Chapter X: Book III: His Book (1)

XII

At this period, and even now when I go back to it, I am completely puzzled by Jevons. Here was a man who professed to understand his wife, to know what she was feeling and thinking in every moment of her existence; he would tell you that a man was a fool if he couldn't get the woman he wanted; and yet, having got her, he didn't seem to know in the most elementary way how to keep her. He didn't seem to care. He adored her, and yet he didn't seem to care. I believe he knew that she was leaving him, that she had left him; and yet, here he was, treating her departure as if it didn't matter, as if it were the most natural and reasonable thing in the world, and lashing himself into a fury about his wretched motor-car. And he was treating the dangerous element in the case, Charlie Thesiger, as if it didn't matter either; as if it didn't exist. He must have known we'd taken his car out to bring his wife back--he knew we wouldn't have touched the beastly thing for anything short of saving her life or his honour; and yet he had flown into a passion and sworn at his chauffeur because we'd taken it. He adored his wife and yet he behaved as if she were of no importance compared with the god he'd made of his motor-car.

All that evening, I remember, he was absorbed in the solitary problem of how he could save his god from further outrages. He settled it towards midnight by saying that he'd buy another car that we could do what we damn-pleased with--a car that wouldn't matter--that you could take out in all weathers.

"I'll not have that black-and-white car used as it was used this afternoon," he said. And after lashing himself up again he ended quite sweetly by saying, "It's my fault, Furny. I ought to have had two cars all along."

I said it _would_ be a good plan, if a black-and-white car was only to be looked at.

He admitted (with a recrudescence of his old childlike innocence) that he liked looking at it. I've no doubt he said it made him feel something, but I forget what.

But when the morning came he wouldn't hear of my going. I was to stay out my fortnight. It was a fine day and the dust was laid; perhaps he could take me for a spin across the Downs to the coast or somewhere. He'd send Parker up to town to look after Nurse and Baby and the luggage. He didn't want, he said, to be left alone.

Oh yes, it was plain to me that he didn't want to be left--that he couldn't bear it. He was trying to lure me to stay with him by holding out this prospect of a spin. I have since believed that he would have agreed to take his car out in almost any weather, if that had been the only way to keep me. He clung to me desperately, pathetically, as he had clung nine years ago at Bruges when Viola had left him there. He might, possibly, this time, have clung to anybody; he was so afraid of being left alone. I think he felt that loneliness here, in the vast, unfamiliar landscape that he had invaded, would be as bad as loneliness in Bruges. He would be abandoned, as he had been then, in a foreign country.

So till Sunday morning I stayed with him.

It was on my last evening, the evening of Saturday, August the first, that he spoke of Viola.

He asked me if I thought that Norah and I could keep her with us, if necessary, for--he hesitated--for six months? (It was as if he had given her six months.) It would, he said, be better.

I said that Norah would be delighted to keep her for any number of months. But did he think she'd stay?

He said why shouldn't she stay? Of course she'd stay. She was awfully fond of us and it was the best thing she could do. And it would make it so much easier for him. He'd feel more comfortable as long as he knew she was with us.

He spoke as if it were he and not Viola who was leaving.

I said then that though we were glad to have her we couldn't, of course, accept any responsibility--

He smiled slightly and asked, "For what?"

I said, "Well--" And he answered his own question in the pause I made.

"I suppose you mean for anything she may take it into her head to do?"

I put it to him that Viola's movements were not always exactly calculable. She might take it into her head to do anything. I really couldn't answer for her.

"_You_ can't," he said. "But _I_ can. She may go off and look at a belfry or two." (I should have said that "looking at the belfry" was a phrase the family had adopted for any queer thing that any of us might do.) "If there's a belfry anywhere to be seen you may depend upon it she'd want to look at it."

"Whether," I said, "it's in a dangerous place or not?"

"Whether it's in a dangerous place or not. But I'll trust you to keep her out of dangerous places. That's rather what I wanted to talk to you about."

I protested. "There's no good talking about it. I've told you that's just precisely the responsibility I won't take. And I won't let Norah take it. If you think there's going to be any danger you must look after your own wife yourself."

"My dear fellow, how can I look after her if I'm not here?"

"You're as much here as I am," I said. "More so. And she's your wife, not mine."

I can say now--there's no reason why I shouldn't; it would only amuse Jimmy if he were to see it written--I can say now that for one awful moment I suspected Jimmy of meditating an infidelity. Perhaps he was; but not as we count infidelity.

He ignored what I took to be the essence of the thing.

"We don't know," he said, "where any of us are going to be for the next four months--or the next four years. I know that _I_ jolly well shan't be here. What I want to propose is this: that you'll look after Viola and let her have your house when she wants to be in town; and that you have this house for yourself and Norah and Baby when you want to be in the country--just as if it was your own. There'll be that other motor-car you can have--as if it was your own. You can run up to town in it. And you'll probably find that the country will be the best place for you. It'll be much the best place for _them_, and the safest--if you aren't here."

I couldn't see it even then. I said, "My dear chap, why shouldn't I be here? I certainly mean to be here."

And he considered it and said, "I don't see why not. It's different for you. You've got a child and I haven't."

I said I couldn't see what Baby had to do with it.

And he replied that a young child was an infernal complication, and that he was jolly glad he hadn't got one. What Baby had to do with it was to keep me out of it.

Then I asked him what on earth he was talking about.

He said, "_I'm_ talking about the European conflagration. What are you?"

He had been talking about it all the time, he had been thinking of nothing but the European conflagration for the last four days. It was the thing, he said, that he had prophesied nine years ago--didn't I remember? (Oh yes, I remembered; but then, he was always prophesying something.) Well then, here it was. And it had come, by God, at the very date he had given it.

I can see him sitting there in his study at Amershott Old Grange. He was deadly quiet. Not a gesture came to disturb my sense of his tranquil triumph in the fulfilment of his prophecy. To say that he enjoyed the European conflagration because it had proved him so abundantly right would give a false impression of an extraordinary and complicated state of mind. There _was_ a sort of exaltation about him (his face positively shone, as if the European conflagration illuminated it from afar); but it was a holy and a sacred exaltation, pure from egoism, except that he saw himself--there's no doubt that already he did see himself--figuring.

I remember saying, as lots of people were saying then, that I didn't suppose for a moment we should be dragged into it.

"Dragged?" he said. "Dragged? We shall be in it without dragging--in the very thick."

From the instant the Germans broke into Luxembourg--and he gave them twenty-four hours--we should be in it. We couldn't keep out with a rag of honour to our names. France, he declared, would be in to-day. He gave us, I _think_--but I do not like to say positively that he gave us--three days; he couldn't have been as dead right as all that.

What struck me then as so extravagantly odd was, not that he had foreseen the war, and England's part in it, but that he should have seen himself there, in the thick--blazing away in the very middle of the conflagration. What on earth Jimmy conceived that _he_ should have to do with it I couldn't think. And all of a sudden I had a reminiscence of Jevons as I had seen him nine years ago, talking to Reggie Thesiger in Viola's rooms at Hampstead, prophesying war, and lamenting that he wouldn't be in it because he was an arrant coward.

And as I looked at him again I saw that what made his face shine like that was the sweat that had broken out on it.

Then he made a remark about Charlie Thesiger. Thesiger, he said, knew all about it. He had gone up--he supposed I knew that?--to offer his services to the War Office in the event of England's coming in.

That Charlie had used the opportunity of going to make love to Jimmy's wife didn't seem to bother Jimmy in the least.

Sunday, I remember, was a fine day, with all the dust laid, and Jimmy made himself lovable by running me up to London in his sacred car. He still clung--I could see that he clung--to the superstition of its sanctity.

He left me at my door in Edwardes Square, which he refused to enter. I think he was afraid of seeing Viola. I thought at the time that this was because he was aware of her attitude; that he knew she was at the end of her tether, and that he wanted to be righteously fair, to give her time to think about leaving him, if she wanted to leave him; that he was behaving now as he had behaved at Bruges when he stood back and let me have my innings, and gave her her chance to free herself. And yet I was puzzled. Even he could hardly stand back to give Thesiger an innings. He _may_ have had an inkling. There may have been something of his queer, scrupulous tenderness in this avoidance of her; there may have been his reckless propensity to take the risk; but I am convinced that even then his main object was--like Viola--to burn his boats. He was afraid that if he were to see Viola again he wouldn't be able to go through with it. He may even have been glad that she had left him, because it had made his way easier.

And so, when he had landed me at my door, he turned the black nose of his car round and ran out of Edwardes Square faster than he had run in; as if he were afraid that the place would catch and keep him.

He didn't go back to Amershott. He stayed in London in one of his clubs (he had several now, besides the club in Dover Street), and I saw him sometimes. I didn't say anything to Viola about him. I didn't tell her he was in town. It was as if there had been some tacit understanding among the three of us; there must have been some tacit agreement between him and me.

Sunday passed, and Monday somehow; and on Tuesday, the fourth, we were all holding our breaths under the tension of the Ultimatum.

I have no doubt that in those three days I had some opinion of my own about the European conflagration, that I must have stared with my own eyes sometimes at the fate of Europe and the fate of England, that I must have felt _some_ horror and anxiety and excitement that was my own. But as I look back on it all I am aware chiefly of Jevons, of _his_ opinions, _his_ vision, _his_ horror and excitement. I seem to have spent the greater part of those three days with Jevons, and there are moments, in looking back, when he fills the scene. He is the largest and most prominent figure in the crowd that walked the streets with me on the evening of the Ultimatum, that waited with me outside Buckingham Palace, when London let itself loose in madness; he seems the only sane figure in that crowd or in the processions that moved for hours on end up and down Parliament Street, between Trafalgar Square and Palace Yard. It is as if I had stood alone with Jevons before the Mansion House at midnight when the Ultimatum was declared.

And when I say that it was his horror and anxiety and excitement--and his defiance and exaltation, if you like--that I felt, I do not mean that Jevons talked about it. He was, for those three days, mostly silent. It is that I saw him consumed and burned up by the fever of patriotism and war, and that beside his passion any emotion I may have felt hardly counted.

And every minute we expected to hear him say that he _liked_ the War because it made him feel manly. Norah and I pretended to each other that he would say it--it was our idea of a joke, God forgive us.

It was on Wednesday, the fifth, very early in the morning, that he began trying to enlist. It was the first thing he did; and we thought _that_ funny.

We thought it so funny that even if he hadn't told us not to tell Viola we wouldn't have told her; we felt that it wouldn't have been quite fair to either of them.

And none of the Thesigers, or anybody connected with the Thesigers, could take Jimmy seriously for one moment. With General Thesiger waiting to be sent to the Front, and Reggie Thesiger preparing to go, and Charlie Thesiger who might be called on any day, with Bertie and all his male cousins enlisting and pulling all the ropes they could lay their hands on to get their commissions, they hadn't time for Jimmy and his importunity. He _was_ importunate; and I'm afraid that in those weeks Jimmy didn't exist for them or any of us, except as a jest that lightened our labours now and then. They were so busy getting their kits that they couldn't even think of the fate of Europe.

And Viola--what she was thinking and feeling God (or Jevons) only knew. She didn't tell us. But I was pretty sure that with Reggie starting for the front in two weeks it wasn't Jevons she was thinking of. I suspected that she wasn't far from feeling that secret hatred of Jimmy that had come to her once or twice before, when she had thought of Reggie. Remember that all this time, even after that illness of hers last year, when she and Reggie met they met as well-bred strangers. She had never lowered her flag or made one sign. She had just suffered in secret with the thought of Reggie biting deeper and deeper into her mind, till, wherever the memory of Reggie was there was a wound. And she had been ill of her wounds and had nearly died of them.

And in those two weeks she had begun to look as if she were going to be ill again. It was bad enough for Norah and for all of them, but conceive what it must have been for her!

And so we came to Reggie's last day and the night when he came to us to say good-bye.

I think she must have written to him or made some sign. But I'm not sure. I only know that he was prepared for her; and that when she came into the room at the last minute, as he turned from Norah's arms, he closed on her, and that they held each other an instant--tight, like lovers--and that neither of them said a word.

* * * * *

After that the War must have seemed to her, as it seemed to all of us, to have wiped Jimmy out.

Just at first we thought that this was the secret of Jimmy's agony, of his rushings round and round, and of his ceaseless manoeuvring. He knew that the War was going to wipe him out; he knew that the world had no use for his sort, the men who only wrote things. There was an end of his writing, of his novels and his short stories and his plays, and if he didn't look out and do something there would be an end of _him_. And he couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear to be reduced to inactivity and insignificance--to be wiped out. He wasn't going to be made an end of if he could help it. These were the things we said about him. What we saw, or thought we saw, was the revolt of his egoism. It didn't look quite sane.

He was furious when he found out that, even if he enlisted, he couldn't buy a commission. He didn't seem to realize that there were things he couldn't buy. He was still more furious when he found that the Thesigers wouldn't help him. They _could_ help him, he declared, if they liked. Commissions were being given every day to the wrong people, by influence.

Up till now, with his talk about commissions, he had been purely funny, and we had laughed at him. But when he found that he couldn't enlist, that they wouldn't have him, that he wasn't strong enough--they'd discovered a leaky valve in his heart or something--and that in any case he was too old, when he broke down as he tried to tell me this, he wasn't funny at all. He'd been to every recruiting station in London and his own county, and they all said the same thing. He was too old.

This, he said, was where his beastly celebrity had gone back on him. He could very easily have lied about his age (he didn't look it), in fact, he _had_ lied about it freely, to every one of them; but his age was recorded against him in the Year-Books of his craft. And he couldn't lie about his heart, he didn't know it had a valve that leaked. He didn't believe it. He had given the man who examined it the lie; and he had gone to a heart-specialist to get the report (which he regarded as a libel) contradicted, and the heart-specialist had confirmed it, and told him he wasn't the first man who had come to him to get an opinion overruled. He said he was to keep quiet and avoid excitement. He mustn't dream of going to the front. I think the specialist must have been sorry for Jevons, for he went on to tell him that there were other ways in which he could serve his country. He seems to have talked a lot of rot about the pen being mightier than the sword, and to have advised Jimmy to "use his wonderful pen." And at that Jimmy seems to have broken from him in a passion.

And here he was, in a passion still, ramping up and down that private room he had at his club, and saying, "Damn my powerful pen, Furny! Damn my powerful pen!" The whole system, he said, was rotten. He'd a good mind to expose it. He'd expose it in the papers. _That_ was the use he'd make of his powerful pen. See how they'd like _that_.

I remember it because it was then that I laid before him my own problem. The _Daily Post_ had asked me if I'd go out as its War-Correspondent. I was to wire "Yes" or "No" in the next half-hour, and if I went I should have to start to-night.

I said I didn't know what to do about it.

He stared. "You don't know what to _do_?"

I said: No. It wasn't so simple when you had a wife and child dependent on you. I didn't know whether I ought to take the risk.

And then he said his memorable thing: "If you can take the risk of living--My God," he said, "if I only had your luck!"

_His_ luck, I told him, was a dead certainty. There wasn't a paper that would refuse Tasker Jevons as War-Correspondent. He'd only got to volunteer. Why on earth, I asked him, didn't he?

He became very grave. He seemed to be considering it.

"No," he said, "no. That isn't quite good enough for me. I don't want to go out to the war to write about it. I want to do things.

"Perhaps--if there's no other way--I may be driven to it."

For a moment, then, I suspected him. I doubted his sincerity. He was making all this fuss about enlisting to cover up his cowardice. He must have known all the time they wouldn't take him. He was safe. But put before him a thing he could do--do better than anybody else--a thing that would take him into the thick and keep him there, if he wasn't killed, and he said, No, thank you. That wasn't quite good enough for him.

I didn't believe in his "Perhaps--if there was no other way--he might be driven to it." I saw him driven to do anything he didn't mean to do!

Meanwhile he drove _me_. Before I had seen him I hadn't really meant to take that job. He did something to me that changed my mind.

That was how I went out to Belgium as a War-Correspondent.

* * * * *

I was out for a month. Then--I was in Ghent at the same old hotel in the Place d'Armes--I got a touch of malaria and had to come home, and the _Daily Post_ sent another man out instead of me.

That was how I managed to see Jevons in what Norah called his second war-phase. He had been trying hard to get out with the Red Cross volunteers, and it had been even funnier, she said, and more pathetic, than his enlisting. I don't know what Viola thought of his war-phases; to Norah they were just that--funny and pathetic. To the other Thesigers he was purely offensive. They resented Jevons's trying to have anything to do with the war, as if it had been some sort of impertinent interference with their prerogative. His mother-in-law, I know, had no patience with him. His frantic efforts to get to the front were nothing, she declared, but a form of war-panic. It took some people like that. She said the only really cruel thing I had ever heard her say of him. She said he _looked_ panic-stricken. (He was lean and haggard by this time, and had a haunted look which may have been what she meant.) And well--if it wasn't panic that was the matter with him it was self-advertisement, and if I'd any regard for him or any influence with him I'd stop it. The little man was simply making himself ridiculous.

I was staying in Canterbury with Norah for the weekend, and I heard all about it. He did seem to have been rather funny. He had begun with a scheme for taking out a Red Cross Motor Field Ambulance which he proposed to command in person. He had offered himself with his convoy first to the War Office, then to the Admiralty, then to the War Office again, and the War Office and the Admiralty kicked him out. Then he had gone round to each of the Red Cross Societies in turn, the American included. And they had all got their own schemes for Motor Field Ambulances, and didn't want his. What they _did_ want was his subscriptions and his powerful pen to support their schemes. And Jevons had said, "Damn my powerful pen!" to every one of them. As for subscriptions, he subscribed enormously to his own Motor Ambulance Corps. He had actually raised his unit, found his volunteers, his surgeons, his chauffeurs and his stretcher-bearers, he had bought and equipped a Motor Ambulance car, the one he had proposed to go with himself. And they took his subscriptions and his Ambulance Car and his volunteers; but they wouldn't take him; no, not at any price. They put one of his surgeons at the head of the thing instead of him and sent it out without him, and Jimmy had to see it go. But when they proposed that Jimmy should use his powerful pen to maintain it in the field, he swore that he would use it to expose the whole system. And when he found that the responsibility for rejecting his services rested with the War Office, he went down to the War Office and complained, and to the Admiralty and complained, and to the Home Office and complained. After that he seems to have visited all the Embassies in turn--the American, the French, the Belgian, and I suppose the Russian and the Japanese.

When I asked the Thesigers what he was doing now they said they didn't know. They hadn't heard of him and his activities for quite a fortnight, and they didn't bother about him. They were too much wrapped up in Bertie and in Reggie, even if they hadn't been too busy--every one of them up to their necks in work for the Army or the hospitals. They admitted that he had sent them large subscriptions.

It seemed to me, as far as I could make out, that Viola hadn't seen or heard of him since she had left Amershott. She was too busy and too much wrapped in Reggie to bother about him either; at least, it looked like it. She seems to have known in a vague way that he had talked about going to the front, but I didn't believe she thought he would ever get there.

And he had lain low for a fortnight.

When we had got back to London at noon on Tuesday, which was the end of Jimmy's fortnight, I found a wire from Amershott waiting for me. It had been sent that morning. It said: "Leaving to-morrow. Must see you urgent business. Can you come down this evening. JEVONS."

I knew that he wouldn't send a wire like that without good reason; so I went.

* * * * *

A light rain was falling when I reached Midhurst. A hired dog-cart met me at the station, so I gathered that Jimmy's mad passion for his motor-car had survived the war.

And at Amershott everything seemed to have survived. If it had not been for troops on the high road, and for the stillness of the coverts, and for the recruiting posters stuck everywhere on the barn-doors, and for the strange figure of old Perrott driving the mail-cart from Midhurst to Amershott instead of his son, you wouldn't have known that the war had anything to do with England. And I expected to find Jimmy in his old Norfolk suit standing in the garage and looking with adoration at his motor-car.

As I thought all this I smiled when Parker told me that Mr. Jevons was in the garage. Parker, I noticed, didn't smile.

And in another minute it was Jevons who did all the smiling.

I found him in the garage--no, I can't say I found him, for I didn't recognize him, but I heard his voice assuring me that it was he. He was in khaki; from head to foot, from his peaked military cap to his puttees he was in faultless, well-fitting khaki; even his shirt and his neck-tie were khaki. Jimmy's colours showed up wonderfully out of all that brownish, greyish, yellowish green. His flush fairly flamed, and his eyes, his eyes looked enormous and very bright--great chunks of dark sapphire his eyes were. They were twinkling at me.

"It's me all right, old man," he said, and turned from me in his deep preoccupation. And as he turned I saw that he wore round his right arm a white brassard with a red cross on it.

At the far end of the coach-house where the great black and white idol used to stand there was a khaki car with a huge red cross on a white square on its flank and on its khaki canvas hood. This was what his eyes turned to.

"But--where's the black-and-white god?" I asked.

"There she is," he said, "you're looking at her."

"You haven't--"

"Yes, I have. She's had her new coat on for the last three weeks. You couldn't take her out as she was, all black and white. She'd have been knocked to bits before we'd begun our job. So I had her painted. She's a good enough target for shell-fire as she is."

"You don't mean," I said, "that you're going out?"

"What else have I been meaning ever since there was a war?"

"But--where are you going _to_?"

"Belgium," he said. He added that it was the only blessed place he _could_ get to.

"And what are you going to do when you get there?"

He said he was going to scout for wounded, of course.

And as he saw me still incredulous he told me how he'd managed it. He had gone every day for three weeks to the Belgian Legation and worried the Belgian Minister into a state of nervous prostration. And when the Minister was at his worst and was obliged to leave things a bit to his secretaries, he'd gone to the secretaries and worried _them_ till the First Secretary had given him his passport and a letter of introduction to the President of the Belgian Red Cross Society at Ghent. And he had gone to Ghent--went there last week--and he had seen the President and talked to him. He had talked for ten minutes before his services had been accepted by the Belgian Red Cross.

And he was going out to-morrow.

"It's just taken me six weeks to do it. I gave myself six weeks."

Of course I congratulated him. But I couldn't realize it. The whole thing seemed incredible. Jevons in his khaki was incredible. The transformed motor-car was incredible, as a thing that Jevons was concerned with. Above all, it was incredible that he should have sacrificed his god.

I couldn't believe it until Kendal, the chauffeur, turned up, also in khaki and with a Red Cross brassard on his right arm. Kendal was credible enough; he looked as if he had been going to the war all his life. It was evident that he was keen on the adventure. It was also evident that he adored Jevons more than ever. By watching Kendal in the act of adoration and keeping my eyes fixed on him I was able to take it in, and to assent to the statement that Jevons was going to the war.

He was of course if Kendal said so.

Kendal was asking me what I thought of the car.

"She's not the beauty she was, sir," said Kendal. "I don't suppose Mr. Jevons will care much how he knocks her about now. And they do say the Belgium roads is fair destruction to cars."

I said they were. I'd motored on them. Kendal looked at me as he might have looked at the survivor of a shattering experience. Then he looked at his car. He seemed to be seeing all the roads in Belgium in a hideous vision.

Then he spoke. "Well, they may be bad roads, but Mr. Jevons isn't going to be done. He'll take out ten cars before 'e turns back. Ten cars, he will."

Yes, yes, I might have known it. Was there ever anything Jevons had made up his mind to do and didn't? Had I ever known him turn back from any adventure that he had set out on? If he said he was going to the war, why couldn't I have known that he would go? The more incredible the thing was, the more likely he was to do it.

When I said so he shook his head and said it wasn't really as likely as it looked.

We were sitting together after dinner in his garden. Though it was the third week in September the nights were still warm. Without Viola, the stillness of the place was strange to me, almost uncanny, as if Viola were dead and had come back and was listening to us somewhere. I had just told him it was splendid of him going out like this, and he had smiled back at me and asked, "Like what?" And then I had said I might have known it; it was the sort of thing he would do.

No, he went on, it wasn't likely. It had been touch and go, he had only just pulled it off by the skin of his teeth. It had given him more trouble than anything he'd ever tried for. It had bothered him more. It had bothered him most damnably.

I thought he was referring to his struggles with the recruiting depots and the War Office and the Home Office and the Embassies and all the rest of it. And I said it _was_ pretty hard luck his own Ambulance Corps being sent out without him. But he said, No; it wasn't. He hadn't been very keen on the Ambulance Corps. He hadn't really wanted to go out with all that beastly crowd. This quick scouting game--by himself--was more in his line. All he regretted was the time he'd lost.

Well, I said, anyhow he was a lucky beggar to have got what he wanted after six weeks.

At that he looked at me suddenly and his face went all sharp and thin. Or else I hadn't noticed till then how sharp and thin it was. His flush had seemed to flood it and fill it out somehow, and his eyes struck your attention like two great flashes of energy. The flash had gone out now as he looked at me.

I reminded him: "Haven't you always said you could get what you wanted?"

"Oh yes, I've _said_ it, and I've done it. That's nothing. Any fool can do that. The great thing is to make yourself get what you don't want. I didn't _want_ to do this. I had to."

"No. You wanted to enlist. But I'm not sure that from your point of view this isn't better."

"Jolly lot you know," he said, "about my point of view."

"Your idea," I explained, "of doing things on your own. Isn't that what you wanted?"

He answered very slowly: "I don't think--it matters--what I wanted--or what I didn't want. It's enough--isn't it?--if I want to _now_--if I want it more than anything else?"

I said, No, I didn't think it did matter.

But I hadn't a notion what he meant. I didn't know that he was on the edge of a confession. I couldn't see that he was trying to tell me something about himself, and that I had started him off by telling him he was splendid. It was as if--then--he too had felt that Viola was there and listening to us, as if he were speaking to her and not to me.

For the next thing he said was, "I want you to tell Viola about it. Tell her it's all right. Tell her I'm all right. See?"

"But shan't you," I said, "be seeing her? Isn't she going to see you off or something?"

He said, "No. Much better not. She wouldn't be content with seeing me off. She'd try to come out with me. She'd worry me to take her. And I'm not going to take her. She isn't to know I'm going till I've gone. And she isn't to know where I've gone to. I won't have her coming out to me. _You've_ got to see to that, Furny. You've got to stop her if she tries to get out. They're _all_ trying. You should just see the bitches--tumbling, and wriggling and scrabbling with their claws and crawling on their stomachs to get to the front--tearing each other's eyes out to get there first. And there are fellows that'll take them. They'll even take their wives.

"Not me. Not much. I wouldn't let Viola cross in the same boat with that lot.

"It ought to be put a stop to.

"The place I'm going to--the things I'm going to see--and to do--aren't fit for women--aren't fit for women to come within ten miles of. Whatever you do, Furny--and I don't care what you do--you're not to let her get out."

I suppose--I suppose I made him some sort of promise. He says I did. I don't remember.

I _do_ remember telling him I thought it was a pity--if he meant to go out--that he hadn't seen Viola all this time.

And I remember his answer. "I haven't seen her--all this time--_because_ I meant to go out. I meant that nothing on this earth should stop me."

"How do you know," I said, "that she'd have stopped you?"

"How do I know? How do I know anything?--It's you who don't know. You don't know anything at all."

* * * * *

Well, he went--like that--without telling any of them.

I ran down on the car with him to Folkestone and saw him off on the boat to Ostend, he and Kendal, his chauffeur--he, as he pointed out to me, superior to Kendal only in the perfect fitting of his khaki. "Otherwise there isn't a pin to choose between us. Except," he said, "that Kendal doesn't funk it and I do."

And with Kendal grinning from ear to ear over Mr. Jevons's delicious joke, and Jimmy waving his khaki cap in a final valediction, and Kendal's grin dying abruptly as he achieved the military salute he judged appropriate, we parted.

Jimmy's last words to me, thrown over the gunwale, were, "Don't run after me, Furny. You won't catch me _this_ time."

XIII

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.

"You _knew_ this," 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. "You _knew_--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 be _here_?"

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 promised Jimmy 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, and Bertie, and Reggie--at least he told Norah--and the people at the War Office and the Admiralty and the Embassies."

"You _went_ to 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 exactly _helping_."

"What _were_ you 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--it _was_ necessary, 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--_he_ pulled 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 them _about_ Jimmy."

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 he _ought_ to 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, "you _told_ him. 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 we _had_ stopped 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 certainly _have_ given 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 could _see_ you 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 think _me_ awful--"

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. What _makes_ you do these things? I believe you _want_ to 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 understand _that_, because I did go to him, and I--I cared for him and you didn't like it. I can even understand your wanting _me_ to 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 you _then_, so I didn't mind. But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can it matter to you _now_ whether 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 that Jimmy _was_ her husband.

"You certainly seem to have forgotten it," I said.

"_He_ knows 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 horrid _then_, because it made it easier for you.... But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can it matter to you _now_ whether 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 the _Morning Standard_ rang 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.