We were hardly out of sound of the guns when I heard Viola saying, "You know it reallywasfunny of Jimmy."
I said, "He won't think it quite so funny when he hears what we've done."
He didn't think it funny at all. He was furious when he heard what we'ddone. He forbade Viola to follow him again. He threatened to sackColville. He said he'd have me sent home to-morrow and kept there, andViola should go with me.
And when he'd finished he told us that Antwerp had fallen.
That was how Jevons came to write the story of the Fall of Antwerp instead of me.
Well, he didn't sack Colville; and he didn't get me packed off with the other war-correspondents who left Ghent in a body the next day. And he said nothing about sending Viola away. He did better than that. He told her he had brought Charlie Thesiger from Antwerp yesterday, and that her cousin was dying in the Couvent de Saint Pierre, and that perhaps it would be a bit easier for him if she were with him.
We took her to the convent that morning. On the way there she asked Jimmy why he hadn't told her about Charlie yesterday. He said that up till midnight we weren't absolutely certain that Charlie wouldn't recover, and that she was safer with us in the hotel than she would be away from us in the convent.
"My safety is to be considered before everything?" she said.
He answered that it was surely enough for her if he risked it now.
I can't think why she didn't see through him. I and Kendal and Colville knew perfectly well that he was taking her to the convent to be safe. I think he argued that if she had poor Charlie to look after it would keep her quiet, and she would be out of mischief till it was time for the Germans to march into Ghent.
So we took her to him.
We found him in a little whitewashed cell that one of the sisters had given up to him. He lay under a crucifix on the nun's narrow bed, which was too short for him, so that his naked feet showed through the blankets at the bottom. The naked feet of the Christ pointed downwards to his head.
He had been shot through the lungs and was dying of pneumonia, sending out his breath in fierce, rapid jerks.
He lay on his side with his back towards us, and his face was hidden from us as we came in.
The sister who sat with him made a sign that said, "Oh yes, you can come in, all of you; it will make no difference."
The cell was so small that Jevons and I had to draw back and let Viola go in by herself. We two stood in the doorway and looked in. After the first glance at the bed—it was enough for me—I looked, I couldn't help looking, at Viola, (Jevons, I noticed, kept his eyes fixed on the body of the dying man.) I heard her catch her breath in a sob before she could have seen him.
He had slipped his blankets from his shoulder, and it was the sight of his back—under the half-open hospital shirt which showed the bandages and dressings of his wound—that upset her; his back that might have been any man's back, the innocent back that she had no memory of, that disguised and hid him from her and made him strange to her and utterly pathetic. And then, there was the back of his head, sunk like lead into his pillow. The cropped hair had begun to grow. You could see a little greyish tuft. You wouldn't have known that it was Charlie's head.
She went slowly round the bed, taking care not to graze the feet that were stretched out to her. And then she saw him.
She saw a deep purplish flush and glazed eyes that couldn't see her, and a greyish beard pointing on an unshaved jaw; and a mouth half open, jerking out its breath. She laid her left hand on his shoulder and with her right she held the limp hand that hung over the mattress.
I heard her say in French, "If only he knew me—"
And the nun, "Perhaps—at the end—he will know you."
And we left her there with his hand in her right hand and her left hand on his shoulder. She was on her honour to stay with him till the end; but her eyes were fixed on Jevons, and they followed him as he went through the doorway of the cell.
* * * * *
The very minute he had left her Jimmy made his bolt for Lokeren. He said he didn't want me; but I had seen Viola's eyes, and I said it would be safer. If I took Viola's car and Colville, she couldn't follow us.
"She won't follow us," he said. "She can't leave him."
We made the first bolt into Lokeren together; and we got out, each with a load of wounded, just as the Germans were coming in. He made his second bolt by himself and secretly, while Colville and I were lunching. We followed, and were stopped in a village two miles from Lokeren.
A Belgian Red Cross man met us here and told us that Jevons had got through in spite of them, and they didn't in the least expect him to come back again. He shrugged his shoulders and seemed to be disgusted and annoyed with Jimmy rather than to admire him.
We hung about in that village an interminable time. I do not remember its name, if I ever knew it; but I know and remember every house in it and every tree in the avenue at the turn of the grey road that led to Lokeren, and even now, in my worst dreams, I find myself in the little plantation at the end of the village on the left where the railway siding is, and where the trains came in loaded with wounded. I am always waiting for Jimmy and looking for Jimmy and not finding him. And at one point I always stumble over Viola's body. I find her lying wounded in a ditch that runs through the plantation. And when I find her I know that Jimmy is dead. And that frightens me—Jimmy's death, I mean, not Viola's body. I take Viola's body as a matter of course.
It is an abominable dream.
But even that dream is not more astonishing, and it is far less improbable than what I was to see. We were at the end of the village. Colville had drawn our car up in the middle of the street, and I was standing by him, when two Belgian soldiers rushed up to us, pointing up the road, and shouting to Colville to clear out of the way.
I turned. Round the bend of the road where the avenue of trees was I saw a train of horses and gun-carriages careening with the curve, and a battery of Belgian artillery came charging down in full retreat. And now in the middle of the battery as if he were part of it and informed it with his energy and speed, and now in front of it as if he led it, and joyous as if he had turned its retreat into a victory, came Jimmy driving his car.
The inside of the car was packed with wounded men; and, wedged up against Jimmy, and standing on the steps, and sitting on the bonnet, and hanging on wherever they could find a foothold and hang, were seven officers and soldiers of the Belgian Army.
Kendal—bleeding profusely from a flesh wound on his forehead, but otherwise unhurt—sat inside among the wounded.
Ithadbeen a victory for Jimmy. He had advanced within fifty yards of the German lines, he had picked up two of his wounded from under their sentry's fire, and the rest of the men and the officers he had gathered on his way.
We sent them all to Ghent with Colville.
Before he left, Kendal implored us just to look at Mr. Jevons's car.
Mr. Jevons's car was worth looking at. It had a hole in the back of it where a bullet had gone clean through and buried itself in the cushions. There were five bullet-holes in its hood. Its flank was scraped by a flying fragment of shell, the same that had tilted its right rear splash-board. Inside, its canvas covers and its rubber mat were stained with blood.
Drawn up motionless in that village street and stared at, Jimmy's car had something of its old self-conscious air. It looked pleased, and at the same time surprised at itself.
And while Jevons was dressing and bandaging his flesh-wound for him an idea struck Kendal and he grinned.
"D'you remember the time, sir, when you wouldn't let her out if there was a spot of rain?"
"I do," said Jevons.
"And look at her now—not three weeks. What a life she's 'ad!"
And when Kendal (he was as pleased as Punch with his bandage) when Kendal had climbed into Colville's car, Jimmy turned his round again; though the officers implored him to come on, for the Germans were on our backs. But Jimmy only jerked his thumb in the direction of Lokeren and made his third bolt. I scrambled in beside him as he started.
I don't mind saying that I hated this adventure. It was one thing to go into Antwerp when the Germans were so busy storming it that they couldn't attend to you, and quite another thing to be alone with Jimmy on that horrid grey road with the Germans coming every minute round the turn of it.
Jimmy explained that there was a wounded man hiding in a ditch about a mile from Lokeren, and he'd got to fetch him.
We fetched him and another car-load without any misadventure.
When we got back to our village we found a Field Ambulance there. Jimmy said, "I believe that'smyField Ambulance." Presently he gave a start that made the car swerve as if he had run over a dog.
"Well, I'm damned if there isn't Viola."
Yes, there she was. She had come out with the Field Ambulance. And itwasJimmy's Field Ambulance, the one that had been sent out without him. It had come on into Ghent from Antwerp yesterday, and Viola had found it.
"This is too bad," said Jevons. "You ought to be looking after Charlie.Whyaren'tyou looking after him?"
"Charlie," she said, "died three hours ago—at twelve o'clock."
It wasn't five hours since we had left her with him in the nun's cell under the crucifix. I don't think I had realized it before, but now it came over me as a new and strange thing, how little he had mattered. Then it struck me that Jevons must have known it all the time.
"I've done everything," she said, "that had to be done. And I've written to Aunt Matty and Uncle George—and Mildred."
"Mildred?" I wondered.
"Well—yes."
Jevons and I had forgotten Mildred. We had forgotten her engagement to Charlie, though I suppose nobody knew better than we did why it had been broken off.
To his father and mother and Mildred hedidmatter.
And perhaps he mattered to Viola, in a way; for she said she would have given anything to have saved him. He must have mattered to Jevons when he brought him from Antwerp and when we buried him in Ghent.
And the cross on his grave reproves me, reminding me that to his country he mattered supremely, after all.
* * * * *
After Lokeren Jevons and I tried to come to terms with Viola.
The conference took place upstairs in their bedroom, where we had withdrawn for greater privacy. Viola sat on the one chair and Jimmy and I on the bed. Jimmy did most of the talking.
He said, "Look here, my dear child, if there wasn't a war on, I wouldn't stand in the way of your amusement for the world. And there's a great deal to be said for you.Ithink you adorable in a tunic and breeches, and General Roubaix agrees with me, if Furny doesn't. We all think you heroic, and you are sometimes useful. But there isn't a thing you've done yet that a man can't do better—except getting Furny through the lines, and nobody wants Furnyinthe lines. And whenyou'rein them you've a moral effect equal to about ten seventeen-inch guns. If the men see you hovering round their trenches they're so jumpy they can hardly hold their rifles. If Kendal sees you he's so jumpy he can hardly steer. Colville says he'd rather hang himself than go through another day like Baerlere. Furny all but lost his job on theMorning Standardbecause he was told off to look after you when he ought to have gone to Antwerp—hewouldhave lost it if I hadn't done his work for him. And you don't make things easier forme. Good God!—sometimes I don't know what I'm doing.
"It isn't fair on us. It isn't fair."
"It isn't fair onme," she said. "I'm jumpy when I'm kept back. You don't know what it's like, Jimmy.Don'tturn me back."
And the poor child began to talk about her duty to the wounded, and that made him burst out again.
"The wounded? If you think you're any more comfort to the wounded than you are to Furny and me I can tell you you're mistaken. There was a poor devil at Lokeren the other day with a bullet in his stomach who told me he didn't mind his wounds and he didn't mind the Germans; what worried him was the lady being there when he wasn't able to defend her."
She tilted her chin at that and said she didn't want anybody to defend her.
"Perhaps you don't, but what would you think of a man who didn't want to defend you? What would you think of Furny and me if we wanted you to be here?"
"I should like you to want me," she said.
"No, my dear child, you wouldn't. You don't know what you're saying."
And then he said, "I know better than you do what you want. Men aren't made like that—if theyaremen. You can't have it both ways." And he said something about chivalry that drove her back in sheer self-defence on a Feminist line. She said that nowadays women had chivalry too.
"Andourchivalry is to go down before yours?"
"Can't you have both?"
"Not in war-time.Yourchivalry is to keep back and not make yourself a danger and a nuisance."
"Come," she said, "what about Joan of Arc?" And that was too much for Jimmy. He jumped up off the bed and walked away from her and sat on the table as if it gave him some advantage.
"No, no," he said. "I can't stand that rot. When you're a saint—or I'm a saint—you can talk about Joan of Arc. If you want to be Joan of Arc go and be it with some man who isn't your husband—who isn't in love with you. Perhapshewon't mind. Go with Furny if you like, though it's rather hard on him."
I said I thought he was rather hard on Viola—if he'd seen the poor child at Baerlere, flinging herself out of the car and proposing to climb over the ruins of several houses and walk by herself—under shell-fire—to Zele, because she thought he was there—
Jimmy looked at her; and he did what he had done that night when he saw her coming towards him in the lounge. He sighed a long sigh of complicated anguish and satisfaction.
She heard it and she understood it, and she said, "I can't help it if I am like that. You'll have to take the risk of me. Please go away, Furny."
And I went.
* * * * *
Norah has been reading what I've just written, and she tells me that there's a great deal about Jimmy's "joy" and his "adventure" and all that; and not one word about his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice. She says I don't give a serious impression of him. He might have gone out to the war just for fun, and that it isn't fair to him.
I don't know whether it's fair or not. I write as he compels me to write. I find that I cannot separate his joy and his adventure from his duty and devotion and self-sacrifice; he didn't separate them himself. I don't even know that self-sacrifice is really the word for it; and the impression he gave me is just that—of going out for fun. It was the wild humour of his devotion that made it the spectacle it was.
(She has told me that it's all right, so long as I recognize that itwasdevotion.)
After Lokeren I had no desire to go through the rest of the war with Jimmy. To be with Jimmy was destruction to your sense of values. I have got it firmly fixed in my head that the taking of Lokeren was an important affair.
As for what Jimmy called the "tinpot bombardment of Melle" (there was nothing wrong withhissense of values), I shall see it insanely, for ever and ever, astheevent of the war.
And there is this to be said, that Lokeren filled the last gap in the line closing round Ghent, north, south and east, and drew it tighter. And Melle (only four and a-half miles away) was the last point in the German advance on Ghent. The taking of Melle would be a sign to us that the game was up.
For three days Jimmy operated joyously in the village and over the leagues of turnip-fields that lay outside it.
Of the first two days I remember an endless tramping over endless furrows that were ditches for the dead; an endless staggering under stretchers that dripped blood; an endless struggling with Viola to keep her under shelter of the walls; each of those acts seemed to be endless, though one gave place to the other, and it was only the firing that went on all the time, till even Jimmy complained once or twice that he was fed up with it.
I remember that Jimmy's Field Ambulance played a great part in these adventures. I remember feeling a malicious satisfaction in the thought that at the same time it was compelled to witnesshisperformances. It couldn't miss him.
I remember all these things; but of Melle itself I remember nothing but the Town Hall, with its double flight of steps up to its door, and the two tall stone pillars, one on each side of the door, and the Greek pediment above it; that and the little old Flemish house that stood back by itself on the other side of the road, and its white walls and its red-tiled roof, and the two green poplars in its garden, mounting guard. The house and its garden and its poplars are always vivid and still; they always appear to me as charged with mystery and significance and as connected in some secret way with Jimmy's fate.
In the pauses of our movements the Field Ambulance and Jimmy's car and Viola's were always drawn up before the Town Hall, facing the little house.
Then came Sunday, the eleventh, the third day of Melle, when Viola was left behind at Ghent.
Jimmy had made her promise on her honour to be brave,thistime, and stay in the hotel and wait for orders.
Colville stayed with her. They were to pack our things and be ready to leave at a minute's notice. Colville had secret orders that, if we were not back by midnight, he was to take Viola on to Bruges in his car, and wait for us there.
For we knew now that we were in for it.
And we knew that the war, which was coming closer and closer to the city, was coming closer to us. It had been Charlie Thesiger first, now it might be Reggie. At least, we knew that Reggie's regiment, the Third ——shires, had come up from Ostend the day before, that it was quartered somewhere between Ghent and Melle, and that it had been engaged at Quatrecht.
Our own orders were to stick to Melle.
I suppose from the way the ambulances were massed there that the end had been foreseen. That afternoon the battle began to sweep round from Quatrecht to Melle; and on our third journey out a rumour reached us at the barrier where the sentry stood guard. It was one of those preposterous rumours that run before disaster and are started God knows how when a retreat begins. I think it was the Belgian Red Cross men who spread it, for I heard the guide who went with Jimmy's Field Ambulance assuring him seriously that seven thousand British had been surrounded and cut to pieces on the road between Quatrecht and Melle. To be sure the number diminished with each repetition of the tale, dropping from seven thousand to seven hundred and from seven hundred to seventy. But in another hour we were bringing in the men of the ——shires.
And towards the end of the day the real bombardment of Melle began, and on our last journey out we and Jimmy's Field Ambulance were in the thick of it.
I can remember nothing of that bombardment but the three shells.
The first ripped open the roof of the Town Hall and set fire to it.
The second struck the Greek pediment and brought the whole front toppling into the street.
Then, about five minutes after, there was the third shell.
The light was going out of the sky, so that we saw the first shell like a sheet of curved lightning making for the village as we approached from the Ghent side. There was a deadly attraction about the thing that made you feel that it and you were the only objects in God's universe, and that you were about to be merged in each other. It looked as if it were rushing out of heaven straight for us, so that we were surprised when it apparently swerved aside and hit the Town Hall instead.
(Jimmy and I were in the front of the car. Kendal, whose flesh wound was beginning to worry him, sat behind.)
A battery of artillery charged past us, followed by the remnants of a French regiment on the run. Jimmy put more speed on. By the time we got into the village the Town Hall was spouting flame.
Jimmy drew up his car about fifty yards away from it. The Field Ambulance had turned, and took its stand a little further away behind us, under the cover of the opposite walls. Its men began dragging out their stretchers. Kendal and I made ready with ours. The wounded were being brought out of every house they were in.
A Belgian Colonel rode past us, trying to look unaware that he was retreating. He shouted to us to clear out of it. This was the only sign of interest that he showed.
Somebody else came up to Jevons and told him that there were three or four wounded men somewhere inside the Town Hall, but that the place was on fire and it was absolutely impossible to get them out. He advised us to pick up the men who were lying in the street, and clear out.
I saw Jevons nod his head as if he agreed and consented. I saw him get out of the car. And then I heard Kendal say, "Give us a hand, sir," and I turned to my stretchers.
When I looked round again Jevons was running towards the Town Hall. The man who had told us to pick up our wounded and clear out was looking after him with a face of the most perfect horror.
Kendal and I followed with the stretchers, and we saw Jevons run up the steps of the Town Hall. He turned at the top of the steps and waved to us to keep back.
Then he went through the big doors between the pillars.
There was a crash and a roar as if the whole building had fallen in. It was the top story plunging to the second floor. The upper half of the Town Hall was like a crate filled with blazing straw. The Greek pediment was the only solid thing that subsisted in that fire.
Then the first floor was caught. It burned more slowly.
Kendal and I and the ambulance men ran forward with the stretchers. And Jimmy came through the doors carrying a wounded Frenchman. He went in again and came out with another Frenchman.
(The ground floor had begun to burn behind him.)
He went in a third time and came out with Reggie Thesiger.
He must have had to go further into the hall to find him, for it was a much longer business. We, Kendal and I, were down the street by the ambulance when they came out, and I didn't see that it was Reggie till I heard Kendal say, "Sir, that's Major Thesiger he's got!"
Reggie's arm was round Jimmy's shoulder and Jimmy's arm was round Reggie's waist. He half carried, half supported him. He came out in the middle of a cloud of smoke that hid him. The smoke was followed by a burst of fire and another crash and roar as the ceiling of the first story plunged to the ground floor.
With all this going on behind him Jevons paused on the top of the steps to readjust his burden to the descent. We heard afterwards that Reggie had said, "You'd better leave me, old man, and scoot. You can't do it."
It didn't look as if he could. But as we went back to them we saw thatJevons had heaved Reggie over his shoulder and was carrying him down thesteps. He came very carefully and slowly, so that we had reached the TownHall before he had staggered to the last step.
As we pressed closer to help him he told us to get back if we didn't want the whole damned place down on the top of us.
We gave back and he followed us. I don't know how we got Reggie on to the stretcher—he had a piece of shell somewhere in his thigh—but we did it and ran with him to the ambulance. We had about a minute to do it in and no more.
And then the second shell came.
It hit the Greek pediment from behind, and we saw the two tall pillars that supported it stagger, snap like two sticks, and bend forwards, looking suddenly queer and corpulent in their fore-shortening; then they parted and fell, bringing down the whole front of the Town Hall.
The Town Hall was spreading itself over the street, with a noise like a ship's coal going down the shute in a thunderstorm, as Reggie's stretcher slid home along its grooves in the ambulance. Kendal and I were inside for a second or two doing things for Reggie. The engine throbbed. The whole ambulance shook with its throbbing.
In that second Jevons had run back to fetch his car, calling out to us to cut and he would overtake us. He had cranked up his engines and jumped in before Kendal could get down and go to his help. When we saw him start we started. There wasn't any time to lose.
Kendal and I were sitting on the back steps of the ambulance, so that we kept him in sight. It was quite certain that he would overtake us.
* * * * *
He was running straight down the middle of the road when the third shell came.
It burst on the ground behind him, on his right, a little to one side.Some of it must have struck the steering gear.
The car plunged to the left. It climbed reeling to the top of a bank and paused there, then fell, front over back, into the ditch and lay there, belly uppermost, and its wheels whirling in the air.
Jevons lay on his face, half in, half out of the ditch.
He lay for about three seconds; then, as we ran to him, we saw him raise himself on his left arm and crawl out of the ditch; and when we reached him he was trying to stand.
And he tried to smile at us. "You needn't look like that," he said. "I'm as right as rain." And then he tried to raise his right arm.
You saw a khaki cuff, horribly stained. A red rag hung from it, a fringe that dripped.
* * * * *
Reggie opened his eyes and turned his face towards the stretcher that slid into its grooves beside him.
"That isn't—Jimmy—is it?" he said.
I saw him move his left hand to find Jimmy's right. And I heard Jimmy saying again (in a weak voice this time) that he was as right as rain.
We had got out of the range of the guns and the surgeons had done their business with bandages and splints. They had taken Reggie first, then Jimmy.
And so, lying beside Reggie, on his own stretcher and in his own ambulance, he was brought back to Ghent.
The military hospitals were full, so we took them to the Convent de SaintPierre. And I went over to the Hôtel de la Poste to fetch Viola.
I don't know what I said to her. I think I must have done what Jimmy told me and said they were all right.Shenever said a word till we got to the Convent. (She told me afterwards that when she saw me coming in alone she had been sure that Jimmy was killed. She didn't know about Reggie yet, you see.)
This part of it is all confused and horrible.
We had to wait before we could see our surgeons at the Convent. The nuns took us into a little parlour and left us there.
And I told her then what had happened. I can see her sitting in the nuns' parlour, looking out of the window as I told her; looking as if she wasn't listening. And I can hear my own voice. It sounded strange and affected, as if I had made it all up and didn't believe what I was telling her.
"He saved Reggie's life—do you see? at the risk of his own.
"At—the risk—of his own."
And still she looked as if she wasn't listening. It didn't sound as if it had really happened.
And I feel—now—as if I had taken hours to tell her.
Then one of our men came to us. He drew back when he saw Mrs. Jevons, andI followed him to the doorway. He said they were busy with MajorThesiger. They hadn't started yet with Mr. Jevons.
And then—ages afterwards—one of the surgeons came and called me out of the room. He said the Major would be all right. They'd got the bit of shell out. But—there was Jevons's hand. They'd have to take it off. They couldn't possibly save it. And it was going to be a beastly business. They'd run out of anaesthetics. Thesiger had had the last they'd got.
Yes, of course it would have been better. But Jevons wouldn't hear of it.Heknew they were short and Thesiger didn't, and he'd insisted on their doing Thesiger first.
It was an awful mistake, he said, because it would hurt Jevons ten times more than it would hurt anybody else. He thought that I had better get Mrs. Jevons out of that room; the ward where they were operating was next to it.
I couldn't get her out of it.
There were five minutes when I sat there and Viola crouched on the floor beside me with her face hidden on my knees and her hands grabbing me tighter and tighter.
And the door opened and I saw two nuns looking in. I heard one say to another, "C'est sa pauvre femme qui devient folle." And the door closed on us.
* * * * *
"All that fuss about a hand!" Jimmy had come out of his faint and was trying to restore Viola to a sense of proportion. If all the rest of him had been blown away, he said, by that confounded shell, and only his hand had been left, she might have had something to cry for.
And yet she cried inconsolably for Jimmy's hand.
God knows what memories came to her when she thought of it. I don't think she thought of it as the hand that had written masterpieces and flung them aside, that could steer a car straight through hell-fire, and that could nurse, and bind up wounds. I know I thought of all these obvious things. But she must have thought of the hand that she knew like her own hand, the hand with the firm, nervous fingers, and the three strong lines in the pinkish palm, the hand she adored and had shrunk from, whose gesture had been torture to her and whose touch was ecstasy, the hand that the surgeons had cut off and tossed into a basket to be cast out with the refuse of the wards.
Not that either of us had much time for thinking of anything but how we could get out of Ghent before the Germans got into it. Viola said it would be quite easy. There was the ambulance, and there washercar and there was Jimmy's car.
I told her that Jimmy's god-like car was lying bottom upwards in a ditch between Ghent and Melle, an object half piteous, half obscene. She said it was a jolly good thing then that she'd brought hers. Perhaps it was.
We had just got Jimmy and Reggie into their first sleep at six o'clock in the morning when the orders came for us to clear out.
We cleared out in Viola's car, with Reggie on his stretcher and Jimmy (propped up with pillows) at his head, and Viola at his feet, and two wounded men in front with Colville, and Kendal and me standing one on each step. (Most of our luggage was on the Boulevard in front of the Convent where we had left it.)
We went, as we had come, through Bruges. We drew up to rest in the MarketPlace under the Belfry.
"You'd better look at it while you can, Viola," said Jevons. "You may never see it again."
"I? I shall never see anything else," she said.
We looked at the Belfry. It was as if, under that menace of destruction, we saw it for the first time.
Wemighthave enjoyed that run back, Viola said; only somehow we didn't. Reggie was ill from his anesthetic all the way, and Jimmy's temperature went up with every mile, and we missed the boat at Ostend, and had to stay there all night; and Jimmy became delirious in the night and thought that he had left Viola behind in the Town Hall at Melle. And there was no room on the morning boat; and when we did get on board the Naval Transport at Dunkirk, Kendal took it into his head to be seasick till he nearly died.
We had no peace till seven o'clock on Tuesday, when we got to Canterbury.
I think I have said that Jevons made me suffer. He did. I can say that before those three weeks of his all my contacts with him were infected by the poison of my suffering. But all that was nothing to what he made me suffer since, what I suffer now when I remember the things I have said of him, the things I have thought and felt—my furtive belittling of him, my unwilling admiration, the doubt that I encouraged in the mean hope that it would become a certainty.
I would give anything to be like the Canon or my wife, the only two of us whose conscience doesn't reproach them when they see Jimmy's right sleeve.
I remember Norah saying to me once, "I shall be sorry foryouif you don't take care." Well, I am sorry for myself.
But I am still sorrier for Mrs. Thesiger.
I know there's a great deal to be said for her. I had wired to them from Dunkirk to tell them that Reggie was slightly wounded but recovering, and that the four of us would be in Canterbury that evening. It wasn't my fault if Reggie, being a British officer, was taken from us at Dover, and sent to a military hospital; but I admit I ought to have wired again to the Thesigers to inform them of the fact. I ought to have remembered that Reggie was more important to Mrs. Thesiger than Jevons, even if Jevons had done what Mrs. Thesiger didn't yet know he'd done.
The maternal passion is a terrible thing. It has made women commit crimes. It made my mother-in-law push Viola from her on her threshold and turn on me as I was helping Jimmy out of the car. It made her say, "You've brought my son-in-law. What have you done with my son?"
(To do her justice, she hadn't seen what had happened to Jimmy. Though he was tired and weak, he could still stand up and stagger along if you held him tight.)
And the maternal passion is not more terrible than the passion that Viola had for Jevons. It made her say to her mother as the Canon and I brought Jimmy in (the dear old man had seen in an instant why he wore his coat slung loose over his right shoulder), "You can see what we're doing with my husband."
And when we were all in the drawing-room and I was explaining gently that Reggie was all right, but that we'dhadto send him to the military hospital, it made her say, "If it wasn't for your son-in-law your son wouldn't be alive."
God knows what thirst she satisfied, what bitterness she exhausted, what secret anguish she avenged.
They were all there, the Thesiger women—they had come, you see, to meet Reggie—Victoria and Millicent and Mildred; and they heard her. But it was Mildred whosaw. She spoke to her mother.
"Can't yousee?" she said.
Viola was kneeling by the sofa where her father had made Jimmy lie, and she had unbuttoned and taken from him his heavy coat. She looked at me and said, "Please take them away somewhere and tell them. Jimmyisso tired."
I know that must seem awful. Itwasawful to come back from the battlefields of Flanders, from sieges and sackings and slaughter, and see the women flashing fire at each other. And they were mother and daughter. But, you see, they were women. I know that the war should have purged them of their passions (perhaps it did purge them); but your lover is your lover and your son your son for all that.
And it wasn't easy for Mrs. Thesiger to see how her son-in-law could have saved her son. I am not sure that she wouldn't have thought it presumption in Jevons to suppose that he could save anybody, let alone her son. There were people like the Thesigers from whom heroism was expected as a matter of course; and there were people like Jevons. You know what she said about his going to the front.
When I had finished the tale—and I let her have the whole of it, from the first shell that hit the Town Hall to the bit of the third shell that hit Jimmy—she said, "You mean that if he hadn't gone back for his car—" She had broken down and was sobbing quietly, but you could see how her mind worked.
I said, "I mean that if he hadn't gone back to the Town Hall to look forReggie he wouldn't have been hit."
Then I told her how they took Jimmy's hand off.
I heard the Canon groan. Millicent and Victoria began to sob as their mother had sobbed. Mildred set her teeth firmly; and Mrs. Thesiger turned to me a queer, disordered face, and spoke.
"They—they gave the anaesthetic to—Reggie?"
"They did," I said. "Because Jimmy made them."
Yes. I am very sorry for Mrs. Thesiger.
She cried, softly, and with a great recovery of beauty and dignity, for about fifteen seconds (the Canon had gone back to Jevons); then she rose and addressed her daughter.
"Mildred dear, I think Jimmy had better have Reggie's room."
Then she went to him; and I am told that she kissed him for the first time. She kissed him as if he had been her son. (Poor Jimmy, I may say, was so tired that he didn't want to be kissed by anybody.)
* * * * *
He still had Reggie's room six weeks later when I came back from France for a week-end. Reggie had recovered, and was with them for a fortnight's leave before he went out again.
Norah and I went down on Saturday to see him. (His leave was up on Sunday night.)
Without Reggie I don't think I should have realized Jevons in his final phase.
He had been happy, I know, at Hampstead in the first two years of his marriage; he had been happy most of the time in Edwardes Square; even in Mayfair he had had moments; and Amershott had been, on the whole, an improvement on Mayfair. And he had lived through his three weeks in Ghent in a sort of ecstasy. And before that, all the time, there had been his work, which I am always forgetting, and his fame, when he didn't forget it.
But there had always been something.
At first it had been the Thesigers. As long as Mrs. Thesiger—as long asoneThesiger—held out against him he had felt defeat. And then there had been Reggie's return and his appalling doubt. He had pretended not to see his doubt and not to mind it. And he had seen it, as he saw everything, and he had minded awfully. Then came Viola's illness, which you could put down to Reggie's doubt. And after that it had been Viola pretty nearly all the time. And even at Ghent, by the tortures of anxiety she had caused him, you may say that she had spoiled his ecstasy.
And now, without any effort, or any calculation or foresight, by a stupendous accident, he had found happiness and peace and certainty. The thing was so consummately done, and so timed to the minute, that when you saw him there enjoying it, you could have sworn that he had played for it and pulled it off. It was as if he had said to himself, "Give me time, and I'll bring all these people round, even Mrs. Thesiger, even Reggie. I'llmakethem love me. Wait, and you'll just see how I shall score."
And there he was scoring.
And it was as if he had said to himself long ago, "As for Viola, I know all about it. I know I do things that make the poor child shudder; but I can put that all right. I can make her forget it. I give myself three weeks." As if he said, "She thought she was going to leave me. I knew that, too, and I didn't care. She might have left me a thousand times and I should have brought her back."
I used to think it pathetic that Jevons should have wanted Mrs. Thesiger to love him—that he should have wanted Reggie to. But I must say his pathos was avenged.Theywere pathetic now. That big, hulking Major wasn't happy unless he was writing Jimmy's letters, or cutting up Jimmy's meat for him, or helping him in and out of his clothes. Mrs. Thesiger wasn't happy unless she was doing things for him. The Canon wasn't happy (though, like Norah, he had nothing on his conscience) and Mildred and Millicent and Victoria weren't happy, nor the Thesiger's friends in the Cathedral Close.
And then—after they had made a hero of him for six weeks—on that Saturday night when we were all together in the Canon's library, Jevons made his confession.
We had been, exchanging reminiscences. Something had made Viola think of Jimmy's General and the two Colonels at Ghent. She began telling the Canon how we had watched them through the glass screen, and how funny General Roubaix had looked with his arm round Jimmy's neck, and how he had said that Jimmy was a salamander, and that he didn't know what fear is.
"Oh,don'tI!" said Jimmy.
And that sent Reggie back to the day when he had first seen Jimmy.
"Look here, old man, what made you say you were an arrant coward?"
"Because," said Jimmy simply, "I am one. Dear old Roubaix was talking through his hat.
"Not know what fear is! I know a good many things, but I don't know anything better than that. You can't tell me anything about fear I don't know.
"You've no idea how I funked going out to the war. Yes—funked.
"It wasn't any ordinary funk, mind you, the little, creepy feeling in your waist, and your tummy tumbling down, and your heart sort of fluttering over the place where it used to be. I believe you can get overthat. And I never had that—ever, except once when I saw Viola in a place where she'd no business to be. It was something much worse. It—it was in my head—in my brain. A sort of madness. And it never let me alone. It was worse at night, and after I got up and began to go about in the morning—when my brain woke and remembered, but it was there all the time.
"I saw things—horrors. And I heard them. I saw and heard the whole war. All the blessed time—all those infernal five weeks before I got out to it, I kept seeing horrors and hearing them. There was a lot of detail—realism wasn't in it—and it was all correct; because I verified it afterwards. Thingswerejust like that. Every morning when I got up I said to myself I'm going out to that damned war, but I wish to God somebody'd come and chloroform me before I get there. There were moments when I could have chloroformed myself. I felt as if it was the utter injustice of God that I—I—had to be mixed up in it.
"Not know what fear is!
"Just conceive," said Jimmy, "a man living like that, in abject, abominable terror, in black funk—keeping it up, all day and half the night, for five solid weeks—before he got there."
"And when you did get there," said Reggie, "were you in a funk?"
"Oh, well, you see, by the time I'd got there it had pretty well worn itself out. There wasn't any funk left tobein."
And when I saw Reggie look at him I knew he had scored again.
Still, I wondered how it really stood with them; and whether Reggie had settled with his doubt, or whether sometimes, when you caught him looking at Jimmy, it had come over him again. The kind of virtue his brother-in-law had displayed in Flanders wouldn't help him, you see, to that particular solution. And with the Thesigers—when they took after their mother—things died hard.
He must have felt that he had to settle it before he went.
Viola told us what happened.
It was his last evening, and the three were together in that room of Reggie's. He had just said that Viola wouldn't care how many Town Halls he was buried under, as long as Jimmy didn't go and dig him out. And then, suddenly, he went straight for it.
"Jimmy," he said, "did you run away with my sister, or didn't you? I don't care whether you did or not, but—did you?"
"No, I didn't," said Jimmy.
"Then what the dickens," Reggie said, "were you doing together inBruges?"
"We were looking at the Belfry," said Jimmy.
And Reggie shook his head. "That's beyond me," he said.
"Yes," said Viola. "But it wasn't beyond Jimmy."
That's the real story of Tasker Jevons and his wife.
Don't ask me what would have happened to them if there hadn't been a war.
I've tried to show you the sort of man he was. He knew his hour even before it found him. And you cannot separate him from his hour.