officers of the Belgian General Staff. Most of the tables were cleared
now and deserted. But from our place on the stair we had a clear view
slantwise of one small table in the corner. And we saw Jimmy seated at
that table.
At least we made him out.
All but Jimmy's head was hidden by the figures of a Belgian General and
two Colonels. They had closed in on him (they were evidently all four at
the end of their dinner); they had closed in on him in an access of
emotion and enthusiasm. The General (the one who sat beside him) had his
arm round Jimmy's shoulder; the two who sat facing him leaned towards
Jimmy over half the table, and one grasped Jimmy's right hand in his; the
other was making some sort of competitive demonstration. The disengaged
arms of the three held up the glasses in which they were about to pledge
him. And at the other end of the room a scattered group of soldiers rose
to their feet and looked on smiling and signalling applause.
What was happening down there was public homage to Jimmy.
And in between the two dark Belgian uniforms that obscured him you could
just see a bit of Jimmy's khaki, and from among the white and grizzled
heads that pressed on him you saw Jimmy's face and Jimmy's flush and
Jimmy's twinkle; his incredible, irrepressible twinkle. You could even
see the tips of Jimmy's little front teeth trying to bite down his lip
into some sort of composure. You could see that he was very shy and very
modest; you could see that in spite of his shyness and his modesty he
was frightfully pleased; but more than anything you could see that he was
amused.
Positively, positively, he had the air of not taking his Belgian officers
very seriously.
"We mustn't go down yet," said Viola, "or we'll spoil it."
So we waited, looking at Jimmy through the screen, while the officers
clinked their glasses and drank to him and called his name; and the group
that looked on echoed it; and the waiters who had come in to see what was
happening, repeated it among themselves.
"_Vive l'Angleterre! Vive les Anglais! Vive Chevons! Chevons! Chevons!_"
"I wonder," said Viola, "what Jimmy has been up to? You can take me to
him."
When we got to the table we found Jimmy trying to explain to the General
and the two Colonels in execrable French that he didn't know what it was
all about. _He_ hadn't done anything.
Then he saw Viola.
For one second, while he stared at her across the room, he appeared to be
suffering from a violent shock. He was so visibly hit that the two men
who had their backs to us turned round to see what it was that had
affected him. His flush had gone suddenly and he was breathing hard, with
his mouth a little open.
I heard him saying something in French about his wife.
He recovered, however, in a second, and disentangled himself from the
General and the Colonels and from the dinner-table, and came forward.
And as he came, I noticed something odd about him. He limped slightly.
His khaki had a battered look; it was soiled and torn in places, and the
Red Cross brassard on his sleeve was simply filthy.
And he had only been out three days, mind you. He was only three days
ahead of us. But he had lost no time.
As they strolled up to each other and met midway in the big public room,
in the fraction of time that passed before their hands touched I heard
him draw a hard, quivering breath and let it out in a long sigh. That
breath was a suppressed cry of trouble and of acquiescence.
Then (I could have blessed him for it) he twinkled.
Viola said, "What _have_ you been up to?"
And Jimmy, "I say, I like that! What are _you_ doing here? Have you come
to look at the Belfry?"
"No. I've come to look at _you_!" She put her hand on his shoulder.
He said, "That's a jolly rig-out you've got," and that was all.
The General and the two Colonels came forward and were presented to Mrs.
Jevons; and Mr. Walter Furnival ("one of our war-correspondents") was
presented to the General and the two Colonels. They saluted Madame; they
begged Madame to accept their profoundest congratulations; they regretted
that Madame had not been present just now when they were drinking her
husband's health.
And the old General (the one with the white hair and imperial) informed
her that Monsieur her husband had a very poor opinion of the Belgian
Army.
"He has saved the lives of three Belgian officers and I do not know _how_
many Belgian soldiers--and he says that it is nothing!"
And the stout, florid Colonel, who had been trying to look young and
rakish ever since he had turned and caught sight of Viola, suggested that
"Perhaps, if he had saved your British, he would not have said that it
was nothing."
And the lean, iron-grey Colonel with the ferocious moustache remarked in
an austere, guttural voice, "_Il est impayable--lui!_"
Jimmy had been offering cigarettes to them as if he thought that was the
only thing that would stop them. Then the old white-haired General sat
between Viola and him with his arm round Jimmy's shoulder and began
again, so loudly that everybody in the room could hear him.
"Your husband, Madame, is a man who does not know what fear is--who
does not care what death is. For two nights and three days, Madame,
he has been down there--at Alost and Termonde--under shell-fire.
_Mais--un enfer, Madame!_ You would have thought he had been born under
fire, your husband. _Ce n'est pas un homme, c'est un salamandre_.
Bullets--mitrailleuse--shrapnel--it is no more to him than to go out in a
shower of rain. When our men were scuttling, and shouted to him to get
under shelter, what do you think he said?--'_Ouvrir une parapluie--ça ne
vaut pas la peine_."
There was a shout of laughter.
"That," said Viola, "is the sort of thing he _would_ say. And please, I
want to know what's the matter with his leg."
I can see her now, sitting on that crimson velvet seat in the lounge and
looking past the gesticulations of the General to Jevons, who was shaking
his head at her as much as to say, "Don't you believe the old boy, he's a
shocking story-teller."
The old General seemed aware of her preoccupation, for he rose, murmuring
affectionately, "_Mon petit Chevons_. I will not praise him to you,
Madame. No doubt you know what he is."
I can see her standing up there and giving her hand to the old General
and trying to stiffen her face to say, "I know."
Evidently she thought General Roubaix was too voluble to be entirely
trustworthy, for, when he left us and Jimmy had gone out to see about our
dinner, she addressed herself to the two Colonels.
"Please tell me what my husband _really_ did."
Both the Colonels tried to tell her; but it was the younger one with the
moustache (the one who had said that Jimmy was _"impayable"_) who
satisfied her.
It was true, every bit of it. Jevons, it seemed, had been in the thick of
the bombardment of Alost and in the fighting for the bridge at Termonde.
His practice was to leave Kendal and the motor-car behind him in some
place of shelter while he walked into the fire. Sometimes he took his
Belgian stretcher-bearers with him, sometimes, when they didn't like the
look of it, he went by himself. He didn't care, the Colonel said, _where_
he went or how. If it was through rifle-fire or mitrailleuse he went on
his hands and knees--he wriggled on his stomach. If it was shrapnel he
took his chance. He had saved one of his three officers by carrying him
straight out of his own battery, when the German guns had found its
range; and he had driven his car, by himself, across a five-mile-long
field, under a hailstorm of shrapnel, to get the other two.
"You see," the Colonel expounded, "your husband has chosen the most
dangerous of all field ambulance work. Those high-speed scouting cars,
running low on the ground, can go where a big ambulance cannot. It is
magnificent what he has done."
When Jevons came back they could still hardly keep their eyes off him;
they could hardly tear themselves away. It was "_À demain, Monsieur_,"
and "_À demain, Colonel_" as if they had arranged another deadly tryst.
"Well," said Jimmy, "how do you like them?"
"Oh--they're dears," said Viola, "especially the one with the moustache.
Do you know, they've told me everything except what's the matter with
leg."
"My leg?" said Jimmy. "A bit of shell barked it. I'm jolly glad it's my
leg and not my hand."
I was a little frightened when Viola left us alone after dinner. I
thought he would pitch into me for bringing her. But he only said sadly,
"You oughtn't to have brought her, Furny. But I suppose you couldn't stop
her."
I said, No, I couldn't stop her. But I hadn't brought her. She had
brought me.
We sat on till the lounge was open to the guests of the hotel. And when
the war-correspondents began to drop in I saw that Jevons was uneasy.
"D'you mind if I turn in, old man?" he said.
I asked him if his wound was hurting him.
He stooped and caressed it pensively.
"No," he said. "Not a bit. I like my wound. It--it makes me feel manly."
Presently he said good night and left me.
I thought--yes, I certainly thought--that he exaggerated his limp a
little as he crossed the room, and for a moment I wondered, "Is he
playing up to the correspondents?"
Then I saw that Viola stood in the doorway waiting for him and that she
gave him her arm.
And then through the glass screen I saw them going together up the stair.
And I remembered the tale that he had told me nine years ago, how he had
seen her standing there and looking down at him--half frightened--through
the glass screen, and how he had said to me, "I couldn't. She was so
helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I couldn't."
It was the same room and the same glass screen and the same stair. And it
was the same man. I knew him. I knew him. I had always known him. (Was
there ever any risk he hadn't taken?) I had never, really, for one
moment misunderstood.
I certainly knew why he "liked" his wound.
XIV
We had breakfast very early the next morning, for Jevons was under orders
to start at eight o'clock for Termonde. We had a table reserved for us in
a corner of the restaurant. The hotel was full of Belgian officers, and
I found I was infinitely better off in attaching myself to Jevons than if
I had joined the war-correspondents.
Viola (I may say that her rig-out which Jevons had admired so much, the
khaki tunic and breeches, made us terribly conspicuous) had come down in
a contrite mood. I heard her telling Jevons that he must be kind to me,
for I had had an awful time with her and I had been an angel.
Well, I had had an awful time; I don't think I remember ever having had a
worse time than the hours I had spent in her company since she had laid
into me on Tuesday evening.
But I had not been an angel; far from it. Looking back on those hours, I
can see that I behaved to her like a perfect brute.
She had her revenge. One of those revenges that are the more
triumphant because they are unpremeditated. She had dished me as a
war-correspondent.
For I declare that from the moment when we found Jevons and his General
in the hotel I became the victim of her miserable point of view. I could
only see the war through Jevons, and as a part of Jevons; I might have
said, like Viola, that to me Ghent was Jevons, and Belgium was Jevons,
and the war was Jevons. I suppose I saw as much of the War from first to
last as any Special Correspondent at the front, and I know, that, barring
the Siege of Antwerp, the three weeks when Jimmy was in it were by no
means the most important or the most thrilling weeks in the war; and of
the one event, the Siege of Antwerp, I didn't see as much as I ought to
have seen, being most terribly handicapped by Viola. And yet--perhaps
a little because of Viola, but infinitely more because of Jevons--those
three weeks stand out in my memory before the battles of the Aisne and
Marne and the long fight for Calais. Because of Jevons I have made them
figure, in the columns of the _Morning Standard_ and elsewhere, with a
superior vividness; even now when I recall them I seem to have lived with
Jevons in Flanders through long periods of time.
I have the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of
the _Morning Standard_, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are
interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his
performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written a very fine
account of Melle, which I understand is a small village four and a-half
miles from Ghent. But there are other events--the Fall of Antwerp, for
instance."
Well, we got the story of the Fall of Antwerp all right. But Jimmy wrote
it for me. It was the last thing he did write.
Yes: he had only three weeks of it, all told. He went out on Tuesday,
September the twenty-second, and he came back on Tuesday, October the
thirteenth. It was his infernal luck that he should have had no more of
it.
And yet, I don't know. I don't see how he could have held out much longer
at his pitch of intensity. Three weeks would have been nothing to any
other man. But Jevons could do more with three weeks than another man
could do with a three years' campaign, and he contrived to crowd into his
term the maximum of glory and of risk. And when it was all over it was
less as if Fate had foiled him than as if he had "given" himself three
weeks.
But Jimmy was discontented, and every morning at breakfast we listened to
the most extraordinary lamentations. His job, he said, wasn't at all the
jolly thing it looked. For he was under orders the whole blessed time.
He'd no more freedom, hadn't Jimmy, than that poor devil of a waiter.
He'd got to go or to stay where a fussy old ram of a Colonel sent him. So
here he was in Ghent, an open city, when he wanted to be in Antwerp. He
hadn't been anywhere--anywhere at all. As for what he'd done, he couldn't
see what the fuss was all about. He hadn't done anything. He'd seen a
little fight in a turnip-field, and a little squabble for a bridge you
could blow up to-day and build again to-morrow, and a little tin-pot town
peppered. And look at the war! Just look at the war!
And when we tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo,
the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next
week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There
wouldn't be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said. "There
won't be any Waterloo for another two years, if then."
He wasn't always lugubrious. It was only when he thought that he was
missing the Siege of Antwerp that his happiness was incomplete.
It was on our third morning, when he rushed off joyously (to Quatrecht, I
think), that I said to Viola, "You thought it would hurt him more than
other people. You needn't have come out after him. You see how much it's
hurting him."
"I'm glad I came," she said. "I don't mind as long as I can see."
"Do you remember him telling Reggie that he wouldn't be in the war
because he was a coward? Don't you wish Reggie could see him now?"
She didn't answer, and I saw that there was still a sting for her in
Reggie's name. The war might have made her forgive him, but there were
things that the war couldn't wipe out from her memory. And there was her
own rather appalling injustice to Jimmy. I wondered whether she was
thinking of how she had tried to stop his going to the front, and how she
had said he didn't want to go.
But I had to own that she had done the best thing for her peace of mind
by coming out.
_My_ peace of mind, I was told quite frankly, didn't matter. Jevons,
though he admitted that I couldn't have stopped her coming out, made me
responsible for her presence at the seat of war. The trouble was that she
insisted on following him wherever he went. And as it wasn't to be
expected that he would take her with him into the tight places that he
managed to get into in his own car, I had to have her in mine. Not that
Viola consented to my putting it that way. It was clear that she made
herself mistress of the situation when she obtained possession of that
car and manoeuvred (as I am convinced she did manoeuvre) for my own
failure with the firm that supplied it. On our first morning in Ghent we
came to what she called an understanding, when she rubbed it well into me
that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out,
and that the man was under her orders, not mine. If I liked to come with
her, why, of course I could. Otherwise, I could go halves with one of the
other correspondents in one of their cars. But she pointed out that I
could hardly do better than come with her, for by simply following Jimmy
I should get nearer to the firing-line than anybody else. (She had
assumed that the firing-line was the goal of every war-correspondent's
ambition.) I would find, she said, that it would work quite well.
It did. It worked better than if I had gone halves with the other
correspondents. For at this time war-correspondents were not greatly
loved by the military authorities, and they were having considerable
difficulty in getting near anything, and the time, Jimmy said, was
coming when they would be cleared neck and crop out of Belgium. My astute
sister-in-law had calculated on all this and on her own part in it.
"If you'll only trust me, Wally," she said the first day we started, when
all the correspondents in the hotel had turned out to see us off, "you'll
find that I'm your Providence and not your curse. I can get you through
where you'd never get yourself. Just look at those men how sick they
are."
I said I thought it would be only decent to take two or three of them
with us. We had room.
But Viola was firm. She said it would be most indecent. We should want
all the room we had for our wounded.
"Do you suppose I'm going to chivy Jimmy about without doing anything to
help him? As for you, you've only to sit tight and do what you're told.
You'll be all right as long as we follow Jimmy."
And so we followed him. My God, what a chase! But Viola's little
chauffeur was game and we followed. Though Jimmy had made elaborate
arrangements for stopping his wife's progress at least two miles outside
the danger-zone she always managed to get through. Sentries, colonels,
army medical officers--she twisted them into coils round her little
finger, and cast them from her and got through. And once through, we were
really quite useful in transporting wounded. Jevons and I between us
managed to keep her out of the actual firing-line by telling her she was
in all of it there was; and when we were loaded up with wounded there was
no difficulty in getting her away.
And certainly it served my turn well enough. Though I was compelled to
see the war through Jimmy, I saw the war.
By the end of our first week Jimmy seemed to get used to being followed
as a matter of course. We had followed him to Alost and Termonde and
Quatrecht and Zele. When we weren't following him we were near him
somewhere, working at the dressing-stations or among the refugees.
Then he did a mean thing. He managed to get himself sent to Antwerp for
three days. He sneaked off there by himself on the Sunday, and when we
tried to follow him we were turned back at Saint Nicolas, just too late
to see the British go through. He had worked it this time.
When he got back from Antwerp at the end of his three days we knew that
something had happened, something that he was keeping from us. It wasn't
only the fate of Antwerp that was hanging over him, as it hung over all
of us in that awful second week. It was as if he had seen something
intimate and terrible that he couldn't talk about.
That night after Viola had gone to her room he told me what had happened.
He had seen Charlie Thesiger's regiment at Saint Nicolas on Sunday. And
to-day--which was Tuesday--he had seen Charlie Thesiger. He had found him
lying dangerously wounded in the British Hospital at Antwerp. That, he
said, was what had kept him there. And he had brought him back with him
to Ghent. He was in the Couvent de Saint Pierre.
He thought, perhaps, it would be better not to tell Viola just yet.
Charlie didn't know, he said, that she was here.
The war was beginning to close round us.
* * * * *
The next day (Wednesday) he announced that he was going to Zele; but he
didn't, he really didn't want me to take Viola there. I could go by
myself, of course, if I liked, though he didn't care about her being
left.
But we did go. Viola's blood was up, after what she called Jimmy's
meanness, and there was no keeping her back.
We were a little uncertain of our way, for following Jimmy as we did, or
rather, following the direction Colville swore he had seen him start in,
took us much too far to the north. We found ourselves on the Antwerp
road, jammed in the traffic, and caught by a stream of refugees. We were
obliged to turn back to Ghent to get our bearings, but the business of
transporting women and children kept us on the Antwerp road all morning,
and it was past two o'clock before we started for Zele.
I remember this particular chase after Jimmy for many reasons. First, we
lost our way and never got to Zele at all.
Down in the south-east on the sky-line we saw a fleet of little clouds
that seemed to be anchored to the earth, and every cloud of the fleet was
the smoke from a burning village. West of the fleet was an enormous cloud
blown by the wind across miles of sky.
Viola was certain that the big cloud was Zele being burned to the ground,
and that Jimmy would be burned with it.
When I told her that it wasn't likely that Jimmy would stay in Zele when
it was burning she said that I didn't know Jimmy, and anyhow it was there
that she was going.
Suddenly Viola sat up very straight.
"Furny, is that guns I hear, or thunder?"
I said it was guns. A deep and solemn booming came from before and behind
us and on either side, east and west. We had rushed bang between the
French and German batteries.
The big cloud turned out to be smoke from a factory that the Belgians had
set fire to themselves, and in following it we had gone miles from Zele.
Now we followed the guns.
We turned east and struck off south and found ourselves in the village of
Baerlere. The lines of fire seemed suddenly to narrow in on us here.
There was a clean path down the centre of the street, for men and horses
stood back close under the housewalls on each side. The place was full of
soldiers. One of them told us that we could get to Zele by going east
through the village, but as the road was being shelled, he didn't advise
us to try.
We went down that clean middle of the street. We were safe enough as long
as we ran between the houses; but the village very soon came to an end,
and then, in the open road, we were in for it.
The fields dropped away from us on each side, leaving us as naked to the
German batteries as if we were running on a raised causeway. At the
bottom of the fields to our right there was a line of willows, beyond the
willows there was the river, and behind the river bank, on the further
side, were the German lines.
The grey smoke of their fire was still tangled in the willow-tops.
Colville drew up under the lee of the last house in the village. He
didn't like the look of that open road. Neither did I.
"Go on," said Viola. "What are you stopping for?"
The guns ceased firing for a moment and we rushed it.
"I do wish," said Viola, "you'd tuck your arm in, Furny. It's your right
arm and you're on the wrong side of the car."
I asked her what made her think of my right arm just then.
"Because it's the only part of himself that Jimmy ever thinks of," she
said.
There was about three-quarters of a mile of causeway and it ended in a
little hamlet. And the hamlet--it had been knocked to bits before we got
into it--the hamlet ended in a hillock of bricks and mortar.
The road to Zele was completely blocked.
"Well--" said Colville, "I _am_ blowed."
"You've got to take it," said Viola.
"Sorry, m'm. It can't be done. You want a motor traction with caterpillar
wheels for this business."
He was backing the car when a shell burst and buried itself in the place
where we had stood.
To my horror I saw that Viola had opened the door of the car and was
getting out.
"What on earth are you doing?" I said.
"I'm going to walk to Zele."
I pulled her back and held her down in her seat by main force. She was
horribly strong. And as she struggled with me she said quietly, "It's all
right. You two _must_ go back and I must go to Jimmy."
I shouted to Colville, "Turn her round, can't you, and get out of this."
He turned her. He drew up deftly under the shelter of a barn that still
stood intact. Then he spoke.
"Are you quite sure, sir, that Mr. Jevons is in that place? Because, sir,
I heard Kendal say something this morning about their going to Antwerp."
"Then why the devil didn't you say so?"
"I didn't think of it, sir, until I saw Mrs. Jevons getting out."
He added by way of afterthought, "Besides, I promised Kendal. You and
Mrs. Jevons wasn't to know he was going on to Antwerp."
Viola and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.
Somewhere behind us from beyond the river a gun boomed and we took no
notice of it. We went on laughing.
"He's had us again," she said.
"Yes. We've been done this time. Well--we'd better scoot."
We made a rush for it between guns and got to Baerlere. Once we were out
of the village and heading for the Ghent road we were safe.
We were hardly out of sound of the guns when I heard Viola saying, "You
know it really _was_ funny of Jimmy."
I said, "He won't think it quite so funny when he hears what we've done."
He didn't think it funny at all. He was furious when he heard what we'd
done. He forbade Viola to follow him again. He threatened to sack
Colville. He said he'd have me sent home to-morrow and kept there, and
Viola should go with me.
And when he'd finished he told us that Antwerp had fallen.
That was how Jevons came to write the story of the Fall of Antwerp
instead of me.
Well, he didn't sack Colville; and he didn't get me packed off with the
other war-correspondents who left Ghent in a body the next day. And he
said nothing about sending Viola away. He did better than that. He told
her he had brought Charlie Thesiger from Antwerp yesterday, and that her
cousin was dying in the Couvent de Saint Pierre, and that perhaps it
would be a bit easier for him if she were with him.
We took her to the convent that morning. On the way there she asked Jimmy
why he hadn't told her about Charlie yesterday. He said that up till
midnight we weren't absolutely certain that Charlie wouldn't recover, and
that she was safer with us in the hotel than she would be away from us in
the convent.
"My safety is to be considered before everything?" she said.
He answered that it was surely enough for her if he risked it now.
I can't think why she didn't see through him. I and Kendal and Colville
knew perfectly well that he was taking her to the convent to be safe. I
think he argued that if she had poor Charlie to look after it would keep
her quiet, and she would be out of mischief till it was time for the
Germans to march into Ghent.
So we took her to him.
We found him in a little whitewashed cell that one of the sisters had
given up to him. He lay under a crucifix on the nun's narrow bed, which
was too short for him, so that his naked feet showed through the blankets
at the bottom. The naked feet of the Christ pointed downwards to his
head.
He had been shot through the lungs and was dying of pneumonia, sending
out his breath in fierce, rapid jerks.
He lay on his side with his back towards us, and his face was hidden from
us as we came in.
The sister who sat with him made a sign that said, "Oh yes, you can come
in, all of you; it will make no difference."
The cell was so small that Jevons and I had to draw back and let Viola go
in by herself. We two stood in the doorway and looked in. After the first
glance at the bed--it was enough for me--I looked, I couldn't help
looking, at Viola, (Jevons, I noticed, kept his eyes fixed on the body of
the dying man.) I heard her catch her breath in a sob before she could
have seen him.
He had slipped his blankets from his shoulder, and it was the sight of
his back--under the half-open hospital shirt which showed the bandages
and dressings of his wound--that upset her; his back that might have been
any man's back, the innocent back that she had no memory of, that
disguised and hid him from her and made him strange to her and utterly
pathetic. And then, there was the back of his head, sunk like lead into
his pillow. The cropped hair had begun to grow. You could see a little
greyish tuft. You wouldn't have known that it was Charlie's head.
She went slowly round the bed, taking care not to graze the feet that
were stretched out to her. And then she saw him.
She saw a deep purplish flush and glazed eyes that couldn't see her, and
a greyish beard pointing on an unshaved jaw; and a mouth half open,
jerking out its breath. She laid her left hand on his shoulder and with
her right she held the limp hand that hung over the mattress.
I heard her say in French, "If only he knew me--"
And the nun, "Perhaps--at the end--he will know you."
And we left her there with his hand in her right hand and her left hand
on his shoulder. She was on her honour to stay with him till the end; but
her eyes were fixed on Jevons, and they followed him as he went through
the doorway of the cell.
* * * * *
The very minute he had left her Jimmy made his bolt for Lokeren. He said
he didn't want me; but I had seen Viola's eyes, and I said it would be
safer. If I took Viola's car and Colville, she couldn't follow us.
"She won't follow us," he said. "She can't leave him."
We made the first bolt into Lokeren together; and we got out, each with a
load of wounded, just as the Germans were coming in. He made his second
bolt by himself and secretly, while Colville and I were lunching. We
followed, and were stopped in a village two miles from Lokeren.
A Belgian Red Cross man met us here and told us that Jevons had got
through in spite of them, and they didn't in the least expect him to come
back again. He shrugged his shoulders and seemed to be disgusted and
annoyed with Jimmy rather than to admire him.
We hung about in that village an interminable time. I do not remember its
name, if I ever knew it; but I know and remember every house in it and
every tree in the avenue at the turn of the grey road that led to
Lokeren, and even now, in my worst dreams, I find myself in the little
plantation at the end of the village on the left where the railway siding
is, and where the trains came in loaded with wounded. I am always waiting
for Jimmy and looking for Jimmy and not finding him. And at one point I
always stumble over Viola's body. I find her lying wounded in a ditch
that runs through the plantation. And when I find her I know that Jimmy
is dead. And that frightens me--Jimmy's death, I mean, not Viola's body.
I take Viola's body as a matter of course.
It is an abominable dream.
But even that dream is not more astonishing, and it is far less
improbable than what I was to see. We were at the end of the village.
Colville had drawn our car up in the middle of the street, and I was
standing by him, when two Belgian soldiers rushed up to us, pointing up
the road, and shouting to Colville to clear out of the way.
I turned. Round the bend of the road where the avenue of trees was I saw
a train of horses and gun-carriages careening with the curve, and a
battery of Belgian artillery came charging down in full retreat. And now
in the middle of the battery as if he were part of it and informed it
with his energy and speed, and now in front of it as if he led it, and
joyous as if he had turned its retreat into a victory, came Jimmy driving
his car.
The inside of the car was packed with wounded men; and, wedged up against
Jimmy, and standing on the steps, and sitting on the bonnet, and hanging
on wherever they could find a foothold and hang, were seven officers and
soldiers of the Belgian Army.
Kendal--bleeding profusely from a flesh wound on his forehead, but
otherwise unhurt--sat inside among the wounded.
It _had_ been a victory for Jimmy. He had advanced within fifty yards of
the German lines, he had picked up two of his wounded from under their
sentry's fire, and the rest of the men and the officers he had gathered
on his way.
We sent them all to Ghent with Colville.
Before he left, Kendal implored us just to look at Mr. Jevons's car.
Mr. Jevons's car was worth looking at. It had a hole in the back of it
where a bullet had gone clean through and buried itself in the cushions.
There were five bullet-holes in its hood. Its flank was scraped by a
flying fragment of shell, the same that had tilted its right rear
splash-board. Inside, its canvas covers and its rubber mat were stained
with blood.
Drawn up motionless in that village street and stared at, Jimmy's car had
something of its old self-conscious air. It looked pleased, and at the
same time surprised at itself.
And while Jevons was dressing and bandaging his flesh-wound for him an
idea struck Kendal and he grinned.
"D'you remember the time, sir, when you wouldn't let her out if there was
a spot of rain?"
"I do," said Jevons.
"And look at her now--not three weeks. What a life she's 'ad!"
And when Kendal (he was as pleased as Punch with his bandage) when Kendal
had climbed into Colville's car, Jimmy turned his round again; though the
officers implored him to come on, for the Germans were on our backs. But
Jimmy only jerked his thumb in the direction of Lokeren and made his
third bolt. I scrambled in beside him as he started.
I don't mind saying that I hated this adventure. It was one thing to go
into Antwerp when the Germans were so busy storming it that they couldn't
attend to you, and quite another thing to be alone with Jimmy on that
horrid grey road with the Germans coming every minute round the turn of
it.
Jimmy explained that there was a wounded man hiding in a ditch about a
mile from Lokeren, and he'd got to fetch him.
We fetched him and another car-load without any misadventure.
When we got back to our village we found a Field Ambulance there. Jimmy
said, "I believe that's _my_ Field Ambulance." Presently he gave a start
that made the car swerve as if he had run over a dog.
"Well, I'm damned if there isn't Viola."
Yes, there she was. She had come out with the Field Ambulance. And it
_was_ Jimmy's Field Ambulance, the one that had been sent out without
him. It had come on into Ghent from Antwerp yesterday, and Viola had
found it.
"This is too bad," said Jevons. "You ought to be looking after Charlie.
Why _aren't_ you looking after him?"
"Charlie," she said, "died three hours ago--at twelve o'clock."
It wasn't five hours since we had left her with him in the nun's cell
under the crucifix. I don't think I had realized it before, but now it
came over me as a new and strange thing, how little he had mattered. Then
it struck me that Jevons must have known it all the time.
"I've done everything," she said, "that had to be done. And I've written
to Aunt Matty and Uncle George--and Mildred."
"Mildred?" I wondered.
"Well--_yes_."
Jevons and I had forgotten Mildred. We had forgotten her engagement to
Charlie, though I suppose nobody knew better than we did why it had been
broken off.
To his father and mother and Mildred he _did_ matter.
And perhaps he mattered to Viola, in a way; for she said she would have
given anything to have saved him. He must have mattered to Jevons when he
brought him from Antwerp and when we buried him in Ghent.
And the cross on his grave reproves me, reminding me that to his country
he mattered supremely, after all.
* * * * *
After Lokeren Jevons and I tried to come to terms with Viola.
The conference took place upstairs in their bedroom, where we had
withdrawn for greater privacy. Viola sat on the one chair and Jimmy and
I on the bed. Jimmy did most of the talking.
He said, "Look here, my dear child, if there wasn't a war on, I wouldn't
stand in the way of your amusement for the world. And there's a great
deal to be said for you. _I_ think you adorable in a tunic and breeches,
and General Roubaix agrees with me, if Furny doesn't. We all think you
heroic, and you are sometimes useful. But there isn't a thing you've done
yet that a man can't do better--except getting Furny through the lines,
and nobody wants Furny _in_ the lines. And when _you're_ in them you've a
moral effect equal to about ten seventeen-inch guns. If the men see you
hovering round their trenches they're so jumpy they can hardly hold their
rifles. If Kendal sees you he's so jumpy he can hardly steer. Colville
says he'd rather hang himself than go through another day like Baerlere.
Furny all but lost his job on the _Morning Standard_ because he was told
off to look after you when he ought to have gone to Antwerp--he _would_
have lost it if I hadn't done his work for him. And you don't make things
easier for _me_. Good God!--sometimes I don't know what I'm doing.
"It isn't fair on us. It isn't fair."
"It isn't fair on _me_," she said. "_I_'m jumpy when I'm kept back. You
don't know what it's like, Jimmy. _Don't_ turn me back."
And the poor child began to talk about her duty to the wounded, and that
made him burst out again.
"The wounded? If you think you're any more comfort to the wounded than
you are to Furny and me I can tell you you're mistaken. There was a poor
devil at Lokeren the other day with a bullet in his stomach who told me
he didn't mind his wounds and he didn't mind the Germans; what worried
him was the lady being there when he wasn't able to defend her."
She tilted her chin at that and said she didn't want anybody to defend
her.
"Perhaps you don't, but what would you think of a man who didn't want to
defend you? What would you think of Furny and me if we wanted you to be
here?"
"I should like you to want me," she said.
"No, my dear child, you wouldn't. You don't know what you're saying."
And then he said, "I know better than you do what you want. Men aren't
made like that--if they _are_ men. You can't have it both ways." And he
said something about chivalry that drove her back in sheer self-defence
on a Feminist line. She said that nowadays women had chivalry too.
"And _our_ chivalry is to go down before yours?"
"Can't you have both?"
"Not in war-time. _Your_ chivalry is to keep back and not make yourself a
danger and a nuisance."
"Come," she said, "what about Joan of Arc?" And that was too much for
Jimmy. He jumped up off the bed and walked away from her and sat on the
table as if it gave him some advantage.
"No, no," he said. "I can't stand that rot. When you're a saint--or I'm a
saint--you can talk about Joan of Arc. If you want to be Joan of Arc go
and be it with some man who isn't your husband--who isn't in love with
you. Perhaps _he_ won't mind. Go with Furny if you like, though it's
rather hard on him."
I said I thought he was rather hard on Viola--if he'd seen the poor child
at Baerlere, flinging herself out of the car and proposing to climb over
the ruins of several houses and walk by herself--under shell-fire--to
Zele, because she thought he was there--
Jimmy looked at her; and he did what he had done that night when he
saw her coming towards him in the lounge. He sighed a long sigh of
complicated anguish and satisfaction.
She heard it and she understood it, and she said, "I can't help it if I
am like that. You'll have to take the risk of me. Please go away, Furny."
And I went.
* * * * *
Norah has been reading what I've just written, and she tells me that
there's a great deal about Jimmy's "joy" and his "adventure" and all
that; and not one word about his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice.
She says I don't give a serious impression of him. He might have gone
out to the war just for fun, and that it isn't fair to him.
I don't know whether it's fair or not. I write as he compels me to write.
I find that I cannot separate his joy and his adventure from his duty and
devotion and self-sacrifice; he didn't separate them himself. I don't
even know that self-sacrifice is really the word for it; and the
impression he gave me is just that--of going out for fun. It was the wild
humour of his devotion that made it the spectacle it was.
(She has told me that it's all right, so long as I recognize that it
_was_ devotion.)
After Lokeren I had no desire to go through the rest of the war with
Jimmy. To be with Jimmy was destruction to your sense of values. I have
got it firmly fixed in my head that the taking of Lokeren was an
important affair.
As for what Jimmy called the "tinpot bombardment of Melle" (there was
nothing wrong with _his_ sense of values), I shall see it insanely, for
ever and ever, as _the_ event of the war.
And there is this to be said, that Lokeren filled the last gap in the
line closing round Ghent, north, south and east, and drew it tighter. And
Melle (only four and a-half miles away) was the last point in the German
advance on Ghent. The taking of Melle would be a sign to us that the game
was up.
For three days Jimmy operated joyously in the village and over the
leagues of turnip-fields that lay outside it.
Of the first two days I remember an endless tramping over endless furrows
that were ditches for the dead; an endless staggering under stretchers
that dripped blood; an endless struggling with Viola to keep her under
shelter of the walls; each of those acts seemed to be endless, though one
gave place to the other, and it was only the firing that went on all the
time, till even Jimmy complained once or twice that he was fed up with
it.
I remember that Jimmy's Field Ambulance played a great part in these
adventures. I remember feeling a malicious satisfaction in the thought
that at the same time it was compelled to witness _his_ performances. It
couldn't miss him.
I remember all these things; but of Melle itself I remember nothing but
the Town Hall, with its double flight of steps up to its door, and the
two tall stone pillars, one on each side of the door, and the Greek
pediment above it; that and the little old Flemish house that stood back
by itself on the other side of the road, and its white walls and its
red-tiled roof, and the two green poplars in its garden, mounting guard.
The house and its garden and its poplars are always vivid and still; they
always appear to me as charged with mystery and significance and as
connected in some secret way with Jimmy's fate.
In the pauses of our movements the Field Ambulance and Jimmy's car and
Viola's were always drawn up before the Town Hall, facing the little
house.
Then came Sunday, the eleventh, the third day of Melle, when Viola was
left behind at Ghent.
Jimmy had made her promise on her honour to be brave, _this_ time, and
stay in the hotel and wait for orders.
Colville stayed with her. They were to pack our things and be ready to
leave at a minute's notice. Colville had secret orders that, if we were
not back by midnight, he was to take Viola on to Bruges in his car, and
wait for us there.
For we knew now that we were in for it.
And we knew that the war, which was coming closer and closer to the
city, was coming closer to us. It had been Charlie Thesiger first,
now it might be Reggie. At least, we knew that Reggie's regiment, the
Third ----shires, had come up from Ostend the day before, that it was
quartered somewhere between Ghent and Melle, and that it had been engaged
at Quatrecht.
Our own orders were to stick to Melle.
I suppose from the way the ambulances were massed there that the end
had been foreseen. That afternoon the battle began to sweep round from
Quatrecht to Melle; and on our third journey out a rumour reached us
at the barrier where the sentry stood guard. It was one of those
preposterous rumours that run before disaster and are started God knows
how when a retreat begins. I think it was the Belgian Red Cross men who
spread it, for I heard the guide who went with Jimmy's Field Ambulance
assuring him seriously that seven thousand British had been surrounded
and cut to pieces on the road between Quatrecht and Melle. To be sure the
number diminished with each repetition of the tale, dropping from seven
thousand to seven hundred and from seven hundred to seventy. But in
another hour we were bringing in the men of the ----shires.
And towards the end of the day the real bombardment of Melle began, and
on our last journey out we and Jimmy's Field Ambulance were in the thick
of it.
I can remember nothing of that bombardment but the three shells.
The first ripped open the roof of the Town Hall and set fire to it.
The second struck the Greek pediment and brought the whole front toppling
into the street.
Then, about five minutes after, there was the third shell.
The light was going out of the sky, so that we saw the first shell like a
sheet of curved lightning making for the village as we approached from
the Ghent side. There was a deadly attraction about the thing that made
you feel that it and you were the only objects in God's universe, and
that you were about to be merged in each other. It looked as if it were
rushing out of heaven straight for us, so that we were surprised when it
apparently swerved aside and hit the Town Hall instead.
(Jimmy and I were in the front of the car. Kendal, whose flesh wound was
beginning to worry him, sat behind.)
A battery of artillery charged past us, followed by the remnants of a
French regiment on the run. Jimmy put more speed on. By the time we got
into the village the Town Hall was spouting flame.
Jimmy drew up his car about fifty yards away from it. The Field Ambulance
had turned, and took its stand a little further away behind us, under the
cover of the opposite walls. Its men began dragging out their stretchers.
Kendal and I made ready with ours. The wounded were being brought out of
every house they were in.
A Belgian Colonel rode past us, trying to look unaware that he was
retreating. He shouted to us to clear out of it. This was the only sign
of interest that he showed.
Somebody else came up to Jevons and told him that there were three or
four wounded men somewhere inside the Town Hall, but that the place was
on fire and it was absolutely impossible to get them out. He advised us
to pick up the men who were lying in the street, and clear out.
I saw Jevons nod his head as if he agreed and consented. I saw him get
out of the car. And then I heard Kendal say, "Give us a hand, sir," and I
turned to my stretchers.
When I looked round again Jevons was running towards the Town Hall. The
man who had told us to pick up our wounded and clear out was looking
after him with a face of the most perfect horror.
Kendal and I followed with the stretchers, and we saw Jevons run up the
steps of the Town Hall. He turned at the top of the steps and waved to us
to keep back.
Then he went through the big doors between the pillars.
There was a crash and a roar as if the whole building had fallen in. It
was the top story plunging to the second floor. The upper half of the
Town Hall was like a crate filled with blazing straw. The Greek pediment
was the only solid thing that subsisted in that fire.
Then the first floor was caught. It burned more slowly.
Kendal and I and the ambulance men ran forward with the stretchers. And
Jimmy came through the doors carrying a wounded Frenchman. He went in
again and came out with another Frenchman.
(The ground floor had begun to burn behind him.)
He went in a third time and came out with Reggie Thesiger.
He must have had to go further into the hall to find him, for it was a
much longer business. We, Kendal and I, were down the street by the
ambulance when they came out, and I didn't see that it was Reggie till I
heard Kendal say, "Sir, that's Major Thesiger he's got!"
Reggie's arm was round Jimmy's shoulder and Jimmy's arm was round
Reggie's waist. He half carried, half supported him. He came out in the
middle of a cloud of smoke that hid him. The smoke was followed by a
burst of fire and another crash and roar as the ceiling of the first
story plunged to the ground floor.
With all this going on behind him Jevons paused on the top of the steps
to readjust his burden to the descent. We heard afterwards that Reggie
had said, "You'd better leave me, old man, and scoot. You can't do it."
It didn't look as if he could. But as we went back to them we saw that
Jevons had heaved Reggie over his shoulder and was carrying him down the
steps. He came very carefully and slowly, so that we had reached the Town
Hall before he had staggered to the last step.
As we pressed closer to help him he told us to get back if we didn't want
the whole damned place down on the top of us.
We gave back and he followed us. I don't know how we got Reggie on to the
stretcher--he had a piece of shell somewhere in his thigh--but we did it
and ran with him to the ambulance. We had about a minute to do it in and
no more.
And then the second shell came.
It hit the Greek pediment from behind, and we saw the two tall pillars
that supported it stagger, snap like two sticks, and bend forwards,
looking suddenly queer and corpulent in their fore-shortening; then they
parted and fell, bringing down the whole front of the Town Hall.
The Town Hall was spreading itself over the street, with a noise like a
ship's coal going down the shute in a thunderstorm, as Reggie's stretcher
slid home along its grooves in the ambulance. Kendal and I were inside
for a second or two doing things for Reggie. The engine throbbed. The
whole ambulance shook with its throbbing.
In that second Jevons had run back to fetch his car, calling out to us to
cut and he would overtake us. He had cranked up his engines and jumped in
before Kendal could get down and go to his help. When we saw him start we
started. There wasn't any time to lose.
Kendal and I were sitting on the back steps of the ambulance, so that we
kept him in sight. It was quite certain that he would overtake us.
* * * * *
He was running straight down the middle of the road when the third shell
came.
It burst on the ground behind him, on his right, a little to one side.
Some of it must have struck the steering gear.
The car plunged to the left. It climbed reeling to the top of a bank and
paused there, then fell, front over back, into the ditch and lay there,
belly uppermost, and its wheels whirling in the air.
Jevons lay on his face, half in, half out of the ditch.
He lay for about three seconds; then, as we ran to him, we saw him raise
himself on his left arm and crawl out of the ditch; and when we reached
him he was trying to stand.
And he tried to smile at us. "You needn't look like that," he said. "I'm
as right as rain." And then he tried to raise his right arm.
You saw a khaki cuff, horribly stained. A red rag hung from it, a fringe
that dripped.
* * * * *
Reggie opened his eyes and turned his face towards the stretcher that
slid into its grooves beside him.
"That isn't--Jimmy--is it?" he said.
I saw him move his left hand to find Jimmy's right. And I heard Jimmy
saying again (in a weak voice this time) that he was as right as rain.
We had got out of the range of the guns and the surgeons had done their
business with bandages and splints. They had taken Reggie first, then
Jimmy.
And so, lying beside Reggie, on his own stretcher and in his own
ambulance, he was brought back to Ghent.
The military hospitals were full, so we took them to the Convent de Saint
Pierre. And I went over to the Hôtel de la Poste to fetch Viola.
I don't know what I said to her. I think I must have done what Jimmy told
me and said they were all right. _She_ never said a word till we got to
the Convent. (She told me afterwards that when she saw me coming in alone
she had been sure that Jimmy was killed. She didn't know about Reggie
yet, you see.)
This part of it is all confused and horrible.
We had to wait before we could see our surgeons at the Convent. The nuns
took us into a little parlour and left us there.
And I told her then what had happened. I can see her sitting in the nuns'
parlour, looking out of the window as I told her; looking as if she
wasn't listening. And I can hear my own voice. It sounded strange and
affected, as if I had made it all up and didn't believe what I was
telling her.
"He saved Reggie's life--do you see? at the risk of his own.
"At--the risk--of his own."
And still she looked as if she wasn't listening. It didn't sound as if it
had really happened.
And I feel--now--as if I had taken hours to tell her.
Then one of our men came to us. He drew back when he saw Mrs. Jevons, and
I followed him to the doorway. He said they were busy with Major
Thesiger. They hadn't started yet with Mr. Jevons.
And then--ages afterwards--one of the surgeons came and called me out of
the room. He said the Major would be all right. They'd got the bit of
shell out. But--there was Jevons's hand. They'd have to take it off.
They couldn't possibly save it. And it was going to be a beastly
business. They'd run out of anaesthetics. Thesiger had had the last
they'd got.
Yes, of course it would have been better. But Jevons wouldn't hear of it.
_He_ knew they were short and Thesiger didn't, and he'd insisted on their
doing Thesiger first.
It was an awful mistake, he said, because it would hurt Jevons ten times
more than it would hurt anybody else. He thought that I had better get
Mrs. Jevons out of that room; the ward where they were operating was next
to it.
I couldn't get her out of it.
There were five minutes when I sat there and Viola crouched on the floor
beside me with her face hidden on my knees and her hands grabbing me
tighter and tighter.
And the door opened and I saw two nuns looking in. I heard one say to
another, "_C'est sa pauvre femme qui devient folle_." And the door closed
on us.
* * * * *
"All that fuss about a hand!" Jimmy had come out of his faint and was
trying to restore Viola to a sense of proportion. If all the rest of him
had been blown away, he said, by that confounded shell, and only his hand
had been left, she might have had something to cry for.
And yet she cried inconsolably for Jimmy's hand.
God knows what memories came to her when she thought of it. I don't think
she thought of it as the hand that had written masterpieces and flung
them aside, that could steer a car straight through hell-fire, and that
could nurse, and bind up wounds. I know I thought of all these obvious
things. But she must have thought of the hand that she knew like her own
hand, the hand with the firm, nervous fingers, and the three strong lines
in the pinkish palm, the hand she adored and had shrunk from, whose
gesture had been torture to her and whose touch was ecstasy, the hand
that the surgeons had cut off and tossed into a basket to be cast out
with the refuse of the wards.
Not that either of us had much time for thinking of anything but how we
could get out of Ghent before the Germans got into it. Viola said it
would be quite easy. There was the ambulance, and there was _her_ car and
there was Jimmy's car.
I told her that Jimmy's god-like car was lying bottom upwards in a ditch
between Ghent and Melle, an object half piteous, half obscene. She said
it was a jolly good thing then that she'd brought hers. Perhaps it was.
We had just got Jimmy and Reggie into their first sleep at six o'clock in
the morning when the orders came for us to clear out.
We cleared out in Viola's car, with Reggie on his stretcher and Jimmy
(propped up with pillows) at his head, and Viola at his feet, and two
wounded men in front with Colville, and Kendal and me standing one on
each step. (Most of our luggage was on the Boulevard in front of the
Convent where we had left it.)
We went, as we had come, through Bruges. We drew up to rest in the Market
Place under the Belfry.
"You'd better look at it while you can, Viola," said Jevons. "You may
never see it again."
"I? I shall never see anything else," she said.
We looked at the Belfry. It was as if, under that menace of destruction,
we saw it for the first time.
We _might_ have enjoyed that run back, Viola said; only somehow we
didn't. Reggie was ill from his anesthetic all the way, and Jimmy's
temperature went up with every mile, and we missed the boat at Ostend,
and had to stay there all night; and Jimmy became delirious in the night
and thought that he had left Viola behind in the Town Hall at Melle. And
there was no room on the morning boat; and when we did get on board the
Naval Transport at Dunkirk, Kendal took it into his head to be seasick
till he nearly died.
We had no peace till seven o'clock on Tuesday, when we got to Canterbury.
XV
I think I have said that Jevons made me suffer. He did. I can say that
before those three weeks of his all my contacts with him were infected by
the poison of my suffering. But all that was nothing to what he made me
suffer since, what I suffer now when I remember the things I have said of
him, the things I have thought and felt--my furtive belittling of him, my
unwilling admiration, the doubt that I encouraged in the mean hope that
it would become a certainty.
I would give anything to be like the Canon or my wife, the only two of us
whose conscience doesn't reproach them when they see Jimmy's right
sleeve.
I remember Norah saying to me once, "I shall be sorry for _you_ if you
don't take care." Well, I am sorry for myself.
But I am still sorrier for Mrs. Thesiger.
I know there's a great deal to be said for her. I had wired to them from
Dunkirk to tell them that Reggie was slightly wounded but recovering, and
that the four of us would be in Canterbury that evening. It wasn't my
fault if Reggie, being a British officer, was taken from us at Dover, and
sent to a military hospital; but I admit I ought to have wired again to
the Thesigers to inform them of the fact. I ought to have remembered that
Reggie was more important to Mrs. Thesiger than Jevons, even if Jevons
had done what Mrs. Thesiger didn't yet know he'd done.
The maternal passion is a terrible thing. It has made women commit
crimes. It made my mother-in-law push Viola from her on her threshold and
turn on me as I was helping Jimmy out of the car. It made her say,
"You've brought my son-in-law. What have you done with my son?"
(To do her justice, she hadn't seen what had happened to Jimmy. Though he
was tired and weak, he could still stand up and stagger along if you held
him tight.)
And the maternal passion is not more terrible than the passion that Viola
had for Jevons. It made her say to her mother as the Canon and I brought
Jimmy in (the dear old man had seen in an instant why he wore his coat
slung loose over his right shoulder), "You can see what we're doing with
my husband."
And when we were all in the drawing-room and I was explaining gently that
Reggie was all right, but that we'd _had_ to send him to the military
hospital, it made her say, "If it wasn't for your son-in-law your son
wouldn't be alive."
God knows what thirst she satisfied, what bitterness she exhausted, what
secret anguish she avenged.
They were all there, the Thesiger women--they had come, you see, to meet
Reggie--Victoria and Millicent and Mildred; and they heard her. But it
was Mildred who _saw_. She spoke to her mother.
"Can't you _see_?" she said.
Viola was kneeling by the sofa where her father had made Jimmy lie, and
she had unbuttoned and taken from him his heavy coat. She looked at me
and said, "Please take them away somewhere and tell them. Jimmy _is_ so
tired."
I know that must seem awful. It _was_ awful to come back from the
battlefields of Flanders, from sieges and sackings and slaughter, and see
the women flashing fire at each other. And they were mother and daughter.
But, you see, they were women. I know that the war should have purged
them of their passions (perhaps it did purge them); but your lover is
your lover and your son your son for all that.
And it wasn't easy for Mrs. Thesiger to see how her son-in-law could
have saved her son. I am not sure that she wouldn't have thought it
presumption in Jevons to suppose that he could save anybody, let alone
her son. There were people like the Thesigers from whom heroism was
expected as a matter of course; and there were people like Jevons. You
know what she said about his going to the front.
When I had finished the tale--and I let her have the whole of it, from
the first shell that hit the Town Hall to the bit of the third shell
that hit Jimmy--she said, "You mean that if he hadn't gone back for his
car--" She had broken down and was sobbing quietly, but you could see how
her mind worked.
I said, "I mean that if he hadn't gone back to the Town Hall to look for
Reggie he wouldn't have been hit."
Then I told her how they took Jimmy's hand off.
I heard the Canon groan. Millicent and Victoria began to sob as their
mother had sobbed. Mildred set her teeth firmly; and Mrs. Thesiger turned
to me a queer, disordered face, and spoke.
"They--they gave the anaesthetic to--Reggie?"
"They did," I said. "Because Jimmy made them."
Yes. I am very sorry for Mrs. Thesiger.
She cried, softly, and with a great recovery of beauty and dignity, for
about fifteen seconds (the Canon had gone back to Jevons); then she rose
and addressed her daughter.
"Mildred dear, I think Jimmy had better have Reggie's room."
Then she went to him; and I am told that she kissed him for the first
time. She kissed him as if he had been her son. (Poor Jimmy, I may say,
was so tired that he didn't want to be kissed by anybody.)
* * * * *
He still had Reggie's room six weeks later when I came back from France
for a week-end. Reggie had recovered, and was with them for a fortnight's
leave before he went out again.
Norah and I went down on Saturday to see him. (His leave was up on Sunday
night.)
Without Reggie I don't think I should have realized Jevons in his final
phase.
He had been happy, I know, at Hampstead in the first two years of his
marriage; he had been happy most of the time in Edwardes Square; even in
Mayfair he had had moments; and Amershott had been, on the whole, an
improvement on Mayfair. And he had lived through his three weeks in Ghent
in a sort of ecstasy. And before that, all the time, there had been his
work, which I am always forgetting, and his fame, when he didn't forget
it.
But there had always been something.
At first it had been the Thesigers. As long as Mrs. Thesiger--as long
as _one_ Thesiger--held out against him he had felt defeat. And then
there had been Reggie's return and his appalling doubt. He had pretended
not to see his doubt and not to mind it. And he had seen it, as he saw
everything, and he had minded awfully. Then came Viola's illness, which
you could put down to Reggie's doubt. And after that it had been Viola
pretty nearly all the time. And even at Ghent, by the tortures of anxiety
she had caused him, you may say that she had spoiled his ecstasy.
And now, without any effort, or any calculation or foresight, by a
stupendous accident, he had found happiness and peace and certainty. The
thing was so consummately done, and so timed to the minute, that when you
saw him there enjoying it, you could have sworn that he had played for it
and pulled it off. It was as if he had said to himself, "Give me time,
and I'll bring all these people round, even Mrs. Thesiger, even Reggie.
I'll _make_ them love me. Wait, and you'll just see how I shall score."
And there he was scoring.
And it was as if he had said to himself long ago, "As for Viola, I know
all about it. I know I do things that make the poor child shudder; but I
can put that all right. I can make her forget it. I give myself three
weeks." As if he said, "She thought she was going to leave me. I knew
that, too, and I didn't care. She might have left me a thousand times and
I should have brought her back."
I used to think it pathetic that Jevons should have wanted Mrs. Thesiger
to love him--that he should have wanted Reggie to. But I must say his
pathos was avenged. _They_ were pathetic now. That big, hulking Major
wasn't happy unless he was writing Jimmy's letters, or cutting up Jimmy's
meat for him, or helping him in and out of his clothes. Mrs. Thesiger
wasn't happy unless she was doing things for him. The Canon wasn't happy
(though, like Norah, he had nothing on his conscience) and Mildred and
Millicent and Victoria weren't happy, nor the Thesiger's friends in the
Cathedral Close.
And then--after they had made a hero of him for six weeks--on that
Saturday night when we were all together in the Canon's library, Jevons
made his confession.
We had been, exchanging reminiscences. Something had made Viola think of
Jimmy's General and the two Colonels at Ghent. She began telling the
Canon how we had watched them through the glass screen, and how funny
General Roubaix had looked with his arm round Jimmy's neck, and how he
had said that Jimmy was a salamander, and that he didn't know what fear
is.
"Oh, _don't_ I!" said Jimmy.
And that sent Reggie back to the day when he had first seen Jimmy.
"Look here, old man, what made you say you were an arrant coward?"
"Because," said Jimmy simply, "I am one. Dear old Roubaix was talking
through his hat.
"Not know what fear is! I know a good many things, but I don't know
anything better than that. You can't tell me anything about fear I don't
know.
"You've no idea how I funked going out to the war. Yes--_funked_.
"It wasn't any ordinary funk, mind you, the little, creepy feeling in
your waist, and your tummy tumbling down, and your heart sort of
fluttering over the place where it used to be. I believe you can get over
_that_. And I never had that--ever, except once when I saw Viola in a
place where she'd no business to be. It was something much worse. It--it
was in my head--in my brain. A sort of madness. And it never let me
alone. It was worse at night, and after I got up and began to go about in
the morning--when my brain woke and remembered, but it was there all the
time.
"I saw things--horrors. And I heard them. I saw and heard the whole
war. All the blessed time--all those infernal five weeks before I got
out to it, I kept seeing horrors and hearing them. There was a lot of
detail--realism wasn't in it--and it was all correct; because I verified
it afterwards. Things _were_ just like that. Every morning when I got up
I said to myself I'm going out to that damned war, but I wish to God
somebody'd come and chloroform me before I get there. There were moments
when I could have chloroformed myself. I felt as if it was the utter
injustice of God that I--_I_--had to be mixed up in it.
"Not know what fear is!
"Just conceive," said Jimmy, "a man living like that, in abject,
abominable terror, in black funk--keeping it up, all day and half the
night, for five solid weeks--before he got there."
"And when you did get there," said Reggie, "were you in a funk?"
"Oh, well, you see, by the time I'd got there it had pretty well worn
itself out. There wasn't any funk left to _be_ in."
And when I saw Reggie look at him I knew he had scored again.
Still, I wondered how it really stood with them; and whether Reggie
had settled with his doubt, or whether sometimes, when you caught him
looking at Jimmy, it had come over him again. The kind of virtue his
brother-in-law had displayed in Flanders wouldn't help him, you see, to
that particular solution. And with the Thesigers--when they took after
their mother--things died hard.
He must have felt that he had to settle it before he went.
Viola told us what happened.
It was his last evening, and the three were together in that room of
Reggie's. He had just said that Viola wouldn't care how many Town Halls
he was buried under, as long as Jimmy didn't go and dig him out. And
then, suddenly, he went straight for it.
"Jimmy," he said, "did you run away with my sister, or didn't you? I
don't care whether you did or not, but--did you?"
"No, I didn't," said Jimmy.
"Then what the dickens," Reggie said, "were you doing together in
Bruges?"
"We were looking at the Belfry," said Jimmy.
And Reggie shook his head. "That's beyond me," he said.
"Yes," said Viola. "But it wasn't beyond Jimmy."
That's the real story of Tasker Jevons and his wife.
Don't ask me what would have happened to them if there hadn't been a war.
I've tried to show you the sort of man he was. He knew his hour even
before it found him. And you cannot separate him from his hour.