That pause saved them.
His stick slipped and tumbled down on the landing with a clatter. We heard him prop it up again. Our eyes met. I'm afraid mine said: "What are you going to donow?"
Then he came in and I saw the gallant Reggie take the shock of him. I don't suppose he had ever before met anything like Jevons—I mean really met him, at close quarters—in his life. But he was gallant, and he had his face well under control. Only the remotest, vanishing quiver and twinkle betrayed the extremity of his astonishment.
Viola, with an admirable air of detachment from Jevons, introduced them. I don't know how she did it. It was as if, without any actual repudiation, she declined to hold herself responsible for Jevons' appearance; for the extraordinary little bow he made; for his jerky aplomb and for his "Glad to meet you, Captain." And for the rest, she just handed him over to her brother and trusted Reggie to be decent to him.
I had wondered: Are they going to let on that they've been out together? She cannot—she cannot own up to that. But how are they going to get out of it, and will he betray her?
I saw how they were going to get out of it. If they didn't say in as many words that they'd met on the doorstep they implied it in everything they said. They asked each other polite questions, all to the tune of: "What have you been doing since I last saw you?"—to convey the impression that they had met thus casually after a long interval. Jevons played up to her well, almost too well; so well, in fact, did he play, that not long afterwards I was to ask myself: Was this perfection the result of collusion? Had they anticipated just such a sudden, disconcerting encounter? Had they thought it all out and arranged with each other beforehand how they should behave? I don't know. I never cared to ask her.
The game lasted some little time. I didn't like to see her driven to these shifts (I was afraid, in fact, they'd overdo it), and I came to her help by telling Jevons that Captain Thesiger was an enthusiastic admirer of his work; and Reggie burst in jubilantly—he was evidently glad to be able to meet Jevons on this happy ground—with: "Are you the chap who wrote those things I've been reading? I say, Vee-Vee, you might have told me."
He fastened upon Jevons then and there. He started him off on the boxing match. There was very little about boxing that Reggie didn't know, but he appealed to Jevons with a charming deference as to an expert. The dear boy had a good deal of his sister's innocent veneration for the chaps who wrote the things they'd been reading, who could, that is to say, do something they couldn't do.
And Jevons, once started on the boxing match, fairly let himself go. He careered over the field of sport, interrupting his own serious professionalélanwith all sorts of childlike and spontaneous gambols. In some of his turns he was entirely lovable. It was clear that Reggie loved him as you love a strange little animal at play, or any vital object that diverts you. From his manner I gathered that, provided he were not committed to closer acquaintance with Jevons, he was willing enough to snatch the passing joy of him.
I do not know by what transitions they slid together on to the Boer War. The Boer War happened to be Reggie's own ground. He had served in it. You would have said that Jevons had served in it too, to hear him. He traced the course of the entire campaign for Reggie's benefit. He showed him by what error each regrettable incident (as they called them then) had occurred, and by what strategy it might have been prevented.
And Reggie—who had been there—listened respectfully to Jevons.
Viola had lured me into a corner where only scraps of their conversation reached us from time to time. So I do not know whether it was in connection with the Boer War that Jevons began telling Reggie that journalism was a rotten game; that from birth he had been baulked of his ambition. He had wanted to be tall and handsome. He had wanted to be valorous and athletic. And here he was sent into the world undersized and not even passably good-looking. And what—he asked Reggie—couldhe do with a physique like his?
I remember Reggie telling Jevons his physique didn't matter a hang. He could be a war correspondent in the next war. I remember Jevons saying in an awful voice: That was just it. He couldn't be anything in the next war—and, by God, there was a big war coming—he gave it eight years—but he couldn't be in it. He was an arrant coward.
That, he said, was his tragedy. His cowardice—his distaste for danger—his certainty that if any danger were ever to come near him he would funk.
And I remember Reggie saying, "My dear fellow, if you've the courage to say so—" and Jevons beating off this consolation with a funny gesture of despair. And then his silence.
It was as if suddenly, in the midst of his gambolling, little Jevons had fallen into an abyss. He sat there, at the bottom of the pit, staring at us in the misery of the damned.
I looked at Viola. Her eyelids drooped; her head drooped. Her whole body drooped under the affliction of his stare, and she would not look at me.
Reggie (he reallywasdecent) tried to turn it off. "I wouldn't worry, if I were you," he said. "Wait till the war comes."
"Oh, it's coming all right," said little Jevons. "No fear."
And as if he could no longer bear to contemplate his cowardice, he said good-bye to us and left. Reggie's eyes followed his dejected, retreating figure.
"How quaint!" he said. "But he's a smart chap, anyway. And, mind you, he's right about that war."
I said (Heaven knows why, except that I think I must have wanted Reggie's opinion of Jevons): "D'you think he's right about his own cowardice?"
Reggie said, "Ask me another. You can't tell. I only know I've seen men look like that and talk like that before an engagement."
Viola raised her head. Her voice came with the clear tremor of a bell:"And did they funk?"
"They didn't run away, if that's what you mean. I daresay they felt likeJevons. I've felt like Jevons myself."
Of course, knowing Jevons as I do now, I have sometimes fancied his talk about cowardice may have been mere bravado, the risk he took with Reggie. But here again I am not quite sure. I don't really know.
I am, however, entirely enlightened as to the game Viola played with me that night.
Jevons had stayed till half-past six. He had talked for two hours and a half. When I got up to go, Reggie suggested that his sister should come and dine with him somewhere in town and do a play afterwards.
She said, All right. She was on. And Furny would come too.
He said, of course I was coming too. That was what he had meant (it wasn't).
And in the end I went. I say in the end—for of course I protested. It was his one evening with his sister. But Viola's poor eyes signalled to me and implored me: "Don't leave me alone with him, whatever you do." She wanted to put off the dreadful moment that must come when he would ask her: "Where on earth did you pick up that shocking little bounder?"
But the question never came. To begin with, Reggie was so enthralled by the funny play we went to that he forgot all about Jevons. And then Viola's game, that started in the restaurant and went on all through dinner, began again and continued in the taxi after the play. And though Reggie was discretion itself, you could see that he had taken it for granted—and no wonder—that she and I were, well, on the brink of an engagement if we hadn't fallen in. As for Jevons, he simply couldn't have conceived him in that connection. To Reggie, Jevons was simply an amusing little scallywag who could write. That Viola should have taken Jevons seriously surpassed his imagination of the possible. So that she never was in any danger of discovery, and there was no need for her manoeuvres. He couldn't have so much as found out that she had gone for a walk with Jevons, because it wouldn't have entered his head that you could go for a walk with him. People didn't do these things.
Besides, he never was alone with her that evening. She took good care of that. She insisted on dropping him at his hotel, which we passed on our way northwards. She actually said to him, "You must get out here. Furny'll see me home. I want to talk to him."
And instead of talking to me, she sat leaning forward with her back half turned to me, staring through the window at nothing at all.
That was how I came to propose to Viola in the taxi. I had been afraid to do it before. I wasn't going to do it at all unless I was sure of her. But it seemed to me that she had been trying all afternoon and all evening to tell me that I might be sure.
* * * * *
Well—she wouldn't have me. She was most decided about it. I had no hope and no defence and no appeal from her decision. Unless I was prepared to be a bounder—and a fatuous bounder at that—I couldn't tell her that she had given me encouragement that almost amounted to invitation. To do her justice, until the dreadful moment in the taxi she hadn't known that she had given me anything. She confessed that she had been trying to convey to Reggie the impression that if her affections were engaged in any quarter it was in mine. She had been so absorbed in calculating the effect on Reggie that she had never considered the effect on me. She said she thought I knew what she was up to and that I was simply seeing her through. She spoke of Jevons as if he was a joke—a joke that might be disastrous if her family took it seriously. It might end in her recall from town. She intimated that there were limits even to Reggie's enjoyment of the absurd; she owned quite frankly that she was afraid of Reggie—afraid of what he might think of her and say to her; because, she said, she was so awfully fond of him. As for me, and whatImight think, it was open to me to regard her solitary stroll with Jevons as a funny escapade.
I do not believe the poor child was trying to throw dust in my eyes. It was her own eyes she was throwing dust in. She didn't want to think of herself what she was afraid of Reggie thinking.
As to the grounds of my rejection (I was determined to know them), she was clear enough in her own little mind. She liked me; she liked me immensely; she liked me better than anybody in the world but Reggie. She admired me; she admired everything I did; she thought me handsome; I was the nicest-looking man she knew, next to Reggie. But she didn't love me.
"What's more, Furny," she said, "I can't think why I don't love you."
I couldn't see her clearly and continuously in the taxi. The lamp-posts we passed on the way to Hampstead lit her up at short, regular intervals, and at short, regular intervals she faded and was withdrawn from me. And in the same intermittent way, her soul, as she was trying to show it to me, was illuminated and withdrawn.
"I ought to love you," she went on. "I know I ought. It would be the very best thing I could do."
The folly in me clutched at that admission and gave tongue. "If that's so," I said, "don't you think you could try to do what you ought?"
The lamp-light fell on her then. She was smiling a little sad, wise smile. "No," she said. "No. I think that'swhyI can't love you—because I ought."
And then she went on to explain that what she had against me was my frightful rectitude.
"You're too nice for me, Furny, much too nice. And ever so much too good. I simply couldn't live with integrity like yours." She paused and then turned to me full as we passed a lamp-post.
"I suppose you know my people would like me to marry you?"
I said a little irritably that I had no reason to suppose anything of the sort.
"They would," she said. "Why, bless you, that's what they asked you down at Whitsuntide for! I don't mean that they said to each other: Let's ask him down and then he'll marry Viola. They wouldn't even think it—they're much too nice. Poor dears—they'd be horrified if they knew I knew it! But it was underneath their minds, you know, pushing them on all the time. I believe they sent Reggie up to have a look at you, though they don't know that either. They think they sent him to see what I was up to. You see, Furny dear, from their point of view youareso eligible. And really, do you know, I think that's what's dished you—what's dished us both, if you like to put it that way. I'm sure you may."
I said it didn't matter much what dished me or how I put it, provided Iwasdished. But—was I?
Oh yes! She left me in no doubt that I was dished. And I saw—I still see, and if anything more clearly—why.
I was everything that Canterbury approved of. And Viola, in her young revolt, was up against everything of which Canterbury approved. Her people were dear people; they were charming people, well-bred people; they had unbroken traditions of beautiful behaviour. And they had tied her up too tight in their traditions; that was all. Viola would never marry anybody on whom Canterbury had set its seal.
And seeing all that, I saw that I had missed her by a mere accident. It was my friend the General who had dished me when he testified to my entire eligibility. That's to say, it was my own fault. If I had let well alone; if I hadn't turned the General on to them,Ishould have been in the highest degree ineligible;Ishould have been a person of whom Canterbury most severely disapproved; when I've no doubt that Viola, out of sheer perversity, would have insisted on marrying me.
She said as much. So far she saw into herself and no farther.
The Northern Heights were favourable to this interview, for the taxi broke down in an attempt to scale East Heath Road, so that we walked the last few hundred yards together to her door.
It was while we were walking that—stung by a sudden fear, a reminiscence of the afternoon—I asked her: Was there anybody else?
No, she said, there wasn't. How could there be? Hadn't she told me she liked me better than anybody else, next to Reggie?
"Are you sure?" I said. "Are you quite sure?"
She stopped in the middle of the road and looked at me.
"Of course," she said. "Thereisn'tanybody. Except poor, funny littleJevons. And you couldn't mean him."
That was as near as we got to him then.
But a week later—the week before Easter—he came to us suddenly in my rooms where Viola was correcting proofs for me.
He had come to tell us of his good luck. His novel had been accepted.
I was glad, of course. But Viola was more than glad. She was excited, agitated. She jumped up and said: "Oh, Jimmy!" (She called him Jimmy, and her voice told me that it was not for the first time.) "Jimmy! How simply spiffing!"
And I saw him look at her with a grave and tender assurance, as a man looks at the woman he loves when he knows that the hour of his triumph is her hour.
And I thought even then: It's nothing. It's only that she's glad the poor chap has pulled it off.
Then she said: "Let's all go and dine somewhere together. You don't mind,Furny dear, do you? I'll take it home and sit up with it."
Oh, I didn't mind. We all went somewhere and dined together. We went, for the sheer appropriateness of it, to that restaurant in Soho where I had dined with Jevons for the first time. That was how it happened—what did happen, I mean, afterwards, in my rooms where Jevons had left us.
We had gone back there for coffee and cigarettes. (Canterbury wouldn't have approved of this.)
He had said good night to us when he turned on the threshold with his reminiscence. The restaurant in Soho had aroused it.
"I say, Furnival, do you remember that half-crown you borrowed from me?"
I said I did. And that to remind me of it now was a joke in very questionable taste.
He said, "You never really knew the joke. I kept it from you most carefully. That little orgy of ours had just about cleared me out and the half-crown was my last half-crown. I had to go without any dinner for three days."
I mumbled something about his not meaning it.
He said, "Of course I meant it. Why, my dear chap, that's the joke!"
He stood there in the doorway, rocking with laughter. Then he saw our faces.
"I say, I wouldn't have told you if I'd thought it would harrow you like that. Thought you'd think it funny. Itisfunny."
I said, "No, my dear fellow, it's just missed being funny."
I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him from the room. (I had seen Viola's face and I didn't want him to see it.) I led him gently downstairs with a hand still on his shoulder. He was a little grieved at giving pain when he had hoped to give pleasure.
At the bottom of the stairs he turned and looked at me with his ungovernable twinkle. "Itwasfunny," he said. "But it wasn't half so funny, Furnival, as your face."
I found Viola sitting at my writing-table, with her arms flung out over it and her head bowed on them. And she was crying—crying with little soft sobs. I've said that I didn't think she could do it. And I didn't. She wasn't the sort that cries. I'm convinced she hadn't cried like this for years, perhaps never since she was a child.
I put my arms round her as if she had been a child; I held her soft, warm, quivering body close to mine; I wiped her tears away with her pocket-handkerchief. And like a child she abandoned herself to my—to my rectitude. She trusted in it utterly. I might have been her brother Reggie.
I said: "You mustn't mind. He was only rotting us." And she said: "He wasn't. It was true. He told me that six months ago he was starving."
I said: "Vee-Vee, if hewas, you mustn't think about him. You mustn't, really."
Then she drew away from me and dried her eyes herself, carefully and efficiently, and said in a calm and measured voice: "I'm not thinking about him."
I went on as if I hadn't heard her: "You mustn't be sorry for him. Jevons is quite clever enough to take care of himself. He isn't a bit pathetic. You mustn't let him get at you that way."
She raised her head with her old, high defiance. "He isn't trying to get at me. I'm not sorry for him—any more than he's sorry for himself."
I said, "You don't know. You're just a dear little ostrich hiding its head in the sand."
"No," she said. "No. I'm not a fool, Furny. Even an ostrich isn't such a fool as it looks. It doesn't imagine for a moment that it isn't seen. It hides its head because it knows it's going to be caught, anyway, and it's afraid of seeing what's going to catch it."
I asked her then, Wassheafraid?
She was standing beside me now, leaning back against my writing-table. Her two hands clutched the edge of it. Her eyes had a far-seeing, candid gaze.
"I'm not afraid," she said, "of anything outside me. Only of things inside me—sometimes."
"What sort of things?"
She smiled, the queerest little, far-off smile.
"Oh, funny things—things you wouldn't understand, Furny."
To that I said, "I wish you'd marry me, Viola."
She shrugged her shoulders and said, so did she, and it was much worse for her than it was for me. And then: "Do you know, Reggie liked you immensely. He told me so."
I said it would be more to the point ifshedid. But since she didn't, since she couldn't marry me, I wished—"I wish," I said, "you'd go back to Canterbury and marry some nice man like Reggie."
"Can't you see," she cried, "that I shall never marry a nice man likeReggie?"
The next thing that happened was that she went off with Jevons.
At least, to all appearances she went off with him. They were in Belgium, at Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent and Bruges again together. I found them at Bruges after having tracked them through all the other places.
It was Captain Thesiger who started me. Reggie (whose family seemed to employ him chiefly to find out what Viola was up to) had called at my rooms after Easter to ask me if I could give him his sister's address. He said they hadn't got it at Hampstead, where he had been to see her, and they didn't know where she was staying. They thought it was in the country somewhere, and that she wouldn't be very long away, as she told them not to forward any letters. He thought I might possibly have her address.
I told him that I hadn't, and that I didn't know how to get it, either.
He said, "It's a rotten habit she's got of sloping off like this without telling you." It wouldn't matter, only his regiment was ordered off to India. He was sailing next week. She was to have come down to Canterbury for Easter and she hadn't. If he only knew the people she was stopping with—if he'd any idea of the town or the village or the county, he'd try and find her. But she might be in the Hebrides for all he knew.
I said I was sorry I couldn't help. All I knew was she had gone into the country (I didn't know it, but I assumed the knowledge for her protection). She had told me she might be going (she had), and I didn't think she'd be away for more than a day or two. I was pretty sure she'd be back before he sailed.
I'd no reason, you see, to suppose she wouldn't be. Anyhow, I satisfied him.
I marvel now at the ease with which I did it. But he was used to Viola's casual behaviour; and the monstrous improbability of the thing she had done this time was her cover. Who in the world would have dreamed that she would go off with Jevons? I don't really know that I dreamed it myself at the moment. I may be mixing up with my first vague dread the certainty that came later. But sometimes I wonder why Reggie didn't suspectme. I suppose my rectitude that had dished me with Viola saved me with her brother.
He took me to lunch with him at his club, and went off quite happily afterwards to the Army and Navy Stores to see about his kit.
I went straight to Jevons's rooms in Bernard Street. Jevons was away. Had been away since Easter. His landlady couldn't give me his address. He hadn't told them where he was going to, and they rather thought he was abroad. His letters were all forwarded to his publishers.Theymight give me his address.
I went to his publishers. They wouldn't give me his address. They weren't allowed to give addresses, but they would forward any letters to Mr. Jevons. I said I was a friend of Mr. Jevons's. Could they at least tell me whether he was or was not in England? They said that when they had last heard from him he was not.
Then I went down to Fleet Street, to his editor, my editor. He couldn't give me Jevons's address because he hadn't got it. He rang up the office. In the office they rather thought Jevons was in Belgium. They'd had a manuscript from him posted at Ostend. They looked up the date. It was three days ago.
I sailed that night for Ostend.
Of course I had no business to follow Jevons. He had a perfect right to travel—to travel anywhere he liked, without interference from anybody. And in fixing on a time to travel in, nothing was more likely than with his mania upon him he would choose a time that had become valueless to him—a time that he had no other use for, the time when Viola Thesiger was away. The poverty of his resources was such that he couldn't afford to waste any opportunity of seeing her. So that I really could not have given any satisfactory answer if I had been asked why I had jumped to the preposterous conclusion that, because they were away at the same time, they were away together. It ought to have been as inconceivable to me as it was to Reggie. I can only say that in following him I acted on an intimation that amounted to certainty, founded on I know not what underground flashes of illumination and secret fear.
I must have trusted to more flashes in pursing his trail. For when I reached Folkestone there wasn't any trail at all. My only clue was that three days ago Jevona had posted a manuscript at Ostend. He might not be in Belgium at all. He might be in Holland or in France or Germany by this time.
When we got to Ostend I made systematic inquiries at the Post Office and at all probable hotels. At the eleventh hotel (a very humble one) I heard that a "Mr. Chevons" had stayed there one night, three nights ago. No, he had nobody with him. He had left no address. They didn't know where he was going on to. I found out under another rubric that Englishmen never came to this hotel. There was no point in making a separate search for Viola; if my intuition held good, all I had to do was to find out where Jevons was.
I went on to Bruges. Why, I cannot tell you. I had never heard either Viola or Jevons say they would like to see Bruges. But Bruges was the sort of place that people did like to see.
No trace of Jevons or of Viola in Bruges.
I went on to Antwerp (it was another of the likely places), and then, in sheer desperation, to Ghent.
And in Ghent, in a certain hotel in thePlace d'Armes, I ran up against Burton Withers, the man who used to be on the oldDispatch, and the very last person I could have wished to see. I didn't ask him if he'd seen Jevons; I didn't mention Jevons; but before we'd parted he had told me that, by the way, he'd come across Jevons in Bruges. He was going about with my typist, Miss Thesiger. They were staying in the same hotel.
I tried to say as casually as I could that Miss Thesiger had wired to me that she was staying in that hotel with her people.
The little bounder then intimated that when he saw Miss Thesiger her people were less conspicuous than Jevons.
I replied that that was probably the reason why they'd asked me to join them when I'd seen Ghent.
Withers advised me to go on seeing Ghent if I wanted to be popular. They—Jevons and Miss Thesiger—didn't look at all as if they wanted to be seen, much less joined.
He had the air of knowing a good deal more than he cared to tell me; but then he always had that air; you may say he lived on it.
I asked him presently (in a suitable context) whether he was going back soon; and to my relief I learned that he had only just come out—for his paper—and was going on into Germany through Brussels. He wouldn't be back in England for another three weeks or more.
He wouldn't be back, I reflected, to tell what he knew or what he didn't know, till Reggie Thesiger had sailed.
I got rid of the little beast on the first likely pretext, having dealt with him so urbanely that he couldn't possibly think he had told me anything I saw reason to believe and therefore to resent.
Then I went back to Bruges.
This time my quest was fairly easy. I didn't know what hotel Jevons was staying in; but I did know the sort of hotel that Withers stayed in when he was travelling for his paper. My errand was narrowed down to three or four (good, but not too good), and the first I struck in the Market-Place was Withers's hotel. It was one of those that three days ago had known nothing of Jevons.
I inquired this time for Withers and was told that he had left that morning. I engaged a room and strolled out into the Market-Place. I visited the Cathedral, the Belfry, and the Béguinage, in the hope of coming suddenly across Viola and Jevons.
I did not come across them in any of those places; but I was not very earnest about the search. I was so sure that if Withers had not lied to me they would presently come across me at their hotel. I meant that it should be that way, if possible: that they should come across me in a place where they could not evade me. God only knows what I meant to say to them when they had found me.
As I entered the hotel again I saw the proprietor's wife make a sign to her husband. They conferred together, and sent theconciergeupstairs after me. He wanted to know if I was the gentleman who had inquired the other day for Mr. Chevons, because, if I was, Mr. Chevons had arrived the day before yesterday and was staying in the hotel.
There was no doubt about it; his name, James Tasker Jevons, was in the visitors' list.
Viola's was not.
From the enthusiasm of the fat proprietor and his wife you would have supposed that Jevons and I had roamed the habitable globe for months in search of one another; and that Jevons, at any rate, would be overpowered with joy when he found that I was here. They said nothing about Viola.
And before I could ask myself what earthly motive Withers could have had for lying to me, I concluded that hehadlied.
Or perhaps—it was more than likely—he had been mistaken.
Jevons, I said to myself, was bound to turn up at dinner. If Viola was in Bruges, Viola would probably be with him. I chose a table by the door behind a screen, where I could see everybody as they came in without being seen first of all by anybody.
Jevons didn't turn up for dinner.
I found him later on in the evening, on the bridge outside the eastern gate of the city. He stood motionless and alone, leaning over the parapet and looking into the water. Away beyond the Canal a long dyke of mist dammed back the flooding moonlight, and the things around Jevons—the trees, the water, the bridge, the gate and its twin turrets—were indistinct. But the man was so poured out and emptied into his posture that I could see his dejection, his despair. The posture ought to have disarmed me, but it didn't.
He moved away as he saw me coming, then, recognizing me, he stood his ground. It was as if almost he were relieved to see me.
"Oh, it's you, is it?" he said.
I asked him who he thought it was, and he said he thought it was that little beast Withers.
I said, "I daresay you did. I saw Withers this morning."
He said quite calmly he supposed that was why I was here.
I said I had been here before I had seen Withers.
"I see," he said. "He's told you."
I said Withers had told me nothing I didn't know.
"You didn't know anything," he said. "You simply came here to find out."
I said: Yes, that was what I had come for.
"Well," he went on; "there isn't much to find out. She's here. And I'm here. And Withers saw us yesterday. As he told you."
He spoke in the tired, toneless voice of a man stating for the thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact. He knew that I had tracked him down, but he didn't resent it. I felt more than ever that this encounter was in some way a relief to him; things, he almost intimated, might have been so much worse. I didn't know then that his calmness was the measure of his trust in me.
"The really beastly thing," he said, "was Withers seeing us."
I answered that the really beastly thing was his being there; his having brought her there; and that it would give me pleasure to pitch him over the canal bridge, only that the canal water was too clean for him.
He said, "The canal water is filthy. But it isn't filthier than—it isn't half so filthy as your imagination. Your imagination, Furnival, is like the main sewer of this city."
He said it without any sort of passion, in his voice of utter weariness, as if he was worn-out with struggling against imaginations such as mine.
"But," he went on, "even your imagination isn't as obscene as Withers's.You may as well tell me what he said to you about Miss Thesiger."
"He said that she—that you were staying together in the same hotel."
"Why shouldn't we? It's a pretty big hotel. Do you mind my going back to it?"
I said grimly that I was going back to it myself. I wasn't going to letJevons out of my sight. I felt as if I had taken him into custody.
We went back.
We didn't speak till we came into the Market-Place. Then Jevons said quietly:
"As it happens, we aren't staying together in that damned hotel. I'm staying in it by myself. We were dining there and having breakfast when Withers spotted us. You don't suppose she'd let me take her to the same hotel, do you? I got a room for her in a boarding-house. Kept by some ladies."
"What do you mean by bringing her here at all? If," I said, "youdidbring her."
He meditated as if he too wondered what he had meant by it.
"I brought her all right. That's to say, I made her come."
"You mean you didn't bring her? She followed you?"
(Ihadto know what they had done, how they had arranged it.)
We stood for a moment in the middle of the vast foreign Market-Place, talking in voices whose softness veiled our hostility.
He answered with a little spurt of anger. "You can't call it following.She came."
"Don't prevaricate," I said. "She came because you made her come. I'm not going to ask you why you made her. It's obvious."
"Is it?" he said. "I wish I knew why. I wish to God I knew."
"Don't talk rot," I said. "You knew all right. And she didn't."
He looked at me. Standing there in the lighted Marketplace, under the shadow of the monument, he looked at me with shining, tragic eyes.
"No, Furnival," he said. "Before God I didn't know. Neither of us knew.But I know now. And I'm going to-morrow."
* * * * *
He stuck to it that he was going. He seemed to think that his going would make it all right. He had just realized—he had only just, after six days of it, mind you, realized—that he had compromised her. I said I supposed he realized it after Withers had seen them?
He said, No, it had come over him before that. Neither of them really cared a damn about Withers. Who was going to care what a beast like Withers thought or said? It had come over him that he oughtn't to have brought her here. He wished he'd hung himself before he'd thought of it, but the fact was that he didn't think. He just felt when he got out here himself that it would be a jolly thing for her to come too; it would do her good to cut everything—all the mimsy tosh she'd been brought up in and hated—to get out of it all—just to do one splendid bunk. That, he said, was all it amounted to.
We talked it over, sitting up in his little bedroom under the roof, the cheapest room in the hotel. You may wonder how I could have endured to talk to him instead of wringing his horrid little neck for him; but there wasn't anything else to be done. After all, it wouldn't have done Viola or me any good if I had wrung his neck. It was, in fact, to save precisely that sort of violent scandal that I had come out here. I had realized so well what wringing Jevons's neck would mean to Viola that I was determined to get at him before Reggie Thesiger could.
Besides I doubt very much if you could have wrung the neck of anybody so abjectly penitent as Jevons was that evening. I felt as if I were shut up with a criminal in the condemned cell, and Jevons no doubt felt as if he had murdered Viola.
And yet, sitting there on his bed, leaning forward with his head in his hands and his eyes staring, staring at the horror he had raised round her, he asserted persistently his innocence.
"Practically," he said, "I brought her out to look at Bruges—theBelfry."
I said: "Good God! Couldn't she look at the Belfry withoutyou?"
He shook his head and replied very gravely: "Not in the same way, Furnival. Not in the same way. It wouldn't have been the same thing at all."
"You mean it wouldn't have been the same for you, you little bounder."
"It wouldn't have been the same thing forher. I wasn't thinking only of myself. Who does?"
It was as if he had said: "Who that loves as I love thinks only of himself?" But I missed that. I was too angry.
At least I suppose I was too angry. I must have been. Jevons's offence was unspeakable, or seemed so. He had outraged all decencies. He had donemeabout the worst injury that one man can do to another—at any rate, I wasn't sure that he hadn't. How could I have been sure! Every appearance was against him. Even his funny candour left me with a ghastly doubt. It was preposterous, his candour. His innocence was preposterous. But it is impossible to write about this singular adventure as it must have appeared to me at the time. I am saturated with Jevons's point of view. I have had to live so long with his innocence and I have forgiven him so thoroughly any wrong he ever did to me. All this is bound to colour my record and confuse me. I have impression upon impression of Jevons piled in my memory; I cannot dig down deep enough to recover the original; I cannot get back to that anger of mine, that passion of violent integrity, that simple abhorrence of Jevons that I must have felt.
He didn't care a rap about me and my abhorrence. He asked me what I thought I was doing when I came out here? He simply smiled when I told him I'd come out to send Viola back to her people before Reggie Thesiger got hold of him and thrashed him within an inch of his life, not because I in the least objected to his being thrashed within an inch of his life—far from it—but because advertisement in these affairs was undesirable. I didn't want Viola's family or anybody else to know about this instance. It was to be hushed up on her account and on their account alone.
He replied pensively (almost too pensively) that he had supposed that was the line I would take. It was his little meditative pose that made me call him a thundering scallywag and accuse him of having calculated on the line that would be taken.
He said quietly, "The word thundering is singularly inappropriate. There's nothing thundering about me. I haven't calculated anything. As for hushing it up, I'm hushing it up myself, thank you. Haven't I told you I'm going to-morrow? Can't you see that I'm packing?"
He had evidently been trying to pack.
"And what," I asked, "is Miss Thesiger doing?"
"She's staying on here by herself a bit. In thepension. As if she'd come by herself."
He seemed entirely satisfied with his plan.
I said, "Look here, Jevons, that won't do. It's no goodyourgoing. You've been seen here. You're supposed to be staying in this hotel together. If you go and she stays—in thatpension—you've deserted her. You've seduced her. You're tired of her—in five days—and you've left her."
"You don't suppose I havereally?" said Jevons.
"I don't suppose anything. I don't know what you've done. I don't think I want to know. That's what it'll look like. Do, for God's sake, remember you've beenseen."
He gathered a portion of his cheek into his mouth and sucked it.
"I suppose," he said, "itwouldlook like that."
I said of course it would. And he asked me then, quite humbly, what I thought he'd better do.
I said I thought he'd better do exactly what I told him. He was to stay here till Captain Thesiger had sailed for India (I wasn't going to let him get back to England till Reggie was out of it). Miss Thesiger was to go back to her people to-morrow, and he was not to see her or write to her before she went.
He asked me was I thinking of taking her back myself?
I said I wasn't. Miss Thesiger had behaved as if she had disappeared.There was no good in my behaving as if she had disappeared withme.
That seemed to pacify him.
I said I should take her to Ostend to-morrow and put her on board the boat. I could see that he didn't at all care about this part of the programme, but his intelligence accepted the whole as the best thing that could be done in the circumstances.
Then I left him to his misery and went round to thepensionto seeViola.
All my instincts revolted against what I had to do.
* * * * *
She has since told me that I did it beautifully. I don't, of course, believe her, and it doesn't matter. The wonder is how I did it at all.
To begin with I was afraid of seeing her, because I conceived that she would be afraid of seeing me. I felt as if I had hunted her down and caught her in a trap. I didn't want the bright, defiant creature to crouch and flinch before me in her corner. And, as I tried to realize our encounter, that was how I saw her—crouching and flinching in a corner. It wouldn't have been quite so awful if the man had been any other man but Jevons. I could not imagine a worse position for a girl like Viola Thesiger than to be caught running off to Belgium, or anywhere, with Jevons, and told to leave him and go home. Put brutally, that was what I had to tell her.
The only way to do it was to ignore the unspeakable element in the affair—to ignore Jevons. To behave as if I'd never heard of him; as if she were just travelling in Belgium on her own account and staying in Bruges alone.
And that—if she had only let me—was what I tried to do.
I remember vividly everything that passed in that interview, but I do not know how to reproduce it, how to give anything like an impression of the marvellous thing it was, or that it turned into under her hands. It ought, you see, to have been so ugly, so humiliating, so absolutely intolerable for both of us. And it wasn't. She took it from me, at the end, and held it up, as it were a little way out of my grasp; and before I knew where I was, with some sudden twist or turn she had brought beauty out of it. Clear and exquisite beauty.
I found her in her room at thepension. It was at the back, on the ground floor; and had long windows opening into a little high-walled garden. The room, I remember, was rather dingy and stuffed up with furniture. Large Flemish pieces, bureaus, chests and cabinets stood against the walls. There was a bed behind the door; she had put her travelling-rug over it. And there was a washstand in an alcove with a curtain hung across it; and some of her coats and gowns hung behind another curtain in a corner, and some were on hooks on the door. And her little trunk was on the floor by the foot of the bed. And her shoes stood by the stove.
Somehow, when I saw these things—especially the shoes—my heart melted inside me with a tenderness that was infinitely more painful than the rather austere disapproval of her which I had relied on for support.
I was prepared, as I said, for a cowed and frightened Viola, or for Viola in a mood at least in keeping with the poignant and somewhat humbling pathos of her surroundings; but not for the Viola I found.
Thegarçonof thepensionclosed the door of this room in my face as he went in with my card to inquire whether she would receive me. I thought, "If she refuses I shall have to insist; and that will be unpleasant."
But she didn't refuse. On the other side of the door I heard a subdued, but curiously reassuring cry.
She had been sitting outside the open window. Her chair was on the flagged path of the garden. As I came in she had risen and was standing in the window, with the intense blue darkness of the garden behind her and the light of the room on her face. She was smiling in a serene and candid joy. For one second I imagined that she had not read the name on the card and that she thought I was Jevons. And then I must have looked away quite steadily so as not to see her shock of recognition; for her voice recalled me.
"Wally—how ripping! Howeverdidyou get here?"
I don't know what I said. I probably didn't say anything. The sheer surprise of it so staggered me that I must have muttered or grunted or choked instead. But I know I took her hand and did my best to smile back at her with the stiff mouth she noticed later.
She went on: "Iamglad to see you. Have you had any dinner?"
I said I had.
"Then," she said, "let's sit in the garden."
I took her hat off a chair and stuck it on a bust on the bureau (Viola laughed). I set the chair on the flagged path of the garden.
"Have you had coffee?" she said then.
I had.
"So have I. But I haven't had it in the garden. We'll have some more."
I rang for coffee.
We sat down and faced each other. She was smiling again as if the delight of seeing me fairly bubbled out of her. One thing struck me then, that at this rate it would be easy enough to ignore Jevons. In fact, if Jevons hadn't given Viola away just now I should have thought that shewastravelling in Belgium on her own account and that his being here in the same town with her was a coincidence, an accident. I could have got over Withers and his story.
Then she said, "Have you come across Mr. Jevons yet? He's here."
I answered, with what I knew to be a very stiff mouth, "We're staying in the same hotel."
"You might have brought him along with you," she said.
I said I didn't want to bring him along with me.
She raised her eyebrows in delicate reproof of my rudeness and said, "Why not?"
"Because," I said, "I want to talk to you."
"Oh—" I don't think I imagined the faint embarrassment in her tone. But it was very faint.
"And" I went on, "I don't want to talk about Jevons."
She looked at me then steadily. The look held me, then defied me to pass beyond a certain limit. I understood now the terms of our encounter. As long as I met her on the ground of a friendship that recognized and included Jevons she was glad to treat with me; but any attitude that repudiated Jevons, or merely ignored him, was a hostile attitude that she was prepared to resent.
"What has he done?" she said.
"I don't know what he's done." I paused. "Why drag in Jevons?"
"Because," she said, "it's his last night. He's going to-morrow."
I said, "And it's my first night. And as it happens he isn't going to-morrow. He's arranged to stay here another fortnight."
Her face softened. "Then it's all right," she said.
I had to dash her down fromthatground and I did it at once.
I said, "I saw your brother the other day."
I could see her face darken then with a flush of pain. We were sitting close to the window, and the light from the room inside showed me all the changes of her face.
She asked, "What day?"
"Let me see. This is Friday. It must have been Monday. I came over that night, as soon as I'd seen him."
"What did you go and see him for?"
"I didn't go. He came to see me."
She looked at me again, if possible, more steadily than before, but without defiance. It was as if she were measuring the extent of my loyalty before she committed herself again to speech.
"Why did he come?" she asked presently.
"He wanted to know if I knew where you were."
"You didn't know," she said.
"I didn't or I wouldn't have lost three days in looking for you. But I made a good shot, anyhow, when I came to Bruges."
Even in her anguish—for she was in anguish—she smiled at the wonder of my shot.
"What made you think of Bruges?"
"I don't know."
I couldn't tell her what had made me think of it. I couldn't tell her that I had tracked her down through Jevons. I was going to keep him out of it, if she would only let me. But she wouldn't.
"I suppose," she meditated gently, "he must have told you."
I answered quite sternly this time, to impress on her the propriety of keeping Jevons out of it:
"He didn't tell me anything."
"Then"—she was still puzzled—"what made you come?"
"You."
"Me?"
"Your brother, if you like."
"He should have come himself."
"That," I said, "is what I'm trying to prevent. He doesn't know you're here. I want to get you back to England before he does know. Besides—he's sailing for India next week."
Then she broke down; that's to say, she lowered her flags. Her head sank to her breast; her eyes stared at the stone path; their lids reddened and swelled with the springing of tears that would not fall.
"Didn't you know?" I said.
"I suppose I must have known—once."
Up till this moment she had not said one word, she had not made one sign, that had really given her away. And nothing could have given her away more completely than the thing she had said now. She had confessed to a passion so dominating and so blind as to be unaware of anything but itself. It was not so much that it had swept before it all the codes and traditions she had been brought up in—codes and traditions might well have been nothing to Viola—it had struck at her strongest affection and her memory. She adored her brother. He was sailing for India next week; she must have known it; and she had forgotten it.
Her confession was not made to me (she had forgottenmyexistence utterly); it was made to herself—the old self that had adored Reggie; that at this evocation of him arose and sat in judgment on the strange, perverted, monstrous self that could forget him. I've called it a confession; but it wasn't a confession. It was a cry, a muttering, rather, of secret, agonized discovery.
"He wants to see you before he goes," I said.
Her eyelids spilled their tears at that; but only those they had gathered; no more came. Her self-control was admirable.
"It's all right," I said. "You've heaps of time. I'm going to take you toOstend in the morning. You'll be in Canterbury to-morrow night."
"Is that what you came for?"
"Yes."
"It was awfully nice of you."
"There was nothing else," I said, "to do."
"You're coming with me to Canterbury." She stated it.
"No, my dear child," I said, "I am not. You don't want them to think you went to Bruges withme."
This was by implication a reference to Jevons. It was as near as I had let myself get to him.
She said, "What are you going to do, then?"
"I'm going to put you on the boat at Ostend, and then I'm coming back here."
It must have been at this point that thegarçonbrought the coffee. For I remember our sitting out there and drinking it amicably until the aroma of it gave Viola an idea.
"What time shall we have to start to-morrow?"
I said, "First thing in the morning."
"Then," she said, "it does seem a pity not to send for Jimmy."
I could see now that there was some deadly purpose in her persistence.But this time I couldn't bear it, and I lost my temper.
I said, "Send for him. Send for him, if you can't live ten minutes without him."
I was sorry even at the time; I have been ashamed since. For, so far from resenting my abominable rudeness—as, under any conclusion, she had a perfect right to—she merely said, "I'm only thinking that if I've got to go so soon to-morrow it'll be horribly lonely for him over there."
"He doesn't expect to see you. We arranged all that."
She pondered it, still with that curious absence of resentment. It was as if, recognizing the danger of the situation, she submitted to any steps, however disagreeable, that were necessary for her safety. It was clear that she trusted me; less clear that she trusted Jevons.
One thing remained mysterious to her.
"What are you coming back here for?" she asked.
I let her have it straight: "To look after Jevons."
"What do you suppose he'd do?"
"He might get into England before your brother got out of it."
She smiled."What do you suppose, then, Reggie'd do?"
I said I knew what I'd do if I were Reggie.
She smiled again. "I see. You're saving him from Reggie."
"I'm not thinking of him, I can assure you."
At that she said, "Dear Wally, so you think you're saving me."
"I'm trying to," I said. "As far as your people are concerned. You don't want them to know you've been here. If you'll only leave it to me, they won't know."
"I'm not going to lie about it. I shall tell them if they ask me."
"Not Reggie," I said.
"Yes, Reggie. If he asks me. Reggie's the very last person I should think of lying to."
It was this attitude of hers that first shook me in my conclusions. ForI'm afraid I'd come to certain very definite conclusions.
Why, I asked her, hadn't she told them before she came?
"Because," she said, "there's no use worrying them. They'd have tried to stop me. You can't imagine what an awful fuss they'd have made. I daresay I might never have got off at all."
What I couldn't understand was her attitude. I mean I couldn't reconcile the secrecy she had practised with her amazing frankness now.
Her manner was supremely assured.
It wasn't, mind you, the brazen assurance of a woman who has been found out and flings up the game; it was a curiously tranquil and patient candour, with something mysterious about it, as if she had knowledge that I couldn't have, and bore with me through all my ignorance and blundering. In fact, from beginning to end, except for the one moment when I upset her by telling her about Reggie's sailing, she showed an extraordinary tranquillity.
But as I couldn't understand her I simply said, "I wish you hadn't got off."
She said in that same quiet way, "I had to."
"Because," I said, "he made you."
Since she had dragged Jevons in she should have him in. I wasn't going to keep him out now to spare her. I had a right to know the truth. She had shaken my conclusions. She had left me in a doubt more unbearable than any certainty, and I considered that I had a right to know. I was determined to know now and end it. That shows that I must have trusted her; that I knew she wouldn't lie to me.
"But," she said, with the least perceptible surprise, "he didn't make me."
"He told me he did."
"He told you?—What did he say exactly?"
"He said—if you must know—that he hadn't brought you, but that he had made you come."
"He didn't. He didn't really. But supposing he had—what then?"
"Youwantme to tell you what I think of it?"
"Yes."
"I think it was a beastly thing to make you do. He couldn't have done it—youknowhe couldn't have done it—if he hadn't been a bit of a blackguard."
I was going to say, "as well as a bounder"; but I didn't want to rub that in. I judged that when the poor child came to her senses her cup would be full enough without my pouring.
"But, you see," she said, still peaceably, "he didn't do it. He onlysaidhe did. That was his niceness. He wanted to save me."
"My dear child, if it's saving you to bring you out here without your people knowing anything about it, and to let you be seen with him everywhere—"
"He didn't bring me. He said he wished I could come with him. And I said I wished I could. I almost asked him to take me; and he said he couldn't. Then he went off by himself. He was all right till he got to Bruges. Then he wrote and said that the beauty of it hurt him, that it was awful being here without me, and that he was coming back at the end of the week without seeing any more of it, because he couldn't bear to know what I was missing. He was going to keep the other places till we could see them together. So I wired to say I was coming, and I came."
"What did you do it for, Viola?"
"Wally, I asked myself that as soon as I got into the train. And it wasn't till I was half across the Channel that I knew why."
She stopped and stared as if at the wonder of herself explained.
"I did it to burn my boats."
I supposeIstared at that. For she expounded:
"To make it impossible to go back."
I said, "My dear child, that was very reckless of you."
She said she wanted to be reckless. I asked her if it didn't occur to her that some day she might want her boats?
She said: No. It was just her boats that she was afraid of. She didn't really want them. She didn't want—really—to go back.
Then she looked at me and said, "You know Jimmy wants to marry me." And then, "Did you know?"
I said I was not in Jevons's confidence, but I had guessed as much. I said, "Do you want to marry him?"
She said, "Yes. I want to marry him more than anything. I don't want to marry anybody else. I never shall marry anybody else. Most of me wants to marry Jimmy. But there's a little bit of me that doesn't. It's mean and snobbish—and dreadful, and it's afraid to marry him. And, you see, if I were to go to my people and say, 'I'm not going to marry Mr. Furnival; I'm going to marry Mr. Jevons,' and I were to show Jimmy to them, they'd all get up and side with that horrid and shameful little bit of me. Reggie would, too. It wouldn't be in the least horrid or snobbish of them, you know, because they wouldn't know what Jimmy's really like. They're just very fastidious and correct. But it's simply awful of me, because I do know."
"It isn't awful. It simply means that he isn't your sort.You're fastidious and correct. Youcan'tmarry him, and you know it. You won't be able to bear it. He'll make you shudder all down your spine."
"All that doesn't prevent my caring for him. I care for him more than for anything on earth, even Reggie. That's why I've burned my boats. So that I may have what I care for without their tearing me to pieces over it."
So far was I from understanding her that it struck me that what she was telling me was as ugly a thing as could be told in words; that she was confessing that, being too weak to stand up against her family, she had deliberately compromised herself with Jevons so that she might marry him without their opposition; just as I was sure that Jevons had compromised her so that he could marry her without opposition from herself.
"But—what you are saying is horrible," I said. "I don't believe you know how horrible it is."
So far was she from understandingmethat she answered: "Yes, it is horrible. But it was only a little bit of me. And it's all over. Burned away, Wally. I burned it when I burned my boats. Don't think of me as if I were really like that."
You see? We had been talking about different things. My mind had been fastened on an external incident, ugly in itself, ugly in its apparent purpose, ugly in its consequences, ugly every way you looked at it. Hers had been concentrated on the event that had happened in her soul, an event to her altogether beautiful—the destruction of the cowardice that would have brought her back, that shrank from taking the risk that her soul dared.
This, she seemed to say, is how I deal with cowardice.
That she had compromised herself by dealing with it in this way had simply never occurred to her. It couldn't. She didn't know and wouldn't have believed it possible that people did these things.
What had frightened her, she said, was Jimmy's saying that about keeping the other places till they could see them together. He meant, you see, till they were married. It brought it so home to her. And it brought home to her what it meant to him. Because he couldn't afford to marry yet for ages.
If she'd gone back, she said, it would have been so cruel to him. And it would have been so cruel to herself, too.
Then she told me what they had done together. Heavens! How she must have trusted him. She joined him here in Bruges. And they'd gone to Antwerp, then to Ghent, then back to Bruges. (I had followed close on their traces, a day behind them at each city.)
And it had all been so beautiful. She simply couldn't tell me how beautiful it had been. It was as if she had never seen anything properly before.
Jimmy had made her see things. "I can understand," she said, "what he meant when he said that the beauty of this place hurt him. It hurtsme."
I reminded her that Jimmy had said it hurt him because she wasn't there.
She looked up and smiled. "He isn't herenow, Furny."
I took her to Ostend first thing in the morning and saw her on to the boat. I advised her to remove the foreign labels from her trunk at Dover, and to contrive so that she shouldn't be seen arriving by the up platform at Canterbury.
"Oh," she said. "You have to takesomerisk!"
We were on the gangway, saying good-bye. And from the boat's gunwale she flung me buoyantly, "If I'm caught I'll say it wasyouI went off with. They won't mind that half so much."
I went back to Bruges the same day and found Jevons disconsolate where I had left him in his hotel. I took him to Brussels in the hope of finding Withers there and confusing him in his ideas. We didn't find him. He had gone on into Germany, carrying with him his impression of Viola and Jevons staying together at Bruges in the same hotel.
It was at Bruges that I said to Jevons, "By the way, Miss Thesiger says youdidn'tmake her come. She proposed coming herself."
He flushed furiously and denied it. "Of course I made her come. It wasn't likely she'd propose a thing like that."
His chivalry was up in arms to defend her. But I could see also that his vanity wasn't going to relinquish the manly role of having made her come to him.
Well, I suppose in a sense hehadmade her.