Chapter 2

HER BOOK

VI

I did not go down to Canterbury all at once. I was vowed, of course, to Mrs. Jevons's everlasting service (I think I've succeeded in making _that_ clear), but I could not--under the whacking blow of her marriage I could _not_ do as she asked me then and there. The reminiscences of Canterbury were poignant. I had to have a little time to recover in. And in those first terrible weeks I didn't see why Jevons should have all the amusement and I all the hard work and the suffering. I knew that Jevons had suffered, too--quite horribly--but his anguish, after all, was a thing of the past; while mine, in full career, devastated the present and the future. I had done my best for them, and I could not share Viola's view that it was my business to go on whitewashing Jevons for ever. There was a limit, at any rate, to the number of coats I could contract to put on him.

So I waited. I waited till they came back from their half honeymoon in Brittany (a fortnight was all the editor of _Sport_ could spare to his subordinate). Then at her invitation I went up to Hampstead to see them.

They had found an old four-roomed cottage that had once been a labourer's. It was whitewashed (Viola was fond of whitewash), and all the wood-work was painted green, and there was a strip of green garden in front with a green paling round it.

A furniture van that you could have packed the house in stood in the Grove outside it, and big, burly men in white aprons were taking furniture out of the van and dumping it down in the garden. Some of it wouldn't go in at the gate and had to be lifted over the palings.

Jevons in an old Norfolk suit and with his hair rumpled was standing on a ten-foot plot of grass contemplating a bed-tester and four bed-posts that leaned up against the palings in the embrace of a bedstead turned upon its side, and Viola in the upper window was contemplating Jevons.

He called to her, "Have you measured?" And she answered, "Yes. He says it can't be done. Oh, there's Furny!"

Jevons turned to me with a smile addressed to the bed-tester rather than to me. Viola came down to us followed by a tall stout carpenter, visibly her slave.

The carpenter was saying: "That there room is out by a good four inches--by a good four inches 'tis. An' the way you've got to look at it is this, m'm. Not as this 'ere tester is too 'igh fer that ceilin', but how as that there ceilin' is too low fer this tester."

"Quite so," said Jevons. "And in that case you've got to raise the ceiling four inches."

"No, sir," said the carpenter (he spoke severely to Jevons). "You 'ave _not_. If I take you off a two inch from each leg of that there bedstead, and a two inch from each of them there postsis, it'll be the same as if the builder 'e raised you the ceilin' a four inch."

"By Jove," said Jevons. "So it will."

"Ay, and it'll corst you somethin' like four shillin', instead of p'raps a matter of forty pound. W'en it comes to tamperin' with ceilin's, you never know where you are."

"I don't know where I am now," said Jevons, "but it might be better to leave the ceiling alone. They haven't started tampering, have they?"

"No, sir. They have not."

Viola ordered the carpenter to go into the study again and measure for those bookshelves. He was her slave and he went.

"Jimmy's been going on like that all day," she said. "He's taken up hours of that man's time. We shall never get him out of the house."

"I don't want to get him out of the house," said Jevons. "I'm awfully happy with him."

He was happy (like a child) with everything, with his house and his garden and his furniture, his oak chests and the dresser and the bureau, above all he was happy with his bed-tester. He said be had never slept under a bed-tester in his life, and he was dying to know what it would be like--to lie there with hundreds of dear little, shy little chintz rosebuds squinting down at you.

"You'll not lay under them rosebuds, not for a twenty-four hour--"

The carpenter had come back to us. He treated Jevons exactly like a child.

"That tester can't be set up to-night. Not unless, as I say, you squeeges of it jam tight between the ceilin' and the floor. An' _then_ you'll 'ave to prise the ceilin' up every time you moves of it, else you'll start them postsis all a twistin' and a rockin', an' 'ow'll you feel then?"

Jevons said he felt frightened to death as it was, and the carpenter could have it his own way provided he didn't hurt the little rosebuds or frighten _them_; and the carpenter sighed and said that the study was ten by thirteen and would take a hundred and sixteen feet of bookshelves.

"Let's go and look at the study," said Viola. And we went and looked at it. And the carpenter came up and looked at _us_. And the foreman and the other men came in with furniture and things out of the garden, and _they_ looked at us. There wasn't one really large and heavy piece of furniture except the four-post bed and the tester, and they treated the whole thing as a joke, as a funny game they were helping two small children to play at. And when Viola and Jevons ought to have been telling the men what things were to go into which room and where, they ran back into the garden to see what flowers they would plant in it and where.

Then they took me to look all over the house. It was an absurd house. Of its four rooms there was one in front that served as a dining-room and a drawing-room and a boudoir for Viola, and there was a kitchen at the back, and a bedroom over the front room, and Jevons's study was over the kitchen. Viola said there were six rooms if you counted the pantry and the bathroom, and they were going to put a settee in Jimmy's study that would turn into a bed when anybody came to stay. And Mrs. Pavitt knew a nice woman who would come in and scrub for them, and sleep in the kitchen when they weren't there.

They showed me the little bits of furniture they'd got. Jevons had a passion for beautiful old things, for old rosewood bureaus and chests of drawers with brass handles. She pointed out the brass handles.

I felt that the poor child was showing me her absurd house and telling me all these things because there wasn't and there hadn't been, and perhaps there never would be anybody else to tell them to. I thought of the mother and the four sisters down at Canterbury and of the other two who were married, who had been married so differently. There was something queer, something wrong about it all. I believe the very workmen felt that it was so and were sorry for her.

When they had all gone away at six o'clock Jevons and I took our coats off and settled down for three solid hours to the serious work of moving furniture, while Viola tried to find the china, to wash it, and sorted all the linen and the blankets. And at nine o'clock we dined on bacon that Jevons fried over the gas-stove in the kitchen and cocoa that Viola and I made in a white-and-pink jug we found in the bath; it was a buxom, wide-pouting jug with an expression that Jevons said reminded him of his mother's sister who had brought him up. He said that jug was all that Viola would be allowed to see of his relations.

I was left with Viola in the kitchen to wash up while Jevons finished what he called his man's job upstairs.

She took advantage of his absence to implore me to go down to Canterbury and make it right for her with her people. She said they'd believe anything I told them and there wasn't anything they wouldn't do for me.

"Tell them," she said, "that Jimmy's going to be so horribly celebrated that they'll look perfect asses if they don't acknowledge him."

I owned there was something in it. She said there was everything in it. And I promised her I'd go and do what I could.

Then I went upstairs to help Jevons to finish his man's job. I found him in the bedroom, making up a bed on the floor. The carpenter had taken away the bedstead and the posts and left him nothing but the mattress and the tester with its roof of rosebud chintz. He had propped the tester up against the wall where he said he could see it last thing before he went to sleep and first thing when he woke up.

The room was very hot, for he'd lit the gas fire to air the sheets and things. He had thought of everything. He had even thought of hanging Viola's nightgown over the back of a chair before the fire, and setting her slippers ready for her feet. He had laid her brush and comb on the little rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles, in the recess. He had unpacked her little trunk and put her things away all folded in the big rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles. He had hung the rosebud chintz curtains at the window and fitted its rosebud chintz cover on the low chair by the fire. And now he was kneeling on the floor, tucking in the blankets and smoothing the pillow for her head. His mouth was just a little open. And he was smiling.

You couldn't hate him.

He said he'd come and see me off at the Tube Station. But he didn't start. He began walking about, opening drawers and looking at things.

Presently he gave a cry of joy. He had found what he was looking for, a rosebud chintz coverlet. He spread it on the bed and said, "There!" He brought in an old Persian rug (small but very beautiful) from the landing and spread it on the floor by the mattress and said, "That's a bit of all right." And he told me he was going to beeswax the floor to-morrow. There was nothing to beat oak-stain and beeswax for a floor.

He stood there gazing. He was so pleased with his work that he couldn't tear himself away.

He said, "The joke is that she thinks she's going to find this room looking like a Jew pawnbroker's shop when, she turns in, and that she'll have the time of her life putting it straight for _me_."

Then he took my arm and led me away, shutting the door carefully, so that nothing, he said, should break the shock of her surprise.

But there was one drop of bitterness in his cup--"If only I could have set up that tester!"

I said he'd had quite enough excitement for one day and that he really must leave something for to-morrow.

On our way to the Tube Station I told him that I was going down to Canterbury in a day or two. I told him what I was going for. He had been so happy thinking about his house and his furniture and Viola that I don't believe he'd ever thought about the Thesigers. At the word "Canterbury" he thrust out his lower jaw so that the tips of his little white teeth were covered (they always disappeared when he was angry).

He said: "Tell that old sinner I don't care a copper damn whether he recognizes _me_ or not. What I can't stand and won't stand is the slur he's putting on my wife."

* * * * *

And that is more or less what I did tell him.

I wired to the Canon to let him know I was coming, and he replied by asking me to stay for the week-end.

I found the family diminished. Mildred had gone to a case; Millicent was away for her Midsummer holiday; only Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and Norah and Victoria were left. They had the air of survivors of an appalling disaster. The Canon and Mrs. Thesiger were aged by about ten years; poor Victoria looked tired and haggard; even Norah was depressed. You felt that the trouble in the house was irreparable this time. They had held their heads up against the scandal that was supposed to have occurred in Belgium; they couldn't realize it; it was the sort of thing that occurred to other people, not to them. And, after all, they didn't _know_ that it had occurred. But the scandal of a _mésalliance_ which really had occurred in England three weeks ago was well within their range, and it had crushed them. It wasn't, as Jevons cynically maintained, that they objected to a _mésalliance_--any _mésalliance_--more than to the other thing; I think they had never really believed in the other thing, and this marriage, so far from effacing it, had rubbed it in, had made it appear publicly as if, after all, it might have been so. It was not only excessively disagreeable to them in itself, but it left them in that ghastly doubt.

And this time they couldn't look to me to save them.

Still it was evident that they looked to me for something. I was tackled by each one of them in turn. The Canon wanted to know if I had anything to tell him. Mrs. Thesiger wondered whether Viola would have enough to live on. Victoria, in the absence of her parents, took me into a corner to inquire under her breath, "Is he really very awful?" Norah--she had known all about it; they hadn't spared her, they hadn't kept it from her; you couldn't keep anything from Norah; she had got it all out of Viola the day before I came down the first time--Norah told me I'd have to make her father ask them down. She took Jevons's view that it was the Canon who was causing all the scandal now (only she called it fuss). There never would have been any if Mummy and Daddy had had the sense to take it properly and treat it as a joke. Nobody who knew Viola could take it as anything else.

"But," she said, "if Daddy goes about pulling a long face and keeping up his sore throat over it, everybody'll think there must be something in it. I could have got it all right for them in a jiffy if they'd left it to me."

"What would you have done, then?" I was really anxious to know.

"Oh, I'd have run round telling everybody about it--as a joke. A thundering good joke. If they'd turned me on to it in time I could have easily overtaken those shocking old cats who got in first. As it is," she said, "I've stopped a lot of it--though Daddy doesn't know it--just that way. You should have seen me with the Colonel and the Dean! But if somebody doesn't stop Daddy he'll go and mess it all up again. Don't you remember how he dished my game at dinner the first night you were here?"

Yes. I remembered. It came back to me, that startling indiscretion at the dinner-table which was, after all, so deliciously discreet. Knowing Norah as I know her now, I wouldn't mind betting that Jevons owes his position, in Canterbury (and he has one) to-day far more to his youngest sister-in-law's manoeuvres with the Dean and Chapter than to my handling of his case--No; I'm forgetting what he does owe that to. Let's say, then, his position in Canterbury yesterday--a year ago.

Well, I had an hour's talk with the Canon.

There was some awkwardness in having to point out to a man of his beauty and dignity that his duty lay in any other direction than the one he was so plainly heading for. I put it on the grounds of pity. I pleaded for Viola, I said she was unhappy.

He replied that that was not the account she had given of herself.

I said, Perhaps not. But if she wasn't unhappy now she very soon would be if he persisted in refusing to acknowledge them.

But his lip went stiffer and stiffer. He was too unhappy himself to be got at that way. So I took him on the ground of expediency. I said after all Jevons was his son-in-law. He couldn't go on ignoring Jevons. I used Viola's argument. He wasn't dealing with an ordinary man. In a few years' time Tasker Jevons would be so celebrated that it would be absurd to pretend to ignore him.

The Canon stuck to it that he didn't care how celebrated the fellow was.

I said, "You can't keep it up for ever. You'll have to recognize him in the end. You don't want to cut the poor chap while he's struggling and accept him when he rolls, as he probably will roll."

The Canon said he wasn't going to accept him at all. He said that Jevons rolling would he if anything more odious than Jevons as he was. He couldn't forget what had happened. And that was the end of it.

I told him that it hadn't happened; but that to repudiate Jevons was the way to make everybody think it had. And whether it had happened or not, he must surely want other people to forget it. And once start the abominable impression, Jevons's celebrity would cause it to be remembered for ever, or at any rate for this generation. Whereas he could put a stop to the whole thing at once by behaving as if nothing had happened. He had only got to ask them down next week.

"Does _he_ want to be asked down?"

I said, No, he didn't. I told him what Jevons had said--that he didn't care whether he was recognized or not, but that he "couldn't stand the slur that was being put upon his wife."

I saw him wince at that.

"That's how it strikes him?" he said.

I answered that that was how it would strike most people.

"_I'm_ putting the slur on my daughter, am I?"

I was pitiless. I said, Certainly he was. If he persisted.

Then, after telling me that I had hit him hard, he fell back on another line of defence. He owed it to his priesthood not to condone his daughter's conduct.

"All the more--all the more, Furnival, if she _is_ my daughter."

I said he owed it to his priesthood to stand up for an innocent girl, even if she _was_ his daughter. I couldn't see anything in it but her innocence--her amazing innocence. I only wished I had his chance of proving it.

He shook his head. "That's it, my dear fellow. We can't prove it."

I said at least we could believe in it and act on our belief.

He said it was all very well for me. I was prejudiced.

"My sort of prejudice," I said, "might work the other way."

"You must have been afraid, or you wouldn't have gone out to bring her back."

"Jevons was afraid himself, for that matter. When things got dangerous he took her back to Bruges and put her in a _pension_ to be safe from him."

He looked up sharply.

"She never told me that--that he took her there to be safe from him."

"I don't suppose she knew. She was as innocent as all that."

"And how do _you_ know?"

"Because he told me so."

I gave him something of what Jevons had told me, but not all.

"That," said the Canon, "seems to make him more credible."

I pictured for him the night of Jevons's remorse.

He said, "That's the best thing I've heard about him yet. You believe him?"

I said, "Yes. The man is extremely sensitive and almost insanely frank."

I let it sink in. Presently he owned that it was the platonic version of the affair that--as a man of the world--he had found it so hard to swallow--"All that nonsense, you know, about the Belfry."

He meditated a while. Then he began to ask questions:

"Where does he come from? Who are his people? What do they do?"

I said his father was a Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in a village somewhere in Hertfordshire.

And then: "Is he--is he _very_ impossible?"

I said, No. Only from their point of view a little improbable.

He didn't press it.

"Well," he said, "it looks as if he was inevitable. I suppose we've got to make the best of him. What do you want me to do?"

I said I wanted him to ask them down. Very soon.

He said, "All right, Furnival. I'll ask them down next week. But if I do you must stop on and see me through. I won't be left alone with him."

I stopped on, playing chess with the Canon and lawn tennis with Norah, who was more than ever determined to beat me.

And on Tuesday of the next week they came down.

* * * * *

The whitewashing of Jevons had not been an easy matter. It took such a lot of coats to make a satisfactory job of him. And it was not a job I would have chosen. But I was serving Mrs. Jevons, and if my service had demanded miracles I should have had to have worked them somewhere, that was all. And perhaps it was a miracle to have turned Jevons out as a morally presentable person according to the requirements of a Cathedral Close.

But up to that Tuesday afternoon in August my private grievance against Jevons remained what it had been. In his absence--even while I whitewashed him--I could not extend a Christian forgiveness and forbearance to Jevons, any more than Mrs. Thesiger could. I think I hated Jevons. I ought to have hated him--by every glorious and manly code, pagan or barbarous, I ought to have hated him. And I did--every minute that he wasn't there. He had made me a figure of preposterous suffering. Because of him I trailed a fatuous tragedy through the Thesigers' house and over the green lawns of the Close, under the eyes of the young subalterns and of Victoria and Norah. (Canon and Mrs. Thesiger I didn't mind so much.) It mattered nothing that they were all extremely kind to me, since my suffering was responsible for their kindness and Jevons was responsible for my suffering.

Well, on that Tuesday he arrived. He was asked for a week and he stayed three days; and in those three days I had forgiven him everything for the sake of his performance.

He arrived in the middle of a tennis-party.

The Thesigers hadn't meant to have a party. The subalterns must have known that he was coming and turned up simply to look at him. (I wondered afterwards whether Norah could have told them. She was dangerously demure that afternoon.)

I ought to have said that for the last two days the Canon had been preparing himself for Jevons by reading him. He had ordered--in defiance of his political principles--the _Morning Standard_, and I had found him reading Jevons's novel and surrounded by numbers of the _Blue Review_, which, if you remember, published the best of Jevons's earlier work. He had no difficulty in getting hold of them; his youngest daughter had been able to supply him with more Jevons than he wanted. In fact, in the study of Tasker Jevons the Canon was weeks behind the rest of his acquaintance. There was hardly a family in Canterbury of any education in which Tasker Jevons was not by this time a household word. The garrison club library had bought him in quantities. The bookseller in the precincts did not stock him (he was not allowed to); but he could order him for you, and