I did not go down to Canterbury all at once. I was vowed, of course, to Mrs. Jevons's everlasting service (I think I've succeeded in makingthatclear), but I could not—under the whacking blow of her marriage I couldnotdo as she asked me then and there. The reminiscences of Canterbury were poignant. I had to have a little time to recover in. And in those first terrible weeks I didn't see why Jevons should have all the amusement and I all the hard work and the suffering. I knew that Jevons had suffered, too—quite horribly—but his anguish, after all, was a thing of the past; while mine, in full career, devastated the present and the future. I had done my best for them, and I could not share Viola's view that it was my business to go on whitewashing Jevons for ever. There was a limit, at any rate, to the number of coats I could contract to put on him.
So I waited. I waited till they came back from their half honeymoon in Brittany (a fortnight was all the editor ofSportcould spare to his subordinate). Then at her invitation I went up to Hampstead to see them.
They had found an old four-roomed cottage that had once been a labourer's. It was whitewashed (Viola was fond of whitewash), and all the wood-work was painted green, and there was a strip of green garden in front with a green paling round it.
A furniture van that you could have packed the house in stood in the Grove outside it, and big, burly men in white aprons were taking furniture out of the van and dumping it down in the garden. Some of it wouldn't go in at the gate and had to be lifted over the palings.
Jevons in an old Norfolk suit and with his hair rumpled was standing on a ten-foot plot of grass contemplating a bed-tester and four bed-posts that leaned up against the palings in the embrace of a bedstead turned upon its side, and Viola in the upper window was contemplating Jevons.
He called to her, "Have you measured?" And she answered, "Yes. He says it can't be done. Oh, there's Furny!"
Jevons turned to me with a smile addressed to the bed-tester rather than to me. Viola came down to us followed by a tall stout carpenter, visibly her slave.
The carpenter was saying: "That there room is out by a good four inches—by a good four inches 'tis. An' the way you've got to look at it is this, m'm. Not as this 'ere tester is too 'igh fer that ceilin', but how as that there ceilin' is too low fer this tester."
"Quite so," said Jevons. "And in that case you've got to raise the ceiling four inches."
"No, sir," said the carpenter (he spoke severely to Jevons). "You 'avenot. If I take you off a two inch from each leg of that there bedstead, and a two inch from each of them there postsis, it'll be the same as if the builder 'e raised you the ceilin' a four inch."
"By Jove," said Jevons. "So it will."
"Ay, and it'll corst you somethin' like four shillin', instead of p'raps a matter of forty pound. W'en it comes to tamperin' with ceilin's, you never know where you are."
"I don't know where I am now," said Jevons, "but it might be better to leave the ceiling alone. They haven't started tampering, have they?"
"No, sir. They have not."
Viola ordered the carpenter to go into the study again and measure for those bookshelves. He was her slave and he went.
"Jimmy's been going on like that all day," she said. "He's taken up hours of that man's time. We shall never get him out of the house."
"I don't want to get him out of the house," said Jevons. "I'm awfully happy with him."
He was happy (like a child) with everything, with his house and his garden and his furniture, his oak chests and the dresser and the bureau, above all he was happy with his bed-tester. He said be had never slept under a bed-tester in his life, and he was dying to know what it would be like—to lie there with hundreds of dear little, shy little chintz rosebuds squinting down at you.
"You'll not lay under them rosebuds, not for a twenty-four hour—"
The carpenter had come back to us. He treated Jevons exactly like a child.
"That tester can't be set up to-night. Not unless, as I say, you squeeges of it jam tight between the ceilin' and the floor. An'thenyou'll 'ave to prise the ceilin' up every time you moves of it, else you'll start them postsis all a twistin' and a rockin', an' 'ow'll you feel then?"
Jevons said he felt frightened to death as it was, and the carpenter could have it his own way provided he didn't hurt the little rosebuds or frightenthem; and the carpenter sighed and said that the study was ten by thirteen and would take a hundred and sixteen feet of bookshelves.
"Let's go and look at the study," said Viola. And we went and looked at it. And the carpenter came up and looked atus. And the foreman and the other men came in with furniture and things out of the garden, andtheylooked at us. There wasn't one really large and heavy piece of furniture except the four-post bed and the tester, and they treated the whole thing as a joke, as a funny game they were helping two small children to play at. And when Viola and Jevons ought to have been telling the men what things were to go into which room and where, they ran back into the garden to see what flowers they would plant in it and where.
Then they took me to look all over the house. It was an absurd house. Of its four rooms there was one in front that served as a dining-room and a drawing-room and a boudoir for Viola, and there was a kitchen at the back, and a bedroom over the front room, and Jevons's study was over the kitchen. Viola said there were six rooms if you counted the pantry and the bathroom, and they were going to put a settee in Jimmy's study that would turn into a bed when anybody came to stay. And Mrs. Pavitt knew a nice woman who would come in and scrub for them, and sleep in the kitchen when they weren't there.
They showed me the little bits of furniture they'd got. Jevons had a passion for beautiful old things, for old rosewood bureaus and chests of drawers with brass handles. She pointed out the brass handles.
I felt that the poor child was showing me her absurd house and telling me all these things because there wasn't and there hadn't been, and perhaps there never would be anybody else to tell them to. I thought of the mother and the four sisters down at Canterbury and of the other two who were married, who had been married so differently. There was something queer, something wrong about it all. I believe the very workmen felt that it was so and were sorry for her.
When they had all gone away at six o'clock Jevons and I took our coats off and settled down for three solid hours to the serious work of moving furniture, while Viola tried to find the china, to wash it, and sorted all the linen and the blankets. And at nine o'clock we dined on bacon that Jevons fried over the gas-stove in the kitchen and cocoa that Viola and I made in a white-and-pink jug we found in the bath; it was a buxom, wide-pouting jug with an expression that Jevons said reminded him of his mother's sister who had brought him up. He said that jug was all that Viola would be allowed to see of his relations.
I was left with Viola in the kitchen to wash up while Jevons finished what he called his man's job upstairs.
She took advantage of his absence to implore me to go down to Canterbury and make it right for her with her people. She said they'd believe anything I told them and there wasn't anything they wouldn't do for me.
"Tell them," she said, "that Jimmy's going to be so horribly celebrated that they'll look perfect asses if they don't acknowledge him."
I owned there was something in it. She said there was everything in it.And I promised her I'd go and do what I could.
Then I went upstairs to help Jevons to finish his man's job. I found him in the bedroom, making up a bed on the floor. The carpenter had taken away the bedstead and the posts and left him nothing but the mattress and the tester with its roof of rosebud chintz. He had propped the tester up against the wall where he said he could see it last thing before he went to sleep and first thing when he woke up.
The room was very hot, for he'd lit the gas fire to air the sheets and things. He had thought of everything. He had even thought of hanging Viola's nightgown over the back of a chair before the fire, and setting her slippers ready for her feet. He had laid her brush and comb on the little rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles, in the recess. He had unpacked her little trunk and put her things away all folded in the big rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles. He had hung the rosebud chintz curtains at the window and fitted its rosebud chintz cover on the low chair by the fire. And now he was kneeling on the floor, tucking in the blankets and smoothing the pillow for her head. His mouth was just a little open. And he was smiling.
You couldn't hate him.
He said he'd come and see me off at the Tube Station. But he didn't start. He began walking about, opening drawers and looking at things.
Presently he gave a cry of joy. He had found what he was looking for, a rosebud chintz coverlet. He spread it on the bed and said, "There!" He brought in an old Persian rug (small but very beautiful) from the landing and spread it on the floor by the mattress and said, "That's a bit of all right." And he told me he was going to beeswax the floor to-morrow. There was nothing to beat oak-stain and beeswax for a floor.
He stood there gazing. He was so pleased with his work that he couldn't tear himself away.
He said, "The joke is that she thinks she's going to find this room looking like a Jew pawnbroker's shop when, she turns in, and that she'll have the time of her life putting it straight forme."
Then he took my arm and led me away, shutting the door carefully, so that nothing, he said, should break the shock of her surprise.
But there was one drop of bitterness in his cup—"If only I could have set up that tester!"
I said he'd had quite enough excitement for one day and that he really must leave something for to-morrow.
On our way to the Tube Station I told him that I was going down to Canterbury in a day or two. I told him what I was going for. He had been so happy thinking about his house and his furniture and Viola that I don't believe he'd ever thought about the Thesigers. At the word "Canterbury" he thrust out his lower jaw so that the tips of his little white teeth were covered (they always disappeared when he was angry).
He said: "Tell that old sinner I don't care a copper damn whether he recognizesmeor not. What I can't stand and won't stand is the slur he's putting on my wife."
* * * * *
And that is more or less what I did tell him.
I wired to the Canon to let him know I was coming, and he replied by asking me to stay for the week-end.
I found the family diminished. Mildred had gone to a case; Millicent was away for her Midsummer holiday; only Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and Norah and Victoria were left. They had the air of survivors of an appalling disaster. The Canon and Mrs. Thesiger were aged by about ten years; poor Victoria looked tired and haggard; even Norah was depressed. You felt that the trouble in the house was irreparable this time. They had held their heads up against the scandal that was supposed to have occurred in Belgium; they couldn't realize it; it was the sort of thing that occurred to other people, not to them. And, after all, they didn'tknowthat it had occurred. But the scandal of amésalliancewhich really had occurred in England three weeks ago was well within their range, and it had crushed them. It wasn't, as Jevons cynically maintained, that they objected to amésalliance—anymésalliance—more than to the other thing; I think they had never really believed in the other thing, and this marriage, so far from effacing it, had rubbed it in, had made it appear publicly as if, after all, it might have been so. It was not only excessively disagreeable to them in itself, but it left them in that ghastly doubt.
And this time they couldn't look to me to save them.
Still it was evident that they looked to me for something. I was tackled by each one of them in turn. The Canon wanted to know if I had anything to tell him. Mrs. Thesiger wondered whether Viola would have enough to live on. Victoria, in the absence of her parents, took me into a corner to inquire under her breath, "Is he really very awful?" Norah—she had known all about it; they hadn't spared her, they hadn't kept it from her; you couldn't keep anything from Norah; she had got it all out of Viola the day before I came down the first time—Norah told me I'd have to make her father ask them down. She took Jevons's view that it was the Canon who was causing all the scandal now (only she called it fuss). There never would have been any if Mummy and Daddy had had the sense to take it properly and treat it as a joke. Nobody who knew Viola could take it as anything else.
"But," she said, "if Daddy goes about pulling a long face and keeping up his sore throat over it, everybody'll think there must be something in it. I could have got it all right for them in a jiffy if they'd left it to me."
"What would you have done, then?" I was really anxious to know.
"Oh, I'd have run round telling everybody about it—as a joke. A thundering good joke. If they'd turned me on to it in time I could have easily overtaken those shocking old cats who got in first. As it is," she said, "I've stopped a lot of it—though Daddy doesn't know it—just that way. You should have seen me with the Colonel and the Dean! But if somebody doesn't stop Daddy he'll go and mess it all up again. Don't you remember how he dished my game at dinner the first night you were here?"
Yes. I remembered. It came back to me, that startling indiscretion at the dinner-table which was, after all, so deliciously discreet. Knowing Norah as I know her now, I wouldn't mind betting that Jevons owes his position, in Canterbury (and he has one) to-day far more to his youngest sister-in-law's manoeuvres with the Dean and Chapter than to my handling of his case—No; I'm forgetting what he does owe that to. Let's say, then, his position in Canterbury yesterday—a year ago.
Well, I had an hour's talk with the Canon.
There was some awkwardness in having to point out to a man of his beauty and dignity that his duty lay in any other direction than the one he was so plainly heading for. I put it on the grounds of pity. I pleaded for Viola, I said she was unhappy.
He replied that that was not the account she had given of herself.
I said, Perhaps not. But if she wasn't unhappy now she very soon would be if he persisted in refusing to acknowledge them.
But his lip went stiffer and stiffer. He was too unhappy himself to be got at that way. So I took him on the ground of expediency. I said after all Jevons was his son-in-law. He couldn't go on ignoring Jevons. I used Viola's argument. He wasn't dealing with an ordinary man. In a few years' time Tasker Jevons would be so celebrated that it would be absurd to pretend to ignore him.
The Canon stuck to it that he didn't care how celebrated the fellow was.
I said, "You can't keep it up for ever. You'll have to recognize him in the end. You don't want to cut the poor chap while he's struggling and accept him when he rolls, as he probably will roll."
The Canon said he wasn't going to accept him at all. He said that Jevons rolling would he if anything more odious than Jevons as he was. He couldn't forget what had happened. And that was the end of it.
I told him that it hadn't happened; but that to repudiate Jevons was the way to make everybody think it had. And whether it had happened or not, he must surely want other people to forget it. And once start the abominable impression, Jevons's celebrity would cause it to be remembered for ever, or at any rate for this generation. Whereas he could put a stop to the whole thing at once by behaving as if nothing had happened. He had only got to ask them down next week.
"Doeshewant to be asked down?"
I said, No, he didn't. I told him what Jevons had said—that he didn't care whether he was recognized or not, but that he "couldn't stand the slur that was being put upon his wife."
I saw him wince at that.
"That's how it strikes him?" he said.
I answered that that was how it would strike most people.
"I'mputting the slur on my daughter, am I?"
I was pitiless. I said, Certainly he was. If he persisted.
Then, after telling me that I had hit him hard, he fell back on another line of defence. He owed it to his priesthood not to condone his daughter's conduct.
"All the more—all the more, Furnival, if sheismy daughter."
I said he owed it to his priesthood to stand up for an innocent girl, even if shewashis daughter. I couldn't see anything in it but her innocence—her amazing innocence. I only wished I had his chance of proving it.
He shook his head. "That's it, my dear fellow. We can't prove it."
I said at least we could believe in it and act on our belief.
He said it was all very well for me. I was prejudiced.
"My sort of prejudice," I said, "might work the other way."
"You must have been afraid, or you wouldn't have gone out to bring her back."
"Jevons was afraid himself, for that matter. When things got dangerous he took her back to Bruges and put her in apensionto be safe from him."
He looked up sharply.
"She never told me that—that he took her there to be safe from him."
"I don't suppose she knew. She was as innocent as all that."
"And how doyouknow?"
"Because he told me so."
I gave him something of what Jevons had told me, but not all.
"That," said the Canon, "seems to make him more credible."
I pictured for him the night of Jevons's remorse.
He said, "That's the best thing I've heard about him yet. You believe him?"
I said, "Yes. The man is extremely sensitive and almost insanely frank."
I let it sink in. Presently he owned that it was the platonic version of the affair that—as a man of the world—he had found it so hard to swallow—"All that nonsense, you know, about the Belfry."
He meditated a while. Then he began to ask questions:
"Where does he come from? Who are his people? What do they do?"
I said his father was a Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in a village somewhere in Hertfordshire.
And then: "Is he—is heveryimpossible?"
I said, No. Only from their point of view a little improbable.
He didn't press it.
"Well," he said, "it looks as if he was inevitable. I suppose we've got to make the best of him. What do you want me to do?"
I said I wanted him to ask them down. Very soon.
He said, "All right, Furnival. I'll ask them down next week. But if I do you must stop on and see me through. I won't be left alone with him."
I stopped on, playing chess with the Canon and lawn tennis with Norah, who was more than ever determined to beat me.
And on Tuesday of the next week they came down.
* * * * *
The whitewashing of Jevons had not been an easy matter. It took such a lot of coats to make a satisfactory job of him. And it was not a job I would have chosen. But I was serving Mrs. Jevons, and if my service had demanded miracles I should have had to have worked them somewhere, that was all. And perhaps it was a miracle to have turned Jevons out as a morally presentable person according to the requirements of a Cathedral Close.
But up to that Tuesday afternoon in August my private grievance against Jevons remained what it had been. In his absence—even while I whitewashed him—I could not extend a Christian forgiveness and forbearance to Jevons, any more than Mrs. Thesiger could. I think I hated Jevons. I ought to have hated him—by every glorious and manly code, pagan or barbarous, I ought to have hated him. And I did—every minute that he wasn't there. He had made me a figure of preposterous suffering. Because of him I trailed a fatuous tragedy through the Thesigers' house and over the green lawns of the Close, under the eyes of the young subalterns and of Victoria and Norah. (Canon and Mrs. Thesiger I didn't mind so much.) It mattered nothing that they were all extremely kind to me, since my suffering was responsible for their kindness and Jevons was responsible for my suffering.
Well, on that Tuesday he arrived. He was asked for a week and he stayed three days; and in those three days I had forgiven him everything for the sake of his performance.
He arrived in the middle of a tennis-party.
The Thesigers hadn't meant to have a party. The subalterns must have known that he was coming and turned up simply to look at him. (I wondered afterwards whether Norah could have told them. She was dangerously demure that afternoon.)
I ought to have said that for the last two days the Canon had been preparing himself for Jevons by reading him. He had ordered—in defiance of his political principles—theMorning Standard, and I had found him reading Jevons's novel and surrounded by numbers of theBlue Review, which, if you remember, published the best of Jevons's earlier work. He had no difficulty in getting hold of them; his youngest daughter had been able to supply him with more Jevons than he wanted. In fact, in the study of Tasker Jevons the Canon was weeks behind the rest of his acquaintance. There was hardly a family in Canterbury of any education in which Tasker Jevons was not by this time a household word. The garrison club library had bought him in quantities. The bookseller in the precincts did not stock him (he was not allowed to); but he could order him for you, and did. And the book-sellers in the High Street displayed him in their windows by the half-dozen.
I have forgotten, in the blaze of his later fame, that (apart from this purely local reputation) he passed in the provinces as a fair-sized celebrity even then. Only, as Jevons judged himself at every stage with accuracy, he hadn't begun to take himself at all seriously yet.
So he arrived in a perfect simplicity, without any of that rather dubious aplomb with which he tried to carry off his celebrity when it really came.
It was very nasty for him.
He had to come out of the house, following Viola and her mother all the way to the far end of the lawn, where the Canon was ready for him with a face which, try as he would—and he tried his hardest—he could not unstiffen. It must be said of the Canon that he nothing common did or mean upon that memorable scene; but he had—as Jevons said afterwards—rather too much the air of walking up to the gun's mouth and calling on us to observe how beautifully a Christian could die.
And there was Victoria standing beside the Canon and holding herself well, and Colonel and Mrs. Braithwaite beside Victoria, trying to look as if there was nothing unusual about Jevons or the situation. There was Norah at the tennis-net quivering with excitement, and (by the time Jevons had caught up with his convoy) there was Mrs. Thesiger alongside the others, turned round to present him, and watching him as he came on. Viola had turned and was looking at him too. And there were the subalterns at the tennis-net with Norah, doing unnecessary things to the net and tryingnotto look at him.
I wondered: How on earth will he carry it off? How is he going to get across that tennis-ground?
He was getting across it somehow, holding himself not quite so well as Victoria or the subalterns, but still holding himself, coming on, a little flushed and twinkling and self-conscious, but coming.
The situation was, for him, most horrible; but it was worse for Viola. I wondered: Is she shivering all down her spine? Is she going to flinch? Whywillshelookat the poor chap?
And then I saw. She was looking at him with a little tender smile, a smile that helped him across, that said: "Come on. Come on. It's difficult, I know, but you're doing it beautifully."
Well, so he was. He was doing it more beautifully than the Canon or any of them. For that group on the lawn were like a rather eager rescue party, holding out hands to a struggling swimmer in the social surf. They expected him to struggle and he didn't. He landed himself in the middle of them with an adroitness that put them in the wrong. What's more, he held his own when he got there. He looked about as different from any of the men on that tennis-ground as a man well could look. He looked odd; and that saved him. They with their distinction had not achieved absolute difference from each other. His difference from all of them was so absolute that it was a sort of distinction in itself.
As soon as he got there Norah came up with the subalterns in tow. She made a little friendly rush at him. She said, "I'm Norah, the youngest. I expect Viola's told you about me. She's told me lots aboutyou."
She meant well, dear child. But she overdid it. She hadn't allowed—none of us except Viola had allowed—for his appalling sensitiveness. The poor chap told me afterwards that he could bear up against the Canon's stiff face and what he called Mrs. Thesiger's ladylike refinements of repudiation, and the poker that Victoria had swallowed, but that that kid's kindness, coming on the top of it all, floored him. He took her hand (I think he squeezed it), and his mouth opened, but he couldn't speak; he just breathed hard and flushed furiously; and his eyes looked as if he were going to cry. But of course he didn't cry. He was, he said, far too much afraid of the subalterns.
It was a good thing, perhaps, after all, that it took him that way. His emotion made him quiet and subdued; it toned him down, so that he started well from the very beginning.
After tea he recovered and talked to the Colonel and the subalterns while the rest of us listened. He said, I remember, that the building of Dreadnoughts was of more importance to the country than Disestablishment. And even more important than the building of Dreadnoughts was the building of submarines. The submarine was the ship of the future. There should be, he said, at least fifty submarines for every Dreadnought turned out.
That made them all sit up. (It was not a platitude in nineteen-six, but a prophecy.) The Colonel and the subalterns hung on his words; and when the Canon saw them hanging, his mouth began to relax a little of its own accord. In his first hour Jevons had scored, notably.
It was as if he had said to himself, "I'll bring these people round, see if I don't. I give myself an hour."
Dinner passed without any misadventure, but you could see that he was careful. Also you could see by his twinkle that he was amusing himself by his own precautions, as if, again, he had said to himself, "They're all expecting me to make noises over my soup, and they'll be disappointed. I just won't make any."
We had coffee in the garden afterwards. And it was then that the Canon asked him what his politics were?
Jevons said he had no politics. Or rather, he had a great many politics. He was a sort of Socialist in time of peace and a red-hot Imperialist in time of war, and a Tory for purposes of Tariff Reform, and a Liberal when it came to Home Rule.
And when the Canon objected that you couldn't run a Government on those lines, little Jevons told him that that was precisely how Governments were run. It was a fallacy to suppose that Oppositions didn't rule.
And again he scored. He did it all with a twinkling, dimpling urbanity and deprecation, as if the Canon had been a beautiful lady he was paying court to, as if he thought it was rather a pity that beauty should lower itself to talk politics; but since he insisted on politics, he should have them; as if, in short, he loved the Canon, but didn't take him very seriously.
Yes; he certainly scored. He gave Viola no cause to flinch.
That evening comes back to me by bits. It must have been that evening that the Canon walked round the garden with me. I see him walking round and round, with Norah hanging on to his arm, teasing him and chattering. I hear her crying out suddenly with no relevance, "Hasn't he got stunning eyes, Daddy?" and the Canon saying that Jevons's eyes would look better in a pair of earrings than in Jevons's head, and her answering, "Wouldn't I like to wear them!" I see his little mock shiver (as if he felt that it was those great chunks of unsuitable sapphire that had charmed Viola across the Channel), and Norah's funny face as she said, "Oh, come, he isn't half bad."
That night he called me into the library when they had all gone to bed. Clearly he wanted to know how it had gone off—how he, in particular, had behaved. I assured him that his behaviour had been perfect. And I asked him what he thought of Jevons?
He said, "Well—he might be worse. He might be much, much worse. He's a clever chap. Where does he get it all from?"
But I noticed that the next day he shut himself up in his library all morning, was silent at lunch, and never emerged properly till dinner-time. Mrs. Thesiger also fought shy of her son-in-law.
Norah and Victoria took him by turns that day. I noticed that he got on very well with Norah. She knocked balls over the net for him all morning. (He couldn't play, but professed a great eagerness to learn.) In the afternoon Victoria took him to look at the Cathedral and the old quarters of the town. In the evening, after dinner, we all sat out in the garden. Canon and Mrs. Thesiger soon left us; Victoria followed them; and Viola and Norah and Jevons and I sat on till long after dark.
Viola and Norah, I remember, sat close together on the long seat under the elm tree. Jevons was on the other side of Viola. I sat on a cushion at her feet.
The night had a rhythm in it. Stillness and peace. The Cathedral chimes. Stillness and peace again. And there was a smell of cut lawn grass with dew on it from the ground, and of roses from the borders, and of lichen and moss and crumbling mortar from the walls. Sometimes these smells pierced the peace like sound; and sometimes they gathered close and wrapped us like warmth.
Then Jevons spoke.
"All this," he said, "is very beautiful. Very beautiful indeed."
And Viola sighed.
"Yes, Yes," she said. "I suppose itisbeautiful."
"Youknowit is," he said.
"I know all right. But I don't think I can see it as you do. I've been shut up in it so long. It's all this that you've taken me out of."
"It's all this," he said, "that's made you what you are."
"It isn't. This isn't really me. It's just Them. I'm what I've made myself. I'm what you've made me. I'm uglier than they are. I'm uglier than anything here, but I'm much, much more alive."
"You surely don't suggest," said Jevons, "that I've made you uglier?"
"You've made me stronger and cleverer and bigger—ever so much bigger than I was."
"Much better in every way," I said, "than your youngest sister here, hasn't he?"
"Poor little Norah! I didn't mean that—you beast—Furny!—Of course I didn't. Jimmy—whatdidI mean?"
He said nothing. But I heard an inarticulate murmur, and I saw that in the darkness his arm went round her and drew her closer.
And that, God forgive him, was his heaviest score up till now.
In two days he had absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere. He was in it. In it as I wasn't and couldn't be.
And the next day Canon and Mrs. Thesiger took him in hand by turns. The Canon showed him the town all over again all morning. And in the afternoon Mrs. Thesiger showed him the Cathedral all over again; and took him with her to the service. And all dinner-time Jevons was very pensive and subdued.
After dinner the Canon talked to Jevons about his novel. (He had retired into his library all afternoon in order to finish it.) He asked him why he had chosen an ugly subject when he might have found a beautiful one?
And Jevons was more pensive than ever. He said, "Well—that's a question—"
He couldn't tell the Canon why he'd chosen it. He couldn't disclose to him his plan of campaign.
"You see, sir, I haven't seen many beautiful things."
He still pondered. Then he said, very slowly, as if he dragged it out of himself with difficulty, "That book was written—written in my head—before I knew my wife."
You could literally see his score running up. By nine o'clock the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger had roped him into their game of whist.
I sat out with Viola and Norah in the garden, when Norah told us that she thought Jimmy was a dear. She was the only one of them that called him Jimmy.
About ten o'clock next morning Viola came to me and asked me to go up toJimmy, in his room. He wanted to speak to me.
I found him packing, packing with a sort of precise and concentrated fury.
He was going. Going up to town. He had torn through Canterbury, eaten his way through Canterbury, through the beauty and peace of it; he had absorbed and assimilated it in three days. And he had had enough. If he stayed in it another hour the beauty and the peace of it would kill him. The Canon's beauty was, he said, adorable; so was Mrs. Thesiger's.
"But if I stay here I shall ruin it. I can't," he said, "go on giving that dear old clergyman clergyman's sore throat. I frighten him so that he can't sing. He doesn't know what to do with me, or say to me. He doesn't know what to call me. He can't call me Jevons, and he won't call me Jimmy, and he knows it would be ridiculous to call me James. Besides, he agitates me and makes me drop my aitches.
"So I've had a wire. You'll explain to him the sort of wire I've had."
"And Viola?" I said. "Is she going too?"
"No. Viola's going to stay till our week's up. By that time she'll be bored stiff and longing to get back to me."
* * * * *
He went, and I'm not at all sure that he didn't score by going.
And that night and the next and the next I thought of little Jevons alone in his little house in Hampstead, lying all by himself in his four-post bed between his rosebud chintz curtains and under his rosebud chintz tester, and saying to himself that he had scored.
The Thesigers lived to be grateful to me for reconciling them to Jevons, if it was I who reconciled them. I don't think Mrs. Thesiger ever really forgave him, ever really liked him till the end; but the Canon very soon owned to a surreptitious regard for him. Luckily he acquired it while Jevons was still struggling, otherwise I do not think I could have saved their faces.
In the first year of his marriage Jevons made them see how right I was when I told them it would be impossible to ignore him. In the second year they saw that he had only just given them time to come round before it was too late. The minute he became prosperous it would have been too late, much too late for their dignity and beauty. And yet they couldn't very well have gone on repudiating Viola for ever. A year would have seen them through that attitude. And Jevons's greatcouphad come off in the year he "gave" it; so that if they had been left to themselves their revulsion of tenderness must have coincided with his prosperity. They would have had every appearance of having surrendered to his income.
And they would have missed the spectacle of his struggle.
I believe it was his struggle, the doggedness, the heroism, the wild humour that he put into it that brought them round. They didn't like his early celebrity and they deplored the cause of it—his first novel.
That book justified everything that Jevons had said of it. It did startle. It did arrest. Itwasunpleasant. So vividly and powerfully unpleasant that it nailed your eyes to it and kept them there. It made a break and a stain in your memory.
When I say it was unpleasant I mean, and he meant, not that it was unclean, but that it was brutal. I shall have written this tale to very little purpose if it isn't transparent that Jevons's mind, Jevons's whole nature was scrupulously clean. Even his brutality was not spontaneous. He broke his neck to get it. You could see him putting his tongue out as he laboured the brutality. You could see him sweating as he went over it again, removing all the marks of labour, making for his effect of sincerity and gorgeous simplicity and ease.
I've said it's doubtful how far Jevons took himself seriously. He certainly had no illusions as to the nature of his success. But whenever I come to this side of him I feel myself untrustworthy. I cannot see him properly. I am prejudiced by knowing him so well. I daresay if I hadn't known him, if he hadn't been so frank in his disclosures, if he hadn't explained so many times the deliberate calculations of his method, I should think him a great novelist. I daresay to a generation that knows nothing about him or his disclosures or his method he will seem a great novelist again. I daresay heisa great novelist. I don't know.
Anyhow there were three great stages in his career: the Slow Advance; the Grand Attack; and Victory. (He had been advancing slowly ever since the day I met him on the football-ground at Blackheath).
All these stages are marked for me by the increasing size and splendour of the houses that he occupied in turn; the four-roomed cottage at Hampstead; the little house in Edwardes Square; the large house in Mayfair; the still larger country house he acquired last of all. And the Jevons I like to think of is the Jevons of the little whitewashed cottage, of the whitewashed rooms, the one sitting-room where we dined; the kitchen at the back where we cooked and washed up; the absurd little bedroom in the front where the four-post bed was set up like a tent with its curtains and its tester; the study at the back where Jevons worked and Norah Thesiger slept when she came to stay. I remember Jevons darting from the kitchen and the dining-room with steaming dishes in his hands; Jevons with a pipe in his mouth and his feet on the chimney-piece, talking, talking, talking about anything—Dreadnoughts, submarines, the War (he had given it nine years now)—from nine till eleven, and then flinging himself out of his chair to turn the settee into a bed for the Kiddy. Whatever he was saying or doing, in the middle of a calculation, he would break off at eleven and drag sheets and blankets out of a coffin-like box under the settee and make up the Kiddy's little bed for her, because Kiddies must on no account be allowed to sit up late at night. I remember Viola and Norah coming in to help and Jevons shooing them away. And Norah would come back again and put her head round the door and look at him where he knelt on the floor absurdly, tucking in blankets and breathing hard as he tucked. And she would say, "Look at him. Isn't he sweet?" as if Jevons had been a rabbit or a guinea-pig, and go away again.
Somehow I always see him like that, making beds, stooping over something, doing something for one of them or for me.
Sometimes they would burst in on him suddenly in his bedmaking and throw pillows at him, or it might be sponges, and there would be madness: two girls running amok and little Jevons flying before them through the house and squealing in his excitement. Once he went out to post a letter in the Grove before midnight and they locked him out and looked at him from the window of the front bedroom and defied him to enter, and he skipped round to the back and climbed up by the water-butt on to the drainpipe of the bathroom, and from the drainpipe, perilously, in through the window of his study, where they found him putting hair-brushes in Norah's bed.
After the drainpipe adventure (when they saw how game he was) they sobered down. I think it was that night that Norah said, "We mustn'tkillJimmy. That would never do."
And there would be theatre-parties when Jimmy had tickets given him, and eighteenpenny dinners at the "Petit Riche," going and returning by the Hampstead Tube.
It seems to me that Norah must have stayed a great deal with them at Hampstead, and yet she couldn't have; they were only two years in the little four-roomed house. Anyhow, we were all immensely happy in those two years; even I was happy. Jevons I know was—and Viola. Viola had never been so happy in her life. She cooked: she washed up with Jimmy to help her; she mended his clothes and made her own; she did his typewriting; she took down his articles in shorthand and typed them; and through all his funny little social lapses she adored him.
When you think of it, poverty and close quarters for two years, and the menace of some of those lapses hanging over her all the time—it was a pretty severe test. You would have said that if she could stand that she could stand anything, and she certainly stood it.
But Jimmy hadn't begun yet to unbend. He was still on the defensive, holding himself in, every nerve strung up to the Grand Attack. This tension affected his behaviour. He knew his danger. He knew there were certain gestures that he must restrain, and he restrained them; there were certain things he did with spoons and forks and table napkins that would wreck him if he were caught doing them, and in those two years he kept a very sharp look-out. You would have thought that this life, on the edge of an abyss, with full knowledge of his danger, would have made him nervous and produced the very disaster that he dreaded. But no. Jevons was a fighting man, and he rose to these crises and prevailed. You felt that for him the real test would come when he was prosperous, when the strain was taken off him and he let himself go.
Meanwhile it was terrifying to see him balancing himself on the edge.
* * * * *
They moved into the Edwardes Square house in the September quarter of nineteen-eight. This was the year of the weeks of consolidation, his second novel and his "Journal," that were to precede the Grand Attack. The novel did exactly what he said it would. It did counteract the effect its predecessor; and the "Journal" gave him a place inBelles-Lettreswhere he was safe from the legend of his own brutality.
But it strained his relations with the Thesigers for the time being. The Rosalind of the "Journal" is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said to have travelled together before they were married. Her figure moves through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an adorable innocence and naïveté, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender than the Viola he knew. You couldn't say she wasn't charming. The Canon couldn't say it; what he did say was that Jevons should have kept her out of it. Jevons's defence was that if he had kept her out of it there wouldn't have been any book.
But he never did it again. Having once for all drawn her portrait as a young girl, he left it, as if he would have kept her youth immortal. You will not find any woman of his novels who suggests even a fugitive likeness to the Viola he married.
The house in Edwardes Square stands for the second period: the period of sober energy that led up to the Grand Attack. It was also the period of deliberate yet vehement refinement. Jevons was determined at all cost to be refined. And at considerable cost, with white-painted panelling throughout, with blue-and-white Chinese vases here and there, and more and more Bokhara rugs everywhere, and tussore silk curtains in the windows and every stick of furniture chosen for its premeditated chastity, the little brown house was made to serve him as a holy standard. He said he had only got to live up to it and he would be all right.
And so, in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at the back. I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his beginnings, how he did it so well. Of course he gave Viola a free hand, he let her have what she wanted; but when I complimented her on any result she let me know at once that it was Jimmy's doing. She was pathetically anxious that I should see that he knew how. She let me know, too, the secret of his passionate absorption in gardens and interiors, lest I should think it argued any unmanliness in him.
I remember so well her showing me that house in Edwardes Square. I had called one afternoon when I had known that Jevons wasn't there. I had left him at his club in Dover Street. (He had a club in Dover Street now; it was my club; I had put him up for it. He enjoyed his club as he enjoyed everything else that he had acquired by conquest; his membership marked another step in his advance, another strip of alien territory gained. And he had chosen this club, he said, because most of the members had retired, to cultivate adipose tissue on pensions, and they made him feel adolescent and slender and energetic.) I had left him in the library writing letters (he said he found a voluptuous pleasure in writing letters on the club paper under that irreproachable address), and I rushed off in a taxi to Viola in Edwardes Square.
She was very glad to see me, and she gave me tea, poured out of an early eighteenth-century silver teapot, in beautiful old blue-and-white Chinese teacups. She wore one of those absurd narrow coats with tails that made women look like long, slender birds that year, and she had done something unexpected with her hair; it was curls, curls, curls all over, the way they did it then, and she sat on a wine-coloured sofa with a wine-coloured rug at her feet.
She began straight away by talking about Jimmy's last book, the"Journal."
"Don't you seenow," she said, "why I went out to him, and how beautiful it all was?"
I asked her did she think I'd ever doubted? She said: "No. But Daddy hates the book. So does Mummy. They all hate it except Norah and me. I'm glad he wrote it. I'm glad he put me into it. I never knew I was so nice, did you?"
"Oh, come," I said, "surely I always knew?"
But she didn't pay any attention to me. She didn't care to know what I thought or what I knew. She wasn't thinking of me or of herself. She was defending Jimmy with little jerky, stabbing thrusts of defiance. You could see that the smallest criticism of him made her suffer; that she was capable of infinite suffering where Jimmy was concerned. Also you saw that she would have to suffer, and that she knew it, and that it was this suffering that she repulsed and thrust from her with her stabs. He was making a tender place in her mind that might some day become a wound.
"You know I did," I insisted—I think, to turn her mind from him.
She looked at me gravely before she smiled.
"Nobody but Jimmy really thinks me nice. Nobody but Jimmy knows how niceIam."
And then she showed me the house.
I praised some detail that Jevons had devised (not that there was much detail; it was all extremely simple). And I believe she saw criticism of Jimmy in that.
"I know it looks as if he cared a lot about this sort of thing. And I daresay you think it's silly of him. But he doesn't really care."
"It certainly looks," I said, "as if he cared about something."
"It's me he cares about," she said.
"And do you care about—this sort of thing, Viola?"
"I care about his caring. But I was every bit as happy in that little four-roomed house, if that's what you mean."
"Aren't you glad to have more room to move about in?"
"I'm glad to have room for Daddy and Mummy when they come to stay."
It was as if she had said, "If you think I'm glad to have room to get away from him you're mistaken."
And there was another impression that she gave me. It was also as if she wanted to warn me not to form the habit of coming to see her when she was alone. I should gain nothing by it. If I insisted on seeing her alone I should get Jimmy, Jimmy, all the time.
I didn't try to see her again alone.
But I saw her often. Jevons was always asking me there. He made a point of it whenever they had what Viola called "anybody interesting." By this she meant somebody belonging to the confraternity of letters. Jevons had a sort of idea that I liked meeting these people and that it did me good. The house in Edwardes Square might have become a haunt of Jimmy'sconfréresif Jimmy had had time to attend to them and if he hadn't been so deliberately exclusive. He was trying for the best—not for the great names so much as for the great achievements, and they were few. And there were one or two of them who rejected Jevons.
And then you had to reckon with Mrs. Jevons's rejections. She was as fastidious in her way as he was in his; and besides, she guarded him, so that the circle around him was rather tight and small.
Oh, he was faithful; he kept me in it; he gave me of his best; and if he could have made me shine I should have blazed among them all.
It doesn't matter now which of them I met there. Jevons was charming to them all. He set them blazing. I don't think he cared much whetherheblazed or not, but if he felt like it he could make a bigger blaze than any of them. He enjoyed them; he enjoyed them vastly, violently. Having once acquired the taste, he couldn't have lived without the intellectual excitement they gave him. But except for that, for the stimulus, the release of energy, it's surprising how little they really counted for him.
And so it's not those evenings and that brilliance that I remember.
In the house in Edwardes Square I seem to have been always meeting Norah Thesiger. Now that they had a room to put her in, she would be there for months at a time. And whenever she was there they would be sure to ask me. If Jevons didn't, Viola did.
There was that summer, too, when Norah and Mildred came together with Charlie Thesiger, their cousin, who was engaged to Mildred. Charlie was then a lieutenant in the South Kent Hussars. He was a large young man, correct, handsome, rather supercilious and rather stupid. He seemed to fill the house in Edwardes Square when he was in it.
He doesn't matter. At least, he didn't matter then. God knows he never really mattered, poor boy, at any time. But he is important. He fixes things for me. He brings me to the incident of June, nineteen-nine.
It was a very slight incident. It wouldn't be worth recording except that it stood for others like itself, a whole crowd. And it was of such slight things that Viola's torments were to be made.
We were at dinner in the little dining-room looking on the flagged court, a party of six: Viola at the head of the round table, with her back to the light; Jevons at the foot, facing her, with the light full on him; Charlie Thesiger was on Viola's right, I was on her left, facing him. Norah sat next to me on Jevons's right, and Mildred sat next to Charlie on Jevons's left, facing Norah. We were all so close together that it would be difficult for one of us to have missed anything that happened or was said. And Viola, with the light behind her, commanded us all.
She had been very gay. I don't suppose Charlie felt anything strained about her gaiety—he was not observant—but I did, and I put it down to Charlie's presence, to the rather flat correctness that made Jevons stand out. Another thing I noticed was that, in labouring for refinement in his surroundings, Jevons hadn't allowed for the effect of contrast. It hadn't occurred to him that an interior that harmonized with Viola would be damaging to him. And it was. Just how damaging I hadn't realized until to-night (which shows how careful he must have been at Canterbury). He didn't stand out. He burst out. He never sank into his background for a single minute. You had to be aware of him all the time.
And yet in a party of the confraternity you were not aware of him like this. For then he blazed; and in the flare he made you didn't notice whether he tilted his soup-plate the right way or not, or care if he couldn't use his table napkin or his pocket-handkerchief and look you square in the face at the same time. Neither did you notice these things if you were alone with him or if only Norah and Viola were there. He was happy with us, and happiness was becoming to him, and he had all sorts of endearing ways that would have disarmed us. And then there's no doubt that Viola protected him. She watched over him; she smoothed his social path for him; she removed his worst pitfalls; she ran, as it were, to pick him up before he fell. He didn't know she was watching him; neither, I think, did she. It was a blind instinct with her to help him. And Norah and I helped him too. And as he wasn't nervous with us everything went well. But when strangers got into our party it was different. Viola couldn't attend to him properly; and if the stranger happened to be rather stupid, like Charlie Thesiger, Jevons didn't blaze and so cover himself; he got bored; and when he was bored he got jumpy; and it was when he got jumpy that he did things.
And Charlie was getting on his nerves.
Still, everything went well until the table was cleared for dessert; and there was no reason why everything shouldn't have gone well even then. Viola had guarded against his most inveterate failing—a habit of stretching for things across the table—by putting everything he wanted within his reach. Within Jevons's reach to-night was a little dish containing among other things chocolate nougat. And he was fond of nougat. He was fond also of chaffing Norah. And he was not prepared to forego one amusement for the other. And Norah had taken a mean advantage of him. She had timed a provocation at the moment when for any other man retort would have been impossible; and she hadn't reckoned with Jevons's ingenuity of resource.
I am not going to say what he did. It wouldn't be fair to him. It was a little thing, but you couldn't pretend for one moment that you hadn't seen it, any more than Jevons could do anything to cover the fantastic horror of it. We simply sat and stiffened; all but Norah, who burst out laughing in Jimmy's face.
Mildred, trying to help him, made matters worse by asking for a peach when she had got a large one on her plate. Charlie Thesiger looked down his nose. I don't know where I looked, but I know that I was conscious of Viola's face and of the flush that darkened it to the tip of her chin and the roots of her hair. And I could feel the shudder down her back passing into mine.
After all, Viola did cover it. She lit a little Roman lamp they had and sent it travelling down the table with the cigarette-box. Then she got up and went to Jevons and stooped over his shoulder and took the little dish from him.
"If anybody wants any more chocolates," she said, "they must come upstairs for them."
"She won't trust me with them," said Jevons. (Hehada nerve.)
Viola trailed off upstairs with her dish, and Mildred and Charlie followed her.
Norah and I held watch with Jevons, who leaned back in his chair and smoked and rubbed the forefinger of his right hand—the innocent instrument (may I say it?) of his crime—with his table napkin, and contemplated Norah in a drowsy imperturbability.
"Did I do anything?" he said presently.
Norah put her hand on his arm and stroked it.
"No, Jimmy dear," she said, "of course you didn't."
It was then that I was aware for the first time of the beauty of Norah's face. Norah's, not Viola's. Up till then I could never see anything but Viola's face in it, coloured wrong, so that it rather worried me to look at it, I resented the everlasting reminder of that likeness under that perverse and disconcerting difference. If her eyes hadn't been so blue and her cheeks so pink; if only her hair had been a little darker and if it hadn't crinkled—
Now, as I looked at her, I wondered how anybody could think she was like Viola. There was only her forehead and the odd turn of her jaw and nose—her profile, if you like, was Viola's—but (when she wasn't laughing) Norah's full face had something that Viola's hadn't and never would have. I had caught it now and then and couldn't make up my mind what it was. Now I saw that it was a sort of wisdom, a look of soberness and goodness that I couldn't quite account for.
Then Jevons explained it for me.
"The Kiddy's growing up," he said (he said it to himself). "She'll be twenty to-morrow. She won't throw wet sponges at me any more."
That was it. Norah was growing up. Her soft face was setting and the expression I had noticed had come to stay.
Presently Jevons got up. He said he had work to do.
"The Grand Attack, Furnival, the Grand Attack!"
And he left us together.
Norah looked after him.
"Poor little Jimmy," she said. "I don't think he ever did abadthing in his life."
And then, with what seemed a daring irrelevance, "I wish Charlie wasn't here. I can't think why Viola ever asked him."
"Why shouldn't she?"
"Because he's bad for Jimmy. He puts him in the wrong."
I'm afraid I laughed a little brutally at the extravagance of this.
"Well," she said. "I can't bear him to suffer."
"You've got a very tender little heart, haven't you?" I said.
"It isn't half as tender as Viola's. But I've got more common sense."
"Then why," I said, "did you laugh at Jimmy just now?"
"That's why. Because it was the best thing you could do. He doesn't mind it half so much when you laugh at him. It's people looking down their noses, like Charlie, that he minds. It must be awful for the poor little chap, when you come to think of it, living on the edge, never knowing when he's going to do something that'll make Viola's blood run cold."
"It must be still more awful for Viola."
To that she said, "It isn't. You don't know how Viola feels about Jimmy.None of my people do. They simply don't understand it."
"Oh, come," I said, "they've accepted it, haven't they?"
"They've accepted itbecausethey don't understand her. They say they never know what she'll do next, and Jimmy's come as a sort of relief to them. They thought she might do something much worse. You see, she isn't a bit like any of us. If she wants to do a thing she'll do it, no matter what it is. She wanted to go to Bruges with Jimmy and look at the Belfry, and she did it like a shot. What they can't see is that she'll neverwantto do anything wrong, so she'll never do it. They can't see that there was just as much Belfry as Jimmy in it. There always will be a Belfry in Viola's life, and when she hears the bells going she'll run off to see. And Jimmy's the only man who'll ever take her to a Belfry.
"She's all right. Because she knows that Jimmy's really ten times more refined than any of us. His little soul's all made of beautiful clean white silk. But Viola can't go on telling people how beautiful he is. They've got to see it for themselves.
"I wishyoucould see it as she does. I wish you could see how she feels about it—"
"My dear Norah," I said, "I've been trying for three years to see asViola sees, and feel as Viola feels. But how can I? I'm not Viola."
"But," she said, "youdounderstand her. If I thought you didn't—if I thought that you could go back on her—and if you go back on Jimmy you go back onher—"
"Well?"
"Well, I don't think I could ever speak to you again."
"My dear child," I said, "you're absurd. I haven't gone back on either of them. Won't it do if I see Jimmy asyousee him?"
"Ye-es," she said. "But—I wonder if you do."
"Norah," I said then, "I wonder if Viola's as sorry for him as you are. I hope she isn't."
"She isn't, then. She isn't sorry for him a bit. No more am I. You'll make me sorry foryouif you don't take care."
When we went to say good night to Jevons we found Viola sitting on the arm of his chair with the little dish in her hand, feeding him with chocolate nougat. Her posture was one of supple contrition, and we heard her say:
"Cheer up, Jimmy. It doesn't really matter what you do. Nobody would ever take you for more than four years old."
Yes. Norah, the youngest, was the one who had grown up.