Chapter 3

windows by the half-dozen.

I have forgotten, in the blaze of his later fame, that (apart from this purely local reputation) he passed in the provinces as a fair-sized celebrity even then. Only, as Jevons judged himself at every stage with accuracy, he hadn't begun to take himself at all seriously yet.

So he arrived in a perfect simplicity, without any of that rather dubious aplomb with which he tried to carry off his celebrity when it really came.

It was very nasty for him.

He had to come out of the house, following Viola and her mother all the way to the far end of the lawn, where the Canon was ready for him with a face which, try as he would--and he tried his hardest--he could not unstiffen. It must be said of the Canon that he nothing common did or mean upon that memorable scene; but he had--as Jevons said afterwards--rather too much the air of walking up to the gun's mouth and calling on us to observe how beautifully a Christian could die.

And there was Victoria standing beside the Canon and holding herself well, and Colonel and Mrs. Braithwaite beside Victoria, trying to look as if there was nothing unusual about Jevons or the situation. There was Norah at the tennis-net quivering with excitement, and (by the time Jevons had caught up with his convoy) there was Mrs. Thesiger alongside the others, turned round to present him, and watching him as he came on. Viola had turned and was looking at him too. And there were the subalterns at the tennis-net with Norah, doing unnecessary things to the net and trying _not_ to look at him.

I wondered: How on earth will he carry it off? How is he going to get across that tennis-ground?

He was getting across it somehow, holding himself not quite so well as Victoria or the subalterns, but still holding himself, coming on, a little flushed and twinkling and self-conscious, but coming.

The situation was, for him, most horrible; but it was worse for Viola. I wondered: Is she shivering all down her spine? Is she going to flinch? Why _will_ she _look_ at the poor chap?

And then I saw. She was looking at him with a little tender smile, a smile that helped him across, that said: "Come on. Come on. It's difficult, I know, but you're doing it beautifully."

Well, so he was. He was doing it more beautifully than the Canon or any of them. For that group on the lawn were like a rather eager rescue party, holding out hands to a struggling swimmer in the social surf. They expected him to struggle and he didn't. He landed himself in the middle of them with an adroitness that put them in the wrong. What's more, he held his own when he got there. He looked about as different from any of the men on that tennis-ground as a man well could look. He looked odd; and that saved him. They with their distinction had not achieved absolute difference from each other. His difference from all of them was so absolute that it was a sort of distinction in itself.

As soon as he got there Norah came up with the subalterns in tow. She made a little friendly rush at him. She said, "I'm Norah, the youngest. I expect Viola's told you about me. She's told me lots about _you_."

She meant well, dear child. But she overdid it. She hadn't allowed--none of us except Viola had allowed--for his appalling sensitiveness. The poor chap told me afterwards that he could bear up against the Canon's stiff face and what he called Mrs. Thesiger's ladylike refinements of repudiation, and the poker that Victoria had swallowed, but that that kid's kindness, coming on the top of it all, floored him. He took her hand (I think he squeezed it), and his mouth opened, but he couldn't speak; he just breathed hard and flushed furiously; and his eyes looked as if he were going to cry. But of course he didn't cry. He was, he said, far too much afraid of the subalterns.

It was a good thing, perhaps, after all, that it took him that way. His emotion made him quiet and subdued; it toned him down, so that he started well from the very beginning.

After tea he recovered and talked to the Colonel and the subalterns while the rest of us listened. He said, I remember, that the building of Dreadnoughts was of more importance to the country than Disestablishment. And even more important than the building of Dreadnoughts was the building of submarines. The submarine was the ship of the future. There should be, he said, at least fifty submarines for every Dreadnought turned out.

That made them all sit up. (It was not a platitude in nineteen-six, but a prophecy.) The Colonel and the subalterns hung on his words; and when the Canon saw them hanging, his mouth began to relax a little of its own accord. In his first hour Jevons had scored, notably.

It was as if he had said to himself, "I'll bring these people round, see if I don't. I give myself an hour."

Dinner passed without any misadventure, but you could see that he was careful. Also you could see by his twinkle that he was amusing himself by his own precautions, as if, again, he had said to himself, "They're all expecting me to make noises over my soup, and they'll be disappointed. I just won't make any."

We had coffee in the garden afterwards. And it was then that the Canon asked him what his politics were?

Jevons said he had no politics. Or rather, he had a great many politics. He was a sort of Socialist in time of peace and a red-hot Imperialist in time of war, and a Tory for purposes of Tariff Reform, and a Liberal when it came to Home Rule.

And when the Canon objected that you couldn't run a Government on those lines, little Jevons told him that that was precisely how Governments were run. It was a fallacy to suppose that Oppositions didn't rule.

And again he scored. He did it all with a twinkling, dimpling urbanity and deprecation, as if the Canon had been a beautiful lady he was paying court to, as if he thought it was rather a pity that beauty should lower itself to talk politics; but since he insisted on politics, he should have them; as if, in short, he loved the Canon, but didn't take him very seriously.

Yes; he certainly scored. He gave Viola no cause to flinch.

That evening comes back to me by bits. It must have been that evening that the Canon walked round the garden with me. I see him walking round and round, with Norah hanging on to his arm, teasing him and chattering. I hear her crying out suddenly with no relevance, "Hasn't he got stunning eyes, Daddy?" and the Canon saying that Jevons's eyes would look better in a pair of earrings than in Jevons's head, and her answering, "Wouldn't I like to wear them!" I see his little mock shiver (as if he felt that it was those great chunks of unsuitable sapphire that had charmed Viola across the Channel), and Norah's funny face as she said, "Oh, come, he isn't half bad."

That night he called me into the library when they had all gone to bed. Clearly he wanted to know how it had gone off--how he, in particular, had behaved. I assured him that his behaviour had been perfect. And I asked him what he thought of Jevons?

He said, "Well--he might be worse. He might be much, much worse. He's a clever chap. Where does he get it all from?"

But I noticed that the next day he shut himself up in his library all morning, was silent at lunch, and never emerged properly till dinner-time. Mrs. Thesiger also fought shy of her son-in-law.

Norah and Victoria took him by turns that day. I noticed that he got on very well with Norah. She knocked balls over the net for him all morning. (He couldn't play, but professed a great eagerness to learn.) In the afternoon Victoria took him to look at the Cathedral and the old quarters of the town. In the evening, after dinner, we all sat out in the garden. Canon and Mrs. Thesiger soon left us; Victoria followed them; and Viola and Norah and Jevons and I sat on till long after dark.

Viola and Norah, I remember, sat close together on the long seat under the elm tree. Jevons was on the other side of Viola. I sat on a cushion at her feet.

The night had a rhythm in it. Stillness and peace. The Cathedral chimes. Stillness and peace again. And there was a smell of cut lawn grass with dew on it from the ground, and of roses from the borders, and of lichen and moss and crumbling mortar from the walls. Sometimes these smells pierced the peace like sound; and sometimes they gathered close and wrapped us like warmth.

Then Jevons spoke.

"All this," he said, "is very beautiful. Very beautiful indeed."

And Viola sighed.

"Yes, Yes," she said. "I suppose it _is_ beautiful."

"You _know_ it is," he said.

"I know all right. But I don't think I can see it as you do. I've been shut up in it so long. It's all this that you've taken me out of."

"It's all this," he said, "that's made you what you are."

"It isn't. This isn't really me. It's just Them. I'm what I've made myself. I'm what you've made me. I'm uglier than they are. I'm uglier than anything here, but I'm much, much more alive."

"You surely don't suggest," said Jevons, "that I've made you uglier?"

"You've made me stronger and cleverer and bigger--ever so much bigger than I was."

"Much better in every way," I said, "than your youngest sister here, hasn't he?"

"Poor little Norah! I didn't mean that--you beast--Furny!--Of course I didn't. Jimmy--what _did_ I mean?"

He said nothing. But I heard an inarticulate murmur, and I saw that in the darkness his arm went round her and drew her closer.

And that, God forgive him, was his heaviest score up till now.

In two days he had absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere. He was in it. In it as I wasn't and couldn't be.

And the next day Canon and Mrs. Thesiger took him in hand by turns. The Canon showed him the town all over again all morning. And in the afternoon Mrs. Thesiger showed him the Cathedral all over again; and took him with her to the service. And all dinner-time Jevons was very pensive and subdued.

After dinner the Canon talked to Jevons about his novel. (He had retired into his library all afternoon in order to finish it.) He asked him why he had chosen an ugly subject when he might have found a beautiful one?

And Jevons was more pensive than ever. He said, "Well--that's a question--"

He couldn't tell the Canon why he'd chosen it. He couldn't disclose to him his plan of campaign.

"You see, sir, I haven't seen many beautiful things."

He still pondered. Then he said, very slowly, as if he dragged it out of himself with difficulty, "That book was written--written in my head--before I knew my wife."

You could literally see his score running up. By nine o'clock the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger had roped him into their game of whist.

I sat out with Viola and Norah in the garden, when Norah told us that she thought Jimmy was a dear. She was the only one of them that called him Jimmy.

About ten o'clock next morning Viola came to me and asked me to go up to Jimmy, in his room. He wanted to speak to me.

I found him packing, packing with a sort of precise and concentrated fury.

He was going. Going up to town. He had torn through Canterbury, eaten his way through Canterbury, through the beauty and peace of it; he had absorbed and assimilated it in three days. And he had had enough. If he stayed in it another hour the beauty and the peace of it would kill him. The Canon's beauty was, he said, adorable; so was Mrs. Thesiger's.

"But if I stay here I shall ruin it. I can't," he said, "go on giving that dear old clergyman clergyman's sore throat. I frighten him so that he can't sing. He doesn't know what to do with me, or say to me. He doesn't know what to call me. He can't call me Jevons, and he won't call me Jimmy, and he knows it would be ridiculous to call me James. Besides, he agitates me and makes me drop my aitches.

"So I've had a wire. You'll explain to him the sort of wire I've had."

"And Viola?" I said. "Is she going too?"

"No. Viola's going to stay till our week's up. By that time she'll be bored stiff and longing to get back to me."

* * * * *

He went, and I'm not at all sure that he didn't score by going.

And that night and the next and the next I thought of little Jevons alone in his little house in Hampstead, lying all by himself in his four-post bed between his rosebud chintz curtains and under his rosebud chintz tester, and saying to himself that he had scored.

VII

The Thesigers lived to be grateful to me for reconciling them to Jevons, if it was I who reconciled them. I don't think Mrs. Thesiger ever really forgave him, ever really liked him till the end; but the Canon very soon owned to a surreptitious regard for him. Luckily he acquired it while Jevons was still struggling, otherwise I do not think I could have saved their faces.

In the first year of his marriage Jevons made them see how right I was when I told them it would be impossible to ignore him. In the second year they saw that he had only just given them time to come round before it was too late. The minute he became prosperous it would have been too late, much too late for their dignity and beauty. And yet they couldn't very well have gone on repudiating Viola for ever. A year would have seen them through that attitude. And Jevons's great _coup_ had come off in the year he "gave" it; so that if they had been left to themselves their revulsion of tenderness must have coincided with his prosperity. They would have had every appearance of having surrendered to his income.

And they would have missed the spectacle of his struggle.

I believe it was his struggle, the doggedness, the heroism, the wild humour that he put into it that brought them round. They didn't like his early celebrity and they deplored the cause of it--his first novel.

That book justified everything that Jevons had said of it. It did startle. It did arrest. It _was_ unpleasant. So vividly and powerfully unpleasant that it nailed your eyes to it and kept them there. It made a break and a stain in your memory.

When I say it was unpleasant I mean, and he meant, not that it was unclean, but that it was brutal. I shall have written this tale to very little purpose if it isn't transparent that Jevons's mind, Jevons's whole nature was scrupulously clean. Even his brutality was not spontaneous. He broke his neck to get it. You could see him putting his tongue out as he laboured the brutality. You could see him sweating as he went over it again, removing all the marks of labour, making for his effect of sincerity and gorgeous simplicity and ease.

I've said it's doubtful how far Jevons took himself seriously. He certainly had no illusions as to the nature of his success. But whenever I come to this side of him I feel myself untrustworthy. I cannot see him properly. I am prejudiced by knowing him so well. I daresay if I hadn't known him, if he hadn't been so frank in his disclosures, if he hadn't explained so many times the deliberate calculations of his method, I should think him a great novelist. I daresay to a generation that knows nothing about him or his disclosures or his method he will seem a great novelist again. I daresay he _is_ a great novelist. I don't know.

Anyhow there were three great stages in his career: the Slow Advance; the Grand Attack; and Victory. (He had been advancing slowly ever since the day I met him on the football-ground at Blackheath).

All these stages are marked for me by the increasing size and splendour of the houses that he occupied in turn; the four-roomed cottage at Hampstead; the little house in Edwardes Square; the large house in Mayfair; the still larger country house he acquired last of all. And the Jevons I like to think of is the Jevons of the little whitewashed cottage, of the whitewashed rooms, the one sitting-room where we dined; the kitchen at the back where we cooked and washed up; the absurd little bedroom in the front where the four-post bed was set up like a tent with its curtains and its tester; the study at the back where Jevons worked and Norah Thesiger slept when she came to stay. I remember Jevons darting from the kitchen and the dining-room with steaming dishes in his hands; Jevons with a pipe in his mouth and his feet on the chimney-piece, talking, talking, talking about anything--Dreadnoughts, submarines, the War (he had given it nine years now)--from nine till eleven, and then flinging himself out of his chair to turn the settee into a bed for the Kiddy. Whatever he was saying or doing, in the middle of a calculation, he would break off at eleven and drag sheets and blankets out of a coffin-like box under the settee and make up the Kiddy's little bed for her, because Kiddies must on no account be allowed to sit up late at night. I remember Viola and Norah coming in to help and Jevons shooing them away. And Norah would come back again and put her head round the door and look at him where he knelt on the floor absurdly, tucking in blankets and breathing hard as he tucked. And she would say, "Look at him. Isn't he sweet?" as if Jevons had been a rabbit or a guinea-pig, and go away again.

Somehow I always see him like that, making beds, stooping over something, doing something for one of them or for me.

Sometimes they would burst in on him suddenly in his bedmaking and throw pillows at him, or it might be sponges, and there would be madness: two girls running amok and little Jevons flying before them through the house and squealing in his excitement. Once he went out to post a letter in the Grove before midnight and they locked him out and looked at him from the window of the front bedroom and defied him to enter, and he skipped round to the back and climbed up by the water-butt on to the drainpipe of the bathroom, and from the drainpipe, perilously, in through the window of his study, where they found him putting hair-brushes in Norah's bed.

After the drainpipe adventure (when they saw how game he was) they sobered down. I think it was that night that Norah said, "We mustn't _kill_ Jimmy. That would never do."

And there would be theatre-parties when Jimmy had tickets given him, and eighteenpenny dinners at the "Petit Riche," going and returning by the Hampstead Tube.

It seems to me that Norah must have stayed a great deal with them at Hampstead, and yet she couldn't have; they were only two years in the little four-roomed house. Anyhow, we were all immensely happy in those two years; even I was happy. Jevons I know was--and Viola. Viola had never been so happy in her life. She cooked: she washed up with Jimmy to help her; she mended his clothes and made her own; she did his typewriting; she took down his articles in shorthand and typed them; and through all his funny little social lapses she adored him.

When you think of it, poverty and close quarters for two years, and the menace of some of those lapses hanging over her all the time--it was a pretty severe test. You would have said that if she could stand that she could stand anything, and she certainly stood it.

But Jimmy hadn't begun yet to unbend. He was still on the defensive, holding himself in, every nerve strung up to the Grand Attack. This tension affected his behaviour. He knew his danger. He knew there were certain gestures that he must restrain, and he restrained them; there were certain things he did with spoons and forks and table napkins that would wreck him if he were caught doing them, and in those two years he kept a very sharp look-out. You would have thought that this life, on the edge of an abyss, with full knowledge of his danger, would have made him nervous and produced the very disaster that he dreaded. But no. Jevons was a fighting man, and he rose to these crises and prevailed. You felt that for him the real test would come when he was prosperous, when the strain was taken off him and he let himself go.

Meanwhile it was terrifying to see him balancing himself on the edge.

* * * * *

They moved into the Edwardes Square house in the September quarter of nineteen-eight. This was the year of the weeks of consolidation, his second novel and his "Journal," that were to precede the Grand Attack. The novel did exactly what he said it would. It did counteract the effect its predecessor; and the "Journal" gave him a place in _Belles-Lettres_ where he was safe from the legend of his own brutality.

But it strained his relations with the Thesigers for the time being. The Rosalind of the "Journal" is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said to have travelled together before they were married. Her figure moves through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an adorable innocence and naïveté, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender than the Viola he knew. You couldn't say she wasn't charming. The Canon couldn't say it; what he did say was that Jevons should have kept her out of it. Jevons's defence was that if he had kept her out of it there wouldn't have been any book.

But he never did it again. Having once for all drawn her portrait as a young girl, he left it, as if he would have kept her youth immortal. You will not find any woman of his novels who suggests even a fugitive likeness to the Viola he married.

The house in Edwardes Square stands for the second period: the period of sober energy that led up to the Grand Attack. It was also the period of deliberate yet vehement refinement. Jevons was determined at all cost to be refined. And at considerable cost, with white-painted panelling throughout, with blue-and-white Chinese vases here and there, and more and more Bokhara rugs everywhere, and tussore silk curtains in the windows and every stick of furniture chosen for its premeditated chastity, the little brown house was made to serve him as a holy standard. He said he had only got to live up to it and he would be all right.

And so, in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at the back. I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his beginnings, how he did it so well. Of course he gave Viola a free hand, he let her have what she wanted; but when I complimented her on any result she let me know at once that it was Jimmy's doing. She was pathetically anxious that I should see that he knew how. She let me know, too, the secret of his passionate absorption in gardens and interiors, lest I should think it argued any unmanliness in him.

I remember so well her showing me that house in Edwardes Square. I had called one afternoon when I had known that Jevons wasn't there. I had left him at his club in Dover Street. (He had a club in Dover Street now; it was my club; I had put him up for it. He enjoyed his club as he enjoyed everything else that he had acquired by conquest; his membership marked another step in his advance, another strip of alien territory gained. And he had chosen this club, he said, because most of the members had retired, to cultivate adipose tissue on pensions, and they made him feel adolescent and slender and energetic.) I had left him in the library writing letters (he said he found a voluptuous pleasure in writing letters on the club paper under that irreproachable address), and I rushed off in a taxi to Viola in Edwardes Square.

She was very glad to see me, and she gave me tea, poured out of an early eighteenth-century silver teapot, in beautiful old blue-and-white Chinese teacups. She wore one of those absurd narrow coats with tails that made women look like long, slender birds that year, and she had done something unexpected with her hair; it was curls, curls, curls all over, the way they did it then, and she sat on a wine-coloured sofa with a wine-coloured rug at her feet.

She began straight away by talking about Jimmy's last book, the "Journal."

"Don't you see _now_," she said, "why I went out to him, and how beautiful it all was?"

I asked her did she think I'd ever doubted? She said: "No. But Daddy hates the book. So does Mummy. They all hate it except Norah and me. I'm glad he wrote it. I'm glad he put me into it. I never knew I was so nice, did you?"

"Oh, come," I said, "surely I always knew?"

But she didn't pay any attention to me. She didn't care to know what I thought or what I knew. She wasn't thinking of me or of herself. She was defending Jimmy with little jerky, stabbing thrusts of defiance. You could see that the smallest criticism of him made her suffer; that she was capable of infinite suffering where Jimmy was concerned. Also you saw that she would have to suffer, and that she knew it, and that it was this suffering that she repulsed and thrust from her with her stabs. He was making a tender place in her mind that might some day become a wound.

"You know I did," I insisted--I think, to turn her mind from him.

She looked at me gravely before she smiled.

"Nobody but Jimmy really thinks me nice. Nobody but Jimmy knows how nice I _am_."

And then she showed me the house.

I praised some detail that Jevons had devised (not that there was much detail; it was all extremely simple). And I believe she saw criticism of Jimmy in that.

"I know it looks as if he cared a lot about this sort of thing. And I daresay you think it's silly of him. But he doesn't really care."

"It certainly looks," I said, "as if he cared about something."

"It's me he cares about," she said.

"And do you care about--this sort of thing, Viola?"

"I care about his caring. But I was every bit as happy in that little four-roomed house, if that's what you mean."

"Aren't you glad to have more room to move about in?"

"I'm glad to have room for Daddy and Mummy when they come to stay."

It was as if she had said, "If you think I'm glad to have room to get away from him you're mistaken."

And there was another impression that she gave me. It was also as if she wanted to warn me not to form the habit of coming to see her when she was alone. I should gain nothing by it. If I insisted on seeing her alone I should get Jimmy, Jimmy, all the time.

I didn't try to see her again alone.

But I saw her often. Jevons was always asking me there. He made a point of it whenever they had what Viola called "anybody interesting." By this she meant somebody belonging to the confraternity of letters. Jevons had a sort of idea that I liked meeting these people and that it did me good. The house in Edwardes Square might have become a haunt of Jimmy's _confréres_ if Jimmy had had time to attend to them and if he hadn't been so deliberately exclusive. He was trying for the best--not for the great names so much as for the great achievements, and they were few. And there were one or two of them who rejected Jevons.

And then you had to reckon with Mrs. Jevons's rejections. She was as fastidious in her way as he was in his; and besides, she guarded him, so that the circle around him was rather tight and small.

Oh, he was faithful; he kept me in it; he gave me of his best; and if he could have made me shine I should have blazed among them all.

It doesn't matter now which of them I met there. Jevons was charming to them all. He set them blazing. I don't think he cared much whether _he_ blazed or not, but if he felt like it he could make a bigger blaze than any of them. He enjoyed them; he enjoyed them vastly, violently. Having once acquired the taste, he couldn't have lived without the intellectual excitement they gave him. But except for that, for the stimulus, the release of energy, it's surprising how little they really counted for him.

And so it's not those evenings and that brilliance that I remember.

In the house in Edwardes Square I seem to have been always meeting Norah Thesiger. Now that they had a room to put her in, she would be there for months at a time. And whenever she was there they would be sure to ask me. If Jevons didn't, Viola did.

There was that summer, too, when Norah and Mildred came together with Charlie Thesiger, their cousin, who was engaged to Mildred. Charlie was then a lieutenant in the South Kent Hussars. He was a large young man, correct, handsome, rather supercilious and rather stupid. He seemed to fill the house in Edwardes Square when he was in it.

He doesn't matter. At least, he didn't matter then. God knows he never really mattered, poor boy, at any time. But he is important. He fixes things for me. He brings me to the incident of June, nineteen-nine.

It was a very slight incident. It wouldn't be worth recording except that it stood for others like itself, a whole crowd. And it was of such slight things that Viola's torments were to be made.

We were at dinner in the little dining-room looking on the flagged court, a party of six: Viola at the head of the round table, with her back to the light; Jevons at the foot, facing her, with the light full on him; Charlie Thesiger was on Viola's right, I was on her left, facing him. Norah sat next to me on Jevons's right, and Mildred sat next to Charlie on Jevons's left, facing Norah. We were all so close together that it would be difficult for one of us to have missed anything that happened or was said. And Viola, with the light behind her, commanded us all.

She had been very gay. I don't suppose Charlie felt anything strained about her gaiety--he was not observant--but I did, and I put it down to Charlie's presence, to the rather flat correctness that made Jevons stand out. Another thing I noticed was that, in labouring for refinement in his surroundings, Jevons hadn't allowed for the effect of contrast. It hadn't occurred to him that an interior that harmonized with Viola would be damaging to him. And it was. Just how damaging I hadn't realized until to-night (which shows how careful he must have been at Canterbury). He didn't stand out. He burst out. He never sank into his background for a single minute. You had to be aware of him all the time.

And yet in a party of the confraternity you were not aware of him like this. For then he blazed; and in the flare he made you didn't notice whether he tilted his soup-plate the right way or not, or care if he couldn't use his table napkin or his pocket-handkerchief and look you square in the face at the same time. Neither did you notice these things if you were alone with him or if only Norah and Viola were there. He was happy with us, and happiness was becoming to him, and he had all sorts of endearing ways that would have disarmed us. And then there's no doubt that Viola protected him. She watched over him; she smoothed his social path for him; she removed his worst pitfalls; she ran, as it were, to pick him up before he fell. He didn't know she was watching him; neither, I think, did she. It was a blind instinct with her to help him. And Norah and I helped him too. And as he wasn't nervous with us everything went well. But when strangers got into our party it was different. Viola couldn't attend to him properly; and if the stranger happened to be rather stupid, like Charlie Thesiger, Jevons didn't blaze and so cover himself; he got bored; and when he was bored he got jumpy; and it was when he got jumpy that he did things.

And Charlie was getting on his nerves.

Still, everything went well until the table was cleared for dessert; and there was no reason why everything shouldn't have gone well even then. Viola had guarded against his most inveterate failing--a habit of stretching for things across the table--by putting everything he wanted within his reach. Within Jevons's reach to-night was a little dish containing among other things chocolate nougat. And he was fond of nougat. He was fond also of chaffing Norah. And he was not prepared to forego one amusement for the other. And Norah had taken a mean advantage of him. She had timed a provocation at the moment when for any other man retort would have been impossible; and she hadn't reckoned with Jevons's ingenuity of resource.

I am not going to say what he did. It wouldn't be fair to him. It was a little thing, but you couldn't pretend for one moment that you hadn't seen it, any more than Jevons could do anything to cover the fantastic horror of it. We simply sat and stiffened; all but Norah, who burst out laughing in Jimmy's face.

Mildred, trying to help him, made matters worse by asking for a peach when she had got a large one on her plate. Charlie Thesiger looked down his nose. I don't know where I looked, but I know that I was conscious of Viola's face and of the flush that darkened it to the tip of her chin and the roots of her hair. And I could feel the shudder down her back passing into mine.

After all, Viola did cover it. She lit a little Roman lamp they had and sent it travelling down the table with the cigarette-box. Then she got up and went to Jevons and stooped over his shoulder and took the little dish from him.

"If anybody wants any more chocolates," she said, "they must come upstairs for them."

"She won't trust me with them," said Jevons. (He _had_ a nerve.)

Viola trailed off upstairs with her dish, and Mildred and Charlie followed her.

Norah and I held watch with Jevons, who leaned back in his chair and smoked and rubbed the forefinger of his right hand--the innocent instrument (may I say it?) of his crime--with his table napkin, and contemplated Norah in a drowsy imperturbability.

"Did I do anything?" he said presently.

Norah put her hand on his arm and stroked it.

"No, Jimmy dear," she said, "of course you didn't."

It was then that I was aware for the first time of the beauty of Norah's face. Norah's, not Viola's. Up till then I could never see anything but Viola's face in it, coloured wrong, so that it rather worried me to look at it, I resented the everlasting reminder of that likeness under that perverse and disconcerting difference. If her eyes hadn't been so blue and her cheeks so pink; if only her hair had been a little darker and if it hadn't crinkled--

Now, as I looked at her, I wondered how anybody could think she was like Viola. There was only her forehead and the odd turn of her jaw and nose--her profile, if you like, was Viola's--but (when she wasn't laughing) Norah's full face had something that Viola's hadn't and never would have. I had caught it now and then and couldn't make up my mind what it was. Now I saw that it was a sort of wisdom, a look of soberness and goodness that I couldn't quite account for.

Then Jevons explained it for me.

"The Kiddy's growing up," he said (he said it to himself). "She'll be twenty to-morrow. She won't throw wet sponges at me any more."

That was it. Norah was growing up. Her soft face was setting and the expression I had noticed had come to stay.

Presently Jevons got up. He said he had work to do.

"The Grand Attack, Furnival, the Grand Attack!"

And he left us together.

Norah looked after him.

"Poor little Jimmy," she said. "I don't think he ever did a _bad_ thing in his life."

And then, with what seemed a daring irrelevance, "I wish Charlie wasn't here. I can't think why Viola ever asked him."

"Why shouldn't she?"

"Because he's bad for Jimmy. He puts him in the wrong."

I'm afraid I laughed a little brutally at the extravagance of this.

"Well," she said. "I can't bear him to suffer."

"You've got a very tender little heart, haven't you?" I said.

"It isn't half as tender as Viola's. But I've got more common sense."

"Then why," I said, "did you laugh at Jimmy just now?"

"That's why. Because it was the best thing you could do. He doesn't mind it half so much when you laugh at him. It's people looking down their noses, like Charlie, that he minds. It must be awful for the poor little chap, when you come to think of it, living on the edge, never knowing when he's going to do something that'll make Viola's blood run cold."

"It must be still more awful for Viola."

To that she said, "It isn't. You don't know how Viola feels about Jimmy. None of my people do. They simply don't understand it."

"Oh, come," I said, "they've accepted it, haven't they?"

"They've accepted it _because_ they don't understand her. They say they never know what she'll do next, and Jimmy's come as a sort of relief to them. They thought she might do something much worse. You see, she isn't a bit like any of us. If she wants to do a thing she'll do it, no matter what it is. She wanted to go to Bruges with Jimmy and look at the Belfry, and she did it like a shot. What they can't see is that she'll never _want_ to do anything wrong, so she'll never do it. They can't see that there was just as much Belfry as Jimmy in it. There always will be a Belfry in Viola's life, and when she hears the bells going she'll run off to see. And Jimmy's the only man who'll ever take her to a Belfry.

"She's all right. Because she knows that Jimmy's really ten times more refined than any of us. His little soul's all made of beautiful clean white silk. But Viola can't go on telling people how beautiful he is. They've got to see it for themselves.

"I wish _you_ could see it as she does. I wish you could see how she feels about it--"

"My dear Norah," I said, "I've been trying for three years to see as Viola sees, and feel as Viola feels. But how can I? I'm not Viola."

"But," she said, "you _do_ understand her. If I thought you didn't--if I thought that you could go back on her--and if you go back on Jimmy you go back on _her_--"

"Well?"

"Well, I don't think I could ever speak to you again."

"My dear child," I said, "you're absurd. I haven't gone back on either of them. Won't it do if I see Jimmy as _you_ see him?"

"Ye-es," she said. "But--I wonder if you do."

"Norah," I said then, "I wonder if Viola's as sorry for him as you are. I hope she isn't."

"She isn't, then. She isn't sorry for him a bit. No more am I. You'll make me sorry for _you_ if you don't take care."

When we went to say good night to Jevons we found Viola sitting on the arm of his chair with the little dish in her hand, feeding him with chocolate nougat. Her posture was one of supple contrition, and we heard her say:

"Cheer up, Jimmy. It doesn't really matter what you do. Nobody would ever take you for more than four years old."

Yes. Norah, the youngest, was the one who had grown up.

VIII

Norah has often told me that I exaggerated the importance of the Nougat Incident; that my weakness is a tendency to dwell with a morbid concentration on small, inessential details. When I tell her that if I succeed in surviving Jimmy I shall write his biography, she tilts her chin and says I'm the last person who should attempt it.

"Between us," she says, "we might manage it. But if you're left to yourself you'll make him _all_ nougat."

When I retort that if _she_ were left to _her_self she'd eliminate the very things that make him the engaging animal he is, and remind her that a straw will show the way the wind's blowing, she asks me, "Did any big wind ever blow a straw before it all the way?"

Well, perhaps I _am_ the very last person--he made me the last person by what he did to me--but when it comes to exaggeration I haven't attached more importance to the Nougat Incident than Jevons did himself. Why, when he shut himself up in his study that night, instead of hurling himself forward in the Grand Attack, he must have sat with his head in his hands brooding over it and wondering what he'd done; he must have gone straight upstairs to ask Viola what he'd done, or there'd have been no earthly sense in what we heard her saying. The detail may have been small, but it was not inessential when it could turn Tasker Jevons from the Grand Attack as he was turned that night.

I tell you, and Jevons would tell you, it is of such small things that tragedies are made--the bitterest, the most insidious.

And when Jevons did finally hurl himself, when he shut himself up, morning after morning and night after night, to labour violently on his greatest work, though (for just as long as he was actually engaged) he might be staving off his tragedy, he was nevertheless precipitating the event. You may say that when you get him there in his study on his battlefield you are among the big forces at once; but the interesting thing is that those big forces by their very expenditure released a whole crowd of little, infinitely little ones that, in their turn, in their miniature explosion, worked for his destruction. Jevons, struggling with his social disabilities, was like a giant devoured by microscopically minute organisms over whose generation he had no control.

And the greater the man, mind you, the greater the tragedy.

Still, for those two years in Edwardes Square, he staved it off. It was the very violence of his labour, the prodigious front of the battle he delivered, that saved him. Then there was his victory, his Third Novel, that for the time threw all minor happenings into the background.

He was right again in his forecast. It _was_ his best work, and (I use his own phrase) it did the trick.

When it came, the Grand Attack (which was bolder even than his first assault) carried, you may say, the whole position, after demolishing at one stroke the enemy's defences. For he had enemies. He was the sort of man who does have them. He didn't _make_ them, at least, not deliberately, he couldn't have been bothered to make them; but he drew them; they seemed to rise out of the ground after every one of his appearances.

Well, they couldn't say he hadn't done it this time.

_Done_ it. There's no good trying to express such a phenomenon as Jevons in terms of literature. You can only think about him in terms of action, every book of his being an onslaught by which he laid his public low.

And this time he had conquered America.

Don't ask me how many thousands he made by it. I've forgotten. They've melted into the tens of thousands that he made before he had finished. Even in the years of the Grand Attack he was making his old father an allowance and investing large sums in case of accidents. (He had been putting by even in the Hampstead days.) How he did it I can't think, though he has tried to explain it to me more than once. The whole thing for him was as obvious as any business transaction (he had the sort of mind for which business transactions _are_ obvious). He had studied the public he set out to capture. He presented the life it knew--the moving, changing, fantastically adventurous life of the middle classes. Until Jevons rushed on them and forced their eyes open, you may say at the point of the bayonet, the middle classes didn't know they were moving and changing and being adventurous. Nobody knew. It was Jevons's discovery.

Then, as he pointed out, there were innumerable discretions in his valour. He knew to a hairbreadth how far he might go, and he went no farther. He respected existing prejudices because they existed. He didn't ask awkward questions; he didn't raise problems; he had the British capacity for doing serious things with an air of not taking himself seriously and frivolous things with an astounding gravity.

"You can do anything, Furnival," he said, "if you're only funny enough."

Norah tells me that that really _is_ his secret.

But, he said, the whole thing was as calculable as any successful deal on the Stock Exchange. When you asked him: "Then why can't other people do it?" he said: "God knows why. They must be precious fools if they want to do it and don't find out how. _I_'ve had to find out."

For one year--the last year in Edwardes Square--he enjoyed pure fame. And he _did_ enjoy it--I think he enjoyed everything--like a child with a mechanical toy, or a girl with a new gown, playing with it and trying it on by snatches when he could spare half an hour from his appalling toil.

Heavens, how he worked that year! With a hard, punctual passion, a multiplied energy, like five financiers engaged on five separate transactions. After victory in the campaign he had settled down to business and the works of peace. There was the business of the short story; the business of the monograph; the business of the magazine article and the newspaper column, and the speculations that developed into the immense business of his plays. (I've forgotten how much he netted by his first curtain-raiser.) That's five.

As I look back on him he seems to have torn through his stages at an incredible pace. There are several that I haven't counted, so suddenly did he leave them behind him: the stage when he was literary adviser to a firm of publishers, who wouldn't believe him when he said the thing was calculable; the stage when he ceased to be sub-editor of _Sport_ and became editor, an appointment so lucrative that you may judge the risk he took when he abandoned it. And in between there was his stage of cruelty, when he did reviewing. It was a brief stage, but he contrived to strew the field with the reputations he had slaughtered (Viola used to plead with him for certain authors, like Queen Philippa for the burghers of Calais), until his job was taken from him in the interests of humanity.

Now--I am speaking in the light of my later knowledge--the first effect of these prodigious and passionate labours was beneficent, and I shouldn't wonder if Jevons, who had calculated everything to a nicety, hadn't allowed for this too. To say nothing of the peculiar purity of his earlier fame, which set him in a place apart and assured beyond all possible depreciation, so long as he elected to stay there, the very conditions of his business saved him. He enjoyed in those two desperate years the immunities of a recluse. The results were prominently before the public, but Jimmy wasn't. His study was literally his sanctuary. Sitting there nearly all day and half the night, he was removed from the world's observation at the precise moment when it became inimical. I don't mean the observation of the confraternity of letters, which was and always had been kindly to his personality, and had taken little or no notice of his disabilities; I mean the observation of the world he married into, for which disabilities like Jimmy's count.

He was also removed from Viola's observation at a time when I think, almost unconsciously, she was beginning to criticize him. When he came to her out of his sanctuary he came with its consecration on him. And then there was the appeal he made to her tenderness. If the shudders down her back began they were checked by the spectacle of his exhaustion. She couldn't shudder at the tired conqueror when he flung himself on the floor beside her and laid his head in her lap.

I've seen her with him like that--once, one evening when Norah was with them, and I had turned in after dinner; it was upstairs in that drawing-room in Edwardes Square that they had made, back and front, in an L. Norah and I were in the long, narrow part at the back; you know how those little town rooms go when they're knocked into one--the fireplaces in the same wall and windows opposite each other, so that the back rakes the fireplace end of the front part.

Viola and Jevons were by the fireplace in the front, she in her low chair and he stretched out on the rug at her feet. And we raked them.

They didn't know they were observed. I think they'd made up their minds that when Norah and I were together we couldn't hear or see anything except ourselves.

And so we heard Viola saying, "What do you do it for?"

And Jimmy, "Oh, for the fun of the thing, I suppose. What does one do things for?"

And she, "It'll be fine fun for me, won't it, when you've killed yourself? When you've burst the top of your head off like the kitchen boiler?"

"I should have to run dry first," said Jevons.

"Well, you will, boiling away seven--eight--nine hours a day for weeks on end. Nobody else does it."

"Nobody else _can_ do it," said Jimmy arrogantly.

"It's all very well; but if you don't burst your head open you'll get neuritis, or cramp. Look at that hand."

"Which hand?"

"Your right hand, silly." She took it and poised it from the wrist. "Look how it wobbles."

He looked.

"It does wobble a bit. Like a drunkard's. And I don't drink."

He was interested in his hand.

"You goose, where's the fun of letting your right hand go to pieces?"

"Easy on. They won't amputate it," said Jimmy.

That was in nineteen-nine. This is nineteen-fifteen. And only yesterday Norah asked me if I remembered what Jimmy said about his hand the night we were engaged.

* * * * *

Yes, that night I was engaged to Norah Thesiger.

I suppose it was our silence that made Viola and Jimmy aware of us at last, for presently I saw Jimmy sit up on the floor and take Viola's hand and squeeze it, and then they got up and very quietly and furtively they left the room.

And the minute I found myself alone with Norah I proposed to her.

I don't know if even then I should have had the courage to do it if I hadn't been driven to it by sheer terror. I forgot to say that I was in Edwardes Square for the weekend and that Norah was not staying with her sister this time, but with her uncle, General Thesiger, at Lancaster Gate. And for three days, ever since her arrival at Lancaster Gate, I had seen the possibility of losing her.

Otherwise you would have said that if ever there was a spontaneous and unexpected performance, it was my proposal to Norah Thesiger.

But no; it seemed that it had been arranged for me by Jevons, planned with his customary deliberation and calculation long ago. This may have been the reason why Norah said she wouldn't tell Viola and Jimmy about it herself; she'd rather I did.

I thought: I shan't have to tell them till to-morrow. I had to take Norah to Lancaster Gate in a taxi, and I walked back across the Serpentine between Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, spinning out the time so that Viola and Jimmy might be in bed when I got to Edwardes Square.

I found them sitting up for me in Jimmy's study.

I dreaded telling them more than I can say. I don't know with what countenance a man can come and tell the woman he has loved (and proposed to three times running) that he has consoled himself with her younger sister. I wanted to avoid every appearance of a fatuous triumph in my success with Norah. And after sticking for four years to my vow of everlasting devotion to Mrs. Jevons I shrank from the confession of a new allegiance. On the other hand, I owed it to Norah to declare myself happy without any airs of deprecation and contrition. And I had certain obligations to the Truth. Why I should have supposed that the Truth should have been disagreeable to Mrs. Jevons Heaven only knows. I suppose these scruples are the last illusions of our egoism. Still, I think that only an impudent egoist like Jevons could have carried off such an embarrassment with any brilliance.

As it happened it was taken out of my hands. Jimmy, who had foreseen the thing itself, foresaw also my predicament and provided for it. As I came into the room he said, "It's all right, old man. You haven't got to tell us. We know all about it."

I looked at Viola. She was sitting on part of Jimmy's chair, with her arm round his shoulder.

"Did Norah tell you, after all?" I said.

Viola pushed out her chin at me and shook her head.

"No, Furny dear, she didn't tell me a thing. It was your face."

"Don't you believe her," Jimmy said. "Your face hasn't anything to do with it. Your face is a tomb of secrets--a beautiful, white tomb. And _you_ are all rectitude and discretion. We knew it ages ago."

"How could you possibly know it, when I didn't?"

"Because it's one of those things" (he twinkled) "that other people always do know."

"Were we as obvious as all that?"

"I didn't say _you_ were obvious. I said _It_ was."

I sat down facing them, and I suppose I must have looked supremely foolish, for Viola began to laugh and Jevons went on twinkling, not in the least as if he saw a joke, but with a thoughtful and complacent air, as if he were turning over the result of some private speculation that had come off entirely to his satisfaction.

Then she took pity on me.

"He means it was bound to happen. It was the heaven-appointed thing. The first minute I saw you, Wally, I thought, 'What an adorable husband he'd make for Norah!' And Jimmy's trying to tell you that we've been hoping it would come and wanting it to come and waiting for it to come for the last year."

"I'm trying to tell him," said Jimmy, "that we've been meaning it to come, and trying to make it come, and seeing it come for the last three years."

This was a blow at the attitude of romantic devotion, and I had to defend it.

"Do you believe that, Viola?" I said.

"Of course I believe it if Jimmy says so."

I sent her a look that was meant to say, "You ought to know better;" but it missed fire somehow. She went on swinging her feet and laughing softly at me over Jimmy's shoulder. She seemed, like Jimmy, to be contemplating some exquisite knowledge that she had. And at last she said:

"Aren't you glad now that you didn't marry me?"

I said, "What am I to say to that?"

Jimmy got up and clapped me on the shoulder. "Never mind her," he said. "Tell the truth and shame the devil. Tell her you're thundering glad."

At that she slid down from her perch and came round to me and patted me very gently on the head.

"_I_ am, Wally. Jimmy, you're a beast."

And she went out of the room. Jimmy said that nothing she had contributed to the discussion became her like her leaving it.

She had left it to him.

He got into his chair again and sat down to it.

"Now, perhaps," he said, "you see how right I was."

"When?"

"The first time we ever spoke about it."

"My dear Jimmy, I haven't spoken to anybody about it till to-night."

"We spoke about it years ago," he said.

"We couldn't possibly have spoken about it years ago."

"At Bruges. Perhaps it was I who spoke. I tell you I saw it coming. Don't you remember I gave you six months?"

"You were out there, anyhow. It's taken three and a half years."

"Because you were such a duffer. You behaved as if you expected the poor child to propose to you herself. I've been trying to make you see it for the last three and a half years, and you wouldn't. There never was such a chap for not seeing what's under his nose."

"Norah isn't under my nose; she's miles above it, and if it comes to that, I've _seen_ it for the last three years."

He had tripped me up by the heels.

"There you are--that brings it to the six months I gave you."

"I didn't mean I was thinking of it then. How could I be?"

"Of course you weren't thinking of it. But _she_ was."

"Norah? Not she! A child of seventeen!"

"I don't mean Norah. I mean Viola."

"Viola?"

"Yes. You didn't see what the unscrupulous minx was after. She was plotting it and planning it the first time you were at Canterbury. I got a letter from her at Bruges--I can't show it you--telling me not to worry about you--I _was_ worrying about you, though you were such a damn fool, if you don't mind my saying so. She said you'd got over it all right. She wouldn't be surprised if some day you married Norah.

"So you see," he said, "you needn't bother about Viola. She knew you couldn't keep it up for ever."

"Keep what up?"

(I knew; but something in his tone or in his twinkle made me pretend I didn't.)

"Your wonderful attitude," he said. "She meant you to marry Norah."

"Why--on earth--should she have wanted that?"

"Well--because I worried about you, and she wanted me to be happy. And because she worried about you, and wanted you to be happy. And because she worried about the Kid, and wanted her to be happy. And because she wanted the rest of them to be happy too."

I said I didn't know what I'd done to be so happy.

"You've done nothing. You don't owe it to yourself that you're happy. My dear fellow, you've been watched, and looked after, and protected for three and a half years with an incessant care. If you'd been left to yourself you'd have bungled the whole business. Either you wouldn't have proposed to her at all, or you'd have proposed three times running when it was too late."

I pointed out to him that I hadn't proposed three times running, neither was I too late.

"All the same," he said, "you wouldn't have thought of it if she hadn't gone to the Thesigers. And she wouldn't have gone to the Thesigers if Viola hadn't got the Thesigers to ask her. It was a put-up job. I tell you, my son, you've been guided and guarded. Why, you didn't even see that the child was grown up till I drew your attention to it."

There was no use pretending I liked it. I didn't.

I said, "Thank you. If a thing comes off it's your doing, and if it doesn't it's mine."

He said it looked like that.

When I saw Norah in the morning she asked me whether Jimmy had said he knew it was coming?

I said he had.

"And I suppose he thinks he made it come?"

That, I said, was Jimmy's attitude.

"Well, then," she said, "he didn't. You don't believe him, do you?"

Did I? Not perhaps at the moment, and never at any time as Jimmy believed it himself. But I do think he meant it to happen. It was one of the moves in his difficult game. He couldn't afford to neglect any means of strengthening his position in his wife's family. When it came to acknowledging Jimmy his wife's family was divided. Portions of it, strange cousins whom I never met till after my marriage, refused to acknowledge him at all. At Lancaster Gate he was received coldly in accordance with the discreet policy by which the Thesigers had avoided the appearances of scandal. Down at Canterbury there were degrees and shades of recognition. Norah openly loved him. The Canon had what he called "a morbid liking for the fellow." Mildred and Victoria tolerated him. Millicent endured him as an infliction. Mrs. Thesiger concealed under the most beautiful manners and the most Christian charity an inveterate repugnance.

I have forgotten Bertie. Bertie, who could generally be found at Lancaster Gate when he wasn't in his chambers in the Temple, was apathetic and amiably evasive. He took the line that Lancaster Gate took when he referred to his brother-in-law as a clever little beast.

And to all these shades Jevons was acutely sensitive.

I have known men (they were of the confraternity of letters) who declared that they could not understand why a man like Jevons, in Jevons's position, should have bothered his head for two minutes about his wife's family. They considered that Jevons's marriage was a disaster, not for the Thesigers, but for Jevons, and that his only safe and proper course was to leave the Thesigers alone. But it wasn't so easy to leave them alone when he had married into them; and to have left them would have been for Jevons a confession of failure. He might just as well have laid down his arms or pulled down the shutters of his shop. From the very beginning, ever since the day when he had met Reggie Thesiger, he conceived that the whole world of Thesigers had challenged him to hold his own in it, and he was too stubborn a fighter to retire on a challenge. Besides, he couldn't have retracted without taking Viola with him.

And you must remember that he was thirty-two when he married her, and that he had behind him an unknown history of struggle and humiliation and defeat. The Thesigers stood for the whole world of things that he had missed, the world of admired refinements and beautiful amenities, that, without abating one atom of its refinement and amenity, had persistently kicked him out. Besides--and this was the pathetic part of it--he had an irrepressible affection for the Canterbury Thesigers, and it hungered and thirsted for recognition. It nourished itself in secret on any scraps that came its way. He met tolerance with grace, and any sort of kindness with passionate gratitude. I think he would have broken his neck to give Norah or the Canon or even Mrs. Thesiger anything they wanted. And the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger wanted Norah to marry me. It wouldn't become me to say what Norah wanted.

Viola, in a serious moment, threw a light on it. (I had been dining in Edwardes Square on the evening of the day I came back from Canterbury after taking Norah down there.)

"I suppose you don't know," she said, "that Mummy and Daddy fell in love with you first? Well, they did. They wanted you to marry me to keep me out of mischief, but more than anything they wanted you to marry Norah. You see, she's their favourite."

And it seemed there was even more in it than that. They wanted to keep Norah out of mischief too. "Not," she said, "that Norah would ever have run off to Belgium, even with you." But that little adventure of Viola's had made them nervous. Norah was inclined to look down on the garrison; like Viola, she had declared in the most decided manner that she meant to strike out a line for herself; she wasn't going to follow Dorothy's and Gwinny's lead (did I say that the two married sisters lived abroad at their husbands' stations--Gwinny at Gibraltar, and Dorothy at Simla?), and that for lack of originality Mildred's engagement to Charlie Thesiger was "the limit."

"It's a good thing, Wally," she said. "It'll knit us all tighter together. That's partly why we've wanted it so awfully. Do you know that if it hadn't been for you Norah wouldn't have been allowed to come and stay with us?"

I said I was sure she was mistaken. Canon Thesiger--

"Oh," she said, "it wasn't Daddy. He wouldn't have minded. It was Mummy. She never _could_ bear poor Jimmy."

"But," she went on, "you're his friend. And he worked it for you. They can't get over those two things."

I remember wondering whether deep down in her heart she meant that my marriage would knit her and Jimmy closer?

I wondered whether Jimmy, in his wisdom, had calculated on that, too?

* * * * *

At that time I didn't realize the innocence that went with Jimmy's wisdom. I think I credited him with insight that I know now he never had. I know now that, even afterwards--at the very worst--he had no misgivings. All the Hampstead time, all through the Edwardes Square time he was happy. And afterwards--well--happiness wasn't the word for it; he lived in a sort of ecstasy. Which shows how little in those days she had let him see.

It was in nineteen-ten, their last year in Edwardes Square, that the tension began. Norah and I were married in the autumn of nineteen-nine, and we were living in my flat in Brunswick Square. In what I made out during this period I had Norah to help me, and she had wonderful lights.

I never could keep track of Jimmy's accelerating material progress, but the Year-Books tell me that his fourth novel came out in the spring of nineteen-nine, and his first successful play was produced in the summer of that year, and ran for the whole season and on through the winter, and I remember that in nineteen-ten he was attacking another novel and another play, which--But it's the attack that is the important thing, the thing that fixes nineteen-ten for me.

You cannot go on attacking, for years on end, with concentrated and increasing violence, and not suffer for it. The first effects of Jimmy's appalling travail may have been beneficent, but its later workings were malign. There's no other word for it. In nineteen-ten Jimmy was beginning to show signs of exhaustion. Not of his creative energy or anything belonging to it, though he prophesied a falling off after Novel Three, and declared that he could detect it. Nobody else could have detected it. The exhaustion was in Jimmy himself, and more especially and fatally in the Jimmy who struggled against what he called "the damnable tendency to do the sort of thing your father does."

He couldn't keep it up. He couldn't stand for ever the double strain of attacking and defending himself against his tendency. There's no doubt that when he was tired he got careless. I have known him come upstairs after dinner, entirely sober, but looking rather drunk, with his hair curling over his forehead and his tie crooked and the buttons of his irreproachable little waistcoat all undone. I have known him do the oddest things with chairs and get into postures inconceivable to ordinary men. I have known him drop his aitches for a whole evening because he was too dead beat to hang on to them. And Norah, going home with me, would say, "Poor Jimmy--he does get it very badly when he's tired."

And I have had to see Viola's face while these things were happening. Sometimes, when he was too outrageous, she would look up and smile with the queerest little half-frightened wonder, and I would be reminded of the time when Jimmy had jaundice and she asked me if I thought he would stay that funny yellow colour all his life? It was as if she were asking me, Did I think he would keep on all his life doing these rather alarming things? Sometimes he would catch himself doing them and say, "See me do that? That's because I'm agitated." Or, "There's another aitch gone. Collar it, somebody." Or, "I suppose that's what Norah would call one of my sillysosms." Sometimes Viola would catch him at it and reprove him. And then he would simply throw the responsibility on the poor old Registrar down in Hertfordshire.

I have heard him say to her with extreme sweetness and docility: "My dear child, if I'd had a father and mother like yours I shouldn't do these things." And I have heard him say almost with bitterness: "Does _that_ shock you? Good Heavens, you should see my father!"

But he took good care she shouldn't see him. I used to think this wasn't very nice of him. But what can a man do in a case so desperate? There were risks that even Jevons couldn't take. I used to think that he salved his conscience by making the Registrar an allowance that increased in proportion to his income and by going down into Hertfordshire regularly every three months to see him himself. I used to think that Jimmy's father must have admirable tact, because he never seemed to have inquired why Jimmy always came alone. But Jimmy said it wasn't tact. It was pure haughtiness. The old bird, he said, was as proud as a peacock with his tail up. I used to think it wasn't very nice of him to talk like that about his father. And I used to think it wasn't very nice of Viola never to go with Jimmy on his pilgrimages.

I was with them once when she was seeing him off at Euston, and I said to her, "Do you never go with him to see the poor old man?"

She turned to me. (I hadn't seen her look stern and fiery before.)

"Wally," she said, "I suppose it's because you're so good that you always think other people aren't. That _poor old man_ was a perfect devil to Jimmy. I don't say that Jimmy always was an angel to him, but he's been pretty decent, considering. He's told me things I couldn't tell you; and there were things he couldn't tell me. He says he didn't believe in God the Father when he was little, just because he wanted to believe in God. He thought God couldn't be anything so frightful as a father.

"That's why he's so awfully fond of Daddy."

* * * * *

And so it went on. She swung between slight shocks and passionate recoveries. One minute Jimmy's manners made her shudder all down her spine, and the next he would do some adorable thing that brought her to his feet. Half the time she pretended that things hadn't happened when they had. And when her flesh crept she had memories that lashed it.

I used to wonder whether this oscillation would slacken or increase with time. Would she swing on a longer and more dangerous rhythm? Would she be flung backwards and forwards between fascination and repulsion?

And I would catch myself up and answer my own words, "Of course not. The poor chap isn't as bad as all that."

Then early in nineteen-ten Reggie Thesiger came home on leave from India.

Looking back on it all now, I seem to see that until he came everything was going well. The oscillations, even if I didn't exaggerate them, couldn't have counted. Her heart was steady, and in her heart she adored her husband. There could be no doubt about it, she adored him. It was because she adored him that she suffered. Nobody can stand imperfection in their god.

But then she adored Reggie too.

She hadn't a misgiving. When Norah rushed to her with the news that Reggie had got his leave, she went wild and nearly strangled poor little Jimmy in her joy. She counted the weeks, the days, the hours till he landed. She argued with Norah as to which of them should have him first and longest when he came to town. Norah told me she didn't think he would stop long with _us_ if he could go to Viola. Viola was his favourite sister.

Well, he didn't go to Viola at all. He went first to the Thesigers at Lancaster Gate. Then he came on to us.

That was all right. We had to arrange our dates to suit the General.

On the Sunday we dined at Lancaster Gate; Viola and Jevons were not there. Reggie had come up on the Friday for ten days, and he stayed with the General for the weekend.

He said he could stay with us for the whole week if we could have him.

We were out in the hall saying good-bye, and he was getting Norah's cloak for her. The hall was full of Thesigers and guests. I remember Norah saying, "We'd love to have you. But--we promised Vee-Vee to divide you with her."

And I remember seeing Reggie's face stiffen over the collar of the cloak as he held it. He said he didn't want to be divided.

It was so startling, she told me afterwards, that she lost her head. She said out loud, so that everybody heard her, "Not with Vee-Vee?" And everybody heard his answer:

"Not with Jevons."

Then he laughed.

In spite of the laugh Norah was quite frightened. She asked me, going home in the taxi, what I thought it meant. I said I thought it meant that Reggie didn't particularly care about meeting Jimmy. She said, "Well, he'll have to meet him to-morrow night. I'm jolly glad we've asked them."

She added pensively, "Reggie's quite changed. I suppose it's India."

I knew she didn't suppose anything of the sort. She thought the General had been telling him things; and I must confess I thought so too. Here, I may say at once, we did that kindly and honourable gentleman a wrong.

He came to us in great distress the next morning. He said Viola and Jevons were to have dined with them last night, only Reggie had declared he wouldn't have anything to do with Jevons. He didn't want to meet him if he could help it. He said, Couldn't they ask Viola without him? And they _had_ asked Viola without him, and Viola had refused to come.

"And do you know" (he stared at us in a sort of helpless horror) "he hasn't been to see her yet."

The poor General went away quite depressed. He lingered with me on the doorstep a moment. "I'm afraid, Furnival," he said, "Reggie's going to make it very awkward for us."

He did make it awkward.

It might have been discreet to have put off our dinner. But I knew that Norah wouldn't hear of it; all the more if Reggie was going to make it awkward. You don't suppose one Thesiger was going to knuckle under to another. It wasn't their way. They were loyal to the last degree, but loyalty was another matter. And if it came to that she was loyal to her sister.

I shall never forget that dinner. I shall never forget Viola's coming in with Jevons behind her.

She was, as I think I've said, a beautifully-made woman, with long limbs and superb shoulders, and a way of holding her small head high. Well, she came in (they were a little late) with her head higher than ever, and with a sweep of her limbs, as if her crushed draperies (she was all in white) were blown backward by a wind; her gauze scarf billowed behind her as if it were wings or sails and the wind filled it. She was like the Victory of Samothrace; she was like a guardian and avenging angel; she was like a ship in full sail breasting a sea. Up to her eyes she was everything that was ever splendid and courageous and defiant.

But her eyes--there was a sort of scared grief in them.

I had seen fright in her face once before, the day when she came into the room at Hampstead with Jevons behind her and saw Reggie there. I said to myself, "She always was afraid of Reggie." But that, for the second that it lasted, was sheer fright. This was different. There was anguish in it; and it was only in her eyes.

And Jevons's entry, this time, was simultaneous. Little Jimmy came behind her, holding himself rather absurdly straight and breathing hard.

And there was Reggie Thesiger waiting for them, standing by the hearth between Norah and me.

Oh yes, India had changed him. Surely, I thought, it must be India that had made him so lean and stiff and hard. But he was handsomer even than he had been five years ago, and he looked taller, he was so formidably upright and well-built. (As a competitive exhibition Jimmy's straightness was pitiful. And yet, if his antagonist had been anybody but Reggie, it might have had a certain dignity.)

I wondered, "_How_ is she going to greet him? Will she lower her flag and kiss him, or what?"

She sailed up to Norah first and kissed her. She shook hands with me. She smiled at me (I don't know how she managed it). Then she turned to Reggie.

She didn't lower her flag. She said, "Well, Reggie," as if they had met yesterday. There was no kissing or any anticipation of a kiss; they shook hands, not at arm's length, not in the least as if they had had a quarrel, but like well-bred people in the house of strangers. It was all beautifully done.

Then it was Jimmy's turn. Reggie looked at him as if he wasn't there.

If I could have run away with any decency I'd have run rather than face what came then. But the women--Heavens, how they stood to their guns!

Norah said, "Reggie, I think you know your brother-in-law?" with an air of stating a platitude rather than of recalling him to a courtesy he had forgotten.

"I don't think so," said Reggie.

But he bowed. And Jimmy bowed. There was no handshaking, at arm's length or otherwise.

Viola said, "You _do_ know him. You met him four years ago in my rooms at Hampstead."

"Did I? I'm afraid I've forgotten."

"You did meet, didn't you, Jimmy?"

"I believe so," said Jimmy, with a quite admirable indifference.

"Anyhow," said Norah sweetly, "you can't say you haven't _heard_ of him."

She meant well, poor darling, but it was a bad shot. It missed its mark completely, and it drew down the enemy's fire.

"I _have_ heard of Mr. Jevons," said Reggie, and he looked at Jimmy as if he realized for the first time that he was there, and resented it.

Norah turned positively white. It was Viola who saved us.

"Please don't, Norah. It's really awful for poor Jimmy now he's on all the buses and in the Tube?"

She referred to the monstrous posters that advertised his play in black letters eighteen inches high on a scarlet ground.

"How do you feel when you're in the Tube?" said Norah.

"You feel," said Jimmy--he was sitting in one of his worst attitudes, with his legs stretched straight out before him and his feet tilted toes upwards. I noticed that Reggie couldn't bear to look at him--"you feel first of all as if everybody was looking at you; you feel a silly ass; then you feel as if everybody was looking at the posters; then you know they aren't looking at them. Then you leave off looking at them yourself. And if one does hit you in the eye you feel as if it referred to somebody else, and after that you don't feel anything more."

It wasn't brilliant, but the wonder was he found anything to say at all.

I was thankful when Pavitt came in to tell us that dinner was served. It delivered us from Jimmy's attitudes.

When it came to dining at our small round table we saw how badly we had erred in not asking anybody else but Viola and Jimmy. A sixth, a woman (almost any woman would have done in the circumstances), a woman to talk to Reggie might have pulled us through. But with Reggie sitting beside Viola, with Jimmy opposite them by himself between me and Norah (the only possible arrangement) it was terrible.

Reggie persisted in talking to Viola like a well-bred stranger. He persisted in ignoring Jevons.

And Jimmy retaliated by ignoring _him_. There was nothing else for him to do. Only it wasn't one of the things he did well. Beside Reggie's accomplishment he looked mean and pitiful and a little vulgar. God forgive me for putting it down, but that is how he looked.

And once or twice, under the strain of it, he dropped an aitch with the most disconcerting effect.

I often wonder what Pavitt thought of that family party. He certainly served Viola as if he loved her, and Jimmy as if he was sorry for him, calling his attention to a dish or a wine which, he seemed to say, it would be a pity for him to miss--it might prove a consolation to him.

Our agony became so unbearable that the women ended it when they could by leaving us at the stage of coffee and cigarettes. Then, with us three men the position became untenable, and Reggie found that he'd have to go out at nine; he had an appointment with a fellow. And at nine he went.

Viola and Jimmy left us very soon after.

She said, "It was dear of you to have us," not in the least humbly, but as if they had enjoyed it.

Up to the very last she was magnificent, and even Jimmy played up well. In fact, when Reggie's perfection was no longer there to damage him he was rather fine.

It was poor little Norah who broke down. I found her crying all by herself on the couch in my study when they'd gone.

She said, "Wally, this is awful. It's _the_ most awful thing that could have happened."

I said, "Oh, come--" and she persisted. "But it _is_. She adored Reggie. He used to adore her--and--you've seen him, how he was to-night. It'll kill her if he keeps it up."

I said, "He won't keep it up."

"Oh, won't he! You don't know Reggie."

I said, "It's odd. He didn't seem to mind Jimmy so much the first day he met him."

"Oh, my dear--he didn't mind, because he never could have dreamed she'd marry him."

"He'll come round all right when he knows him," I said.

She shook her head and made little dabs at her face with her pocket-handkerchief.

"That's just it. He thinks he does know him. I mean he thinks he knows something. I'm sure he thinks it."

"My dear child, however could he? He couldn't even have heard. If you mean that Belgian business, it was all over and done with four years ago. Have we any of us thought of it since?"

"No--but I think he had an idea then. He guessed that there must be something. You see--we never told Vee-Vee, but--he thought it was awfully queer of her to go off--anywhere--just when he was sailing."

"Well," I said, "it _was_ a bit odd. She must have been awfully gone on Jimmy."

"She was."

"Poor dear. She said she meant to burn her boats."

"Don't you see--that was part of the burning. She had to break the hold that Reggie had on her. You don't know what it was like, Wally. She had to break it or she could never have married Jimmy at all. It was a toss-up between them; and Jimmy won."

"Is it going to be a toss-up between them all over again, d'you think?" I said.

"No. It's going to be war to the knife. They won't either of them give in as long as Reggie's got that idea in his head."

"We must get it out of his head. Surely," I said, "we can do something."

"No, we can't. There's no way of getting it out. It's no good trying to make a joke of it. You can't joke with Reggie past a certain point. And it's not as if you could give him a hint. You can't hint at these things."

"What do you think he'll do?"

"He won't do anything. He won't say anything. He'll just go on like this all the time, and she won't be able to bear it. It'll break her heart."

Well, though I agreed with her, I still thought that something could be done. I tried to do it when Reggie got back that night after Norah had gone to bed. I couldn't of course assume that he had his idea. My plan was to present Jevons to him in a light that was incompatible with his idea. It was easy enough to say that Jevons might be rather startling, but that he was awfully decent and the soul of honour. The soul of honour covered it--absolutely ruled out his idea.

He didn't contradict me. He just sat there smoking amicably, just saying every now and then that he couldn't stand him; he was sorry--I might be perfectly right and Jevons might be everything I said--only he couldn't stand him; and he wasn't going to. Nothing would induce him to stop with Jevons. He didn't want to have anything to do with the little beast.

When I said, "I assure you, my dear fellow, it's all right," he only threw the onus of suspicion on me by replying suavely, "My dear fellow, I assure you I never said it wasn't."

It was as if he really knew it wasn't, knew something that we didn't know, and was determined to keep his knowledge to himself.

And when I'd finished he said, "The whole thing's a mystery to _me_. I thought she was going to marry you." And then--"How she can stick him I can't think. D'you mind, old man, if I go to bed? No, I don't want any whisky and soda, thanks."

It was Pavitt, of all people, who threw a light on it when he brought the whisky.

"Beg your pardon, sir," said Pavitt, "but I believe I never told you that the Captain called here one day when you was in Belgium."

"Are you quite sure, Pavitt? He called the day I left."

"Yes, sir, I remember his calling the day you left. It's only just come back to me that he called again, three days after, I think it was. I told him you was gone to Belgium, and he said that was all he wanted. He didn't leave no message, else I should have remembered. It was the young gentleman's likeness to Mrs. Jevons, sir, what fixed him in my mind."

I told Reggie this the next day as an instance of Pavitt's wonderful memory. "Only," I said, "he forgot to tell me that you called."

He smiled rather bitterly as if he remembered the incident well.

"Oh, I called all right," he said. "I wanted to know where you were."

After that Norah and I made it out between us. Not all at once, but bit by bit, as things occurred to us or as he suggested them.

He must have begun to suspect something when the time went on and Viola didn't turn up. Only he thought it was I who was at the bottom of it. Perhaps, so long as he thought it was I, he had made up his mind that there could be no great harm in it. He had been all right with her down at Canterbury those last few days. Anyhow, he hadn't said anything.

Then--when he heard that she had married Jevons--he had his idea. It wasn't necessary for him to have heard anything else. And then, even if he hadn't guessed it, there was Jimmy's book, the "Flemish Journal," to tell him she had been in Belgium with him. And he knew she didn't marry him till afterwards.

And so, he thought things. If he didn't think them of Viola he thought them of Jevons. (Even on the most charitable assumption he would consider his sister's passion for Jimmy a piece of morbid perversity.) And anyhow, he was left with an appalling doubt.

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

IX

That we had made out something very like the truth of it I realized when I met Burton Withers. For eventually I did meet him. It was at the end of June, nineteen-ten, in the green room of the Crown Theatre on the hundredth night of Jimmy's play. That is what I remember it by.

Norah and I were with Viola and Jimmy. Withers had come in with a friend, an important member of the cast, who was evidently under the impression that we had never met before, for he introduced him to us all round. Withers showed tact in not recognizing Viola or claiming the acquaintance he certainly had with Jevons. He had, in fact, a most reassuring air of starting again with a clean slate and no reminiscences. This was in the interval between the First and Second Acts. When the curtain rose on Act Two, I was alone in Jimmy's box. (Jimmy and Viola and Norah were trying the effect of the play from the stalls.) And at the next interval Withers came to me there. It was funny, he said, the way little Jevons had come on. He didn't suppose any of us had thought of _this_ four years ago when we had all met together in Bruges.

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

"Well, if it wasn't in Ghent. Oh--of course it was at Ghent you and I met. You hadn't joined the others then."

At first I was hopelessly mystified by these allusions. I couldn't think what point he was making for or where he would come out. He seemed to be trying uneasily to get somewhere. Then I saw that he had had it on his mind that when we had last met he had made a defamatory statement to me about the lady who had become my sister-in-law, and about a man who had become a celebrity (I knew Withers's little weakness for celebrities). And he was scared.

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

"D'you know, I've been most awfully sorry for chaffing you in that idiotic way--about--your sister-in-law. Silly sort of thing one says, you know. But of course you knew I was pulling your leg."

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

Of course I knew he was doing nothing of the sort, for Withers slandered right and left when it wasn't worth his while to grovel, and I had no doubt now that he believed his own dirty tale when he told it; but he had been impressed and thoroughly frightened, even at the time, by the calmness of my bluff, and the little beast was far more afraid of us than we ever could have been of him now. We could henceforth dismiss Withers from our minds. He was a "social climber" of the sort that would eat his own words if he thought they would do the smallest damage to his climbing.

As for the ladies, General Thesiger's friends, I rather think the General had settled with them at the time.

You might say we had nothing to fear from Reggie, if Reggie's silence--and his deafness--hadn't been more terrible than anything he could have heard or said.

I suppose nineteen-ten ought to stand as the year of Tasker Jevons's great Play, the play that ran for a whole year after the hundredth night, that ran on and on as if it would never stop, that, when it was taken off the Crown stage to make room for its successor, still careered through the provinces and the United States. It seemed the year of Jimmy's utmost affluence. If he kept it up, we said, he'd be a millionaire before he died of it. But it wasn't conceivable that he could keep it up for long. We thought he'd never write another play like this one. There never would be another year like nineteen-ten.

I believe that even Jimmy thought there'd never be another year like it, so far had he surpassed his own calculations, as it was.

But for me nineteen-ten is the year of other things, the things that happened in the family, the year of Reggie's return and all the misery that came from it, the year of Viola's struggle--the agony of which we, Norah and I, were the helpless spectators. _She_ never said a word to us. It was Norah who conveyed to me the secret, intimate shock of it.

That year Jimmy rained boxes and stalls and theatre-parties for his play on all the Thesigers (except Reggie) and on all their friends, and on Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands when they came back from Simla and Gibraltar (it was the year of their return too); but we stood behind the scenes of a tragedy that mercifully was hidden from Jimmy's eyes. It was the year when Mildred broke off her engagement to Charlie Thesiger. It was the year when our little girl, Viola, was born; the year when we moved from our Bloomsbury flat into the little house in Edwardes Square, taking over the end of the lease and all the fixtures and some of the furniture from Jimmy. Jimmy hadn't a child, and he had sworn that he never would have one; he was so afraid (and this fear was the only thing that disturbed his optimism), so horribly afraid that Viola might die. But he had outgrown the house in Edwardes Square. It was the year of his first really startling expansion.

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

Why Mayfair we really couldn't think. He said he liked the sound of it; it made him feel as if he was in the country when he wasn't, and as if it was the month of May, when there never was any month of May in England; as if there were a maypole where the fountain is in Park Lane; and as if processions, and processions of horses, splendid stallions and brood-mares and thoroughbreds and hacks and great Suffolk punches with their manes and tails tied up with ribbons were coming past his house to the fair.

He may have felt like that about it. I put no limits to Jimmy's imagination; but I suspected him of throwing out these airy fancies as a veil to cover the preposterous nature of his ambition.

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

And it was the year in which he and Viola went to the Riviera while the plumbers and painters were at work on the house in Green Street, Mayfair. They stayed away all autumn, and at the end of November they settled in. And at Christmas they gave their house-warming.

It wasn't a large party--only a few friends of Viola's, and Jimmy's lawyer and his doctor and his agent, and a few picked members of the confraternity; the rest were Thesigers. If Jimmy had meant to give a demonstration proving that he could gather the whole of his wife's family round him at a pinch, he had all but succeeded. I suppose every available member had turned up that night, except Reggie. The General and his wife and daughters were there; and Charlie Thesiger and Bertie; and Canon and Mrs. Thesiger (they had come up from Canterbury on purpose, and were staying with the General); and Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands; and Victoria and Mildred, who stayed with Viola; and Millicent, who came to us; and a whole crowd of miscellaneous aunts and cousins; perhaps sixty altogether, counting outsiders.

Norah and I had been away for weeks in the country and had only got back that afternoon, so we had not seen the house in Green Street since it had been furnished. It burst, it literally burst, on us, without the smallest warning or preparation.

Like Jimmy's first novel, it was designed to startle and arrest, hitting you in the eye as you came in. The actual reception was held in the large hall, which had been formed by turning what had once been the dining-room loose into the passage and the stair-place.

So far the architect had done his work well. After that he had been left to struggle with and interpret as he best could the baronial idea that had been imposed on him. The hall was panelled half-way in dark oak, and above the oak the walls were hung with a rough papering of old gold. But what hit you in the eye as you came in was the oak staircase that went up royally along the bottom wall. It had scarlet-and-gold Tudor roses on the flank of the balustrade, and at every third banister there was a shield picked out in scarlet and gold. And at the bottom of the balustrade and at the turn a little oak lion sat on his haunches and held up yet another shield (picked out in scarlet and gold) in his fore-paws. The bare oak planks of the upper floor made the ceiling, and there was an enormous Tudor rose in the middle of it, where other people might have had a chandelier, and little Tudor roses blazed at intervals all along the cornice. And there was a great stone hearth and chimney-piece, a Tudor chimney-piece, mullioned, with a shield carved in the centre and the motto: "_Dominus Defensor Domi_," and on either side the rose and the grill, the rose and the grill, alternately. There were andirons on the hearth and an immense log burning, and swords and daggers and suits of armour hung on the gold walls above the panelling.

And I swear to you that the curtains and upholstery were in tapestry cloth, the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground. It was as if Jimmy had wanted to say to the Thesigers that if it came to being Tudor, he could be as Tudor as any of them, and more so. Thus deeply had he absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere.

When she saw the suits of armour Norah squeezed my arm and breathed "Oh--my _darling_ Wally!"--in an ecstasy that was anguish. Poor Mildred's plump face turned as scarlet as the Tudor roses with an emotion that we could not fathom, but judged to be painful.

We had come early with the idea of making ourselves useful, if necessary; but there was hardly anybody there yet, only two or three guests drinking coffee or champagne-cup at the long table under the windows, and Jimmy, who stood in the middle of his Tudor hall, talking to one of the confraternity, and rocking himself gently from his toes to his heels and from his heels to his toes again, as a sign that he was not in the least elated, but only at his ease.

He was delighted to see us, and for quite three seconds he ceased his rocking and began to twinkle in a most natural and reassuring manner. Then I remember him scuttling away to greet another guest, and the _confrère_ gazing after him with affection and turning to us in a sort of grave enjoyment of the scene. I remember Viola coming up to us and her little baffling smile and her look--the look she was to have for long enough--of detachment from Jimmy and his Tudor hall. I remember the dark blue, half-transparent gown she wore that was certainly not Tudor, and her general air of being an uninvited and inappropriate guest, and how she conveyed us to the table to get drinks "all comfy" before the others came. And when Viola had drifted away, I remember Charlie Thesiger strolling up to us. The supercilious youth had been, getting a drink "all comfy" on his own account, and his little stiff moustache was still wet with Jimmy's champagne-cup above the atrocious smile he met us with.

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

We said we hadn't, and he advised us to go up and look at it at once, before anybody else did. "You can't see it properly," he said, "unless you're alone with it."

I suppose we ought to have been grateful to Charlie for not letting us miss it, and it was perfectly true that the way to see it was to be alone with it; there would, indeed, have been a positive indecency in seeing it in any other way. He had spared our decency. And yet I think we hated him for having sent us there. It was as if he had sent us to look at something horrible, at an outrage, at violence done to shrinking, delicate things.

We looked at it, and we looked at each other. We didn't speak, and I don't think either of us smiled. I remember Norah going behind me and closing the door swiftly, as she might have closed it on some horror that she and I had to deal with alone. I remember her saying then, "This is _too_ awful!" not in the least as if she meant what we were looking at, but as if she saw something invisible that lurked and loomed behind it, so that I asked her what she thought it meant.

"It means," she said, "that Jimmy's done it all himself. He's had to do it all himself. She hasn't _cared_."

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

She moaned, "Oh, but he did--he did. He's cared so awfully. That's the dreadful part of it. You can see he has. Just look at those vases and those cabinets and things. And think of the money the poor thing must have spent on it!"

"But," I said, "it's so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable. The old house was perfect. So, in its way, was the cottage."

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

"She told us _he_ did."

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

"He appreciated it, anyhow."

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

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

"Because she hasn't cared. She hasn't cared a hang. She's left everything to him. And you can see, poor dear, how he's spread himself."

Oh, yes, you could see. It was as if he had never had scope before, and now, with no limit to his opportunity, he had simply run amok. It wasn't that the things he had gathered round him in his orgy were not fine things. It was the awful way he'd mixed them, yielding incontinently to each solicitation as it came along. Dealers had been on the look-out for Jimmy to exploit his fury.

In his Tudor hall he had been constrained to unity by a great idea. But not here. And reminiscences of the Canterbury drawing-room had suggested to him that you _could_ mix things. So, using a satinwood suite with tinted marqueterie and old rose upholsterings (he had succumbed to it in the first freshness of his innocence) as a base, he had added Boule cabinets and modern Indian tables in carved open-work to Adams cabinets and Renaissance tables in ebony inlaid with engraved ivory, and eighteenth-century gilded bergère chairs to old oak and Chippendale. Cloisonné and Sèvres stood side by side on the same shelf. He had an Aubusson carpet in the middle of the floor, and his Bokhara rugs at intervals down the sides. Norah was sitting on the emerald-green brocade of an Empire sofa, clutching the gilt sphinx head of the arm-end. It was a double room, and emerald-green curtains hung at the tall windows in the front and at the large stained-glass window at the back, and at the wide archway between. And an Algerian lamp swung from the back ceiling, and an Early Victorian glass chandelier from the front.

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

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

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

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

We couldn't say anything--we were too miserable. She looked round the dreadful rooms as if she were trying to see them for the first time, as if some reverberation of the horror we had felt did penetrate to her in her remoteness. She smiled faintly.

"What _does_ it matter," she said, "so long as it makes him happy? It would be sweet if you'd come down and help us now."

We went down, and the house-warming began.

It was Jimmy who told us what our business was. We were to stand by visitors, he said, as they came in and break the shock (he had observed it) of the Tudor hall. If we couldn't break it we must do what we could to help recovery. He had seen desperate cases yield to champagne-cup administered during the first paroxysm.

We had a little trouble with some of the minor confraternity--their emotions were facile and champagne intensified them. They would ask where the throne-room was and when our host was going to be measured for his suit of armour, and what did we think he'd done with the family portraits?

But the Thesigers (all except Charlie--and Charlie, Norah said, had no heart), the Thesigers offered an example of the most beautiful manners. I shall never forget the General's face as the suits of armour struck him--his sudden spasm of joy and the austere heroism that suppressed it. And the Canon--

The Canon rose to even greater heights. We were a bit afraid that he would overdo it and look as if he were trying to show us how a Christian gentleman could bear such things as Jimmy's furnishings. But no. He behaved as though he saw nothing in the least unusual in his furnishings, as though Jimmy's Tudor hall and miscellaneous drawing-room were his natural background.

But for sheer pluck and presence of mind not one of them could touch Jevons. He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his atmosphere of deadly peril. He volplaned, he looped the loop. _His_ behaviour was unsurpassable. For _his_ case, if you like, was desperate. I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room. He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger, not the quiver of an eyelash, had escaped him. And consider what it meant to him. In a furious climax of expenditure he had achieved the arresting spectacle of his house in Mayfair, and his first night, his house-warming, was turning under his eyes into a triumph for the Thesigers' manners and a failure for him. He had no illusions. Unless he did something to stop it, the whole thing would be one enormous and lamentable and expensive failure.

He had to do something. And he did it. He left off his uneasy swagger and his rocking. He met the heroic and beautiful faces of the Thesigers with his engaging twinkle. He sought out and ministered to two young girls who had been brought there by the minor confraternity and were hiding in a corner on the point of hysteria. We heard him telling them that the throne-room was being built out over the scullery leads (he must have known what the minor confraternity had been up to), that in the great fireplace in his kitchen you could roast three journalists whole, and that the question of the family portraits was receiving his attention. He had a deal on with the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery for the purchase of the Holbein Henry the Eighth. By the time he had finished it was open to us to suppose that the house in Mayfair was his joke and not ours, that he had furnished it in this preposterous manner in order to be really and truly funny, and to keep himself and Viola in perfect and perpetual gaiety. It was as if he were trying to say to us, "None of you people--least of all the confraternity--knows how to live. Life isn't a calamity; it's a joke; and to live properly you should meet life in its own spirit; you should do exuberant and gay and gorgeous things, like me."

And then when we had all come round, he rearranged all the furniture in his drawing-room for charades (showing no respect whatever for his satinwood suite); and after the charades he rolled up his Aubusson carpet and cleared the place for a dance that was ruin to his parquet floor. And we had supper; and then more dancing till four o'clock in the morning.

Of the dancing I remember nothing but Viola whirling round and round, as it were for ever, in Charlie Thesiger's arms, and her dead-white face looking over his shoulder, as if she saw nothing, nothing whatever; as if she were detached even from the arms that held her.

My last recollection is of Jimmy's face when Norah said to him, "Oh, Jimmy, I _love_ your dear little lions!"--and Jimmy's answer:

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

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

* * * * *

At this point, when I look back over what I've written, it seems to me that I've done nothing but record changes so many and so marked that their history has no sort of continuity. But in reality it was not so. Up to December, nineteen-ten, there was no break, not even a dividing line. Compared with what happened then I am compelled to think of Viola's marriage, not as a risky experiment that had so far defeated prophecy, but as an entirely serene and happy thing. Between the moment when they set up that four-post bed in that absurd little house in Hampstead and the day of their leaving Edwardes Square behind them I cannot point to any time and say, "That was the beginning of it," or put my finger on an event and show the difference there.

Unless it was Reggie's coming back.

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

Any difference I may have noted previously was an affair of shades, of delicate oscillations. There was no lapse without a recovery, no departure without a return.

And here, at the end of nineteen-ten, I got a line drawn sharply on either side of a break I cannot bridge. The minute Jimmy moved into that house in Mayfair things began to go wrong.

It was as if Jimmy, in his love of doing risky things, had cast, this time, a dreadful die.

From that evening onward I watched them with anxiety. I do not know how far Jevons was aware that the house in Mayfair was a blunder; I think he wouldn't have acknowledged that it was a blunder at all. His own attitude to it was not in the least disturbed by his humorous perception of other people's. With his dexterity in adjustments he was quite capable of reconciling them, quite capable of enjoying the effect it had on nervous organisms while he himself took it seriously. It was, after all, his own achievement, and a very astonishing achievement too. He continued to respect it as the immense sign of his material prosperity, the advertisement, you may say, of his arrival. His business instinct would never have allowed him to repent of an advertisement.

There _was_ this gross element in his enjoyment.

And there was also the pure and charming happiness of a child that suddenly finds itself left, with boundless opportunity, to its own gorgeous caprice. You could no more blame Jevons for the bad taste of his drawing-room and his Tudor hall than you could blame a child for its joy in a treasure of tinsel and coloured glass.

But when we asked ourselves where, in this outbreak of Jimmy's fantasy, did Viola come in, we had to own that she came in nowhere. Not only had she stood by without lifting a finger to interfere with its tempestuous course; not only had she submitted without a protest; she seemed to show no adequate sense of what had happened. Her detachment was the unnatural and dreadful thing.

And this happiness of his was at Viola's mercy. It would last just so long as she could keep him from knowing that he had outraged the beauty, the fitness and the simplicity she loved. I thought how he had once boasted that he knew what she wanted, that he knew what she was thinking and feeling all the time. How could he have imagined that she wanted _this_? What was his knowledge worth if he didn't know what she would think and feel about it?

Unless, indeed, she had lied to him. Lied from first to last, deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside, where you would have thought she would have most wanted to plunge in; the calculation and the indifference both were so beyond her that you could only think one thing: she hated it; she hated the new turn his prosperity had taken; she almost hated him because of it; and her heart was broken because of Reggie, and it was hardening where it broke; she hated Reggie at moments; and she had moments of hating Jevons because he had come between them; and she was compounding with her conscience, punishing herself for all these hatreds and for a thousand secret criticisms and disloyalties and repugnances; avenging, as it were beforehand, all hatreds and criticisms, disloyalties and repugnances to come. For she saw it all now--how it was going to be. And she was trying to make up for it by giving Jimmy his own way in the things that, as she had said, "didn't matter."

And if Jimmy's way was to surround her with pretentious silliness instead of beautiful simplicity, then she must rise above her surroundings. Her spirit, at any rate, must refuse to be surrounded.

Her attitude was more lofty than you can imagine. As Norah had said, there would always be a Belfry--something high and unusual--in Viola's life. Well, she was going to live in the Belfry, that was all. And if she was to be perfectly safe in her Belfry, and Jimmy perfectly happy in his Tudor hall, he mustn't know that she was there.

I don't know how she really put it to herself; I don't suppose she "put" it any way; but subconsciously, as they say, it must have been like that. Anyhow, her behaviour amounted to an evasion of Jimmy, and this particular evasion was sad enough when you consider that in the beginning it had been Jimmy who had taken her to look at the Belfry--who was the one man who could be trusted to take her, and that she would never have dreamed of setting off on such an adventure by herself, and that she wasn't fitted for it. In fact, I can't think of anybody less fit.

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

It had worn off even for us to whom he came each time with a comparative freshness. And if it hadn't worn off for his public and for the confraternity, it was simply because as an engineer of literature he was inexhaustible. He had so perfected his machinery that the turning out of novels and of plays had become with him a sort of automatic habit, and if there was any falling off in his quality he was right when he said that nobody but himself would find it out. He had got an infinite capacity for plagiarizing himself; and in his worst things he imitated his best so closely that he might well defy you to tell the difference.

But you cannot work as he had worked for five years at a stretch and not suffer for it. And you cannot aim at material success as he had aimed, deliberately and continuously, for five years without becoming yourself a bit material. And you cannot be immersed and wallow in it as he wallowed without corruption.

There's no doubt that for the next, two--three--four years he wallowed. He was so deep in that, even after Viola's illness that came in nineteen-thirteen and purged him somewhat, he continued to wallow. And we had to stand by while he was doing it and pretend that we weren't shocked. There was no good trying to give him a hand to help him out, he was so happy wallowing.

I am far from blaming him. Personally, if it hadn't been for Viola, I should have liked to think that he was able to get all that ecstasy out of his sordid triumph. For it _was_ sordid. If it wasn't for Viola you could tick off each year with a note of his preposterously increasing income, and say that was all there was in it.

I muddle up the first years of it. I know that in nineteen-eleven he brought out his fifth novel and his third play and that the run and the returns of both were astounding, even for him. I know that in nineteen-twelve he brought out two novels and two new plays that ran at the same time, and that he roped in Europe and the Colonies; and that his income rose into five figures. He couldn't help it. His business was a thing that had passed beyond his control. With infinite exertions he had set it spinning, and now it looked as if he had only to touch it now and then with his finger to keep it going. And if he did get a bit excited is it any wonder? There was the dreadful fascination of the thing that compelled him to watch it till its perpetual gyrations went to his head and made it reel.

His figure seems to me to reel slightly as it moves through those rooms in the house in Green Street, and before the footlights as he answered calls, and across the banquet-halls of the "Ritz" or the "Criterion" or the "Savoy," when--about three times a year--he celebrated his triumphs. I see those years as a succession of banquets running indistinguishably into each other. I see him buying more and more furniture and superintending its disposal with excitement. He seems to me to have been always buying things. I've forgotten most of them except the things he bought for Viola--the jewellery that frightened her, the opera cloak that made her hysterical, the furs that had to be sent back again (you'd have thought he couldn't have gone wrong with furs, but he did), and the hats that even Jimmy owned it was impossible to wear. I can see his face saddened by these failures and a little puzzled, as if he couldn't conceive how his star should have gone back on him like that. I can see him, and I can see Viola, kneeling on the floor in his study and packing some beastly thing up in paper, tenderly, as if it had been the corpse of a beloved hope; and I can hear him saying (it was after the opera cloak and the hysterics), "Walter, you can monkey with a woman's 'eart, and you can ruin her immortal soul, but if you meddle with her clothes it's hell for both of you. Don't you do it, my boy."

I remember scores of little things like that, things done and things said with an incorruptible sweetness and affection, but things accentuated with lapsed aitches and with gestures that only Jimmy was unaware of. Those years are marked for me more than anything by the awful increase in his solecisms. Their number, their enormity and frequency rose with his income, and for the best of reasons. It was as if, his object being gained, he could afford them. He was no longer on his guard. He had no longer any need to be. The strain was over--he relaxed, and in relaxation he fell back into his old habits.

All those years we seem to have been looking on at the slow, slow process of his vulgarization. By nineteen-twelve the confraternity had begun to regard Tasker Jevons as an outrageous joke. And in nineteen-thirteen, when both his plays were still running, even his father-in-law said that he was a disgusting spectacle. And Reggie (he was Major Thesiger now, with a garrison appointment at Woolwich) Reggie kept as far away from him as ever.

Sometimes I have thought that Viola's detachment helped his undoing. She wasn't there to pull him up or to cover his disasters; she had more and more the look of not being there at all.

And Charlie Thesiger was always there. There with a most decided look of being up to something.

Jevons didn't seem to mind him. You might have said that Charlie was another of the risks he took.

X

In nineteen-thirteen Jimmy bought a motor-car.

He was more excited about his motor-car than he had been about his house--any of his houses. Even Viola was interested and came rushing down from her Belfry when it arrived.

He bought it at the end of January. A good, useful car that would shut or open and serve for town or country. But it was no good to them till April.

For all February and March Viola was ill. She had been running down gradually for about two years, getting a little whiter and a little slenderer every month, and in the first week of February she got influenza and ignored it, and went out for a drive in the motor-car with a temperature of a hundred and four.

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

It turned to pneumonia and she was dangerously ill for three weeks, in fact, she nearly died of it; and for more weeks than I can remember she lay about on sofas to which Jimmy and the nurse or one of us carried her from her bed. And in all that time Jimmy nursed and waited on her and sat up with her at night. If he slept it was with one eye and both ears open. And I never saw anybody as gentle as he was and as skilful with his hands and quiet. He didn't even breathe hard. And when she was convalescent and a little fretful and troublesome there wasn't anybody else who could manage her. The nurses would call him to feed her and give her her medicine and lift her. She couldn't bear anybody else to touch her.

I remember one day when she had been moved from her bed to the couch for the first time and she was so weak, poor darling, that she cried. I remember her saying, "Jimmy, if you'll only put your hands on my forehead and keep them there."

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

I doubt if he was ever away from her for more than a few minutes except when one of us came and dragged him out for a walk in the Park against his will. It was always for a walk in the Park--the same walk, through Stanhope Gate to the end of the Serpentine and back again, so that he could time it to a minute. He wouldn't look at his motor-car. I think he hated it. Anyhow, I know he lent it to us until she was well enough to go out in it again.

She wasn't well enough till April. She never would have been well enough, she never would have been with us at all, the doctors and the nurses said, if it hadn't been for Jimmy. He swore that they were fools when they gave her up and said she couldn't live. He said he'd _make_ her live. And I believe he made her.

He gave her till April to get well in; and when April came she did get well. And he took her away to the South of France, and to Switzerland when the months grew warmer (the doctor told him it was a risk, but he said he'd take it); he took her in the motor-car, and he brought her back in June, still slender but recovered.

That illness of hers saved them for the time. It reinstated him. It improved him. He couldn't, you see, be devoted and vulgar at the same time. All lighter agitations and excitements might be dangerous to Jevons, but passion and great grief and grave anxiety ennobled him. He came back from Switzerland chastened and purified of all offence. Even Reggie couldn't have found a flaw in him.

That had always been Jevons's way. Just when you had made up your mind that you couldn't bear him he would go and do something so beautiful that it made your heart ache. From the very fact that he was intolerable to-day you might be sure he'd be adorable to-morrow.

And when we saw him the night he brought Viola home, moving quietly about the house, giving orders in that gentle voice that he had in reserve, we thought, Really, it will be all right now. Viola's passion for him had been near death so many times, and each time he had saved it.

We hadn't allowed for the reaction--he was bound to feel it after three months' unnatural repression; we hadn't allowed for the reaction that Viola was bound to feel after three years' unnatural detachment; we hadn't allowed for the state of her nerves after her illness; there were all sorts of things we hadn't allowed for, and they all came at once; they burst out from under their covers one evening in June when Norah and I were dining in Green Street.

It was one of Jimmy's gestures that began it. Viola had never been able to control his gestures; she had never been able to get used to them; and there were two in particular that made her wince still as she had winced in the beginning. She had contracted the habit of wincing in response to them. Whenever Jimmy jerked his thumb over his shoulder you saw her blink; and whenever he cracked his knuckles she shrank back. The blink followed the jerk, and the shrinking followed the cracking as the flash follows the snap of the trigger.

I have never known Jimmy jerk as he jerked that evening. When Norah had no salad, when my glass was empty, when Viola wanted more potatoes, when he wanted more potatoes himself, Jimmy jerked his thumb. The butler seemed to have made it a point of honour to acknowledge no other signal. And every time it happened I noticed the increasing violence of Viola's reaction. What had once been a gentle flicker of the eyelashes was now a succession of spasms that left her eyebrows twisted.

And at the fifth jerk she covered her eyes with her hands and cried out, "Jimmy, if you do that _once_ more I shall scream."

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

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

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

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

I was thinking, "Whatever will she do if he cracks his knuckles?" and that very minute he cracked them. The butler, demoralized by Jimmy's methods, had gone out of the room just when he was wanted. That annoyed Jimmy. I have never known him produce such a detonation.

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

Jimmy didn't see her. He was looking over his shoulder to see whether the butler was or was not answering his summons. And then--I think that at one period of his life he must have been a little proud of his accomplishment--he did it again. He did it _crescendo, fortissimo, prestissimo, strabato and con molto expressione_; he played on his knuckles with a virtuosity of which I have never seen the like.

The sheer technique of the performance ought to have disarmed her. (It enchanted Norah. But then Norah hadn't had an illness.) She flung a wild look round the room as if she called on treacherous heavenly powers to save her, then rose and very slowly, in silence and a matchless dignity, she walked out, past me, past Jimmy, past the returning butler, and down the passage and into the Tudor hall.

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

Norah put her hand on his arm.

"You were wonderful, Jimmy dear," she said. "I could have listened to you for ever. So could Walter. But then, we haven't any nerves."

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

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

"I say! _Come_--"

We had heard the andirons go down with a clatter.

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

He found her there when he trotted out and took her some wine and a peach. He came back almost instantly.

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

But it was very far from all right.

All the prisoned storms and the secret agonies of years were loose that night, and they had their way with her.

We found her dreadfully calm when we got back to her. She had peeled her peach and eaten it, and she had drunk her wine, and she was sitting by the great hearth where she had kicked down the andirons; she was sitting, I remember, on one of the Tudor chairs with the carved backs and the tapestry--the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground--sitting very upright, in her beautiful trailing gown that curled round her feet; and she was a little flushed (but that may have been the wine).

Jimmy went and stood next her in front of his hearth, with his hands in his trouser pockets--I mean with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, where he seemed to have put them to keep them out of mischief; and he twinkled as if he were still thinking of the andirons. And every now and then he glanced at his wife sideways out of his brilliant sapphire eyes, without moving his head a hair's-breadth.

And none of us said anything.

Then Jimmy rang for coffee, and that started her.

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

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

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

"All right." He said it vaguely. But he must have suspected something was up, for he turned his head round and looked at her straight; and again he said, "Why?"

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

He flushed faintly at this. "You mean," he said, "it's the only one I didn't bother about?"

"I _said_ it was the only tolerable one."

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

There was no doubt he saw.

She had hurt him badly. It was quite a minute before he spoke again, and when he did speak you felt that he had yielded, in spite of himself, to an overpowering curiosity. He must--he seemed to be saying to himself--sift this mystery to the bottom.

"D'you mean," he said, "that _this_ room doesn't--er--appeal to you? What's wrong with it?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Your boudoir," he went on, as if she hadn't said anything, "is, if possible, more detestable than the drawing-room."

"I never said so."

"Precisely. That's my grievance. Why, in Heaven's name, didn't you say so? Why did you tell me that you _liked_ all these abominations?"

"Because they didn't matter."

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

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

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

"The way you went on about them."

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

She rose. I think she had heard the tinkle of the coffee-cups in the corridor and wanted to put an end to what in any hands but Jimmy's would have been an unseemly altercation.

"Will it matter if we go upstairs?"

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

She went, and Norah followed her.

Jevons settled himself in an armchair. I saw how unperturbed and deliberate he was as he took his coffee from the tray, and with what an incorrigible air he jerked his thumb towards the staircase. I can still hear him call up the staircase in a magisterial voice, "The ladies are in the study, Parker." When we were alone he fell into meditation.

It was apparently as the result of meditation that he said, "I suppose it is a bit crude, if you come to think of it. Only why couldn't she say so at the time?"

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

"My feelings? How could I have any feelings about a blanketty drawing-room suite? Does she really think I'm such a fool that I can't live without lions on my staircase? I stuck the beastly things there because I thought she'd like 'em. If I thought she'd like a tame rhinoceros in her boudoir I'd have got her one, if I'd 'ad to go out and catch 'im and train 'im myself. If I thought _now_ that the only way to preserve her affection was to wear that suit of armour every night at dinner I'd wear it and glory in wearing it. There isn't any damned silly thing I wouldn't do and glory in."

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

He meditated again.

"Tell you what--I'll get rid of this place. I'll let it go furnished for what it'll fetch. I'll only keep the things we had before--the things she liked. They _are_ prettier."

He looked round him with his disenchanted eyes.

"I can see it's all wrong, this sort of thing. It's in bad taste. Rotten bad taste. I suppose I must have been a bit excited about it at the time--I must have thought it was all right or I couldn't have stood it.

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

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

"Fact is, I hate the place myself--the whole beastly house I hate. I've hated it ever since she was ill in it. I can't get away from her illness. I shall always see her ill. She'll be ill again if we go on living in it.

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

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

I went upstairs.

She was sitting in one corner of the study with a book in her hand pretending to read. Norah was sitting in another corner with a book in her hand, pretending to read. I gathered that Norah had been talking to her sister. I took up a book and pretended to read too.

Presently, when she thought we were absorbed, Viola got up and left us. Norah waited till the door had closed on her. Then she spoke.

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

"Well," I said, "she won't have to stand it much longer. He's going to chuck the place. It's got on _his_ nerves, too. He understands exactly how she feels about it."

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

"What is it, then?"

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

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

"Oh, no, she cares about him, and it's because she cares so that she can't stand him."

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

"It's rough on her. It's rough on both of them. It's getting rougher and rougher, and it's wearing her out."

"Won't it wear him out too?"

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

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

She shook her head.

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

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

"There are two things," she said, "that would save them--if Reggie were to come round. Or if Jimmy were to have an illness; and neither of them is in the least likely to happen."

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

"That isn't likely either. He'd never let her. He says it would kill her. It's pitiful, it's pitiful. Can't you see," she said, "that he adores her?"

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

As I followed her down the stairs that led to the Tudor hall she paused suddenly on the landing where a second lion marked the turn. She had her finger to her lip. We drew back. But not before I had looked down over the balustrade into the hall and seen Jimmy sitting on one of the thrones with the lilies of France, and Viola crouching beside him on the rug with her head hidden on his knee.

He had his hands on her forehead and was saying, "It's all right. Do you suppose I don't understand?"

XI

It was late in August before Jevons found a country house large enough, yet not too large, and old enough, yet not too old--he would have nothing that even remotely suggested the Tudor period. And in the intervals of looking for his house he wrote another novel and two more plays. There was a decided falling-off in all of them, and I think Jevons himself was a little nervous. He said he'd have to be careful next time or they'd find him out. Once he had settled the affair of the house he would set to work and strengthen the position which, after all, he hadn't lost.

He had gained, if anything. Nineteen-thirteen stands as his year of maximum prosperity. Even the house in Mayfair justified itself when he let it, with all its principal rooms furnished, to an American railway magnate at a rent that enabled him to indulge the passion he had conceived for Amershott Old Grange.

He used to say he would never have been happy again if he couldn't have had Amershott Old Grange. Everything about it seemed propitious. They had found it by a happy accident when they weren't looking for it, weren't thinking of it, when they were trying to get out of Sussex and back to London after a long day's motoring in search of houses. Nothing that Essex or Kent or Buckinghamshire (Hertfordshire was ruled out by the presence in it of the Registrar) or Surrey or Hampshire or Sussex, so far, could do had satisfied them, and Jevons was beginning to talk rather wildly about Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and Wilts, and even Devon and Cornwall, when they lost their way in the cross-country roads between Midhurst and Petworth and so came upon Amershott Old Grange. It was hidden behind an old rose-red brick wall in a lane, and it was only by standing up in the motorcar that they caught sight of its long line of red-tiled dormer windows. The very notice-board was hidden, staggering back in an ivy bush that topped the wall.

"I won't have a house," said Jimmy, "that's a day older than Queen Anne." No more would Viola.

And the Old Grange was not a day older than Queen Anne or a day younger. It was the most perfect specimen of a Queen Anne house you could have wished to see--the long, straight front, the slender door, the two storeys with their rows of straight, flat windows and the steep brows of the dormers over them. It was all rose-red brick and rose-red tiles, with roses and clematis bursting out in crimson and purple all over the front. It stood at right angles to the wall and to the lane, and there was a long grass-garden in front of it, with walls all round and herbaceous borders under the walls; and from the high postern door in the outer wall opening to the lane a wide flagged path went all the way in front of the house to the door in the inner wall that led into the kitchen garden and the orchard. Further down the lane were the doors of the courtyard at the back of the house where the outhouses and the stables and the dovecot were; and beyond the courtyard there was a paddock, and you would have thought that was enough. But, besides his Queen Anne house and his gardens and his orchard and his courtyard and his dovecot and his paddock, Jimmy had acquired ten acres of moorland, to say nothing of a belt of pinewood that ran the whole length of his estate behind the kitchen garden and the paddock and the moor. And the whole business of acquiring this property went without a hitch. He took it on the long tail-end of a lease from an impecunious landlord who couldn't afford to keep it up.

He obtained possession by September and in the early spring of nineteen-fourteen he was settled in Amershott Old Grange.

They furnished it as they had furnished the house in Edwardes Square, with the most complete return to beautiful simplicity.

Jimmy polished off a short novel and a play between October and June, and kept himself going on the proceeds of his old novels, his old plays, and his old short stories collected in a volume. Then I think he must have sat down to wait events.

For when we went down to stay with them we found him waiting. He was entirely prepared for certain contingencies. If anybody knew anything about English social conditions it was Tasker Jevons. He had calculated all the chances and provided for the ostracism that attends the inexpert invader of the country-side. He was aware that there were powers in and around Amershott that were not to be conciliated. The very fact that their territory lay so near the frontier (Amershott is only sixty-seven miles from London) kept them on their guard. To any good old county family, Tasker Jevons's celebrity was nothing, if it was not an added offence, and his opulence was less than nothing. In settling among them he ran the risk of being ignored. But when it came to ignoring, Jimmy considered that success lay with the party who got in first. So before he settled he took care to diffuse a sort of impression that the Tasker Jevonses were never at home to anybody, that it was not to be expected that a great novelist and playwright would have time for calling and being called on, even if he had the absurd inclination. He had one solitary introduction in the neighbourhood, and he worked it very adroitly, not to obtain other introductions, but to spread the rumour of retirement and exclusiveness.

His arrival, preceded by this attractive legend, became an event. You couldn't even affect to overlook it. And if it was not possible for Jimmy to subdue his features to an expression of complete ignoring, he had got in so promptly with his attitude that it took the wind out of the sails of any people who were merely proposing to ignore.

Then, having come amongst them as a shy recluse, Jimmy began instantly to focus attention on himself. He hadn't been six weeks in the county before he had become the most conspicuous object in it.

I don't know how he did it; you never really caught him at it; and yet, when you came down to stay with him, you felt all the time that he was doing it; you felt a sort of shame (a shame that he couldn't feel) in seeing that he did it so perpetually and so well. He had a way of making his privacy a public thing. There was something positively indecent in his detachment; it advertised him as no possible immersion could have done. I've seen him lying out on his moor basking all by himself in the sun; I've seen him meditating all by himself in his pinewood; I've seen him sitting in his walled garden, with the apparatus of his business all about him, when you would have said that if ever a man's life was hidden and withdrawn it was Tasker Jevons's. And yet it wasn't. You knew it wasn't; and he knew that you knew. He knew that his gardener and his chauffeur and his butler and his cook and his housemaid and his parlourmaid knew that he was sitting in his garden writing, or meditating in his pinewood or basking on his moor in the sun, and that their knowledge penetrated to every house in the village, to every house in the county within a radius of twenty miles. And when he was not doing any of these prominently tranquil things he was tearing about the country in his motor-car.

I have never seen anything like Jevons's motoring. It was in this new aspect of his that he was, I think, most remarkable. I say he made his privacy a public thing; but in the furious publicity of his motoring it was the other way round. He turned the public roads into a private track through paradise. I do not mean that he was a road-hog; far from it. He had the most exquisite manners of the road, He would slow down for a hen in the distance and upset himself into the ditch to avoid a rabbit. I have known him (with his first car) give a lift to any filthy tramp between Midhurst and Portsmouth. I mean that the act of motoring transported him; and he did these things instinctively, mechanically, without interruption to his rapture. Speed and the wind of speed, the air rushing by like a water-race as he ripped through it, the streaming past him of trees and hedges, the humming and throbbing of his engines, were ecstasy to Jimmy. He had learned to drive the thing, and his sense of power over it gave him the physical exaltation that he craved for. I believe that when he sat in his motor-car, driving it, he was filled, intoxicated, with the pride and splendour of life. He had power over everybody and everything that lay in his track, except other motor-cars; and he exulted in his knowledge that he could annihilate them and didn't. He enjoyed (voluptuously) his own mercy that spared them. Through his motor-car he attained such an extension of his personality that he became intolerable to other people and unrecognizable to himself.

And yet I do not think that even at the height of his ecstasy he ever really forgot that he was Tasker Jevons, the great novelist and playwright, in his motor-car. When he drove you through Portsmouth or Chichester, or even through little Midhurst, you felt that he thrilled from head to foot with self-consciousness. He knew and had acute pleasure in knowing that people noticed him as he went by; that the tradesmen turned out of their shops to stare after him; and that everybody said, "See that chap? That's Tasker Jevons. He always drives his own car."

He owned that he enjoyed it. I remember the first time we went down to stay with them (it was in May of nineteen-fourteen), when he was driving us through Midhurst from the station, how he said to us, "I'm glad I thought of living in the country. It makes me feel celebrated."

We asked him if he hadn't ever felt it before; and he answered solemnly, "Never for a minute. Never, I mean, like I do down here. In London, if you do gather a crowd round you, you're swallowed up in it. Besides, you can't always gather a crowd. D'you suppose, if I were to drive down Piccadilly in this car--short of standing on my head--I could attract the attention I've attracted to-day? You saw those fellows come out and look at me? Well--they do that pretty nearly every time, Furnival.

"No. London's no good. Too many houses--too many people--too many motor-cars. You can't stand out. What a man wants to set him off is landscape, Furny, landscape. You should see me on the goose-green at Amershott towards post-time."

Well, I did see him on the goose-green towards post-time, and I saw what he meant. It was really as if I'd never seen him before properly.

Heavens, how he stood out! It was as if a stage had been cleared for him, and for the figure he cut. He was quite right. You couldn't have done it in Piccadilly, or even in the suburbs. And he wasn't in his motor-car, mind you, then; he was simply strolling over from his house to post a letter in the village on the green, and I do not know how he contrived to infuse into so simple an act that subtle taint of advertisement. There was no necessity for him to post his own letters, he could easily have sent a servant. But I do believe he couldn't bear to miss the opportunity of being seen. When he passed the Vicarage, the Vicar and his wife and daughters were generally in their garden, and they turned to look at his passing, and he was exquisitely conscious of them. The villagers came out on to their doorsteps to look at him, and he was conscious of the villagers. The geese followed him in a long line across the common and stretched out their necks after him, and he was conscious of the geese. He enjoyed the publicity they gave him, and he said so.

And I began to wonder whether the funny frankness that had so disarmed us was really as funny as it looked (the idea of disarmament, you see, was serious), whether he didn't say these things because he knew we saw him as he really was; because he saw himself as he really was, and couldn't bear it; because there was no escape for him unless he could make believe that he was in fun when he really wasn't.

I do believe there was a time (any time before his Tudor period) when he _was_ in fun, pure fun; and even through the Tudor period his enjoyment of himself was innocent. But as I walked home with him across his moor that evening it was borne in upon me that Jimmy's innocence was gone. Living in the country had killed it. I had never perceived so definite a taint of vulgarity in him before.

You would have thought it would have been all the other way, that living in the country would have made altogether for simplicity and purity. I believe that quite honestly he had thought it would, that he had come into the country to be purified and simplified, and to put himself right with Viola for ever. And the horrid irony of it was that the country didn't do any of these things to him; it complicated him, it saturated him with that taint I've mentioned, and instead of putting him right it showed him up. Quite horribly and cruelly it showed him up. I do not think there was a single weakness or a single secret meanness that he had that didn't suddenly rise up and stand out on the background of Amershott.

All through that summer there, quite frankly, I detested Jevons. I believe that Norah came near detesting him, that she felt something very like contempt for him.

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

She was with us one evening (it was June, I think, and our second visit), when Jimmy showed most unmistakably the cloven hoof. We had come in from a long motor drive, and he had made at once, as he always did, for the silver plate in the hall where cards left by callers were put, if any callers came. I can see him now, breathing hard. I can see the glance he cast at the cards, and the little jerky curb he put on his excitement--he had the grace to be ashamed of it. And then I see him holding four cards in his hand, sober and quiet and flushed like a man who has triumphed solemnly. And I hear him read out the names: "Lord Amerley, Lady Amerley, Lady Octavia Amerley, the Honourable Frances Amerley. _That's_ all right. I gave them three months."

And I see Viola look at him, taking in his figure in its motor-dress, and his face, with the foolish, weak elation he couldn't for the life of him keep out of it.

Again I see him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity--and I don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there--very spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party they took us to.

And later on--in the very beginning of July it must have been--I see him on his own lawn at his own garden-party, and--I didn't dream it this time--he was really dreadful. Instead of carrying it off with the levity that had so often saved him from perdition, there was that revolting triumph about him and an uneasy eagerness, as if he knew that his triumph wasn't quite complete. But the garden-party was, as he would have said, all right. They were all there, those people he had given three months to. He had pulled it off precisely as he had schemed and calculated. Those legends of his detachment and his hermit habits had been worked so as to excite a supreme curiosity--and it was being satisfied.

And I cannot tell you whether he was really altered, or whether he had been like that all the time before Amershott had shown him up, and none of us had seen it except Viola.

Oh no--it's impossible. He had altered. If he had been like this we must have seen it. What Viola had seen--if she had seen anything--was only the foreshadowing, the bare possibility of this.

Charlie Thesiger was at that garden-party (he had retired from the service with the rank of Captain).

And it was at the garden-party that I first noticed a change in his manner to his cousin's husband. He used to treat Jevons with a certain superciliousness, and with as much amusement, as much perception of his absurdity, as was possible for Charlie, who perceived so few things. Now I was struck with the correct young man's deference to his host. It was really as if it had at last dawned on Charlie that Jevons _was_ his host, and that he had other claims to distinction as well. The more dreadful Jimmy was, the more courteous Charlie showed himself to Jimmy. And this in spite of the fact that Jevons had a way of treating Charlie as if he didn't matter, as if for all recognizable purposes he wasn't there.

When I spoke of this to Norah, she said that Viola had told him that if he couldn't be decent to Jimmy she wouldn't have him there.

Well, there he was, hanging about Viola from morning till night; he had any amount of time on his hands now, and he spent most of it at Amershott. He was there when we weren't sometimes, so that we couldn't keep track of him. But his purposes ought to have been apparent to us. I think it was partly because he was aware of them himself that he went out of his way to be decent to Jimmy, almost as if he were sorry for him beforehand.

For it was evident enough that Viola liked his being there, and liked to have him hanging round her. There was nothing about him that shocked or grated. I've no doubt he made himself entirely charming. His manners could be as beautiful as any of the Thesigers' when he chose, and they soothed her. I think she had ceased to feel them as a reproach to Jimmy. She had given up _his_ manners, poor dear, long ago, as a bad job. It was as if she had slaked her thirst for the unusual. Some secret and strong revulsion had thrown her back on the people and the things that she had been brought up amongst and that she had run away from. When Jimmy jarred on her she turned to Charlie for relief. And, after all, as Norah said, he was her cousin.

I don't think we either of us saw anything more in it than that. Without some such reaction she must have surrendered to Amershott. She couldn't defend Jevons against that showing up. She couldn't defend herself against those revelations, she could only stand by and look on at his enormity and shudder. Unless she had put her dear eyes out she must have seen that in the country he was not only a bounder but a snob. And she must have writhed in feeling that to see him that way was to be a bit of a snob herself. She had accused herself of snobbishness long ago, before she married him, when, in order to marry him, she had burned her boats.

What could she do? She couldn't put her eyes out. But I believe she would have been grateful to anybody who would have put them out for her.

I can't tell whether she was always unhappy. I rather think she had liked Amershott, the house and the garden and the pinewood and the bit of moor, and I am certain that she liked motoring almost as much as Jimmy did at first. She could even take pleasure in Jimmy's power over the car when they were alone with it in the open country, when his pleasure had no taint in it. I've heard her say, when he wanted to run down to Chichester or Portsmouth, "Oh, for Heaven's sake, let's go somewhere where nobody can look at us!"

She must have regarded the open country as the last refuge of his innocence. For her, more than for any of us, he had lost it.

* * * * *

How far he really lost it we shall never know. Even now, with all my lights, with that intense country light fairly beating on him, I can wonder: Am I saying these things because I think them? Or because I believe I must have thought them then? And I cannot answer my own wonder. I remember how at Amershott, when I sat beside him in that car of his and watched his ecstasy, I used to pull myself up and say to myself, "You _know_ he isn't like that. Look at him--what woolly lamb could be more simple and innocent than he is now?" And if anybody had come to me and asked me if I didn't think that Jevons _was_ a little awful I should have said that if you were a little awful yourself you might think so, but not otherwise. My conscience has told me that as he became more successful I became more critical; it has even suggested that I may have been jealous of his success.

* * * * *

But that was in the days (they were comparatively innocent) of his first motor-car. Round that car there really is a light of romance and of adventure, a glamour that isn't at all the glamour of his opulence. In those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income. In June, at any rate, he was still the master of his car and not--as we saw him later on--its servant. There never was anything like that first fury of his motoring.

It couldn't last. He was wearing himself out. Those early excesses exhausted his capacity for pleasure, and when we came to stay with him in the last two weeks of July we found him apathetic about motoring.

But not about motor-cars. As far as the cars went he had developed into an incurable motor-maniac. He was never tired of talking about carburetters, and tyres, and petrol, and garages and gear. He dreamed of these things at night. Every day he invented some extraordinary contrivance for increasing speed and lessening friction. He knew all that was to be known about the different kinds of cars; and he would roll their names on his tongue--Panhard and Fiat and Daimler and Mercédès and Rolls-Royce, as if the sound of them caressed him like music.

And the first car which he had mastered--it was a comparatively cheap one, but it wouldn't be fair to say what kind it was, for the poor thing had gone to pieces under his hand in six months; he had served her, his chauffeur said, something cruel--that first car had been sold for a hundred and fifty pounds, and Viola was mourning for it when we came down in July.

We couldn't think why she mourned, for he had bought another. We supposed that the new car had broken down, for we were met at Midhurst station by the local cab proprietor. But we were very soon to know that nothing had happened to the new car, and that something very serious indeed had happened to Jimmy.

He had gone mad--you can only call it mad--over his new car.

As soon as we had tea we were taken to see it where it stood in the coach-house that served as a garage.

It was a magpie car--the first, Jimmy told me, that had appeared down in that part of the country--white, with black bonnet and black splashboards, and black leather hood and cushions; so black that its body, in the matchless purity of its whiteness, staggered you. Anybody, Jevons said, could have an all-white car, and it wouldn't be noticed any more than a common taxi-cab. But one magpie in a countless crowd of cars annihilated all the rest. Lemon colour was good and so was scarlet; but for effect--for sheer destruction to other automobilists--there was nothing like a white car with black points. It was, Jimmy said and Kendal, the chauffeur, said, a perfect car. From their tone you wondered what you had ever done that you should be allowed to approach and see it where it stood.

Where it stood, I say. You couldn't see that car doing anything else. It stood like an immense idol in a temple; and it looked as if all its life it never had done anything else but stand in its perfection to be stared at. And by its air of self-consciousness, of majesty, of arrogant power in repose, you gathered that it knew it was there to be stared at. The thing was drawn up at the far end of the garage, where no breath could blow on it, over an open pit. You knew that Kendal, the chauffeur, went down on a ladder into the pit to examine the secret being of the car; you knew it and yet it was incredible. You refused to believe that an outrage to which common cars were subject ever had been or would be perpetrated on this holy one. You would have said that no spot of mud or dust or rain had ever lighted on it; it might have descended into the garage out of heaven for any sign of travel that it showed. It was surrounded by I know not what atmosphere of consecration and immunity.

So that Norah's first question sounded like a profanity.

"What speed is it?" she said.

It might have been fancy, but I thought that Jevons's face underwent a change. I certainly saw Kendal the chauffeur looking at it.

"Speed?" he said. "Speed? Well--you _can_ speed her up to sixty miles an hour if you want to." (He seemed to say, "If she ever is speeded up," or "You jolly well may want.")

He ran his hand lovingly along the car's white flank as if it were alive and could respond to the caress.

"She's a beauty," he said.

The chauffeur looked at him again.

"You won't want to knock her about like you did the last one, Mr. Jevons," he said.

And Jimmy's face expressed a sort of horror.

The chauffeur looked at us then, and, if you can wink without any motion of the eyelids, he winked. He saw, and he was trying to indicate to us, the state that Jevons had fallen into.

It was infatuation; it was idolatry; it was the most extraordinary passion I have ever known a man otherwise sane to be possessed by. You would have said that that creature with the black-and-white body and the terrific bowels of machinery had some sinister and magic power over him. He loved it; he worshipped it; he was afraid of it. And when you think of how, as the chauffeur said, he had "served" the other car--

Knock her about, indeed! He daren't take her out of the garage for a fifteen-mile run without agonies of apprehension. He never took her out at all unless he was certain that it wouldn't rain and that there wouldn't be any mud or any dust or any wind (I don't know what harm he thought the wind would do her). Instead of taking her out he would spend hours in the garage standing still and looking at her, stooping sometimes to examine her for a spot or a crack on her enamel, but always with reverence. I believe he never touched her without washing his hands first.

We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn't been out in that car three times, though the weather was perfect. Jimmy never could see that it was perfect enough. If it hadn't rained for two days he was afraid of dust; if it did rain he was afraid of mud; what he wanted was one light shower to lay the dust; and when he got it he was afraid of another shower coming. And on hot days he was afraid the sun might do something. And he was afraid of _us_ all the time lest we should ask him to take the car out on a day that wouldn't do.

I do not know how or why he had come to look on that car as his god. It wasn't, I do believe that it wasn't, because the thing was valuable, because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself: "Motor-cars are perishable things. I did for my first beloved by my excesses. Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from motoring." And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune out of Jimmy's abstinence.

The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. (He too had come down for the last fortnight in July.) He was the only one of us who didn't protest, didn't clamour, didn't try to reason or to laugh Jimmy out of his insanity. And he went further. He refused to enter the car, to be taken in it on the few suitable days when Jimmy allowed it to go out. It was as if he were dominated by some scruple as morbid as his host's passion. We couldn't account for it at the time, for he liked motoring excessively, and he couldn't afford it.

I've wondered since whether this wasn't the way Charlie settled with his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency. He could eat Jimmy's bread and drink his wine and stay for weeks under his roof, since his necessity--the necessity of seeing Viola--compelled him, but to profit by him to that extent, to make use of Jimmy's opulence, was beyond him. His conscience may have even said to him, "If he loves his motor-car, for God's sake let him have _that_, at any rate, to himself."

And Viola seemed to share Charlie's scruple. She, too, shrank from using the new car. And I remember her saying to me one day as we crossed the courtyard and saw Jimmy, as usual, in the garage, worshipping his car, "I'm so glad he's got it. I think it makes him happier." As if she had confessed that it was all he _had_ got; that she was not able to make him happy any more; and as if, in some day of unhappiness that she saw coming, it would be a consolation to the poor chap. At any rate, as if she were not in the least jealous of the power it had over him.

So, that July, Norah and I drove with Jimmy when the car, so to speak, let him drive it; and Viola walked through the woods and over the downs with Charlie Thesiger.

We often wondered what they found to talk about.

That wonder, of what Viola could see in Charlie, and how she could endure for so many hours the burden of his society, was all that Norah had allowed herself, so far, to express. If she felt any uneasiness she had not yet confided it to me. As for Jevons, he tolerated him as you only tolerate a thing that doesn't matter. I think honestly that to both of them, Charlie, in any serious connection with Viola, was as impossible as Jevons himself had been to her brother Reggie.

So little did he take him seriously that at the very end of July he went up to London for the inside of the week (he went by train so as to save the car) while Charlie was still at the Old Grange.

* * * * *

It was the week of the international crisis, and European mobilization was occupying Jimmy's mind to the exclusion of other matters. Still, you could hardly suppose that it was the crisis that was taking him up to London. I remember thinking he had run away from Charlie Thesiger, because he bored him.

He left on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, and he was to be back on Friday, the thirty-first, and Charlie was to leave with Norah and me and our nurse and Baby on the Monday following, when our fortnight was up.

So on Friday afternoon I was a little astonished to find my sister-in-law, dressed in her town suit of white cloth, drinking tea at three o'clock before going up to London. She simply stated the fact that she was going up. Norah had said she might stay in our house and she hoped I wouldn't mind.

When I suggested that it would surely be nicer for us all to go up together on Monday she looked at me with a certain long-suffering expression that she had for me at times, and said that wouldn't suit her, since she had got to go to-day. She was of course awfully sorry to leave us, but Norah understood, and Jimmy would look after us very well.

No. She wasn't going up by Midhurst. She was going by Selham.

She rose. I noticed the impatient energy of her little hands as they knotted her veil under her chin. I looked up her trains and found that there was none from Selham till four forty-five. I pointed out to her that there was no hurry; she had missed the two fifty-five, which had left Selham fifteen minutes ago, and she had an hour to spare even if the car took half an hour getting to the station. (The day was fine and there was no dust. Even Jimmy couldn't have objected to her taking the car.)

But she said she hadn't missed the two fifty-five; she wasn't trying for it; and she wasn't going in the car; it would be wanted to meet Jimmy at Midhurst Station; and no--no--_no_--she didn't want a cab from Midhurst. She was going to walk.

I said it was absurd for her to walk four miles on a hot day like this, and she replied that the day would be cool enough if only I'd keep quiet. (She was still long-suffering.)

Then of course I said I'd walk with her.

But that was too much for her, and she stamped her foot and said I'd do nothing of the kind. She didn't want anybody to walk with her.

And when I inquired about her luggage--But I can't repeat what she said about her luggage!

Then she softened suddenly, as her way was, and kissed Norah, and said I was a dear, and she was sorry for snapping my head off, but it was all right. Norah knew all about it. She'd explain.

I can see her standing in the postern doorway and saying these things and then giving me her hand and holding mine tight, while she shook her head at me and smiled that little baffling smile that seemed to come up flickering from her depths of wisdom on purpose to put me in the wrong.

"The trouble with you, Furny," she said, "is that you're much too good."

She went; and we saw her tall, lithe figure swinging up the lane, past the courtyard and the paddock and the moor.

Then Norah plucked me in by the coat-sleeve as if she thought we oughtn't to be looking at her. We shut the door on her flight and turned to each other where we stood on the flagged path before the house.

"What does it mean?" I said.

"It means that she's at the end of her tether."

"The end--?" I think I must have gasped.

"The very end. She can't stand it any longer."

"But," I said, "she--she's got to stand it. After all--"

"There's no good talking that way. She _can't_, and that settles it. I knew she couldn't, once she got beyond a certain point."

"Do you mean to say," I said, "that she's going to leave him?"

"I--don't--know. I believe--she's going to think about it."

"But--it's out of the question. She mustn't think about it."

"You can't stop her thinking, Wally. She's gone away to think about it sanely. It's the best thing she can do."

"And you're helping her to get away?"

She was silent for a moment.

"I'm only helping her to think," she said.

I was stern with her. "You're not. You're just helping her to bolt," I said. "You're conniving at her bolting. You've lent her our house."

"Isn't it better she should come to us?"

"No, it isn't better. I don't like it. And I won't have it. I won't have you mixed up in it. Do you understand?"

"Dear Wally--there isn't anything to be mixed up in. We'll be back on Monday; then she'll only be staying with us."

"And till then--?"

"Till then--for Heaven's sake let the poor thing have peace for three days to think in."

"That's all very well," I said, "but what are we to say to Jimmy when he comes back this afternoon?"

"You say--you say she's tired of--of Amershott and wants three days in London to herself.--No, you don't. You don't say anything. You leave it to me. Vee-Vee said it was to be left to me."

"And _I_ say I won't have you dragged into it. Good Heavens, have you any idea what you may be let in for, supposing--?"

"Supposing what?"

I couldn't say what. But I don't think I really had supposed anything--then.

"You needn't suppose things," she said. "Vee-Vee would never let us in. Look here, Wally--you've got to trust me this time. I'm going to see Vee-Vee through, and I'm going to see Jimmy through; but I can't do it if you don't trust me. I can't do it if you interfere."

I said I did trust her, and that God knew I didn't want to interfere, but was she quite sure she was doing a wise thing?

She said, "Quite sure. Let's go and lie down in the pine-wood till tea-time. I wonder if Jimmy would mind us going into Midhurst with the car. We shouldn't hurt it, sitting in it."

We lay out in the pine-wood till we heard the bell for tea, which we had ordered a little before four, in case Jevons should wire for the car to meet him by the early afternoon train that got to Midhurst at four-sixteen.

The table was set as usual in the garden on the lawn in front of the house.

By four o'clock no wire had come from Jevons; so we knew we needn't expect him till a later train. He nearly always came by Waterloo and Petersfield and was met at Midhurst, which gave him his public. But he might come, as Viola had gone, by Victoria and Horsham and be met at Selham.

I remember saying, in a startling manner as the idea struck me, "Supposing he comes by Victoria?"

And Norah said, "What if he does?"

And I, "They might meet at Horsham."

"Why shouldn't they?" she said. "You don't suppose he'll eat her for running up to town?"

"He might," I said, "think it odd of her."

"Not he. The beauty of Jimmy is that odd things don't seem odd to him. Do you know where Charlie is?"

I didn't. We had finished tea before either of us had thought of him. We shouted to him through the open windows of the house, for Charlie had a habit of mooning about indoors till Viola was ready to walk with him.

No answer came to our summons, but it brought Parker, the butler, out on to the lawn. He had a slightly surprised and slightly embarrassed look on his respectable and respectful face, no longer demoralized by Jimmy.

"Were you looking for the Captain, sir?" he said.

I said we were.

Something grave and a little sorrowful came into Parker's embarrassed look.

"Didn't you know he'd gone, sir?"

I said I didn't even know he was going; and then I saw Norah looking at me.

Parker was trying not to look at Norah. He began gathering up the tea-things as if to justify his presence and explain it.

"When did he go?" I said as casually as I could.

"Well, sir--the cab was ordered to catch the four thirty-five from Midhurst."

Now the four thirty-five from Midhurst is the four forty-five from Selham, the train that Viola had gone by. We knew this; and Parker knew that we knew it. That was why, instead of stating outright that Captain Thesiger had gone by that train, he tried to soften the blow to us by saying that the cab had been ordered to catch it, and leaving it open to us to suppose that perhaps, after all, it might have missed it.

"Did he say when he was coming back?" I asked, again casually.

"He isn't coming back, sir," said Parker. "He's took his luggage with him and all."

"Of course," said Norah. "He's gone to see what they're doing at the War Office. He said he would."

But I knew and she knew and Parker knew he hadn't--or, if he had, it was only one of the things he had gone for. Because, if the War Office had been all that he had in his mind he would have told us, and Viola would have told us, and they would have gone openly together, instead of dodging about like two clumsy criminals, one at Midhurst and the other at Selham.

When Parker had left (he did it very quickly) Norah got on her feet.

She said, "Go and find Kendal and tell him to bring the car around at once."

I asked her what she was going to do?

"Do?" she flashed at me. She had changed all in a moment into a woman whom I did not know.

"I'm going to fetch her back," she said. She had wriggled into her coat. "We'll overtake her before she gets to Selham, if you're quick."

I looked at my watch. It was barely half-past four. Yes, if we were quick, if we started at once, if we let the new car rip we should overtake her on the road, or at the station before she could get into that train with Charlie Thesiger in it. I meant, and Norah's eyes meant, that we would stop her going with him, if we had to drag her from the platform.

We ran to the garage to find Kendal. The new car, the superb black and white creature, stood in the middle of the courtyard, ready to start when Jimmy's wire came. So far it was all right.

But we had reckoned without Kendal, the chauffeur.

Kendal, absolved from the four-sixteen train at Midhurst, was at his tea in the servants' hall, and at my summons he came out slowly, munching as he came. He was visibly outraged at our intrusion on his sacred leisure. And when he was ordered to start at once for Selham, he refused. There was no train from Victoria, he said, between the four-four that Mr. Jevons hadn't come by and the five fifty-two. _If_, Kendal said, he did come by Victoria, and he always came by Waterloo.

What was the sense, said Kendal, with his mouth full, of going to Selham when we hadn't got a wire?

The sense of it, Norah told him, was that we had a message--an important message--for Mrs. Jevons, which she _must_ get before she started.

At this Kendal left off munching and looked at my wife. Even in my eagerness I was struck by the singular intelligence of that look. There was nothing covert in it. On the contrary it was a most straightforward and transparent look. Kendal's knowledge--which might have sought cover if you had hunted it--had come out to meet ours on equal terms.

It only lasted for the fraction of a second. Kendal repeated firmly, but this time respectfully, that she was Mr. Jevons's car and he couldn't take her out without Mr. Jevons's orders, for if he did Mr. Jevons would give him the sack.

To which Norah replied that Mr. Jevons would give him the sack if he didn't, or if he made us miss that train by arguing. I told him sternly to look sharp. He looked it and we got off. I had begun to crank up the car myself while I spoke.

But he had wasted three minutes of our valuable fifteen. Though on the open road we speeded up the car to her sixty miles an hour, we had to slow down in the narrow lanes. Once we were held up by a country cart, and once by cows in our track, and Norah was beside herself at each halt.

As we careened into the station yard I thought that my wife would have hurled herself out of the car.

The station-master stood by the booking-office door. He had an ominous air of leisure. And when he saw us coming he looked at his watch.

He told us that we had missed the train by three minutes (the three minutes that Kendal had wasted).

I had jumped out of the car and was telling Kendal that it was all his fault, and that if he'd done what he was told we should have caught the train, when he turned on me as only a chauffeur convicted of folly can turn.

"Stand away from the car, sir," he shouted. He jerked her nose round with the savage energy of a chauffeur in the wrong; he seemed to impart his own fury to the car. She snorted and screamed as he backed her and drove her forward and backed her again.

And again he shouted to me. "You get in, sir, if you don't want to be left be'ind."

As he seemed to be animated chiefly by the fear of Jevons (whom, by the way, he adored), we could only suppose that his idea was to fly back to Amershott in time for Jimmy's wire.

On the high road past the station he took the wrong turn.

_I_ shouted then, "What do you think you're doing, you confounded fool?"

"Ketch the London train at 'Orsham, sir," said Kendal. And he grinned.

"You can't do it," we said.

"I'll 'ave a try," said Kendal.

His honour as a chauffeur was at stake. His blood was up. His knowledge had begun to work in him and he adored his master. He knew what he was trying to do.

We could do it if we kept our heads; if we exceeded the speed limit; if we had luck; if we didn't break down; if neither the county constabulary nor the country traffic held us up.

Kendal declared we could do it easily and allow for accidents. At Horsham Junction you have nearly half an hour to wait between the arrival of the Midhurst and Selham train and the departure of the London express. And the local trains take more than half an hour to get from Selham to Horsham. At a pinch you could speed the car up to the limit of the local train. And, as we had to allow for accidents, we did speed her up whenever we saw a clean track before us.

The run to Selham was nothing to it. It was as if we were racing the train with its three minutes start, as if, positively, we might overtake it at any of the intermediate stations, as if it were in this hope that we dashed up the long white slope to Petworth.

The heat of the day gathered over our heads and smouldered in the east.

And as we ran I realized at last why we were running and what the race was and the hunt, and what our quarry. I remembered that other slower chase that was yet so keen and so agonizing; that hunting down of the same tender flesh and blood, over the Channel and across a foreign country. That was bad enough; but it was not like this. For then I was alone in my hunting of Viola; there was nobody but me, who loved her, to see her run to earth and caught crouching in her corner. That she would crouch, this time, and hide herself, I had no doubt. This hunt that I shared with her sister and her servant was abominable to me and shameful. And between the shame of that flight of hers and this flight there was no comparison. You don't go looking at belfries with Charlie Thesiger. I could not reconcile that enchanting and enchanted Viola of the garden of Bruges with this dreadful flying figure.

I hated myself; I hated Kendal, the chauffeur, as I sat behind his tight, efficient body that quivered with the fury of the hunt. (To think that _his_ blood should be up and against Viola!) I hated the car that seemed more than ever a living thing, that breathed and snorted and vibrated with the same passion, and was endowed with this incredible speed and this superhuman power. With its black nose and white flanks, and its black hood and the black wings of its splash-boards, it was some terrible and sinister and malignant monster of prey hunting down Viola. Its body had been built, its engines had been forged, to hunt down Viola. The infernal thing had been invented to hunt down Viola.

Somewhere between Petworth and Fittleworth Kendal stopped to water his engine. It was then that we noticed how the gathering heat was piled into a bank of cloud over the east. At the back of our necks we could feel a little hot puff of wind that came up from the west.

"Shouldn't wonder if there was a storm," said Kendal. He added, with the ghost of a grin, "If Mr. Jevons sees that cloud, sir, he'll not wire to be met at Midhurst. He'd crawl home on his 'ands and knees first."

He slipped into his seat and we dashed on.

At Fittleworth, within a stone's-throw of the railway and the road, there is a patch of moor where the ground rises in a hillock. In July and August when the heather's out this hillock is a crimson landmark above the water meadows.

When we came within sight of it Kendal suddenly slowed down, then jammed his brakes hard, and with an awful grinding and snorting the car came to a stand-still.

Kendal stood up. He muttered something about being blowed. Then he turned.

"Got the glasses there, sir?"

I found the glasses, but I didn't give them to Kendal. I stood up too and looked through them.

I couldn't see anything at first.

"There, sir," said Kendal, pointing. "No. You're looking too much to the left. You got to get right o' thet sandy patch--against thet there clump of heather. Now d'you see, sir?"

I did.

Kendal had made out with the naked eye a figure, the figure of a woman, seated on the hillside, a white figure that showed plainly against the red background of the heather.

"It's Mrs. Jevons, sir," he stated.

It was.

I could see her quite distinctly through the field-glasses. She was sitting on the clump of heather to the right of the sandy patch, settled and motionless, in the attitude of one who waited at her ease, with hours before her. And she was alone.

We went on as far as we could towards the moor. Norah and I left the car and struck across the moor by the sandy track that led to the bare patch and the clump of heather.

The seated figure must have been aware of us from the first moment of our approach. You couldn't miss that black and white car as it charged along the highway, or as it stood now, with its engines still humming, by the roadside. But the figure remained seated in its attitude of waiting. It waited while we crossed the moor; and as we climbed the hillock we became intensely aware of it and of its immobility.

We saw its face fixed on us with an expression of tranquil patience and expectation. I may say that I felt an intolerable embarrassment before this quietness of the hunted thing that we had run to earth; especially as it was on me, and not Norah, that Viola's face was fixed as we came nearer.

Then she smiled at me; there was neither conciliation nor defiance in her smile, but a sort of serene assurance and--yes, it was unmistakable--contempt.

She said, "Whatever do you think you're doing _now_?"

I said we might not know what we were doing, but we knew what we were going to do. We were going to take her back with us in the car.

At that she asked us (but without any sign of perturbation) if we had got Jimmy there?

Norah said No, our idea was to run back to Amershott before Jimmy got there.

"Where were you running to when you saw me sitting up here?" she said.

I said we'd meant to catch her at Selham but we missed the train and were trying to get to Horsham before the London train started.

She was looking at me now with a sort of compassion, the tenderness of her contempt.

"I see," she said. "You _were_ clever, weren't you?"

She looked at her watch. "Well, as you _are_ here," she said, "I'd let you run me down to Horsham, if you want a run, only I can't very well use Jimmy's car."

I think it was Norah who asked her what on earth she was doing at Fittleworth.

"Can't you see," she said, "that I'm waiting for the next train?"

"Did you walk here from Amershott, or what?" I said.

She said, "Rather not. I was in the train."

Then Norah said, "What happened?"

It had dawned on us both how odd it was that Viola should be here, apparently alone, at Fittleworth. It was also odd how we were all ignoring Charlie. I believe I had a sort of idea that she had got him hidden somewhere in the landscape.

Viola smiled a reminiscent smile. "If you _must_ know," she said, "what happened was that Charlie was in that train, too--he came bursting out on to the platform at Selham, awfully pleased with himself, because he'd picked my luggage up at Midhurst and bagged a corner seat for me, and made faces at people to keep them out."

"Did you know he was going up to town?" I said.

"No, of course I didn't. He didn't know it himself. There was no reason why he shouldn't go. And you'd have thought there was no reason why we shouldn't go together. He was all right till we got to Petworth. But after that he lost his head and made such an ass of himself that I had to get out here and make him go on by himself. Silly idiot!"

We were sitting in the heather, one on each side of her, and I saw my wife slip her arm into hers and hug it to her.

"Did _you_ know," she said, "that Charlie'd gone?"

We didn't answer. We simply couldn't.

And then Viola said, "Poor little Norah!"

And she told her to run away for ten minutes while she talked to me.

"Why poor little Norah?" I asked when we were alone.

"Because," she said, "you frightened her."

"I? Frightened her?"

"Yes," she said. "You made her think I was going to run away with Charlie. There's no good trying to look as if you didn't. You're quite awful, Furny, in the things you think. You can't help it, I know. You're so good, so shockingly good, and you can't bear other people to be naughty. You thought I'd run away to Belgium with Jimmy and you came rushing after me and fetched me back. You thought I'd run away with Charlie and you came rushing--in your dreadful rectitude, and in Jimmy's motor-car that he won't let anybody look at. You'll have an awful time with Jimmy when you get back. It's going to rain, and there'll be mud on the car, and he'll dance with rage when he sees it. And he won't think it's any excuse if you tell him you thought I was running away with Charlie, and you took the car to fetch me back; he'll say you'd no business to think it and in any case you'd no business to take the car out. And poor Kendal will be sacked.

"That's all you've done," she said, "by your fussy interference."

She went on. "It wouldn't matter what you think about me--but it was beastly of you to go and make Norah think it."

I said I didn't suppose either of us thought anything, except that since she was going up to town with the idea of leaving her husband, it was not desirable that she should go up with Charlie Thesiger.

"Who could possibly have supposed," she said, "that Charlie would be such an ass?"

I said I for one could.

"Oh, you--haven't I told you you're always supposing things?"

"Surely?" I said, "you must have seen--yourself--"

She smiled. "My dear--I couldn't see anything but poor Jimmy."

"And yet," I said, "you could think of leaving him?"

She moaned. "You fool--you fool--that's _why_ I'm thinking of it."

She pressed her hands to her eyes as if she shut back the sight of him.

"You aren't thinking of it," I said. "You haven't left him. You've only been for a good long walk to Fittleworth, and we've come to fetch you back in the car."

"Haven't I told you that I can't and won't use Jimmy's car?"

"You can't use it to run away from him in; but you can very well use it to go back to him."

"I'm not going back to him," she said. "Can't you see that I've burnt my boats?"

"You may have burnt the old ones, Viola," I said. "But you can build new."

"You must give me time, Wally. It'll take a long time. And you don't understand me. I _want_ to get away from Jimmy. That's why I'm going away now, while he isn't there. That's what I mean by burning my boats. If I go back to him--if I see him--I shall never get away. I shan't have the courage. I shall just crumple up with the first sight of him--with the first word he says--"

"Why not," I said, "crumple up?"

She lifted her head as I had seen her lift it before.

"Because," she said, "I wish to be straight."

I asked her if running away behind Jimmy's back was her idea of straightness? To which she replied that _my_ rectitude was excruciating and that I'd twist anything to a moral purpose, but it was twisting all the same. Couldn't I see that _the_ awful thing would be to come sneaking back and pretend to Jimmy that she hadn't run away from him?--If that was my idea of straightness she was sorry for me.

I said, "My dear child, you must see that running away by yourself is one thing, and running away with Charlie Thesiger is another. It would be all very well if Charlie hadn't got into that train."

She wanted to know what that mattered when she had got out of the train? I suggested that the people who saw Charlie get in hadn't seen her get out, and that she must look at the thing as it appeared to other people.

"Look," I said, "at the facts. Mrs. Jevons walks to Selham Station for the London train. Captain Thesiger joins her there, presumably by pre-arrangement, leaving by Midhurst station so that they may not be seen going away together. She is, however, seen entering his compartment at Selham. At Fittleworth she is seized with prudence and with panic. She is seen getting out on to the platform. And she is seen two hours later following the Captain up to London by the next train."

She seemed to be considering it.

"How many people," she said, "know that Charlie was in that train? People that matter--I don't mean you and Norah."

"Your butler, your parlourmaid, your housemaid, your cook, your gardener--by this time--and Baby's nurse--"

("And Baby," she interrupted.)

"--The guard of the train, the booking clerks and porters at Midhurst and Selham, and the station-masters at Midhurst and Selham and Petworth (probably) and Fittleworth. Quite a number of important people, to say nothing of Kendal, who is perhaps the most important of them all."

"And who was it who brought Kendal into it?"

I was silent.

"Nobody but you, Furny, or a born fool, would have dreamed of bringing Kendal in."

I said that a little reflection would show her that it was impossible to keep him out. To this she said, "Please go and find Norah. I want her."

I found Norah. I warned her that Viola was going to be extremely difficult. She said it would be all right if I left Viola to her.

As we approached, Viola turned to her sister with an air of outraged and long-suffering dignity.

"Norah," she said. "I do wish you would make Wally see what an ass he's making of himself."

My wife said, in her admirable, judicial way, "How an ass?"

"Well--trying to make me go back and bringing Kendal out here to fetch me. He doesn't seem to see that if I do go back with him it'll be as good as proclaiming to everybody that I ran away with Charlie and was found out by my clever brother-in-law who tracked me down in my husband's motor-car and brought me back in it. Whereas, if I go quietly on to London, as I meant to and as everybody knows I meant to, it'll be all right."

"It won't," I said, "as long as Charlie's there. It will be if you come home with us in the car now, and go up to town with Norah and me on Monday."

"I've told you," she said wearily, "that I can't go back because I shall never get away if I do. And I _must_--I must--and I will."

"Yes, dear, and you shall," my wife said, as if she were humouring somebody who was mad.

But for a mad woman Viola, I must say, was extraordinarily lucid.

"What excuse did you give to Kendal for following me in this way?"

"We told him we had an important message to give you before you started."

"Important message! That was pretty thin. I'd have thought of something cleverer than that if I'd been you. You _are_ a precious pair of conspirators. Can't you see that it's you--with your ridiculous suspicions--that have given me away?"

Norah answered her.

"Oh, Vee-Vee," she said, "we hadn't any suspicions. The message was to tell you that Charlie was in the train. We knew you didn't know it."

To this Viola said coldly, "Walter didn't."

I tried to reassure her, but she waved me away with her hands and implored me to "let her think."

"Well," she said presently, "it isn't as bad as you've tried to make it, even with Kendal thrown in. You came rushing after me to give me a message, and you _have_ given me a message, and now you'll go and tell Kendal that it's all right, and thank him nicely for catching me up, and _you_ rush home again, and I go on quietly to London by the next train."

"Yes, dear," said Norah. "And I'm going up with you while Wally rushes home and follows with Nurse and Baby and the luggage by the morning train."

"That's all very well," said Viola, "but who explains to Jimmy?"

"Oh," said my wife, "Wally does that. You can trust him. Besides you haven't got to explain things to Jimmy."

Well, we settled it that way. It was the only possible solution. The more she thought of it, Viola said, the more she liked it. And she rubbed it into me that it was Norah's solution, and not mine.

Her last words to me as I saw them off at Fittleworth Station were that I needn't worry. It was going to rain. And when poor Jimmy saw his car come in all splashed with rain and covered with mud--"It won't be me," she said, "you'll have to explain about."

And it wasn't.

The storm came down just as we were leaving Fittleworth, and we brought that car back in an awful state. You wouldn't have known it had ever been a black-and-white car. And Jevons (in a mackintosh) was waiting for me in the lane by the courtyard gates. He had caught the early train, but he had seen the storm coming and had walked up from Midhurst, and, as I say, he was waiting for us.

Well--neither Viola nor Norah was with us, and the language, that Jimmy poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly, a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur was prostrated with admiration.

"When Mr. Jevons lays himself out to express himself, sir," he said to me as we retreated, "he pulls it off what you may call a bleedin' masterpiece."

I tried to explain about Viola an hour later. But he wouldn't listen to me. That was all right, he said. He was going to ask us to take her for a month or so anyhow. It was getting a bit stuffy for her down here.

Then he fixed me with "Did Thesiger go up with her?"

There was no good trying to lie to Jevons, so I said that had been Thesiger's idea, but Viola hadn't cared much about having him, for she had got out at Fittleworth and taken Norah on with her.

"I suppose the young ass tried to make love to her. He's fool enough for anything," said Jimmy. But he reverted. "I still can't see why you took the car out. Anybody but an idiot would have known it was going to rain."