Then I went back and told Viola about it. I took her into my library that had once been Jevons's study, where he had delivered the Grand Attack. I gave her a letter that Jevons had scribbled before lunch in the hotel at Folkestone. I suppose he had explained things in it.
But as for me, or any power I had to break it to her, I might just as well have told her that he was dead.
Except that perhaps then she wouldn't have turned on me.
"Youknewthis," she said, "you knew he was going and you never told me?"
I said I had only known it last night—how could I have told her?
She persisted. "Youknew—at what time last night?"
I hesitated and she drove it home.
"You might have wired. It wasn't too late."
I said it was, and that I didn't know that she didn't know till it was too late to wire.
"Do you suppose," she said, "—if I'd known—that I should behere?"
I couldn't tell her—she was so white under her wound and the shock of it—I couldn't tell her that she had given me no reason to suppose that she would be with him.
And she went on. "Why couldn't you have wired in the morning, then? I could have caught that boat."
"Because, my dear girl, he doesn't want you to go out."
"It doesn't matter what he wants—or thinks he wants—I'm going.
"And what's more," she said, "you've got to take me. That's all you've gained by trying to stop me."
I replied that nothing would induce me to take her out, that I'd promisedJimmy she shouldn't go.
She said that didn't matter. Jimmy'd know I couldn't keep a silly promise like that, and if I wouldn't take her she'd simply go by herself.
I tried to explain to her very gently that her going—at all—was out of the question. She would do no good to anybody by going; she would annoy Jimmy most frightfully; untrained women were not wanted at the front.
Untrained? She had got her certificate three days ago. What did I suppose she had wanted it for—if it wasn't to go out with Jimmy if he went?
"You knew he was going, then?" I said.
"I knew he wanted to go. But I didn't think he'd go so soon. I didn't really think he'd go at all. They told me I needn't worry, that he hadn't a chance."
"Who told you?"
"Oh, everybody. The General and Colonel Braithwaite and Charlie, andBertie, and Reggie—at least he told Norah—and the people at the WarOffice and the Admiralty and the Embassies."
"Youwentto them? You went to the War Office?"
"I went everywhere where he did, or as near as I could get. And they all told me the same thing—he hadn't a chance. Not the ghost of a chance. I really thought he hadn't. When you think of the men—men who can do things, who are dying to go and are being kept back—"
"You were helping him to go?" I said. I saw a vision, or I tried to see it, a pathetic vision of Viola following poor Jimmy in his pursuit of secretaries and ambassadors, doing insane, impossible things to help him.
And then I saw Viola herself. She was looking at me, with all her features tilted in that funny way she had.
"Well—no," she said; "I wasn't exactlyhelping."
"Whatwereyou doing, then?"
"I'm afraid I was trying to stop him."
The sheer folly of it took my breath away.
"Surely," I said, "if he hadn't the ghost of a chance, it wasn't necessary?"
"Well—itwasnecessary, you see. He's so awfully clever. He was very nearly off once or twice. Only we just managed to get in in time."
"Who got in in time?"
"Oh, it wasn't only me, Furny, it was all of us. We were all out trying to stop him—Charlie and Reggie and Uncle Billy—hepulled all the ropes—we couldn't do much."
"But what—what did General Thesiger do?"
"He didn't 'do' anything. He hadn't got to. He just said things. Told themaboutJimmy."
I don't know whether my face expressed horror or admiration. It must have been a sort of horror, for she began to excuse herself.
"Why not? Why should poor little Jimmy go?"
"Because he wants to. You'd no business to stop him when he wanted to go."
"But—that was it. He didn't want to go. He only thought heoughtto go."
"How," I said sternly, "do you know what he wanted?"
"Because," she said, "he told Uncle Billy. He kept on saying he ought to go. And we told him he oughtn't. What earthly good can Jimmy do out there, with his poor little heart all dicky? He'll simply die of it. You don't suppose I'd have stopped him if I'd thought it was good for him to go? Or if I'd thought he really wanted to? We told him all that—Uncle Billy and I did—we told him straight that if he tried to get out we'd try and stop him."
"Oh," I said, "youtoldhim. That's a different thing."
"Things, Furny, always are different to what you think them. At least they're never half so nasty. Of course we told him. And of course he laughed in our faces. We thought wehadstopped him. But—he's slipped through our fingers.
"We might," she said, "have known."
I heard her say all that, though I wasn't listening. It comes back to me that she said it. It was dawning on me that in this queer business there were details, quite important details, that had escaped me. The war had taken up my attention to the exclusion of Viola's affairs. But it was evident that things had happened while I was away. I was thinking of something that she let out.
"Look here," I said, "when you say you told him, do you mean that you and he have been seeing each other?"
"Of course we've been seeing each other. Until he stopped it. He said he couldn't stand the strain."
"And you?" I said. "Did you stand it?"
She looked at me straight and hard.
"You've no right to ask me that," she said.
* * * * *
Well, perhaps I hadn't. And if I had owned frankly that I hadn't all might have been well. But, as it was, before I knew where we both were, we had quarrelled.
Yes. I quarrelled with Viola; or she quarrelled with me; it really doesn't matter how you put it; and it shows the awful tension we must have been living in.
When I heard her say that I had no right to ask her that question I answered that I thought I had.
She said, "What right?"
And I said if she would think a little she would see what right.
And at that she fired up and the blaze was awful. We two were up there alone and she had me at her mercy. She held me in the blaze.
"I suppose," she said, "I'm to think of your everlasting meddling with my affairs?"
I pointed out that a charge of meddling came rather oddly from a lady who honoured me by staying in my house because she preferred it to her husband's.
"You know perfectly well why I'm staying in your house; and if you don't,Norah does. I could have stayed with my father, for that matter."
I said I thought that that was extremely doubtful—in the circumstances.
I had her there, and she knew it, for she retired in bad order on an irrelevant point. She said I was no judge of the circumstances.
I said peaceably that perhaps I wasn't, but that she must own that I had behaved as if I were. At any rate I'd given her the benefit of the doubt.
She said, "You talk as if I'd been through the Divorce Court. Perhaps that's where you think I ought to be. The benefit of the doubt! You certainlyhavegiven it me. It's been nothing but doubt with you, Walter, ever since I knew you. You always thought awful things about me. I know you have. I couldseeyou thinking them. You thought vile things about me, and vile things about Jimmy. You came rushing out to Belgium because you thought them. And the other day you thought the same thing of me and Charlie Thesiger, and you came rushing after me again and giving me away, and behaving so that everybody else would think me awful too."
"My dear child, you owned yourself that Charlie—"
"Oh—Charlie! As if he mattered! He was only being an ass—the war upset him, or something. I don't care what you think about Charlie—he doesn't either—but why you should go out of your way to thinkmeawful—"
I said I thought we'd done with that.
"No," she said, "we haven't done with it. I want to get to the bottom of it. Whatmakesyou do these things? I believe youwantto make out that I'm horrid, just as you wanted to make out that poor little Jimmy was, when I went to him in Bruges."
She went on. "I can understandthat, because I did go to him, and I—I cared for him and you didn't like it. I can even understand your wantingmeto be horrid then, because it made it easier for you. I had the sense to see that that was all that was the matter with youthen, so I didn't mind. But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can it matter to younowwhether I'm nice or horrid?"
She had rushed on, carried away by her own passion, without seeing where she was going. I don't think she had seen, any more than I had, that for nine years I had been living behind a screen. A screen that had hidden me from myself. I don't think she saw even now when she came crashing into it.
It was I who saw.
The thing was down about my ears; and it wasn't the violence of its fall that terrified me; it was my own nakedness. I wasn't prepared to find myself morally undressed.
I turned away from her. I began fiddling with my pens and papers. I trailed long slip-proofs under her eyes, pretending that I had work to do. But she saw through my pretences and her voice followed me.
It was softer, though. It seemed to be pleading, as if she knew nothing about me and my screen.
"What harm did I ever do you? Or poor Jimmy either? I didn't let you marry me. You ought to be grateful to Jimmy. At least he saved you from that."
I said I thought we needn't drag her husband into it, and I haven't a notion what I meant. I had to say something, and if it sounded disagreeable, so much the better.
And she said there I was again—thinking that I had to remind her thatJimmywasher husband.
"You certainly seem to have forgotten it," I said.
"Heknows how much I've forgotten."
With that last word she left me.
I tried hard to shake the horror of it off. I remember I sat down to my proofs, and I suppose I tried to correct them. But all the time I heard Viola's voice saying, "I can understand your wanting me to be horridthen, because it made it easier for you…. But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can it matter to younowwhether I'm nice or horrid?"
It went on in my head till the words ceased to have any meaning. I had only a dreadful sense that I should remember them to-morrow, and that perhaps when to-morrow came I should know what they meant.
* * * * *
And when to-morrow came the war took up my attention again, so that I actually forgot that Viola had said she was going out to it.
She had let the subject drop abruptly. She didn't even refer to it when my friend the editor of theMorning Standardrang me up the next day to ask me if I'd go out to Belgium as their Special Correspondent.
He was charmingly frank about it. He told me that it was Tasker Jevons he wanted, and Tasker Jevons he had asked to go, but since he couldn't get him (and his powerful pen) why then, he'd had to fall back on me. Jevons, he said, had let him down pretty badly; he'd understood from Jevons that he was prepared to go for them at twelve hours' notice. And he'd given him twenty-four hours; and he'd found that he'd gone out there two days ago. Chucked them, my friend the editor supposed, for another paper. Could I, at twenty-three hours' notice, take his place?
I said I could and I would, and I put him right about Jevons.
And then I went to see about my motor-car.
It was when Viola began to bother me about her passport that the fight began.
First of all, she asked me what I was doing about a motor-car? I told her she needn't worry herself about my motor-car. It wasn't any concern of hers. She grinned at that and said, All right. What she really wanted was to consult me about her passport.
And when I refused to be consulted about her passport, to hear a word about her passport or about her going, she walked straight out of the house into a passing taxi that took her to the Belgian Legation, where she saw that weak-minded secretary that Jevons had handled; and she came back in time for tea, very cheerful and dressed in a sort of khaki uniform she had ordered, with a tunic and knee-breeches and puttees and a Red Cross brassard on her right arm.
She said it had been a very tight squeeze, but she'd worked it, down to her uniform, and it was all right, and if I'd had any difficulty with my motor people (I had had awful difficulty, but how she knew it I haven't to this day found out. Sometimes I think she'd worked that too; she knew the firm, and she wasn't Mrs. Tasker Jevons for nothing)—if I'd had any difficulty she could put that straight for me. She'd gothercar—Jimmy'd ordered it for Amershott and forgotten about it—and her chauffeur, and I could go in it with her if I liked.
It was a better car than the one I'd had in Belgium before or, she said significantly, than the one I was going to take out with me. It was true that I didn't know anything about cars.
Then Norah, my wife, stood up beside her sister, flagrantly partisan, and said, Couldn't I see it wasn't any use trying to stop her? She had me at every point. If I wouldn't take her she'd go by herself with the chauffeur.
And when I said, How about my promises—my word of honour? Viola laughed.
"Your honour's all right, Wally," she said. "You're not taking me out;I'm taking you."
And very early in the morning we motored down to Folkestone to catch the midday boat for Ostend. And Norah came with us to see us off. If I'd given her the smallest encouragement she'd have come too. Imighttake her, she said; it was beastly being left behind.
I said, like a savage, that Belgium was no place for women. I'd take my sister-in-law there, but not my wife.
I suppose the dressing-down I'd got from Viola two nights before had rankled. I must have felt that I was getting my own back that time, when I threw it up to her that she wasn't my wife.
Norah, I said, had too much sense to want to go where she wasn't wanted.
But Viola only laughed again and said, "Please remember that I'm taking you, not you me. And Norah wants to go as much as I do, and it isn't altogether on your account. You needn't think it. As for keeping her back, you couldn't do it if she meant to go. It's Baby that's keeping her, not you."
And then she thanked God she hadn't got a child.
And so, sparring and chaffing by turns, half in play and half in earnest—for a secret subterranean anger smouldered still in both of us—we got off. I remember at the last moment Norah—dear little Norah—telling her that she was not to bully me. She was to let me sit in the motor-car as much as I liked; and she was to see that I didn't get into any danger.
Danger? Danger? As the great fans of the screws churned the harbour water into foam that the waves thinned and flattened out again till the green lane broadened between our track and the pier head where Norah stood, and the little, slender, dark blue figure became a dot on the pier and lost itself in the crowd of dots and disappeared, then, for the first time, it struck me that to be going off like this, alone, with Viola, was danger in itself.
Because, the other night she had made me see myself as I really was—a man, not of an irreproachable rectitude, an immaculate purity (had I ever, had anybody ever really supposed that I was such a man?) but quite deplorably human, and blind—yes, my dear Viola, blind as any bat—and vulnerable, so vulnerable that I think you might have spared me, you might have had some pity.
I found myself addressing her like that, in my heart, as I walked up and down, up and down the deck, not looking at her, but acutely aware of her, where she sat in her deck-chair, bundled up in her great khaki motor-coat and in the rugs I had wrapped round her.
I resented the power she had over me to make me aware of her—at such a time, or at any time, for that matter. Here was I, a Special Correspondent, going out to the war; and there, on the other side of the Channel,wasthe war; in the fields of France and of Flanders men were fighting, men were slaughtering each other every day by thousands. I was a man and I should have been thinking of those men; and here I was, compelled against my conscience and my will to think of this woman. She had come out with me against my conscience and my will, and against my judgment and my good taste and my honour and my common sense, against everything in me that I set most store by. I hadn't meant to take her with me, and she had made me take her.
And when my common sense told me that she hadn't; that I wasn't taking her, and that she had as much right to be on the Ostend boat as I had, I still resented her being there. I still raged as I realized the power she had over me. She had always had it. She had had it the first day I ever saw her, when she had walked into my rooms against my orders, half an hour behind the time I had appointed, and had made herself my secretary against my will. She had had it when she used me as a stalking-horse to draw her brother's suspicions away from her and Jevons; she had had it when she drew me after her to Belgium, and when I followed her from Bruges to Canterbury at her bidding; she had had it when I married Norah (hadn't she told me, in the insolence of it, that she had meant that I should marry Norah?). She had had it, this malign power over me, the other night, and she had it now. She always would have it.
It wasn't my fault, I told myself, if she compelled me to look at her, this time, as I passed her deck-chair.
I looked at her, and she sent me a little sad interrogative smile that asked me why I walked the decks thus savagely and alone? And I paid no attention to her or to her smile. In the very arrogance of isolation I continued to walk the decks. I meant her to see that Icouldbe alone and savage if I liked.
And when I looked at her again (she couldn't havemademe this time, for she was unaware of me, lost in some profound meditation of her own), when I looked at her again my anger and my resentment died with a sort of struggle and a pang.
She had, after all, the grace of her ignorance and innocence. If she had had no pity on me, it was because she was as blind as she had said I was. She didn't, she couldn't see me as she had made me see myself. She didn't know that she had any power over me, or else she wouldn't have used her power; she was too honourable for that, too chivalrous. You could trust her to play the game until she threw it up and left it.
And I passed again in my sullen tramping, and I looked at her for the third time, urged by the remorse that stung me. And this time she drew me so that I went over to her and sat by her. I looked at my watch, we had been two hours on board.
I had left her two hours alone; and in those two hours she had suffered. Her face was set now in a sort of brooding fear and anguish; her breathing had a tremor in it, as if her heart dragged at her side. It was better, far better, that we should quarrel than she should suffer and sit quivering in silence and see frightful things.
But I saw that she wasn't going to quarrel, she wasn't going to pitch into me; she wasn't going to assert herself and domineer over me just now. This agony of hers had made her gentle, so that she spoke to me as if she were sorry for me after all.
"Are you tired," she said, "of tramping up and down?"
"Horribly tired."
"Put my rug round you if you're going to sit still. Norah wouldn't let you sit still without a rug."
"Norah wouldn't let me do anything I shouldn't do."
She smiled down at me, still sad, but with the least little flicker of irony on the top of her sadness. "Norah's job isn't very hard. You don't everwantto do anything you shouldn't."
"Oh—don't I?"
"No, never. That's the pull you have over naughty people like me. You're so good."
"It wasn't my goodness you were rubbing into me the other night."
"Never mind the other night. It doesn't matter what I said the other night. Only what I'm saying now this minute has any importance. But it was your goodness, if it comes to that."
"Queer sort of goodness." I was still, you see, a little stung.
"All goodness," she said, "is queer, carried to that pitch. But you're a dear in spite of it. I won't bully you."
We made the last part of the crossing on the highway of the sunset. The propeller lashed through crimson and fiery copper, and the white wake tossed on to the highway turned to rose and gold and its edges to purple.
I had left her again and I called to her to look at this wonder of the sky and sea; but she shook her head at me. There was no need to call her. She had looked. I could see by her eyes that the intolerable beauty had brought Jevons back to her. He was there for her in all beauty and in all wonder.
Then she called tome. "Wally, come here. I want to speak to you."
I came.
"You thought I was going to leave Jimmy. But I wasn't.Heknew I wasn't. Why, the first night I knew how impossible it was."
I said, Yes. Of course it was impossible. And of course he knew.
"I shan't mind if only we can get to him before anything happens."
I said nothing would happen, and of course we should get to him.
She was silent so long that I was startled when she said, "Wally—your nervous aren'tyou, are they?"
I said, No. No. Of course they weren't.
I knew what she was thinking. Out of the intolerable beauty she had seen Jimmy rise with all his gestures. She heard the cracking of his knuckles and saw the jerking of his thumb. And these things became tender and pathetic and dear to her as if he were dead.
And she had seen herself shudder at them as if it had been another woman who shuddered, a strange and pitiless woman whom she hated.
"It wouldn't matter so much if he had wanted to go," she said.
"Why do you keep on saying that he didn't want to go?"
"Because he said so. He said he was only going because he couldn't go."
"I think you're doing him a great injustice. He told me he wanted to go;I've no doubt he did want to go—just like any other man."
"Yes. To be just like any other man—that'swhat he wanted. But he couldn't be. He isn't like any other man. And so it's worse for him. Can't you see that it's worse for him? It'll hurt him more."
I said I didn't see it, and that she was absurd and morbid and utterly unreasonable, and that she was making Jimmy out unreasonable and morbid and absurd.
She told me then I didn't understand either of them; and we were silent, as if we had quarrelled again, until we came in sight of the Flemish coast.
We sailed into Ostend on the tail-end of the sunset. What was left of it was enough to keep up for us the intense moment of transfiguration, so that we didn't miss it. The long white Digue, the towers, the domes of the casinos and hotels, the high, flat fronts of the houses showed soaked in light, quivering with light. Ostend might have been some enchanted Eastern city. It was as if the heroic land faced us with the illusion of enchantment, to cover the desolation that lay beyond her dykes.
And we who looked at it were still silent, not now as if we had quarrelled, but as if this beauty had made peace between us.
Viola's face had changed. It reminded me in the oddest way of her brother Reggie's. I think that for the moment, while it lasted, she had forgotten Jimmy, she had forgotten her brother Reggie; she had touched the fringe of the immensity that had drawn them from her and swallowed them up. And in forgetting them she had forgotten her unhappy self.
In Ostend, at any rate, I was to have no more of her brooding. We had no sooner landed than she became the adorable creature who had run away with Jevons nine years ago and led me that dance through the cities of Flanders. She showed the same wholehearted devotion to the adventure, the same innocence, the same tact in ignoring my state of mind. She seemed to be making terms with me as she had made them then, suggesting that ifIwould ignore a few things I should find her the most delightful companion in my travels. We must, she seemed to say, of course forget everything that she had said to me the other night or that I had said to her before or since; and, as she swung beside me in her khaki, her freedom and her freshness declared how admirablyshehad forgotten. It wasn't as if we didn't know what we were really out for.
Except that she was a maturer person—thirty-one and not twenty-two—I might have mistaken her for Viola Thesiger, my secretary, setting out, in defiance of all conventions, with little Jevons, to look for Belfries in Belgium, and taking the war, since therewasa war on, in her stride.
And as I walked with her through the same streets where nine years ago I had hunted for her and Jevons, it struck me as a strange, unsettling thing that I should be taking her out to look for Jevons and at the same time playing precisely Jevons's part in the adventure. She too must have been aware of this oddness—for she stopped suddenly to say to me, "Do you remember when I ran away with Jimmy? Isn't it funny that I should be running away with you?"
I said it was. Very funny indeed. And I wondered why she had drawn my attention to it just now? Did she want to make me judge by the transparent innocence of this running the not quite so transparent innocence of that? I think so. Remember, it was Reggie Thesiger's apparent doubt as to her innocence that had been at the bottom of all the trouble of the last five years. It accounted for her attack on me the other night. It was as if she had turned to say to me triumphantly, "Now, perhaps, when I'm running away withyourprecious perfection, at last you understand?"
We had some difficulty in finding quarters and Viola insisted on our staying in the Station Hotel, which had been bombarded by an aeroplane the night before. She pointed out that it was almost entirely empty. "And so," she said, "there won't be anybody to see us."
It was as if she wished to remind me by how thin a threadmyreputation hung.
The business of our passports kept us in Ostend the next morning. I had made up my mind there would be difficulty about Viola's military pass, I was even contemplating the possibility of her being sent back to England by the next boat; but no; she had forestalled obstruction, and the pocket of her khaki coat was stuffed with letters from the War Office, the British Red Cross, and the French and Belgian Embassies. In fact, there was one horrid moment at the depot when it looked as if the Special Correspondent would be smuggled through under Viola's protection.
"You see, Furny," she said, "nobody's going to stop me. Nobody wants to stop me."
At last we got off, and early in the afternoon we were in Bruges.
We had run into the Market-Place before we knew where we were; and yonder in the street at the back of it was Viola'spension, and here on our right hand was Jimmy's hotel, and there, towering before us, was the Belfry. We looked at each other. And through the war and across nine years, it all came back to us.
"The Belfry's still there," I said.
"It always was." She said it a little sternly. But she had smiled at the allusion, all the same—the smile that had never been denied to it.
We stayed an hour in Bruges and lunched there in Jimmy's hotel. The fat proprietor and his wife were still there and they remembered us. They remembered Jimmy. And they had seen him three days ago. Mr. Chevons had passed through Bruges in his Red Cross motor-car. They seemed uncertain whether Viola was Mrs. Chevons or Mrs. Furnival, and they addressed her indifferently as either. An awful indifference had come to them. Of the war they said,"C'est triste, nest-ce pas?"We left them, sitting pallid and depressed behind the barricade of their bureau, gazing after us with the saddest of smiles.
That hour in Bruges was a mistake; so was our lunching at Jimmy's hotel. It was too much for Viola. It brought Jimmy so horribly near to her. I don't know what she was thinking, but I am convinced that from the moment of our entering Bruges the poor child had made up her mind that Jimmy had been killed. The smile she had given to the Belfry was the last flicker of her self-control, and halfway through lunch the grey melancholy that Bruges had absorbed from Jimmy nine years ago came down on her, as nine years ago it had come down on me, and it swallowed her up. By the time the waiter brought the coffee she was done for. Her eyes stared, hard and hot, over the cup she tried to drink from. She couldn't drink because of the spasm in her throat.
"Come," I said, "we must clear out of this."
We cleared out.
I too was invaded by the grey melancholy as we came to the bridge by the eastern gate where I had found Jevons that night leaning over and looking into the Canal. It was the sentry's sudden springing up to challenge us that saved me. I hoped that it would save Viola. She enjoyed the sentries.
But not this time. Her nerves were all on edge and she showed some irritation at the delay. I felt then that I had to take her in hand.
"My dear child," I said (we were running out on the road to Ghent now), "do you realize that there's a war?"
She answered, "Yes, Wally, yes, I know there is."
"Do you know that Antwerp's over there, a little way to the north? And that they've dragged up the big guns from Namur for the siege of Antwerp?"
"Oh, Wally—havethey?"
She turned her face to the north as if she thought she could see or hear the siege-guns.
"But yousaidJimmy was in Ghent."
"Jimmy," I said, "is probably in Ghent. If he isn't, he's in Antwerp. Do you know that the battlefields are down there—no—there—to the south, where I'm pointing? There's fighting going on therenow."
She said, "Yes, dear, I know, I know," very gently; and she put her hand on my knee, as if she recognized the war as my private tragedy and was sorry for me. Then she fell back to her brooding.
Somewhere on the great flagged road between Bruges and Ecloo we met a straggling train of refugees—old men and women and children, bent double under their enormous bundles, making for Bruges and Ostend. They stared, not at us, but at the road in front of them, with a dreadful apathy, as we passed.
"This," I said, "is what finishesme—every time I see it."
She said nothing.
"Do you realize," I said, "that those women and those little children are flying for their lives? That they've come, doubled up like that, for miles—from Termonde or Alost? That they've lost everything they ever had?" (I can hear my own voice beating out the horror of it in hard, cruel jerks.) "That their homes—theirhomes—are burned to ashes somewhere down there?"
At my last jerk she turned.
"No," she said. "I'm cold and hard and stupid, and I donotrealize it. Neither do you. If either of us realized it for two seconds we should be either cutting our throats in that ditch or going back to Ostend now with a load of those women and children, instead of tearing past them like devils in this damned car.
"I can't realize anything till I know whether Jimmy's all right or not. Ican't see anything, or feel anything, or think of anything but Jimmy.Bruges is Jimmy and Belgium is Jimmy and the whole war is Jimmy—to me.I don't care if youarehorrified. I can't help it if Iamcallous.It is so. And you can't make it different."
I remember saying quite abjectly that I was sorry—that I was only trying to turn her mind to other things as a relief.
"I'm to turn my mind tothat—as a relief!"
She showed me a woman I was trying not to see, a woman who carried the bedding of her household on her back and dragged a four-year-old child by the hand. The child slipped to its knees at every other yard, and at every other yard was pulled up whimpering and dragged again—not with anger or any emotion whatever, but with a sickening repetition, as if its mother's arm was a mechanism set going to pull and drag.
If ever there was a weathercock it was my sister-in-law. Without even pretending to consult me, she made Colville, the chauffeur, turn the car round. (He washerchauffeur, after all, she said.)
"I don't know," she said, "whether I realize that woman or not, or whether you do. But I'm going to take her into Bruges."
And we took her. (Viola nursed the four-year-old child all the way.) We also took an old man and a young woman with a baby at her breast, and two small children. It was the only thing to be done, Viola said.
It was nearly half-past five when we left Bruges the second time.
"God only knows," I groaned, "what time we'll get to Ghent!"
"He does," she said. "He knows perfectly well we shall get there by half-past seven."
And we did.
It was dark when we turned into the Place d'Armes and drew up before the long, grey Hôtel de la Poste. I jumped out and stood by the kerb to give Viola my hand.
"But—" she said, "Iknowthis place."
"You ought to."
I don't know where she expected us to go. She still sat in the car as if held there by the shock of recognition. She ignored my outstretched hand.
"You'd better take your things," she said at last, "if you want to get out here. I'm going on to look for Jimmy."
I had then my first full sense of what I was in for. I saw that she was perfectly prepared to throw me over, to dump me down here or anywhere else and go on by herself with the car and the chauffeur that were, or ought to have been, mine.
She didn't care if I was Special Correspondent to theMorning Standard, and she had that beastly chauffeur in her pocket all the time. (I discovered afterwards that she'd laid in food for him and hidden it in the locker under the front seat, so that they might be ready for any sort of adventure.) And yet in the very moment that I realized her disastrous obstinacy I found her intolerably pathetic.
"If you want to look for Jimmy," I said, "you'd better get out too. He'll be here if he's anywhere in Ghent."
But she was already on the kerb, brushing me aside. She had seen behind my back the approach of the concierge and she made for him.
"Is Mr. Jevons in this hotel—Mr. Tasker Jevons?"
Yes, Mr. Chevons was in the hotel. Madame would find him in the lounge.
She had swept past him to the stair of the lounge, and I was following her discreetly when the proprietor dashed out of his bureau to intercept us. The lounge, he said, was reserved from seven till nine o'clock for the officers of the General Staff.
Viola had paid no attention to the proprietor and was sweeping up the stair. I gave Jevons's name and explained that the lady was Mrs. Jevons.
The proprietor, a portly and pompous Belgian, positively dissolved in smiles and bows and apologetic gestures.Mille pardons, monsieur, mille pardons.It would beallright. Monsieur Chevons was dining with the officers of the General Staff.
He did not know that Madame was expected. He was to reserve a room forMonsieur?
I told him to reserve rooms for me and the chauffeur, and to consult Mr.Jevons about Madame. And I hurried up the stair after Viola.
She was waiting for me at the turn, on the landing, by the wide archway of the lounge, where the great glass screen began that shut off the staircase. She stood back from the entrance, looking in, and smiling at what she saw. It was clear by her attitude and her absorption that something was happening in there.
As I approached she made a sign to me and withdrew farther back and up the stair.
"He's there," she whispered. "Over there. In that corner."
For a moment we stood together on the stair, looking down through the glass screen into the lounge.
The far end of the lounge had been turned into a dining-place for the officers of the Belgian General Staff. Most of the tables were cleared now and deserted. But from our place on the stair we had a clear view slantwise of one small table in the corner. And we saw Jimmy seated at that table.
At least we made him out.
All but Jimmy's head was hidden by the figures of a Belgian General and two Colonels. They had closed in on him (they were evidently all four at the end of their dinner); they had closed in on him in an access of emotion and enthusiasm. The General (the one who sat beside him) had his arm round Jimmy's shoulder; the two who sat facing him leaned towards Jimmy over half the table, and one grasped Jimmy's right hand in his; the other was making some sort of competitive demonstration. The disengaged arms of the three held up the glasses in which they were about to pledge him. And at the other end of the room a scattered group of soldiers rose to their feet and looked on smiling and signalling applause.
What was happening down there was public homage to Jimmy.
And in between the two dark Belgian uniforms that obscured him you could just see a bit of Jimmy's khaki, and from among the white and grizzled heads that pressed on him you saw Jimmy's face and Jimmy's flush and Jimmy's twinkle; his incredible, irrepressible twinkle. You could even see the tips of Jimmy's little front teeth trying to bite down his lip into some sort of composure. You could see that he was very shy and very modest; you could see that in spite of his shyness and his modesty he was frightfully pleased; but more than anything you could see that he was amused.
Positively, positively, he had the air of not taking his Belgian officers very seriously.
"We mustn't go down yet," said Viola, "or we'll spoil it."
So we waited, looking at Jimmy through the screen, while the officers clinked their glasses and drank to him and called his name; and the group that looked on echoed it; and the waiters who had come in to see what was happening, repeated it among themselves.
"Vive l'Angleterre! Vive les Anglais! Vive Chevons! Chevons! Chevons!"
"I wonder," said Viola, "what Jimmy has been up to? You can take me to him."
When we got to the table we found Jimmy trying to explain to the General and the two Colonels in execrable French that he didn't know what it was all about.Hehadn't done anything.
Then he saw Viola.
For one second, while he stared at her across the room, he appeared to be suffering from a violent shock. He was so visibly hit that the two men who had their backs to us turned round to see what it was that had affected him. His flush had gone suddenly and he was breathing hard, with his mouth a little open.
I heard him saying something in French about his wife.
He recovered, however, in a second, and disentangled himself from theGeneral and the Colonels and from the dinner-table, and came forward.
And as he came, I noticed something odd about him. He limped slightly.His khaki had a battered look; it was soiled and torn in places, and theRed Cross brassard on his sleeve was simply filthy.
And he had only been out three days, mind you. He was only three days ahead of us. But he had lost no time.
As they strolled up to each other and met midway in the big public room, in the fraction of time that passed before their hands touched I heard him draw a hard, quivering breath and let it out in a long sigh. That breath was a suppressed cry of trouble and of acquiescence.
Then (I could have blessed him for it) he twinkled.
Viola said, "Whathaveyou been up to?"
And Jimmy, "I say, I like that! What areyoudoing here? Have you come to look at the Belfry?"
"No. I've come to look atyou!" She put her hand on his shoulder.
He said, "That's a jolly rig-out you've got," and that was all.
The General and the two Colonels came forward and were presented to Mrs. Jevons; and Mr. Walter Furnival ("one of our war-correspondents") was presented to the General and the two Colonels. They saluted Madame; they begged Madame to accept their profoundest congratulations; they regretted that Madame had not been present just now when they were drinking her husband's health.
And the old General (the one with the white hair and imperial) informed her that Monsieur her husband had a very poor opinion of the Belgian Army.
"He has saved the lives of three Belgian officers and I do not knowhowmany Belgian soldiers—and he says that it is nothing!"
And the stout, florid Colonel, who had been trying to look young and rakish ever since he had turned and caught sight of Viola, suggested that "Perhaps, if he had saved your British, he would not have said that it was nothing."
And the lean, iron-grey Colonel with the ferocious moustache remarked in an austere, guttural voice, "Il est impayable—lui!"
Jimmy had been offering cigarettes to them as if he thought that was the only thing that would stop them. Then the old white-haired General sat between Viola and him with his arm round Jimmy's shoulder and began again, so loudly that everybody in the room could hear him.
"Your husband, Madame, is a man who does not know what fear is—who does not care what death is. For two nights and three days, Madame, he has been down there—at Alost and Termonde—under shell-fire.Mais—un enfer, Madame!You would have thought he had been born under fire, your husband.Ce n'est pas un homme, c'est un salamandre. Bullets—mitrailleuse—shrapnel—it is no more to him than to go out in a shower of rain. When our men were scuttling, and shouted to him to get under shelter, what do you think he said?—'Ouvrir une parapluie—ça ne vaut pas la peine."
There was a shout of laughter.
"That," said Viola, "is the sort of thing hewouldsay. And please, I want to know what's the matter with his leg."
I can see her now, sitting on that crimson velvet seat in the lounge and looking past the gesticulations of the General to Jevons, who was shaking his head at her as much as to say, "Don't you believe the old boy, he's a shocking story-teller."
The old General seemed aware of her preoccupation, for he rose, murmuring affectionately, "Mon petit Chevons. I will not praise him to you, Madame. No doubt you know what he is."
I can see her standing up there and giving her hand to the old General and trying to stiffen her face to say, "I know."
Evidently she thought General Roubaix was too voluble to be entirely trustworthy, for, when he left us and Jimmy had gone out to see about our dinner, she addressed herself to the two Colonels.
"Please tell me what my husbandreallydid."
Both the Colonels tried to tell her; but it was the younger one with the moustache (the one who had said that Jimmy was"impayable") who satisfied her.
It was true, every bit of it. Jevons, it seemed, had been in the thick of the bombardment of Alost and in the fighting for the bridge at Termonde. His practice was to leave Kendal and the motor-car behind him in some place of shelter while he walked into the fire. Sometimes he took his Belgian stretcher-bearers with him, sometimes, when they didn't like the look of it, he went by himself. He didn't care, the Colonel said,wherehe went or how. If it was through rifle-fire or mitrailleuse he went on his hands and knees—he wriggled on his stomach. If it was shrapnel he took his chance. He had saved one of his three officers by carrying him straight out of his own battery, when the German guns had found its range; and he had driven his car, by himself, across a five-mile-long field, under a hailstorm of shrapnel, to get the other two.
"You see," the Colonel expounded, "your husband has chosen the most dangerous of all field ambulance work. Those high-speed scouting cars, running low on the ground, can go where a big ambulance cannot. It is magnificent what he has done."
When Jevons came back they could still hardly keep their eyes off him; they could hardly tear themselves away. It was "À demain, Monsieur," and "À demain, Colonel" as if they had arranged another deadly tryst.
"Well," said Jimmy, "how do you like them?"
"Oh—they're dears," said Viola, "especially the one with the moustache. Do you know, they've told me everything except what's the matter with leg."
"My leg?" said Jimmy. "A bit of shell barked it. I'm jolly glad it's my leg and not my hand."
I was a little frightened when Viola left us alone after dinner. I thought he would pitch into me for bringing her. But he only said sadly, "You oughtn't to have brought her, Furny. But I suppose you couldn't stop her."
I said, No, I couldn't stop her. But I hadn't brought her. She had brought me.
We sat on till the lounge was open to the guests of the hotel. And when the war-correspondents began to drop in I saw that Jevons was uneasy.
"D'you mind if I turn in, old man?" he said.
I asked him if his wound was hurting him.
He stooped and caressed it pensively.
"No," he said. "Not a bit. I like my wound. It—it makes me feel manly."
Presently he said good night and left me.
I thought—yes, I certainly thought—that he exaggerated his limp a little as he crossed the room, and for a moment I wondered, "Is he playing up to the correspondents?"
Then I saw that Viola stood in the doorway waiting for him and that she gave him her arm.
And then through the glass screen I saw them going together up the stair. And I remembered the tale that he had told me nine years ago, how he had seen her standing there and looking down at him—half frightened—through the glass screen, and how he had said to me, "I couldn't. She was so helpless somehow—and so pretty—that for the life of me I couldn't."
It was the same room and the same glass screen and the same stair. And it was the same man. I knew him. I knew him. I had always known him. (Was there ever any risk he hadn't taken?) I had never, really, for one moment misunderstood.
I certainly knew why he "liked" his wound.
We had breakfast very early the next morning, for Jevons was under orders to start at eight o'clock for Termonde. We had a table reserved for us in a corner of the restaurant. The hotel was full of Belgian officers, and I found I was infinitely better off in attaching myself to Jevons than if I had joined the war-correspondents.
Viola (I may say that her rig-out which Jevons had admired so much, the khaki tunic and breeches, made us terribly conspicuous) had come down in a contrite mood. I heard her telling Jevons that he must be kind to me, for I had had an awful time with her and I had been an angel.
Well, I had had an awful time; I don't think I remember ever having had a worse time than the hours I had spent in her company since she had laid into me on Tuesday evening.
But I had not been an angel; far from it. Looking back on those hours, I can see that I behaved to her like a perfect brute.
She had her revenge. One of those revenges that are the more triumphant because they are unpremeditated. She had dished me as a war-correspondent.
For I declare that from the moment when we found Jevons and his General in the hotel I became the victim of her miserable point of view. I could only see the war through Jevons, and as a part of Jevons; I might have said, like Viola, that to me Ghent was Jevons, and Belgium was Jevons, and the war was Jevons. I suppose I saw as much of the War from first to last as any Special Correspondent at the front, and I know, that, barring the Siege of Antwerp, the three weeks when Jimmy was in it were by no means the most important or the most thrilling weeks in the war; and of the one event, the Siege of Antwerp, I didn't see as much as I ought to have seen, being most terribly handicapped by Viola. And yet—perhaps a little because of Viola, but infinitely more because of Jevons—those three weeks stand out in my memory before the battles of the Aisne and Marne and the long fight for Calais. Because of Jevons I have made them figure, in the columns of theMorning Standardand elsewhere, with a superior vividness; even now when I recall them I seem to have lived with Jevons in Flanders through long periods of time.
I have the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of theMorning Standard, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written a very fine account of Melle, which I understand is a small village four and a-half miles from Ghent. But there are other events—the Fall of Antwerp, for instance."
Well, we got the story of the Fall of Antwerp all right. But Jimmy wrote it for me. It was the last thing he did write.
Yes: he had only three weeks of it, all told. He went out on Tuesday, September the twenty-second, and he came back on Tuesday, October the thirteenth. It was his infernal luck that he should have had no more of it.
And yet, I don't know. I don't see how he could have held out much longer at his pitch of intensity. Three weeks would have been nothing to any other man. But Jevons could do more with three weeks than another man could do with a three years' campaign, and he contrived to crowd into his term the maximum of glory and of risk. And when it was all over it was less as if Fate had foiled him than as if he had "given" himself three weeks.
But Jimmy was discontented, and every morning at breakfast we listened to the most extraordinary lamentations. His job, he said, wasn't at all the jolly thing it looked. For he was under orders the whole blessed time. He'd no more freedom, hadn't Jimmy, than that poor devil of a waiter. He'd got to go or to stay where a fussy old ram of a Colonel sent him. So here he was in Ghent, an open city, when he wanted to be in Antwerp. He hadn't been anywhere—anywhere at all. As for what he'd done, he couldn't see what the fuss was all about. He hadn't done anything. He'd seen a little fight in a turnip-field, and a little squabble for a bridge you could blow up to-day and build again to-morrow, and a little tin-pot town peppered. And look at the war! Just look at the war!
And when we tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo, the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There wouldn't be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said. "There won't be any Waterloo for another two years, if then."
He wasn't always lugubrious. It was only when he thought that he was missing the Siege of Antwerp that his happiness was incomplete.
It was on our third morning, when he rushed off joyously (to Quatrecht, I think), that I said to Viola, "You thought it would hurt him more than other people. You needn't have come out after him. You see how much it's hurting him."
"I'm glad I came," she said. "I don't mind as long as I can see."
"Do you remember him telling Reggie that he wouldn't be in the war because he was a coward? Don't you wish Reggie could see him now?"
She didn't answer, and I saw that there was still a sting for her in Reggie's name. The war might have made her forgive him, but there were things that the war couldn't wipe out from her memory. And there was her own rather appalling injustice to Jimmy. I wondered whether she was thinking of how she had tried to stop his going to the front, and how she had said he didn't want to go.
But I had to own that she had done the best thing for her peace of mind by coming out.
Mypeace of mind, I was told quite frankly, didn't matter. Jevons, though he admitted that I couldn't have stopped her coming out, made me responsible for her presence at the seat of war. The trouble was that she insisted on following him wherever he went. And as it wasn't to be expected that he would take her with him into the tight places that he managed to get into in his own car, I had to have her in mine. Not that Viola consented to my putting it that way. It was clear that she made herself mistress of the situation when she obtained possession of that car and manoeuvred (as I am convinced she did manoeuvre) for my own failure with the firm that supplied it. On our first morning in Ghent we came to what she called an understanding, when she rubbed it well into me that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out, and that the man was under her orders, not mine. If I liked to come with her, why, of course I could. Otherwise, I could go halves with one of the other correspondents in one of their cars. But she pointed out that I could hardly do better than come with her, for by simply following Jimmy I should get nearer to the firing-line than anybody else. (She had assumed that the firing-line was the goal of every war-correspondent's ambition.) I would find, she said, that it would work quite well.
It did. It worked better than if I had gone halves with the other correspondents. For at this time war-correspondents were not greatly loved by the military authorities, and they were having considerable difficulty in getting near anything, and the time, Jimmy said, was coming when they would be cleared neck and crop out of Belgium. My astute sister-in-law had calculated on all this and on her own part in it.
"If you'll only trust me, Wally," she said the first day we started, when all the correspondents in the hotel had turned out to see us off, "you'll find that I'm your Providence and not your curse. I can get you through where you'd never get yourself. Just look at those men how sick they are."
I said I thought it would be only decent to take two or three of them with us. We had room.
But Viola was firm. She said it would be most indecent. We should want all the room we had for our wounded.
"Do you suppose I'm going to chivy Jimmy about without doing anything to help him? As for you, you've only to sit tight and do what you're told. You'll be all right as long as we follow Jimmy."
And so we followed him. My God, what a chase! But Viola's little chauffeur was game and we followed. Though Jimmy had made elaborate arrangements for stopping his wife's progress at least two miles outside the danger-zone she always managed to get through. Sentries, colonels, army medical officers—she twisted them into coils round her little finger, and cast them from her and got through. And once through, we were really quite useful in transporting wounded. Jevons and I between us managed to keep her out of the actual firing-line by telling her she was in all of it there was; and when we were loaded up with wounded there was no difficulty in getting her away.
And certainly it served my turn well enough. Though I was compelled to see the war through Jimmy, I saw the war.
By the end of our first week Jimmy seemed to get used to being followed as a matter of course. We had followed him to Alost and Termonde and Quatrecht and Zele. When we weren't following him we were near him somewhere, working at the dressing-stations or among the refugees.
Then he did a mean thing. He managed to get himself sent to Antwerp for three days. He sneaked off there by himself on the Sunday, and when we tried to follow him we were turned back at Saint Nicolas, just too late to see the British go through. He had worked it this time.
When he got back from Antwerp at the end of his three days we knew that something had happened, something that he was keeping from us. It wasn't only the fate of Antwerp that was hanging over him, as it hung over all of us in that awful second week. It was as if he had seen something intimate and terrible that he couldn't talk about.
That night after Viola had gone to her room he told me what had happened. He had seen Charlie Thesiger's regiment at Saint Nicolas on Sunday. And to-day—which was Tuesday—he had seen Charlie Thesiger. He had found him lying dangerously wounded in the British Hospital at Antwerp. That, he said, was what had kept him there. And he had brought him back with him to Ghent. He was in the Couvent de Saint Pierre.
He thought, perhaps, it would be better not to tell Viola just yet.Charlie didn't know, he said, that she was here.
The war was beginning to close round us.
* * * * *
The next day (Wednesday) he announced that he was going to Zele; but he didn't, he really didn't want me to take Viola there. I could go by myself, of course, if I liked, though he didn't care about her being left.
But we did go. Viola's blood was up, after what she called Jimmy's meanness, and there was no keeping her back.
We were a little uncertain of our way, for following Jimmy as we did, or rather, following the direction Colville swore he had seen him start in, took us much too far to the north. We found ourselves on the Antwerp road, jammed in the traffic, and caught by a stream of refugees. We were obliged to turn back to Ghent to get our bearings, but the business of transporting women and children kept us on the Antwerp road all morning, and it was past two o'clock before we started for Zele.
I remember this particular chase after Jimmy for many reasons. First, we lost our way and never got to Zele at all.
Down in the south-east on the sky-line we saw a fleet of little clouds that seemed to be anchored to the earth, and every cloud of the fleet was the smoke from a burning village. West of the fleet was an enormous cloud blown by the wind across miles of sky.
Viola was certain that the big cloud was Zele being burned to the ground, and that Jimmy would be burned with it.
When I told her that it wasn't likely that Jimmy would stay in Zele when it was burning she said that I didn't know Jimmy, and anyhow it was there that she was going.
Suddenly Viola sat up very straight.
"Furny, is that guns I hear, or thunder?"
I said it was guns. A deep and solemn booming came from before and behind us and on either side, east and west. We had rushed bang between the French and German batteries.
The big cloud turned out to be smoke from a factory that the Belgians had set fire to themselves, and in following it we had gone miles from Zele. Now we followed the guns.
We turned east and struck off south and found ourselves in the village ofBaerlere. The lines of fire seemed suddenly to narrow in on us here.
There was a clean path down the centre of the street, for men and horses stood back close under the housewalls on each side. The place was full of soldiers. One of them told us that we could get to Zele by going east through the village, but as the road was being shelled, he didn't advise us to try.
We went down that clean middle of the street. We were safe enough as long as we ran between the houses; but the village very soon came to an end, and then, in the open road, we were in for it.
The fields dropped away from us on each side, leaving us as naked to the German batteries as if we were running on a raised causeway. At the bottom of the fields to our right there was a line of willows, beyond the willows there was the river, and behind the river bank, on the further side, were the German lines.
The grey smoke of their fire was still tangled in the willow-tops.
Colville drew up under the lee of the last house in the village. He didn't like the look of that open road. Neither did I.
"Go on," said Viola. "What are you stopping for?"
The guns ceased firing for a moment and we rushed it.
"I do wish," said Viola, "you'd tuck your arm in, Furny. It's your right arm and you're on the wrong side of the car."
I asked her what made her think of my right arm just then.
"Because it's the only part of himself that Jimmy ever thinks of," she said.
There was about three-quarters of a mile of causeway and it ended in a little hamlet. And the hamlet—it had been knocked to bits before we got into it—the hamlet ended in a hillock of bricks and mortar.
The road to Zele was completely blocked.
"Well—" said Colville, "Iamblowed."
"You've got to take it," said Viola.
"Sorry, m'm. It can't be done. You want a motor traction with caterpillar wheels for this business."
He was backing the car when a shell burst and buried itself in the place where we had stood.
To my horror I saw that Viola had opened the door of the car and was getting out.
"What on earth are you doing?" I said.
"I'm going to walk to Zele."
I pulled her back and held her down in her seat by main force. She was horribly strong. And as she struggled with me she said quietly, "It's all right. You twomustgo back and I must go to Jimmy."
I shouted to Colville, "Turn her round, can't you, and get out of this."
He turned her. He drew up deftly under the shelter of a barn that still stood intact. Then he spoke.
"Are you quite sure, sir, that Mr. Jevons is in that place? Because, sir,I heard Kendal say something this morning about their going to Antwerp."
"Then why the devil didn't you say so?"
"I didn't think of it, sir, until I saw Mrs. Jevons getting out."
He added by way of afterthought, "Besides, I promised Kendal. You andMrs. Jevons wasn't to know he was going on to Antwerp."
Viola and I looked at each other and burst out laughing.
Somewhere behind us from beyond the river a gun boomed and we took no notice of it. We went on laughing.
"He's had us again," she said.
"Yes. We've been done this time. Well—we'd better scoot."
We made a rush for it between guns and got to Baerlere. Once we were out of the village and heading for the Ghent road we were safe.