"Do?" she flashed at me. She had changed all in a moment into a woman whom I did not know.
"I'm going to fetch her back," she said. She had wriggled into her coat."We'll overtake her before she gets to Selham, if you're quick."
I looked at my watch. It was barely half-past four. Yes, if we were quick, if we started at once, if we let the new car rip we should overtake her on the road, or at the station before she could get into that train with Charlie Thesiger in it. I meant, and Norah's eyes meant, that we would stop her going with him, if we had to drag her from the platform.
We ran to the garage to find Kendal. The new car, the superb black and white creature, stood in the middle of the courtyard, ready to start when Jimmy's wire came. So far it was all right.
But we had reckoned without Kendal, the chauffeur.
Kendal, absolved from the four-sixteen train at Midhurst, was at his tea in the servants' hall, and at my summons he came out slowly, munching as he came. He was visibly outraged at our intrusion on his sacred leisure. And when he was ordered to start at once for Selham, he refused. There was no train from Victoria, he said, between the four-four that Mr. Jevons hadn't come by and the five fifty-two.If, Kendal said, he did come by Victoria, and he always came by Waterloo.
What was the sense, said Kendal, with his mouth full, of going to Selham when we hadn't got a wire?
The sense of it, Norah told him, was that we had a message—an important message—for Mrs. Jevons, which shemustget before she started.
At this Kendal left off munching and looked at my wife. Even in my eagerness I was struck by the singular intelligence of that look. There was nothing covert in it. On the contrary it was a most straightforward and transparent look. Kendal's knowledge—which might have sought cover if you had hunted it—had come out to meet ours on equal terms.
It only lasted for the fraction of a second. Kendal repeated firmly, but this time respectfully, that she was Mr. Jevons's car and he couldn't take her out without Mr. Jevons's orders, for if he did Mr. Jevons would give him the sack.
To which Norah replied that Mr. Jevons would give him the sack if he didn't, or if he made us miss that train by arguing. I told him sternly to look sharp. He looked it and we got off. I had begun to crank up the car myself while I spoke.
But he had wasted three minutes of our valuable fifteen. Though on the open road we speeded up the car to her sixty miles an hour, we had to slow down in the narrow lanes. Once we were held up by a country cart, and once by cows in our track, and Norah was beside herself at each halt.
As we careened into the station yard I thought that my wife would have hurled herself out of the car.
The station-master stood by the booking-office door. He had an ominous air of leisure. And when he saw us coming he looked at his watch.
He told us that we had missed the train by three minutes (the three minutes that Kendal had wasted).
I had jumped out of the car and was telling Kendal that it was all his fault, and that if he'd done what he was told we should have caught the train, when he turned on me as only a chauffeur convicted of folly can turn.
"Stand away from the car, sir," he shouted. He jerked her nose round with the savage energy of a chauffeur in the wrong; he seemed to impart his own fury to the car. She snorted and screamed as he backed her and drove her forward and backed her again.
And again he shouted to me. "You get in, sir, if you don't want to be left be'ind."
As he seemed to be animated chiefly by the fear of Jevons (whom, by the way, he adored), we could only suppose that his idea was to fly back to Amershott in time for Jimmy's wire.
On the high road past the station he took the wrong turn.
Ishouted then, "What do you think you're doing, you confounded fool?"
"Ketch the London train at 'Orsham, sir," said Kendal. And he grinned.
"You can't do it," we said.
"I'll 'ave a try," said Kendal.
His honour as a chauffeur was at stake. His blood was up. His knowledge had begun to work in him and he adored his master. He knew what he was trying to do.
We could do it if we kept our heads; if we exceeded the speed limit; if we had luck; if we didn't break down; if neither the county constabulary nor the country traffic held us up.
Kendal declared we could do it easily and allow for accidents. At Horsham Junction you have nearly half an hour to wait between the arrival of the Midhurst and Selham train and the departure of the London express. And the local trains take more than half an hour to get from Selham to Horsham. At a pinch you could speed the car up to the limit of the local train. And, as we had to allow for accidents, we did speed her up whenever we saw a clean track before us.
The run to Selham was nothing to it. It was as if we were racing the train with its three minutes start, as if, positively, we might overtake it at any of the intermediate stations, as if it were in this hope that we dashed up the long white slope to Petworth.
The heat of the day gathered over our heads and smouldered in the east.
And as we ran I realized at last why we were running and what the race was and the hunt, and what our quarry. I remembered that other slower chase that was yet so keen and so agonizing; that hunting down of the same tender flesh and blood, over the Channel and across a foreign country. That was bad enough; but it was not like this. For then I was alone in my hunting of Viola; there was nobody but me, who loved her, to see her run to earth and caught crouching in her corner. That she would crouch, this time, and hide herself, I had no doubt. This hunt that I shared with her sister and her servant was abominable to me and shameful. And between the shame of that flight of hers and this flight there was no comparison. You don't go looking at belfries with Charlie Thesiger. I could not reconcile that enchanting and enchanted Viola of the garden of Bruges with this dreadful flying figure.
I hated myself; I hated Kendal, the chauffeur, as I sat behind his tight, efficient body that quivered with the fury of the hunt. (To think thathisblood should be up and against Viola!) I hated the car that seemed more than ever a living thing, that breathed and snorted and vibrated with the same passion, and was endowed with this incredible speed and this superhuman power. With its black nose and white flanks, and its black hood and the black wings of its splash-boards, it was some terrible and sinister and malignant monster of prey hunting down Viola. Its body had been built, its engines had been forged, to hunt down Viola. The infernal thing had been invented to hunt down Viola.
Somewhere between Petworth and Fittleworth Kendal stopped to water his engine. It was then that we noticed how the gathering heat was piled into a bank of cloud over the east. At the back of our necks we could feel a little hot puff of wind that came up from the west.
"Shouldn't wonder if there was a storm," said Kendal. He added, with the ghost of a grin, "If Mr. Jevons sees that cloud, sir, he'll not wire to be met at Midhurst. He'd crawl home on his 'ands and knees first."
He slipped into his seat and we dashed on.
At Fittleworth, within a stone's-throw of the railway and the road, there is a patch of moor where the ground rises in a hillock. In July and August when the heather's out this hillock is a crimson landmark above the water meadows.
When we came within sight of it Kendal suddenly slowed down, then jammed his brakes hard, and with an awful grinding and snorting the car came to a stand-still.
Kendal stood up. He muttered something about being blowed. Then he turned.
"Got the glasses there, sir?"
I found the glasses, but I didn't give them to Kendal. I stood up too and looked through them.
I couldn't see anything at first.
"There, sir," said Kendal, pointing. "No. You're looking too much to the left. You got to get right o' thet sandy patch—against thet there clump of heather. Now d'you see, sir?"
I did.
Kendal had made out with the naked eye a figure, the figure of a woman, seated on the hillside, a white figure that showed plainly against the red background of the heather.
"It's Mrs. Jevons, sir," he stated.
It was.
I could see her quite distinctly through the field-glasses. She was sitting on the clump of heather to the right of the sandy patch, settled and motionless, in the attitude of one who waited at her ease, with hours before her. And she was alone.
We went on as far as we could towards the moor. Norah and I left the car and struck across the moor by the sandy track that led to the bare patch and the clump of heather.
The seated figure must have been aware of us from the first moment of our approach. You couldn't miss that black and white car as it charged along the highway, or as it stood now, with its engines still humming, by the roadside. But the figure remained seated in its attitude of waiting. It waited while we crossed the moor; and as we climbed the hillock we became intensely aware of it and of its immobility.
We saw its face fixed on us with an expression of tranquil patience and expectation. I may say that I felt an intolerable embarrassment before this quietness of the hunted thing that we had run to earth; especially as it was on me, and not Norah, that Viola's face was fixed as we came nearer.
Then she smiled at me; there was neither conciliation nor defiance in her smile, but a sort of serene assurance and—yes, it was unmistakable—contempt.
She said, "Whatever do you think you're doingnow?"
I said we might not know what we were doing, but we knew what we were going to do. We were going to take her back with us in the car.
At that she asked us (but without any sign of perturbation) if we had gotJimmy there?
Norah said No, our idea was to run back to Amershott before Jimmy got there.
"Where were you running to when you saw me sitting up here?" she said.
I said we'd meant to catch her at Selham but we missed the train and were trying to get to Horsham before the London train started.
She was looking at me now with a sort of compassion, the tenderness of her contempt.
"I see," she said. "Youwereclever, weren't you?"
She looked at her watch. "Well, as youarehere," she said, "I'd let you run me down to Horsham, if you want a run, only I can't very well use Jimmy's car."
I think it was Norah who asked her what on earth she was doing atFittleworth.
"Can't you see," she said, "that I'm waiting for the next train?"
"Did you walk here from Amershott, or what?" I said.
She said, "Rather not. I was in the train."
Then Norah said, "What happened?"
It had dawned on us both how odd it was that Viola should be here, apparently alone, at Fittleworth. It was also odd how we were all ignoring Charlie. I believe I had a sort of idea that she had got him hidden somewhere in the landscape.
Viola smiled a reminiscent smile. "If youmustknow," she said, "what happened was that Charlie was in that train, too—he came bursting out on to the platform at Selham, awfully pleased with himself, because he'd picked my luggage up at Midhurst and bagged a corner seat for me, and made faces at people to keep them out."
"Did you know he was going up to town?" I said.
"No, of course I didn't. He didn't know it himself. There was no reason why he shouldn't go. And you'd have thought there was no reason why we shouldn't go together. He was all right till we got to Petworth. But after that he lost his head and made such an ass of himself that I had to get out here and make him go on by himself. Silly idiot!"
We were sitting in the heather, one on each side of her, and I saw my wife slip her arm into hers and hug it to her.
"Didyouknow," she said, "that Charlie'd gone?"
We didn't answer. We simply couldn't.
And then Viola said, "Poor little Norah!"
And she told her to run away for ten minutes while she talked to me.
"Why poor little Norah?" I asked when we were alone.
"Because," she said, "you frightened her."
"I? Frightened her?"
"Yes," she said. "You made her think I was going to run away with Charlie. There's no good trying to look as if you didn't. You're quite awful, Furny, in the things you think. You can't help it, I know. You're so good, so shockingly good, and you can't bear other people to be naughty. You thought I'd run away to Belgium with Jimmy and you came rushing after me and fetched me back. You thought I'd run away with Charlie and you came rushing—in your dreadful rectitude, and in Jimmy's motor-car that he won't let anybody look at. You'll have an awful time with Jimmy when you get back. It's going to rain, and there'll be mud on the car, and he'll dance with rage when he sees it. And he won't think it's any excuse if you tell him you thought I was running away with Charlie, and you took the car to fetch me back; he'll say you'd no business to think it and in any case you'd no business to take the car out. And poor Kendal will be sacked.
"That's all you've done," she said, "by your fussy interference."
She went on. "It wouldn't matter what you think about me—but it was beastly of you to go and make Norah think it."
I said I didn't suppose either of us thought anything, except that since she was going up to town with the idea of leaving her husband, it was not desirable that she should go up with Charlie Thesiger.
"Who could possibly have supposed," she said, "that Charlie would be such an ass?"
I said I for one could.
"Oh, you—haven't I told you you're always supposing things?"
"Surely?" I said, "you must have seen—yourself—"
She smiled. "My dear—I couldn't see anything but poor Jimmy."
"And yet," I said, "you could think of leaving him?"
She moaned. "You fool—you fool—that'swhyI'm thinking of it."
She pressed her hands to her eyes as if she shut back the sight of him.
"You aren't thinking of it," I said. "You haven't left him. You've only been for a good long walk to Fittleworth, and we've come to fetch you back in the car."
"Haven't I told you that I can't and won't use Jimmy's car?"
"You can't use it to run away from him in; but you can very well use it to go back to him."
"I'm not going back to him," she said. "Can't you see that I've burnt my boats?"
"You may have burnt the old ones, Viola," I said. "But you can build new."
"You must give me time, Wally. It'll take a long time. And you don't understand me. Iwantto get away from Jimmy. That's why I'm going away now, while he isn't there. That's what I mean by burning my boats. If I go back to him—if I see him—I shall never get away. I shan't have the courage. I shall just crumple up with the first sight of him—with the first word he says—"
"Why not," I said, "crumple up?"
She lifted her head as I had seen her lift it before.
"Because," she said, "I wish to be straight."
I asked her if running away behind Jimmy's back was her idea of straightness? To which she replied thatmyrectitude was excruciating and that I'd twist anything to a moral purpose, but it was twisting all the same. Couldn't I see thattheawful thing would be to come sneaking back and pretend to Jimmy that she hadn't run away from him?—If that was my idea of straightness she was sorry for me.
I said, "My dear child, you must see that running away by yourself is one thing, and running away with Charlie Thesiger is another. It would be all very well if Charlie hadn't got into that train."
She wanted to know what that mattered when she had got out of the train? I suggested that the people who saw Charlie get in hadn't seen her get out, and that she must look at the thing as it appeared to other people.
"Look," I said, "at the facts. Mrs. Jevons walks to Selham Station for the London train. Captain Thesiger joins her there, presumably by pre-arrangement, leaving by Midhurst station so that they may not be seen going away together. She is, however, seen entering his compartment at Selham. At Fittleworth she is seized with prudence and with panic. She is seen getting out on to the platform. And she is seen two hours later following the Captain up to London by the next train."
She seemed to be considering it.
"How many people," she said, "know that Charlie was in that train? People that matter—I don't mean you and Norah."
"Your butler, your parlourmaid, your housemaid, your cook, your gardener—by this time—and Baby's nurse—"
("And Baby," she interrupted.)
"—The guard of the train, the booking clerks and porters at Midhurst and Selham, and the station-masters at Midhurst and Selham and Petworth (probably) and Fittleworth. Quite a number of important people, to say nothing of Kendal, who is perhaps the most important of them all."
"And who was it who brought Kendal into it?"
I was silent.
"Nobody but you, Furny, or a born fool, would have dreamed of bringingKendal in."
I said that a little reflection would show her that it was impossible to keep him out. To this she said, "Please go and find Norah. I want her."
I found Norah. I warned her that Viola was going to be extremely difficult. She said it would be all right if I left Viola to her.
As we approached, Viola turned to her sister with an air of outraged and long-suffering dignity.
"Norah," she said. "I do wish you would make Wally see what an ass he's making of himself."
My wife said, in her admirable, judicial way, "How an ass?"
"Well—trying to make me go back and bringing Kendal out here to fetch me. He doesn't seem to see that if I do go back with him it'll be as good as proclaiming to everybody that I ran away with Charlie and was found out by my clever brother-in-law who tracked me down in my husband's motor-car and brought me back in it. Whereas, if I go quietly on to London, as I meant to and as everybody knows I meant to, it'll be all right."
"It won't," I said, "as long as Charlie's there. It will be if you come home with us in the car now, and go up to town with Norah and me on Monday."
"I've told you," she said wearily, "that I can't go back because I shall never get away if I do. And Imust—I must—and I will."
"Yes, dear, and you shall," my wife said, as if she were humouring somebody who was mad.
But for a mad woman Viola, I must say, was extraordinarily lucid.
"What excuse did you give to Kendal for following me in this way?"
"We told him we had an important message to give you before you started."
"Important message! That was pretty thin. I'd have thought of something cleverer than that if I'd been you. Youarea precious pair of conspirators. Can't you see that it's you—with your ridiculous suspicions—that have given me away?"
Norah answered her.
"Oh, Vee-Vee," she said, "we hadn't any suspicions. The message was to tell you that Charlie was in the train. We knew you didn't know it."
To this Viola said coldly, "Walter didn't."
I tried to reassure her, but she waved me away with her hands and implored me to "let her think."
"Well," she said presently, "it isn't as bad as you've tried to make it, even with Kendal thrown in. You came rushing after me to give me a message, and youhavegiven me a message, and now you'll go and tell Kendal that it's all right, and thank him nicely for catching me up, andyourush home again, and I go on quietly to London by the next train."
"Yes, dear," said Norah. "And I'm going up with you while Wally rushes home and follows with Nurse and Baby and the luggage by the morning train."
"That's all very well," said Viola, "but who explains to Jimmy?"
"Oh," said my wife, "Wally does that. You can trust him. Besides you haven't got to explain things to Jimmy."
Well, we settled it that way. It was the only possible solution. The more she thought of it, Viola said, the more she liked it. And she rubbed it into me that it was Norah's solution, and not mine.
Her last words to me as I saw them off at Fittleworth Station were that I needn't worry. It was going to rain. And when poor Jimmy saw his car come in all splashed with rain and covered with mud—"It won't be me," she said, "you'll have to explain about."
And it wasn't.
The storm came down just as we were leaving Fittleworth, and we brought that car back in an awful state. You wouldn't have known it had ever been a black-and-white car. And Jevons (in a mackintosh) was waiting for me in the lane by the courtyard gates. He had caught the early train, but he had seen the storm coming and had walked up from Midhurst, and, as I say, he was waiting for us.
Well—neither Viola nor Norah was with us, and the language, that Jimmy poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly, a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur was prostrated with admiration.
"When Mr. Jevons lays himself out to express himself, sir," he said to me as we retreated, "he pulls it off what you may call a bleedin' masterpiece."
I tried to explain about Viola an hour later. But he wouldn't listen to me. That was all right, he said. He was going to ask us to take her for a month or so anyhow. It was getting a bit stuffy for her down here.
Then he fixed me with "Did Thesiger go up with her?"
There was no good trying to lie to Jevons, so I said that had been Thesiger's idea, but Viola hadn't cared much about having him, for she had got out at Fittleworth and taken Norah on with her.
"I suppose the young ass tried to make love to her. He's fool enough for anything," said Jimmy. But he reverted. "I still can't see why you took the car out. Anybody but an idiot would have known it was going to rain."
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 itwouldbe 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.
"Youcan't," he said. "ButIcan. 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 thatIjolly 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 forthem, 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'mtalking 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. Therewasa 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, Ithink—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 thatheshould 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. Hemayhave 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 feltsomehorror and anxiety and excitement that was my own. But as I look back on it all I am aware chiefly of Jevons, ofhisopinions,hisvision,hishorror 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 helikedthe 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 thoughtthatfunny.
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. Hewasimportunate; 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 ofhim. 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. Theycouldhelp 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, hehadlied 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.Thatwas the use he'd make of his powerful pen. See how they'd likethat.
I remember it because it was then that I laid before him my own problem. TheDaily Posthad 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 todo?"
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!"
Hisluck, 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 droveme. 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 theDaily Postsent 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 helookedpanic-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 theydidwant 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 goingto?"
"Belgium," he said. He added that it was the only blessed place hecouldget 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 worriedthemtill 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 theBelgium 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 itwaspretty 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'vesaidit, 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'twantto 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 tonow—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'vegot to see to that, Furny. You've got to stop her if she tries to get out. They'realltrying. 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.
Idoremember 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—becauseI 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 methistime."