Chapter 4

HIS BOOK

XII

At this period, and even now when I go back to it, I am completely puzzled by Jevons. Here was a man who professed to understand his wife, to know what she was feeling and thinking in every moment of her existence; he would tell you that a man was a fool if he couldn't get the woman he wanted; and yet, having got her, he didn't seem to know in the most elementary way how to keep her. He didn't seem to care. He adored her, and yet he didn't seem to care. I believe he knew that she was leaving him, that she had left him; and yet, here he was, treating her departure as if it didn't matter, as if it were the most natural and reasonable thing in the world, and lashing himself into a fury about his wretched motor-car. And he was treating the dangerous element in the case, Charlie Thesiger, as if it didn't matter either; as if it didn't exist. He must have known we'd taken his car out to bring his wife back--he knew we wouldn't have touched the beastly thing for anything short of saving her life or his honour; and yet he had flown into a passion and sworn at his chauffeur because we'd taken it. He adored his wife and yet he behaved as if she were of no importance compared with the god he'd made of his motor-car.

All that evening, I remember, he was absorbed in the solitary problem of how he could save his god from further outrages. He settled it towards midnight by saying that he'd buy another car that we could do what we damn-pleased with--a car that wouldn't matter--that you could take out in all weathers.

"I'll not have that black-and-white car used as it was used this afternoon," he said. And after lashing himself up again he ended quite sweetly by saying, "It's my fault, Furny. I ought to have had two cars all along."

I said it _would_ be a good plan, if a black-and-white car was only to be looked at.

He admitted (with a recrudescence of his old childlike innocence) that he liked looking at it. I've no doubt he said it made him feel something, but I forget what.

But when the morning came he wouldn't hear of my going. I was to stay out my fortnight. It was a fine day and the dust was laid; perhaps he could take me for a spin across the Downs to the coast or somewhere. He'd send Parker up to town to look after Nurse and Baby and the luggage. He didn't want, he said, to be left alone.

Oh yes, it was plain to me that he didn't want to be left--that he couldn't bear it. He was trying to lure me to stay with him by holding out this prospect of a spin. I have since believed that he would have agreed to take his car out in almost any weather, if that had been the only way to keep me. He clung to me desperately, pathetically, as he had clung nine years ago at Bruges when Viola had left him there. He might, possibly, this time, have clung to anybody; he was so afraid of being left alone. I think he felt that loneliness here, in the vast, unfamiliar landscape that he had invaded, would be as bad as loneliness in Bruges. He would be abandoned, as he had been then, in a foreign country.

So till Sunday morning I stayed with him.

It was on my last evening, the evening of Saturday, August the first, that he spoke of Viola.

He asked me if I thought that Norah and I could keep her with us, if necessary, for--he hesitated--for six months? (It was as if he had given her six months.) It would, he said, be better.

I said that Norah would be delighted to keep her for any number of months. But did he think she'd stay?

He said why shouldn't she stay? Of course she'd stay. She was awfully fond of us and it was the best thing she could do. And it would make it so much easier for him. He'd feel more comfortable as long as he knew she was with us.

He spoke as if it were he and not Viola who was leaving.

I said then that though we were glad to have her we couldn't, of course, accept any responsibility--

He smiled slightly and asked, "For what?"

I said, "Well--" And he answered his own question in the pause I made.

"I suppose you mean for anything she may take it into her head to do?"

I put it to him that Viola's movements were not always exactly calculable. She might take it into her head to do anything. I really couldn't answer for her.

"_You_ can't," he said. "But _I_ can. She may go off and look at a belfry or two." (I should have said that "looking at the belfry" was a phrase the family had adopted for any queer thing that any of us might do.) "If there's a belfry anywhere to be seen you may depend upon it she'd want to look at it."

"Whether," I said, "it's in a dangerous place or not?"

"Whether it's in a dangerous place or not. But I'll trust you to keep her out of dangerous places. That's rather what I wanted to talk to you about."

I protested. "There's no good talking about it. I've told you that's just precisely the responsibility I won't take. And I won't let Norah take it. If you think there's going to be any danger you must look after your own wife yourself."

"My dear fellow, how can I look after her if I'm not here?"

"You're as much here as I am," I said. "More so. And she's your wife, not mine."

I can say now--there's no reason why I shouldn't; it would only amuse Jimmy if he were to see it written--I can say now that for one awful moment I suspected Jimmy of meditating an infidelity. Perhaps he was; but not as we count infidelity.

He ignored what I took to be the essence of the thing.

"We don't know," he said, "where any of us are going to be for the next four months--or the next four years. I know that _I_ jolly well shan't be here. What I want to propose is this: that you'll look after Viola and let her have your house when she wants to be in town; and that you have this house for yourself and Norah and Baby when you want to be in the country--just as if it was your own. There'll be that other motor-car you can have--as if it was your own. You can run up to town in it. And you'll probably find that the country will be the best place for you. It'll be much the best place for _them_, and the safest--if you aren't here."

I couldn't see it even then. I said, "My dear chap, why shouldn't I be here? I certainly mean to be here."

And he considered it and said, "I don't see why not. It's different for you. You've got a child and I haven't."

I said I couldn't see what Baby had to do with it.

And he replied that a young child was an infernal complication, and that he was jolly glad he hadn't got one. What Baby had to do with it was to keep me out of it.

Then I asked him what on earth he was talking about.

He said, "_I'm_ talking about the European conflagration. What are you?"

He had been talking about it all the time, he had been thinking of nothing but the European conflagration for the last four days. It was the thing, he said, that he had prophesied nine years ago--didn't I remember? (Oh yes, I remembered; but then, he was always prophesying something.) Well then, here it was. And it had come, by God, at the very date he had given it.

I can see him sitting there in his study at Amershott Old Grange. He was deadly quiet. Not a gesture came to disturb my sense of his tranquil triumph in the fulfilment of his prophecy. To say that he enjoyed the European conflagration because it had proved him so abundantly right would give a false impression of an extraordinary and complicated state of mind. There _was_ a sort of exaltation about him (his face positively shone, as if the European conflagration illuminated it from afar); but it was a holy and a sacred exaltation, pure from egoism, except that he saw himself--there's no doubt that already he did see himself--figuring.

I remember saying, as lots of people were saying then, that I didn't suppose for a moment we should be dragged into it.

"Dragged?" he said. "Dragged? We shall be in it without dragging--in the very thick."

From the instant the Germans broke into Luxembourg--and he gave them twenty-four hours--we should be in it. We couldn't keep out with a rag of honour to our names. France, he declared, would be in to-day. He gave us, I _think_--but I do not like to say positively that he gave us--three days; he couldn't have been as dead right as all that.

What struck me then as so extravagantly odd was, not that he had foreseen the war, and England's part in it, but that he should have seen himself there, in the thick--blazing away in the very middle of the conflagration. What on earth Jimmy conceived that _he_ should have to do with it I couldn't think. And all of a sudden I had a reminiscence of Jevons as I had seen him nine years ago, talking to Reggie Thesiger in Viola's rooms at Hampstead, prophesying war, and lamenting that he wouldn't be in it because he was an arrant coward.

And as I looked at him again I saw that what made his face shine like that was the sweat that had broken out on it.

Then he made a remark about Charlie Thesiger. Thesiger, he said, knew all about it. He had gone up--he supposed I knew that?--to offer his services to the War Office in the event of England's coming in.

That Charlie had used the opportunity of going to make love to Jimmy's wife didn't seem to bother Jimmy in the least.

Sunday, I remember, was a fine day, with all the dust laid, and Jimmy made himself lovable by running me up to London in his sacred car. He still clung--I could see that he clung--to the superstition of its sanctity.

He left me at my door in Edwardes Square, which he refused to enter. I think he was afraid of seeing Viola. I thought at the time that this was because he was aware of her attitude; that he knew she was at the end of her tether, and that he wanted to be righteously fair, to give her time to think about leaving him, if she wanted to leave him; that he was behaving now as he had behaved at Bruges when he stood back and let me have my innings, and gave her her chance to free herself. And yet I was puzzled. Even he could hardly stand back to give Thesiger an innings. He _may_ have had an inkling. There may have been something of his queer, scrupulous tenderness in this avoidance of her; there may have been his reckless propensity to take the risk; but I am convinced that even then his main object was--like Viola--to burn his boats. He was afraid that if he were to see Viola again he wouldn't be able to go through with it. He may even have been glad that she had left him, because it had made his way easier.

And so, when he had landed me at my door, he turned the black nose of his car round and ran out of Edwardes Square faster than he had run in; as if he were afraid that the place would catch and keep him.

He didn't go back to Amershott. He stayed in London in one of his clubs (he had several now, besides the club in Dover Street), and I saw him sometimes. I didn't say anything to Viola about him. I didn't tell her he was in town. It was as if there had been some tacit understanding among the three of us; there must have been some tacit agreement between him and me.

Sunday passed, and Monday somehow; and on Tuesday, the fourth, we were all holding our breaths under the tension of the Ultimatum.

I have no doubt that in those three days I had some opinion of my own about the European conflagration, that I must have stared with my own eyes sometimes at the fate of Europe and the fate of England, that I must have felt _some_ horror and anxiety and excitement that was my own. But as I look back on it all I am aware chiefly of Jevons, of _his_ opinions, _his_ vision, _his_ horror and excitement. I seem to have spent the greater part of those three days with Jevons, and there are moments, in looking back, when he fills the scene. He is the largest and most prominent figure in the crowd that walked the streets with me on the evening of the Ultimatum, that waited with me outside Buckingham Palace, when London let itself loose in madness; he seems the only sane figure in that crowd or in the processions that moved for hours on end up and down Parliament Street, between Trafalgar Square and Palace Yard. It is as if I had stood alone with Jevons before the Mansion House at midnight when the Ultimatum was declared.

And when I say that it was his horror and anxiety and excitement--and his defiance and exaltation, if you like--that I felt, I do not mean that Jevons talked about it. He was, for those three days, mostly silent. It is that I saw him consumed and burned up by the fever of patriotism and war, and that beside his passion any emotion I may have felt hardly counted.

And every minute we expected to hear him say that he _liked_ the War because it made him feel manly. Norah and I pretended to each other that he would say it--it was our idea of a joke, God forgive us.

It was on Wednesday, the fifth, very early in the morning, that he began trying to enlist. It was the first thing he did; and we thought _that_ funny.

We thought it so funny that even if he hadn't told us not to tell Viola we wouldn't have told her; we felt that it wouldn't have been quite fair to either of them.

And none of the Thesigers, or anybody connected with the Thesigers, could take Jimmy seriously for one moment. With General Thesiger waiting to be sent to the Front, and Reggie Thesiger preparing to go, and Charlie Thesiger who might be called on any day, with Bertie and all his male cousins enlisting and pulling all the ropes they could lay their hands on to get their commissions, they hadn't time for Jimmy and his importunity. He _was_ importunate; and I'm afraid that in those weeks Jimmy didn't exist for them or any of us, except as a jest that lightened our labours now and then. They were so busy getting their kits that they couldn't even think of the fate of Europe.

And Viola--what she was thinking and feeling God (or Jevons) only knew. She didn't tell us. But I was pretty sure that with Reggie starting for the front in two weeks it wasn't Jevons she was thinking of. I suspected that she wasn't far from feeling that secret hatred of Jimmy that had come to her once or twice before, when she had thought of Reggie. Remember that all this time, even after that illness of hers last year, when she and Reggie met they met as well-bred strangers. She had never lowered her flag or made one sign. She had just suffered in secret with the thought of Reggie biting deeper and deeper into her mind, till, wherever the memory of Reggie was there was a wound. And she had been ill of her wounds and had nearly died of them.

And in those two weeks she had begun to look as if she were going to be ill again. It was bad enough for Norah and for all of them, but conceive what it must have been for her!

And so we came to Reggie's last day and the night when he came to us to say good-bye.

I think she must have written to him or made some sign. But I'm not sure. I only know that he was prepared for her; and that when she came into the room at the last minute, as he turned from Norah's arms, he closed on her, and that they held each other an instant--tight, like lovers--and that neither of them said a word.

* * * * *

After that the War must have seemed to her, as it seemed to all of us, to have wiped Jimmy out.

Just at first we thought that this was the secret of Jimmy's agony, of his rushings round and round, and of his ceaseless manoeuvring. He knew that the War was going to wipe him out; he knew that the world had no use for his sort, the men who only wrote things. There was an end of his writing, of his novels and his short stories and his plays, and if he didn't look out and do something there would be an end of _him_. And he couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear to be reduced to inactivity and insignificance--to be wiped out. He wasn't going to be made an end of if he could help it. These were the things we said about him. What we saw, or thought we saw, was the revolt of his egoism. It didn't look quite sane.

He was furious when he found out that, even if he enlisted, he couldn't buy a commission. He didn't seem to realize that there were things he couldn't buy. He was still more furious when he found that the Thesigers wouldn't help him. They _could_ help him, he declared, if they liked. Commissions were being given every day to the wrong people, by influence.

Up till now, with his talk about commissions, he had been purely funny, and we had laughed at him. But when he found that he couldn't enlist, that they wouldn't have him, that he wasn't strong enough--they'd discovered a leaky valve in his heart or something--and that in any case he was too old, when he broke down as he tried to tell me this, he wasn't funny at all. He'd been to every recruiting station in London and his own county, and they all said the same thing. He was too old.

This, he said, was where his beastly celebrity had gone back on him. He could very easily have lied about his age (he didn't look it), in fact, he _had_ lied about it freely, to every one of them; but his age was recorded against him in the Year-Books of his craft. And he couldn't lie about his heart, he didn't know it had a valve that leaked. He didn't believe it. He had given the man who examined it the lie; and he had gone to a heart-specialist to get the report (which he regarded as a libel) contradicted, and the heart-specialist had confirmed it, and told him he wasn't the first man who had come to him to get an opinion overruled. He said he was to keep quiet and avoid excitement. He mustn't dream of going to the front. I think the specialist must have been sorry for Jevons, for he went on to tell him that there were other ways in which he could serve his country. He seems to have talked a lot of rot about the pen being mightier than the sword, and to have advised Jimmy to "use his wonderful pen." And at that Jimmy seems to have broken from him in a passion.

And here he was, in a passion still, ramping up and down that private room he had at his club, and saying, "Damn my powerful pen, Furny! Damn my powerful pen!" The whole system, he said, was rotten. He'd a good mind to expose it. He'd expose it in the papers. _That_ was the use he'd make of his powerful pen. See how they'd like _that_.

I remember it because it was then that I laid before him my own problem. The _Daily Post_ had asked me if I'd go out as its War-Correspondent. I was to wire "Yes" or "No" in the next half-hour, and if I went I should have to start to-night.

I said I didn't know what to do about it.

He stared. "You don't know what to _do_?"

I said: No. It wasn't so simple when you had a wife and child dependent on you. I didn't know whether I ought to take the risk.

And then he said his memorable thing: "If you can take the risk of living--My God," he said, "if I only had your luck!"

_His_ luck, I told him, was a dead certainty. There wasn't a paper that would refuse Tasker Jevons as War-Correspondent. He'd only got to volunteer. Why on earth, I asked him, didn't he?

He became very grave. He seemed to be considering it.

"No," he said, "no. That isn't quite good enough for me. I don't want to go out to the war to write about it. I want to do things.

"Perhaps--if there's no other way--I may be driven to it."

For a moment, then, I suspected him. I doubted his sincerity. He was making all this fuss about enlisting to cover up his cowardice. He must have known all the time they wouldn't take him. He was safe. But put before him a thing he could do--do better than anybody else--a thing that would take him into the thick and keep him there, if he wasn't killed, and he said, No, thank you. That wasn't quite good enough for him.

I didn't believe in his "Perhaps--if there was no other way--he might be driven to it." I saw him driven to do anything he didn't mean to do!

Meanwhile he drove _me_. Before I had seen him I hadn't really meant to take that job. He did something to me that changed my mind.

That was how I went out to Belgium as a War-Correspondent.

* * * * *

I was out for a month. Then--I was in Ghent at the same old hotel in the Place d'Armes--I got a touch of malaria and had to come home, and the _Daily Post_ sent another man out instead of me.

That was how I managed to see Jevons in what Norah called his second war-phase. He had been trying hard to get out with the Red Cross volunteers, and it had been even funnier, she said, and more pathetic, than his enlisting. I don't know what Viola thought of his war-phases; to Norah they were just that--funny and pathetic. To the other Thesigers he was purely offensive. They resented Jevons's trying to have anything to do with the war, as if it had been some sort of impertinent interference with their prerogative. His mother-in-law, I know, had no patience with him. His frantic efforts to get to the front were nothing, she declared, but a form of war-panic. It took some people like that. She said the only really cruel thing I had ever heard her say of him. She said he _looked_ panic-stricken. (He was lean and haggard by this time, and had a haunted look which may have been what she meant.) And well--if it wasn't panic that was the matter with him it was self-advertisement, and if I'd any regard for him or any influence with him I'd stop it. The little man was simply making himself ridiculous.

I was staying in Canterbury with Norah for the weekend, and I heard all about it. He did seem to have been rather funny. He had begun with a scheme for taking out a Red Cross Motor Field Ambulance which he proposed to command in person. He had offered himself with his convoy first to the War Office, then to the Admiralty, then to the War Office again, and the War Office and the Admiralty kicked him out. Then he had gone round to each of the Red Cross Societies in turn, the American included. And they had all got their own schemes for Motor Field Ambulances, and didn't want his. What they _did_ want was his subscriptions and his powerful pen to support their schemes. And Jevons had said, "Damn my powerful pen!" to every one of them. As for subscriptions, he subscribed enormously to his own Motor Ambulance Corps. He had actually raised his unit, found his volunteers, his surgeons, his chauffeurs and his stretcher-bearers, he had bought and equipped a Motor Ambulance car, the one he had proposed to go with himself. And they took his subscriptions and his Ambulance Car and his volunteers; but they wouldn't take him; no, not at any price. They put one of his surgeons at the head of the thing instead of him and sent it out without him, and Jimmy had to see it go. But when they proposed that Jimmy should use his powerful pen to maintain it in the field, he swore that he would use it to expose the whole system. And when he found that the responsibility for rejecting his services rested with the War Office, he went down to the War Office and complained, and to the Admiralty and complained, and to the Home Office and complained. After that he seems to have visited all the Embassies in turn--the American, the French, the Belgian, and I suppose the Russian and the Japanese.

When I asked the Thesigers what he was doing now they said they didn't know. They hadn't heard of him and his activities for quite a fortnight, and they didn't bother about him. They were too much wrapped up in Bertie and in Reggie, even if they hadn't been too busy--every one of them up to their necks in work for the Army or the hospitals. They admitted that he had sent them large subscriptions.

It seemed to me, as far as I could make out, that Viola hadn't seen or heard of him since she had left Amershott. She was too busy and too much wrapped in Reggie to bother about him either; at least, it looked like it. She seems to have known in a vague way that he had talked about going to the front, but I didn't believe she thought he would ever get there.

And he had lain low for a fortnight.

When we had got back to London at noon on Tuesday, which was the end of Jimmy's fortnight, I found a wire from Amershott waiting for me. It had been sent that morning. It said: "Leaving to-morrow. Must see you urgent business. Can you come down this evening. JEVONS."

I knew that he wouldn't send a wire like that without good reason; so I went.

* * * * *

A light rain was falling when I reached Midhurst. A hired dog-cart met me at the station, so I gathered that Jimmy's mad passion for his motor-car had survived the war.

And at Amershott everything seemed to have survived. If it had not been for troops on the high road, and for the stillness of the coverts, and for the recruiting posters stuck everywhere on the barn-doors, and for the strange figure of old Perrott driving the mail-cart from Midhurst to Amershott instead of his son, you wouldn't have known that the war had anything to do with England. And I expected to find Jimmy in his old Norfolk suit standing in the garage and looking with adoration at his motor-car.

As I thought all this I smiled when Parker told me that Mr. Jevons was in the garage. Parker, I noticed, didn't smile.

And in another minute it was Jevons who did all the smiling.

I found him in the garage--no, I can't say I found him, for I didn't recognize him, but I heard his voice assuring me that it was he. He was in khaki; from head to foot, from his peaked military cap to his puttees he was in faultless, well-fitting khaki; even his shirt and his neck-tie were khaki. Jimmy's colours showed up wonderfully out of all that brownish, greyish, yellowish green. His flush fairly flamed, and his eyes, his eyes looked enormous and very bright--great chunks of dark sapphire his eyes were. They were twinkling at me.

"It's me all right, old man," he said, and turned from me in his deep preoccupation. And as he turned I saw that he wore round his right arm a white brassard with a red cross on it.

At the far end of the coach-house where the great black and white idol used to stand there was a khaki car with a huge red cross on a white square on its flank and on its khaki canvas hood. This was what his eyes turned to.

"But--where's the black-and-white god?" I asked.

"There she is," he said, "you're looking at her."

"You haven't--"

"Yes, I have. She's had her new coat on for the last three weeks. You couldn't take her out as she was, all black and white. She'd have been knocked to bits before we'd begun our job. So I had her painted. She's a good enough target for shell-fire as she is."

"You don't mean," I said, "that you're going out?"

"What else have I been meaning ever since there was a war?"

"But--where are you going _to_?"

"Belgium," he said. He added that it was the only blessed place he _could_ get to.

"And what are you going to do when you get there?"

He said he was going to scout for wounded, of course.

And as he saw me still incredulous he told me how he'd managed it. He had gone every day for three weeks to the Belgian Legation and worried the Belgian Minister into a state of nervous prostration. And when the Minister was at his worst and was obliged to leave things a bit to his secretaries, he'd gone to the secretaries and worried _them_ till the First Secretary had given him his passport and a letter of introduction to the President of the Belgian Red Cross Society at Ghent. And he had gone to Ghent--went there last week--and he had seen the President and talked to him. He had talked for ten minutes before his services had been accepted by the Belgian Red Cross.

And he was going out to-morrow.

"It's just taken me six weeks to do it. I gave myself six weeks."

Of course I congratulated him. But I couldn't realize it. The whole thing seemed incredible. Jevons in his khaki was incredible. The transformed motor-car was incredible, as a thing that Jevons was concerned with. Above all, it was incredible that he should have sacrificed his god.

I couldn't believe it until Kendal, the chauffeur, turned up, also in khaki and with a Red Cross brassard on his right arm. Kendal was credible enough; he looked as if he had been going to the war all his life. It was evident that he was keen on the adventure. It was also evident that he adored Jevons more than ever. By watching Kendal in the act of adoration and keeping my eyes fixed on him I was able to take it in, and to assent to the statement that Jevons was going to the war.

He was of course if Kendal said so.

Kendal was asking me what I thought of the car.

"She's not the beauty she was, sir," said Kendal. "I don't suppose Mr. Jevons will care much how he knocks her about now. And they do say the Belgium roads is fair destruction to cars."

I said they were. I'd motored on them. Kendal looked at me as he might have looked at the survivor of a shattering experience. Then he looked at his car. He seemed to be seeing all the roads in Belgium in a hideous vision.

Then he spoke. "Well, they may be bad roads, but Mr. Jevons isn't going to be done. He'll take out ten cars before 'e turns back. Ten cars, he will."

Yes, yes, I might have known it. Was there ever anything Jevons had made up his mind to do and didn't? Had I ever known him turn back from any adventure that he had set out on? If he said he was going to the war, why couldn't I have known that he would go? The more incredible the thing was, the more likely he was to do it.

When I said so he shook his head and said it wasn't really as likely as it looked.

We were sitting together after dinner in his garden. Though it was the third week in September the nights were still warm. Without Viola, the stillness of the place was strange to me, almost uncanny, as if Viola were dead and had come back and was listening to us somewhere. I had just told him it was splendid of him going out like this, and he had smiled back at me and asked, "Like what?" And then I had said I might have known it; it was the sort of thing he would do.

No, he went on, it wasn't likely. It had been touch and go, he had only just pulled it off by the skin of his teeth. It had given him more trouble than anything he'd ever tried for. It had bothered him more. It had bothered him most damnably.

I thought he was referring to his struggles with the recruiting depots and the War Office and the Home Office and the Embassies and all the rest of it. And I said it _was_ pretty hard luck his own Ambulance Corps being sent out without him. But he said, No; it wasn't. He hadn't been very keen on the Ambulance Corps. He hadn't really wanted to go out with all that beastly crowd. This quick scouting game--by himself--was more in his line. All he regretted was the time he'd lost.

Well, I said, anyhow he was a lucky beggar to have got what he wanted after six weeks.

At that he looked at me suddenly and his face went all sharp and thin. Or else I hadn't noticed till then how sharp and thin it was. His flush had seemed to flood it and fill it out somehow, and his eyes struck your attention like two great flashes of energy. The flash had gone out now as he looked at me.

I reminded him: "Haven't you always said you could get what you wanted?"

"Oh yes, I've _said_ it, and I've done it. That's nothing. Any fool can do that. The great thing is to make yourself get what you don't want. I didn't _want_ to do this. I had to."

"No. You wanted to enlist. But I'm not sure that from your point of view this isn't better."

"Jolly lot you know," he said, "about my point of view."

"Your idea," I explained, "of doing things on your own. Isn't that what you wanted?"

He answered very slowly: "I don't think--it matters--what I wanted--or what I didn't want. It's enough--isn't it?--if I want to _now_--if I want it more than anything else?"

I said, No, I didn't think it did matter.

But I hadn't a notion what he meant. I didn't know that he was on the edge of a confession. I couldn't see that he was trying to tell me something about himself, and that I had started him off by telling him he was splendid. It was as if--then--he too had felt that Viola was there and listening to us, as if he were speaking to her and not to me.

For the next thing he said was, "I want you to tell Viola about it. Tell her it's all right. Tell her I'm all right. See?"

"But shan't you," I said, "be seeing her? Isn't she going to see you off or something?"

He said, "No. Much better not. She wouldn't be content with seeing me off. She'd try to come out with me. She'd worry me to take her. And I'm not going to take her. She isn't to know I'm going till I've gone. And she isn't to know where I've gone to. I won't have her coming out to me. _You've_ got to see to that, Furny. You've got to stop her if she tries to get out. They're _all_ trying. You should just see the bitches--tumbling, and wriggling and scrabbling with their claws and crawling on their stomachs to get to the front--tearing each other's eyes out to get there first. And there are fellows that'll take them. They'll even take their wives.

"Not me. Not much. I wouldn't let Viola cross in the same boat with that lot.

"It ought to be put a stop to.

"The place I'm going to--the things I'm going to see--and to do--aren't fit for women--aren't fit for women to come within ten miles of. Whatever you do, Furny--and I don't care what you do--you're not to let her get out."

I suppose--I suppose I made him some sort of promise. He says I did. I don't remember.

I _do_ remember telling him I thought it was a pity--if he meant to go out--that he hadn't seen Viola all this time.

And I remember his answer. "I haven't seen her--all this time--_because_ I meant to go out. I meant that nothing on this earth should stop me."

"How do you know," I said, "that she'd have stopped you?"

"How do I know? How do I know anything?--It's you who don't know. You don't know anything at all."

* * * * *

Well, he went--like that--without telling any of them.

I ran down on the car with him to Folkestone and saw him off on the boat to Ostend, he and Kendal, his chauffeur--he, as he pointed out to me, superior to Kendal only in the perfect fitting of his khaki. "Otherwise there isn't a pin to choose between us. Except," he said, "that Kendal doesn't funk it and I do."

And with Kendal grinning from ear to ear over Mr. Jevons's delicious joke, and Jimmy waving his khaki cap in a final valediction, and Kendal's grin dying abruptly as he achieved the military salute he judged appropriate, we parted.

Jimmy's last words to me, thrown over the gunwale, were, "Don't run after me, Furny. You won't catch me _this_ time."

XIII

Then I went back and told Viola about it. I took her into my library that had once been Jevons's study, where he had delivered the Grand Attack. I gave her a letter that Jevons had scribbled before lunch in the hotel at Folkestone. I suppose he had explained things in it.

But as for me, or any power I had to break it to her, I might just as well have told her that he was dead.

Except that perhaps then she wouldn't have turned on me.

"You _knew_ this," she said, "you knew he was going and you never told me?"

I said I had only known it last night--how could I have told her?

She persisted. "You _knew_--at what time last night?"

I hesitated and she drove it home.

"You might have wired. It wasn't too late."

I said it was, and that I didn't know that she didn't know till it was too late to wire.

"Do you suppose," she said, "--if I'd known--that I should be _here_?"

I couldn't tell her--she was so white under her wound and the shock of it--I couldn't tell her that she had given me no reason to suppose that she would be with him.

And she went on. "Why couldn't you have wired in the morning, then? I could have caught that boat."

"Because, my dear girl, he doesn't want you to go out."

"It doesn't matter what he wants--or thinks he wants--I'm going.

"And what's more," she said, "you've got to take me. That's all you've gained by trying to stop me."

I replied that nothing would induce me to take her out, that I'd promised Jimmy she shouldn't go.

She said that didn't matter. Jimmy'd know I couldn't keep a silly promise like that, and if I wouldn't take her she'd simply go by herself.

I tried to explain to her very gently that her going--at all--was out of the question. She would do no good to anybody by going; she would annoy Jimmy most frightfully; untrained women were not wanted at the front.

Untrained? She had got her certificate three days ago. What did I suppose she had wanted it for--if it wasn't to go out with Jimmy if he went?

"You knew he was going, then?" I said.

"I knew he wanted to go. But I didn't think he'd go so soon. I didn't really think he'd go at all. They told me I needn't worry, that he hadn't a chance."

"Who told you?"

"Oh, everybody. The General and Colonel Braithwaite and Charlie, and Bertie, and Reggie--at least he told Norah--and the people at the War Office and the Admiralty and the Embassies."

"You _went_ to them? You went to the War Office?"

"I went everywhere where he did, or as near as I could get. And they all told me the same thing--he hadn't a chance. Not the ghost of a chance. I really thought he hadn't. When you think of the men--men who can do things, who are dying to go and are being kept back--"

"You were helping him to go?" I said. I saw a vision, or I tried to see it, a pathetic vision of Viola following poor Jimmy in his pursuit of secretaries and ambassadors, doing insane, impossible things to help him.

And then I saw Viola herself. She was looking at me, with all her features tilted in that funny way she had.

"Well--no," she said; "I wasn't exactly _helping_."

"What _were_ you doing, then?"

"I'm afraid I was trying to stop him."

The sheer folly of it took my breath away.

"Surely," I said, "if he hadn't the ghost of a chance, it wasn't necessary?"

"Well--it _was_ necessary, you see. He's so awfully clever. He was very nearly off once or twice. Only we just managed to get in in time."

"Who got in in time?"

"Oh, it wasn't only me, Furny, it was all of us. We were all out trying to stop him--Charlie and Reggie and Uncle Billy--_he_ pulled all the ropes--we couldn't do much."

"But what--what did General Thesiger do?"

"He didn't 'do' anything. He hadn't got to. He just said things. Told them _about_ Jimmy."

I don't know whether my face expressed horror or admiration. It must have been a sort of horror, for she began to excuse herself.

"Why not? Why should poor little Jimmy go?"

"Because he wants to. You'd no business to stop him when he wanted to go."

"But--that was it. He didn't want to go. He only thought he _ought_ to go."

"How," I said sternly, "do you know what he wanted?"

"Because," she said, "he told Uncle Billy. He kept on saying he ought to go. And we told him he oughtn't. What earthly good can Jimmy do out there, with his poor little heart all dicky? He'll simply die of it. You don't suppose I'd have stopped him if I'd thought it was good for him to go? Or if I'd thought he really wanted to? We told him all that--Uncle Billy and I did--we told him straight that if he tried to get out we'd try and stop him."

"Oh," I said, "you _told_ him. That's a different thing."

"Things, Furny, always are different to what you think them. At least they're never half so nasty. Of course we told him. And of course he laughed in our faces. We thought we _had_ stopped him. But--he's slipped through our fingers.

"We might," she said, "have known."

I heard her say all that, though I wasn't listening. It comes back to me that she said it. It was dawning on me that in this queer business there were details, quite important details, that had escaped me. The war had taken up my attention to the exclusion of Viola's affairs. But it was evident that things had happened while I was away. I was thinking of something that she let out.

"Look here," I said, "when you say you told him, do you mean that you and he have been seeing each other?"

"Of course we've been seeing each other. Until he stopped it. He said he couldn't stand the strain."

"And you?" I said. "Did you stand it?"

She looked at me straight and hard.

"You've no right to ask me that," she said.

* * * * *

Well, perhaps I hadn't. And if I had owned frankly that I hadn't all might have been well. But, as it was, before I knew where we both were, we had quarrelled.

Yes. I quarrelled with Viola; or she quarrelled with me; it really doesn't matter how you put it; and it shows the awful tension we must have been living in.

When I heard her say that I had no right to ask her that question I answered that I thought I had.

She said, "What right?"

And I said if she would think a little she would see what right.

And at that she fired up and the blaze was awful. We two were up there alone and she had me at her mercy. She held me in the blaze.

"I suppose," she said, "I'm to think of your everlasting meddling with my affairs?"

I pointed out that a charge of meddling came rather oddly from a lady who honoured me by staying in my house because she preferred it to her husband's.

"You know perfectly well why I'm staying in your house; and if you don't, Norah does. I could have stayed with my father, for that matter."

I said I thought that that was extremely doubtful--in the circumstances.

I had her there, and she knew it, for she retired in bad order on an irrelevant point. She said I was no judge of the circumstances.

I said peaceably that perhaps I wasn't, but that she must own that I had behaved as if I were. At any rate I'd given her the benefit of the doubt.

She said, "You talk as if I'd been through the Divorce Court. Perhaps that's where you think I ought to be. The benefit of the doubt! You certainly _have_ given it me. It's been nothing but doubt with you, Walter, ever since I knew you. You always thought awful things about me. I know you have. I could _see_ you thinking them. You thought vile things about me, and vile things about Jimmy. You came rushing out to Belgium because you thought them. And the other day you thought the same thing of me and Charlie Thesiger, and you came rushing after me again and giving me away, and behaving so that everybody else would think me awful too."

"My dear child, you owned yourself that Charlie--"

"Oh--Charlie! As if he mattered! He was only being an ass--the war upset him, or something. I don't care what you think about Charlie--he doesn't either--but why you should go out of your way to think _me_ awful--"

I said I thought we'd done with that.

"No," she said, "we haven't done with it. I want to get to the bottom of it. What _makes_ you do these things? I believe you _want_ to make out that I'm horrid, just as you wanted to make out that poor little Jimmy was, when I went to him in Bruges."

She went on. "I can understand _that_, because I did go to him, and I--I cared for him and you didn't like it. I can even understand your wanting _me_ to be horrid then, because it made it easier for you. I had the sense to see that that was all that was the matter with you _then_, so I didn't mind. But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or horrid?"

She had rushed on, carried away by her own passion, without seeing where she was going. I don't think she had seen, any more than I had, that for nine years I had been living behind a screen. A screen that had hidden me from myself. I don't think she saw even now when she came crashing into it.

It was I who saw.

The thing was down about my ears; and it wasn't the violence of its fall that terrified me; it was my own nakedness. I wasn't prepared to find myself morally undressed.

I turned away from her. I began fiddling with my pens and papers. I trailed long slip-proofs under her eyes, pretending that I had work to do. But she saw through my pretences and her voice followed me.

It was softer, though. It seemed to be pleading, as if she knew nothing about me and my screen.

"What harm did I ever do you? Or poor Jimmy either? I didn't let you marry me. You ought to be grateful to Jimmy. At least he saved you from that."

I said I thought we needn't drag her husband into it, and I haven't a notion what I meant. I had to say something, and if it sounded disagreeable, so much the better.

And she said there I was again--thinking that I had to remind her that Jimmy _was_ her husband.

"You certainly seem to have forgotten it," I said.

"_He_ knows how much I've forgotten."

With that last word she left me.

I tried hard to shake the horror of it off. I remember I sat down to my proofs, and I suppose I tried to correct them. But all the time I heard Viola's voice saying, "I can understand your wanting me to be horrid _then_, because it made it easier for you.... But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can it matter to you _now_ whether I'm nice or horrid?"

It went on in my head till the words ceased to have any meaning. I had only a dreadful sense that I should remember them to-morrow, and that perhaps when to-morrow came I should know what they meant.

* * * * *

And when to-morrow came the war took up my attention again, so that I actually forgot that Viola had said she was going out to it.

She had let the subject drop abruptly. She didn't even refer to it when my friend the editor of the _Morning Standard_ rang me up the next day to ask me if I'd go out to Belgium as their Special Correspondent.

He was charmingly frank about it. He told me that it was Tasker Jevons he wanted, and Tasker Jevons he had asked to go, but since he couldn't get him (and his powerful pen) why then, he'd had to fall back on me. Jevons, he said, had let him down pretty badly; he'd understood from Jevons that he was prepared to go for them at twelve hours' notice. And he'd given him twenty-four hours; and he'd found that he'd gone out there two days ago. Chucked them, my friend the editor supposed, for another paper. Could I, at twenty-three hours' notice, take his place?

I said I could and I would, and I put him right about Jevons.

And then I went to see about my motor-car.

It was when Viola began to bother me about her passport that the fight began.

First of all, she asked me what I was doing about a motor-car? I told her she needn't worry herself about my motor-car. It wasn't any concern of hers. She grinned at that and said, All right. What she really wanted was to consult me about her passport.

And when I refused to be consulted about her passport, to hear a word about her passport or about her going, she walked straight out of the house into a passing taxi that took her to the Belgian Legation, where she saw that weak-minded secretary that Jevons had handled; and she came back in time for tea, very cheerful and dressed in a sort of khaki uniform she had ordered, with a tunic and knee-breeches and puttees and a Red Cross brassard on her right arm.

She said it had been a very tight squeeze, but she'd worked it, down to her uniform, and it was all right, and if I'd had any difficulty with my motor people (I had had awful difficulty, but how she knew it I haven't to this day found out. Sometimes I think she'd worked that too; she knew the firm, and she wasn't Mrs. Tasker Jevons for nothing)--if I'd had any difficulty she could put that straight for me. She'd got _her_ car--Jimmy'd ordered it for Amershott and forgotten about it--and her chauffeur, and I could go in it with her if I liked.

It was a better car than the one I'd had in Belgium before or, she said significantly, than the one I was going to take out with me. It was true that I didn't know anything about cars.

Then Norah, my wife, stood up beside her sister, flagrantly partisan, and said, Couldn't I see it wasn't any use trying to stop her? She had me at every point. If I wouldn't take her she'd go by herself with the chauffeur.

And when I said, How about my promises--my word of honour? Viola laughed.

"Your honour's all right, Wally," she said. "You're not taking me out; I'm taking you."

And very early in the morning we motored down to Folkestone to catch the midday boat for Ostend. And Norah came with us to see us off. If I'd given her the smallest encouragement she'd have come too. I _might_ take her, she said; it was beastly being left behind.

I said, like a savage, that Belgium was no place for women. I'd take my sister-in-law there, but not my wife.

I suppose the dressing-down I'd got from Viola two nights before had rankled. I must have felt that I was getting my own back that time, when I threw it up to her that she wasn't my wife.

Norah, I said, had too much sense to want to go where she wasn't wanted.

But Viola only laughed again and said, "Please remember that I'm taking you, not you me. And Norah wants to go as much as I do, and it isn't altogether on your account. You needn't think it. As for keeping her back, you couldn't do it if she meant to go. It's Baby that's keeping her, not you."

And then she thanked God she hadn't got a child.

And so, sparring and chaffing by turns, half in play and half in earnest--for a secret subterranean anger smouldered still in both of us--we got off. I remember at the last moment Norah--dear little Norah--telling her that she was not to bully me. She was to let me sit in the motor-car as much as I liked; and she was to see that I didn't get into any danger.

Danger? Danger? As the great fans of the screws churned the harbour water into foam that the waves thinned and flattened out again till the green lane broadened between our track and the pier head where Norah stood, and the little, slender, dark blue figure became a dot on the pier and lost itself in the crowd of dots and disappeared, then, for the first time, it struck me that to be going off like this, alone, with Viola, was danger in itself.

Because, the other night she had made me see myself as I really was--a man, not of an irreproachable rectitude, an immaculate purity (had I ever, had anybody ever really supposed that I was such a man?) but quite deplorably human, and blind--yes, my dear Viola, blind as any bat--and vulnerable, so vulnerable that I think you might have spared me, you might have had some pity.

I found myself addressing her like that, in my heart, as I walked up and down, up and down the deck, not looking at her, but acutely aware of her, where she sat in her deck-chair, bundled up in her great khaki motor-coat and in the rugs I had wrapped round her.

I resented the power she had over me to make me aware of her--at such a time, or at any time, for that matter. Here was I, a Special Correspondent, going out to the war; and there, on the other side of the Channel, _was_ the war; in the fields of France and of Flanders men were fighting, men were slaughtering each other every day by thousands. I was a man and I should have been thinking of those men; and here I was, compelled against my conscience and my will to think of this woman. She had come out with me against my conscience and my will, and against my judgment and my good taste and my honour and my common sense, against everything in me that I set most store by. I hadn't meant to take her with me, and she had made me take her.

And when my common sense told me that she hadn't; that I wasn't taking her, and that she had as much right to be on the Ostend boat as I had, I still resented her being there. I still raged as I realized the power she had over me. She had always had it. She had had it the first day I ever saw her, when she had walked into my rooms against my orders, half an hour behind the time I had appointed, and had made herself my secretary against my will. She had had it when she used me as a stalking-horse to draw her brother's suspicions away from her and Jevons; she had had it when she drew me after her to Belgium, and when I followed her from Bruges to Canterbury at her bidding; she had had it when I married Norah (hadn't she told me, in the insolence of it, that she had meant that I should marry Norah?). She had had it, this malign power over me, the other night, and she had it now. She always would have it.

It wasn't my fault, I told myself, if she compelled me to look at her, this time, as I passed her deck-chair.

I looked at her, and she sent me a little sad interrogative smile that asked me why I walked the decks thus savagely and alone? And I paid no attention to her or to her smile. In the very arrogance of isolation I continued to walk the decks. I meant her to see that I _could_ be alone and savage if I liked.

And when I looked at her again (she couldn't have _made_ me this time, for she was unaware of me, lost in some profound meditation of her own), when I looked at her again my anger and my resentment died with a sort of struggle and a pang.

She had, after all, the grace of her ignorance and innocence. If she had had no pity on me, it was because she was as blind as she had said I was. She didn't, she couldn't see me as she had made me see myself. She didn't know that she had any power over me, or else she wouldn't have used her power; she was too honourable for that, too chivalrous. You could trust her to play the game until she threw it up and left it.

And I passed again in my sullen tramping, and I looked at her for the third time, urged by the remorse that stung me. And this time she drew me so that I went over to her and sat by her. I looked at my watch, we had been two hours on board.

I had left her two hours alone; and in those two hours she had suffered. Her face was set now in a sort of brooding fear and anguish; her breathing had a tremor in it, as if her heart dragged at her side. It was better, far better, that we should quarrel than she should suffer and sit quivering in silence and see frightful things.

But I saw that she wasn't going to quarrel, she wasn't going to pitch into me; she wasn't going to assert herself and domineer over me just now. This agony of hers had made her gentle, so that she spoke to me as if she were sorry for me after all.

"Are you tired," she said, "of tramping up and down?"

"Horribly tired."

"Put my rug round you if you're going to sit still. Norah wouldn't let you sit still without a rug."

"Norah wouldn't let me do anything I shouldn't do."

She smiled down at me, still sad, but with the least little flicker of irony on the top of her sadness. "Norah's job isn't very hard. You don't ever _want_ to do anything you shouldn't."

"Oh--don't I?"

"No, never. That's the pull you have over naughty people like me. You're so good."

"It wasn't my goodness you were rubbing into me the other night."

"Never mind the other night. It doesn't matter what I said the other night. Only what I'm saying now this minute has any importance. But it was your goodness, if it comes to that."

"Queer sort of goodness." I was still, you see, a little stung.

"All goodness," she said, "is queer, carried to that pitch. But you're a dear in spite of it. I won't bully you."

We made the last part of the crossing on the highway of the sunset. The propeller lashed through crimson and fiery copper, and the white wake tossed on to the highway turned to rose and gold and its edges to purple.

I had left her again and I called to her to look at this wonder of the sky and sea; but she shook her head at me. There was no need to call her. She had looked. I could see by her eyes that the intolerable beauty had brought Jevons back to her. He was there for her in all beauty and in all wonder.

Then she called to _me_. "Wally, come here. I want to speak to you."

I came.

"You thought I was going to leave Jimmy. But I wasn't. _He_ knew I wasn't. Why, the first night I knew how impossible it was."

I said, Yes. Of course it was impossible. And of course he knew.

"I shan't mind if only we can get to him before anything happens."

I said nothing would happen, and of course we should get to him.

She was silent so long that I was startled when she said, "Wally--your nervous aren't _you_, are they?"

I said, No. No. Of course they weren't.

I knew what she was thinking. Out of the intolerable beauty she had seen Jimmy rise with all his gestures. She heard the cracking of his knuckles and saw the jerking of his thumb. And these things became tender and pathetic and dear to her as if he were dead.

And she had seen herself shudder at them as if it had been another woman who shuddered, a strange and pitiless woman whom she hated.

"It wouldn't matter so much if he had wanted to go," she said.

"Why do you keep on saying that he didn't want to go?"

"Because he said so. He said he was only going because he couldn't go."

"I think you're doing him a great injustice. He told me he wanted to go; I've no doubt he did want to go--just like any other man."

"Yes. To be just like any other man--_that's_ what he wanted. But he couldn't be. He isn't like any other man. And so it's worse for him. Can't you see that it's worse for him? It'll hurt him more."

I said I didn't see it, and that she was absurd and morbid and utterly unreasonable, and that she was making Jimmy out unreasonable and morbid and absurd.

She told me then I didn't understand either of them; and we were silent, as if we had quarrelled again, until we came in sight of the Flemish coast.

We sailed into Ostend on the tail-end of the sunset. What was left of it was enough to keep up for us the intense moment of transfiguration, so that we didn't miss it. The long white Digue, the towers, the domes of the casinos and hotels, the high, flat fronts of the houses showed soaked in light, quivering with light. Ostend might have been some enchanted Eastern city. It was as if the heroic land faced us with the illusion of enchantment, to cover the desolation that lay beyond her dykes.

And we who looked at it were still silent, not now as if we had quarrelled, but as if this beauty had made peace between us.

Viola's face had changed. It reminded me in the oddest way of her brother Reggie's. I think that for the moment, while it lasted, she had forgotten Jimmy, she had forgotten her brother Reggie; she had touched the fringe of the immensity that had drawn them from her and swallowed them up. And in forgetting them she had forgotten her unhappy self.

In Ostend, at any rate, I was to have no more of her brooding. We had no sooner landed than she became the adorable creature who had run away with Jevons nine years ago and led me that dance through the cities of Flanders. She showed the same wholehearted devotion to the adventure, the same innocence, the same tact in ignoring my state of mind. She seemed to be making terms with me as she had made them then, suggesting that if _I_ would ignore a few things I should find her the most delightful companion in my travels. We must, she seemed to say, of course forget everything that she had said to me the other night or that I had said to her before or since; and, as she swung beside me in her khaki, her freedom and her freshness declared how admirably _she_ had forgotten. It wasn't as if we didn't know what we were really out for.

Except that she was a maturer person--thirty-one and not twenty-two--I might have mistaken her for Viola Thesiger, my secretary, setting out, in defiance of all conventions, with little Jevons, to look for Belfries in Belgium, and taking the war, since there _was_ a war on, in her stride.

And as I walked with her through the same streets where nine years ago I had hunted for her and Jevons, it struck me as a strange, unsettling thing that I should be taking her out to look for Jevons and at the same time playing precisely Jevons's part in the adventure. She too must have been aware of this oddness--for she stopped suddenly to say to me, "Do you remember when I ran away with Jimmy? Isn't it funny that I should be running away with you?"

I said it was. Very funny indeed. And I wondered why she had drawn my attention to it just now? Did she want to make me judge by the transparent innocence of this running the not quite so transparent innocence of that? I think so. Remember, it was Reggie Thesiger's apparent doubt as to her innocence that had been at the bottom of all the trouble of the last five years. It accounted for her attack on me the other night. It was as if she had turned to say to me triumphantly, "Now, perhaps, when I'm running away with _your_ precious perfection, at last you understand?"

We had some difficulty in finding quarters and Viola insisted on our staying in the Station Hotel, which had been bombarded by an aeroplane the night before. She pointed out that it was almost entirely empty. "And so," she said, "there won't be anybody to see us."

It was as if she wished to remind me by how thin a thread _my_ reputation hung.

The business of our passports kept us in Ostend the next morning. I had made up my mind there would be difficulty about Viola's military pass, I was even contemplating the possibility of her being sent back to England by the next boat; but no; she had forestalled obstruction, and the pocket of her khaki coat was stuffed with letters from the War Office, the British Red Cross, and the French and Belgian Embassies. In fact, there was one horrid moment at the depot when it looked as if the Special Correspondent would be smuggled through under Viola's protection.

"You see, Furny," she said, "nobody's going to stop me. Nobody wants to stop me."

At last we got off, and early in the afternoon we were in Bruges.

We had run into the Market-Place before we knew where we were; and yonder in the street at the back of it was Viola's _pension_, and here on our right hand was Jimmy's hotel, and there, towering before us, was the Belfry. We looked at each other. And through the war and across nine years, it all came back to us.

"The Belfry's still there," I said.

"It always was." She said it a little sternly. But she had smiled at the allusion, all the same--the smile that had never been denied to it.

We stayed an hour in Bruges and lunched there in Jimmy's hotel. The fat proprietor and his wife were still there and they remembered us. They remembered Jimmy. And they had seen him three days ago. Mr. Chevons had passed through Bruges in his Red Cross motor-car. They seemed uncertain whether Viola was Mrs. Chevons or Mrs. Furnival, and they addressed her indifferently as either. An awful indifference had come to them. Of the war they said, _"C'est triste, nest-ce pas?"_ We left them, sitting pallid and depressed behind the barricade of their bureau, gazing after us with the saddest of smiles.

That hour in Bruges was a mistake; so was our lunching at Jimmy's hotel. It was too much for Viola. It brought Jimmy so horribly near to her. I don't know what she was thinking, but I am convinced that from the moment of our entering Bruges the poor child had made up her mind that Jimmy had been killed. The smile she had given to the Belfry was the last flicker of her self-control, and halfway through lunch the grey melancholy that Bruges had absorbed from Jimmy nine years ago came down on her, as nine years ago it had come down on me, and it swallowed her up. By the time the waiter brought the coffee she was done for. Her eyes stared, hard and hot, over the cup she tried to drink from. She couldn't drink because of the spasm in her throat.

"Come," I said, "we must clear out of this."

We cleared out.

I too was invaded by the grey melancholy as we came to the bridge by the eastern gate where I had found Jevons that night leaning over and looking into the Canal. It was the sentry's sudden springing up to challenge us that saved me. I hoped that it would save Viola. She enjoyed the sentries.

But not this time. Her nerves were all on edge and she showed some irritation at the delay. I felt then that I had to take her in hand.

"My dear child," I said (we were running out on the road to Ghent now), "do you realize that there's a war?"

She answered, "Yes, Wally, yes, I know there is."

"Do you know that Antwerp's over there, a little way to the north? And that they've dragged up the big guns from Namur for the siege of Antwerp?"

"Oh, Wally--_have_ they?"

She turned her face to the north as if she thought she could see or hear the siege-guns.

"But you _said_ Jimmy was in Ghent."

"Jimmy," I said, "is probably in Ghent. If he isn't, he's in Antwerp. Do you know that the battlefields are down there--no--there--to the south, where I'm pointing? There's fighting going on there _now_."

She said, "Yes, dear, I know, I know," very gently; and she put her hand on my knee, as if she recognized the war as my private tragedy and was sorry for me. Then she fell back to her brooding.

Somewhere on the great flagged road between Bruges and Ecloo we met a straggling train of refugees--old men and women and children, bent double under their enormous bundles, making for Bruges and Ostend. They stared, not at us, but at the road in front of them, with a dreadful apathy, as we passed.

"This," I said, "is what finishes _me_--every time I see it."

She said nothing.

"Do you realize," I said, "that those women and those little children are flying for their lives? That they've come, doubled up like that, for miles--from Termonde or Alost? That they've lost everything they ever had?" (I can hear my own voice beating out the horror of it in hard, cruel jerks.) "That their homes--their _homes_--are burned to ashes somewhere down there?"

At my last jerk she turned.

"No," she said. "I'm cold and hard and stupid, and I do _not_ realize it. Neither do you. If either of us realized it for two seconds we should be either cutting our throats in that ditch or going back to Ostend now with a load of those women and children, instead of tearing past them like devils in this damned car.

"I can't realize anything till I know whether Jimmy's all right or not. I can't see anything, or feel anything, or think of anything but Jimmy. Bruges is Jimmy and Belgium is Jimmy and the whole war is Jimmy--to me. I don't care if you _are_ horrified. I can't help it if I _am_ callous. It is so. And you can't make it different."

I remember saying quite abjectly that I was sorry--that I was only trying to turn her mind to other things as a relief.

"I'm to turn my mind to _that_--as a relief!"

She showed me a woman I was trying not to see, a woman who carried the bedding of her household on her back and dragged a four-year-old child by the hand. The child slipped to its knees at every other yard, and at every other yard was pulled up whimpering and dragged again--not with anger or any emotion whatever, but with a sickening repetition, as if its mother's arm was a mechanism set going to pull and drag.

If ever there was a weathercock it was my sister-in-law. Without even pretending to consult me, she made Colville, the chauffeur, turn the car round. (He was _her_ chauffeur, after all, she said.)

"I don't know," she said, "whether I realize that woman or not, or whether you do. But I'm going to take her into Bruges."

And we took her. (Viola nursed the four-year-old child all the way.) We also took an old man and a young woman with a baby at her breast, and two small children. It was the only thing to be done, Viola said.

It was nearly half-past five when we left Bruges the second time.

"God only knows," I groaned, "what time we'll get to Ghent!"

"He does," she said. "He knows perfectly well we shall get there by half-past seven."

And we did.

It was dark when we turned into the Place d'Armes and drew up before the long, grey Hôtel de la Poste. I jumped out and stood by the kerb to give Viola my hand.

"But--" she said, "I _know_ this place."

"You ought to."

I don't know where she expected us to go. She still sat in the car as if held there by the shock of recognition. She ignored my outstretched hand.

"You'd better take your things," she said at last, "if you want to get out here. I'm going on to look for Jimmy."

I had then my first full sense of what I was in for. I saw that she was perfectly prepared to throw me over, to dump me down here or anywhere else and go on by herself with the car and the chauffeur that were, or ought to have been, mine.

She didn't care if I was Special Correspondent to the _Morning Standard_, and she had that beastly chauffeur in her pocket all the time. (I discovered afterwards that she'd laid in food for him and hidden it in the locker under the front seat, so that they might be ready for any sort of adventure.) And yet in the very moment that I realized her disastrous obstinacy I found her intolerably pathetic.

"If you want to look for Jimmy," I said, "you'd better get out too. He'll be here if he's anywhere in Ghent."

But she was already on the kerb, brushing me aside. She had seen behind my back the approach of the concierge and she made for him.

"Is Mr. Jevons in this hotel--Mr. Tasker Jevons?"

Yes, Mr. Chevons was in the hotel. Madame would find him in the lounge.

She had swept past him to the stair of the lounge, and I was following her discreetly when the proprietor dashed out of his bureau to intercept us. The lounge, he said, was reserved from seven till nine o'clock for the officers of the General Staff.

Viola had paid no attention to the proprietor and was sweeping up the stair. I gave Jevons's name and explained that the lady was Mrs. Jevons.

The proprietor, a portly and pompous Belgian, positively dissolved in smiles and bows and apologetic gestures. _Mille pardons, monsieur, mille pardons._ It would be _all_ right. Monsieur Chevons was dining with the officers of the General Staff.

He did not know that Madame was expected. He was to reserve a room for Monsieur?

I told him to reserve rooms for me and the chauffeur, and to consult Mr. Jevons about Madame. And I hurried up the stair after Viola.

She was waiting for me at the turn, on the landing, by the wide archway of the lounge, where the great glass screen began that shut off the staircase. She stood back from the entrance, looking in, and smiling at what she saw. It was clear by her attitude and her absorption that something was happening in there.

As I approached she made a sign to me and withdrew farther back and up the stair.

"He's there," she whispered. "Over there. In that corner."

For a moment we stood together on the stair, looking down through the glass screen into the lounge.

The far end of the lounge had been turned into a dining-place for the officers of the Belgian General Staff. Most of the tables were cleared now and deserted. But from our place on the stair we had a clear view slantwise of one small table in the corner. And we saw Jimmy seated at that table.

At least we made him out.

All but Jimmy's head was hidden by the figures of a Belgian General and two Colonels. They had closed in on him (they were evidently all four at the end of their dinner); they had closed in on him in an access of emotion and enthusiasm. The General (the one who sat beside him) had his arm round Jimmy's shoulder; the two who sat facing him leaned towards Jimmy over half the table, and one grasped Jimmy's right hand in his; the other was making some sort of competitive demonstration. The disengaged arms of the three held up the glasses in which they were about to pledge him. And at the other end of the room a scattered group of soldiers rose to their feet and looked on smiling and signalling applause.

What was happening down there was public homage to Jimmy.

And in between the two dark Belgian uniforms that obscured him you could just see a bit of Jimmy's khaki, and from among the white and grizzled heads that pressed on him you saw Jimmy's face and Jimmy's flush and Jimmy's twinkle; his incredible, irrepressible twinkle. You could even see the tips of Jimmy's little front teeth trying to bite down his lip into some sort of composure. You could see that he was very shy and very modest; you could see that in spite of his shyness and his modesty he was frightfully pleased; but more than anything you could see that he was amused.

Positively, positively, he had the air of not taking his Belgian officers very seriously.

"We mustn't go down yet," said Viola, "or we'll spoil it."

So we waited, looking at Jimmy through the screen, while the officers clinked their glasses and drank to him and called his name; and the group that looked on echoed it; and the waiters who had come in to see what was happening, repeated it among themselves.

"_Vive l'Angleterre! Vive les Anglais! Vive Chevons! Chevons! Chevons!_"

"I wonder," said Viola, "what Jimmy has been up to? You can take me to him."

When we got to the table we found Jimmy trying to explain to the General and the two Colonels in execrable French that he didn't know what it was all about. _He_ hadn't done anything.

Then he saw Viola.

For one second, while he stared at her across the room, he appeared to be suffering from a violent shock. He was so visibly hit that the two men who had their backs to us turned round to see what it was that had affected him. His flush had gone suddenly and he was breathing hard, with his mouth a little open.

I heard him saying something in French about his wife.

He recovered, however, in a second, and disentangled himself from the General and the Colonels and from the dinner-table, and came forward.

And as he came, I noticed something odd about him. He limped slightly. His khaki had a battered look; it was soiled and torn in places, and the Red Cross brassard on his sleeve was simply filthy.

And he had only been out three days, mind you. He was only three days ahead of us. But he had lost no time.

As they strolled up to each other and met midway in the big public room, in the fraction of time that passed before their hands touched I heard him draw a hard, quivering breath and let it out in a long sigh. That breath was a suppressed cry of trouble and of acquiescence.

Then (I could have blessed him for it) he twinkled.

Viola said, "What _have_ you been up to?"

And Jimmy, "I say, I like that! What are _you_ doing here? Have you come to look at the Belfry?"

"No. I've come to look at _you_!" She put her hand on his shoulder.

He said, "That's a jolly rig-out you've got," and that was all.

The General and the two Colonels came forward and were presented to Mrs. Jevons; and Mr. Walter Furnival ("one of our war-correspondents") was presented to the General and the two Colonels. They saluted Madame; they begged Madame to accept their profoundest congratulations; they regretted that Madame had not been present just now when they were drinking her husband's health.

And the old General (the one with the white hair and imperial) informed her that Monsieur her husband had a very poor opinion of the Belgian Army.

"He has saved the lives of three Belgian officers and I do not know _how_ many Belgian soldiers--and he says that it is nothing!"

And the stout, florid Colonel, who had been trying to look young and rakish ever since he had turned and caught sight of Viola, suggested that "Perhaps, if he had saved your British, he would not have said that it was nothing."

And the lean, iron-grey Colonel with the ferocious moustache remarked in an austere, guttural voice, "_Il est impayable--lui!_"

Jimmy had been offering cigarettes to them as if he thought that was the only thing that would stop them. Then the old white-haired General sat between Viola and him with his arm round Jimmy's shoulder and began again, so loudly that everybody in the room could hear him.

"Your husband, Madame, is a man who does not know what fear is--who does not care what death is. For two nights and three days, Madame, he has been down there--at Alost and Termonde--under shell-fire. _Mais--un enfer, Madame!_ You would have thought he had been born under fire, your husband. _Ce n'est pas un homme, c'est un salamandre_. Bullets--mitrailleuse--shrapnel--it is no more to him than to go out in a shower of rain. When our men were scuttling, and shouted to him to get under shelter, what do you think he said?--'_Ouvrir une parapluie--ça ne vaut pas la peine_."

There was a shout of laughter.

"That," said Viola, "is the sort of thing he _would_ say. And please, I want to know what's the matter with his leg."

I can see her now, sitting on that crimson velvet seat in the lounge and looking past the gesticulations of the General to Jevons, who was shaking his head at her as much as to say, "Don't you believe the old boy, he's a shocking story-teller."

The old General seemed aware of her preoccupation, for he rose, murmuring affectionately, "_Mon petit Chevons_. I will not praise him to you, Madame. No doubt you know what he is."

I can see her standing up there and giving her hand to the old General and trying to stiffen her face to say, "I know."

Evidently she thought General Roubaix was too voluble to be entirely trustworthy, for, when he left us and Jimmy had gone out to see about our dinner, she addressed herself to the two Colonels.

"Please tell me what my husband _really_ did."

Both the Colonels tried to tell her; but it was the younger one with the moustache (the one who had said that Jimmy was _"impayable"_) who satisfied her.

It was true, every bit of it. Jevons, it seemed, had been in the thick of the bombardment of Alost and in the fighting for the bridge at Termonde. His practice was to leave Kendal and the motor-car behind him in some place of shelter while he walked into the fire. Sometimes he took his Belgian stretcher-bearers with him, sometimes, when they didn't like the look of it, he went by himself. He didn't care, the Colonel said, _where_ he went or how. If it was through rifle-fire or mitrailleuse he went on his hands and knees--he wriggled on his stomach. If it was shrapnel he took his chance. He had saved one of his three officers by carrying him straight out of his own battery, when the German guns had found its range; and he had driven his car, by himself, across a five-mile-long field, under a hailstorm of shrapnel, to get the other two.

"You see," the Colonel expounded, "your husband has chosen the most dangerous of all field ambulance work. Those high-speed scouting cars, running low on the ground, can go where a big ambulance cannot. It is magnificent what he has done."

When Jevons came back they could still hardly keep their eyes off him; they could hardly tear themselves away. It was "_À demain, Monsieur_," and "_À demain, Colonel_" as if they had arranged another deadly tryst.

"Well," said Jimmy, "how do you like them?"

"Oh--they're dears," said Viola, "especially the one with the moustache. Do you know, they've told me everything except what's the matter with leg."

"My leg?" said Jimmy. "A bit of shell barked it. I'm jolly glad it's my leg and not my hand."

I was a little frightened when Viola left us alone after dinner. I thought he would pitch into me for bringing her. But he only said sadly, "You oughtn't to have brought her, Furny. But I suppose you couldn't stop her."

I said, No, I couldn't stop her. But I hadn't brought her. She had brought me.

We sat on till the lounge was open to the guests of the hotel. And when the war-correspondents began to drop in I saw that Jevons was uneasy.

"D'you mind if I turn in, old man?" he said.

I asked him if his wound was hurting him.

He stooped and caressed it pensively.

"No," he said. "Not a bit. I like my wound. It--it makes me feel manly."

Presently he said good night and left me.

I thought--yes, I certainly thought--that he exaggerated his limp a little as he crossed the room, and for a moment I wondered, "Is he playing up to the correspondents?"

Then I saw that Viola stood in the doorway waiting for him and that she gave him her arm.

And then through the glass screen I saw them going together up the stair. And I remembered the tale that he had told me nine years ago, how he had seen her standing there and looking down at him--half frightened--through the glass screen, and how he had said to me, "I couldn't. She was so helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I couldn't."

It was the same room and the same glass screen and the same stair. And it was the same man. I knew him. I knew him. I had always known him. (Was there ever any risk he hadn't taken?) I had never, really, for one moment misunderstood.

I certainly knew why he "liked" his wound.

XIV

We had breakfast very early the next morning, for Jevons was under orders to start at eight o'clock for Termonde. We had a table reserved for us in a corner of the restaurant. The hotel was full of Belgian officers, and I found I was infinitely better off in attaching myself to Jevons than if I had joined the war-correspondents.

Viola (I may say that her rig-out which Jevons had admired so much, the khaki tunic and breeches, made us terribly conspicuous) had come down in a contrite mood. I heard her telling Jevons that he must be kind to me, for I had had an awful time with her and I had been an angel.

Well, I had had an awful time; I don't think I remember ever having had a worse time than the hours I had spent in her company since she had laid into me on Tuesday evening.

But I had not been an angel; far from it. Looking back on those hours, I can see that I behaved to her like a perfect brute.

She had her revenge. One of those revenges that are the more triumphant because they are unpremeditated. She had dished me as a war-correspondent.

For I declare that from the moment when we found Jevons and his General in the hotel I became the victim of her miserable point of view. I could only see the war through Jevons, and as a part of Jevons; I might have said, like Viola, that to me Ghent was Jevons, and Belgium was Jevons, and the war was Jevons. I suppose I saw as much of the War from first to last as any Special Correspondent at the front, and I know, that, barring the Siege of Antwerp, the three weeks when Jimmy was in it were by no means the most important or the most thrilling weeks in the war; and of the one event, the Siege of Antwerp, I didn't see as much as I ought to have seen, being most terribly handicapped by Viola. And yet--perhaps a little because of Viola, but infinitely more because of Jevons--those three weeks stand out in my memory before the battles of the Aisne and Marne and the long fight for Calais. Because of Jevons I have made them figure, in the columns of the _Morning Standard_ and elsewhere, with a superior vividness; even now when I recall them I seem to have lived with Jevons in Flanders through long periods of time.

I have the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of the _Morning Standard_, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written a very fine account of Melle, which I understand is a small village four and a-half miles from Ghent. But there are other events--the Fall of Antwerp, for instance."

Well, we got the story of the Fall of Antwerp all right. But Jimmy wrote it for me. It was the last thing he did write.

Yes: he had only three weeks of it, all told. He went out on Tuesday, September the twenty-second, and he came back on Tuesday, October the thirteenth. It was his infernal luck that he should have had no more of it.

And yet, I don't know. I don't see how he could have held out much longer at his pitch of intensity. Three weeks would have been nothing to any other man. But Jevons could do more with three weeks than another man could do with a three years' campaign, and he contrived to crowd into his term the maximum of glory and of risk. And when it was all over it was less as if Fate had foiled him than as if he had "given" himself three weeks.

But Jimmy was discontented, and every morning at breakfast we listened to the most extraordinary lamentations. His job, he said, wasn't at all the jolly thing it looked. For he was under orders the whole blessed time. He'd no more freedom, hadn't Jimmy, than that poor devil of a waiter. He'd got to go or to stay where a fussy old ram of a Colonel sent him. So here he was in Ghent, an open city, when he wanted to be in Antwerp. He hadn't been anywhere--anywhere at all. As for what he'd done, he couldn't see what the fuss was all about. He hadn't done anything. He'd seen a little fight in a turnip-field, and a little squabble for a bridge you could blow up to-day and build again to-morrow, and a little tin-pot town peppered. And look at the war! Just look at the war!

And when we tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo, the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There wouldn't be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said. "There won't be any Waterloo for another two years, if then."

He wasn't always lugubrious. It was only when he thought that he was missing the Siege of Antwerp that his happiness was incomplete.

It was on our third morning, when he rushed off joyously (to Quatrecht, I think), that I said to Viola, "You thought it would hurt him more than other people. You needn't have come out after him. You see how much it's hurting him."

"I'm glad I came," she said. "I don't mind as long as I can see."

"Do you remember him telling Reggie that he wouldn't be in the war because he was a coward? Don't you wish Reggie could see him now?"

She didn't answer, and I saw that there was still a sting for her in Reggie's name. The war might have made her forgive him, but there were things that the war couldn't wipe out from her memory. And there was her own rather appalling injustice to Jimmy. I wondered whether she was thinking of how she had tried to stop his going to the front, and how she had said he didn't want to go.

But I had to own that she had done the best thing for her peace of mind by coming out.

_My_ peace of mind, I was told quite frankly, didn't matter. Jevons, though he admitted that I couldn't have stopped her coming out, made me responsible for her presence at the seat of war. The trouble was that she insisted on following him wherever he went. And as it wasn't to be expected that he would take her with him into the tight places that he managed to get into in his own car, I had to have her in mine. Not that Viola consented to my putting it that way. It was clear that she made herself mistress of the situation when she obtained possession of that car and manoeuvred (as I am convinced she did manoeuvre) for my own failure with the firm that supplied it. On our first morning in Ghent we came to what she called an understanding, when she rubbed it well into me that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out, and that the man was under her orders, not mine. If I liked to come with her, why, of course I could. Otherwise, I could go halves with one of the other correspondents in one of their cars. But she pointed out that I could hardly do better than come with her, for by simply following Jimmy I should get nearer to the firing-line than anybody else. (She had assumed that the firing-line was the goal of every war-correspondent's ambition.) I would find, she said, that it would work quite well.

It did. It worked better than if I had gone halves with the other correspondents. For at this time war-correspondents were not greatly loved by the military authorities, and they were having considerable difficulty in getting near anything, and the time, Jimmy said, was coming when they would be cleared neck and crop out of Belgium. My astute sister-in-law had calculated on all this and on her own part in it.

"If you'll only trust me, Wally," she said the first day we started, when all the correspondents in the hotel had turned out to see us off, "you'll find that I'm your Providence and not your curse. I can get you through where you'd never get yourself. Just look at those men how sick they are."

I said I thought it would be only decent to take two or three of them with us. We had room.

But Viola was firm. She said it would be most indecent. We should want all the room we had for our wounded.

"Do you suppose I'm going to chivy Jimmy about without doing anything to help him? As for you, you've only to sit tight and do what you're told. You'll be all right as long as we follow Jimmy."

And so we followed him. My God, what a chase! But Viola's little chauffeur was game and we followed. Though Jimmy had made elaborate arrangements for stopping his wife's progress at least two miles outside the danger-zone she always managed to get through. Sentries, colonels, army medical officers--she twisted them into coils round her little finger, and cast them from her and got through. And once through, we were really quite useful in transporting wounded. Jevons and I between us managed to keep her out of the actual firing-line by telling her she was in all of it there was; and when we were loaded up with wounded there was no difficulty in getting her away.

And certainly it served my turn well enough. Though I was compelled to see the war through Jimmy, I saw the war.

By the end of our first week Jimmy seemed to get used to being followed as a matter of course. We had followed him to Alost and Termonde and Quatrecht and Zele. When we weren't following him we were near him somewhere, working at the dressing-stations or among the refugees.

Then he did a mean thing. He managed to get himself sent to Antwerp for three days. He sneaked off there by himself on the Sunday, and when we tried to follow him we were turned back at Saint Nicolas, just too late to see the British go through. He had worked it this time.

When he got back from Antwerp at the end of his three days we knew that something had happened, something that he was keeping from us. It wasn't only the fate of Antwerp that was hanging over him, as it hung over all of us in that awful second week. It was as if he had seen something intimate and terrible that he couldn't talk about.

That night after Viola had gone to her room he told me what had happened. He had seen Charlie Thesiger's regiment at Saint Nicolas on Sunday. And to-day--which was Tuesday--he had seen Charlie Thesiger. He had found him lying dangerously wounded in the British Hospital at Antwerp. That, he said, was what had kept him there. And he had brought him back with him to Ghent. He was in the Couvent de Saint Pierre.

He thought, perhaps, it would be better not to tell Viola just yet. Charlie didn't know, he said, that she was here.

The war was beginning to close round us.

* * * * *

The next day (Wednesday) he announced that he was going to Zele; but he didn't, he really didn't want me to take Viola there. I could go by myself, of course, if I liked, though he didn't care about her being left.

But we did go. Viola's blood was up, after what she called Jimmy's meanness, and there was no keeping her back.

We were a little uncertain of our way, for following Jimmy as we did, or rather, following the direction Colville swore he had seen him start in, took us much too far to the north. We found ourselves on the Antwerp road, jammed in the traffic, and caught by a stream of refugees. We were obliged to turn back to Ghent to get our bearings, but the business of transporting women and children kept us on the Antwerp road all morning, and it was past two o'clock before we started for Zele.

I remember this particular chase after Jimmy for many reasons. First, we lost our way and never got to Zele at all.

Down in the south-east on the sky-line we saw a fleet of little clouds that seemed to be anchored to the earth, and every cloud of the fleet was the smoke from a burning village. West of the fleet was an enormous cloud blown by the wind across miles of sky.

Viola was certain that the big cloud was Zele being burned to the ground, and that Jimmy would be burned with it.

When I told her that it wasn't likely that Jimmy would stay in Zele when it was burning she said that I didn't know Jimmy, and anyhow it was there that she was going.

Suddenly Viola sat up very straight.

"Furny, is that guns I hear, or thunder?"

I said it was guns. A deep and solemn booming came from before and behind us and on either side, east and west. We had rushed bang between the French and German batteries.

The big cloud turned out to be smoke from a factory that the Belgians had set fire to themselves, and in following it we had gone miles from Zele. Now we followed the guns.

We turned east and struck off south and found ourselves in the village of Baerlere. The lines of fire seemed suddenly to narrow in on us here.

There was a clean path down the centre of the street, for men and horses stood back close under the housewalls on each side. The place was full of soldiers. One of them told us that we could get to Zele by going east through the village, but as the road was being shelled, he didn't advise us to try.

We went down that clean middle of the street. We were safe enough as long as we ran between the houses; but the village very soon came to an end, and then, in the open road, we were in for it.

The fields dropped away from us on each side, leaving us as naked to the German batteries as if we were running on a raised causeway. At the bottom of the fields to our right there was a line of willows, beyond the willows there was the river, and behind the river bank, on the further side, were the German lines.

The grey smoke of their fire was still tangled in the willow-tops.

Colville drew up under the lee of the last house in the village. He didn't like the look of that open road. Neither did I.

"Go on," said Viola. "What are you stopping for?"

The guns ceased firing for a moment and we rushed it.

"I do wish," said Viola, "you'd tuck your arm in, Furny. It's your right arm and you're on the wrong side of the car."

I asked her what made her think of my right arm just then.

"Because it's the only part of himself that Jimmy ever thinks of," she said.

There was about three-quarters of a mile of causeway and it ended in a little hamlet. And the hamlet--it had been knocked to bits before we got into it--the hamlet ended in a hillock of bricks and mortar.

The road to Zele was completely blocked.

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

"You've got to take it," said Viola.

"Sorry, m'm. It can't be done. You want a motor traction with caterpillar wheels for this business."

He was backing the car when a shell burst and buried itself in the place where we had stood.

To my horror I saw that Viola had opened the door of the car and was getting out.

"What on earth are you doing?" I said.

"I'm going to walk to Zele."

I pulled her back and held her down in her seat by main force. She was horribly strong. And as she struggled with me she said quietly, "It's all right. You two _must_ go back and I must go to Jimmy."

I shouted to Colville, "Turn her round, can't you, and get out of this."

He turned her. He drew up deftly under the shelter of a barn that still stood intact. Then he spoke.

"Are you quite sure, sir, that Mr. Jevons is in that place? Because, sir, I heard Kendal say something this morning about their going to Antwerp."

"Then why the devil didn't you say so?"

"I didn't think of it, sir, until I saw Mrs. Jevons getting out."

He added by way of afterthought, "Besides, I promised Kendal. You and Mrs. Jevons wasn't to know he was going on to Antwerp."

Viola and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.

Somewhere behind us from beyond the river a gun boomed and we took no notice of it. We went on laughing.

"He's had us again," she said.

"Yes. We've been done this time. Well--we'd better scoot."

We made a rush for it between guns and got to Baerlere. Once we were out of the village and heading for the Ghent road we were safe.

We were hardly out of sound of the guns when I heard Viola saying, "You know it really _was_ funny of Jimmy."

I said, "He won't think it quite so funny when he hears what we've done."

He didn't think it funny at all. He was furious when he heard what we'd done. He forbade Viola to follow him again. He threatened to sack Colville. He said he'd have me sent home to-morrow and kept there, and Viola should go with me.

And when he'd finished he told us that Antwerp had fallen.

That was how Jevons came to write the story of the Fall of Antwerp instead of me.

Well, he didn't sack Colville; and he didn't get me packed off with the other war-correspondents who left Ghent in a body the next day. And he said nothing about sending Viola away. He did better than that. He told her he had brought Charlie Thesiger from Antwerp yesterday, and that her cousin was dying in the Couvent de Saint Pierre, and that perhaps it would be a bit easier for him if she were with him.

We took her to the convent that morning. On the way there she asked Jimmy why he hadn't told her about Charlie yesterday. He said that up till midnight we weren't absolutely certain that Charlie wouldn't recover, and that she was safer with us in the hotel than she would be away from us in the convent.

"My safety is to be considered before everything?" she said.

He answered that it was surely enough for her if he risked it now.

I can't think why she didn't see through him. I and Kendal and Colville knew perfectly well that he was taking her to the convent to be safe. I think he argued that if she had poor Charlie to look after it would keep her quiet, and she would be out of mischief till it was time for the Germans to march into Ghent.

So we took her to him.

We found him in a little whitewashed cell that one of the sisters had given up to him. He lay under a crucifix on the nun's narrow bed, which was too short for him, so that his naked feet showed through the blankets at the bottom. The naked feet of the Christ pointed downwards to his head.

He had been shot through the lungs and was dying of pneumonia, sending out his breath in fierce, rapid jerks.

He lay on his side with his back towards us, and his face was hidden from us as we came in.

The sister who sat with him made a sign that said, "Oh yes, you can come in, all of you; it will make no difference."

The cell was so small that Jevons and I had to draw back and let Viola go in by herself. We two stood in the doorway and looked in. After the first glance at the bed--it was enough for me--I looked, I couldn't help looking, at Viola, (Jevons, I noticed, kept his eyes fixed on the body of the dying man.) I heard her catch her breath in a sob before she could have seen him.

He had slipped his blankets from his shoulder, and it was the sight of his back--under the half-open hospital shirt which showed the bandages and dressings of his wound--that upset her; his back that might have been any man's back, the innocent back that she had no memory of, that disguised and hid him from her and made him strange to her and utterly pathetic. And then, there was the back of his head, sunk like lead into his pillow. The cropped hair had begun to grow. You could see a little greyish tuft. You wouldn't have known that it was Charlie's head.

She went slowly round the bed, taking care not to graze the feet that were stretched out to her. And then she saw him.

She saw a deep purplish flush and glazed eyes that couldn't see her, and a greyish beard pointing on an unshaved jaw; and a mouth half open, jerking out its breath. She laid her left hand on his shoulder and with her right she held the limp hand that hung over the mattress.

I heard her say in French, "If only he knew me--"

And the nun, "Perhaps--at the end--he will know you."

And we left her there with his hand in her right hand and her left hand on his shoulder. She was on her honour to stay with him till the end; but her eyes were fixed on Jevons, and they followed him as he went through the doorway of the cell.

* * * * *

The very minute he had left her Jimmy made his bolt for Lokeren. He said he didn't want me; but I had seen Viola's eyes, and I said it would be safer. If I took Viola's car and Colville, she couldn't follow us.

"She won't follow us," he said. "She can't leave him."

We made the first bolt into Lokeren together; and we got out, each with a load of wounded, just as the Germans were coming in. He made his second bolt by himself and secretly, while Colville and I were lunching. We followed, and were stopped in a village two miles from Lokeren.

A Belgian Red Cross man met us here and told us that Jevons had got through in spite of them, and they didn't in the least expect him to come back again. He shrugged his shoulders and seemed to be disgusted and annoyed with Jimmy rather than to admire him.

We hung about in that village an interminable time. I do not remember its name, if I ever knew it; but I know and remember every house in it and every tree in the avenue at the turn of the grey road that led to Lokeren, and even now, in my worst dreams, I find myself in the little plantation at the end of the village on the left where the railway siding is, and where the trains came in loaded with wounded. I am always waiting for Jimmy and looking for Jimmy and not finding him. And at one point I always stumble over Viola's body. I find her lying wounded in a ditch that runs through the plantation. And when I find her I know that Jimmy is dead. And that frightens me--Jimmy's death, I mean, not Viola's body. I take Viola's body as a matter of course.

It is an abominable dream.

But even that dream is not more astonishing, and it is far less improbable than what I was to see. We were at the end of the village. Colville had drawn our car up in the middle of the street, and I was standing by him, when two Belgian soldiers rushed up to us, pointing up the road, and shouting to Colville to clear out of the way.

I turned. Round the bend of the road where the avenue of trees was I saw a train of horses and gun-carriages careening with the curve, and a battery of Belgian artillery came charging down in full retreat. And now in the middle of the battery as if he were part of it and informed it with his energy and speed, and now in front of it as if he led it, and joyous as if he had turned its retreat into a victory, came Jimmy driving his car.

The inside of the car was packed with wounded men; and, wedged up against Jimmy, and standing on the steps, and sitting on the bonnet, and hanging on wherever they could find a foothold and hang, were seven officers and soldiers of the Belgian Army.

Kendal--bleeding profusely from a flesh wound on his forehead, but otherwise unhurt--sat inside among the wounded.

It _had_ been a victory for Jimmy. He had advanced within fifty yards of the German lines, he had picked up two of his wounded from under their sentry's fire, and the rest of the men and the officers he had gathered on his way.

We sent them all to Ghent with Colville.

Before he left, Kendal implored us just to look at Mr. Jevons's car.

Mr. Jevons's car was worth looking at. It had a hole in the back of it where a bullet had gone clean through and buried itself in the cushions. There were five bullet-holes in its hood. Its flank was scraped by a flying fragment of shell, the same that had tilted its right rear splash-board. Inside, its canvas covers and its rubber mat were stained with blood.

Drawn up motionless in that village street and stared at, Jimmy's car had something of its old self-conscious air. It looked pleased, and at the same time surprised at itself.

And while Jevons was dressing and bandaging his flesh-wound for him an idea struck Kendal and he grinned.

"D'you remember the time, sir, when you wouldn't let her out if there was a spot of rain?"

"I do," said Jevons.

"And look at her now--not three weeks. What a life she's 'ad!"

And when Kendal (he was as pleased as Punch with his bandage) when Kendal had climbed into Colville's car, Jimmy turned his round again; though the officers implored him to come on, for the Germans were on our backs. But Jimmy only jerked his thumb in the direction of Lokeren and made his third bolt. I scrambled in beside him as he started.

I don't mind saying that I hated this adventure. It was one thing to go into Antwerp when the Germans were so busy storming it that they couldn't attend to you, and quite another thing to be alone with Jimmy on that horrid grey road with the Germans coming every minute round the turn of it.

Jimmy explained that there was a wounded man hiding in a ditch about a mile from Lokeren, and he'd got to fetch him.

We fetched him and another car-load without any misadventure.

When we got back to our village we found a Field Ambulance there. Jimmy said, "I believe that's _my_ Field Ambulance." Presently he gave a start that made the car swerve as if he had run over a dog.

"Well, I'm damned if there isn't Viola."

Yes, there she was. She had come out with the Field Ambulance. And it _was_ Jimmy's Field Ambulance, the one that had been sent out without him. It had come on into Ghent from Antwerp yesterday, and Viola had found it.

"This is too bad," said Jevons. "You ought to be looking after Charlie. Why _aren't_ you looking after him?"

"Charlie," she said, "died three hours ago--at twelve o'clock."

It wasn't five hours since we had left her with him in the nun's cell under the crucifix. I don't think I had realized it before, but now it came over me as a new and strange thing, how little he had mattered. Then it struck me that Jevons must have known it all the time.

"I've done everything," she said, "that had to be done. And I've written to Aunt Matty and Uncle George--and Mildred."

"Mildred?" I wondered.

"Well--_yes_."

Jevons and I had forgotten Mildred. We had forgotten her engagement to Charlie, though I suppose nobody knew better than we did why it had been broken off.

To his father and mother and Mildred he _did_ matter.

And perhaps he mattered to Viola, in a way; for she said she would have given anything to have saved him. He must have mattered to Jevons when he brought him from Antwerp and when we buried him in Ghent.

And the cross on his grave reproves me, reminding me that to his country he mattered supremely, after all.

* * * * *

After Lokeren Jevons and I tried to come to terms with Viola.

The conference took place upstairs in their bedroom, where we had withdrawn for greater privacy. Viola sat on the one chair and Jimmy and I on the bed. Jimmy did most of the talking.

He said, "Look here, my dear child, if there wasn't a war on, I wouldn't stand in the way of your amusement for the world. And there's a great deal to be said for you. _I_ think you adorable in a tunic and breeches, and General Roubaix agrees with me, if Furny doesn't. We all think you heroic, and you are sometimes useful. But there isn't a thing you've done yet that a man can't do better--except getting Furny through the lines, and nobody wants Furny _in_ the lines. And when _you're_ in them you've a moral effect equal to about ten seventeen-inch guns. If the men see you hovering round their trenches they're so jumpy they can hardly hold their rifles. If Kendal sees you he's so jumpy he can hardly steer. Colville says he'd rather hang himself than go through another day like Baerlere. Furny all but lost his job on the _Morning Standard_ because he was told off to look after you when he ought to have gone to Antwerp--he _would_ have lost it if I hadn't done his work for him. And you don't make things easier for _me_. Good God!--sometimes I don't know what I'm doing.

"It isn't fair on us. It isn't fair."

"It isn't fair on _me_," she said. "_I_'m jumpy when I'm kept back. You don't know what it's like, Jimmy. _Don't_ turn me back."

And the poor child began to talk about her duty to the wounded, and that made him burst out again.

"The wounded? If you think you're any more comfort to the wounded than you are to Furny and me I can tell you you're mistaken. There was a poor devil at Lokeren the other day with a bullet in his stomach who told me he didn't mind his wounds and he didn't mind the Germans; what worried him was the lady being there when he wasn't able to defend her."

She tilted her chin at that and said she didn't want anybody to defend her.

"Perhaps you don't, but what would you think of a man who didn't want to defend you? What would you think of Furny and me if we wanted you to be here?"

"I should like you to want me," she said.

"No, my dear child, you wouldn't. You don't know what you're saying."

And then he said, "I know better than you do what you want. Men aren't made like that--if they _are_ men. You can't have it both ways." And he said something about chivalry that drove her back in sheer self-defence on a Feminist line. She said that nowadays women had chivalry too.

"And _our_ chivalry is to go down before yours?"

"Can't you have both?"

"Not in war-time. _Your_ chivalry is to keep back and not make yourself a danger and a nuisance."

"Come," she said, "what about Joan of Arc?" And that was too much for Jimmy. He jumped up off the bed and walked away from her and sat on the table as if it gave him some advantage.

"No, no," he said. "I can't stand that rot. When you're a saint--or I'm a saint--you can talk about Joan of Arc. If you want to be Joan of Arc go and be it with some man who isn't your husband--who isn't in love with you. Perhaps _he_ won't mind. Go with Furny if you like, though it's rather hard on him."

I said I thought he was rather hard on Viola--if he'd seen the poor child at Baerlere, flinging herself out of the car and proposing to climb over the ruins of several houses and walk by herself--under shell-fire--to Zele, because she thought he was there--

Jimmy looked at her; and he did what he had done that night when he saw her coming towards him in the lounge. He sighed a long sigh of complicated anguish and satisfaction.

She heard it and she understood it, and she said, "I can't help it if I am like that. You'll have to take the risk of me. Please go away, Furny."

And I went.

* * * * *

Norah has been reading what I've just written, and she tells me that there's a great deal about Jimmy's "joy" and his "adventure" and all that; and not one word about his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice. She says I don't give a serious impression of him. He might have gone out to the war just for fun, and that it isn't fair to him.

I don't know whether it's fair or not. I write as he compels me to write. I find that I cannot separate his joy and his adventure from his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice; he didn't separate them himself. I don't even know that self-sacrifice is really the word for it; and the impression he gave me is just that--of going out for fun. It was the wild humour of his devotion that made it the spectacle it was.

(She has told me that it's all right, so long as I recognize that it _was_ devotion.)

After Lokeren I had no desire to go through the rest of the war with Jimmy. To be with Jimmy was destruction to your sense of values. I have got it firmly fixed in my head that the taking of Lokeren was an important affair.

As for what Jimmy called the "tinpot bombardment of Melle" (there was nothing wrong with _his_ sense of values), I shall see it insanely, for ever and ever, as _the_ event of the war.

And there is this to be said, that Lokeren filled the last gap in the line closing round Ghent, north, south and east, and drew it tighter. And Melle (only four and a-half miles away) was the last point in the German advance on Ghent. The taking of Melle would be a sign to us that the game was up.

For three days Jimmy operated joyously in the village and over the leagues of turnip-fields that lay outside it.

Of the first two days I remember an endless tramping over endless furrows that were ditches for the dead; an endless staggering under stretchers that dripped blood; an endless struggling with Viola to keep her under shelter of the walls; each of those acts seemed to be endless, though one gave place to the other, and it was only the firing that went on all the time, till even Jimmy complained once or twice that he was fed up with it.

I remember that Jimmy's Field Ambulance played a great part in these adventures. I remember feeling a malicious satisfaction in the thought that at the same time it was compelled to witness _his_ performances. It couldn't miss him.

I remember all these things; but of Melle itself I remember nothing but the Town Hall, with its double flight of steps up to its door, and the two tall stone pillars, one on each side of the door, and the Greek pediment above it; that and the little old Flemish house that stood back by itself on the other side of the road, and its white walls and its red-tiled roof, and the two green poplars in its garden, mounting guard. The house and its garden and its poplars are always vivid and still; they always appear to me as charged with mystery and significance and as connected in some secret way with Jimmy's fate.

In the pauses of our movements the Field Ambulance and Jimmy's car and Viola's were always drawn up before the Town Hall, facing the little house.

Then came Sunday, the eleventh, the third day of Melle, when Viola was left behind at Ghent.

Jimmy had made her promise on her honour to be brave, _this_ time, and stay in the hotel and wait for orders.

Colville stayed with her. They were to pack our things and be ready to leave at a minute's notice. Colville had secret orders that, if we were not back by midnight, he was to take Viola on to Bruges in his car, and wait for us there.

For we knew now that we were in for it.

And we knew that the war, which was coming closer and closer to the city, was coming closer to us. It had been Charlie Thesiger first, now it might be Reggie. At least, we knew that Reggie's regiment, the Third ----shires, had come up from Ostend the day before, that it was quartered somewhere between Ghent and Melle, and that it had been engaged at Quatrecht.

Our own orders were to stick to Melle.

I suppose from the way the ambulances were massed there that the end had been foreseen. That afternoon the battle began to sweep round from Quatrecht to Melle; and on our third journey out a rumour reached us at the barrier where the sentry stood guard. It was one of those preposterous rumours that run before disaster and are started God knows how when a retreat begins. I think it was the Belgian Red Cross men who spread it, for I heard the guide who went with Jimmy's Field Ambulance assuring him seriously that seven thousand British had been surrounded and cut to pieces on the road between Quatrecht and Melle. To be sure the number diminished with each repetition of the tale, dropping from seven thousand to seven hundred and from seven hundred to seventy. But in another hour we were bringing in the men of the ----shires.

And towards the end of the day the real bombardment of Melle began, and on our last journey out we and Jimmy's Field Ambulance were in the thick of it.

I can remember nothing of that bombardment but the three shells.

The first ripped open the roof of the Town Hall and set fire to it.

The second struck the Greek pediment and brought the whole front toppling into the street.

Then, about five minutes after, there was the third shell.

The light was going out of the sky, so that we saw the first shell like a sheet of curved lightning making for the village as we approached from the Ghent side. There was a deadly attraction about the thing that made you feel that it and you were the only objects in God's universe, and that you were about to be merged in each other. It looked as if it were rushing out of heaven straight for us, so that we were surprised when it apparently swerved aside and hit the Town Hall instead.

(Jimmy and I were in the front of the car. Kendal, whose flesh wound was beginning to worry him, sat behind.)

A battery of artillery charged past us, followed by the remnants of a French regiment on the run. Jimmy put more speed on. By the time we got into the village the Town Hall was spouting flame.

Jimmy drew up his car about fifty yards away from it. The Field Ambulance had turned, and took its stand a little further away behind us, under the cover of the opposite walls. Its men began dragging out their stretchers. Kendal and I made ready with ours. The wounded were being brought out of every house they were in.

A Belgian Colonel rode past us, trying to look unaware that he was retreating. He shouted to us to clear out of it. This was the only sign of interest that he showed.

Somebody else came up to Jevons and told him that there were three or four wounded men somewhere inside the Town Hall, but that the place was on fire and it was absolutely impossible to get them out. He advised us to pick up the men who were lying in the street, and clear out.

I saw Jevons nod his head as if he agreed and consented. I saw him get out of the car. And then I heard Kendal say, "Give us a hand, sir," and I turned to my stretchers.

When I looked round again Jevons was running towards the Town Hall. The man who had told us to pick up our wounded and clear out was looking after him with a face of the most perfect horror.

Kendal and I followed with the stretchers, and we saw Jevons run up the steps of the Town Hall. He turned at the top of the steps and waved to us to keep back.

Then he went through the big doors between the pillars.

There was a crash and a roar as if the whole building had fallen in. It was the top story plunging to the second floor. The upper half of the Town Hall was like a crate filled with blazing straw. The Greek pediment was the only solid thing that subsisted in that fire.

Then the first floor was caught. It burned more slowly.

Kendal and I and the ambulance men ran forward with the stretchers. And Jimmy came through the doors carrying a wounded Frenchman. He went in again and came out with another Frenchman.

(The ground floor had begun to burn behind him.)

He went in a third time and came out with Reggie Thesiger.

He must have had to go further into the hall to find him, for it was a much longer business. We, Kendal and I, were down the street by the ambulance when they came out, and I didn't see that it was Reggie till I heard Kendal say, "Sir, that's Major Thesiger he's got!"

Reggie's arm was round Jimmy's shoulder and Jimmy's arm was round Reggie's waist. He half carried, half supported him. He came out in the middle of a cloud of smoke that hid him. The smoke was followed by a burst of fire and another crash and roar as the ceiling of the first story plunged to the ground floor.

With all this going on behind him Jevons paused on the top of the steps to readjust his burden to the descent. We heard afterwards that Reggie had said, "You'd better leave me, old man, and scoot. You can't do it."

It didn't look as if he could. But as we went back to them we saw that Jevons had heaved Reggie over his shoulder and was carrying him down the steps. He came very carefully and slowly, so that we had reached the Town Hall before he had staggered to the last step.

As we pressed closer to help him he told us to get back if we didn't want the whole damned place down on the top of us.

We gave back and he followed us. I don't know how we got Reggie on to the stretcher--he had a piece of shell somewhere in his thigh--but we did it and ran with him to the ambulance. We had about a minute to do it in and no more.

And then the second shell came.

It hit the Greek pediment from behind, and we saw the two tall pillars that supported it stagger, snap like two sticks, and bend forwards, looking suddenly queer and corpulent in their fore-shortening; then they parted and fell, bringing down the whole front of the Town Hall.

The Town Hall was spreading itself over the street, with a noise like a ship's coal going down the shute in a thunderstorm, as Reggie's stretcher slid home along its grooves in the ambulance. Kendal and I were inside for a second or two doing things for Reggie. The engine throbbed. The whole ambulance shook with its throbbing.

In that second Jevons had run back to fetch his car, calling out to us to cut and he would overtake us. He had cranked up his engines and jumped in before Kendal could get down and go to his help. When we saw him start we started. There wasn't any time to lose.

Kendal and I were sitting on the back steps of the ambulance, so that we kept him in sight. It was quite certain that he would overtake us.

* * * * *

He was running straight down the middle of the road when the third shell came.

It burst on the ground behind him, on his right, a little to one side. Some of it must have struck the steering gear.

The car plunged to the left. It climbed reeling to the top of a bank and paused there, then fell, front over back, into the ditch and lay there, belly uppermost, and its wheels whirling in the air.

Jevons lay on his face, half in, half out of the ditch.

He lay for about three seconds; then, as we ran to him, we saw him raise himself on his left arm and crawl out of the ditch; and when we reached him he was trying to stand.

And he tried to smile at us. "You needn't look like that," he said. "I'm as right as rain." And then he tried to raise his right arm.

You saw a khaki cuff, horribly stained. A red rag hung from it, a fringe that dripped.

* * * * *

Reggie opened his eyes and turned his face towards the stretcher that slid into its grooves beside him.

"That isn't--Jimmy--is it?" he said.

I saw him move his left hand to find Jimmy's right. And I heard Jimmy saying again (in a weak voice this time) that he was as right as rain.

We had got out of the range of the guns and the surgeons had done their business with bandages and splints. They had taken Reggie first, then Jimmy.

And so, lying beside Reggie, on his own stretcher and in his own ambulance, he was brought back to Ghent.

The military hospitals were full, so we took them to the Convent de Saint Pierre. And I went over to the Hôtel de la Poste to fetch Viola.

I don't know what I said to her. I think I must have done what Jimmy told me and said they were all right. _She_ never said a word till we got to the Convent. (She told me afterwards that when she saw me coming in alone she had been sure that Jimmy was killed. She didn't know about Reggie yet, you see.)

This part of it is all confused and horrible.

We had to wait before we could see our surgeons at the Convent. The nuns took us into a little parlour and left us there.

And I told her then what had happened. I can see her sitting in the nuns' parlour, looking out of the window as I told her; looking as if she wasn't listening. And I can hear my own voice. It sounded strange and affected, as if I had made it all up and didn't believe what I was telling her.

"He saved Reggie's life--do you see? at the risk of his own.

"At--the risk--of his own."

And still she looked as if she wasn't listening. It didn't sound as if it had really happened.

And I feel--now--as if I had taken hours to tell her.

Then one of our men came to us. He drew back when he saw Mrs. Jevons, and I followed him to the doorway. He said they were busy with Major Thesiger. They hadn't started yet with Mr. Jevons.

And then--ages afterwards--one of the surgeons came and called me out of the room. He said the Major would be all right. They'd got the bit of shell out. But--there was Jevons's hand. They'd have to take it off. They couldn't possibly save it. And it was going to be a beastly business. They'd run out of anaesthetics. Thesiger had had the last they'd got.

Yes, of course it would have been better. But Jevons wouldn't hear of it. _He_ knew they were short and Thesiger didn't, and he'd insisted on their doing Thesiger first.

It was an awful mistake, he said, because it would hurt Jevons ten times more than it would hurt anybody else. He thought that I had better get Mrs. Jevons out of that room; the ward where they were operating was next to it.

I couldn't get her out of it.

There were five minutes when I sat there and Viola crouched on the floor beside me with her face hidden on my knees and her hands grabbing me tighter and tighter.

And the door opened and I saw two nuns looking in. I heard one say to another, "_C'est sa pauvre femme qui devient folle_." And the door closed on us.

* * * * *

"All that fuss about a hand!" Jimmy had come out of his faint and was trying to restore Viola to a sense of proportion. If all the rest of him had been blown away, he said, by that confounded shell, and only his hand had been left, she might have had something to cry for.

And yet she cried inconsolably for Jimmy's hand.

God knows what memories came to her when she thought of it. I don't think she thought of it as the hand that had written masterpieces and flung them aside, that could steer a car straight through hell-fire, and that could nurse, and bind up wounds. I know I thought of all these obvious things. But she must have thought of the hand that she knew like her own hand, the hand with the firm, nervous fingers, and the three strong lines in the pinkish palm, the hand she adored and had shrunk from, whose gesture had been torture to her and whose touch was ecstasy, the hand that the surgeons had cut off and tossed into a basket to be cast out with the refuse of the wards.

Not that either of us had much time for thinking of anything but how we could get out of Ghent before the Germans got into it. Viola said it would be quite easy. There was the ambulance, and there was _her_ car and there was Jimmy's car.

I told her that Jimmy's god-like car was lying bottom upwards in a ditch between Ghent and Melle, an object half piteous, half obscene. She said it was a jolly good thing then that she'd brought hers. Perhaps it was.

We had just got Jimmy and Reggie into their first sleep at six o'clock in the morning when the orders came for us to clear out.

We cleared out in Viola's car, with Reggie on his stretcher and Jimmy (propped up with pillows) at his head, and Viola at his feet, and two wounded men in front with Colville, and Kendal and me standing one on each step. (Most of our luggage was on the Boulevard in front of the Convent where we had left it.)

We went, as we had come, through Bruges. We drew up to rest in the Market Place under the Belfry.

"You'd better look at it while you can, Viola," said Jevons. "You may never see it again."

"I? I shall never see anything else," she said.

We looked at the Belfry. It was as if, under that menace of destruction, we saw it for the first time.

We _might_ have enjoyed that run back, Viola said; only somehow we didn't. Reggie was ill from his anesthetic all the way, and Jimmy's temperature went up with every mile, and we missed the boat at Ostend, and had to stay there all night; and Jimmy became delirious in the night and thought that he had left Viola behind in the Town Hall at Melle. And there was no room on the morning boat; and when we did get on board the Naval Transport at Dunkirk, Kendal took it into his head to be seasick till he nearly died.

We had no peace till seven o'clock on Tuesday, when we got to Canterbury.

XV

I think I have said that Jevons made me suffer. He did. I can say that before those three weeks of his all my contacts with him were infected by the poison of my suffering. But all that was nothing to what he made me suffer since, what I suffer now when I remember the things I have said of him, the things I have thought and felt--my furtive belittling of him, my unwilling admiration, the doubt that I encouraged in the mean hope that it would become a certainty.

I would give anything to be like the Canon or my wife, the only two of us whose conscience doesn't reproach them when they see Jimmy's right sleeve.

I remember Norah saying to me once, "I shall be sorry for _you_ if you don't take care." Well, I am sorry for myself.

But I am still sorrier for Mrs. Thesiger.

I know there's a great deal to be said for her. I had wired to them from Dunkirk to tell them that Reggie was slightly wounded but recovering, and that the four of us would be in Canterbury that evening. It wasn't my fault if Reggie, being a British officer, was taken from us at Dover, and sent to a military hospital; but I admit I ought to have wired again to the Thesigers to inform them of the fact. I ought to have remembered that Reggie was more important to Mrs. Thesiger than Jevons, even if Jevons had done what Mrs. Thesiger didn't yet know he'd done.

The maternal passion is a terrible thing. It has made women commit crimes. It made my mother-in-law push Viola from her on her threshold and turn on me as I was helping Jimmy out of the car. It made her say, "You've brought my son-in-law. What have you done with my son?"

(To do her justice, she hadn't seen what had happened to Jimmy. Though he was tired and weak, he could still stand up and stagger along if you held him tight.)

And the maternal passion is not more terrible than the passion that Viola had for Jevons. It made her say to her mother as the Canon and I brought Jimmy in (the dear old man had seen in an instant why he wore his coat slung loose over his right shoulder), "You can see what we're doing with my husband."

And when we were all in the drawing-room and I was explaining gently that Reggie was all right, but that we'd _had_ to send him to the military hospital, it made her say, "If it wasn't for your son-in-law your son wouldn't be alive."

God knows what thirst she satisfied, what bitterness she exhausted, what secret anguish she avenged.

They were all there, the Thesiger women--they had come, you see, to meet Reggie--Victoria and Millicent and Mildred; and they heard her. But it was Mildred who _saw_. She spoke to her mother.

"Can't you _see_?" she said.

Viola was kneeling by the sofa where her father had made Jimmy lie, and she had unbuttoned and taken from him his heavy coat. She looked at me and said, "Please take them away somewhere and tell them. Jimmy _is_ so tired."

I know that must seem awful. It _was_ awful to come back from the battlefields of Flanders, from sieges and sackings and slaughter, and see the women flashing fire at each other. And they were mother and daughter. But, you see, they were women. I know that the war should have purged them of their passions (perhaps it did purge them); but your lover is your lover and your son your son for all that.

And it wasn't easy for Mrs. Thesiger to see how her son-in-law could have saved her son. I am not sure that she wouldn't have thought it presumption in Jevons to suppose that he could save anybody, let alone her son. There were people like the Thesigers from whom heroism was expected as a matter of course; and there were people like Jevons. You know what she said about his going to the front.

When I had finished the tale--and I let her have the whole of it, from the first shell that hit the Town Hall to the bit of the third shell that hit Jimmy--she said, "You mean that if he hadn't gone back for his car--" She had broken down and was sobbing quietly, but you could see how her mind worked.

I said, "I mean that if he hadn't gone back to the Town Hall to look for Reggie he wouldn't have been hit."

Then I told her how they took Jimmy's hand off.

I heard the Canon groan. Millicent and Victoria began to sob as their mother had sobbed. Mildred set her teeth firmly; and Mrs. Thesiger turned to me a queer, disordered face, and spoke.

"They--they gave the anaesthetic to--Reggie?"

"They did," I said. "Because Jimmy made them."

Yes. I am very sorry for Mrs. Thesiger.

She cried, softly, and with a great recovery of beauty and dignity, for about fifteen seconds (the Canon had gone back to Jevons); then she rose and addressed her daughter.

"Mildred dear, I think Jimmy had better have Reggie's room."

Then she went to him; and I am told that she kissed him for the first time. She kissed him as if he had been her son. (Poor Jimmy, I may say, was so tired that he didn't want to be kissed by anybody.)

* * * * *

He still had Reggie's room six weeks later when I came back from France for a week-end. Reggie had recovered, and was with them for a fortnight's leave before he went out again.

Norah and I went down on Saturday to see him. (His leave was up on Sunday night.)

Without Reggie I don't think I should have realized Jevons in his final phase.

He had been happy, I know, at Hampstead in the first two years of his marriage; he had been happy most of the time in Edwardes Square; even in Mayfair he had had moments; and Amershott had been, on the whole, an improvement on Mayfair. And he had lived through his three weeks in Ghent in a sort of ecstasy. And before that, all the time, there had been his work, which I am always forgetting, and his fame, when he didn't forget it.

But there had always been something.

At first it had been the Thesigers. As long as Mrs. Thesiger--as long as _one_ Thesiger--held out against him he had felt defeat. And then there had been Reggie's return and his appalling doubt. He had pretended not to see his doubt and not to mind it. And he had seen it, as he saw everything, and he had minded awfully. Then came Viola's illness, which you could put down to Reggie's doubt. And after that it had been Viola pretty nearly all the time. And even at Ghent, by the tortures of anxiety she had caused him, you may say that she had spoiled his ecstasy.

And now, without any effort, or any calculation or foresight, by a stupendous accident, he had found happiness and peace and certainty. The thing was so consummately done, and so timed to the minute, that when you saw him there enjoying it, you could have sworn that he had played for it and pulled it off. It was as if he had said to himself, "Give me time, and I'll bring all these people round, even Mrs. Thesiger, even Reggie. I'll _make_ them love me. Wait, and you'll just see how I shall score."

And there he was scoring.

And it was as if he had said to himself long ago, "As for Viola, I know all about it. I know I do things that make the poor child shudder; but I can put that all right. I can make her forget it. I give myself three weeks." As if he said, "She thought she was going to leave me. I knew that, too, and I didn't care. She might have left me a thousand times and I should have brought her back."

I used to think it pathetic that Jevons should have wanted Mrs. Thesiger to love him--that he should have wanted Reggie to. But I must say his pathos was avenged. _They_ were pathetic now. That big, hulking Major wasn't happy unless he was writing Jimmy's letters, or cutting up Jimmy's meat for him, or helping him in and out of his clothes. Mrs. Thesiger wasn't happy unless she was doing things for him. The Canon wasn't happy (though, like Norah, he had nothing on his conscience) and Mildred and Millicent and Victoria weren't happy, nor the Thesiger's friends in the Cathedral Close.

And then--after they had made a hero of him for six weeks--on that Saturday night when we were all together in the Canon's library, Jevons made his confession.

We had been, exchanging reminiscences. Something had made Viola think of Jimmy's General and the two Colonels at Ghent. She began telling the Canon how we had watched them through the glass screen, and how funny General Roubaix had looked with his arm round Jimmy's neck, and how he had said that Jimmy was a salamander, and that he didn't know what fear is.

"Oh, _don't_ I!" said Jimmy.

And that sent Reggie back to the day when he had first seen Jimmy.

"Look here, old man, what made you say you were an arrant coward?"

"Because," said Jimmy simply, "I am one. Dear old Roubaix was talking through his hat.

"Not know what fear is! I know a good many things, but I don't know anything better than that. You can't tell me anything about fear I don't know.

"You've no idea how I funked going out to the war. Yes--_funked_.

"It wasn't any ordinary funk, mind you, the little, creepy feeling in your waist, and your tummy tumbling down, and your heart sort of fluttering over the place where it used to be. I believe you can get over _that_. And I never had that--ever, except once when I saw Viola in a place where she'd no business to be. It was something much worse. It--it was in my head--in my brain. A sort of madness. And it never let me alone. It was worse at night, and after I got up and began to go about in the morning--when my brain woke and remembered, but it was there all the time.

"I saw things--horrors. And I heard them. I saw and heard the whole war. All the blessed time--all those infernal five weeks before I got out to it, I kept seeing horrors and hearing them. There was a lot of detail--realism wasn't in it--and it was all correct; because I verified it afterwards. Things _were_ just like that. Every morning when I got up I said to myself I'm going out to that damned war, but I wish to God somebody'd come and chloroform me before I get there. There were moments when I could have chloroformed myself. I felt as if it was the utter injustice of God that I--_I_--had to be mixed up in it.

"Not know what fear is!

"Just conceive," said Jimmy, "a man living like that, in abject, abominable terror, in black funk--keeping it up, all day and half the night, for five solid weeks--before he got there."

"And when you did get there," said Reggie, "were you in a funk?"

"Oh, well, you see, by the time I'd got there it had pretty well worn itself out. There wasn't any funk left to _be_ in."

And when I saw Reggie look at him I knew he had scored again.

Still, I wondered how it really stood with them; and whether Reggie had settled with his doubt, or whether sometimes, when you caught him looking at Jimmy, it had come over him again. The kind of virtue his brother-in-law had displayed in Flanders wouldn't help him, you see, to that particular solution. And with the Thesigers--when they took after their mother--things died hard.

He must have felt that he had to settle it before he went.

Viola told us what happened.

It was his last evening, and the three were together in that room of Reggie's. He had just said that Viola wouldn't care how many Town Halls he was buried under, as long as Jimmy didn't go and dig him out. And then, suddenly, he went straight for it.

"Jimmy," he said, "did you run away with my sister, or didn't you? I don't care whether you did or not, but--did you?"

"No, I didn't," said Jimmy.

"Then what the dickens," Reggie said, "were you doing together in Bruges?"

"We were looking at the Belfry," said Jimmy.

And Reggie shook his head. "That's beyond me," he said.

"Yes," said Viola. "But it wasn't beyond Jimmy."

That's the real story of Tasker Jevons and his wife.

Don't ask me what would have happened to them if there hadn't been a war.

I've tried to show you the sort of man he was. He knew his hour even before it found him. And you cannot separate him from his hour.