if there was a storm," said Kendal. He added, with the

ghost of a grin, "If Mr. Jevons sees that cloud, sir, he'll not wire to

be met at Midhurst. He'd crawl home on his 'ands and knees first."

He slipped into his seat and we dashed on.

At Fittleworth, within a stone's-throw of the railway and the road, there

is a patch of moor where the ground rises in a hillock. In July and

August when the heather's out this hillock is a crimson landmark above

the water meadows.

When we came within sight of it Kendal suddenly slowed down, then jammed

his brakes hard, and with an awful grinding and snorting the car came to

a stand-still.

Kendal stood up. He muttered something about being blowed. Then he

turned.

"Got the glasses there, sir?"

I found the glasses, but I didn't give them to Kendal. I stood up too and

looked through them.

I couldn't see anything at first.

"There, sir," said Kendal, pointing. "No. You're looking too much to the

left. You got to get right o' thet sandy patch--against thet there clump

of heather. Now d'you see, sir?"

I did.

Kendal had made out with the naked eye a figure, the figure of a woman,

seated on the hillside, a white figure that showed plainly against the

red background of the heather.

"It's Mrs. Jevons, sir," he stated.

It was.

I could see her quite distinctly through the field-glasses. She was

sitting on the clump of heather to the right of the sandy patch, settled

and motionless, in the attitude of one who waited at her ease, with hours

before her. And she was alone.

We went on as far as we could towards the moor. Norah and I left the car

and struck across the moor by the sandy track that led to the bare patch

and the clump of heather.

The seated figure must have been aware of us from the first moment of our

approach. You couldn't miss that black and white car as it charged along

the highway, or as it stood now, with its engines still humming, by the

roadside. But the figure remained seated in its attitude of waiting. It

waited while we crossed the moor; and as we climbed the hillock we became

intensely aware of it and of its immobility.

We saw its face fixed on us with an expression of tranquil patience and

expectation. I may say that I felt an intolerable embarrassment before

this quietness of the hunted thing that we had run to earth; especially

as it was on me, and not Norah, that Viola's face was fixed as we came

nearer.

Then she smiled at me; there was neither conciliation nor defiance

in her smile, but a sort of serene assurance and--yes, it was

unmistakable--contempt.

She said, "Whatever do you think you're doing _now_?"

I said we might not know what we were doing, but we knew what we were

going to do. We were going to take her back with us in the car.

At that she asked us (but without any sign of perturbation) if we had got

Jimmy there?

Norah said No, our idea was to run back to Amershott before Jimmy got

there.

"Where were you running to when you saw me sitting up here?" she said.

I said we'd meant to catch her at Selham but we missed the train and were

trying to get to Horsham before the London train started.

She was looking at me now with a sort of compassion, the tenderness of

her contempt.

"I see," she said. "You _were_ clever, weren't you?"

She looked at her watch. "Well, as you _are_ here," she said, "I'd let

you run me down to Horsham, if you want a run, only I can't very well use

Jimmy's car."

I think it was Norah who asked her what on earth she was doing at

Fittleworth.

"Can't you see," she said, "that I'm waiting for the next train?"

"Did you walk here from Amershott, or what?" I said.

She said, "Rather not. I was in the train."

Then Norah said, "What happened?"

It had dawned on us both how odd it was that Viola should be here,

apparently alone, at Fittleworth. It was also odd how we were all

ignoring Charlie. I believe I had a sort of idea that she had got him

hidden somewhere in the landscape.

Viola smiled a reminiscent smile. "If you _must_ know," she said, "what

happened was that Charlie was in that train, too--he came bursting out on

to the platform at Selham, awfully pleased with himself, because he'd

picked my luggage up at Midhurst and bagged a corner seat for me, and

made faces at people to keep them out."

"Did you know he was going up to town?" I said.

"No, of course I didn't. He didn't know it himself. There was no reason

why he shouldn't go. And you'd have thought there was no reason why we

shouldn't go together. He was all right till we got to Petworth. But

after that he lost his head and made such an ass of himself that I had to

get out here and make him go on by himself. Silly idiot!"

We were sitting in the heather, one on each side of her, and I saw my

wife slip her arm into hers and hug it to her.

"Did _you_ know," she said, "that Charlie'd gone?"

We didn't answer. We simply couldn't.

And then Viola said, "Poor little Norah!"

And she told her to run away for ten minutes while she talked to me.

"Why poor little Norah?" I asked when we were alone.

"Because," she said, "you frightened her."

"I? Frightened her?"

"Yes," she said. "You made her think I was going to run away with

Charlie. There's no good trying to look as if you didn't. You're quite

awful, Furny, in the things you think. You can't help it, I know. You're

so good, so shockingly good, and you can't bear other people to be

naughty. You thought I'd run away to Belgium with Jimmy and you came

rushing after me and fetched me back. You thought I'd run away with

Charlie and you came rushing--in your dreadful rectitude, and in Jimmy's

motor-car that he won't let anybody look at. You'll have an awful time

with Jimmy when you get back. It's going to rain, and there'll be mud on

the car, and he'll dance with rage when he sees it. And he won't think

it's any excuse if you tell him you thought I was running away with

Charlie, and you took the car to fetch me back; he'll say you'd no

business to think it and in any case you'd no business to take the car

out. And poor Kendal will be sacked.

"That's all you've done," she said, "by your fussy interference."

She went on. "It wouldn't matter what you think about me--but it was

beastly of you to go and make Norah think it."

I said I didn't suppose either of us thought anything, except that since

she was going up to town with the idea of leaving her husband, it was not

desirable that she should go up with Charlie Thesiger.

"Who could possibly have supposed," she said, "that Charlie would be such

an ass?"

I said I for one could.

"Oh, you--haven't I told you you're always supposing things?"

"Surely?" I said, "you must have seen--yourself--"

She smiled. "My dear--I couldn't see anything but poor Jimmy."

"And yet," I said, "you could think of leaving him?"

She moaned. "You fool--you fool--that's _why_ I'm thinking of it."

She pressed her hands to her eyes as if she shut back the sight of him.

"You aren't thinking of it," I said. "You haven't left him. You've only

been for a good long walk to Fittleworth, and we've come to fetch you

back in the car."

"Haven't I told you that I can't and won't use Jimmy's car?"

"You can't use it to run away from him in; but you can very well use it

to go back to him."

"I'm not going back to him," she said. "Can't you see that I've burnt my

boats?"

"You may have burnt the old ones, Viola," I said. "But you can build

new."

"You must give me time, Wally. It'll take a long time. And you don't

understand me. I _want_ to get away from Jimmy. That's why I'm going away

now, while he isn't there. That's what I mean by burning my boats.

If I go back to him--if I see him--I shall never get away. I shan't have

the courage. I shall just crumple up with the first sight of him--with

the first word he says--"

"Why not," I said, "crumple up?"

She lifted her head as I had seen her lift it before.

"Because," she said, "I wish to be straight."

I asked her if running away behind Jimmy's back was her idea of

straightness? To which she replied that _my_ rectitude was excruciating

and that I'd twist anything to a moral purpose, but it was twisting all

the same. Couldn't I see that _the_ awful thing would be to come sneaking

back and pretend to Jimmy that she hadn't run away from him?--If that was

my idea of straightness she was sorry for me.

I said, "My dear child, you must see that running away by yourself is one

thing, and running away with Charlie Thesiger is another. It would be all

very well if Charlie hadn't got into that train."

She wanted to know what that mattered when she had got out of the train?

I suggested that the people who saw Charlie get in hadn't seen her get

out, and that she must look at the thing as it appeared to other people.

"Look," I said, "at the facts. Mrs. Jevons walks to Selham Station for

the London train. Captain Thesiger joins her there, presumably by

pre-arrangement, leaving by Midhurst station so that they may not be seen

going away together. She is, however, seen entering his compartment at

Selham. At Fittleworth she is seized with prudence and with panic. She is

seen getting out on to the platform. And she is seen two hours later

following the Captain up to London by the next train."

She seemed to be considering it.

"How many people," she said, "know that Charlie was in that train? People

that matter--I don't mean you and Norah."

"Your butler, your parlourmaid, your housemaid, your cook, your

gardener--by this time--and Baby's nurse--"

("And Baby," she interrupted.)

"--The guard of the train, the booking clerks and porters at Midhurst and

Selham, and the station-masters at Midhurst and Selham and Petworth

(probably) and Fittleworth. Quite a number of important people, to say

nothing of Kendal, who is perhaps the most important of them all."

"And who was it who brought Kendal into it?"

I was silent.

"Nobody but you, Furny, or a born fool, would have dreamed of bringing

Kendal in."

I said that a little reflection would show her that it was impossible to

keep him out. To this she said, "Please go and find Norah. I want her."

I found Norah. I warned her that Viola was going to be extremely

difficult. She said it would be all right if I left Viola to her.

As we approached, Viola turned to her sister with an air of outraged and

long-suffering dignity.

"Norah," she said. "I do wish you would make Wally see what an ass he's

making of himself."

My wife said, in her admirable, judicial way, "How an ass?"

"Well--trying to make me go back and bringing Kendal out here to fetch

me. He doesn't seem to see that if I do go back with him it'll be as good

as proclaiming to everybody that I ran away with Charlie and was found

out by my clever brother-in-law who tracked me down in my husband's

motor-car and brought me back in it. Whereas, if I go quietly on to

London, as I meant to and as everybody knows I meant to, it'll be all

right."

"It won't," I said, "as long as Charlie's there. It will be if you come

home with us in the car now, and go up to town with Norah and me on

Monday."

"I've told you," she said wearily, "that I can't go back because I shall

never get away if I do. And I _must_--I must--and I will."

"Yes, dear, and you shall," my wife said, as if she were humouring

somebody who was mad.

But for a mad woman Viola, I must say, was extraordinarily lucid.

"What excuse did you give to Kendal for following me in this way?"

"We told him we had an important message to give you before you started."

"Important message! That was pretty thin. I'd have thought of something

cleverer than that if I'd been you. You _are_ a precious pair of

conspirators. Can't you see that it's you--with your ridiculous

suspicions--that have given me away?"

Norah answered her.

"Oh, Vee-Vee," she said, "we hadn't any suspicions. The message was to

tell you that Charlie was in the train. We knew you didn't know it."

To this Viola said coldly, "Walter didn't."

I tried to reassure her, but she waved me away with her hands and

implored me to "let her think."

"Well," she said presently, "it isn't as bad as you've tried to make it,

even with Kendal thrown in. You came rushing after me to give me a

message, and you _have_ given me a message, and now you'll go and tell

Kendal that it's all right, and thank him nicely for catching me up, and

_you_ rush home again, and I go on quietly to London by the next train."

"Yes, dear," said Norah. "And I'm going up with you while Wally rushes

home and follows with Nurse and Baby and the luggage by the morning

train."

"That's all very well," said Viola, "but who explains to Jimmy?"

"Oh," said my wife, "Wally does that. You can trust him. Besides you

haven't got to explain things to Jimmy."

Well, we settled it that way. It was the only possible solution. The more

she thought of it, Viola said, the more she liked it. And she rubbed it

into me that it was Norah's solution, and not mine.

Her last words to me as I saw them off at Fittleworth Station were that I

needn't worry. It was going to rain. And when poor Jimmy saw his car come

in all splashed with rain and covered with mud--"It won't be me," she

said, "you'll have to explain about."

And it wasn't.

The storm came down just as we were leaving Fittleworth, and we brought

that car back in an awful state. You wouldn't have known it had ever been

a black-and-white car. And Jevons (in a mackintosh) was waiting for me in

the lane by the courtyard gates. He had caught the early train, but he

had seen the storm coming and had walked up from Midhurst, and, as I say,

he was waiting for us.

Well--neither Viola nor Norah was with us, and the language, that Jimmy

poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour

of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the

colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a

gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly,

a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur

was prostrated with admiration.

"When Mr. Jevons lays himself out to express himself, sir," he said

to me as we retreated, "he pulls it off what you may call a bleedin'

masterpiece."

I tried to explain about Viola an hour later. But he wouldn't listen to

me. That was all right, he said. He was going to ask us to take her for a

month or so anyhow. It was getting a bit stuffy for her down here.

Then he fixed me with "Did Thesiger go up with her?"

There was no good trying to lie to Jevons, so I said that had been

Thesiger's idea, but Viola hadn't cared much about having him, for she

had got out at Fittleworth and taken Norah on with her.

"I suppose the young ass tried to make love to her. He's fool enough for

anything," said Jimmy. But he reverted. "I still can't see why you took

the car out. Anybody but an idiot would have known it was going to rain."