We didn't stay in Brussels more than a day or two. Jevons didn't like it. He had become sentimentally attached to Bruges, and he wasn't happy till I took him back there. I can't say he was exactly happy then except in so far as he may have enjoyed his own suicidal gloom. I wasn't very happy either. All my recollections of Bruges are poisoned by Jevons's gloom and by my own miserable business of looking after him and seeing that he didn't walk gloomily into any of the canals. As for seeing Bruges, I don't know to this day whether the Belfry is beautiful or not. I only know that it stood there in the grey sky like an immense monument to the melancholy of Jevons. He made me horribly uneasy. I thought every day that if he didn't walk into a canal he'd have another fit of jaundice.
He seemed to be suffering chiefly from remorse, and oddly enough it was this remorse of his that gave me the measure of his essential innocence, as if Viola hadn't given it me already.
It was in his dejection that he showed his tact. He had, for our remarkable circumstances, the right manner. If Jevons had been jaunty; if he had tried to brazen it out, I should have hated him. As it was, his misery might be poisonous, but it was most disarming. So was his trust in me. He realized that he had got Viola into the devil of a mess, and he looked, intelligently, to me to get her out of it. And with the same confiding simplicity he put himself into my hands now. The adventure had shaken his nerve and he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some supremely foolish thing like following Viola to Canterbury. I believe he would have consented to stay in Bruges long after the term I had imposed if I had told him it was necessary.
I said I took him to Brussels and brought him back to Bruges. He submitted to be brought and taken; to be banged about in trains and omnibuses, to be fetched and carried like a parcel. He let me feel in the most touching manner that my presence was a comfort to him, while he recognized that his might be anything but a comfort to me. I know I had nothing to do with Jevons's melancholy. The fat proprietor and his wife (who smiled at us by way of encouragement in our passages to and fro before their bureau), these thralls of Jevons's odd fascination, had confided to me that he had been much worse the day before I came. The poor gentleman could neither eat nor sleep; other guests in the hotel had come upon him wandering by himself at strange hours on the quays. (There were a good many English in Bruges that spring.)
I was greatly relieved by these disclosures; they testified to the fact that Jevons, at any rate on Viola's last day, had been seen very much by himself.
We had not spoken of Viola since the day when I had come back from Ostend after seeing her off. I can't recall much of what we did talk about, but I remember that Jevons's remarks were always interesting, and that in his lucid intervals he laid himself out to be amusing. In one respect only he had deteriorated. Jevons's strong language was no longer strong. It came, if it came at all, in brief spurts, never with the passionate rush, the gorgeous colour, the sustained crescendo of his first runnings. It was a thing of feebleclichésthat might have passed in any drawing-room.
We didn't, then, talk about Viola. But I know that he heard from her and that I didn't.
The first week of Jevons's fortnight was up when I got a wire fromCanterbury. It said: "Reggie sailed yesterday. Trouble. Can you comeCanterbury at once. Viola."
Of course the word that stuck out of it was "Trouble." For the rest it was ambiguous. I couldn't tell, neither could Jevons, whether the trouble was connected somehow with Reggie's sailing, or whether in announcing his departure she meant to intimate that Jevons might now return to England; the coast was clear. Jevons, I may say, took this view of it and I did not. It was I and not Jevons who was asked to come at once. Jevons, for Viola's present purposes, was ignored.
With his usual intelligence he saw my point. We made out that the message suggested trouble with Viola's family, and he agreed heartily that he was not precisely the person to deal with that.
Oh yes, he trusted me. He gave me his word of honour that he would stay in Bruges until I either sent for him or came back to fetch him.
Before I left I had a straight talk with him.
I pointed out to him (what he said he knew as well as I did) that on the most lenient view of his case he had compromised Miss Thesiger very seriously. But, I said, he would have had to have compromised her more seriously still before her people would consent to her marrying him. He must see that, with what he had done, by stopping short of what he might have done, he had made himself, if anything, more unacceptable than he was to begin with. She might—she probably would in her present mood—insist on marrying him without their consent. On the other hand, she just mightn't. And it wasn't as if he could afford to marry her at once, while her present mood was on.
He said, No. But in six months he could afford it. He gave himself six months.
I said, Anything might happen in six months. Miss Thesiger's present mood (which, I put it to him, was very much made up of old Flemish glamour) might change. And if it did, it was just conceivable that she might marryme. He was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if he got the chance.Iwas determined to marry Miss Thesiger ifIgot the chance. At the present most of the chances, I owned, were in his favour. But there was just the off-chance in mine.
And that off-chance, I told him plainly, I meant to make the most of. I wouldn't be human if I didn't. I wasn't taking any unfair advantage of him, considering the tremendous innings he had had in Flanders, with the Flemish atmosphere to help him. If I could make any running in Canterbury, with the Canterbury atmosphere to helpme(he owned very handsomely that it would help me, that I'd be "in it" quite beautifully) why, I'd make it.
Had he anything to say?
He looked at me very straight, with just the least perceptible twinkle, and he said, "All right, old man, cut in, and take your chance. I'll risk it."
I got to Canterbury in the early evening and went straight from my Fifteenth Century hotel to the Thesigers' house in the Close. I spotted it at once. It was all old red brick and grey stone like the Tudor houses in John's and Margaret's Quad.
I asked for Miss Viola Thesiger and was shown into the Canon's library. To my great relief the Canon wasn't in his library. It looked out on to a perfect garden with a thick green lawn, and an old red-brick wall, very high, all round it, and tall elms topping the wall, and long beds of wallflowers and tulips blazing away underneath it. I said to myself, "If I want atmosphere I've got it. Bruges is nothing to the Thesigers' garden in Canterbury Close." I'd time to take it all in, for Viola kept me waiting.
I was glad of the peace of the garden, for I'd taken in more atmosphere than I wanted already as I came through the house. You went upstairs to the Canon's library, and along a narrow black-oak corridor. And in passing I was aware of a peculiar quietness everywhere. It wasn't simply the quietness and laziness of the Cathedral Close. It was something in the house. I felt it as I crossed the threshold and the hall. It was the sum of slight but definite impressions: the sudden silence of voices that were talking somewhere when I came in; the shutting of a door that stood ajar; the withdrawal of footsteps approaching on the landing.
It was as if there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker called in to help them to bury their dead.
The trouble was strictly confined to the Thesigers' house. From the tennis-lawns under the high walls of other gardens there came shouts of girls and of young men at play.
Presently Viola came to me. She held her head if anything higher than usual, and the expression of her face was out of keeping with the trouble in the air. But as she came nearer I saw that this gay face was white, its tissue had a sort of sick smoothness, and there were dark smears under her eyes.
The poor child had paid her tribute to the Trouble.
She said, "Itisgood of you to come. Did you mind awfully?"
I said, of course I didn't. She smiled again, the little white, blank smile she had for me in those days, and I asked her what had happened.
She said, "Everything's happened. It's been awful."
Her smile took on significance—the whole wild irony of disaster. Then she said, "They know."
"All of them? Your brother?"
"No. Not Reggie. He got away in time. They won't tell him. They won't even tell Bertie. They'll never talk about it. But they know."
I said, "Supposing theydoknow—as long as other people don't—"
"But, Wally, that's just it. Everybody does know."
I couldn't take her quite seriously yet. I asked her: Was it the labels? and she said, No, she'd picked all the foreign ones off at Dover, and she got the Dover ones off in the cab coming home, and she'd had Heaven's own luck at the station, nobody'd seen her on the up platform, and her people thought she'd come from London. Of course they all asked her where she'd been, and she told them she wasn't going to let on just yet, that it wasn't good for them to know too much, and that if they behaved themselves they'd know some day. She meant to tell them as soon as ever Reggie'd gone. "Really and truly, Wally, I meant to tell them."
"And do you know," she said, "they thought I was rotting them, that I'd been in some stuffy place in the country all the time."
"Then how on earth," I said, "did they find out?"
"They didn't. They never do find out things. They heard—last night.Somebody saw us."
"Withers?" I said. I'd thought of Withers at once. But he didn't seem likely. He wasn't back yet.
"No. Not Withers. Some women who knew my uncle, General Thesiger. They were in your hotel in Bruges, and they knew some other women staying in thepension. They saw my name in the visitors' book and it excited them. It all comes, you see, of my uncle being so beastly distinguished, so that theyhadto say they knew him. And then of course the other people chipped in and told them all they knew aboutme. Can't you see them doing it?"
I could indeed.
"I never thought thepensionwas a good scheme," she said; "but poor Jimmywouldmake me go to it. He said it was safe. You see how safe it was."
I wasn't quite clear yet as to where Jevons came in.
"You say these people saw you. You mean they saw you and Jevons?"
She smiled more than ever. "No, Wally. It wasyouthey saw."
I don't know whether I was glad or sorry. I believe I was both. I was glad that Jevons—the ugly element—was disposed of. I was sorry—sorry, indeed, is hardly the word for what I felt—when I thought of the impression Viola's family had of menow; of the terms on which I should be received into it if I were received into it at all. I couldn't clear myself entirely, you see, without dragging in Jevons, and for Viola's sake Jevons had at any cost to be suppressed.
"What on earth," I said, "must your people think of me?"
She said surprisingly, "They think you a perfect dear."
"What, for carrying you off to Belgium? That's what I seem to have done. I don't quite see how I'm to get out of it unless we can persuade them that we met by accident."
"Oh," she said, "Igot you out of it all right."
I asked her, "How?"
She said, "I told them the truth. I said it wasn't you; it was Jimmy."
"What did you do that for?"
"Because itwasJimmy I went off with. You're all right. Theyknowit's Jimmy."
I groaned. "That's precisely what I've been trying to prevent them knowing."
"They know that,too. I told them that you came out to look for me—like a lamb, to save me—and that you made me come back. They think that was dear of you."
She paused on it with a tenderness that touched me.
"You see," she said, "I've saved you."
I could only say, "My dear child—have you savedyourself?"
She was visibly troubled.
"I think—Ithinkthey believe me. They say they do. But they don't understand. That's why I sent for you. I want you to make them see."
"Make them see what?" I said. (It was clumsy of me.)
"What it really was," she said.
I asked her if they knew I was there. She said, Yes, they were coming in to see me.
"They want to see you. They want to know."
I saw then what my work was to be. I was not only to witness to her innocence and Jevons's—if they doubted it; I was to show them what she had shown me in the garden at Bruges, the beauty of the whole thing as it appeared to her. I was to show them Jevons's beauty.
Well, I thought, it'll take some showing.
"Do they," I asked her, "at all realize Jevons?"
"Yes. They asked me if he was the man Reggie met at my rooms. Of course I had to say he was. It's almost a pity Reggie met him. That's what's frightened them. You see, he only saw the funny part of him."
(I could imagine what Reggie's description of the funny part of Jevons had been.)
I said she was asking me to do a rather difficult thing.
She said, "Yes. And I've made it worse by telling them I'm going to marryJimmy."
"And I'm to persuade them that that's the best thing you can do, am I?"
She said, Yes—if I could do that—
I said I couldn't. I couldn't persuade myself. How could I, when I was convinced that the best thing she could do was to marryme?
She said she'd forgotten that and that I could leave the marrying part of it to her. "It's about Bruges," she said, "that I want you to tell them."
"I can't very well if they don't ask me," I expounded.
"Oh, but," she said, "theywillask you. At least Daddy will."
* * * * *
It was at this point (when, I must say, we had thrashed it out pretty thoroughly) that Mrs. Thesiger came in. Viola left me to her.
I noticed that, except for the moment of Viola's formal introduction of me, neither of them spoke to or looked at the other.
I have said that Mrs. Thesiger was a charming woman. I may have said other things that imply she was not so charming; those things, if I really said them, I take back, now that I have come to my first meeting with her. When I recall that ten minutes—it didn't last longer—I cannot think of her as otherwise than perfect. It took perfection, of a sort, to deal creditably with the situation. Nothing could well have been more painful for Mrs. Thesiger. I, an utter stranger, was supposed to know all about her daughter, to know more than she or any of them knew. I held the secret of those dubious seven days in Belgium. That the days would be dubious I must have known when I set out to bring Viola back from Belgium. I must, the poor lady probably said to herself, have known Viola. And my knowledge of her, so dreadful and so intimate, was a thing she was afraid of; she didn't want to come too near it. But it was also a thing that must be exceedingly painful to me. She conceived that I would dread her approach every bit as much as she dreaded mine.
And so—and so Mrs. Thesiger ignored my knowledge; she ignored the situation. Beautifully and consistently, from the beginning to the end of my stay in Canterbury, she ignored it.
She had come in now to bring me her invitation, and her husband's invitation, to stay. Her husband, she said, expected me. He was out; he had had to go to a Diocesan Meeting—but it would be over by now, the tiresome meeting, and he would be here in a few minutes.
I protested. I had taken rooms at my Fifteenth Century hotel.
She insisted. They could make that all right. They knew the hotel-keeper. He was used to having people taken from him at the last minute. They would send round for my things. My room was waiting for me.
I said, Really?—But they were too kind—
She said, No. It was the least they could do.
This, with its faint suggestion of indebtedness, was as near as she got to the situation.
She must have sighted it in the distance, for she slanted away from it with a perilous and graceful sweep. She had heard so much about me from her daughter. She had wanted to make my acquaintance. She was glad of this opportunity—
(We smiled at each other to show that there was nothing to wince at in her phrase.)
I said I was glad of it too, and what a charming garden they had.
Wasn't it? And did I know Canterbury? I wished I did. Well—I would know it now. And if I didn't mind ringing the bell the butler would fetch my things over from the "Tabard." And so on, charmingly, till the Canon came in and relieved her.
She had done very well.
He, dear, charming man, did the same thing, and did it even better. That's to say, he had a beautiful voice and he was happier in his phrases. He could ignore with the greater ease because he wouldn't have to keep it up so long.
He kept it up till dinner-time. Only now and then his kind, keen look at me told me that he was going to have it out with me, and that he was measuring the man with whom he would have to do.
But before dinner they had taken me to my room. They hoped I wouldn't mind having Bertie's room. The house was full; all the girls were at home, so they had had to give me Bertie's room.
As I dressed in Bertie's room (the drawback of it was that it looked bang out on to the Cathedral Tower and was fairly raked by the chimes), with the Cathedral Tower before my eyes and the Cathedral chimes in my ears, and Canon Thesiger's beautiful voice and Mrs. Thesiger's beautiful face and the beautiful manners of both of them in my memory, it came over me with renewed conviction that Jevons was impossible; that Viola's people knew and felt he was impossible; that Viola knew and felt he was impossible herself; and that in the face of all this impossibility I had a chance. Bruges might back Jevons, but Canterbury would never back him; whereas it was quite evident that Canterbury was backing me.
I was in the drawing-room ten minutes before dinner-time. They were all there: the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and their five unmarried daughters—Victoria, the eldest, Millicent, the High School teacher, Mildred, the nurse, Viola, the youngest but one, and Norah, the youngest.
They were all there, the whole seven of them. And they were all silent until I appeared. As I went down the stairs and through the hall I noticed that the door was open and that no sounds came through it. I caught sight of Viola standing by the window with her back to her family; the others sat or stood in attitudes averted from her and from each other.
When they heard me they all stirred and began talking. And as I came into the room I found the girls drawn together (even Viola had turned from her window).
I see them now: Canon Thesiger standing on the hearthrug, looking handsome; and Mrs. Thesiger beside him, looking handsome, too, in grey silk and a little flushed. I hadn't realized in our first meetinghowhandsome they both were, and how brilliantly unlike. He was well-built, slender, aquiline, clean-cut and clean-shaven; he had thin, beautiful lips that he held in stiffly; he had dark eyes like his son Reggie's, and dark hair parted correctly in the middle, hair that waved. He had tried to depress and subdue it by hard brushing with a wet brush, but it continued to wave in spite of him, and the crests of the waves were silver, which accentuated them.
Mrs. Thesiger was tall and at the same time plump. She was fair and blue-eyed and still delicately florid; she had perfect little features, with mutinous upward curves in the plumpness. I say mutinous, because Mrs. Thesiger's way of being handsome was in revolt against her husband's. Her light-brown hair waved, too, and to a discreet extent she encouraged its waving. This sounds as if Mrs. Thesiger's appearance was frivolous. But it was not. All these florid plumpnesses and the upward curves were held in tight, like Canon Thesiger's mouth. Their intentions were denied and frustrated, the original design was altered to harmonize with his. Herein you saw the superior restraint, the superior plasticity, the superiorartof Mrs. Thesiger.
It was all very well for him to be correct when his features were formed that way, but this was the very triumph of correctness.
And she was, if anything, braver than her husband. He could only just smile with his stiff lip; she could laugh over the business of presenting me to the four unmarried daughters whom (she emphasized it) Ididn'tknow.
And they—the four daughters—I'm not sure that they weren't the most gallant of this gallant family.
I suppose that it was the violent dissimilarity in their parents' beauty that had produced the engaging irregularity of their features. Not one of those five little faces was correct. Victoria's had tried hard for correctness in her father's manner, but her mother's irrepressible plumpness had made her miss it, poor girl, just as (I was soon to learn) she had missed everything.
Millicent's face, the face of the one who had been at Girton, hadn't tried for it; it had achieved a plainness I admired because it was oddly like Viola's face, only that Millicent was sallow and thin and dry and wore pince-nez.
Mildred, the nurse, was frankly plump and fair and florid like her mother; her face would have been pretty if her father's nose hadn't stepped in and struggled with her mother's and so spoilt it for her.
Norah, the youngest, was pretty—and odd. She was Viola all over again, but more slender and coloured differently, coloured all wrong. I didn't take to Norah all at once. I wasn't prepared for a Viola with blue eyes and pink cheeks and light hair, and the figure of a young foal. Besides, her hair was outrageous; it waved too much; it was all crinkles, and she hadn't found out yet how to keep it tidy.
She told me afterwards it was "up" that evening for the first time. When it came to her turn, she said: "There are such a dreadful lot of us, aren't there?"
There certainly was. And as I looked at them I thought: Viola has done an irreparable injury to her family, to all these charming people. She has hurt her father and mother in their beauty and their dignity and their honour. As for her sisters, she has ruined what they are much too well-bred to call their "chances." The story of the going off to Belgium with Jevons is spreading through the Close, and through the High School where Millicent teaches, and through the garrison. They will try to hush it up, but they won't be able to; it will reach Chatham and Dover. If they go up to town it will follow them there. Wherever they go it will ultimately follow them. She has struck at the solidarity of the family. To be sure, it was the solidarity of the family that drove her to strike at it. But if you were to tell Canon and Mrs. Thesiger that they had driven her, that they had tied her up too tight, they wouldn't see it. They would say: "We never stopped her going off to London. But that wasn't enough for her. She must go off to Belgium with that man Jevons. She must ruin us."
And Viola knew that she had ruined them.
And there they were, all holding themselves well, and all well dressed—the two youngest in white, the elders in light colours on a scale that deepened to Victoria's old rose. I remember them, even to what they wore and the pathos of their wearing it; they stood out so against the black panelling of the old room. It was full of oak chests and bureaus and Chinese cabinets, and Madonnas in Italian frames, and red and white ivory chessmen, and little bookcases with books in white vellum with scarlet title-pieces, and family portraits, and saints in triptychs on golden backgrounds, and murderous assegais and the skins and horns of animals. And the leaves of the old elms stuffed up the low, mullioned windows looking on the garden.
And somehow you were aware of great streams of empire and of race, streams of august tradition; of sanctity and heroism and honour, and beautiful looks and gentle ways and breeding, all meeting there.
I looked at the Thesigers and I looked at all these things, and I thought again of Jevons—of Jevons as absolutely impossible. You may say it was pure snobbishness to think of him in that way, and I daresay it was; but there wasn't any other way.
It wasn't their tradition, you see, that appealed to me so much as their behaviour. I don't think I ever met people who knew so well how to behave.
They kept it up. All evening they behaved like people under some heavy calamity which they ignored for the comfort of their guest and for their own dignity. And yet, even if I hadn't known of their calamity, I must have felt it in the air. They knew that I knew it; but that was all the more reason why they should ignore it; they wanted to remove from me the oppression of my knowledge.
During dinner, perhaps, you felt the tension of the catastrophe; any guest who knew as much as I did was bound to be aware of it. It was in little sudden, momentary silences, in the hushed voices and half-scared movements of the butler and the parlourmaid, in the stiffness of the Canon's lip, and in some shade of the elder girls' manner to Viola.
I remember how, in one of those silences, Norah, who sat facing me, leaned forward and addressed me. She said, "Mr. Furnival, you've come from Belgium, haven't you? Do tell me about it! I can't get a word out of Viola."
I supposed they hadn't told Norah. They had spared the youngest. She was only seventeen.
The butler and the parlourmaid, standing rigid by the sideboard, looked at each other in their fright. Mrs. Thesiger saw them and flushed. But Canon Thesiger, who had his back to them, observed that Belgium was a large order, and that Mr. Furnival would have to tell her about it afterwards.
But there was never any afterwards for Norah. She said, "I believe there's a joke about Belgium, and that Mr. Furnival's in it."
Viola laughed. It was, on the whole, the best thing she could do. If I'd giggled, too, it might have helped, but I didn't dare to, sitting there beside Mrs. Thesiger.
The Canon pushed a dish of chocolates in front of his youngest daughter to keep her quiet, and then plunged like a hero into the tendencies of modern music, which he deplored. He asked my opinion of Richard Strauss, a composer of whom he was profoundly ignorant. Scarlatti and Corelli tided us over dessert, and Purcell floated us tenderly into the drawing-room and coffee. After coffee the Canon took me into the library (he said) for a smoke.
I could see by the fuss he made about his cigarettes that he was nervous, staving off the moment.
It came with the silence of the first cigarette. There were no transitions. He simply settled himself a little deeper into his chair and said, "I'm a little anxious about that girl of mine."
I said, "Areyou, sir?" as if I were surprised.
"Well"—he was evidently trying to steer between his decision to ignore and his desire for knowledge—"you see, she's rather reckless and impulsive."
I agreed. She was—a little.
"More than a little, I'm afraid. Do you know anything of this man Jevons she talks about?"
That was masterly of the Canon, the subtle suggestion that Viola did no more than talk about Jevons, the still more subtle implication that if shecouldtalk about him all was well.
I said that Jevons was a very decent fellow, and added that CaptainThesiger had met him.
It was mean of me to shovel the responsibility on to Reggie, but I wanted to gain time, too.
The Canon remembered that Reggie had said something. And then suddenly he discarded subtlety and told me straight out that Reggie had said Jevons was a bit of a bounder, and he supposed he was.
I could see him watching me, trying to break down my defences.
I dodged him with "These things are comparative," and he floored me with a sudden thrust:
"No, my dear boy, they arenot."
He meditated. "What sort of age is he?"
I told him, "About thirty-one or two."
"Ah!"
And then: Did I know anything about the young man's morals?
I assured him I had never heard a word against them.
He looked at me keenly and I remembered the words of Withers which Ihadheard. Still, I knew nothing against Jevons's morals, and I said they were all right for all I knew.
"Never mind what youknow," he answered. "What do you think?"
I said I thought that Jevons had as clean a record as any man I knew.
"You mean," he said, "these things are comparative?"
I said I meant I only wished my morals were as clean. (I went as far as that for Viola—to save her. Besides, there was Jevons to be thought of. I was there to take a fair advantage of him, not an unfair one.)
He took another look at me that seemed to satisfy him, for he said:"Thank you. That's all I want to know."
We smoked in silence. Presently we went into the drawing-room "for a little music." Victoria played. The Canon and Mildred and Norah sang. Millicent went upstairs to prepare a lecture.
When the music was over Viola and Mildred and Norah and I went into the garden, and very soon Mildred and Norah drifted back into the house again and left me with Viola.
She began at once, "Well—did you make him understand?"
I said I hadn't had much opportunity.
Did he ask me about Bruges? No, but he had asked me about Jevons. I told her more or less how I had answered, and she said it was dear of me.
"But it's no use telling them anything aboutme, Wally."
I asked her, Had they said much?
She said, "No. It's what they think. Or rather, what they don't think.They'll never think the same of me again. And they'll never trust me."
I said, Come, it wasn't so bad as all that.
But she stuck to it.
"There!" she said. "Didn't I tell you?"
Mrs. Thesiger from the drawing-room window was calling to us to come in.The grass was damp.
"They won't trust me even with you."
I thought: "Poor little Viola—she's burned her boats with a vengeance."
Presently it was Bertie's room again, and moonlight, and the Cathedral chimes. They kept me awake all night.
* * * * *
Of course I hadn't made them understand. How could I? The peculiar awfulness of their calamity was that they knew so little about it. They didn't know, after all, what had happened at Bruges; they didn't know what lengths Viola had gone to. And though they evidently thought that I knew, that wasn't any good to them. They couldn't ask me what had happened at Bruges. They couldn't cross-question me about Viola's "lengths." I couldn't tell them that, according to my lights, nothinghadhappened, that Viola's lengths were not likely to be very long. Besides, even if I had come with the proofs of her innocence in my hands, and removed their private sorrow, that wouldn't have repaired their public wrong. Nobody was going to believe in Viola's innocence. Appearances were dead against her.
It was awful for them every way they looked at it; awful if she married Jevons just because she had to; awful even if she hadn't to, so long as people thought she had; awful if she married him for any reason; more awful if she didn't marry him at all. And supposing she married him. They might go on ignoring for ever and ever, but who else would, with that marriage staring them in the face and perpetuating the disgraceful memory?
It struck me that Viola herself must see that there was only one way in which I could make them understand, only one thing that I could do for her, and that I had come to do it.
The next morning I asked Canon Thesiger if he could give me half an hour. He gave it with a sort of sad alacrity. I didn't anticipate the smallest difficulty with him or with any of Viola's family. They seemed to be looking to me pathetically to save them. I had every reason to know that my one chance was good, and that poor Jevons, with all his chances, wasn't anywhere. In fact, I found in that half-hour with the Canon that my very fairness to Jevons had worked against him to abase him, while it raised me several points in the Canon's estimation. He had seen what I had been driving at. The cleaner I made out Jevons's record to be, the better I succeeded in shielding Viola. He expressed in the most moving terms his admiration of my moral beauty.
And yet (I suppose I must have overdone it) it was my moral beauty that dished me with the Canon. I had reckoned, you see, without his, without Mrs. Thesiger's.
I told him straight out that if he and Mrs. Thesiger would allow me, I meant to ask Viola to marry me. His lip stiffened.
I said I hoped it wouldn't be a violent shock to them—they must have had some idea of what I had come for.
He said, Yes. They had been afraid I had come for that.
And then—oh, it was a terrible half-hour!
They had been afraid, and they had talked it over. He didn't tell me all they'd said, but I could imagine most of it: how they had seen that my marrying Viola was the one way out for them, the one way out for her, and how it had occurred to them that perhaps I didn't know what I was doing, and how they had decided—dear, simple, honourable people—that it would be very wrong to deceive me, and that in any case they had no right to accept so great a sacrifice, even if itwasthe one way out. I daresay they said to each other that they couldn't put such a burden on an innocent young man; it was their child's doing and they must bear the whole ghastly ruin and shame of it themselves. They even went further. What Jevons had done to Viola (they'd made up their minds about him) was devil's work. What Viola had done to them was in some way the expression—the very singular and unintelligible and bizarre expression—of God's will. It was the cross they had to bear. God, I suppose, knew the kind of cross that would hurt them most.
A great deal of this he did say to me. He said it very simply, without phrases.
Nothing, he said, would have pleased them better than that I should marry Viola. But—he didn't think that he could let me do it. If I had only come to him three weeks ago—
He hadn't been able—naturally—to talk about it last night. He had hoped he wouldn't have to say anything about it at all, but I had forced him.
It couldn't have been worse if I'd seen him about to put a knife into his breast. I tried to stop him, but he would do it, hewouldput the knife in.
"We don't know," he said, "what may have occurred at Bruges."
"Nothing occurred," I said, "nothing that you need mind."
He said, "That's what the child tells me."
And I, "Surely, sir, you believe her word?"
Of course—of course he believed her word. Viola, he said, might keep the truth from them if (he smiled in spite of himself) if she thought it would not be good for them to know it. But she had never told them an untruth. Never. She was—essentially—truthful.
"Only," he said, "we don't know what she may have been driven to. She may have been trying to shield that man Jevons."
I said I was convinced that, technically, Jevons was innocent. It looked as if he had been criminally reckless and inconsiderate; but he seemed to have honestly thought that there was no harm in Viola's joining him in Bruges.
But the Canon didn't want to know what Jevons had thought, honestly or otherwise. Or what Viola had thought. "It's what they've done," he said. "You can't get over it."
I said what they'd done didn't amount to more than, looking at theBelfry. I could very easily get over that.
He said that I was an Israelite indeed. But the world wasn't allBelfries, and we must look at it like men of the world.
"They travelled together, Furnival. They travelled together."
I said, "Yes. And it wasn't till they'd got to Bruges the second time that Jevons realized that they never ought to. As soon as he did realize it, he cleared out."
He did that too late, the Canon insisted. It was no good my trying to shield Jevons. It wasn't easy to believe that Jevons was as innocent as Viola, and, as nobody was going to believe it, the injury the brute had done her was irreparable.
"Not," I said, "if she marries me."
He said, "My dear boy, supposing—supposing it isn't all as innocent as you think? You can't marry her."
I said that made no difference. It was all the more reason.
All the more reason, he insisted, for her marrying Jevons.
That, he said, was what they'd have to go into.
But there I took a high stand. I said it was for me to go into it, and if I didn't, why should they? If I believed in Viola, surely they might? If I knew that she could do nothing and feel nothing that was not beautiful, wasn't my knowledge good enough for them? I said, "I shall go to her at once and ask her to marry me."
He got up and laid his hand on my arm. "No," he said. "Not at once. Wait.Far better wait."
I asked him, "How long?"
He said, "Till she's had time to get over him."
Mrs. Thesiger (I had half an hour with her, too) said the same thing."Wait," she said, "at any rate, another week."
She had given her, as Jevons would have said, a week.
* * * * *
I waited.
I stayed with the Thesigers a week. In fact, I stayed ten days. I got used to the chimes and slept through them. I played chess with Mrs. Thesiger; I played golf and tennis with the girls and the young subalterns of the garrison; I played violent hockey with Mildred and Norah; I walked with Viola and Victoria; I tried to talk to Millicent (Millicent, I must own, was a bit beyond me); I played tennis again (singles) against Norah, who was bent on beating me. We all went for picnics with the subalterns into Romney Marshes and visited Winchelsea and Rye. And in between I was taken by Canon and Mrs. Thesiger to lunch or dinner or tea in the other Canons' houses, and was introduced to the Dean and the Archbishop. I attended the Cathedral services to an extent that provoked Viola to denounce me as a humbug.
I told her I did it in order to look at the finest spectacle of defiance I had ever seen—the Canon in his stall in the chancel singing the solo in the anthem with his beautiful voice, in the very teeth of disaster, as if nothing had happened.
She said, "Daddy is beautiful, isn't he? He had a sore throat for a fortnight after Aunt Vicky died. And he thinks this is far worse, but he won't go back on me. So he sings."
I was sitting with her in the garden on the Sunday evening. I said to her, "Viola, you were caught with the beauty of Bruges. Why can't you see the beauty of all this?"
She looked at me with her great dark eyes (they were very young and brilliant), and she answered, "Dear Walter, I've been seeing the beauty of it all my life."
I was seeing it for the first time.
I made the most of it, of the Canterbury atmosphere. I sank into it and felt it sinking into me. I was, as Jevons had said I should be, "in it."
And, as I made my running, I thought with some remorse of that unfortunate one, languishing in Bruges on his parole. But Canterbury would have been no use to Jevons if he had been there.
There's no doubt that I did something for the Thesigers in those ten days. I had effaced Jevons's legend. I had even effaced my own legend (for the scandal, if you remember, had begun with me). And the Thesigers were tackling their catastrophe with dignity and courage and, I think, considerable success. By having me there, by being charming to me, by presenting me openly and honourably to all their friends, they gave slander the most effective answer. People asked each other: Was it likely that the Thesigers would receive young Furnival with open arms if young Furnival had been the man they'd heard about?
At the end of my week the whole seven of them were almost merry. (I may say Norah, the youngest, had been merry all the time.) My visit lapped over into another week.
At the end of ten days my relations with Canon and Mrs. Thesiger became so intimate that we could discuss the situation. They could even smile when I reminded them that there was one good thing about it—Canterbury didn't, andcouldn't, realize Jevons.
They hoped devoutly that it never would.
And they thought it wouldn't. By this time, poor darlings, they believed that I had saved them; that Jevons was an illness and that Viola had got over him; that I had cured Viola of Jevons.
I believed it myself. She had avoided me most of the time; she had left me to her sisters, particularly the youngest, Norah. And when I was alone with her she was silent and embarrassed. I thought: "She is beginning to be afraid of me. And that is an excellent sign."
The night before I left Canterbury I asked her, for the third time, to marry me.
She said, "I know why you're asking me, and it's dear of you. But it's no good. It can't be done. Not even that way."
The next day I went back to Bruges to release Jevons from his parole.
I found him sitting tight in his hotel in the Market-Place, waiting my return with composure.
He had recovered in my absence and had been making the best of his internment. He had written a series of articles on "The Old Cities of Flanders." He worked them up afterwards into that little masterpiece of his, "My Flemish Journal," which gave him his European celebrity (it must have made delightful reading for the Thesigers). There was no delay, no reverse, no calamity that Jevons couldn't turn into use and profit as it came. Yes, I know, and into charm and beauty. Viola Thesiger lives in his "Flemish Journal" with an enduring beauty and charm.
I said I was sorry for keeping him shut up in Bruges so long. He said it didn't matter a bit. He had been very busy.
I thought it was his articles and his book (he had been dreaming of it) that had made Jevons so happy. But I was mistaken.
We spent half the night in talking, sitting up in my big room on the first floor for the sake of space and air.
Jevons went straight to the point by asking me how I had got on atCanterbury.
I felt that I owed him a perfect frankness in return for the liberties I had taken with him, so I told him how I had got on.
He said, "I'm not going to pretend to be astonished. But you can't say I didn't play fair. I gave you your innings, didn't I?"
I said I'd had them, anyhow. We'd leave it at that.
He said, No. We couldn't leave it at that. He'dgivenme my innings. He could have stopped my having them any minute, but he'd made up his mind I should have them. So that nobody should say afterwards he hadn't played fair.
I remember perfectly everything that Jevons said to me that night. I am putting it all down so that it may be clear that what the Thesigers called the beauty of my behaviour was nothing to the beauty of his. Think of him, shut up there in his hotel in Bruges, giving me my innings, when he could have struck in and won the game without waiting those horrible ten days.
Well, I suppose he knew that he had it in his hands all the time.
"You see," he went on, "I knew you'd got one chance, and I meant you to have it. I meant you to make the most of it. There are things, Furnival, I haven't got the hang of—yet—little, little things like breeding and good looks, where you might get the pull of me still if you had a free hand.
"Well, I gave you a free hand.
"You needn't thank me. I wasn't thinking of you so much. I was thinking of Viola. I wanted to be perfectly fair toher. If therewasa chance of her liking you better than she liked me, and being happier with you, I wanted her to have her chance. I wanted, you see, to be rather more than fair. If I was going to win this game I was going to win it hands over, not just to sneak in on a doubtful point. I wanted Viola to know what she was doing. I wanted her to see exactly what she was giving up if she married me—to go home and see it all over again in case she had forgotten.
"And of course I was thinking of myself too. I'm an egoist. For my own sake I wanted her to be quite sure she hadn't any sort of hankering after you."
I said if it was any comfort to him he could be. Viola hadn't any hankering after me at all. This—if he cared to know it—was the third time that I had proposed to her and been turned down.
He said hedidcare to know it, very much. It was most important.
"I," he said, "have never proposed to her at all.
"That," he went on, "is just the one risk I wouldn't take.
"And there," he explained, "is where I've scored. I knew that Viola is obstinate, and that if she starts by turning you down she'll keep it up out of sheer cussedness.
"So I never let her start. Women," he generalized, "admire success. If I were to give you your innings all over again, Furnival—and I will if you like—you couldn't make anything of them with those three howlers to your account. There isn't any record of failure againstme. Good God! D'you supposeI'd be such a damn fool as to muff it three times with the same woman? Not me!"
I said he needn't rub it in.
He said he was rubbing it in for my good, so that I shouldn't go and do the same thing next time.
"Because—nowwe're coming to the point—there will be a next time for you, Furnival. That's why I don't even pretend to be sorry for you. There'll be other women. But there aren't any next times for me, and there aren't any other women. This—I meanshe—was my one chance. It was pretty jumpy work, I can tell you, sitting tight and gambling with it for ten blasted days. Any other man would have gone clean off his chump with worrying over it. There've been times when I've felt like it myself. It was infernal—when you think what I stood to lose."
I said that was all rot. It was his beastly egoism. He didn't stand to lose more than I did.
He said it wasn't a question of more or less. And it wasn't his egoism. It was his sweetness and his heart-rending humility. He'd stood to lose everything. He'd be done for if Viola wouldn't have him. He couldn't look at any other woman after her. And he put it to me: What other woman would look at him? Whereas my resources were practically inexhaustible. Almost any nice woman would know that I would give her what she wanted. And almost any nice woman would give me what I wanted, too. When I insisted that I didn't see it, he said I'd see it shortly. He gave me six months.
Viola, he declared, would never have given me what I wanted. I could never give her what she wanted. And he could.
He said he admitted that it was odd that he should be able to succeed where I failed; but so it was, and he went on to expound to me all the reasons for my failure.
"To begin with, you're not her sort; or, rather, you're too much her sort. You with your integrity are one of the beautiful works of God, and she's been used to that sort of beauty all her life and she's tired of it. But she isn't used to me. She never will be. She's never seen anything in the least like me before, and she never will see anything quite like me again as long as she lives. I'm the queer, unexpected thing she wants and always will want.
"But let that pass.
"You couldn't get her because you didn't give your mind to it. You didn't know how to get her and you didn't try to find out. You set about it the wrong way. I told you ages ago that a man's a fool if he wants a thing and doesn't find out how to get it. You should have begun by trying to find out something abouther. But you didn't try. With all your opportunities you haven't found out anything. You don't know the least thing about her. You don't know what she wants, you don't know what she's thinking, or what she's feeling, or what she'll do—how she'll behave if you propose to her three times running. She's told you things and you haven't understood them or tried to understand. Because the whole blessed time you were thinking about yourself, or what she was thinking about you, or was going to think. Whereas I haven't been thinking about anything but her—I've been studying her straight on end for ten months and I've found out a little bit about her. At any rate, I jolly well know what she wants and I jolly well know how to give it her.
"You see, I was determined to get her, and I left no stone unturned. I took trouble."
I suggested thatI'd taken trouble enough in all conscience. He laughed.
"Youonly took trouble to get her away, old man, when she wanted to be here with me. What do you suppose I brought her here for? Wouldyouhave ever thought of letting her come with you? Of giving her what she wanted to that extent? Not you! You'd only have thought of shutting her up and protecting her for your own wretched sake—which was the last thing she wanted. She'd had about enough of that."
I replied that certainly I should have thought of protecting a young girl before everything else; that it never would have occurred to me to compromise her in order to marry her—even if I did find I couldn't marry her in any other way.
I had hit him there. He was quiet for a little while after it. I didn't look at him—I didn't want to look at him—but I could feel him there, breathing hard from the shock of it, with his mouth a little open.
Presently he took the thing up again. He went on, placably, quietly explaining. "I thought of protecting her too. Only I wasn't such an idiot as to think of it before everything else."
"No. You were clever enough to think of it afterwards—when you'd got what you wanted. When you had compromised her."
"I suppose you mean there was only one thing I wanted? There, Furnival, you lie."
I said I only meant that shewascompromised. At any rate, that was what it looked like to her people and to everybody to whom it mattered.
"If you will persist in taking the ugliest view of it, of course it'll look like that. I can't help how it looks to a set of old ladies and clergymen in Canterbury. Come to that, it matters a damned sight more tomethan it can to any of you people."
I said he wouldn't say so if he knew how he had made them suffer.
He laughed out at that.
"Suffer? They haven't suffered a quarter as much as I have. Not a hundredth part as much. They've suffered thinking of themselves—of their precious respectability. I've suffered thinking ofher.
"Suffer? I've been through allthat. It wasn't right, Furnival, it wasn't right for anybody to have to go through what I did. But I've come out of it. You've been pretty hard on me with your infernal virtue; but if you think you can make me suffer more, you can't. I'm past it."
I said I was sorry if I seemed too hard on him. But it would be well if he tried to look at his really very outrageous behaviour as it was bound to appear to other people.
"You admit, then," he said, "that it appears more outrageous than it is?"
I said, "You see, my dear fellow, I don't yet know what it is."
He asked me if I'd like to know what it was? And I told him that, certainly, some sort of an account was owing and that he'd better perhaps make a clean breast of it while he was about it.
Well—he made his clean breast.
He confessed that the sting of a great deal that I had said to him was in its truth. I needn't be frightened. Nothing had happened. Nothing beyond what I knew. But—there was a point, he said, when everything might have. When he had meant that it should happen.
He hadn't meant it at first. Nothing had been further from him when he let her come to Bruges. He had meant nothing—nothing beyond looking at the Belfry. He had thought—as she did—that it would be quite possible to be content with looking at the Belfry. That was where the damned folly of the thing had come in. They began to be aware of the folly when they found themselves going together to Antwerp. He wasn't aware even then of what he meant. But he knew what he meant when he left Antwerp and took her to Ghent.
Because hedidtake her there. He meant—then—exactly what Viola's father and her brother and her uncles and her male cousins would mean if they took a woman to Ghent.
"I meant," he said, "to compromise her. But—here's where you went wrong—I didn't mean to compromise her in order to marry her. I didn't mean to marry her at all. There was a moment when I thought that marrying me—tying herself up to me for ever—was a risk I ought not to let her take. I thought—I thought I could make her happy without all that awful risk. It seemed to me that after the risk wehadtaken we had a right to happiness. Certainlyshehad. And I thought she thought the same.
"So I took her to Ghent.
"I say I thought she knew what I meant when I took her.
"I ought to tell you that wedidhave rooms in the same hotel in Antwerp and Ghent. There weren't any English there that mattered—nobody that either of us knew.
"But when I'd got her to Ghent I couldn't—I don't know how it was—but it came over me that I couldn't—I hadn't the courage. I think I found out that she was afraid or something. We'd taken rooms in that hotel you were in in thePlace d'Armes. We were sitting together in the lounge—you know that big lounge on the first floor with the glass partition in it along the staircase—you can see people through it going up and down stairs. She'd got up suddenly and stuck out her hand and said good night. And there was a look in her eyes—Fright, a sort of fright.
"I saw her through the glass going up the stair. When she got to the landing I saw her turn her head over her shoulder and look down into the lounge, to make sure I was still there.
"She looked so helpless somehow—and so pretty—that for the life of me I couldn't.
"No.
"I took her back to Bruges the next morning and put her in thepensionwith those women."
I thought of the irony of it.
If Jevons had really been the blackguard he seemed we could have hushed it up. If he hadn't repented, if he hadn't taken her back to Bruges and put her in thepensionwith those women, ten to one Withers wouldn't have seen them and General Thesiger's friends wouldn't have heard of them. I should have got her quietly away from Ghent without Canterbury being a bit the wiser.
But I didn't tell Jevons that. I hadn't the heart to.
We stayed three days longer in Bruges. There were still some odd corners of the city that he hadn't had time to look up.
Jevons was very kind to me all those three days.
After we got back to England Jevons's affairs picked up and went forward with a rush. His novel came out at the end of May. In June he was made sub-editor ofSport, and thus acquired a settled income. And one morning in July I got a letter from Viola written at Quimpol in Brittany:
"I married Jimmy five days ago. Nobody but Norah knew anything about ittill it was all over. But I wrote and told Daddy before we left England.I'm afraid he's had a sore throat ever since. I wish you'd go down toCanterbury and tell them that it's all right and that I'm ever so happy.There really isn't any reason why Daddy shouldn't sing.
"As Norah says: 'It's his not singing that gives the show away.' Yours ever,