Chapter 1

MY BOOK

I

Of course this story can't be published as it stands just yet. Not--if I'm to be decent--for another generation, because, thank Heaven, they're still alive. (They've had me there, as they've always had me everywhere.) How they managed it I can't think. I don't mean merely at the end, though that was stupendous, but how they ever managed it. It seems to me they must have taken _all_ the risks, always.

I suppose if you asked him he'd say, "That's how." It was certainly the way they managed the business of living. Perhaps it's why they managed it on the whole so well. I remember how when I was shilly-shallying about that last job of mine he said, "Take it. Take it. If you can risk living at all, my dear fellow, you can risk that."

And he added, "If I'd only _your_ luck!"

Well, that's exactly what he did have. He had my luck, I mean the luck I ought to have had, all the time, from the beginning to the very end. But there is one thing he can't take from me, and that is the telling of this story. He can hold it up as long as he lives--as long as _she_ lives--as he has held up pretty nearly everything where I was concerned. But he can't take it from me. He doesn't "want" it. Even he with his infernal talent couldn't do anything with it. Unscrupulous as he was, and I assure you he'd stick at nothing (he'd "take" his mother's last agony if he "wanted" it badly enough), indecent as he was, he'd stick at that.

I don't mean he couldn't take his wife, part of her, anyhow, at a pinch. And I don't mean he couldn't take himself, his own emotions, his own eccentricities, if he happened to want them, and his own meannesses, if nobody else's, so to speak, would do. But he couldn't and wouldn't take his own big things, particularly not that last thing.

When I say that I can't publish this story yet as it stands, I'm not forgetting that I _have_ published the end of it already. But only in the way of business; to publish that sort of thing was what I went out for; it was all part of my Special Correspondent's job.

And when you think that it was just touch and go--Why, if I hadn't bucked up and taken that job when he told me to I might have missed him. No amount of hearing about him would have been the same thing. I had to see him.

What I wrote then doesn't count. I had to tell what I saw just after I had seen it. I had to take it as I saw it, a fragment snapped off from the rest of him, and dated October 11th, 1914, as if it didn't belong to him; as if he were only another splendid instance. And of course I had to leave _her_ out.

Told like that, it didn't amount to much.

This is the real telling.

I must get away from the end, right back to the beginning.

I suppose, to be accurate, the very beginning was the day I first met him in nineteen-six--no, nineteen-five it must have been. It was at Blackheath Football Ground, the last match of the season, when Woolwich Arsenal played East Kent and beat them by two goals and a try. He was there as a representative of the Press, "doing" the match for some sporting paper.

He held me up at the barrier (yes, he held me up in the first moment of our acquaintance) while he fumbled for his pass. He had given the word "Press" with an exaggerated aplomb that showed he was young to his job, and the gate-keeper challenged him. It was, in fact, the exquisite self-consciousness of the little man that made me look at him. And he caught me looking at him; he blushed, caught himself blushing and smiled to himself with the most delicious appreciation of his own absurdity. And as he stood there fumbling, and holding me up while he argued with the gate-keeper, who didn't know him, I got his engaging twinkle. It was as if he looked at me and said, "See me swank just then? Funny, wasn't it?"

He hung about on the edge of the crowd for a while with his hands in his pockets, sucking his little blond moustache and looking dreamy and rather incompetent. I was a full-blown journalist even then, and I remember feeling a sort of pity for his youth. He was so obviously on his maiden trip, and obviously, I fancied, doomed never to arrive in any port.

Well--well; I came upon him afterwards at a crisis in the game. He was taking notes in shorthand with a sort of savagery between his tense and concentrated glares at the scrimmage that was then massed in the centre of the field. Woolwich Arsenal and East Kent, locked in each other's bodies, now struggled and writhed and butted like two immense beasts welded together by the impact of their battle, now swayed and quivered and snorted as one beast torn by a solitary and mysterious rage.

Self-consciousness had vanished from my man. He stood, leaning forward with his legs a little apart. His boyish face was deeply flushed; he had sucked and bitten his blond moustache into a wisp; he was breathing heavily, with his mouth ajar; his very large and conspicuous blue eyes glittered with a sort of passion. (He wore those eyes in his odd little ugly face like some inappropriate decoration.)

All these symptoms declared that he was "on." They made up a look that I was soon to know him by.

I remember marvelling at his excitement.

I remember also discussing the match with him as we went back to town. It must have been then that he began to tell me about himself: that his name was James Tasker Jevons; that he lived, or hoped to live, by going about the country and reporting the big cricket and football matches.

At least he called it reporting. I shouldn't think there has ever been any reporting like it before or since.

I told him I was out for my paper, the _Morning Standard_, too. Not exactly reporting, in _his_ sense (I little knew what _his_ sense was when I put it that way); and there left it. You see, I didn't want to rub it into the poor chap that the stranger he had been unfolding himself to so quaintly was a cut above his job.

But he saw through it. I don't know how he managed to convey to me that my delicacy needn't suffer. Anyhow, he must have had some scruples of his own, since he waited for another context before remarking quietly that what I was doing now he would be doing in another six months. (And he was.) These things, he said, took time, and he gave himself six months. (Yes; in less than six months he was holding me up, again, in my own paper. I had to wait till he was "out" before I could get in.) He didn't seem to boast so much as to trace for my benefit the path of some natural force, some upward-tending, indestructible Energy that happened to be him.

All this I remember. But I cannot remember by what stages we arrived at dining together, as we did that night in a little restaurant in Soho. Perhaps there were no stages; we may have simply leaped by one bound at that consummation. He had swung himself into my compartment as the train was leaving the platform at Blackheath; so I suppose it was destiny. After that I was tempted to conceive that he fastened on me as on something that he had need of; but I think it was rather that I fell to his mysterious attraction.

While we dined he informed me further that he had been reporting football matches for six weeks. Before that he had been proof-reader for a firm of printers for about a year. Before that he had been a compositor. And before that again he had worked in an office with his father, who was Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths for some parish down in Hertfordshire. He chucked that because he found that the registration of births, marriages and deaths was spoiling his handwriting quite as much as his handwriting was spoiling the registration of births, marriages and deaths. (He was, he said, cultivating a careless, scholarly hand.) He liked his present job, because it took him out pretty often into the open air. Also he liked looking on at football matches and prize fights.

He said it made him feel manly.

You should have seen him sitting there and telling me these things in a gentle, throaty and rather thick voice with a cockney accent and a sort of tenor ring in it and a queer, humorous intonation that was like an audible twinkle, as if he saw himself as he thought I must see him, mainly in the light of absurdity. You should have seen his face, its thin cheeks, its vivid flush, its queer, inquisitive, contradictory nose that had a slender, high bridge and a tilted, pointed end in profile and three-quarters, and turned suddenly all broad and blunt in a full view; and his mouth that stood ajar with excitement, and even in moments of quiescence failed to hide the tips of two rather prominent white teeth pressed down on the lower lip. I don't say there was anything unmanly about Jevons's figure (he wasn't noticeably undersized), or about his mouth and jaw. I knew a great General with a mouth and jaw like that, and he was one of the handsomest figures in the Service. I'm not hinting at anything like effeminacy in Jevons, only at a certain oddity that really saved him. If he'd been handsome he'd have been dreadful. His flush, his decorative eyes, his dark eyebrows and eyelashes, his sleek, light brown hair, would have made him vulgar. As it was, his queerness gave them a sort of point.

I dwell on these physical details because, afterwards, I found myself continually looking at him as if to see where his charm lay. To see, I suppose, what _she_ saw in him.

If anybody had asked me that night what I saw in him myself beyond an ordinary little journalist "on the make," I don't suppose I could have told them. But there's no doubt that I felt his charm, or that night would have been the end instead of the beginning.

We sat in the restaurant when he had done telling me about himself; I remember we sat quite a long time discussing an English writer--our contemporary--whom I rather considered I had discovered. In those days I used to apply him as an infallible test. Jevons had read every word of him; it was he, in fact, who brought him into the conversation. He confessed afterwards that he had done it on purpose. He had been testing _me_.

Even so our acquaintance might have lapsed but for the thing that happened when the waiter came up with the bill. My share of it was three and twopence, and I found myself with only ninepence in my pocket. I had to borrow half a crown, from Jevons. You mayn't see anything very dreadful in that. I didn't at the time, and there wasn't. The dreadful thing was that I forgot to pay him back.

Yes. Something happened that put Jevons and his half-crown out of my head for long enough. I forgot to pay him, and he had to go without his dinner for three nights in consequence. It was his last half-crown.

He told me this as an immense joke, long afterwards.

And Viola Thesiger cried.

That crying of hers, that child-like softening and breaking down under him, in itself so unexpected (I didn't know she could do it), that sudden and innocent catastrophe, was the first sign to me that I was done for--wiped out. There wasn't any violence or any hysteria about it, only grief, only pity. It was an entirely simple, gentle and beautiful performance, and it took place in my rooms after Jevons had left us. But, as I say, this was long afterwards. The agony of my undoing was a horribly protracted affair.

I needn't say that what happened--I mean the thing that made me forget all about Jevons and his half-crown--was Viola Thesiger.

I had his address, but the next day--the day after the match--was Sunday, so I couldn't get the postal order I had meant to send him. And on Monday she walked into my rooms at ten in the morning.

The appointment, I may remark, was for nine-thirty. I had fixed that early hour for it because I wanted to get it done with. I wasn't going to have my morning murdered with violence when it was two hours old; neither did I intend it to be poisoned by the thought of this interview hanging over me at the end.

I had just sent for Pavitt, my man, and told him that if Miss Thesiger called he was on no account to let her in. He was to say that the appointment was for nine-thirty and that Mr. Furnival was now engaged. She would have to call again at three if she wished to see him. When engaging a typist it is as well to begin as you mean to go on, and I was anxious to let Miss Thesiger know at once that I was not a man who would stand any nonsense. I was abominably busy that morning.

And Pavitt let her in. (It was the first time he had failed in this way.) He never explained or apologized for it afterwards. He seemed to think that when I had seen Miss Thesiger I would see, even more vividly than he did, how impossible it was to do otherwise, unless he had relinquished all claim to manhood and to chivalry. The look he sent me from the threshold as he retreated backwards, drawing the door upon himself like a screen and shutting me in alone with her, said very plainly, "You may curse, sir, and you may swear; but if you think you'll get out of it any better than I have you're mistaken."

Yes: it was something more than her appearance and her manner, though they, in all conscience, were enough.

I do not know what appearance and what manner, if any, are proper to a young woman calling on a young man at his rooms to seek employment. The mere situation may, for all I know, bristle with embarrassments. Anyhow, I can imagine that in some hands it might have moments, let us say, of extreme difficulty on either side. Miss Thesiger's appearance and her manner were perfect; but they didn't suggest by any sign or shade that she was a young woman seeking employment, that she was a young woman seeking anything; but rather that she was a young woman to whom all things naturally came.

She approached me very slowly. Her adorable little salutation, with all its maturity, its gravity, was somehow essentially young. She was rather tall, and her figure had the same serious maturity in youth. She carried her small head high, and held her shoulders well back, so that she got a sort of squareness into the divine slope of them (people hadn't begun to slouch forward from the hips in those days), a squareness that agreed somehow with the character of her small face. I didn't know then whether it was a pretty face or not. I daresay it was a bit too odd and square for prettiness, and, as for beauty, that had all gone into the lines of her body (which _was_ beautiful, if you like). When you looked carefully, you got a little square, white forehead, and straight eyebrows of the same darkness as her hair, and very distinct on the white, and eyes also very dark and distinct, and fairly crystalline with youth; and a little white and very young nose that started straight and ended absurdly in a little soft knob that had a sort of kink in it; and a mouth which would have been too large for her face if it hadn't made room for itself by tilting up at the corners; and then a little square white chin and jaw; they were thrust forward, but so lightly and slenderly that it didn't matter. It doesn't sound--does it?--as if she could have been pretty, let alone beautiful; and yet--and yet she managed that little head of hers and that little odd face so as to give an impression of beauty or of prettiness. It was partly the oddness of the face and head, coming on the top of all that symmetry, that perfection, that made the total effect of her so bewildering. I can't find words for the total effect (I don't know that you ever got it all at once, and I certainly didn't get it then), and if I were to tell you that what struck me first about her was something perverse and wilful and defiant, this would be misleading.

She smiled in her mature, perfunctory manner as she took the chair I gave her. She cast out her muff over my writing-table, and flung back the furs that covered her breast and shoulders, as if she had come to stay, as if it were four o'clock in the afternoon and I had asked her to tea for the first time.

I remember saying, "That's right. I'm afraid this room is a bit warm, isn't it?"--as if she had done something uninvited and a little unexpected, and I wished to reassure her. As if, too, I desired to assert my position as the giver of assurances.

(And it was I who needed them, not she.)

She hadn't been in that room five minutes before she had created a situation; a situation that bristled with difficulty and danger.

To begin with, she was so young. She couldn't have been, then, a day older than one-and-twenty. My first instinct (at least, I suppose it was my first) was to send her away; to tell her that I was afraid she wouldn't do, that she was too unpunctual, and that I had found, between nine-thirty and ten o'clock, somebody who would suit me rather better. Any lie I could think of, so long as I got out of it. So long as I got her out of it.

I don't know how it was she so contrived to impress me as being in for something, some impetuous adventure, some enterprise of enormous uncertainty. It may have been because she looked so well-cared-for and expensive. I do not understand these matters, but her furs, and her tailor-made suit of dark cloth, and the little black velvet hat with the fur tail in it were not the sort of clothes I had hitherto seen worn by typists seeking for employment. So that I doubted whether financial necessity could have driven her to my door. Or else I had a premonition. She herself had none. She was guileless and unaware of taking any risks. And that, I think, was what disturbed me. The situation bristled because she so ignored all difficulty or danger.

Please don't imagine that I regarded myself as dangerous or even difficult, or her as being, in any vulgar sense, out for adventure, or as balancing herself even for amusement on any perilous edge. It was not what she was _out_ for, it was, as I say, what she might possibly be in for; and what she would, in consequence, let me in for too. She made me feel responsible.

"Let me see," I said; "it's typing, isn't it?"

I began raking through drawers and pigeon-holes, pretending to find her letter and the sample of her work that she had sent me, though I knew all the time that they lay under my hand hidden by the blotter. I wanted to give myself time; I wanted to create the impression that I was old at this game; that I had to do with scores and scores of young women seeking employment; to make her realize the grim fact of competition; to saturate her with the idea that she was only one of scores and scores, all docketed and pigeon-holed, any one of whom might have superior qualities; when it would be easy enough to say, "I'm sorry, but the fact is, I rather think I've engaged somebody already."

"Yes," she said, "it's typing. I can't do anything else. But if you want shorthand, I could learn it."

This gave me an opening. "Well--I'm sorry--but the fact is--"

"Did you like what I sent you?"

That staggered me. I hadn't allowed for her voice. For a moment I wondered wildly what _had_ she sent me?

"Oh, yes. I liked it. But--" I began it again.

She leaned forward this time, peering under my elbow (the minx! I'm convinced she knew the infernal thing was there).

"I see," she said. "You've lost it. Don't bother. I can do another. As long as you liked it, that's all right."

I remember thinking violently: "It isn't all right. It's all wrong. And the more I like it (if I _do_ like it) the worse it's going to be." But all I said was, "You wrote from Canterbury, didn't you?"

"Yes."

It was as if she challenged me with: "Why not? Why shouldn't one write from Canterbury?" And she stuck out her little chin as her eyes opened fire on me at close range.

"Do you live there?" I said.

"Yes." She corrected herself. "My people live there."

"Oh! Because--in that case--I'm sorry--but--the fact is, I'm afraid--" I floundered, and she watched me floundering. Then I plunged. "I must have a typist who lives in London." (And I might have added "a typist who won't open fire on me at close range.")

"But," she said, "I do--at least, I'm going to to-morrow evening."

I must have sat staring then quite a long time, not at her, but at one of Roland Simpson's sketches on the wall in front of me.

She followed, but not quite accurately, the direction of my thoughts.

"If you want references, I can give you heaps. General Thesiger's my uncle. Why? Do you know him?"

I had ceased staring. He was not the General I knew, but she had spoken a sufficiently distinguished name. I said as much.

"Of course lots of people know him," she went on with a sort of radiant rapidity. "And he knows lots of people. But I wouldn't write to him if I were you. He'll only be rude, and ask you who the devil _you_ are. There's my father, Canon Thesiger. It's no good writing to him, either. It'll worry him. And there's--no, you mustn't bother the Archbishop. But there's the Dean. You might write to _him_! And there's Colonel Braithwaite and Mrs. Braithwaite. They're all dears. You might write to any of them. Only I'd much rather you didn't."

"Why?" I said. I thought I was entitled to ask why.

"Because," she said, "it'll only mean a lot more bother for me."

I believe I meditated on this before I asked her, "Why should it?"

"Because it isn't easy to get away and earn your own living in this country. And they'll try, poor dears, to stop me. And they can't."

"If they don't," I said, "are you sure it won't mean a lot of bother for _them_?"

"Not," she said gravely, "if they're left alone and not worried. It will, of course, if you go and write and stir them all up again."

"I see. For the moment, then, they are placated?"

"Rather." (I wondered on what grounds.) "We settled _that_ last night."

"Then--" I said, "forgive my asking so many questions--your people know you had this appointment with me?"

Her eyebrows took a little tortured twist in her pity for my stupidity.

"Oh no. That would have upset them all for nothing. It doesn't do to worry them with silly details. You see, they don't know anything about you."

It was exquisite, the innocence with which she brought it out.

"But," I insisted, "that's rather my point. _You_ don't know anything about me either, do you?"

"Yes, I do. I knew," she said, "the minute I came into the room. If it comes to that, you don't know anything about _me_."

I said I did; I knew the minute _she_ came into the room. And she faced me with, "Well then, you see!" as if that settled it.

I suppose it did settle it. I must have decided that since nobody could stop her, and I wasn't, after all, a villain, if she insisted on being somebody's typist, she had very much better be mine. You see, she was so young. I wanted to protect her. Not that there was anything helpless and pathetic about her, anything, except her innocence, that appealed to me for protection. On the contrary, she struck me as a creature of high courage and defiance. That, of course, was what constituted the danger. She would insist on taking risks. Presently I heard myself saying, "Yes, the Close, Canterbury. I've got that. But where am I to find you here?"

She gave me an address that made me whistle.

I asked her if she knew anything, anything whatever, about the people of the house?

She said she didn't. She had chosen it because it had a nice green door, and there was an Angora cat on the door-step. A large orange cat with green eyes.

Had she actually taken rooms there?

No. But she had chosen them (I think she said because they had pretty chintz curtains.) She was going to take them _now_.

She had her hand on the door. She was eager, like a child that has got off at last, after irritating delay.

I closed the door against her precipitate flight. I said I thought we could settle that here, over the telephone.

And I settled it.

Having settled it, I sent Pavitt, my man, to get rooms for her that afternoon in Hampstead, with his sister-in-law, in a house overlooking the Heath. I said I couldn't promise her chintz curtains and a green door and an orange Angora cat with green eyes, but I thought she would be fairly comfortable with Mrs. Pavitt.

She was.

She told me a week later that the Hampstead rooms _had_ chintz curtains and there was a Persian kitten too. A blue Persian, with yellow eyes.

There was. But I didn't tell her who put them there.

The kitten alone (it was a pure-bred Persian) cost me three guineas; and to this day she thinks that Pavitt, who brought it to her, found it on the Heath.

Yet, with all my precautions, there was trouble when Canterbury heard about my typist. (She had become my typist, though I had never said a word about engaging her.)

This, of course, was owing to the criminal secrecy with which Viola conducted her affairs. The Minor Canon wrote to me as if I had seduced, or was about to seduce, his daughter. (He had upset himself by rushing up to take her back to Canterbury, and finding that she wouldn't go with him.) I think, in his excitement, he ordered me to give her up. He was a guileless and indeed a holy man; and it's always the guileless and the holy people who raise the uncleanest scandals. And Mrs. Thesiger wrote, and the General and the Dean; and I've no doubt the Archbishop would have written too, if I hadn't unearthed _my_ General at his club, and asked him if he knew the Thesigers, and found out that he did, and implored him to arrange the horrid business for me as best he could. I said he might tell them that if the girl had been left to them to look after her, she would have got into rooms in--I named the street, and testified to the sinister character of the house. And my General wrote and explained to the other General and to the Minor Canon what a thoroughly nice chap I was, and how lamentably they had misunderstood what I believed he was pleased to call my relations with Miss Thesiger. I'm not at all sure that he didn't even go farther and stick in a lot about my family, and suggest that I was eligible to the extent that, though my fortunes were still to make, I had (besides private means that enabled me to live in spite of journalism) considerable expectations (he knew an aunt of mine--better, it would seem, than I did). In short, that I was a thoroughly nice chap, and that the father of seven daughters (five unmarried) might do far worse than cultivate my acquaintance. He must have gone quite as far as that, or farther, otherwise I couldn't account for the peculiarly tender note that the Minor Canon put into the letter of apology that he wrote me, still less for the invitation I received by the same post from Mrs. Thesiger to spend Whitsuntide with them at Canterbury. (Viola had said she was going home for Whitsuntide.)

Dear lady, she was herself the daughter of a Canon, and she had lived all her life in a cathedral close, and the atmosphere of a cathedral close may foster innocence, but I cannot think it could have been entirely responsible for the kind of indiscretion Mrs. Thesiger was guilty of. Neither do I think Mrs. Thesiger was entirely responsible herself. She is a nice woman, and I am sure she couldn't have written as she did unless my friend the General had led her to believe that there was some sort of an understanding between me and Viola. But still, for all she knew about me, I might have been a villain. Not perhaps the gross villain the Minor Canon took me for, but a villain in some profound and subtle way inappreciable to my friend the General.

Well, of course I didn't spend Whitsuntide with the Thesigers at Canterbury. It would have been sheer waste of Viola. For the worst of all this confounded rumpus was that it made me put off proposing to Viola till she had forgotten all about it. She would never have listened to me while the trail of the scandal still lingered.

In fact, it was only the marked coldness of my manner to her just then that saved me.

* * * * *

It saved me to suffer. I didn't know it was possible to suffer as she made me suffer--I mean as _they_ made me, between them.

It didn't begin all at once. It didn't begin, really, for another three months, the end of those six months that Jevons had given himself. Not even then. Not, you may say, for a whole year; because he gave himself another six months as soon as he saw her. He was always giving himself these periods of time, as if, with his mania for taking risks, he was always having some prodigious bet on himself. I never knew a man back his own enterprises as he did.

But until he turned up again I was happy. I say I, not we. I don't know whether Viola was happy or not, though she looked it. I had enough sense to see that her happiness, if she was happy, had nothing to do with me except in so far as I was the humble means, under Providence, of the definite escape from Canterbury.

For I very soon saw what had been the matter with her. She was one of nine, the youngest but one of seven daughters. The Minor Canon had only been able to educate one of the seven properly, because he had had a son at Sandhurst, and the other was still reading for the Bar, which is pretty expensive too if you're as amiably stupid as Bertie Thesiger. (I mention Bertie because, though he doesn't come into this story, his stupidity and his amiability combined to tighten the situation considerably for Viola.) And Mrs. Thesiger had only been able to marry off two of her seven daughters. Of the others, one (the one who had been to Girton) was a High School teacher in Canterbury and she lived at home; one was a trained nurse and lived at home between cases; that left three girls living continually at home and, as Viola put it, eating their heads off.

These were the circumstances which Viola (with some omissions) recited by way of justification for her revolt; the fact being that she would have revolted anyway. She was, as I have said, a creature of high courage and vitality and she was tied up much too tight in that Cathedral Close, besides being much too well fed; and she longed to do things. To do them with her hands and with her head. She was tired of playing tennis on the velvet lawns of the Canons' gardens; she was tired of calling on the Canons' wives and talking to their daughters. I am aware that Canterbury is a garrison town and that other resources, and other prospects, I suppose, were open to Viola. But Viola was tired of talking to the garrison. I think she would have been tired in any case, even if the garrison hadn't been bespoken, as it were, by her unmarried sisters. (It is, humanly speaking, impossible that, even in a garrison town, seven sisters will _all_ marry into the Service, as I fatuously supposed Mrs. Thesiger must have realized when she asked me to Canterbury.) It always bored Viola to do what her family did, and what her family, just because they did it, expected her to do. And somehow, in the long hours spent in the Cathedral Close, she had acquired a taste for what she called "literature," what she innocently believed to be literature. She was of an engaging innocence in this respect; so that typing authors' manuscripts appealed to her as a vocation that combined one of the highest forms of cerebral activity with I don't know what glamour of romantic adventure.

Her enthusiasm, her veneration for the written word made her an admirable typist. But not all at once. To say that she brought to her really horrible task a respect, a meticulous devotion, would give you no idea of the child's attitude; it was a blind, savage superstition that would have been exasperating if it had not been so heart-rending. It cleared gradually until it became intelligent co-operation.

I trained her for six months.

I don't suppose I ever worked harder than I did in that first half year of her. I mean my output was never greater. For every blessed thing I wrote was an excuse for going to see her, or for her coming to see me. It was a perpetual journeying between my rooms in Brunswick Square, and her rooms in Hampstead overlooking the Heath. The more I wrote the more I saw of her.

I trained her for six months--until Jevons was ready for her.

When I tell you that she reverenced my performances you may imagine in what spirit she approached his.

For their meeting, as for what happened afterwards, I alone am responsible. I brought it on myself. By sheer quixotic fuss and interference with what, after all, wasn't my affair. For little Jevons most decidedly was not. I might easily have let that sleeping dog lie. He certainly did sleep, in some obscure kennel of London; he had slept ever since I had left him at the door of that restaurant in Soho. He slept almost for the six months he had then given himself.

And then, before (according to his own schedule) he was quite due, he appeared in the columns (in my columns) of the _Morning Standard_. I had almost forgotten his existence; but when I saw his name, James Tasker Jevons, stick out familiarly under the big headlines, I remembered that that name, on a card with an address, had been lying in my left-hand writing-table drawer all this time; I remembered that it was there because he had lent me half a crown, and that I had never paid him. Then he came back to me--he lived again.

I sent him a postal order and an apology. I referred, very handsomely as I thought, to his cuckoo's nesting in my paper. (I informed him, in fact, that he "did it" better than I did); and because I had worked myself up to a pitch of affability and generosity, I asked him to come and see me at such time as he should be free. And because, also, I was indifferent and lazy and didn't want to be seriously bothered with him, instead of asking him to lunch or dine with me, I said I was generally free myself between four and five.

Between four and five was an hour when Viola was very apt to come in.

In the instant that followed the posting of that letter I saw what I had done. And I wrote to him the next day asking him to dinner, in order that he should not come in between four and five. For some weeks, whenever I fancied he was about due at four o'clock, I wrote and asked him to dinner. That was how I fastened him to me. There wasn't any sense in which he fastened on me. I wasn't by any means his only hope.

I may say at once I was prostrated as any slave before his conversation.

I shall never forget the radiance of his twinkle when he told me he had been sacked three weeks ago from the sporting paper that had provided him with his sole visible means of subsistence. It was his blessed (only he didn't call it blessed) style that had dished him: the suicidal _élan_ that he brought to the business. He was warned, he said. He was aware that his existence as a reporter hung by the bare thread of statement (wearing thinner and thinner) on which he weaved his fantastic web. His editor told him he was engaged to report football, not to play it with the paper. But he couldn't help it. He had got, he said, the ensanguined habit. Still, I was not to imagine that he bungled things. He jolly well knew his way about. In his wildest flights there was a homing impulse; he was preparing a place for himself all the time (that it happened to be _my_ place didn't seem to afflict him in the least). Like St. Paul, he knew how to abound and he knew how to abstain. His abstinence, in fact, gave the measure of his abundance. He held himself in for five perilous weeks; and when he let himself rip again it was with a burst that landed him in the front page of the _Morning Standard_.

What he sketched for me had no resemblance to the career of a peaceful man of letters. It was a hot race, a combat as bloody (his own word) as those contests of which he was the delighted eye-witness.

He had come thin and worn out of the struggle, but you gathered that he had borne himself in it with coolness and deliberate caution. His phrases produced a false effect of vehemence and excitement. You saw that he had simply followed out a calculated scheme, not one step of which had miscarried. And you felt that his most passionate affairs would be conducted with the same formidable precision.

I ought to have felt it. For we were precious soon in the thick of it--of his most passionate affair.

I had dined him, I suppose, about three times, and I had lunched him twice. And I had had tea with him once in his bedroom. He was living in one room in a street off the Euston Road, and he called it his bedroom because it looked so much more that than anything else. I might have let it go at that. But I didn't. I had seen his bedroom. I took the liberty of inquiring into his finances. They were, he said, as yet undeveloped. He had a scheme of his own for improving them, but while it was maturing he was, he certainly _was_ open to offers of work. I got him some translation. (He was a fairly good French scholar.)

Then--it was the fatality of the proceedings that impressed them on my memory--then (I forgot to say that at that time I was reader to a firm of publishers; these things are in themselves so inessential to this story) I turned over to him any books that came more into his province than mine. His province, I can tell you, was pretty extensive, too.

He began by doing me the honour to consult me about any instances that seemed doubtful.

And so--you see how carefully I had prepared his path for him--one afternoon he turned up at my rooms, uninvited, between four and five. He said he remembered I had told him I should be free at that hour.

He remembered. Yes; I don't think Tasker Jevons ever forgot anything, anything likely to be useful to him, in his life.

And he hadn't been with me ten minutes before Viola Thesiger came in.

He was saying, "Why the Heaven-afflicted idiot" (his author) "should think it necessary--" when Viola came in.

She came in, and suddenly I made up my mind that she was beautiful. I hadn't seen it before. I don't know why I saw it now. It may have been some turn of her small, squarish head that surprised me with subtle tendernesses and curves; or more likely it may have been her effect on him. I may have seen her with his eyes. I don't know--I don't know. I hardly like to think he saw anything in her I hadn't seen first.

He stopped talking. They looked at each other. I introduced him. Not to have introduced him would have struck him as a slight.

I ordered tea at once in the hope of hastening his departure. He had been curiously silent since she had come in.

But he didn't go. He just sat there, saying nothing, but looking at her furtively now and again, and blinking, as if looking at her hurt him. Whenever she said anything he stared, with his mouth a little open, breathing heavily.

She hadn't paid very much attention to him. Then, suddenly, as if intrigued by his silence, she said:

"Who is the Heaven-afflicted idiot?"

I said, "Ask Mr. Jevons."

She did.

Jevons didn't answer her. He simply looked at her and blinked. Then he looked away again.

"Come," I said, "you might finish what you were going to say."

"I don't know," he muttered, "that I was going to say anything--Oh yes--that thing you sent me. Why the silly blighter should suppose it's necessary to stick in a storm at sea when it's quite obvious he hasn't seen one--he talks about a brig when he means a bark, and from the way he navigates her you'd say the wind blew all ways at once in the Atlantic."

I said it might for all I knew; and I asked him if he'd ever seen a storm at sea himself.

It seemed he had. He'd been ordered a sea-voyage for his health after his spell of printing; and his uncle, who was a sea-captain, took him with him to Hong-Kong in his ship. And he had been all through a cyclone in the Pacific.

I got him--with some difficulty, for he had become extremely shy--I got him to tell us about it.

He did. And by the time he had finished with us we had all been through a cyclone in the Pacific.

It was too much. The little beast could talk almost as well as he wrote. A fellow who can write like Tasker Jevons has no business to talk at all.

Viola left soon after six. He had outstayed her. I went downstairs with her. When I came back to him he was still staring at the doorway she had passed through.

"Who's that girl?" he said.

I said she was my typist.

He meditated, and brought out as the result: "Do you mind telling me how much she charges you?"

I told him. He looked dejected.

"I can't afford her," he said presently. "No. I can't possibly afford her. Not yet." He paused. "Do you mind giving me her address?"

"I thought you said you couldn't afford her?"

"I can't. Not yet. But I _will_ afford her. I will. I give myself another--" He stopped. His mouth fell ajar, and I saw his lips moving as he went through some inaudible calculation--"another six months."

He hid his face in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair. Then, as if he conceived himself to be unobserved behind this shelter, he let himself go; and I became the witness of an agony, a passion, a self-abandoned nakedness, to the utter shedding of all reticences and decencies, with nothing but those thin hands and that hair between me and it.

"I'll work," he said. "I'll work like a hundred bloody niggers. Like ten hundred thousand million sweated tailors in a stinking cellar. I'll pinch. I'll skimp and save. I'll deny myself butter. I'll wear celluloid collars and sell my dress-suit. My God! I'd sell the coat off my back and the shoes off my feet; I'd sell my own mother's body off her death-bed, and go without my dinner for nine months to see her again for five minutes. Just to see her for five minutes. Five (unprintable) little minutes that another man wouldn't know what to do with, wouldn't use for tying up a bootlace in."

Pause.

"I didn't know it hurt. I didn't know a girl's face could land you one like this, and her eyes jab you, and her voice turn round and round in your stomach like a circular saw. That's what it feels like. Exactly.

"Dry up, you old Geyser, yourself. I'm getting it, not you. You'd spout if you'd had to sit tight with all the gas in the shop blazing away under you for the last hour. If you can turn it off at the meter, turn it. I can't. No, I won't have another cup of tea. And I won't get up and clear out, I'm going to sit here another five minutes. I'm not well, I tell you, and it relieves me to talk about it. I don't care if you don't listen. Or if you do. I'm past caring.

"D'you notice that I didn't speak a word to her--not one blessed word the whole time? I should have choked if I'd tried to. I didn't want to look at her, to think of her. That's why I told that rotten story, just to keep myself going. What a blethering idiot she must have thought me! What a putrid ass! The sea--And _me_!

"And the way she looked at me--"

I said, "D'you mean to say, Jevons, it didn't happen?"

And he groaned. "Oh, it _happened_ all right. I can't invent things to save my life.

"God! It isn't even as if she was pretty. I could understand _that_."

He grabbed his throat suddenly and began to cough.

I tried to be kind to him. "Look here," I said, "old chap. I'm awfully sorry if it takes you this way. But it's no good."

He turned on me coughing and choking. I cannot remember all he said or half the things he called me, but it was something like this: "You snivelling defective." (Cough) "You septic idiot." (Cough) "You poisonous and polluted ass." (Cough, cough, cough) "You scarlet imbecile." (I have to water down the increasing richness of his epithets.) "You last diminutive purple embryo of an epileptic stock, do you suppose I don't know that? No good? Of course it's no good--yet. I got to wait for another six months. And you can take it from me, if a fellow knows what he wants, and doesn't try to get it--doesn't know how to get it--in six months--and doesn't find out--_he_'s no good, if you like."

These words didn't strike me at the time as having any personal application. He was to repeat them later on, however, in circumstances which I defy anybody to have foreseen.

* * * * *

I cannot recall the precise phases of their remarkable friendship. I wasn't present at its earliest stages.

I had my first intimation of its existence one evening in the winter of nineteen-five, when he dropped in on me to consult me, he said, about a rather delicate matter, in which I gathered there lurked for his inexperience the most frightful pitfalls of offence. That he should come to me in this spirit was evidence that a certain chastening had been going on in him.

The delicate matter was this. He had given Miss Thesiger a lot of work, the typing of a whole book, in fact. And--he had immense difficulty in getting to this part of it--she had refused to take any payment. She had got it into her head that he was hard up. He had sent her a cheque three times, and three times she had returned it. She was as obstinate as a mule about it. And now she was saying that she had never meant him to pay her; she had done the whole thing out of friendship, which, of course, was very pretty of her, but it put him in a beastly position. He'd never been precisely in that position before and he didn't know what to do about it. He didn't want to offend her and yet he didn't see--did I?--how he could let her do it. It was, he said, all the wrong way about, according to his notions. And for the life of him he didn't know what to do. It might seem to me incredible that such virgin innocence as his should exist in a world where the rules for most sorts of conduct were fairly settled. He had lived all his life in an atmosphere of births, marriages and deaths, and he knew all the rules for the registration of them. And that was about all he did know. And it was the most infernally hard luck to be stumped like this at the very beginning, just when he wanted most awfully to do the right thing.

Besides, it had knocked him all to bits--the sheer prettiness of it.

He laid bare for me all the curious intricacies of a soul tortured by its own delicacy. There was agony in his eyes.

If he were to take this kindness from a lady--would it, in my opinion, or would it not, be cricket?

I didn't like to tell him that he had brought his agony on himself by his imprudence in employing a typist when he couldn't afford one. So I only said that, if I knew the lady, he would find her uncommonly hard to move.

He hadn't any hope, he said, of moving her; but did I think that if he made her a present--say, the Collected Works of George Meredith, it would meet the case?

I said it would meet the case all right, but that in my opinion it would spoil its prettiness. If Miss Thesiger didn't want to be paid in one way, she wouldn't at all care about being paid in another. Perhaps Miss Thesiger liked being pretty. Hadn't he better leave it at that, anyhow, for the present?

You see I looked on Viola and Viola's behaviour as infinitely more my concern than his. I found myself replying for her as she would have wished me to reply, as if I could claim an intenser appreciation of her motives than was his, as if she and I were agreed about this question of helping Tasker Jevons and I were the custodian of her generosity.

He said he supposed it wouldn't hurt him to leave it at that. It wasn't as if it wouldn't be all one in the long run. He gave himself three months.

I supposed he meant to pay her in.

Three weeks later I heard that Jevons was actually living up in Hampstead in the same house as Viola. I didn't hear it from Viola, but from my man, Pavitt, who had it from his sister-in-law. And what Pavitt came to tell me was that Mr. Jevons had been ill.

I went up to Hampstead that afternoon to see him.

I found him in a back room, at the top of the house, sitting by the fire in an easy-chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was as thin as a lath and his face was a bright yellow. The very whites of his eyes were yellow. I would have said you never saw a more miserable object, but that Jevons was not miserable. He was happy. And as far as his devastated condition would allow him, he looked happy. This face, yellow with jaundice, was doing its best to smile. The smile was a grimace, not an affair of the lips at all, but of the deep crescent lines drawn at right angles to them. Still, he was smiling. In a sort of ecstasy.

He was smiling at Viola, who sat in the chair facing him on the other side of the hearth. She looked as if she had been there for ages. Also, as if she had been sitting up all night.

She was smiling too, straight at Jevons. What I saw was the beatitude of his response.

He tried to smile at me, too, as I came in, but the effort was a failure. He wasn't really a bit glad to see me. Viola got up and left me with him. I wasn't to stay with him for more than ten minutes, she said. It was the first day he had been allowed to sit up.

I sat with him for fifteen minutes.

He was lodged, as before, in one room; but its domestic character was disguised by many ingenious devices giving you the idea that it was nothing but his study.

Well, there he was, haggard and yellow with jaundice, utterly pitiable as to his appearance and surroundings; and yet he looked at me in, positively, a sort of triumph, as much as to say, "Yes. Here I am. And you, with all your superior resources, haven't managed half so well."

And I thought that he (not knowing Viola so well as I did) was suffering from a lamentable delusion.

He said she had been awfully good to him. But it was rather hard luck on him, wasn't it, that he should have gone and turned this beastly colour?

I said rather loftily I didn't suppose it mattered to Viola what colour he turned.

(What _could_ it matter to her?)

She came in presently and took me down to her sitting-room, and gave me tea. She owned to having sat up three nights with Jevons. She couldn't have believed it possible that anybody could be so ill. For three days and three nights the poor thing hadn't been able to keep anything down--not even a drop of water. But to-day she had been feeding him on the whites of eggs beaten up with brandy.

She seemed to me to be obsessed with Jevons's illness, and I made her come out with me for ten minutes for a blow on the Heath. I tried to lead her mind to other things, and she listened politely. Then there was silence, and presently I felt her arm slide into mine (she had these adorable impulses of confidence).

"Furny," she said, "what does jaundice come from?"

I said it generally came from chill.

She frowned, as if she were not satisfied with that explanation. And there was another silence. Then she began again:

"Would being unhappy--very, _very_ unhappy--give it you?"

I thought I saw how her mind was working and I advised her to put that idea out of her head. Happiness, I said, wouldn't be good for Jevons.

She said, "Oh, _wouldn't_ it!" And, after prolonged meditation, "I wonder if he'll stay that funny yellow colour all his life."

I found out from her that he had been living in that top room above hers for three weeks--ever since he had finished his book. It looked as if he had become frantic when he saw the end of his pretexts and occasions for meeting her, and had cast off all prudence and had followed her, determined to live under the same roof.

I looked on it as a madness that possessed him.

But that it should ever possess _her_--that was inconceivable.

II

He recovered.

The brilliant orange of his jaundice faded to lemon, and the lemon to a sallow tint that cleared rapidly as it was flooded by his flush.

I did not realize then what sources he was drawing on. Looking back on it all, I am amazed at my own stupidity. I was, of course, aware that Viola was sorry for him; but I might have known that a girl's pity was not a stimulant that would keep a man like Jevons going for very long. I am sure he would never have lowered himself by any appeal to it. Why, the bare idea of pity would have been intolerable to him, bursting, as he was, with vitality and invading with the courage and energy and genius of a conqueror a world that was not his.

He laid before me very soon what I can only call his plan of campaign. Journalism with him was a purely defensive operation; but the novel and the short story were his attack. The work that Viola had typed for him was his first novel. He had dug himself in very securely that winter, and each paper that he had occupied and left behind him was a line of trenches that shifted nearer and nearer towards the desired territory. He didn't begin his assault on the public before he had secured his retreat.

I know I am writing about a man whom many people still consider a great novelist and a great playwright. God knows I don't want to disparage him. But to me what he has written matters so little; it has no interest for me except as his vehicle, the vehicle in which he arrived; which brought him to his destination quicker perhaps than any other which he could have chosen. His talent was so adroit that he might have chosen almost any other; chance and a happy knack and a habit of observation determined his selection of the written word. Compared with the spectacle of his arrival, what he has written is neither here nor there. What I have written myself is neither here nor there. For the purposes of this history it counts only as the means which enabled me to witness the last act of his drama.

That is why I say so much about his adventure, his campaign, his business, and so little about his books. In this I am adopting his own values, almost his own phrases. He wanted most awfully to arrive. How far he took himself seriously as a writer nobody will ever know. Viola was convinced, and always will be convinced, that he was a great genius. (There's no doubt he traded with her on her conviction. He wanted most awfully to arrive, but more than anything he wanted Viola.) Still, he was too clever, I think, ever to have quite convinced himself.

His adventure, then, began with his reporting; his campaign with his journalism, and his earlier novels; his business was to follow later in the long period of peace and prosperity he saw ahead of him.

His first novel, he told me, was calculated, deliberately, to startle and arrest; to hit the public, rather unpleasantly, in the eye. _That_, he said, was the way to be remembered. It wouldn't sell. He didn't want it to sell. What he wanted first was to gain a position; then to consolidate it; then to build. He talked like the consummate architect of his own fortunes.

His second novel would be designed, deliberately, to counteract the disagreeable effects of his first.

"Why," I asked, "counteract them?"

Because, he said, if he went on being disagreeable, he'd alienate the very sections of the public he most wished to gain. His retirement was simply the preparation for the Grand Attack.

It was in his third novel that he meant, still deliberately, to come into his kingdom and his power and his glory, for ever and ever, Amen. His third novel, he declared, would sell; and it would be his best. On that utterly secure and yet elevated basis he could build afterwards pretty much as he pleased. I asked him if it wasn't a mistake to put his best so early in the series? Wouldn't it be more effective if he worked up to it? But he said No. He'd thought of that. There wasn't anything he hadn't thought of. That third novel was to start his big sales. And the worst of a big sale was this, that when you'd caught your public you were bound to go on giving them the sort of thing you'd caught them with, therefore, he'd be jolly careful to start 'em with the sort of thing he happened to like himself, otherwise he'd have to spend the rest of his life knuckling under to them. He could get a cheaper glory if he chose to try for it; but a cheaper glory wouldn't satisfy him. That was why he decided to make for the highest point he could reach in the beginning, so that his very fallings-off would be glorious and would pay him as no gradual working up and up could possibly be made to pay. Besides, he wanted his glory and his pay quick. He couldn't afford to wait a month longer than his third novel. As for the different quality in the glory it would be years before anybody but himself could tell the difference, and by the time they spotted him he'd be at another game. A game in which he defied anybody to catch him out.

He'd be writing plays.

All this he told me, sitting in an arm-chair in my rooms, with his feet up on another chair, and smiling, smiling with one side of his mouth while with the other he smoked innumerable cigarettes. I can see his blue eyes twinkle still, through the cigarette smoke that obscured him. That night he had got down to solid business.

It was quite clear that Jevons's business was the business of the speculator who loves the excitement of the risks he takes. I remember exhorting him to prudence. I said: "This isn't art, it's speculation. You're taking considerable risks, my friend."

He took his cigarette out of his mouth, dispersed the smoke, and looked at me very straight and without a twinkle.

"I've got to make money," he said, "and to make it soon. I should be taking worse risks if I didn't."

It's marvellous how he has pulled it off. Just as he said, dates and all. For he named the dates for each stage of his advance.

That was in March; about a week before Easter, nineteen-six.

* * * * *

The next day I went up to Hampstead towards teatime, to see how Viola was getting on. I didn't expect to see Jevons there, for he'd left. He told me in a burst of confidence he'd had to. He couldn't stand it. It was getting too risky. He was living now in rooms in Bernard Street, not far from mine.

At Hampstead I was told that Miss Thesiger was out. She had gone for a walk on the Heath with Mr. Jevons, but they were coming in at half-past four for tea. If I'd step upstairs into the sitting-room I'd find her brother, Captain Thesiger, waiting there.

I stepped upstairs and found Captain Thesiger. I was glad to find him, for I don't mind owning that by this time I was getting somewhat uneasy about Viola.

It was all very well for Viola to nurse Jevons through his jaundice, she might have done that out of pure humanity; but she had no business to be going for walks with the little bounder. Even the charm of his conversation and his personality (and it _had_ a charm) couldn't conceal the fact that he was a little bounder. Why, in moments of excitement he had gestures that must have made her shudder all down her spine, and more than once I have known his aitches become fugitive, though, on the whole, I must say he was pretty careful. And Viola was letting herself in for him. In sheer innocence and recklessness she was letting herself in. I felt that if ever it should come to getting her out I would be glad of an ally. Now that I saw what Viola was capable of, I began to feel some sympathy with her people at Canterbury who had tried so ineffectually to hold her in.

There was nothing ineffectual about Reggie Thesiger. I suppose he would have been impressive anyway from the sheer height and breadth of him, his visible and palpable perfection; but what "had" me was not his perfection, but the odd likeness to his sister which he combined, and in some mysterious way reconciled, with it. His face had taken over not only the dominant and defiant look of hers, exaggerated by his sheer virility; but it had the very tricks of her charm, even to the uptilted lines of her mouth; his little black moustache followed and gave accent to them. I said to myself: "Here is a young man who will not stand any nonsense."

He greeted me with a joy that I could not account for all at once in an entire stranger, and it was mixed with a childlike and candid surprise. I wondered what I had done that he should be so glad to see me.

His manner very soon left me in no doubt as to what I had done. I had brought the most intense relief to the Captain's innocent mind. I do not know by what subtle shades he managed to convey to me that, compared with the queer chap I so easily might have been, he found me distinctly agreeable. It was obvious that I existed for him only as the chap, the strange and legendary chap, that Viola had taken up with, and that in this capacity he, to his own amazement, approved of me. I gathered that, knowing his sister, he had feared the worst, and that the blessed relief of it was more than he could bear if he didn't let himself go a bit.

He had quite evidently come, or had been sent, to see what Viola was up to. Possibly he may have had in his mind the extraordinary treatment I had received from his father, and he may have been anxious to atone.

Any relief that I might have brought to Captain Thesiger was surpassed by the reassurance that I took from my first sight of him. It was as if I had instantly argued to myself: "This is the sort of thing that has produced Viola. This is the sort of man she has been brought up with. When Viola thinks of men it is this sort of man she is thinking of. It is therefore inconceivable that Tasker Jevons should exist for her otherwise than as a curious intellectual freak. Even _her_ perversity couldn't--no, it could not--fall so far from this familiar perfection." Though Captain Thesiger's perfection might not help me personally, it did dispose of little Jevons. Looking at him, I felt as if my uneasiness, you may say my jealousy, of Jevons (it almost amounted to that) had been an abominable insult to his sister.

Reggie--he is my brother-in-law now, and I cannot go on calling him Captain Thesiger--Reggie was good enough to say that he had heard of me from his sister. His voice conveyed, without any vulgar implication, an acknowledgment of my right to be heard of from her--but, of course, he went on agreeably, he had heard of me in any case; he supposed everybody had. My celebrity was so immature that I should not have recognized this allusion to it if Reggie had not gone on even more genially. He said he liked awfully the things I did in the _Morning Standard_. Most especially and enthusiastically he liked my account of the big boxing match at Olympia. You could see it was written by a chap who knew what he was talking about.

I had to confess that Tasker Jevons was the chap who wrote it. Reggie, quite prettily abashed, tried to recover himself and plunged further. He brought up from his memory one thing after another. And all his reminiscences were of Jevons. He had mixed us up hopelessly, as people did in those days. They knew I was associated with the _Morning Standard_, and that was all they knew about me; if they wanted to recall anything striking I had done, it was always Jevons they remembered. Poor Reggie was so inveterate in his blundering that after his fourth desperate effort he gave it up. His memory, he said, was rotten.

I said, on the contrary, his memory for Jevons was perfect, and he looked at me charmingly and laughed.

While he was laughing Viola came in. She had Jevons with her.

It was evident that neither of them was prepared for Reggie Thesiger. They had let themselves in with a latch-key and come straight upstairs without encountering Mrs. Pavitt.

At the sight of her brother Viola betrayed a feeling I should not have believed possible to her. For the first and I may say the last, time in my experience of her, I saw Viola show funk.

It was the merest tremor of her tilted mouth, the flicker of an eyelash, an almost invisible veiling of her brilliant eyes; I do not think it would have been perceptible to anybody who watched her with a less tense anxiety than mine. But it was there, and it hurt me to see it.

There was one person, only one person, in the world whom Viola was afraid of, and that was her brother Reggie. She was afraid of him because she loved him. He was the person in the world that she loved best, before--before the catastrophe. And this fear of hers that I alone saw (Reggie most certainly had not seen it) ought to have warned me if nothing else had.

It probably would have warned me but for what she did next; but for her whole subsequent behaviour.

She broke loose from Reggie, who had closed on her with a shout of "Hallo, Vee-Vee!" and an embrace; she broke loose from Reggie and turned to me, all laughing and rosy from his impact, with an outstretched hand and a voice that swept to me and rippled with a sort of nervous joy. And she said: "Oh, Wally, this _is_ nice of you! You'll stop for tea."

Her mouth said that. But her eyes--they had grown suddenly pathetic--said a lot more. They said: "Don't go, Wally, _please_ don't go. Whatever you do, don't leave me alone with him." At least, I can see now that that's what they were saying. And even at the time I saw on her dear face the same blessed relief (at finding me there) that I had seen on Reggie's.

Neither Reggie nor I, mind you, had seen Jevons yet (I am speaking of fractions of seconds of time); and he wasn't actually in the room; but Viola and I were aware of him outside. If he had not paused on the landing to dispose of his overcoat and his hat and his stick, their entrance would have been simultaneous.

That pause saved them.

His stick slipped and tumbled down on the landing with a clatter. We heard him prop it up again. Our eyes met. I'm afraid mine said: "What are you going to do _now_?"

Then he came in and I saw the gallant Reggie take the shock of him. I don't suppose he had ever before met anything like Jevons--I mean really met him, at close quarters--in his life. But he was gallant, and he had his face well under control. Only the remotest, vanishing quiver and twinkle betrayed the extremity of his astonishment.

Viola, with an admirable air of detachment from Jevons, introduced them. I don't know how she did it. It was as if, without any actual repudiation, she declined to hold herself responsible for Jevons' appearance; for the extraordinary little bow he made; for his jerky aplomb and for his "Glad to meet you, Captain." And for the rest, she just handed him over to her brother and trusted Reggie to be decent to him.

I had wondered: Are they going to let on that they've been out together? She cannot--she cannot own up to that. But how are they going to get out of it, and will he betray her?

I saw how they were going to get out of it. If they didn't say in as many words that they'd met on the doorstep they implied it in everything they said. They asked each other polite questions, all to the tune of: "What have you been doing since I last saw you?"--to convey the impression that they had met thus casually after a long interval. Jevons played up to her well, almost too well; so well, in fact, did he play, that not long afterwards I was to ask myself: Was this perfection the result of collusion? Had they anticipated just such a sudden, disconcerting encounter? Had they thought it all out and arranged with each other beforehand how they should behave? I don't know. I never cared to ask her.

The game lasted some little time. I didn't like to see her driven to these shifts (I was afraid, in fact, they'd overdo it), and I came to her help by telling Jevons that Captain Thesiger was an enthusiastic admirer of his work; and Reggie burst in jubilantly--he was evidently glad to be able to meet Jevons on this happy ground--with: "Are you the chap who wrote those things I've been reading? I say, Vee-Vee, you might have told me."

He fastened upon Jevons then and there. He started him off on the boxing match. There was very little about boxing that Reggie didn't know, but he appealed to Jevons with a charming deference as to an expert. The dear boy had a good deal of his sister's innocent veneration for the chaps who wrote the things they'd been reading, who could, that is to say, do something they couldn't do.

And Jevons, once started on the boxing match, fairly let himself go. He careered over the field of sport, interrupting his own serious professional _élan_ with all sorts of childlike and spontaneous gambols. In some of his turns he was entirely lovable. It was clear that Reggie loved him as you love a strange little animal at play, or any vital object that diverts you. From his manner I gathered that, provided he were not committed to closer acquaintance with Jevons, he was willing enough to snatch the passing joy of him.

I do not know by what transitions they slid together on to the Boer War. The Boer War happened to be Reggie's own ground. He had served in it. You would have said that Jevons had served in it too, to hear him. He traced the course of the entire campaign for Reggie's benefit. He showed him by what error each regrettable incident (as they called them then) had occurred, and by what strategy it might have been prevented.

And Reggie--who had been there--listened respectfully to Jevons.

Viola had lured me into a corner where only scraps of their conversation reached us from time to time. So I do not know whether it was in connection with the Boer War that Jevons began telling Reggie that journalism was a rotten game; that from birth he had been baulked of his ambition. He had wanted to be tall and handsome. He had wanted to be valorous and athletic. And here he was sent into the world undersized and not even passably good-looking. And what--he asked Reggie--_could_ he do with a physique like his?

I remember Reggie telling Jevons his physique didn't matter a hang. He could be a war correspondent in the next war. I remember Jevons saying in an awful voice: That was just it. He couldn't be anything in the next war--and, by God, there was a big war coming--he gave it eight years--but he couldn't be in it. He was an arrant coward.

That, he said, was his tragedy. His cowardice--his distaste for danger--his certainty that if any danger were ever to come near him he would funk.

And I remember Reggie saying, "My dear fellow, if you've the courage to say so--" and Jevons beating off this consolation with a funny gesture of despair. And then his silence.

It was as if suddenly, in the midst of his gambolling, little Jevons had fallen into an abyss. He sat there, at the bottom of the pit, staring at us in the misery of the damned.

I looked at Viola. Her eyelids drooped; her head drooped. Her whole body drooped under the affliction of his stare, and she would not look at me.

Reggie (he really _was_ decent) tried to turn it off. "I wouldn't worry, if I were you," he said. "Wait till the war comes."

"Oh, it's coming all right," said little Jevons. "No fear."

And as if he could no longer bear to contemplate his cowardice, he said good-bye to us and left. Reggie's eyes followed his dejected, retreating figure.

"How quaint!" he said. "But he's a smart chap, anyway. And, mind you, he's right about that war."

I said (Heaven knows why, except that I think I must have wanted Reggie's opinion of Jevons): "D'you think he's right about his own cowardice?"

Reggie said, "Ask me another. You can't tell. I only know I've seen men look like that and talk like that before an engagement."

Viola raised her head. Her voice came with the clear tremor of a bell: "And did they funk?"

"They didn't run away, if that's what you mean. I daresay they felt like Jevons. I've felt like Jevons myself."

Of course, knowing Jevons as I do now, I have sometimes fancied his talk about cowardice may have been mere bravado, the risk he took with Reggie. But here again I am not quite sure. I don't really know.

I am, however, entirely enlightened as to the game Viola played with me that night.

Jevons had stayed till half-past six. He had talked for two hours and a half. When I got up to go, Reggie suggested that his sister should come and dine with him somewhere in town and do a play afterwards.

She said, All right. She was on. And Furny would come too.

He said, of course I was coming too. That was what he had meant (it wasn't).

And in the end I went. I say in the end--for of course I protested. It was his one evening with his sister. But Viola's poor eyes signalled to me and implored me: "Don't leave me alone with him, whatever you do." She wanted to put off the dreadful moment that must come when he would ask her: "Where on earth did you pick up that shocking little bounder?"

But the question never came. To begin with, Reggie was so enthralled by the funny play we went to that he forgot all about Jevons. And then Viola's game, that started in the restaurant and went on all through dinner, began again and continued in the taxi after the play. And though Reggie was discretion itself, you could see that he had taken it for granted--and no wonder--that she and I were, well, on the brink of an engagement if we hadn't fallen in. As for Jevons, he simply couldn't have conceived him in that connection. To Reggie, Jevons was simply an amusing little scallywag who could write. That Viola should have taken Jevons seriously surpassed his imagination of the possible. So that she never was in any danger of discovery, and there was no need for her manoeuvres. He couldn't have so much as found out that she had gone for a walk with Jevons, because it wouldn't have entered his head that you could go for a walk with him. People didn't do these things.

Besides, he never was alone with her that evening. She took good care of that. She insisted on dropping him at his hotel, which we passed on our way northwards. She actually said to him, "You must get out here. Furny'll see me home. I want to talk to him."

And instead of talking to me, she sat leaning forward with her back half turned to me, staring through the window at nothing at all.

That was how I came to propose to Viola in the taxi. I had been afraid to do it before. I wasn't going to do it at all unless I was sure of her. But it seemed to me that she had been trying all afternoon and all evening to tell me that I might be sure.

* * * * *

Well--she wouldn't have me. She was most decided about it. I had no hope and no defence and no appeal from her decision. Unless I was prepared to be a bounder--and a fatuous bounder at that--I couldn't tell her that she had given me encouragement that almost amounted to invitation. To do her justice, until the dreadful moment in the taxi she hadn't known that she had given me anything. She confessed that she had been trying to convey to Reggie the impression that if her affections were engaged in any quarter it was in mine. She had been so absorbed in calculating the effect on Reggie that she had never considered the effect on me. She said she thought I knew what she was up to and that I was simply seeing her through. She spoke of Jevons as if he was a joke--a joke that might be disastrous if her family took it seriously. It might end in her recall from town. She intimated that there were limits even to Reggie's enjoyment of the absurd; she owned quite frankly that she was afraid of Reggie--afraid of what he might think of her and say to her; because, she said, she was so awfully fond of him. As for me, and what _I_ might think, it was open to me to regard her solitary stroll with Jevons as a funny escapade.

I do not believe the poor child was trying to throw dust in my eyes. It was her own eyes she was throwing dust in. She didn't want to think of herself what she was afraid of Reggie thinking.

As to the grounds of my rejection (I was determined to know them), she was clear enough in her own little mind. She liked me; she liked me immensely; she liked me better than anybody in the world but Reggie. She admired me; she admired everything I did; she thought me handsome; I was the nicest-looking man she knew, next to Reggie. But she didn't love me.

"What's more, Furny," she said, "I can't think why I don't love you."

I couldn't see her clearly and continuously in the taxi. The lamp-posts we passed on the way to Hampstead lit her up at short, regular intervals, and at short, regular intervals she faded and was withdrawn from me. And in the same intermittent way, her soul, as she was trying to show it to me, was illuminated and withdrawn.

"I ought to love you," she went on. "I know I ought. It would be the very best thing I could do."

The folly in me clutched at that admission and gave tongue. "If that's so," I said, "don't you think you could try to do what you ought?"

The lamp-light fell on her then. She was smiling a little sad, wise smile. "No," she said. "No. I think that's _why_ I can't love you--because I ought."

And then she went on to explain that what she had against me was my frightful rectitude.

"You're too nice for me, Furny, much too nice. And ever so much too good. I simply couldn't live with integrity like yours." She paused and then turned to me full as we passed a lamp-post.

"I suppose you know my people would like me to marry you?"

I said a little irritably that I had no reason to suppose anything of the sort.

"They would," she said. "Why, bless you, that's what they asked you down at Whitsuntide for! I don't mean that they said to each other: Let's ask him down and then he'll marry Viola. They wouldn't even think it--they're much too nice. Poor dears--they'd be horrified if they knew I knew it! But it was underneath their minds, you know, pushing them on all the time. I believe they sent Reggie up to have a look at you, though they don't know that either. They think they sent him to see what I was up to. You see, Furny dear, from their point of view you _are_ so eligible. And really, do you know, I think that's what's dished you--what's dished us both, if you like to put it that way. I'm sure you may."

I said it didn't matter much what dished me or how I put it, provided I _was_ dished. But--was I?

Oh yes! She left me in no doubt that I was dished. And I saw--I still see, and if anything more clearly--why.

I was everything that Canterbury approved of. And Viola, in her young revolt, was up against everything of which Canterbury approved. Her people were dear people; they were charming people, well-bred people; they had unbroken traditions of beautiful behaviour. And they had tied her up too tight in their traditions; that was all. Viola would never marry anybody on whom Canterbury had set its seal.

And seeing all that, I saw that I had missed her by a mere accident. It was my friend the General who had dished me when he testified to my entire eligibility. That's to say, it was my own fault. If I had let well alone; if I hadn't turned the General on to them, _I_ should have been in the highest degree ineligible; _I_ should have been a person of whom Canterbury most severely disapproved; when I've no doubt that Viola, out of sheer perversity, would have insisted on marrying me.

She said as much. So far she saw into herself and no farther.

The Northern Heights were favourable to this interview, for the taxi broke down in an attempt to scale East Heath Road, so that we walked the last few hundred yards together to her door.

It was while we were walking that--stung by a sudden fear, a reminiscence of the afternoon--I asked her: Was there anybody else?

No, she said, there wasn't. How could there be? Hadn't she told me she liked me better than anybody else, next to Reggie?

"Are you sure?" I said. "Are you quite sure?"

She stopped in the middle of the road and looked at me.

"Of course," she said. "There _isn't_ anybody. Except poor, funny little Jevons. And you couldn't mean him."

That was as near as we got to him then.

But a week later--the week before Easter--he came to us suddenly in my rooms where Viola was correcting proofs for me.

He had come to tell us of his good luck. His novel had been accepted.

I was glad, of course. But Viola was more than glad. She was excited, agitated. She jumped up and said: "Oh, Jimmy!" (She called him Jimmy, and her voice told me that it was not for the first time.) "Jimmy! How simply spiffing!"

And I saw him look at her with a grave and tender assurance, as a man looks at the woman he loves when he knows that the hour of his triumph is her hour.

And I thought even then: It's nothing. It's only that she's glad the poor chap has pulled it off.

Then she said: "Let's all go and dine somewhere together. You don't mind, Furny dear, do you? I'll take it home and sit up with it."

Oh, I didn't mind. We all went somewhere and dined together. We went, for the sheer appropriateness of it, to that restaurant in Soho where I had dined with Jevons for the first time. That was how it happened--what did happen, I mean, afterwards, in my rooms where Jevons had left us.

We had gone back there for coffee and cigarettes. (Canterbury wouldn't have approved of this.)

He had said good night to us when he turned on the threshold with his reminiscence. The restaurant in Soho had aroused it.

"I say, Furnival, do you remember that half-crown you borrowed from me?"

I said I did. And that to remind me of it now was a joke in very questionable taste.

He said, "You never really knew the joke. I kept it from you most carefully. That little orgy of ours had just about cleared me out and the half-crown was my last half-crown. I had to go without any dinner for three days."

I mumbled something about his not meaning it.

He said, "Of course I meant it. Why, my dear chap, that's the joke!"

He stood there in the doorway, rocking with laughter. Then he saw our faces.

"I say, I wouldn't have told you if I'd thought it would harrow you like that. Thought you'd think it funny. It _is_ funny."

I said, "No, my dear fellow, it's just missed being funny."

I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him from the room. (I had seen Viola's face and I didn't want him to see it.) I led him gently downstairs with a hand still on his shoulder. He was a little grieved at giving pain when he had hoped to give pleasure.

At the bottom of the stairs he turned and looked at me with his ungovernable twinkle. "It _was_ funny," he said. "But it wasn't half so funny, Furnival, as your face."

I found Viola sitting at my writing-table, with her arms flung out over it and her head bowed on them. And she was crying--crying with little soft sobs. I've said that I didn't think she could do it. And I didn't. She wasn't the sort that cries. I'm convinced she hadn't cried like this for years, perhaps never since she was a child.

I put my arms round her as if she had been a child; I held her soft, warm, quivering body close to mine; I wiped her tears away with her pocket-handkerchief. And like a child she abandoned herself to my--to my rectitude. She trusted in it utterly. I might have been her brother Reggie.

I said: "You mustn't mind. He was only rotting us." And she said: "He wasn't. It was true. He told me that six months ago he was starving."

I said: "Vee-Vee, if he _was_, you mustn't think about him. You mustn't, really."

Then she drew away from me and dried her eyes herself, carefully and efficiently, and said in a calm and measured voice: "I'm not thinking about him."

I went on as if I hadn't heard her: "You mustn't be sorry for him. Jevons is quite clever enough to take care of himself. He isn't a bit pathetic. You mustn't let him get at you that way."

She raised her head with her old, high defiance. "He isn't trying to get at me. I'm not sorry for him--any more than he's sorry for himself."

I said, "You don't know. You're just a dear little ostrich hiding its head in the sand."

"No," she said. "No. I'm not a fool, Furny. Even an ostrich isn't such a fool as it looks. It doesn't imagine for a moment that it isn't seen. It hides its head because it knows it's going to be caught, anyway, and it's afraid of seeing what's going to catch it."

I asked her then, Was _she_ afraid?

She was standing beside me now, leaning back against my writing-table. Her two hands clutched the edge of it. Her eyes had a far-seeing, candid gaze.

"I'm not afraid," she said, "of anything outside me. Only of things inside me--sometimes."

"What sort of things?"

She smiled, the queerest little, far-off smile.

"Oh, funny things--things you wouldn't understand, Furny."

To that I said, "I wish you'd marry me, Viola."

She shrugged her shoulders and said, so did she, and it was much worse for her than it was for me. And then: "Do you know, Reggie liked you immensely. He told me so."

I said it would be more to the point if _she_ did. But since she didn't, since she couldn't marry me, I wished--"I wish," I said, "you'd go back to Canterbury and marry some nice man like Reggie."

"Can't you see," she cried, "that I shall never marry a nice man like Reggie?"

III

The next thing that happened was that she went off with Jevons.

At least, to all appearances she went off with him. They were in Belgium, at Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent and Bruges again together. I found them at Bruges after having tracked them through all the other places.

It was Captain Thesiger who started me. Reggie (whose family seemed to employ him chiefly to find out what Viola was up to) had called at my rooms after Easter to ask me if I could give him his sister's address. He said they hadn't got it at Hampstead, where he had been to see her, and they didn't know where she was staying. They thought it was in the country somewhere, and that she wouldn't be very long away, as she told them not to forward any letters. He thought I might possibly have her address.

I told him that I hadn't, and that I didn't know how to get it, either.

He said, "It's a rotten habit she's got of sloping off like this without telling you." It wouldn't matter, only his regiment was ordered off to India. He was sailing next week. She was to have come down to Canterbury for Easter and she hadn't. If he only knew the people she was stopping with--if he'd any idea of the town or the village or the county, he'd try and find her. But she might be in the Hebrides for all he knew.

I said I was sorry I couldn't help. All I knew was she had gone into the country (I didn't know it, but I assumed the knowledge for her protection). She had told me she might be going (she had), and I didn't think she'd be away for more than a day or two. I was pretty sure she'd be back before he sailed.

I'd no reason, you see, to suppose she wouldn't be. Anyhow, I satisfied him.

I marvel now at the ease with which I did it. But he was used to Viola's casual behaviour; and the monstrous improbability of the thing she had done this time was her cover. Who in the world would have dreamed that she would go off with Jevons? I don't really know that I dreamed it myself at the moment. I may be mixing up with my first vague dread the certainty that came later. But sometimes I wonder why Reggie didn't suspect _me_. I suppose my rectitude that had dished me with Viola saved me with her brother.

He took me to lunch with him at his club, and went off quite happily afterwards to the Army and Navy Stores to see about his kit.

I went straight to Jevons's rooms in Bernard Street. Jevons was away. Had been away since Easter. His landlady couldn't give me his address. He hadn't told them where he was going to, and they rather thought he was abroad. His letters were all forwarded to his publishers. _They_ might give me his address.

I went to his publishers. They wouldn't give me his address. They weren't allowed to give addresses, but they would forward any letters to Mr. Jevons. I said I was a friend of Mr. Jevons's. Could they at least tell me whether he was or was not in England? They said that when they had last heard from him he was not.

Then I went down to Fleet Street, to his editor, my editor. He couldn't give me Jevons's address because he hadn't got it. He rang up the office. In the office they rather thought Jevons was in Belgium. They'd had a manuscript from him posted at Ostend. They looked up the date. It was three days ago.

I sailed that night for Ostend.

Of course I had no business to follow Jevons. He had a perfect right to travel--to travel anywhere he liked, without interference from anybody. And in fixing on a time to travel in, nothing was more likely than with his mania upon him he would choose a time that had become valueless to him--a time that he had no other use for, the time when Viola Thesiger was away. The poverty of his resources was such that he couldn't afford to waste any opportunity of seeing her. So that I really could not have given any satisfactory answer if I had been asked why I had jumped to the preposterous conclusion that, because they were away at the same time, they were away together. It ought to have been as inconceivable to me as it was to Reggie. I can only say that in following him I acted on an intimation that amounted to certainty, founded on I know not what underground flashes of illumination and secret fear.

I must have trusted to more flashes in pursing his trail. For when I reached Folkestone there wasn't any trail at all. My only clue was that three days ago Jevona had posted a manuscript at Ostend. He might not be in Belgium at all. He might be in Holland or in France or Germany by this time.

When we got to Ostend I made systematic inquiries at the Post Office and at all probable hotels. At the eleventh hotel (a very humble one) I heard that a "Mr. Chevons" had stayed there one night, three nights ago. No, he had nobody with him. He had left no address. They didn't know where he was going on to. I found out under another rubric that Englishmen never came to this hotel. There was no point in making a separate search for Viola; if my intuition held good, all I had to do was to find out where Jevons was.

I went on to Bruges. Why, I cannot tell you. I had never heard either Viola or Jevons say they would like to see Bruges. But Bruges was the sort of place that people did like to see.

No trace of Jevons or of Viola in Bruges.

I went on to Antwerp (it was another of the likely places), and then, in sheer desperation, to Ghent.

And in Ghent, in a certain hotel in the _Place d'Armes_, I ran up against Burton Withers, the man who used to be on the old _Dispatch_, and the very last person I could have wished to see. I didn't ask him if he'd seen Jevons; I didn't mention Jevons; but before we'd parted he had told me that, by the way, he'd come across Jevons in Bruges. He was going about with my typist, Miss Thesiger. They were staying in the same hotel.

I tried to say as casually as I could that Miss Thesiger had wired to me that she was staying in that hotel with her people.

The little bounder then intimated that when he saw Miss Thesiger her people were less conspicuous than Jevons.

I replied that that was probably the reason why they'd asked me to join them when I'd seen Ghent.

Withers advised me to go on seeing Ghent if I wanted to be popular. They--Jevons and Miss Thesiger--didn't look at all as if they wanted to be seen, much less joined.

He had the air of knowing a good deal more than he cared to tell me; but then he always had that air; you may say he lived on it.

I asked him presently (in a suitable context) whether he was going back soon; and to my relief I learned that he had only just come out--for his paper--and was going on into Germany through Brussels. He wouldn't be back in England for another three weeks or more.

He wouldn't be back, I reflected, to tell what he knew or what he didn't know, till Reggie Thesiger had sailed.

I got rid of the little beast on the first likely pretext, having dealt with him so urbanely that he couldn't possibly think he had told me anything I saw reason to believe and therefore to resent.

Then I went back to Bruges.

This time my quest was fairly easy. I didn't know what hotel Jevons was staying in; but I did know the sort of hotel that Withers stayed in when he was travelling for his paper. My errand was narrowed down to three or four (good, but not too good), and the first I struck in the Market-Place was Withers's hotel. It was one of those that three days ago had known nothing of Jevons.

I inquired this time for Withers and was told that he had left that morning. I engaged a room and strolled out into the Market-Place. I visited the Cathedral, the Belfry, and the Béguinage, in the hope of coming suddenly across Viola and Jevons.

I did not come across them in any of those places; but I was not very earnest about the search. I was so sure that if Withers had not lied to me they would presently come across me at their hotel. I meant that it should be that way, if possible: that they should come across me in a place where they could not evade me. God only knows what I meant to say to them when they had found me.

As I entered the hotel again I saw the proprietor's wife make a sign to her husband. They conferred together, and sent the _concierge_ upstairs after me. He wanted to know if I was the gentleman who had inquired the other day for Mr. Chevons, because, if I was, Mr. Chevons had arrived the day before yesterday and was staying in the hotel.

There was no doubt about it; his name, James Tasker Jevons, was in the visitors' list.

Viola's was not.

From the enthusiasm of the fat proprietor and his wife you would have supposed that Jevons and I had roamed the habitable globe for months in search of one another; and that Jevons, at any rate, would be overpowered with joy when he found that I was here. They said nothing about Viola.

And before I could ask myself what earthly motive Withers could have had for lying to me, I concluded that he _had_ lied.

Or perhaps--it was more than likely--he had been mistaken.

Jevons, I said to myself, was bound to turn up at dinner. If Viola was in Bruges, Viola would probably be with him. I chose a table by the door behind a screen, where I could see everybody as they came in without being seen first of all by anybody.

Jevons didn't turn up for dinner.

I found him later on in the evening, on the bridge outside the eastern gate of the city. He stood motionless and alone, leaning over the parapet and looking into the water. Away beyond the Canal a long dyke of mist dammed back the flooding moonlight, and the things around Jevons--the trees, the water, the bridge, the gate and its twin turrets--were indistinct. But the man was so poured out and emptied into his posture that I could see his dejection, his despair. The posture ought to have disarmed me, but it didn't.

He moved away as he saw me coming, then, recognizing me, he stood his ground. It was as if almost he were relieved to see me.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" he said.

I asked him who he thought it was, and he said he thought it was that little beast Withers.

I said, "I daresay you did. I saw Withers this morning."

He said quite calmly he supposed that was why I was here.

I said I had been here before I had seen Withers.

"I see," he said. "He's told you."

I said Withers had told me nothing I didn't know.

"You didn't know anything," he said. "You simply came here to find out."

I said: Yes, that was what I had come for.

"Well," he went on; "there isn't much to find out. She's here. And I'm here. And Withers saw us yesterday. As he told you."

He spoke in the tired, toneless voice of a man stating for the thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact. He knew that I had tracked him down, but he didn't resent it. I felt more than ever that this encounter was in some way a relief to him; things, he almost intimated, might have been so much worse. I didn't know then that his calmness was the measure of his trust in me.

"The really beastly thing," he said, "was Withers seeing us."

I answered that the really beastly thing was his being there; his having brought her there; and that it would give me pleasure to pitch him over the canal bridge, only that the canal water was too clean for him.

He said, "The canal water is filthy. But it isn't filthier than--it isn't half so filthy as your imagination. Your imagination, Furnival, is like the main sewer of this city."

He said it without any sort of passion, in his voice of utter weariness, as if he was worn-out with struggling against imaginations such as mine.

"But," he went on, "even your imagination isn't as obscene as Withers's. You may as well tell me what he said to you about Miss Thesiger."

"He said that she--that you were staying together in the same hotel."

"Why shouldn't we? It's a pretty big hotel. Do you mind my going back to it?"

I said grimly that I was going back to it myself. I wasn't going to let Jevons out of my sight. I felt as if I had taken him into custody.

We went back.

We didn't speak till we came into the Market-Place. Then Jevons said quietly:

"As it happens, we aren't staying together in that damned hotel. I'm staying in it by myself. We were dining there and having breakfast when Withers spotted us. You don't suppose she'd let me take her to the same hotel, do you? I got a room for her in a boarding-house. Kept by some ladies."

"What do you mean by bringing her here at all? If," I said, "you _did_ bring her."

He meditated as if he too wondered what he had meant by it.

"I brought her all right. That's to say, I made her come."

"You mean you didn't bring her? She followed you?"

(I _had_ to know what they had done, how they had arranged it.)

We stood for a moment in the middle of the vast foreign Market-Place, talking in voices whose softness veiled our hostility.

He answered with a little spurt of anger. "You can't call it following. She came."

"Don't prevaricate," I said. "She came because you made her come. I'm not going to ask you why you made her. It's obvious."

"Is it?" he said. "I wish I knew why. I wish to God I knew."

"Don't talk rot," I said. "You knew all right. And she didn't."

He looked at me. Standing there in the lighted Marketplace, under the shadow of the monument, he looked at me with shining, tragic eyes.

"No, Furnival," he said. "Before God I didn't know. Neither of us knew. But I know now. And I'm going to-morrow."

* * * * *

He stuck to it that he was going. He seemed to think that his going would make it all right. He had just realized--he had only just, after six days of it, mind you, realized--that he had compromised her. I said I supposed he realized it after Withers had seen them?

He said, No, it had come over him before that. Neither of them really cared a damn about Withers. Who was going to care what a beast like Withers thought or said? It had come over him that he oughtn't to have brought her here. He wished he'd hung himself before he'd thought of it, but the fact was that he didn't think. He just felt when he got out here himself that it would be a jolly thing for her to come too; it would do her good to cut everything--all the mimsy tosh she'd been brought up in and hated--to get out of it all--just to do one splendid bunk. That, he said, was all it amounted to.

We talked it over, sitting up in his little bedroom under the roof, the cheapest room in the hotel. You may wonder how I could have endured to talk to him instead of wringing his horrid little neck for him; but there wasn't anything else to be done. After all, it wouldn't have done Viola or me any good if I had wrung his neck. It was, in fact, to save precisely that sort of violent scandal that I had come out here. I had realized so well what wringing Jevons's neck would mean to Viola that I was determined to get at him before Reggie Thesiger could.

Besides I doubt very much if you could have wrung the neck of anybody so abjectly penitent as Jevons was that evening. I felt as if I were shut up with a criminal in the condemned cell, and Jevons no doubt felt as if he had murdered Viola.

And yet, sitting there on his bed, leaning forward with his head in his hands and his eyes staring, staring at the horror he had raised round her, he asserted persistently his innocence.

"Practically," he said, "I brought her out to look at Bruges--the Belfry."

I said: "Good God! Couldn't she look at the Belfry without _you_?"

He shook his head and replied very gravely: "Not in the same way, Furnival. Not in the same way. It wouldn't have been the same thing at all."

"You mean it wouldn't have been the same for you, you little bounder."

"It wouldn't have been the same thing for _her_. I wasn't thinking only of myself. Who does?"

It was as if he had said: "Who that loves as I love thinks only of himself?" But I missed that. I was too angry.

At least I suppose I was too angry. I must have been. Jevons's offence was unspeakable, or seemed so. He had outraged all decencies. He had done _me_ about the worst injury that one man can do to another--at any rate, I wasn't sure that he hadn't. How could I have been sure! Every appearance was against him. Even his funny candour left me with a ghastly doubt. It was preposterous, his candour. His innocence was preposterous. But it is impossible to write about this singular adventure as it must have appeared to me at the time. I am saturated with Jevons's point of view. I have had to live so long with his innocence and I have forgiven him so thoroughly any wrong he ever did to me. All this is bound to colour my record and confuse me. I have impression upon impression of Jevons piled in my memory; I cannot dig down deep enough to recover the original; I cannot get back to that anger of mine, that passion of violent integrity, that simple abhorrence of Jevons that I must have felt.

He didn't care a rap about me and my abhorrence. He asked me what I thought I was doing when I came out here? He simply smiled when I told him I'd come out to send Viola back to her people before Reggie Thesiger got hold of him and thrashed him within an inch of his life, not because I in the least objected to his being thrashed within an inch of his life--far from it--but because advertisement in these affairs was undesirable. I didn't want Viola's family or anybody else to know about this instance. It was to be hushed up on her account and on their account alone.

He replied pensively (almost too pensively) that he had supposed that was the line I would take. It was his little meditative pose that made me call him a thundering scallywag and accuse him of having calculated on the line that would be taken.

He said quietly, "The word thundering is singularly inappropriate. There's nothing thundering about me. I haven't calculated anything. As for hushing it up, I'm hushing it up myself, thank you. Haven't I told you I'm going to-morrow? Can't you see that I'm packing?"

He had evidently been trying to pack.

"And what," I asked, "is Miss Thesiger doing?"

"She's staying on here by herself a bit. In the _pension_. As if she'd come by herself."

He seemed entirely satisfied with his plan.

I said, "Look here, Jevons, that won't do. It's no good _your_ going. You've been seen here. You're supposed to be staying in this hotel together. If you go and she stays--in that _pension_--you've deserted her. You've seduced her. You're tired of her--in five days--and you've left her."

"You don't suppose I have _really_?" said Jevons.

"I don't suppose anything. I don't know what you've done. I don't think I want to know. That's what it'll look like. Do, for God's sake, remember you've been _seen_."

He gathered a portion of his cheek into his mouth and sucked it.

"I suppose," he said, "it _would_ look like that."

I said of course it would. And he asked me then, quite humbly, what I thought he'd better do.

I said I thought he'd better do exactly what I told him. He was to stay here till Captain Thesiger had sailed for India (I wasn't going to let him get back to England till Reggie was out of it). Miss Thesiger was to go back to her people to-morrow, and he was not to see her or write to her before she went.

He asked me was I thinking of taking her back myself?

I said I wasn't. Miss Thesiger had behaved as if she had disappeared. There was no good in my behaving as if she had disappeared with _me_.

That seemed to pacify him.

I said I should take her to Ostend to-morrow and put her on board the boat. I could see that he didn't at all care about this part of the programme, but his intelligence accepted the whole as the best thing that could be done in the circumstances.

Then I left him to his misery and went round to the _pension_ to see Viola.

All my instincts revolted against what I had to do.

* * * * *

She has since told me that I did it beautifully. I don't, of course, believe her, and it doesn't matter. The wonder is how I did it at all.

To begin with I was afraid of seeing her, because I conceived that she would be afraid of seeing me. I felt as if I had hunted her down and caught her in a trap. I didn't want the bright, defiant creature to crouch and flinch before me in her corner. And, as I tried to realize our encounter, that was how I saw her--crouching and flinching in a corner. It wouldn't have been quite so awful if the man had been any other man but Jevons. I could not imagine a worse position for a girl like Viola Thesiger than to be caught running off to Belgium, or anywhere, with Jevons, and told to leave him and go home. Put brutally, that was what I had to tell her.

The only way to do it was to ignore the unspeakable element in the affair--to ignore Jevons. To behave as if I'd never heard of him; as if she were just travelling in Belgium on her own account and staying in Bruges alone.

And that--if she had only let me--was what I tried to do.

I remember vividly everything that passed in that interview, but I do not know how to reproduce it, how to give anything like an impression of the marvellous thing it was, or that it turned into under her hands. It ought, you see, to have been so ugly, so humiliating, so absolutely intolerable for both of us. And it wasn't. She took it from me, at the end, and held it up, as it were a little way out of my grasp; and before I knew where I was, with some sudden twist or turn she had brought beauty out of it. Clear and exquisite beauty.

I found her in her room at the _pension_. It was at the back, on the ground floor; and had long windows opening into a little high-walled garden. The room, I remember, was rather dingy and stuffed up with furniture. Large Flemish pieces, bureaus, chests and cabinets stood against the walls. There was a bed behind the door; she had put her travelling-rug over it. And there was a washstand in an alcove with a curtain hung across it; and some of her coats and gowns hung behind another curtain in a corner, and some were on hooks on the door. And her little trunk was on the floor by the foot of the bed. And her shoes stood by the stove.

Somehow, when I saw these things--especially the shoes--my heart melted inside me with a tenderness that was infinitely more painful than the rather austere disapproval of her which I had relied on for support.

I was prepared, as I said, for a cowed and frightened Viola, or for Viola in a mood at least in keeping with the poignant and somewhat humbling pathos of her surroundings; but not for the Viola I found.

The _garçon_ of the _pension_ closed the door of this room in my face as he went in with my card to inquire whether she would receive me. I thought, "If she refuses I shall have to insist; and that will be unpleasant."

But she didn't refuse. On the other side of the door I heard a subdued, but curiously reassuring cry.

She had been sitting outside the open window. Her chair was on the flagged path of the garden. As I came in she had risen and was standing in the window, with the intense blue darkness of the garden behind her and the light of the room on her face. She was smiling in a serene and candid joy. For one second I imagined that she had not read the name on the card and that she thought I was Jevons. And then I must have looked away quite steadily so as not to see her shock of recognition; for her voice recalled me.

"Wally--how ripping! However _did_ you get here?"

I don't know what I said. I probably didn't say anything. The sheer surprise of it so staggered me that I must have muttered or grunted or choked instead. But I know I took her hand and did my best to smile back at her with the stiff mouth she noticed later.

She went on: "I _am_ glad to see you. Have you had any dinner?"

I said I had.

"Then," she said, "let's sit in the garden."

I took her hat off a chair and stuck it on a bust on the bureau (Viola laughed). I set the chair on the flagged path of the garden.

"Have you had coffee?" she said then.

I had.

"So have I. But I haven't had it in the garden. We'll have some more."

I rang for coffee.

We sat down and faced each other. She was smiling again as if the delight of seeing me fairly bubbled out of her. One thing struck me then, that at this rate it would be easy enough to ignore Jevons. In fact, if Jevons hadn't given Viola away just now I should have thought that she _was_ travelling in Belgium on her own account and that his being here in the same town with her was a coincidence, an accident. I could have got over Withers and his story.

Then she said, "Have you come across Mr. Jevons yet? He's here."

I answered, with what I knew to be a very stiff mouth, "We're staying in the same hotel."

"You might have brought him along with you," she said.

I said I didn't want to bring him along with me.

She raised her eyebrows in delicate reproof of my rudeness and said, "Why not?"

"Because," I said, "I want to talk to you."

"Oh--" I don't think I imagined the faint embarrassment in her tone. But it was very faint.

"_And_" I went on, "I don't want to talk about Jevons."

She looked at me then steadily. The look held me, then defied me to pass beyond a certain limit. I understood now the terms of our encounter. As long as I met her on the ground of a friendship that recognized and included Jevons she was glad to treat with me; but any attitude that repudiated Jevons, or merely ignored him, was a hostile attitude that she was prepared to resent.

"What has he done?" she said.

"I don't know what he's done." I paused. "Why drag in Jevons?"

"Because," she said, "it's his last night. He's going to-morrow."

I said, "And it's my first night. And as it happens he isn't going to-morrow. He's arranged to stay here another fortnight."

Her face softened. "Then it's all right," she said.

I had to dash her down from _that_ ground and I did it at once.

I said, "I saw your brother the other day."

I could see her face darken then with a flush of pain. We were sitting close to the window, and the light from the room inside showed me all the changes of her face.

She asked, "What day?"

"Let me see. This is Friday. It must have been Monday. I came over that night, as soon as I'd seen him."

"What did you go and see him for?"

"I didn't go. He came to see me."

She looked at me again, if possible, more steadily than before, but without defiance. It was as if she were measuring the extent of my loyalty before she committed herself again to speech.

"Why did he come?" she asked presently.

"He wanted to know if I knew where you were."

"You didn't know," she said.

"I didn't or I wouldn't have lost three days in looking for you. But I made a good shot, anyhow, when I came to Bruges."

Even in her anguish--for she was in anguish--she smiled at the wonder of my shot.

"What made you think of Bruges?"

"I don't know."

I couldn't tell her what had made me think of it. I couldn't tell her that I had tracked her down through Jevons. I was going to keep him out of it, if she would only let me. But she wouldn't.

"I suppose," she meditated gently, "he must have told you."

I answered quite sternly this time, to impress on her the propriety of keeping Jevons out of it:

"He didn't tell me anything."

"Then"--she was still puzzled--"what made you come?"

"You."

"Me?"

"Your brother, if you like."

"He should have come himself."

"That," I said, "is what I'm trying to prevent. He doesn't know you're here. I want to get you back to England before he does know. Besides--he's sailing for India next week."

Then she broke down; that's to say, she lowered her flags. Her head sank to her breast; her eyes stared at the stone path; their lids reddened and swelled with the springing of tears that would not fall.

"Didn't you know?" I said.

"I suppose I must have known--once."

Up till this moment she had not said one word, she had not made one sign, that had really given her away. And nothing could have given her away more completely than the thing she had said now. She had confessed to a passion so dominating and so blind as to be unaware of anything but itself. It was not so much that it had swept before it all the codes and traditions she had been brought up in--codes and traditions might well have been nothing to Viola--it had struck at her strongest affection and her memory. She adored her brother. He was sailing for India next week; she must have known it; and she had forgotten it.

Her confession was not made to me (she had forgotten _my_ existence utterly); it was made to herself--the old self that had adored Reggie; that at this evocation of him arose and sat in judgment on the strange, perverted, monstrous self that could forget him. I've called it a confession; but it wasn't a confession. It was a cry, a muttering, rather, of secret, agonized discovery.

"He wants to see you before he goes," I said.

Her eyelids spilled their tears at that; but only those they had gathered; no more came. Her self-control was admirable.

"It's all right," I said. "You've heaps of time. I'm going to take you to Ostend in the morning. You'll be in Canterbury to-morrow night."

"Is that what you came for?"

"Yes."

"It was awfully nice of you."

"There was nothing else," I said, "to do."

"You're coming with me to Canterbury." She stated it.

"No, my dear child," I said, "I am not. You don't want them to think you went to Bruges with _me_."

This was by implication a reference to Jevons. It was as near as I had let myself get to him.

She said, "What are you going to do, then?"

"I'm going to put you on the boat at Ostend, and then I'm coming back here."

It must have been at this point that the _garçon_ brought the coffee. For I remember our sitting out there and drinking it amicably until the aroma of it gave Viola an idea.

"What time shall we have to start to-morrow?"

I said, "First thing in the morning."

"Then," she said, "it does seem a pity not to send for Jimmy."

I could see now that there was some deadly purpose in her persistence. But this time I couldn't bear it, and I lost my temper.

I said, "Send for him. Send for him, if you can't live ten minutes without him."

I was sorry even at the time; I have been ashamed since. For, so far from resenting my abominable rudeness--as, under any conclusion, she had a perfect right to--she merely said, "I'm only thinking that if I've got to go so soon to-morrow it'll be horribly lonely for him over there."

"He doesn't expect to see you. We arranged all that."

She pondered it, still with that curious absence of resentment. It was as if, recognizing the danger of the situation, she submitted to any steps, however disagreeable, that were necessary for her safety. It was clear that she trusted me; less clear that she trusted Jevons.

One thing remained mysterious to her.

"What are you coming back here for?" she asked.

I let her have it straight: "To look after Jevons."

"What do you suppose he'd do?"

"He might get into England before your brother got out of it."

She smiled. _"What do you suppose, then, Reggie'd do?"_

I said I knew what I'd do if I were Reggie.

She smiled again. "I see. You're saving him from Reggie."

"I'm not thinking of him, I can assure you."

At that she said, "Dear Wally, so you think you're saving me."

"I'm trying to," I said. "As far as your people are concerned. You don't want them to know you've been here. If you'll only leave it to me, they won't know."

"I'm not going to lie about it. I shall tell them if they ask me."

"Not Reggie," I said.

"Yes, Reggie. If he asks me. Reggie's the very last person I should think of lying to."

It was this attitude of hers that first shook me in my conclusions. For I'm afraid I'd come to certain very definite conclusions.

Why, I asked her, hadn't she told them before she came?

"Because," she said, "there's no use worrying them. They'd have tried to stop me. You can't imagine what an awful fuss they'd have made. I daresay I might never have got off at all."

What I couldn't understand was her attitude. I mean I couldn't reconcile the secrecy she had practised with her amazing frankness now.

Her manner was supremely assured.

It wasn't, mind you, the brazen assurance of a woman who has been found out and flings up the game; it was a curiously tranquil and patient candour, with something mysterious about it, as if she had knowledge that I couldn't have, and bore with me through all my ignorance and blundering. In fact, from beginning to end, except for the one moment when I upset her by telling her about Reggie's sailing, she showed an extraordinary tranquillity.

But as I couldn't understand her I simply said, "I wish you hadn't got off."

She said in that same quiet way, "I had to."

"Because," I said, "he made you."

Since she had dragged Jevons in she should have him in. I wasn't going to keep him out now to spare her. I had a right to know the truth. She had shaken my conclusions. She had left me in a doubt more unbearable than any certainty, and I considered that I had a right to know. I was determined to know now and end it. That shows that I must have trusted her; that I knew she wouldn't lie to me.

"But," she said, with the least perceptible surprise, "he didn't make me."

"He told me he did."

"He told you?--What did he say exactly?"

"He said--if you must know--that he hadn't brought you, but that he had made you come."

"He didn't. He didn't really. But supposing he had--what then?"

"You _want_ me to tell you what I think of it?"

"Yes."

"I think it was a beastly thing to make you do. He couldn't have done it--you _know_ he couldn't have done it--if he hadn't been a bit of a blackguard."

I was going to say, "as well as a bounder"; but I didn't want to rub that in. I judged that when the poor child came to her senses her cup would be full enough without my pouring.

"But, you see," she said, still peaceably, "he didn't do it. He only _said_ he did. That was his niceness. He wanted to save me."

"My dear child, if it's saving you to bring you out here without your people knowing anything about it, and to let you be seen with him everywhere--"

"He didn't bring me. He said he wished I could come with him. And I said I wished I could. I almost asked him to take me; and he said he couldn't. Then he went off by himself. He was all right till he got to Bruges. Then he wrote and said that the beauty of it hurt him, that it was awful being here without me, and that he was coming back at the end of the week without seeing any more of it, because he couldn't bear to know what I was missing. He was going to keep the other places till we could see them together. So I wired to say I was coming, and I came."

"What did you do it for, Viola?"

"Wally, I asked myself that as soon as I got into the train. And it wasn't till I was half across the Channel that I knew why."

She stopped and stared as if at the wonder of herself explained.

"I did it to burn my boats."

I suppose _I_ stared at that. For she expounded:

"To make it impossible to go back."

I said, "My dear child, that was very reckless of you."

She said she wanted to be reckless. I asked her if it didn't occur to her that some day she might want her boats?

She said: No. It was just her boats that she was afraid of. She didn't really want them. She didn't want--really--to go back.

Then she looked at me and said, "You know Jimmy wants to marry me." And then, "Did you know?"

I said I was not in Jevons's confidence, but I had guessed as much. I said, "Do you want to marry him?"

She said, "Yes. I want to marry him more than anything. I don't want to marry anybody else. I never shall marry anybody else. Most of me wants to marry Jimmy. But there's a little bit of me that doesn't. It's mean and snobbish--and dreadful, and it's afraid to marry him. And, you see, if I were to go to my people and say, 'I'm not going to marry Mr. Furnival; I'm going to marry Mr. Jevons,' and I were to show Jimmy to them, they'd all get up and side with that horrid and shameful little bit of me. Reggie would, too. It wouldn't be in the least horrid or snobbish of them, you know, because they wouldn't know what Jimmy's really like. They're just very fastidious and correct. But it's simply awful of me, because I do know."

"It isn't awful. It simply means that he isn't your sort. _You_'re fastidious and correct. You _can't_ marry him, and you know it. You won't be able to bear it. He'll make you shudder all down your spine."

"All that doesn't prevent my caring for him. I care for him more than for anything on earth, even Reggie. That's why I've burned my boats. So that I may have what I care for without their tearing me to pieces over it."

So far was I from understanding her that it struck me that what she was telling me was as ugly a thing as could be told in words; that she was confessing that, being too weak to stand up against her family, she had deliberately compromised herself with Jevons so that she might marry him without their opposition; just as I was sure that Jevons had compromised her so that he could marry her without opposition from herself.

"But--what you are saying is horrible," I said. "I don't believe you know how horrible it is."

So far was she from understanding _me_ that she answered: "Yes, it is horrible. But it was only a little bit of me. And it's all over. Burned away, Wally. I burned it when I burned my boats. Don't think of me as if I were really like that."

You see? We had been talking about different things. My mind had been fastened on an external incident, ugly in itself, ugly in its apparent purpose, ugly in its consequences, ugly every way you looked at it. Hers had been concentrated on the event that had happened in her soul, an event to her altogether beautiful--the destruction of the cowardice that would have brought her back, that shrank from taking the risk that her soul dared.

This, she seemed to say, is how I deal with cowardice.

That she had compromised herself by dealing with it in this way had simply never occurred to her. It couldn't. She didn't know and wouldn't have believed it possible that people did these things.

What had frightened her, she said, was Jimmy's saying that about keeping the other places till they could see them together. He meant, you see, till they were married. It brought it so home to her. And it brought home to her what it meant to him. Because he couldn't afford to marry yet for ages.

If she'd gone back, she said, it would have been so cruel to him. And it would have been so cruel to herself, too.

Then she told me what they had done together. Heavens! How she must have trusted him. She joined him here in Bruges. And they'd gone to Antwerp, then to Ghent, then back to Bruges. (I had followed close on their traces, a day behind them at each city.)

And it had all been so beautiful. She simply couldn't tell me how beautiful it had been. It was as if she had never seen anything properly before.

Jimmy had made her see things. "I can understand," she said, "what he meant when he said that the beauty of this place hurt him. It hurts _me_."

I reminded her that Jimmy had said it hurt him because she wasn't there.

She looked up and smiled. "He isn't here _now_, Furny."

I took her to Ostend first thing in the morning and saw her on to the boat. I advised her to remove the foreign labels from her trunk at Dover, and to contrive so that she shouldn't be seen arriving by the up platform at Canterbury.

"Oh," she said. "You have to take _some_ risk!"

We were on the gangway, saying good-bye. And from the boat's gunwale she flung me buoyantly, "If I'm caught I'll say it was _you_ I went off with. They won't mind that half so much."

I went back to Bruges the same day and found Jevons disconsolate where I had left him in his hotel. I took him to Brussels in the hope of finding Withers there and confusing him in his ideas. We didn't find him. He had gone on into Germany, carrying with him his impression of Viola and Jevons staying together at Bruges in the same hotel.

It was at Bruges that I said to Jevons, "By the way, Miss Thesiger says you _didn't_ make her come. She proposed coming herself."

He flushed furiously and denied it. "Of course I made her come. It wasn't likely she'd propose a thing like that."

His chivalry was up in arms to defend her. But I could see also that his vanity wasn't going to relinquish the manly role of having made her come to him.

Well, I suppose in a sense he _had_ made her.

IV

We didn't stay in Brussels more than a day or two. Jevons didn't like it. He had become sentimentally attached to Bruges, and he wasn't happy till I took him back there. I can't say he was exactly happy then except in so far as he may have enjoyed his own suicidal gloom. I wasn't very happy either. All my recollections of Bruges are poisoned by Jevons's gloom and by my own miserable business of looking after him and seeing that he didn't walk gloomily into any of the canals. As for seeing Bruges, I don't know to this day whether the Belfry is beautiful or not. I only know that it stood there in the grey sky like an immense monument to the melancholy of Jevons. He made me horribly uneasy. I thought every day that if he didn't walk into a canal he'd have another fit of jaundice.

He seemed to be suffering chiefly from remorse, and oddly enough it was this remorse of his that gave me the measure of his essential innocence, as if Viola hadn't given it me already.

It was in his dejection that he showed his tact. He had, for our remarkable circumstances, the right manner. If Jevons had been jaunty; if he had tried to brazen it out, I should have hated him. As it was, his misery might be poisonous, but it was most disarming. So was his trust in me. He realized that he had got Viola into the devil of a mess, and he looked, intelligently, to me to get her out of it. And with the same confiding simplicity he put himself into my hands now. The adventure had shaken his nerve and he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some supremely foolish thing like following Viola to Canterbury. I believe he would have consented to stay in Bruges long after the term I had imposed if I had told him it was necessary.

I said I took him to Brussels and brought him back to Bruges. He submitted to be brought and taken; to be banged about in trains and omnibuses, to be fetched and carried like a parcel. He let me feel in the most touching manner that my presence was a comfort to him, while he recognized that his might be anything but a comfort to me. I know I had nothing to do with Jevons's melancholy. The fat proprietor and his wife (who smiled at us by way of encouragement in our passages to and fro before their bureau), these thralls of Jevons's odd fascination, had confided to me that he had been much worse the day before I came. The poor gentleman could neither eat nor sleep; other guests in the hotel had come upon him wandering by himself at strange hours on the quays. (There were a good many English in Bruges that spring.)

I was greatly relieved by these disclosures; they testified to the fact that Jevons, at any rate on Viola's last day, had been seen very much by himself.

We had not spoken of Viola since the day when I had come back from Ostend after seeing her off. I can't recall much of what we did talk about, but I remember that Jevons's remarks were always interesting, and that in his lucid intervals he laid himself out to be amusing. In one respect only he had deteriorated. Jevons's strong language was no longer strong. It came, if it came at all, in brief spurts, never with the passionate rush, the gorgeous colour, the sustained crescendo of his first runnings. It was a thing of feeble _clichés_ that might have passed in any drawing-room.

We didn't, then, talk about Viola. But I know that he heard from her and that I didn't.

The first week of Jevons's fortnight was up when I got a wire from Canterbury. It said: "Reggie sailed yesterday. Trouble. Can you come Canterbury at once. Viola."

Of course the word that stuck out of it was "Trouble." For the rest it was ambiguous. I couldn't tell, neither could Jevons, whether the trouble was connected somehow with Reggie's sailing, or whether in announcing his departure she meant to intimate that Jevons might now return to England; the coast was clear. Jevons, I may say, took this view of it and I did not. It was I and not Jevons who was asked to come at once. Jevons, for Viola's present purposes, was ignored.

With his usual intelligence he saw my point. We made out that the message suggested trouble with Viola's family, and he agreed heartily that he was not precisely the person to deal with that.

Oh yes, he trusted me. He gave me his word of honour that he would stay in Bruges until I either sent for him or came back to fetch him.

Before I left I had a straight talk with him.

I pointed out to him (what he said he knew as well as I did) that on the most lenient view of his case he had compromised Miss Thesiger very seriously. But, I said, he would have had to have compromised her more seriously still before her people would consent to her marrying him. He must see that, with what he had done, by stopping short of what he might have done, he had made himself, if anything, more unacceptable than he was to begin with. She might--she probably would in her present mood--insist on marrying him without their consent. On the other hand, she just mightn't. And it wasn't as if he could afford to marry her at once, while her present mood was on.

He said, No. But in six months he could afford it. He gave himself six months.

I said, Anything might happen in six months. Miss Thesiger's present mood (which, I put it to him, was very much made up of old Flemish glamour) might change. And if it did, it was just conceivable that she might marry _me_. He was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if he got the chance. _I_ was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if _I_ got the chance. At the present most of the chances, I owned, were in his favour. But there was just the off-chance in mine.

And that off-chance, I told him plainly, I meant to make the most of. I wouldn't be human if I didn't. I wasn't taking any unfair advantage of him, considering the tremendous innings he had had in Flanders, with the Flemish atmosphere to help him. If I could make any running in Canterbury, with the Canterbury atmosphere to help _me_ (he owned very handsomely that it would help me, that I'd be "in it" quite beautifully) why, I'd make it.

Had he anything to say?

He looked at me very straight, with just the least perceptible twinkle, and he said, "All right, old man, cut in, and take your chance. I'll risk it."

I got to Canterbury in the early evening and went straight from my Fifteenth Century hotel to the Thesigers' house in the Close. I spotted it at once. It was all old red brick and grey stone like the Tudor houses in John's and Margaret's Quad.

I asked for Miss Viola Thesiger and was shown into the Canon's library. To my great relief the Canon wasn't in his library. It looked out on to a perfect garden with a thick green lawn, and an old red-brick wall, very high, all round it, and tall elms topping the wall, and long beds of wallflowers and tulips blazing away underneath it. I said to myself, "If I want atmosphere I've got it. Bruges is nothing to the Thesigers' garden in Canterbury Close." I'd time to take it all in, for Viola kept me waiting.

I was glad of the peace of the garden, for I'd taken in more atmosphere than I wanted already as I came through the house. You went upstairs to the Canon's library, and along a narrow black-oak corridor. And in passing I was aware of a peculiar quietness everywhere. It wasn't simply the quietness and laziness of the Cathedral Close. It was something in the house. I felt it as I crossed the threshold and the hall. It was the sum of slight but definite impressions: the sudden silence of voices that were talking somewhere when I came in; the shutting of a door that stood ajar; the withdrawal of footsteps approaching on the landing.

It was as if there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker called in to help them to bury their dead.

The trouble was strictly confined to the Thesigers' house. From the tennis-lawns under the high walls of other gardens there came shouts of girls and of young men at play.

Presently Viola came to me. She held her head if anything higher than usual, and the expression of her face was out of keeping with the trouble in the air. But as she came nearer I saw that this gay face was white, its tissue had a sort of sick smoothness, and there were dark smears under her eyes.

The poor child had paid her tribute to the Trouble.

She said, "It _is_ good of you to come. Did you mind awfully?"

I said, of course I didn't. She smiled again, the little white, blank smile she had for me in those days, and I asked her what had happened.

She said, "Everything's happened. It's been awful."

Her smile took on significance--the whole wild irony of disaster. Then she said, "They know."

"All of them? Your brother?"

"No. Not Reggie. He got away in time. They won't tell him. They won't even tell Bertie. They'll never talk about it. But they know."

I said, "Supposing they _do_ know--as long as other people don't--"

"But, Wally, that's just it. Everybody does know."

I couldn't take her quite seriously yet. I asked her: Was it the labels? and she said, No, she'd picked all the foreign ones off at Dover, and she got the Dover ones off in the cab coming home, and she'd had Heaven's own luck at the station, nobody'd seen her on the up platform, and her people thought she'd come from London. Of course they all asked her where she'd been, and she told them she wasn't going to let on just yet, that it wasn't good for them to know too much, and that if they behaved themselves they'd know some day. She meant to tell them as soon as ever Reggie'd gone. "Really and truly, Wally, I meant to tell them."

"And do you know," she said, "they thought I was rotting them, that I'd been in some stuffy place in the country all the time."

"Then how on earth," I said, "did they find out?"

"They didn't. They never do find out things. They heard--last night. Somebody saw us."

"Withers?" I said. I'd thought of Withers at once. But he didn't seem likely. He wasn't back yet.

"No. Not Withers. Some women who knew my uncle, General Thesiger. They were in your hotel in Bruges, and they knew some other women staying in the _pension_. They saw my name in the visitors' book and it excited them. It all comes, you see, of my uncle being so beastly distinguished, so that they _had_ to say they knew him. And then of course the other people chipped in and told them all they knew about _me_. Can't you see them doing it?"

I could indeed.

"I never thought the _pension_ was a good scheme," she said; "but poor Jimmy _would_ make me go to it. He said it was safe. You see how safe it was."

I wasn't quite clear yet as to where Jevons came in.

"You say these people saw you. You mean they saw you and Jevons?"

She smiled more than ever. "No, Wally. It was _you_ they saw."

I don't know whether I was glad or sorry. I believe I was both. I was glad that Jevons--the ugly element--was disposed of. I was sorry--sorry, indeed, is hardly the word for what I felt--when I thought of the impression Viola's family had of me _now_; of the terms on which I should be received into it if I were received into it at all. I couldn't clear myself entirely, you see, without dragging in Jevons, and for Viola's sake Jevons had at any cost to be suppressed.

"What on earth," I said, "must your people think of me?"

She said surprisingly, "They think you a perfect dear."

"What, for carrying you off to Belgium? That's what I seem to have done. I don't quite see how I'm to get out of it unless we can persuade them that we met by accident."

"Oh," she said, "_I_ got you out of it all right."

I asked her, "How?"

She said, "I told them the truth. I said it wasn't you; it was Jimmy."

"What did you do that for?"

"Because it _was_ Jimmy I went off with. You're all right. They _know_ it's Jimmy."

I groaned. "That's precisely what I've been trying to prevent them knowing."

"They know that, _too_. I told them that you came out to look for me--like a lamb, to save me--and that you made me come back. They think that was dear of you."

She paused on it with a tenderness that touched me.

"You see," she said, "I've saved you."

I could only say, "My dear child--have you saved _yourself_?"

She was visibly troubled.

"I think--I _think_ they believe me. They say they do. But they don't understand. That's why I sent for you. I want you to make them see."

"Make them see what?" I said. (It was clumsy of me.)

"What it really was," she said.

I asked her if they knew I was there. She said, Yes, they were coming in to see me.

"They want to see you. They want to know."

I saw then what my work was to be. I was not only to witness to her innocence and Jevons's--if they doubted it; I was to show them what she had shown me in the garden at Bruges, the beauty of the whole thing as it appeared to her. I was to show them Jevons's beauty.

Well, I thought, it'll take some showing.

"Do they," I asked her, "at all realize Jevons?"

"Yes. They asked me if he was the man Reggie met at my rooms. Of course I had to say he was. It's almost a pity Reggie met him. That's what's frightened them. You see, he only saw the funny part of him."

(I could imagine what Reggie's description of the funny part of Jevons had been.)

I said she was asking me to do a rather difficult thing.

She said, "Yes. And I've made it worse by telling them I'm going to marry Jimmy."

"And I'm to persuade them that that's the best thing you can do, am I?"

She said, Yes--if I could do that--

I said I couldn't. I couldn't persuade myself. How could I, when I was convinced that the best thing she could do was to marry _me_?

She said she'd forgotten that and that I could leave the marrying part of it to her. "It's about Bruges," she said, "that I want you to tell them."

"I can't very well if they don't ask me," I expounded.

"Oh, but," she said, "they _will_ ask you. At least Daddy will."

* * * * *

It was at this point (when, I must say, we had thrashed it out pretty thoroughly) that Mrs. Thesiger came in. Viola left me to her.

I noticed that, except for the moment of Viola's formal introduction of me, neither of them spoke to or looked at the other.

I have said that Mrs. Thesiger was a charming woman. I may have said other things that imply she was not so charming; those things, if I really said them, I take back, now that I have come to my first meeting with her. When I recall that ten minutes--it didn't last longer--I cannot think of her as otherwise than perfect. It took perfection, of a sort, to deal creditably with the situation. Nothing could well have been more painful for Mrs. Thesiger. I, an utter stranger, was supposed to know all about her daughter, to know more than she or any of them knew. I held the secret of those dubious seven days in Belgium. That the days would be dubious I must have known when I set out to bring Viola back from Belgium. I must, the poor lady probably said to herself, have known Viola. And my knowledge of her, so dreadful and so intimate, was a thing she was afraid of; she didn't want to come too near it. But it was also a thing that must be exceedingly painful to me. She conceived that I would dread her approach every bit as much as she dreaded mine.

And so--and so Mrs. Thesiger ignored my knowledge; she ignored the situation. Beautifully and consistently, from the beginning to the end of my stay in Canterbury, she ignored it.

She had come in now to bring me her invitation, and her husband's invitation, to stay. Her husband, she said, expected me. He was out; he had had to go to a Diocesan Meeting--but it would be over by now, the tiresome meeting, and he would be here in a few minutes.

I protested. I had taken rooms at my Fifteenth Century hotel.

She insisted. They could make that all right. They knew the hotel-keeper. He was used to having people taken from him at the last minute. They would send round for my things. My room was waiting for me.

I said, Really?--But they were too kind--

She said, No. It was the least they could do.

This, with its faint suggestion of indebtedness, was as near as she got to the situation.

She must have sighted it in the distance, for she slanted away from it with a perilous and graceful sweep. She had heard so much about me from her daughter. She had wanted to make my acquaintance. She was glad of this opportunity--

(We smiled at each other to show that there was nothing to wince at in her phrase.)

I said I was glad of it too, and what a charming garden they had.

Wasn't it? And did I know Canterbury? I wished I did. Well--I would know it now. And if I didn't mind ringing the bell the butler would fetch my things over from the "Tabard." And so on, charmingly, till the Canon came in and relieved her.

She had done very well.

He, dear, charming man, did the same thing, and did it even better. That's to say, he had a beautiful voice and he was happier in his phrases. He could ignore with the greater ease because he wouldn't have to keep it up so long.

He kept it up till dinner-time. Only now and then his kind, keen look at me told me that he was going to have it out with me, and that he was measuring the man with whom he would have to do.

But before dinner they had taken me to my room. They hoped I wouldn't mind having Bertie's room. The house was full; all the girls were at home, so they had had to give me Bertie's room.

As I dressed in Bertie's room (the drawback of it was that it looked bang out on to the Cathedral Tower and was fairly raked by the chimes), with the Cathedral Tower before my eyes and the Cathedral chimes in my ears, and Canon Thesiger's beautiful voice and Mrs. Thesiger's beautiful face and the beautiful manners of both of them in my memory, it came over me with renewed conviction that Jevons was impossible; that Viola's people knew and felt he was impossible; that Viola knew and felt he was impossible herself; and that in the face of all this impossibility I had a chance. Bruges might back Jevons, but Canterbury would never back him; whereas it was quite evident that Canterbury was backing me.

I was in the drawing-room ten minutes before dinner-time. They were all there: the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and their five unmarried daughters--Victoria, the eldest, Millicent, the High School teacher, Mildred, the nurse, Viola, the youngest but one, and Norah, the youngest.

They were all there, the whole seven of them. And they were all silent until I appeared. As I went down the stairs and through the hall I noticed that the door was open and that no sounds came through it. I caught sight of Viola standing by the window with her back to her family; the others sat or stood in attitudes averted from her and from each other.

When they heard me they all stirred and began talking. And as I came into the room I found the girls drawn together (even Viola had turned from her window).

I see them now: Canon Thesiger standing on the hearthrug, looking handsome; and Mrs. Thesiger beside him, looking handsome, too, in grey silk and a little flushed. I hadn't realized in our first meeting _how_ handsome they both were, and how brilliantly unlike. He was well-built, slender, aquiline, clean-cut and clean-shaven; he had thin, beautiful lips that he held in stiffly; he had dark eyes like his son Reggie's, and dark hair parted correctly in the middle, hair that waved. He had tried to depress and subdue it by hard brushing with a wet brush, but it continued to wave in spite of him, and the crests of the waves were silver, which accentuated them.

Mrs. Thesiger was tall and at the same time plump. She was fair and blue-eyed and still delicately florid; she had perfect little features, with mutinous upward curves in the plumpness. I say mutinous, because Mrs. Thesiger's way of being handsome was in revolt against her husband's. Her light-brown hair waved, too, and to a discreet extent she encouraged its waving. This sounds as if Mrs. Thesiger's appearance was frivolous. But it was not. All these florid plumpnesses and the upward curves were held in tight, like Canon Thesiger's mouth. Their intentions were denied and frustrated, the original design was altered to harmonize with his. Herein you saw the superior restraint, the superior plasticity, the superior _art_ of Mrs. Thesiger.

It was all very well for him to be correct when his features were formed that way, but this was the very triumph of correctness.

And she was, if anything, braver than her husband. He could only just smile with his stiff lip; she could laugh over the business of presenting me to the four unmarried daughters whom (she emphasized it) I _didn't_ know.

And they--the four daughters--I'm not sure that they weren't the most gallant of this gallant family.

I suppose that it was the violent dissimilarity in their parents' beauty that had produced the engaging irregularity of their features. Not one of those five little faces was correct. Victoria's had tried hard for correctness in her father's manner, but her mother's irrepressible plumpness had made her miss it, poor girl, just as (I was soon to learn) she had missed everything.

Millicent's face, the face of the one who had been at Girton, hadn't tried for it; it had achieved a plainness I admired because it was oddly like Viola's face, only that Millicent was sallow and thin and dry and wore pince-nez.

Mildred, the nurse, was frankly plump and fair and florid like her mother; her face would have been pretty if her father's nose hadn't stepped in and struggled with her mother's and so spoilt it for her.

Norah, the youngest, was pretty--and odd. She was Viola all over again, but more slender and coloured differently, coloured all wrong. I didn't take to Norah all at once. I wasn't prepared for a Viola with blue eyes and pink cheeks and light hair, and the figure of a young foal. Besides, her hair was outrageous; it waved too much; it was all crinkles, and she hadn't found out yet how to keep it tidy.

She told me afterwards it was "up" that evening for the first time. When it came to her turn, she said: "There are such a dreadful lot of us, aren't there?"

There certainly was. And as I looked at them I thought: Viola has done an irreparable injury to her family, to all these charming people. She has hurt her father and mother in their beauty and their dignity and their honour. As for her sisters, she has ruined what they are much too well-bred to call their "chances." The story of the going off to Belgium with Jevons is spreading through the Close, and through the High School where Millicent teaches, and through the garrison. They will try to hush it up, but they won't be able to; it will reach Chatham and Dover. If they go up to town it will follow them there. Wherever they go it will ultimately follow them. She has struck at the solidarity of the family. To be sure, it was the solidarity of the family that drove her to strike at it. But if you were to tell Canon and Mrs. Thesiger that they had driven her, that they had tied her up too tight, they wouldn't see it. They would say: "We never stopped her going off to London. But that wasn't enough for her. She must go off to Belgium with that man Jevons. She must ruin us."

And Viola knew that she had ruined them.

And there they were, all holding themselves well, and all well dressed--the two youngest in white, the elders in light colours on a scale that deepened to Victoria's old rose. I remember them, even to what they wore and the pathos of their wearing it; they stood out so against the black panelling of the old room. It was full of oak chests and bureaus and Chinese cabinets, and Madonnas in Italian frames, and red and white ivory chessmen, and little bookcases with books in white vellum with scarlet title-pieces, and family portraits, and saints in triptychs on golden backgrounds, and murderous assegais and the skins and horns of animals. And the leaves of the old elms stuffed up the low, mullioned windows looking on the garden.

And somehow you were aware of great streams of empire and of race, streams of august tradition; of sanctity and heroism and honour, and beautiful looks and gentle ways and breeding, all meeting there.

I looked at the Thesigers and I looked at all these things, and I thought again of Jevons--of Jevons as absolutely impossible. You may say it was pure snobbishness to think of him in that way, and I daresay it was; but there wasn't any other way.

It wasn't their tradition, you see, that appealed to me so much as their behaviour. I don't think I ever met people who knew so well how to behave.

They kept it up. All evening they behaved like people under some heavy calamity which they ignored for the comfort of their guest and for their own dignity. And yet, even if I hadn't known of their calamity, I must have felt it in the air. They knew that I knew it; but that was all the more reason why they should ignore it; they wanted to remove from me the oppression of my knowledge.

During dinner, perhaps, you felt the tension of the catastrophe; any guest who knew as much as I did was bound to be aware of it. It was in little sudden, momentary silences, in the hushed voices and half-scared movements of the butler and the parlourmaid, in the stiffness of the Canon's lip, and in some shade of the elder girls' manner to Viola.

I remember how, in one of those silences, Norah, who sat facing me, leaned forward and addressed me. She said, "Mr. Furnival, you've come from Belgium, haven't you? Do tell me about it! I can't get a word out of Viola."

I supposed they hadn't told Norah. They had spared the youngest. She was only seventeen.

The butler and the parlourmaid, standing rigid by the sideboard, looked at each other in their fright. Mrs. Thesiger saw them and flushed. But Canon Thesiger, who had his back to them, observed that Belgium was a large order, and that Mr. Furnival would have to tell her about it afterwards.

But there was never any afterwards for Norah. She said, "I believe there's a joke about Belgium, and that Mr. Furnival's in it."

Viola laughed. It was, on the whole, the best thing she could do. If I'd giggled, too, it might have helped, but I didn't dare to, sitting there beside Mrs. Thesiger.

The Canon pushed a dish of chocolates in front of his youngest daughter to keep her quiet, and then plunged like a hero into the tendencies of modern music, which he deplored. He asked my opinion of Richard Strauss, a composer of whom he was profoundly ignorant. Scarlatti and Corelli tided us over dessert, and Purcell floated us tenderly into the drawing-room and coffee. After coffee the Canon took me into the library (he said) for a smoke.

I could see by the fuss he made about his cigarettes that he was nervous, staving off the moment.

It came with the silence of the first cigarette. There were no transitions. He simply settled himself a little deeper into his chair and said, "I'm a little anxious about that girl of mine."

I said, "_Are_ you, sir?" as if I were surprised.

"Well"--he was evidently trying to steer between his decision to ignore and his desire for knowledge--"you see, she's rather reckless and impulsive."

I agreed. She was--a little.

"More than a little, I'm afraid. Do you know anything of this man Jevons she talks about?"

That was masterly of the Canon, the subtle suggestion that Viola did no more than talk about Jevons, the still more subtle implication that if she _could_ talk about him all was well.

I said that Jevons was a very decent fellow, and added that Captain Thesiger had met him.

It was mean of me to shovel the responsibility on to Reggie, but I wanted to gain time, too.

The Canon remembered that Reggie had said something. And then suddenly he discarded subtlety and told me straight out that Reggie had said Jevons was a bit of a bounder, and he supposed he was.

I could see him watching me, trying to break down my defences.

I dodged him with "These things are comparative," and he floored me with a sudden thrust:

"No, my dear boy, they are _not_."

He meditated. "What sort of age is he?"

I told him, "About thirty-one or two."

"Ah!"

And then: Did I know anything about the young man's morals?

I assured him I had never heard a word against them.

He looked at me keenly and I remembered the words of Withers which I _had_ heard. Still, I knew nothing against Jevons's morals, and I said they were all right for all I knew.

"Never mind what you _know_," he answered. "What do you think?"

I said I thought that Jevons had as clean a record as any man I knew.

"You mean," he said, "these things are comparative?"

I said I meant I only wished my morals were as clean. (I went as far as that for Viola--to save her. Besides, there was Jevons to be thought of. I was there to take a fair advantage of him, not an unfair one.)

He took another look at me that seemed to satisfy him, for he said: "Thank you. That's all I want to know."

We smoked in silence. Presently we went into the drawing-room "for a little music." Victoria played. The Canon and Mildred and Norah sang. Millicent went upstairs to prepare a lecture.

When the music was over Viola and Mildred and Norah and I went into the garden, and very soon Mildred and Norah drifted back into the house again and left me with Viola.

She began at once, "Well--did you make him understand?"

I said I hadn't had much opportunity.

Did he ask me about Bruges? No, but he had asked me about Jevons. I told her more or less how I had answered, and she said it was dear of me.

"But it's no use telling them anything about _me_, Wally."

I asked her, Had they said much?

She said, "No. It's what they think. Or rather, what they don't think. They'll never think the same of me again. And they'll never trust me."

I said, Come, it wasn't so bad as all that.

But she stuck to it.

"There!" she said. "Didn't I tell you?"

Mrs. Thesiger from the drawing-room window was calling to us to come in. The grass was damp.

"They won't trust me even with you."

I thought: "Poor little Viola--she's burned her boats with a vengeance."

Presently it was Bertie's room again, and moonlight, and the Cathedral chimes. They kept me awake all night.

* * * * *

Of course I hadn't made them understand. How could I? The peculiar awfulness of their calamity was that they knew so little about it. They didn't know, after all, what had happened at Bruges; they didn't know what lengths Viola had gone to. And though they evidently thought that I knew, that wasn't any good to them. They couldn't ask me what had happened at Bruges. They couldn't cross-question me about Viola's "lengths." I couldn't tell them that, according to my lights, nothing _had_ happened, that Viola's lengths were not likely to be very long. Besides, even if I had come with the proofs of her innocence in my hands, and removed their private sorrow, that wouldn't have repaired their public wrong. Nobody was going to believe in Viola's innocence. Appearances were dead against her.

It was awful for them every way they looked at it; awful if she married Jevons just because she had to; awful even if she hadn't to, so long as people thought she had; awful if she married him for any reason; more awful if she didn't marry him at all. And supposing she married him. They might go on ignoring for ever and ever, but who else would, with that marriage staring them in the face and perpetuating the disgraceful memory?

It struck me that Viola herself must see that there was only one way in which I could make them understand, only one thing that I could do for her, and that I had come to do it.

The next morning I asked Canon Thesiger if he could give me half an hour. He gave it with a sort of sad alacrity. I didn't anticipate the smallest difficulty with him or with any of Viola's family. They seemed to be looking to me pathetically to save them. I had every reason to know that my one chance was good, and that poor Jevons, with all his chances, wasn't anywhere. In fact, I found in that half-hour with the Canon that my very fairness to Jevons had worked against him to abase him, while it raised me several points in the Canon's estimation. He had seen what I had been driving at. The cleaner I made out Jevons's record to be, the better I succeeded in shielding Viola. He expressed in the most moving terms his admiration of my moral beauty.

And yet (I suppose I must have overdone it) it was my moral beauty that dished me with the Canon. I had reckoned, you see, without his, without Mrs. Thesiger's.

I told him straight out that if he and Mrs. Thesiger would allow me, I meant to ask Viola to marry me. His lip stiffened.

I said I hoped it wouldn't be a violent shock to them--they must have had some idea of what I had come for.

He said, Yes. They had been afraid I had come for that.

And then--oh, it was a terrible half-hour!

They had been afraid, and they had talked it over. He didn't tell me all they'd said, but I could imagine most of it: how they had seen that my marrying Viola was the one way out for them, the one way out for her, and how it had occurred to them that perhaps I didn't know what I was doing, and how they had decided--dear, simple, honourable people--that it would be very wrong to deceive me, and that in any case they had no right to accept so great a sacrifice, even if it _was_ the one way out. I daresay they said to each other that they couldn't put such a burden on an innocent young man; it was their child's doing and they must bear the whole ghastly ruin and shame of it themselves. They even went further. What Jevons had done to Viola (they'd made up their minds about him) was devil's work. What Viola had done to them was in some way the expression--the very singular and unintelligible and bizarre expression--of God's will. It was the cross they had to bear. God, I suppose, knew the kind of cross that would hurt them most.

A great deal of this he did say to me. He said it very simply, without phrases.

Nothing, he said, would have pleased them better than that I should marry Viola. But--he didn't think that he could let me do it. If I had only come to him three weeks ago--

He hadn't been able--naturally--to talk about it last night. He had hoped he wouldn't have to say anything about it at all, but I had forced him.

It couldn't have been worse if I'd seen him about to put a knife into his breast. I tried to stop him, but he would do it, he _would_ put the knife in.

"We don't know," he said, "what may have occurred at Bruges."

"Nothing occurred," I said, "nothing that you need mind."

He said, "That's what the child tells me."

And I, "Surely, sir, you believe her word?"

Of course--of course he believed her word. Viola, he said, might keep the truth from them if (he smiled in spite of himself) if she thought it would not be good for them to know it. But she had never told them an untruth. Never. She was--essentially--truthful.

"Only," he said, "we don't know what she may have been driven to. She may have been trying to shield that man Jevons."

I said I was convinced that, technically, Jevons was innocent. It looked as if he had been criminally reckless and inconsiderate; but he seemed to have honestly thought that there was no harm in Viola's joining him in Bruges.

But the Canon didn't want to know what Jevons had thought, honestly or otherwise. Or what Viola had thought. "It's what they've done," he said. "You can't get over it."

I said what they'd done didn't amount to more than, looking at the Belfry. I could very easily get over that.

He said that I was an Israelite indeed. But the world wasn't all Belfries, and we must look at it like men of the world.

"They travelled together, Furnival. They travelled together."

I said, "Yes. And it wasn't till they'd got to Bruges the second time that Jevons realized that they never ought to. As soon as he did realize it, he cleared out."

He did that too late, the Canon insisted. It was no good my trying to shield Jevons. It wasn't easy to believe that Jevons was as innocent as Viola, and, as nobody was going to believe it, the injury the brute had done her was irreparable.

"Not," I said, "if she marries me."

He said, "My dear boy, supposing--supposing it isn't all as innocent as you think? You can't marry her."

I said that made no difference. It was all the more reason.

All the more reason, he insisted, for her marrying Jevons.

That, he said, was what they'd have to go into.

But there I took a high stand. I said it was for me to go into it, and if I didn't, why should they? If I believed in Viola, surely they might? If I knew that she could do nothing and feel nothing that was not beautiful, wasn't my knowledge good enough for them? I said, "I shall go to her at once and ask her to marry me."

He got up and laid his hand on my arm. "No," he said. "Not at once. Wait. Far better wait."

I asked him, "How long?"

He said, "Till she's had time to get over him."

Mrs. Thesiger (I had half an hour with her, too) said the same thing. "Wait," she said, "at any rate, another week."

She had given her, as Jevons would have said, a week.

* * * * *

I waited.

I stayed with the Thesigers a week. In fact, I stayed ten days. I got used to the chimes and slept through them. I played chess with Mrs. Thesiger; I played golf and tennis with the girls and the young subalterns of the garrison; I played violent hockey with Mildred and Norah; I walked with Viola and Victoria; I tried to talk to Millicent (Millicent, I must own, was a bit beyond me); I played tennis again (singles) against Norah, who was bent on beating me. We all went for picnics with the subalterns into Romney Marshes and visited Winchelsea and Rye. And in between I was taken by Canon and Mrs. Thesiger to lunch or dinner or tea in the other Canons' houses, and was introduced to the Dean and the Archbishop. I attended the Cathedral services to an extent that provoked Viola to denounce me as a humbug.

I told her I did it in order to look at the finest spectacle of defiance I had ever seen--the Canon in his stall in the chancel singing the solo in the anthem with his beautiful voice, in the very teeth of disaster, as if nothing had happened.

She said, "Daddy is beautiful, isn't he? He had a sore throat for a fortnight after Aunt Vicky died. And he thinks this is far worse, but he won't go back on me. So he sings."

I was sitting with her in the garden on the Sunday evening. I said to her, "Viola, you were caught with the beauty of Bruges. Why can't you see the beauty of all this?"

She looked at me with her great dark eyes (they were very young and brilliant), and she answered, "Dear Walter, I've been seeing the beauty of it all my life."

I was seeing it for the first time.

I made the most of it, of the Canterbury atmosphere. I sank into it and felt it sinking into me. I was, as Jevons had said I should be, "in it."

And, as I made my running, I thought with some remorse of that unfortunate one, languishing in Bruges on his parole. But Canterbury would have been no use to Jevons if he had been there.

There's no doubt that I did something for the Thesigers in those ten days. I had effaced Jevons's legend. I had even effaced my own legend (for the scandal, if you remember, had begun with me). And the Thesigers were tackling their catastrophe with dignity and courage and, I think, considerable success. By having me there, by being charming to me, by presenting me openly and honourably to all their friends, they gave slander the most effective answer. People asked each other: Was it likely that the Thesigers would receive young Furnival with open arms if young Furnival had been the man they'd heard about?

At the end of my week the whole seven of them were almost merry. (I may say Norah, the youngest, had been merry all the time.) My visit lapped over into another week.

At the end of ten days my relations with Canon and Mrs. Thesiger became so intimate that we could discuss the situation. They could even smile when I reminded them that there was one good thing about it--Canterbury didn't, and _couldn't_, realize Jevons.

They hoped devoutly that it never would.

And they thought it wouldn't. By this time, poor darlings, they believed that I had saved them; that Jevons was an illness and that Viola had got over him; that I had cured Viola of Jevons.

I believed it myself. She had avoided me most of the time; she had left me to her sisters, particularly the youngest, Norah. And when I was alone with her she was silent and embarrassed. I thought: "She is beginning to be afraid of me. And that is an excellent sign."

The night before I left Canterbury I asked her, for the third time, to marry me.

She said, "I know why you're asking me, and it's dear of you. But it's no good. It can't be done. Not even that way."

V

The next day I went back to Bruges to release Jevons from his parole.

I found him sitting tight in his hotel in the Market-Place, waiting my return with composure.

He had recovered in my absence and had been making the best of his internment. He had written a series of articles on "The Old Cities of Flanders." He worked them up afterwards into that little masterpiece of his, "My Flemish Journal," which gave him his European celebrity (it must have made delightful reading for the Thesigers). There was no delay, no reverse, no calamity that Jevons couldn't turn into use and profit as it came. Yes, I know, and into charm and beauty. Viola Thesiger lives in his "Flemish Journal" with an enduring beauty and charm.

I said I was sorry for keeping him shut up in Bruges so long. He said it didn't matter a bit. He had been very busy.

I thought it was his articles and his book (he had been dreaming of it) that had made Jevons so happy. But I was mistaken.

We spent half the night in talking, sitting up in my big room on the first floor for the sake of space and air.

Jevons went straight to the point by asking me how I had got on at Canterbury.

I felt that I owed him a perfect frankness in return for the liberties I had taken with him, so I told him how I had got on.

He said, "I'm not going to pretend to be astonished. But you can't say I didn't play fair. I gave you your innings, didn't I?"

I said I'd had them, anyhow. We'd leave it at that.

He said, No. We couldn't leave it at that. He'd _given_ me my innings. He could have stopped my having them any minute, but he'd made up his mind I should have them. So that nobody should say afterwards he hadn't played fair.

I remember perfectly everything that Jevons said to me that night. I am putting it all down so that it may be clear that what the Thesigers called the beauty of my behaviour was nothing to the beauty of his. Think of him, shut up there in his hotel in Bruges, giving me my innings, when he could have struck in and won the game without waiting those horrible ten days.

Well, I suppose he knew that he had it in his hands all the time.

"You see," he went on, "I knew you'd got one chance, and I meant you to have it. I meant you to make the most of it. There are things, Furnival, I haven't got the hang of--yet--little, little things like breeding and good looks, where you might get the pull of me still if you had a free hand.

"Well, I gave you a free hand.

"You needn't thank me. I wasn't thinking of you so much. I was thinking of Viola. I wanted to be perfectly fair to _her_. If there _was_ a chance of her liking you better than she liked me, and being happier with you, I wanted her to have her chance. I wanted, you see, to be rather more than fair. If I was going to win this game I was going to win it hands over, not just to sneak in on a doubtful point. I wanted Viola to know what she was doing. I wanted her to see exactly what she was giving up if she married me--to go home and see it all over again in case she had forgotten.

"And of course I was thinking of myself too. I'm an egoist. For my own sake I wanted her to be quite sure she hadn't any sort of hankering after you."

I said if it was any comfort to him he could be. Viola hadn't any hankering after me at all. This--if he cared to know it--was the third time that I had proposed to her and been turned down.

He said he _did_ care to know it, very much. It was most important.

"I," he said, "have never proposed to her at all.

"That," he went on, "is just the one risk I wouldn't take.

"And there," he explained, "is where I've scored. I knew that Viola is obstinate, and that if she starts by turning you down she'll keep it up out of sheer cussedness.

"So I never let her start. Women," he generalized, "admire success. If I were to give you your innings all over again, Furnival--and I will if you like--you couldn't make anything of them with those three howlers to your account. There isn't any record of failure against _me_. Good God! D'you suppose _I_'d be such a damn fool as to muff it three times with the same woman? Not me!"

I said he needn't rub it in.

He said he was rubbing it in for my good, so that I shouldn't go and do the same thing next time.

"Because--_now_ we're coming to the point--there will be a next time for you, Furnival. That's why I don't even pretend to be sorry for you. There'll be other women. But there aren't any next times for me, and there aren't any other women. This--I mean _she_--was my one chance. It was pretty jumpy work, I can tell you, sitting tight and gambling with it for ten blasted days. Any other man would have gone clean off his chump with worrying over it. There've been times when I've felt like it myself. It was infernal--when you think what I stood to lose."

I said that was all rot. It was his beastly egoism. He didn't stand to lose more than I did.

He said it wasn't a question of more or less. And it wasn't his egoism. It was his sweetness and his heart-rending humility. He'd stood to lose everything. He'd be done for if Viola wouldn't have him. He couldn't look at any other woman after her. And he put it to me: What other woman would look at him? Whereas my resources were practically inexhaustible. Almost any nice woman would know that I would give her what she wanted. And almost any nice woman would give me what I wanted, too. When I insisted that I didn't see it, he said I'd see it shortly. He gave me six months.

Viola, he declared, would never have given me what I wanted. I could never give her what she wanted. And he could.

He said he admitted that it was odd that he should be able to succeed where I failed; but so it was, and he went on to expound to me all the reasons for my failure.

"To begin with, you're not her sort; or, rather, you're too much her sort. You with your integrity are one of the beautiful works of God, and she's been used to that sort of beauty all her life and she's tired of it. But she isn't used to me. She never will be. She's never seen anything in the least like me before, and she never will see anything quite like me again as long as she lives. I'm the queer, unexpected thing she wants and always will want.

"But let that pass.

"You couldn't get her because you didn't give your mind to it. You didn't know how to get her and you didn't try to find out. You set about it the wrong way. I told you ages ago that a man's a fool if he wants a thing and doesn't find out how to get it. You should have begun by trying to find out something about _her_. But you didn't try. With all your opportunities you haven't found out anything. You don't know the least thing about her. You don't know what she wants, you don't know what she's thinking, or what she's feeling, or what she'll do--how she'll behave if you propose to her three times running. She's told you things and you haven't understood them or tried to understand. Because the whole blessed time you were thinking about yourself, or what she was thinking about you, or was going to think. Whereas I haven't been thinking about anything but her--I've been studying her straight on end for ten months and I've found out a little bit about her. At any rate, I jolly well know what she wants and I jolly well know how to give it her.

"You see, I was determined to get her, and I left no stone unturned. I took trouble."

I suggested that _I_'d taken trouble enough in all conscience. He laughed.

"_You_ only took trouble to get her away, old man, when she wanted to be here with me. What do you suppose I brought her here for? Would _you_ have ever thought of letting her come with you? Of giving her what she wanted to that extent? Not you! You'd only have thought of shutting her up and protecting her for your own wretched sake--which was the last thing she wanted. She'd had about enough of that."

I replied that certainly I should have thought of protecting a young girl before everything else; that it never would have occurred to me to compromise her in order to marry her--even if I did find I couldn't marry her in any other way.

I had hit him there. He was quiet for a little while after it. I didn't look at him--I didn't want to look at him--but I could feel him there, breathing hard from the shock of it, with his mouth a little open.

Presently he took the thing up again. He went on, placably, quietly explaining. "I thought of protecting her too. Only I wasn't such an idiot as to think of it before everything else."

"No. You were clever enough to think of it afterwards--when you'd got what you wanted. When you had compromised her."

"I suppose you mean there was only one thing I wanted? There, Furnival, you lie."

I said I only meant that she _was_ compromised. At any rate, that was what it looked like to her people and to everybody to whom it mattered.

"If you will persist in taking the ugliest view of it, of course it'll look like that. I can't help how it looks to a set of old ladies and clergymen in Canterbury. Come to that, it matters a damned sight more to _me_ than it can to any of you people."

I said he wouldn't say so if he knew how he had made them suffer.

He laughed out at that.

"Suffer? They haven't suffered a quarter as much as I have. Not a hundredth part as much. They've suffered thinking of themselves--of their precious respectability. I've suffered thinking of _her_.

"Suffer? I've been through all _that_. It wasn't right, Furnival, it wasn't right for anybody to have to go through what I did. But I've come out of it. You've been pretty hard on me with your infernal virtue; but if you think you can make me suffer more, you can't. I'm past it."

I said I was sorry if I seemed too hard on him. But it would be well if he tried to look at his really very outrageous behaviour as it was bound to appear to other people.

"You admit, then," he said, "that it appears more outrageous than it is?"

I said, "You see, my dear fellow, I don't yet know what it is."

He asked me if I'd like to know what it was? And I told him that, certainly, some sort of an account was owing and that he'd better perhaps make a clean breast of it while he was about it.

Well--he made his clean breast.

He confessed that the sting of a great deal that I had said to him was in its truth. I needn't be frightened. Nothing had happened. Nothing beyond what I knew. But--there was a point, he said, when everything might have. When he had meant that it should happen.

He hadn't meant it at first. Nothing had been further from him when he let her come to Bruges. He had meant nothing--nothing beyond looking at the Belfry. He had thought--as she did--that it would be quite possible to be content with looking at the Belfry. That was where the damned folly of the thing had come in. They began to be aware of the folly when they found themselves going together to Antwerp. He wasn't aware even then of what he meant. But he knew what he meant when he left Antwerp and took her to Ghent.

Because he _did_ take her there. He meant--_then_--exactly what Viola's father and her brother and her uncles and her male cousins would mean if they took a woman to Ghent.

"I meant," he said, "to compromise her. But--here's where you went wrong--I didn't mean to compromise her in order to marry her. I didn't mean to marry her at all. There was a moment when I thought that marrying me--tying herself up to me for ever--was a risk I ought not to let her take. I thought--I thought I could make her happy without all that awful risk. It seemed to me that after the risk we _had_ taken we had a right to happiness. Certainly _she_ had. And I thought she thought the same.

"So I took her to Ghent.

"I say I thought she knew what I meant when I took her.

"I ought to tell you that we _did_ have rooms in the same hotel in Antwerp and Ghent. There weren't any English there that mattered--nobody that either of us knew.

"But when I'd got her to Ghent I couldn't--I don't know how it was--but it came over me that I couldn't--I hadn't the courage. I think I found out that she was afraid or something. We'd taken rooms in that hotel you were in in the _Place d'Armes_. We were sitting together in the lounge--you know that big lounge on the first floor with the glass partition in it along the staircase--you can see people through it going up and down stairs. She'd got up suddenly and stuck out her hand and said good night. And there was a look in her eyes--Fright, a sort of fright.

"I saw her through the glass going up the stair. When she got to the landing I saw her turn her head over her shoulder and look down into the lounge, to make sure I was still there.

"She looked so helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I couldn't.

"No.

"I took her back to Bruges the next morning and put her in the _pension_ with those women."

I thought of the irony of it.

If Jevons had really been the blackguard he seemed we could have hushed it up. If he hadn't repented, if he hadn't taken her back to Bruges and put her in the _pension_ with those women, ten to one Withers wouldn't have seen them and General Thesiger's friends wouldn't have heard of them. I should have got her quietly away from Ghent without Canterbury being a bit the wiser.

But I didn't tell Jevons that. I hadn't the heart to.

We stayed three days longer in Bruges. There were still some odd corners of the city that he hadn't had time to look up.

Jevons was very kind to me all those three days.

After we got back to England Jevons's affairs picked up and went forward with a rush. His novel came out at the end of May. In June he was made sub-editor of _Sport_, and thus acquired a settled income. And one morning in July I got a letter from Viola written at Quimpol in Brittany:

"MY DEAR WALTER:

"I married Jimmy five days ago. Nobody but Norah knew anything about it till it was all over. But I wrote and told Daddy before we left England. I'm afraid he's had a sore throat ever since. I wish you'd go down to Canterbury and tell them that it's all right and that I'm ever so happy. There really isn't any reason why Daddy shouldn't sing.

"As Norah says: 'It's his not singing that gives the show away.' Yours ever,

"V. J."