HIS BOOK
XII
At this period, and even now when I go back to it, I am completely
puzzled by Jevons. Here was a man who professed to understand his wife,
to know what she was feeling and thinking in every moment of her
existence; he would tell you that a man was a fool if he couldn't get the
woman he wanted; and yet, having got her, he didn't seem to know in the
most elementary way how to keep her. He didn't seem to care. He adored
her, and yet he didn't seem to care. I believe he knew that she was
leaving him, that she had left him; and yet, here he was, treating her
departure as if it didn't matter, as if it were the most natural and
reasonable thing in the world, and lashing himself into a fury about his
wretched motor-car. And he was treating the dangerous element in the
case, Charlie Thesiger, as if it didn't matter either; as if it didn't
exist. He must have known we'd taken his car out to bring his wife
back--he knew we wouldn't have touched the beastly thing for anything
short of saving her life or his honour; and yet he had flown into a
passion and sworn at his chauffeur because we'd taken it. He adored his
wife and yet he behaved as if she were of no importance compared with the
god he'd made of his motor-car.
All that evening, I remember, he was absorbed in the solitary problem of
how he could save his god from further outrages. He settled it towards
midnight by saying that he'd buy another car that we could do what we
damn-pleased with--a car that wouldn't matter--that you could take out in
all weathers.
"I'll not have that black-and-white car used as it was used this
afternoon," he said. And after lashing himself up again he ended quite
sweetly by saying, "It's my fault, Furny. I ought to have had two cars
all along."
I said it _would_ be a good plan, if a black-and-white car was only to be
looked at.
He admitted (with a recrudescence of his old childlike innocence) that he
liked looking at it. I've no doubt he said it made him feel something,
but I forget what.
But when the morning came he wouldn't hear of my going. I was to stay out
my fortnight. It was a fine day and the dust was laid; perhaps he could
take me for a spin across the Downs to the coast or somewhere. He'd send
Parker up to town to look after Nurse and Baby and the luggage. He didn't
want, he said, to be left alone.
Oh yes, it was plain to me that he didn't want to be left--that he
couldn't bear it. He was trying to lure me to stay with him by holding
out this prospect of a spin. I have since believed that he would have
agreed to take his car out in almost any weather, if that had been the
only way to keep me. He clung to me desperately, pathetically, as he had
clung nine years ago at Bruges when Viola had left him there. He might,
possibly, this time, have clung to anybody; he was so afraid of being
left alone. I think he felt that loneliness here, in the vast, unfamiliar
landscape that he had invaded, would be as bad as loneliness in Bruges.
He would be abandoned, as he had been then, in a foreign country.
So till Sunday morning I stayed with him.
It was on my last evening, the evening of Saturday, August the first,
that he spoke of Viola.
He asked me if I thought that Norah and I could keep her with us, if
necessary, for--he hesitated--for six months? (It was as if he had given
her six months.) It would, he said, be better.
I said that Norah would be delighted to keep her for any number of
months. But did he think she'd stay?
He said why shouldn't she stay? Of course she'd stay. She was awfully
fond of us and it was the best thing she could do. And it would make it
so much easier for him. He'd feel more comfortable as long as he knew she
was with us.
He spoke as if it were he and not Viola who was leaving.
I said then that though we were glad to have her we couldn't, of course,
accept any responsibility--
He smiled slightly and asked, "For what?"
I said, "Well--" And he answered his own question in the pause I made.
"I suppose you mean for anything she may take it into her head to do?"
I put it to him that Viola's movements were not always exactly
calculable. She might take it into her head to do anything. I really
couldn't answer for her.
"_You_ can't," he said. "But _I_ can. She may go off and look at a belfry
or two." (I should have said that "looking at the belfry" was a phrase
the family had adopted for any queer thing that any of us might do.) "If
there's a belfry anywhere to be seen you may depend upon it she'd want to
look at it."
"Whether," I said, "it's in a dangerous place or not?"
"Whether it's in a dangerous place or not. But I'll trust you to keep her
out of dangerous places. That's rather what I wanted to talk to you
about."
I protested. "There's no good talking about it. I've told you that's just
precisely the responsibility I won't take. And I won't let Norah take it.
If you think there's going to be any danger you must look after your own
wife yourself."
"My dear fellow, how can I look after her if I'm not here?"
"You're as much here as I am," I said. "More so. And she's your wife, not
mine."
I can say now--there's no reason why I shouldn't; it would only amuse
Jimmy if he were to see it written--I can say now that for one awful
moment I suspected Jimmy of meditating an infidelity. Perhaps he was; but
not as we count infidelity.
He ignored what I took to be the essence of the thing.
"We don't know," he said, "where any of us are going to be for the next
four months--or the next four years. I know that _I_ jolly well shan't be
here. What I want to propose is this: that you'll look after Viola and
let her have your house when she wants to be in town; and that you have
this house for yourself and Norah and Baby when you want to be in the
country--just as if it was your own. There'll be that other motor-car you
can have--as if it was your own. You can run up to town in it. And you'll
probably find that the country will be the best place for you. It'll be
much the best place for _them_, and the safest--if you aren't here."
I couldn't see it even then. I said, "My dear chap, why shouldn't I be
here? I certainly mean to be here."
And he considered it and said, "I don't see why not. It's different for
you. You've got a child and I haven't."
I said I couldn't see what Baby had to do with it.
And he replied that a young child was an infernal complication, and that
he was jolly glad he hadn't got one. What Baby had to do with it was to
keep me out of it.
Then I asked him what on earth he was talking about.
He said, "_I'm_ talking about the European conflagration. What are you?"
He had been talking about it all the time, he had been thinking of
nothing but the European conflagration for the last four days. It was the
thing, he said, that he had prophesied nine years ago--didn't I remember?
(Oh yes, I remembered; but then, he was always prophesying something.)
Well then, here it was. And it had come, by God, at the very date he had
given it.
I can see him sitting there in his study at Amershott Old Grange. He was
deadly quiet. Not a gesture came to disturb my sense of his tranquil
triumph in the fulfilment of his prophecy. To say that he enjoyed the
European conflagration because it had proved him so abundantly right
would give a false impression of an extraordinary and complicated state
of mind. There _was_ a sort of exaltation about him (his face positively
shone, as if the European conflagration illuminated it from afar); but it
was a holy and a sacred exaltation, pure from egoism, except that he saw
himself--there's no doubt that already he did see himself--figuring.
I remember saying, as lots of people were saying then, that I didn't
suppose for a moment we should be dragged into it.
"Dragged?" he said. "Dragged? We shall be in it without dragging--in the
very thick."
From the instant the Germans broke into Luxembourg--and he gave them
twenty-four hours--we should be in it. We couldn't keep out with a rag of
honour to our names. France, he declared, would be in to-day. He gave us,
I _think_--but I do not like to say positively that he gave us--three
days; he couldn't have been as dead right as all that.
What struck me then as so extravagantly odd was, not that he had
foreseen the war, and England's part in it, but that he should have
seen himself there, in the thick--blazing away in the very middle of the
conflagration. What on earth Jimmy conceived that _he_ should have to
do with it I couldn't think. And all of a sudden I had a reminiscence of
Jevons as I had seen him nine years ago, talking to Reggie Thesiger in
Viola's rooms at Hampstead, prophesying war, and lamenting that he
wouldn't be in it because he was an arrant coward.
And as I looked at him again I saw that what made his face shine like
that was the sweat that had broken out on it.
Then he made a remark about Charlie Thesiger. Thesiger, he said, knew all
about it. He had gone up--he supposed I knew that?--to offer his services
to the War Office in the event of England's coming in.
That Charlie had used the opportunity of going to make love to Jimmy's
wife didn't seem to bother Jimmy in the least.
Sunday, I remember, was a fine day, with all the dust laid, and Jimmy
made himself lovable by running me up to London in his sacred car. He
still clung--I could see that he clung--to the superstition of its
sanctity.
He left me at my door in Edwardes Square, which he refused to enter. I
think he was afraid of seeing Viola. I thought at the time that this was
because he was aware of her attitude; that he knew she was at the end of
her tether, and that he wanted to be righteously fair, to give her time
to think about leaving him, if she wanted to leave him; that he was
behaving now as he had behaved at Bruges when he stood back and let me
have my innings, and gave her her chance to free herself. And yet I was
puzzled. Even he could hardly stand back to give Thesiger an innings. He
_may_ have had an inkling. There may have been something of his queer,
scrupulous tenderness in this avoidance of her; there may have been his
reckless propensity to take the risk; but I am convinced that even then
his main object was--like Viola--to burn his boats. He was afraid that if
he were to see Viola again he wouldn't be able to go through with it. He
may even have been glad that she had left him, because it had made his
way easier.
And so, when he had landed me at my door, he turned the black nose of his
car round and ran out of Edwardes Square faster than he had run in; as if
he were afraid that the place would catch and keep him.
He didn't go back to Amershott. He stayed in London in one of his clubs
(he had several now, besides the club in Dover Street), and I saw him
sometimes. I didn't say anything to Viola about him. I didn't tell her he
was in town. It was as if there had been some tacit understanding among
the three of us; there must have been some tacit agreement between him
and me.
Sunday passed, and Monday somehow; and on Tuesday, the fourth, we were
all holding our breaths under the tension of the Ultimatum.
I have no doubt that in those three days I had some opinion of my own
about the European conflagration, that I must have stared with my own
eyes sometimes at the fate of Europe and the fate of England, that I must
have felt _some_ horror and anxiety and excitement that was my own. But
as I look back on it all I am aware chiefly of Jevons, of _his_ opinions,
_his_ vision, _his_ horror and excitement. I seem to have spent the
greater part of those three days with Jevons, and there are moments, in
looking back, when he fills the scene. He is the largest and most
prominent figure in the crowd that walked the streets with me on the
evening of the Ultimatum, that waited with me outside Buckingham Palace,
when London let itself loose in madness; he seems the only sane figure in
that crowd or in the processions that moved for hours on end up and down
Parliament Street, between Trafalgar Square and Palace Yard. It is as if
I had stood alone with Jevons before the Mansion House at midnight when
the Ultimatum was declared.
And when I say that it was his horror and anxiety and excitement--and his
defiance and exaltation, if you like--that I felt, I do not mean that
Jevons talked about it. He was, for those three days, mostly silent. It
is that I saw him consumed and burned up by the fever of patriotism and
war, and that beside his passion any emotion I may have felt hardly
counted.
And every minute we expected to hear him say that he _liked_ the War
because it made him feel manly. Norah and I pretended to each other that
he would say it--it was our idea of a joke, God forgive us.
It was on Wednesday, the fifth, very early in the morning, that he began
trying to enlist. It was the first thing he did; and we thought _that_
funny.
We thought it so funny that even if he hadn't told us not to tell Viola
we wouldn't have told her; we felt that it wouldn't have been quite fair
to either of them.
And none of the Thesigers, or anybody connected with the Thesigers, could
take Jimmy seriously for one moment. With General Thesiger waiting to be
sent to the Front, and Reggie Thesiger preparing to go, and Charlie
Thesiger who might be called on any day, with Bertie and all his male
cousins enlisting and pulling all the ropes they could lay their hands on
to get their commissions, they hadn't time for Jimmy and his importunity.
He _was_ importunate; and I'm afraid that in those weeks Jimmy didn't
exist for them or any of us, except as a jest that lightened our labours
now and then. They were so busy getting their kits that they couldn't
even think of the fate of Europe.
And Viola--what she was thinking and feeling God (or Jevons) only knew.
She didn't tell us. But I was pretty sure that with Reggie starting for
the front in two weeks it wasn't Jevons she was thinking of. I suspected
that she wasn't far from feeling that secret hatred of Jimmy that had
come to her once or twice before, when she had thought of Reggie.
Remember that all this time, even after that illness of hers last year,
when she and Reggie met they met as well-bred strangers. She had never
lowered her flag or made one sign. She had just suffered in secret with
the thought of Reggie biting deeper and deeper into her mind, till,
wherever the memory of Reggie was there was a wound. And she had been ill
of her wounds and had nearly died of them.
And in those two weeks she had begun to look as if she were going to be
ill again. It was bad enough for Norah and for all of them, but conceive
what it must have been for her!
And so we came to Reggie's last day and the night when he came to us to
say good-bye.
I think she must have written to him or made some sign. But I'm not sure.
I only know that he was prepared for her; and that when she came into the
room at the last minute, as he turned from Norah's arms, he closed on
her, and that they held each other an instant--tight, like lovers--and
that neither of them said a word.
* * * * *
After that the War must have seemed to her, as it seemed to all of us, to
have wiped Jimmy out.
Just at first we thought that this was the secret of Jimmy's agony, of
his rushings round and round, and of his ceaseless manoeuvring. He knew
that the War was going to wipe him out; he knew that the world had no use
for his sort, the men who only wrote things. There was an end of his
writing, of his novels and his short stories and his plays, and if he
didn't look out and do something there would be an end of _him_. And he
couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear to be reduced to inactivity and
insignificance--to be wiped out. He wasn't going to be made an end of if
he could help it. These were the things we said about him. What we saw,
or thought we saw, was the revolt of his egoism. It didn't look quite
sane.
He was furious when he found out that, even if he enlisted, he couldn't
buy a commission. He didn't seem to realize that there were things he
couldn't buy. He was still more furious when he found that the Thesigers
wouldn't help him. They _could_ help him, he declared, if they liked.
Commissions were being given every day to the wrong people, by influence.
Up till now, with his talk about commissions, he had been purely funny,
and we had laughed at him. But when he found that he couldn't enlist,
that they wouldn't have him, that he wasn't strong enough--they'd
discovered a leaky valve in his heart or something--and that in any case
he was too old, when he broke down as he tried to tell me this, he wasn't
funny at all. He'd been to every recruiting station in London and his own
county, and they all said the same thing. He was too old.
This, he said, was where his beastly celebrity had gone back on him. He
could very easily have lied about his age (he didn't look it), in fact,
he _had_ lied about it freely, to every one of them; but his age was
recorded against him in the Year-Books of his craft. And he couldn't lie
about his heart, he didn't know it had a valve that leaked. He didn't
believe it. He had given the man who examined it the lie; and he had gone
to a heart-specialist to get the report (which he regarded as a libel)
contradicted, and the heart-specialist had confirmed it, and told him he
wasn't the first man who had come to him to get an opinion overruled. He
said he was to keep quiet and avoid excitement. He mustn't dream of going
to the front. I think the specialist must have been sorry for Jevons, for
he went on to tell him that there were other ways in which he could serve
his country. He seems to have talked a lot of rot about the pen being
mightier than the sword, and to have advised Jimmy to "use his wonderful
pen." And at that Jimmy seems to have broken from him in a passion.
And here he was, in a passion still, ramping up and down that private
room he had at his club, and saying, "Damn my powerful pen, Furny! Damn
my powerful pen!" The whole system, he said, was rotten. He'd a good mind
to expose it. He'd expose it in the papers. _That_ was the use he'd make
of his powerful pen. See how they'd like _that_.
I remember it because it was then that I laid before him my own problem.
The _Daily Post_ had asked me if I'd go out as its War-Correspondent. I
was to wire "Yes" or "No" in the next half-hour, and if I went I should
have to start to-night.
I said I didn't know what to do about it.
He stared. "You don't know what to _do_?"
I said: No. It wasn't so simple when you had a wife and child dependent
on you. I didn't know whether I ought to take the risk.
And then he said his memorable thing: "If you can take the risk of
living--My God," he said, "if I only had your luck!"
_His_ luck, I told him, was a dead certainty. There wasn't a paper that
would refuse Tasker Jevons as War-Correspondent. He'd only got to
volunteer. Why on earth, I asked him, didn't he?
He became very grave. He seemed to be considering it.
"No," he said, "no. That isn't quite good enough for me. I don't want to
go out to the war to write about it. I want to do things.
"Perhaps--if there's no other way--I may be driven to it."
For a moment, then, I suspected him. I doubted his sincerity. He was
making all this fuss about enlisting to cover up his cowardice. He must
have known all the time they wouldn't take him. He was safe. But put
before him a thing he could do--do better than anybody else--a thing that
would take him into the thick and keep him there, if he wasn't killed,
and he said, No, thank you. That wasn't quite good enough for him.
I didn't believe in his "Perhaps--if there was no other way--he might be
driven to it." I saw him driven to do anything he didn't mean to do!
Meanwhile he drove _me_. Before I had seen him I hadn't really meant to
take that job. He did something to me that changed my mind.
That was how I went out to Belgium as a War-Correspondent.
* * * * *
I was out for a month. Then--I was in Ghent at the same old hotel in the
Place d'Armes--I got a touch of malaria and had to come home, and the
_Daily Post_ sent another man out instead of me.
That was how I managed to see Jevons in what Norah called his second
war-phase. He had been trying hard to get out with the Red Cross
volunteers, and it had been even funnier, she said, and more pathetic,
than his enlisting. I don't know what Viola thought of his war-phases;
to Norah they were just that--funny and pathetic. To the other Thesigers
he was purely offensive. They resented Jevons's trying to have anything
to do with the war, as if it had been some sort of impertinent
interference with their prerogative. His mother-in-law, I know, had no
patience with him. His frantic efforts to get to the front were nothing,
she declared, but a form of war-panic. It took some people like that. She
said the only really cruel thing I had ever heard her say of him. She
said he _looked_ panic-stricken. (He was lean and haggard by this time,
and had a haunted look which may have been what she meant.) And well--if
it wasn't panic that was the matter with him it was self-advertisement,
and if I'd any regard for him or any influence with him I'd stop it. The
little man was simply making himself ridiculous.
I was staying in Canterbury with Norah for the weekend, and I heard all
about it. He did seem to have been rather funny. He had begun with a
scheme for taking out a Red Cross Motor Field Ambulance which he proposed
to command in person. He had offered himself with his convoy first to the
War Office, then to the Admiralty, then to the War Office again, and the
War Office and the Admiralty kicked him out. Then he had gone round to
each of the Red Cross Societies in turn, the American included. And they
had all got their own schemes for Motor Field Ambulances, and didn't want
his. What they _did_ want was his subscriptions and his powerful pen to
support their schemes. And Jevons had said, "Damn my powerful pen!" to
every one of them. As for subscriptions, he subscribed enormously to his
own Motor Ambulance Corps. He had actually raised his unit, found his
volunteers, his surgeons, his chauffeurs and his stretcher-bearers, he
had bought and equipped a Motor Ambulance car, the one he had proposed to
go with himself. And they took his subscriptions and his Ambulance Car
and his volunteers; but they wouldn't take him; no, not at any price.
They put one of his surgeons at the head of the thing instead of him and
sent it out without him, and Jimmy had to see it go. But when they
proposed that Jimmy should use his powerful pen to maintain it in the
field, he swore that he would use it to expose the whole system. And when
he found that the responsibility for rejecting his services rested with
the War Office, he went down to the War Office and complained, and to the
Admiralty and complained, and to the Home Office and complained. After
that he seems to have visited all the Embassies in turn--the American,
the French, the Belgian, and I suppose the Russian and the Japanese.
When I asked the Thesigers what he was doing now they said they didn't
know. They hadn't heard of him and his activities for quite a fortnight,
and they didn't bother about him. They were too much wrapped up in
Bertie and in Reggie, even if they hadn't been too busy--every one of
them up to their necks in work for the Army or the hospitals. They
admitted that he had sent them large subscriptions.
It seemed to me, as far as I could make out, that Viola hadn't seen or
heard of him since she had left Amershott. She was too busy and too much
wrapped in Reggie to bother about him either; at least, it looked like
it. She seems to have known in a vague way that he had talked about going
to the front, but I didn't believe she thought he would ever get there.
And he had lain low for a fortnight.
When we had got back to London at noon on Tuesday, which was the end of
Jimmy's fortnight, I found a wire from Amershott waiting for me. It had
been sent that morning. It said: "Leaving to-morrow. Must see you urgent
business. Can you come down this evening. JEVONS."
I knew that he wouldn't send a wire like that without good reason; so I
went.
* * * * *
A light rain was falling when I reached Midhurst. A hired dog-cart met me
at the station, so I gathered that Jimmy's mad passion for his motor-car
had survived the war.
And at Amershott everything seemed to have survived. If it had not been
for troops on the high road, and for the stillness of the coverts, and
for the recruiting posters stuck everywhere on the barn-doors, and for
the strange figure of old Perrott driving the mail-cart from Midhurst to
Amershott instead of his son, you wouldn't have known that the war had
anything to do with England. And I expected to find Jimmy in his old
Norfolk suit standing in the garage and looking with adoration at his
motor-car.
As I thought all this I smiled when Parker told me that Mr. Jevons was in
the garage. Parker, I noticed, didn't smile.
And in another minute it was Jevons who did all the smiling.
I found him in the garage--no, I can't say I found him, for I didn't
recognize him, but I heard his voice assuring me that it was he. He was
in khaki; from head to foot, from his peaked military cap to his puttees
he was in faultless, well-fitting khaki; even his shirt and his neck-tie
were khaki. Jimmy's colours showed up wonderfully out of all that
brownish, greyish, yellowish green. His flush fairly flamed, and his
eyes, his eyes looked enormous and very bright--great chunks of dark
sapphire his eyes were. They were twinkling at me.
"It's me all right, old man," he said, and turned from me in his deep
preoccupation. And as he turned I saw that he wore round his right arm a
white brassard with a red cross on it.
At the far end of the coach-house where the great black and white idol
used to stand there was a khaki car with a huge red cross on a white
square on its flank and on its khaki canvas hood. This was what his eyes
turned to.
"But--where's the black-and-white god?" I asked.
"There she is," he said, "you're looking at her."
"You haven't--"
"Yes, I have. She's had her new coat on for the last three weeks. You
couldn't take her out as she was, all black and white. She'd have been
knocked to bits before we'd begun our job. So I had her painted. She's a
good enough target for shell-fire as she is."
"You don't mean," I said, "that you're going out?"
"What else have I been meaning ever since there was a war?"
"But--where are you going _to_?"
"Belgium," he said. He added that it was the only blessed place he
_could_ get to.
"And what are you going to do when you get there?"
He said he was going to scout for wounded, of course.
And as he saw me still incredulous he told me how he'd managed it. He had
gone every day for three weeks to the Belgian Legation and worried the
Belgian Minister into a state of nervous prostration. And when the
Minister was at his worst and was obliged to leave things a bit to his
secretaries, he'd gone to the secretaries and worried _them_ till the
First Secretary had given him his passport and a letter of introduction
to the President of the Belgian Red Cross Society at Ghent. And he had
gone to Ghent--went there last week--and he had seen the President and
talked to him. He had talked for ten minutes before his services had been
accepted by the Belgian Red Cross.
And he was going out to-morrow.
"It's just taken me six weeks to do it. I gave myself six weeks."
Of course I congratulated him. But I couldn't realize it. The whole thing
seemed incredible. Jevons in his khaki was incredible. The transformed
motor-car was incredible, as a thing that Jevons was concerned with.
Above all, it was incredible that he should have sacrificed his god.
I couldn't believe it until Kendal, the chauffeur, turned up, also in
khaki and with a Red Cross brassard on his right arm. Kendal was credible
enough; he looked as if he had been going to the war all his life. It was
evident that he was keen on the adventure. It was also evident that he
adored Jevons more than ever. By watching Kendal in the act of adoration
and keeping my eyes fixed on him I was able to take it in, and to assent
to the statement that Jevons was going to the war.
He was of course if Kendal said so.
Kendal was asking me what I thought of the car.
"She's not the beauty she was, sir," said Kendal. "I don't suppose Mr.
Jevons will care much how he knocks her about now. And they do say the
Belgium roads is fair destruction to cars."
I said they were. I'd motored on them. Kendal looked at me as he might
have looked at the survivor of a shattering experience. Then he looked at
his car. He seemed to be seeing all the roads in Belgium in a hideous
vision.
Then he spoke. "Well, they may be bad roads, but Mr. Jevons isn't going
to be done. He'll take out ten cars before 'e turns back. Ten cars, he
will."
Yes, yes, I might have known it. Was there ever anything Jevons had made
up his mind to do and didn't? Had I ever known him turn back from any
adventure that he had set out on? If he said he was going to the war,
why couldn't I have known that he would go? The more incredible the thing
was, the more likely he was to do it.
When I said so he shook his head and said it wasn't really as likely as
it looked.
We were sitting together after dinner in his garden. Though it was the
third week in September the nights were still warm. Without Viola, the
stillness of the place was strange to me, almost uncanny, as if Viola
were dead and had come back and was listening to us somewhere. I had just
told him it was splendid of him going out like this, and he had smiled
back at me and asked, "Like what?" And then I had said I might have known
it; it was the sort of thing he would do.
No, he went on, it wasn't likely. It had been touch and go, he had only
just pulled it off by the skin of his teeth. It had given him more
trouble than anything he'd ever tried for. It had bothered him more. It
had bothered him most damnably.
I thought he was referring to his struggles with the recruiting depots
and the War Office and the Home Office and the Embassies and all the rest
of it. And I said it _was_ pretty hard luck his own Ambulance Corps being
sent out without him. But he said, No; it wasn't. He hadn't been very
keen on the Ambulance Corps. He hadn't really wanted to go out with all
that beastly crowd. This quick scouting game--by himself--was more in his
line. All he regretted was the time he'd lost.
Well, I said, anyhow he was a lucky beggar to have got what he wanted
after six weeks.
At that he looked at me suddenly and his face went all sharp and thin. Or
else I hadn't noticed till then how sharp and thin it was. His flush had
seemed to flood it and fill it out somehow, and his eyes struck your
attention like two great flashes of energy. The flash had gone out now as
he looked at me.
I reminded him: "Haven't you always said you could get what you wanted?"
"Oh yes, I've _said_ it, and I've done it. That's nothing. Any fool can
do that. The great thing is to make yourself get what you don't want. I
didn't _want_ to do this. I had to."
"No. You wanted to enlist. But I'm not sure that from your point of view
this isn't better."
"Jolly lot you know," he said, "about my point of view."
"Your idea," I explained, "of doing things on your own. Isn't that what
you wanted?"
He answered very slowly: "I don't think--it matters--what I wanted--or
what I didn't want. It's enough--isn't it?--if I want to _now_--if I want
it more than anything else?"
I said, No, I didn't think it did matter.
But I hadn't a notion what he meant. I didn't know that he was on the
edge of a confession. I couldn't see that he was trying to tell me
something about himself, and that I had started him off by telling him he
was splendid. It was as if--then--he too had felt that Viola was there
and listening to us, as if he were speaking to her and not to me.
For the next thing he said was, "I want you to tell Viola about it. Tell
her it's all right. Tell her I'm all right. See?"
"But shan't you," I said, "be seeing her? Isn't she going to see you off
or something?"
He said, "No. Much better not. She wouldn't be content with seeing me
off. She'd try to come out with me. She'd worry me to take her. And
I'm not going to take her. She isn't to know I'm going till I've gone.
And she isn't to know where I've gone to. I won't have her coming out
to me. _You've_ got to see to that, Furny. You've got to stop her if
she tries to get out. They're _all_ trying. You should just see the
bitches--tumbling, and wriggling and scrabbling with their claws and
crawling on their stomachs to get to the front--tearing each other's eyes
out to get there first. And there are fellows that'll take them. They'll
even take their wives.
"Not me. Not much. I wouldn't let Viola cross in the same boat with that
lot.
"It ought to be put a stop to.
"The place I'm going to--the things I'm going to see--and to do--aren't
fit for women--aren't fit for women to come within ten miles of. Whatever
you do, Furny--and I don't care what you do--you're not to let her get
out."
I suppose--I suppose I made him some sort of promise. He says I did. I
don't remember.
I _do_ remember telling him I thought it was a pity--if he meant to go
out--that he hadn't seen Viola all this time.
And I remember his answer. "I haven't seen her--all this time--_because_
I meant to go out. I meant that nothing on this earth should stop me."
"How do you know," I said, "that she'd have stopped you?"
"How do I know? How do I know anything?--It's you who don't know. You
don't know anything at all."
* * * * *
Well, he went--like that--without telling any of them.
I ran down on the car with him to Folkestone and saw him off on the boat
to Ostend, he and Kendal, his chauffeur--he, as he pointed out to me,
superior to Kendal only in the perfect fitting of his khaki. "Otherwise
there isn't a pin to choose between us. Except," he said, "that Kendal
doesn't funk it and I do."
And with Kendal grinning from ear to ear over Mr. Jevons's delicious
joke, and Jimmy waving his khaki cap in a final valediction, and Kendal's
grin dying abruptly as he achieved the military salute he judged
appropriate, we parted.
Jimmy's last words to me, thrown over the gunwale, were, "Don't run after
me, Furny. You won't catch me _this_ time."
XIII
Then I went back and told Viola about it. I took her into my library that
had once been Jevons's study, where he had delivered the Grand Attack. I
gave her a letter that Jevons had scribbled before lunch in the hotel at
Folkestone. I suppose he had explained things in it.
But as for me, or any power I had to break it to her, I might just as
well have told her that he was dead.
Except that perhaps then she wouldn't have turned on me.
"You _knew_ this," she said, "you knew he was going and you never told
me?"
I said I had only known it last night--how could I have told her?
She persisted. "You _knew_--at what time last night?"
I hesitated and she drove it home.
"You might have wired. It wasn't too late."
I said it was, and that I didn't know that she didn't know till it was
too late to wire.
"Do you suppose," she said, "--if I'd known--that I should be _here_?"
I couldn't tell her--she was so white under her wound and the shock of
it--I couldn't tell her that she had given me no reason to suppose that
she would be with him.
And she went on. "Why couldn't you have wired in the morning, then? I
could have caught that boat."
"Because, my dear girl, he doesn't want you to go out."
"It doesn't matter what he wants--or thinks he wants--I'm going.
"And what's more," she said, "you've got to take me. That's all you've
gained by trying to stop me."
I replied that nothing would induce me to take her out, that I'd promised
Jimmy she shouldn't go.
She said that didn't matter. Jimmy'd know I couldn't keep a silly promise
like that, and if I wouldn't take her she'd simply go by herself.
I tried to explain to her very gently that her going--at all--was out of
the question. She would do no good to anybody by going; she would annoy
Jimmy most frightfully; untrained women were not wanted at the front.
Untrained? She had got her certificate three days ago. What did I suppose
she had wanted it for--if it wasn't to go out with Jimmy if he went?
"You knew he was going, then?" I said.
"I knew he wanted to go. But I didn't think he'd go so soon. I didn't
really think he'd go at all. They told me I needn't worry, that he hadn't
a chance."
"Who told you?"
"Oh, everybody. The General and Colonel Braithwaite and Charlie, and
Bertie, and Reggie--at least he told Norah--and the people at the War
Office and the Admiralty and the Embassies."
"You _went_ to them? You went to the War Office?"
"I went everywhere where he did, or as near as I could get. And they all
told me the same thing--he hadn't a chance. Not the ghost of a chance. I
really thought he hadn't. When you think of the men--men who can do
things, who are dying to go and are being kept back--"
"You were helping him to go?" I said. I saw a vision, or I tried to see
it, a pathetic vision of Viola following poor Jimmy in his pursuit of
secretaries and ambassadors, doing insane, impossible things to help him.
And then I saw Viola herself. She was looking at me, with all her
features tilted in that funny way she had.
"Well--no," she said; "I wasn't exactly _helping_."
"What _were_ you doing, then?"
"I'm afraid I was trying to stop him."
The sheer folly of it took my breath away.
"Surely," I said, "if he hadn't the ghost of a chance, it wasn't
necessary?"
"Well--it _was_ necessary, you see. He's so awfully clever. He was very
nearly off once or twice. Only we just managed to get in in time."
"Who got in in time?"
"Oh, it wasn't only me, Furny, it was all of us. We were all out trying
to stop him--Charlie and Reggie and Uncle Billy--_he_ pulled all the
ropes--we couldn't do much."
"But what--what did General Thesiger do?"
"He didn't 'do' anything. He hadn't got to. He just said things. Told
them _about_ Jimmy."
I don't know whether my face expressed horror or admiration. It must have
been a sort of horror, for she began to excuse herself.
"Why not? Why should poor little Jimmy go?"
"Because he wants to. You'd no business to stop him when he wanted to
go."
"But--that was it. He didn't want to go. He only thought he _ought_ to
go."
"How," I said sternly, "do you know what he wanted?"
"Because," she said, "he told Uncle Billy. He kept on saying he ought to
go. And we told him he oughtn't. What earthly good can Jimmy do out
there, with his poor little heart all dicky? He'll simply die of it. You
don't suppose I'd have stopped him if I'd thought it was good for him to
go? Or if I'd thought he really wanted to? We told him all that--Uncle
Billy and I did--we told him straight that if he tried to get out we'd
try and stop him."
"Oh," I said, "you _told_ him. That's a different thing."
"Things, Furny, always are different to what you think them. At least
they're never half so nasty. Of course we told him. And of course he
laughed in our faces. We thought we _had_ stopped him. But--he's slipped
through our fingers.
"We might," she said, "have known."
I heard her say all that, though I wasn't listening. It comes back to me
that she said it. It was dawning on me that in this queer business there
were details, quite important details, that had escaped me. The war had
taken up my attention to the exclusion of Viola's affairs. But it was
evident that things had happened while I was away. I was thinking of
something that she let out.
"Look here," I said, "when you say you told him, do you mean that you and
he have been seeing each other?"
"Of course we've been seeing each other. Until he stopped it. He said he
couldn't stand the strain."
"And you?" I said. "Did you stand it?"
She looked at me straight and hard.
"You've no right to ask me that," she said.
* * * * *
Well, perhaps I hadn't. And if I had owned frankly that I hadn't all
might have been well. But, as it was, before I knew where we both were,
we had quarrelled.
Yes. I quarrelled with Viola; or she quarrelled with me; it really
doesn't matter how you put it; and it shows the awful tension we must
have been living in.
When I heard her say that I had no right to ask her that question I
answered that I thought I had.
She said, "What right?"
And I said if she would think a little she would see what right.
And at that she fired up and the blaze was awful. We two were up there
alone and she had me at her mercy. She held me in the blaze.
"I suppose," she said, "I'm to think of your everlasting meddling with my
affairs?"
I pointed out that a charge of meddling came rather oddly from a lady who
honoured me by staying in my house because she preferred it to her
husband's.
"You know perfectly well why I'm staying in your house; and if you don't,
Norah does. I could have stayed with my father, for that matter."
I said I thought that that was extremely doubtful--in the circumstances.
I had her there, and she knew it, for she retired in bad order on an
irrelevant point. She said I was no judge of the circumstances.
I said peaceably that perhaps I wasn't, but that she must own that I had
behaved as if I were. At any rate I'd given her the benefit of the doubt.
She said, "You talk as if I'd been through the Divorce Court. Perhaps
that's where you think I ought to be. The benefit of the doubt! You
certainly _have_ given it me. It's been nothing but doubt with you,
Walter, ever since I knew you. You always thought awful things about me.
I know you have. I could _see_ you thinking them. You thought vile things
about me, and vile things about Jimmy. You came rushing out to Belgium
because you thought them. And the other day you thought the same thing of
me and Charlie Thesiger, and you came rushing after me again and giving
me away, and behaving so that everybody else would think me awful too."
"My dear child, you owned yourself that Charlie--"
"Oh--Charlie! As if he mattered! He was only being an ass--the war upset
him, or something. I don't care what you think about Charlie--he doesn't
either--but why you should go out of your way to think _me_ awful--"
I said I thought we'd done with that.
"No," she said, "we haven't done with it. I want to get to the bottom of
it. What _makes_ you do these things? I believe you _want_ to make out
that I'm horrid, just as you wanted to make out that poor little Jimmy
was, when I went to him in Bruges."
She went on. "I can understand _that_, because I did go to him, and I--I
cared for him and you didn't like it. I can even understand your wanting
_me_ to be horrid then, because it made it easier for you. I had the
sense to see that that was all that was the matter with you _then_, so I
didn't mind. But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can
it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or horrid?"
She had rushed on, carried away by her own passion, without seeing where
she was going. I don't think she had seen, any more than I had, that for
nine years I had been living behind a screen. A screen that had hidden me
from myself. I don't think she saw even now when she came crashing into
it.
It was I who saw.
The thing was down about my ears; and it wasn't the violence of its fall
that terrified me; it was my own nakedness. I wasn't prepared to find
myself morally undressed.
I turned away from her. I began fiddling with my pens and papers. I
trailed long slip-proofs under her eyes, pretending that I had work to
do. But she saw through my pretences and her voice followed me.
It was softer, though. It seemed to be pleading, as if she knew nothing
about me and my screen.
"What harm did I ever do you? Or poor Jimmy either? I didn't let you
marry me. You ought to be grateful to Jimmy. At least he saved you from
that."
I said I thought we needn't drag her husband into it, and I haven't a
notion what I meant. I had to say something, and if it sounded
disagreeable, so much the better.
And she said there I was again--thinking that I had to remind her that
Jimmy _was_ her husband.
"You certainly seem to have forgotten it," I said.
"_He_ knows how much I've forgotten."
With that last word she left me.
I tried hard to shake the horror of it off. I remember I sat down to my
proofs, and I suppose I tried to correct them. But all the time I heard
Viola's voice saying, "I can understand your wanting me to be horrid
_then_, because it made it easier for you.... But why on earth you should
keep it up like this! What can it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or
horrid?"
It went on in my head till the words ceased to have any meaning. I had
only a dreadful sense that I should remember them to-morrow, and that
perhaps when to-morrow came I should know what they meant.
* * * * *
And when to-morrow came the war took up my attention again, so that I
actually forgot that Viola had said she was going out to it.
She had let the subject drop abruptly. She didn't even refer to it when
my friend the editor of the _Morning Standard_ rang me up the next day to
ask me if I'd go out to Belgium as their Special Correspondent.
He was charmingly frank about it. He told me that it was Tasker Jevons he
wanted, and Tasker Jevons he had asked to go, but since he couldn't get
him (and his powerful pen) why then, he'd had to fall back on me. Jevons,
he said, had let him down pretty badly; he'd understood from Jevons that
he was prepared to go for them at twelve hours' notice. And he'd given
him twenty-four hours; and he'd found that he'd gone out there two days
ago. Chucked them, my friend the editor supposed, for another paper.
Could I, at twenty-three hours' notice, take his place?
I said I could and I would, and I put him right about Jevons.
And then I went to see about my motor-car.
It was when Viola began to bother me about her passport that the fight
began.
First of all, she asked me what I was doing about a motor-car? I told her
she needn't worry herself about my motor-car. It wasn't any concern of
hers. She grinned at that and said, All right. What she really wanted was
to consult me about her passport.
And when I refused to be consulted about her passport, to hear a word
about her passport or about her going, she walked straight out of the
house into a passing taxi that took her to the Belgian Legation, where
she saw that weak-minded secretary that Jevons had handled; and she came
back in time for tea, very cheerful and dressed in a sort of khaki
uniform she had ordered, with a tunic and knee-breeches and puttees and a
Red Cross brassard on her right arm.
She said it had been a very tight squeeze, but she'd worked it, down
to her uniform, and it was all right, and if I'd had any difficulty with
my motor people (I had had awful difficulty, but how she knew it I
haven't to this day found out. Sometimes I think she'd worked that too;
she knew the firm, and she wasn't Mrs. Tasker Jevons for nothing)--if
I'd had any difficulty she could put that straight for me. She'd got
_her_ car--Jimmy'd ordered it for Amershott and forgotten about it--and
her chauffeur, and I could go in it with her if I liked.
It was a better car than the one I'd had in Belgium before or, she said
significantly, than the one I was going to take out with me. It was true
that I didn't know anything about cars.
Then Norah, my wife, stood up beside her sister, flagrantly partisan, and
said, Couldn't I see it wasn't any use trying to stop her? She had me at
every point. If I wouldn't take her she'd go by herself with the
chauffeur.
And when I said, How about my promises--my word of honour? Viola laughed.
"Your honour's all right, Wally," she said. "You're not taking me out;
I'm taking you."
And very early in the morning we motored down to Folkestone to catch the
midday boat for Ostend. And Norah came with us to see us off. If I'd
given her the smallest encouragement she'd have come too. I _might_ take
her, she said; it was beastly being left behind.
I said, like a savage, that Belgium was no place for women. I'd take my
sister-in-law there, but not my wife.
I suppose the dressing-down I'd got from Viola two nights before had
rankled. I must have felt that I was getting my own back that time, when
I threw it up to her that she wasn't my wife.
Norah, I said, had too much sense to want to go where she wasn't wanted.
But Viola only laughed again and said, "Please remember that I'm taking
you, not you me. And Norah wants to go as much as I do, and it isn't
altogether on your account. You needn't think it. As for keeping her
back, you couldn't do it if she meant to go. It's Baby that's keeping
her, not you."
And then she thanked God she hadn't got a child.
And so, sparring and chaffing by turns, half in play and half in
earnest--for a secret subterranean anger smouldered still in both of
us--we got off. I remember at the last moment Norah--dear little
Norah--telling her that she was not to bully me. She was to let me sit
in the motor-car as much as I liked; and she was to see that I didn't
get into any danger.
Danger? Danger? As the great fans of the screws churned the harbour water
into foam that the waves thinned and flattened out again till the green
lane broadened between our track and the pier head where Norah stood, and
the little, slender, dark blue figure became a dot on the pier and lost
itself in the crowd of dots and disappeared, then, for the first time, it
struck me that to be going off like this, alone, with Viola, was danger
in itself.
Because, the other night she had made me see myself as I really was--a
man, not of an irreproachable rectitude, an immaculate purity (had I
ever, had anybody ever really supposed that I was such a man?) but quite
deplorably human, and blind--yes, my dear Viola, blind as any bat--and
vulnerable, so vulnerable that I think you might have spared me, you
might have had some pity.
I found myself addressing her like that, in my heart, as I walked up and
down, up and down the deck, not looking at her, but acutely aware of her,
where she sat in her deck-chair, bundled up in her great khaki motor-coat
and in the rugs I had wrapped round her.
I resented the power she had over me to make me aware of her--at such a
time, or at any time, for that matter. Here was I, a Special
Correspondent, going out to the war; and there, on the other side of the
Channel, _was_ the war; in the fields of France and of Flanders men were
fighting, men were slaughtering each other every day by thousands. I was
a man and I should have been thinking of those men; and here I was,
compelled against my conscience and my will to think of this woman. She
had come out with me against my conscience and my will, and against my
judgment and my good taste and my honour and my common sense, against
everything in me that I set most store by. I hadn't meant to take her
with me, and she had made me take her.
And when my common sense told me that she hadn't; that I wasn't taking
her, and that she had as much right to be on the Ostend boat as I had, I
still resented her being there. I still raged as I realized the power she
had over me. She had always had it. She had had it the first day I ever
saw her, when she had walked into my rooms against my orders, half an
hour behind the time I had appointed, and had made herself my secretary
against my will. She had had it when she used me as a stalking-horse
to draw her brother's suspicions away from her and Jevons; she had had it
when she drew me after her to Belgium, and when I followed her from
Bruges to Canterbury at her bidding; she had had it when I married Norah
(hadn't she told me, in the insolence of it, that she had meant that I
should marry Norah?). She had had it, this malign power over me, the
other night, and she had it now. She always would have it.
It wasn't my fault, I told myself, if she compelled me to look at her,
this time, as I passed her deck-chair.
I looked at her, and she sent me a little sad interrogative smile that
asked me why I walked the decks thus savagely and alone? And I paid no
attention to her or to her smile. In the very arrogance of isolation I
continued to walk the decks. I meant her to see that I _could_ be alone
and savage if I liked.
And when I looked at her again (she couldn't have _made_ me this time,
for she was unaware of me, lost in some profound meditation of her own),
when I looked at her again my anger and my resentment died with a sort of
struggle and a pang.
She had, after all, the grace of her ignorance and innocence. If she had
had no pity on me, it was because she was as blind as she had said I was.
She didn't, she couldn't see me as she had made me see myself. She didn't
know that she had any power over me, or else she wouldn't have used her
power; she was too honourable for that, too chivalrous. You could trust
her to play the game until she threw it up and left it.
And I passed again in my sullen tramping, and I looked at her for the
third time, urged by the remorse that stung me. And this time she drew me
so that I went over to her and sat by her. I looked at my watch, we had
been two hours on board.
I had left her two hours alone; and in those two hours she had suffered.
Her face was set now in a sort of brooding fear and anguish; her
breathing had a tremor in it, as if her heart dragged at her side. It was
better, far better, that we should quarrel than she should suffer and sit
quivering in silence and see frightful things.
But I saw that she wasn't going to quarrel, she wasn't going to pitch
into me; she wasn't going to assert herself and domineer over me just
now. This agony of hers had made her gentle, so that she spoke to me as
if she were sorry for me after all.
"Are you tired," she said, "of tramping up and down?"
"Horribly tired."
"Put my rug round you if you're going to sit still. Norah wouldn't let
you sit still without a rug."
"Norah wouldn't let me do anything I shouldn't do."
She smiled down at me, still sad, but with the least little flicker of
irony on the top of her sadness. "Norah's job isn't very hard. You don't
ever _want_ to do anything you shouldn't."
"Oh--don't I?"
"No, never. That's the pull you have over naughty people like me. You're
so good."
"It wasn't my goodness you were rubbing into me the other night."
"Never mind the other night. It doesn't matter what I said the other
night. Only what I'm saying now this minute has any importance. But it
was your goodness, if it comes to that."
"Queer sort of goodness." I was still, you see, a little stung.
"All goodness," she said, "is queer, carried to that pitch. But you're a
dear in spite of it. I won't bully you."
We made the last part of the crossing on the highway of the sunset. The
propeller lashed through crimson and fiery copper, and the white wake
tossed on to the highway turned to rose and gold and its edges to purple.
I had left her again and I called to her to look at this wonder of the
sky and sea; but she shook her head at me. There was no need to call her.
She had looked. I could see by her eyes that the intolerable beauty had
brought Jevons back to her. He was there for her in all beauty and in all
wonder.
Then she called to _me_. "Wally, come here. I want to speak to you."
I came.
"You thought I was going to leave Jimmy. But I wasn't. _He_ knew I
wasn't. Why, the first night I knew how impossible it was."
I said, Yes. Of course it was impossible. And of course he knew.
"I shan't mind if only we can get to him before anything happens."
I said nothing would happen, and of course we should get to him.
She was silent so long that I was startled when she said, "Wally--your
nervous aren't _you_, are they?"
I said, No. No. Of course they weren't.
I knew what she was thinking. Out of the intolerable beauty she had seen
Jimmy rise with all his gestures. She heard the cracking of his knuckles
and saw the jerking of his thumb. And these things became tender and
pathetic and dear to her as if he were dead.
And she had seen herself shudder at them as if it had been another woman
who shuddered, a strange and pitiless woman whom she hated.
"It wouldn't matter so much if he had wanted to go," she said.
"Why do you keep on saying that he didn't want to go?"
"Because he said so. He said he was only going because he couldn't go."
"I think you're doing him a great injustice. He told me he wanted to go;
I've no doubt he did want to go--just like any other man."
"Yes. To be just like any other man--_that's_ what he wanted. But he
couldn't be. He isn't like any other man. And so it's worse for him.
Can't you see that it's worse for him? It'll hurt him more."
I said I didn't see it, and that she was absurd and morbid and utterly
unreasonable, and that she was making Jimmy out unreasonable and morbid
and absurd.
She told me then I didn't understand either of them; and we were silent,
as if we had quarrelled again, until we came in sight of the Flemish
coast.
We sailed into Ostend on the tail-end of the sunset. What was left of it
was enough to keep up for us the intense moment of transfiguration, so
that we didn't miss it. The long white Digue, the towers, the domes of
the casinos and hotels, the high, flat fronts of the houses showed
soaked in light, quivering with light. Ostend might have been some
enchanted Eastern city. It was as if the heroic land faced us with the
illusion of enchantment, to cover the desolation that lay beyond her
dykes.
And we who looked at it were still silent, not now as if we had
quarrelled, but as if this beauty had made peace between us.
Viola's face had changed. It reminded me in the oddest way of her brother
Reggie's. I think that for the moment, while it lasted, she had forgotten
Jimmy, she had forgotten her brother Reggie; she had touched the fringe
of the immensity that had drawn them from her and swallowed them up. And
in forgetting them she had forgotten her unhappy self.
In Ostend, at any rate, I was to have no more of her brooding. We had no
sooner landed than she became the adorable creature who had run away with
Jevons nine years ago and led me that dance through the cities of
Flanders. She showed the same wholehearted devotion to the adventure, the
same innocence, the same tact in ignoring my state of mind. She seemed to
be making terms with me as she had made them then, suggesting that if _I_
would ignore a few things I should find her the most delightful companion
in my travels. We must, she seemed to say, of course forget everything
that she had said to me the other night or that I had said to her before
or since; and, as she swung beside me in her khaki, her freedom and her
freshness declared how admirably _she_ had forgotten. It wasn't as if we
didn't know what we were really out for.
Except that she was a maturer person--thirty-one and not twenty-two--I
might have mistaken her for Viola Thesiger, my secretary, setting out, in
defiance of all conventions, with little Jevons, to look for Belfries in
Belgium, and taking the war, since there _was_ a war on, in her stride.
And as I walked with her through the same streets where nine years ago I
had hunted for her and Jevons, it struck me as a strange, unsettling
thing that I should be taking her out to look for Jevons and at the same
time playing precisely Jevons's part in the adventure. She too must have
been aware of this oddness--for she stopped suddenly to say to me, "Do
you remember when I ran away with Jimmy? Isn't it funny that I should be
running away with you?"
I said it was. Very funny indeed. And I wondered why she had drawn my
attention to it just now? Did she want to make me judge by the
transparent innocence of this running the not quite so transparent
innocence of that? I think so. Remember, it was Reggie Thesiger's
apparent doubt as to her innocence that had been at the bottom of all the
trouble of the last five years. It accounted for her attack on me the
other night. It was as if she had turned to say to me triumphantly, "Now,
perhaps, when I'm running away with _your_ precious perfection, at last
you understand?"
We had some difficulty in finding quarters and Viola insisted on our
staying in the Station Hotel, which had been bombarded by an aeroplane
the night before. She pointed out that it was almost entirely empty. "And
so," she said, "there won't be anybody to see us."
It was as if she wished to remind me by how thin a thread _my_ reputation
hung.
The business of our passports kept us in Ostend the next morning. I had
made up my mind there would be difficulty about Viola's military pass, I
was even contemplating the possibility of her being sent back to England
by the next boat; but no; she had forestalled obstruction, and the pocket
of her khaki coat was stuffed with letters from the War Office, the
British Red Cross, and the French and Belgian Embassies. In fact, there
was one horrid moment at the depot when it looked as if the Special
Correspondent would be smuggled through under Viola's protection.
"You see, Furny," she said, "nobody's going to stop me. Nobody wants to
stop me."
At last we got off, and early in the afternoon we were in Bruges.
We had run into the Market-Place before we knew where we were; and yonder
in the street at the back of it was Viola's _pension_, and here on our
right hand was Jimmy's hotel, and there, towering before us, was the
Belfry. We looked at each other. And through the war and across nine
years, it all came back to us.
"The Belfry's still there," I said.
"It always was." She said it a little sternly. But she had smiled at the
allusion, all the same--the smile that had never been denied to it.
We stayed an hour in Bruges and lunched there in Jimmy's hotel. The fat
proprietor and his wife were still there and they remembered us. They
remembered Jimmy. And they had seen him three days ago. Mr. Chevons had
passed through Bruges in his Red Cross motor-car. They seemed uncertain
whether Viola was Mrs. Chevons or Mrs. Furnival, and they addressed her
indifferently as either. An awful indifference had come to them. Of the
war they said, _"C'est triste, nest-ce pas?"_ We left them, sitting
pallid and depressed behind the barricade of their bureau, gazing after
us with the saddest of smiles.
That hour in Bruges was a mistake; so was our lunching at Jimmy's hotel.
It was too much for Viola. It brought Jimmy so horribly near to her. I
don't know what she was thinking, but I am convinced that from the moment
of our entering Bruges the poor child had made up her mind that Jimmy had
been killed. The smile she had given to the Belfry was the last flicker
of her self-control, and halfway through lunch the grey melancholy that
Bruges had absorbed from Jimmy nine years ago came down on her, as nine
years ago it had come down on me, and it swallowed her up. By the time
the waiter brought the coffee she was done for. Her eyes stared, hard and
hot, over the cup she tried to drink from. She couldn't drink because of
the spasm in her throat.
"Come," I said, "we must clear out of this."
We cleared out.
I too was invaded by the grey melancholy as we came to the bridge by the
eastern gate where I had found Jevons that night leaning over and looking
into the Canal. It was the sentry's sudden springing up to challenge us
that saved me. I hoped that it would save Viola. She enjoyed the
sentries.
But not this time. Her nerves were all on edge and she showed some
irritation at the delay. I felt then that I had to take her in hand.
"My dear child," I said (we were running out on the road to Ghent now),
"do you realize that there's a war?"
She answered, "Yes, Wally, yes, I know there is."
"Do you know that Antwerp's over there, a little way to the north? And
that they've dragged up the big guns from Namur for the siege of
Antwerp?"
"Oh, Wally--_have_ they?"
She turned her face to the north as if she thought she could see or hear
the siege-guns.
"But you _said_ Jimmy was in Ghent."
"Jimmy," I said, "is probably in Ghent. If he isn't, he's in Antwerp. Do
you know that the battlefields are down there--no--there--to the south,
where I'm pointing? There's fighting going on there _now_."
She said, "Yes, dear, I know, I know," very gently; and she put her hand
on my knee, as if she recognized the war as my private tragedy and was
sorry for me. Then she fell back to her brooding.
Somewhere on the great flagged road between Bruges and Ecloo we met a
straggling train of refugees--old men and women and children, bent double
under their enormous bundles, making for Bruges and Ostend. They stared,
not at us, but at the road in front of them, with a dreadful apathy, as
we passed.
"This," I said, "is what finishes _me_--every time I see it."
She said nothing.
"Do you realize," I said, "that those women and those little children are
flying for their lives? That they've come, doubled up like that, for
miles--from Termonde or Alost? That they've lost everything they ever
had?" (I can hear my own voice beating out the horror of it in hard,
cruel jerks.) "That their homes--their _homes_--are burned to ashes
somewhere down there?"
At my last jerk she turned.
"No," she said. "I'm cold and hard and stupid, and I do _not_ realize it.
Neither do you. If either of us realized it for two seconds we should be
either cutting our throats in that ditch or going back to Ostend now with
a load of those women and children, instead of tearing past them like
devils in this damned car.
"I can't realize anything till I know whether Jimmy's all right or not. I
can't see anything, or feel anything, or think of anything but Jimmy.
Bruges is Jimmy and Belgium is Jimmy and the whole war is Jimmy--to me.
I don't care if you _are_ horrified. I can't help it if I _am_ callous.
It is so. And you can't make it different."
I remember saying quite abjectly that I was sorry--that I was only trying
to turn her mind to other things as a relief.
"I'm to turn my mind to _that_--as a relief!"
She showed me a woman I was trying not to see, a woman who carried the
bedding of her household on her back and dragged a four-year-old child by
the hand. The child slipped to its knees at every other yard, and at
every other yard was pulled up whimpering and dragged again--not with
anger or any emotion whatever, but with a sickening repetition, as if its
mother's arm was a mechanism set going to pull and drag.
If ever there was a weathercock it was my sister-in-law. Without even
pretending to consult me, she made Colville, the chauffeur, turn the car
round. (He was _her_ chauffeur, after all, she said.)
"I don't know," she said, "whether I realize that woman or not, or
whether you do. But I'm going to take her into Bruges."
And we took her. (Viola nursed the four-year-old child all the way.) We
also took an old man and a young woman with a baby at her breast, and two
small children. It was the only thing to be done, Viola said.
It was nearly half-past five when we left Bruges the second time.
"God only knows," I groaned, "what time we'll get to Ghent!"
"He does," she said. "He knows perfectly well we shall get there by
half-past seven."
And we did.
It was dark when we turned into the Place d'Armes and drew up before the
long, grey Hôtel de la Poste. I jumped out and stood by the kerb to give
Viola my hand.
"But--" she said, "I _know_ this place."
"You ought to."
I don't know where she expected us to go. She still sat in the car as if
held there by the shock of recognition. She ignored my outstretched hand.
"You'd better take your things," she said at last, "if you want to get
out here. I'm going on to look for Jimmy."
I had then my first full sense of what I was in for. I saw that she was
perfectly prepared to throw me over, to dump me down here or anywhere
else and go on by herself with the car and the chauffeur that were, or
ought to have been, mine.
She didn't care if I was Special Correspondent to the _Morning Standard_,
and she had that beastly chauffeur in her pocket all the time. (I
discovered afterwards that she'd laid in food for him and hidden it in
the locker under the front seat, so that they might be ready for any
sort of adventure.) And yet in the very moment that I realized her
disastrous obstinacy I found her intolerably pathetic.
"If you want to look for Jimmy," I said, "you'd better get out too. He'll
be here if he's anywhere in Ghent."
But she was already on the kerb, brushing me aside. She had seen behind
my back the approach of the concierge and she made for him.
"Is Mr. Jevons in this hotel--Mr. Tasker Jevons?"
Yes, Mr. Chevons was in the hotel. Madame would find him in the lounge.
She had swept past him to the stair of the lounge, and I was following
her discreetly when the proprietor dashed out of his bureau to intercept
us. The lounge, he said, was reserved from seven till nine o'clock for
the officers of the General Staff.
Viola had paid no attention to the proprietor and was sweeping up the
stair. I gave Jevons's name and explained that the lady was Mrs. Jevons.
The proprietor, a portly and pompous Belgian, positively dissolved in
smiles and bows and apologetic gestures. _Mille pardons, monsieur, mille
pardons._ It would be _all_ right. Monsieur Chevons was dining with the
officers of the General Staff.
He did not know that Madame was expected. He was to reserve a room for
Monsieur?
I told him to reserve rooms for me and the chauffeur, and to consult Mr.
Jevons about Madame. And I hurried up the stair after Viola.
She was waiting for me at the turn, on the landing, by the wide archway
of the lounge, where the great glass screen began that shut off the
staircase. She stood back from the entrance, looking in, and smiling at
what she saw. It was clear by her attitude and her absorption that
something was happening in there.
As I approached she made a sign to me and withdrew farther back and up
the stair.
"He's there," she whispered. "Over there. In that corner."
For a moment we stood together on the stair, looking down through the
glass screen into the lounge.