Chapter II: Book I: My Book (2)

I found him in a back room, at the top of the house, sitting by the fire in an easy-chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was as thin as a lath and his face was a bright yellow. The very whites of his eyes were yellow. I would have said you never saw a more miserable object, but that Jevons was not miserable. He was happy. And as far as his devastated condition would allow him, he looked happy. This face, yellow with jaundice, was doing its best to smile. The smile was a grimace, not an affair of the lips at all, but of the deep crescent lines drawn at right angles to them. Still, he was smiling. In a sort of ecstasy.

He was smiling at Viola, who sat in the chair facing him on the other side of the hearth. She looked as if she had been there for ages. Also, as if she had been sitting up all night.

She was smiling too, straight at Jevons. What I saw was the beatitude of his response.

He tried to smile at me, too, as I came in, but the effort was a failure. He wasn't really a bit glad to see me. Viola got up and left me with him. I wasn't to stay with him for more than ten minutes, she said. It was the first day he had been allowed to sit up.

I sat with him for fifteen minutes.

He was lodged, as before, in one room; but its domestic character was disguised by many ingenious devices giving you the idea that it was nothing but his study.

Well, there he was, haggard and yellow with jaundice, utterly pitiable as to his appearance and surroundings; and yet he looked at me in, positively, a sort of triumph, as much as to say, "Yes. Here I am. And you, with all your superior resources, haven't managed half so well."

And I thought that he (not knowing Viola so well as I did) was suffering from a lamentable delusion.

He said she had been awfully good to him. But it was rather hard luck on him, wasn't it, that he should have gone and turned this beastly colour?

I said rather loftily I didn't suppose it mattered to Viola what colour he turned.

(What _could_ it matter to her?)

She came in presently and took me down to her sitting-room, and gave me tea. She owned to having sat up three nights with Jevons. She couldn't have believed it possible that anybody could be so ill. For three days and three nights the poor thing hadn't been able to keep anything down--not even a drop of water. But to-day she had been feeding him on the whites of eggs beaten up with brandy.

She seemed to me to be obsessed with Jevons's illness, and I made her come out with me for ten minutes for a blow on the Heath. I tried to lead her mind to other things, and she listened politely. Then there was silence, and presently I felt her arm slide into mine (she had these adorable impulses of confidence).

"Furny," she said, "what does jaundice come from?"

I said it generally came from chill.

She frowned, as if she were not satisfied with that explanation. And there was another silence. Then she began again:

"Would being unhappy--very, _very_ unhappy--give it you?"

I thought I saw how her mind was working and I advised her to put that idea out of her head. Happiness, I said, wouldn't be good for Jevons.

She said, "Oh, _wouldn't_ it!" And, after prolonged meditation, "I wonder if he'll stay that funny yellow colour all his life."

I found out from her that he had been living in that top room above hers for three weeks--ever since he had finished his book. It looked as if he had become frantic when he saw the end of his pretexts and occasions for meeting her, and had cast off all prudence and had followed her, determined to live under the same roof.

I looked on it as a madness that possessed him.

But that it should ever possess _her_--that was inconceivable.

II

He recovered.

The brilliant orange of his jaundice faded to lemon, and the lemon to a sallow tint that cleared rapidly as it was flooded by his flush.

I did not realize then what sources he was drawing on. Looking back on it all, I am amazed at my own stupidity. I was, of course, aware that Viola was sorry for him; but I might have known that a girl's pity was not a stimulant that would keep a man like Jevons going for very long. I am sure he would never have lowered himself by any appeal to it. Why, the bare idea of pity would have been intolerable to him, bursting, as he was, with vitality and invading with the courage and energy and genius of a conqueror a world that was not his.

He laid before me very soon what I can only call his plan of campaign. Journalism with him was a purely defensive operation; but the novel and the short story were his attack. The work that Viola had typed for him was his first novel. He had dug himself in very securely that winter, and each paper that he had occupied and left behind him was a line of trenches that shifted nearer and nearer towards the desired territory. He didn't begin his assault on the public before he had secured his retreat.

I know I am writing about a man whom many people still consider a great novelist and a great playwright. God knows I don't want to disparage him. But to me what he has written matters so little; it has no interest for me except as his vehicle, the vehicle in which he arrived; which brought him to his destination quicker perhaps than any other which he could have chosen. His talent was so adroit that he might have chosen almost any other; chance and a happy knack and a habit of observation determined his selection of the written word. Compared with the spectacle of his arrival, what he has written is neither here nor there. What I have written myself is neither here nor there. For the purposes of this history it counts only as the means which enabled me to witness the last act of his drama.

That is why I say so much about his adventure, his campaign, his business, and so little about his books. In this I am adopting his own values, almost his own phrases. He wanted most awfully to arrive. How far he took himself seriously as a writer nobody will ever know. Viola was convinced, and always will be convinced, that he was a great genius. (There's no doubt he traded with her on her conviction. He wanted most awfully to arrive, but more than anything he wanted Viola.) Still, he was too clever, I think, ever to have quite convinced himself.

His adventure, then, began with his reporting; his campaign with his journalism, and his earlier novels; his business was to follow later in the long period of peace and prosperity he saw ahead of him.

His first novel, he told me, was calculated, deliberately, to startle and arrest; to hit the public, rather unpleasantly, in the eye. _That_, he said, was the way to be remembered. It wouldn't sell. He didn't want it to sell. What he wanted first was to gain a position; then to consolidate it; then to build. He talked like the consummate architect of his own fortunes.

His second novel would be designed, deliberately, to counteract the disagreeable effects of his first.

"Why," I asked, "counteract them?"

Because, he said, if he went on being disagreeable, he'd alienate the very sections of the public he most wished to gain. His retirement was simply the preparation for the Grand Attack.

It was in his third novel that he meant, still deliberately, to come into his kingdom and his power and his glory, for ever and ever, Amen. His third novel, he declared, would sell; and it would be his best. On that utterly secure and yet elevated basis he could build afterwards pretty much as he pleased. I asked him if it wasn't a mistake to put his best so early in the series? Wouldn't it be more effective if he worked up to it? But he said No. He'd thought of that. There wasn't anything he hadn't thought of. That third novel was to start his big sales. And the worst of a big sale was this, that when you'd caught your public you were bound to go on giving them the sort of thing you'd caught them with, therefore, he'd be jolly careful to start 'em with the sort of thing he happened to like himself, otherwise he'd have to spend the rest of his life knuckling under to them. He could get a cheaper glory if he chose to try for it; but a cheaper glory wouldn't satisfy him. That was why he decided to make for the highest point he could reach in the beginning, so that his very fallings-off would be glorious and would pay him as no gradual working up and up could possibly be made to pay. Besides, he wanted his glory and his pay quick. He couldn't afford to wait a month longer than his third novel. As for the different quality in the glory it would be years before anybody but himself could tell the difference, and by the time they spotted him he'd be at another game. A game in which he defied anybody to catch him out.

He'd be writing plays.

All this he told me, sitting in an arm-chair in my rooms, with his feet up on another chair, and smiling, smiling with one side of his mouth while with the other he smoked innumerable cigarettes. I can see his blue eyes twinkle still, through the cigarette smoke that obscured him. That night he had got down to solid business.

It was quite clear that Jevons's business was the business of the speculator who loves the excitement of the risks he takes. I remember exhorting him to prudence. I said: "This isn't art, it's speculation. You're taking considerable risks, my friend."

He took his cigarette out of his mouth, dispersed the smoke, and looked at me very straight and without a twinkle.

"I've got to make money," he said, "and to make it soon. I should be taking worse risks if I didn't."

It's marvellous how he has pulled it off. Just as he said, dates and all. For he named the dates for each stage of his advance.

That was in March; about a week before Easter, nineteen-six.

* * * * *

The next day I went up to Hampstead towards teatime, to see how Viola was getting on. I didn't expect to see Jevons there, for he'd left. He told me in a burst of confidence he'd had to. He couldn't stand it. It was getting too risky. He was living now in rooms in Bernard Street, not far from mine.

At Hampstead I was told that Miss Thesiger was out. She had gone for a walk on the Heath with Mr. Jevons, but they were coming in at half-past four for tea. If I'd step upstairs into the sitting-room I'd find her brother, Captain Thesiger, waiting there.

I stepped upstairs and found Captain Thesiger. I was glad to find him, for I don't mind owning that by this time I was getting somewhat uneasy about Viola.

It was all very well for Viola to nurse Jevons through his jaundice, she might have done that out of pure humanity; but she had no business to be going for walks with the little bounder. Even the charm of his conversation and his personality (and it _had_ a charm) couldn't conceal the fact that he was a little bounder. Why, in moments of excitement he had gestures that must have made her shudder all down her spine, and more than once I have known his aitches become fugitive, though, on the whole, I must say he was pretty careful. And Viola was letting herself in for him. In sheer innocence and recklessness she was letting herself in. I felt that if ever it should come to getting her out I would be glad of an ally. Now that I saw what Viola was capable of, I began to feel some sympathy with her people at Canterbury who had tried so ineffectually to hold her in.

There was nothing ineffectual about Reggie Thesiger. I suppose he would have been impressive anyway from the sheer height and breadth of him, his visible and palpable perfection; but what "had" me was not his perfection, but the odd likeness to his sister which he combined, and in some mysterious way reconciled, with it. His face had taken over not only the dominant and defiant look of hers, exaggerated by his sheer virility; but it had the very tricks of her charm, even to the uptilted lines of her mouth; his little black moustache followed and gave accent to them. I said to myself: "Here is a young man who will not stand any nonsense."

He greeted me with a joy that I could not account for all at once in an entire stranger, and it was mixed with a childlike and candid surprise. I wondered what I had done that he should be so glad to see me.

His manner very soon left me in no doubt as to what I had done. I had brought the most intense relief to the Captain's innocent mind. I do not know by what subtle shades he managed to convey to me that, compared with the queer chap I so easily might have been, he found me distinctly agreeable. It was obvious that I existed for him only as the chap, the strange and legendary chap, that Viola had taken up with, and that in this capacity he, to his own amazement, approved of me. I gathered that, knowing his sister, he had feared the worst, and that the blessed relief of it was more than he could bear if he didn't let himself go a bit.

He had quite evidently come, or had been sent, to see what Viola was up to. Possibly he may have had in his mind the extraordinary treatment I had received from his father, and he may have been anxious to atone.

Any relief that I might have brought to Captain Thesiger was surpassed by the reassurance that I took from my first sight of him. It was as if I had instantly argued to myself: "This is the sort of thing that has produced Viola. This is the sort of man she has been brought up with. When Viola thinks of men it is this sort of man she is thinking of. It is therefore inconceivable that Tasker Jevons should exist for her otherwise than as a curious intellectual freak. Even _her_ perversity couldn't--no, it could not--fall so far from this familiar perfection." Though Captain Thesiger's perfection might not help me personally, it did dispose of little Jevons. Looking at him, I felt as if my uneasiness, you may say my jealousy, of Jevons (it almost amounted to that) had been an abominable insult to his sister.

Reggie--he is my brother-in-law now, and I cannot go on calling him Captain Thesiger--Reggie was good enough to say that he had heard of me from his sister. His voice conveyed, without any vulgar implication, an acknowledgment of my right to be heard of from her--but, of course, he went on agreeably, he had heard of me in any case; he supposed everybody had. My celebrity was so immature that I should not have recognized this allusion to it if Reggie had not gone on even more genially. He said he liked awfully the things I did in the _Morning Standard_. Most especially and enthusiastically he liked my account of the big boxing match at Olympia. You could see it was written by a chap who knew what he was talking about.

I had to confess that Tasker Jevons was the chap who wrote it. Reggie, quite prettily abashed, tried to recover himself and plunged further. He brought up from his memory one thing after another. And all his reminiscences were of Jevons. He had mixed us up hopelessly, as people did in those days. They knew I was associated with the _Morning Standard_, and that was all they knew about me; if they wanted to recall anything striking I had done, it was always Jevons they remembered. Poor Reggie was so inveterate in his blundering that after his fourth desperate effort he gave it up. His memory, he said, was rotten.

I said, on the contrary, his memory for Jevons was perfect, and he looked at me charmingly and laughed.

While he was laughing Viola came in. She had Jevons with her.

It was evident that neither of them was prepared for Reggie Thesiger. They had let themselves in with a latch-key and come straight upstairs without encountering Mrs. Pavitt.

At the sight of her brother Viola betrayed a feeling I should not have believed possible to her. For the first and I may say the last, time in my experience of her, I saw Viola show funk.

It was the merest tremor of her tilted mouth, the flicker of an eyelash, an almost invisible veiling of her brilliant eyes; I do not think it would have been perceptible to anybody who watched her with a less tense anxiety than mine. But it was there, and it hurt me to see it.

There was one person, only one person, in the world whom Viola was afraid of, and that was her brother Reggie. She was afraid of him because she loved him. He was the person in the world that she loved best, before--before the catastrophe. And this fear of hers that I alone saw (Reggie most certainly had not seen it) ought to have warned me if nothing else had.

It probably would have warned me but for what she did next; but for her whole subsequent behaviour.

She broke loose from Reggie, who had closed on her with a shout of "Hallo, Vee-Vee!" and an embrace; she broke loose from Reggie and turned to me, all laughing and rosy from his impact, with an outstretched hand and a voice that swept to me and rippled with a sort of nervous joy. And she said: "Oh, Wally, this _is_ nice of you! You'll stop for tea."

Her mouth said that. But her eyes--they had grown suddenly pathetic--said a lot more. They said: "Don't go, Wally, _please_ don't go. Whatever you do, don't leave me alone with him." At least, I can see now that that's what they were saying. And even at the time I saw on her dear face the same blessed relief (at finding me there) that I had seen on Reggie's.

Neither Reggie nor I, mind you, had seen Jevons yet (I am speaking of fractions of seconds of time); and he wasn't actually in the room; but Viola and I were aware of him outside. If he had not paused on the landing to dispose of his overcoat and his hat and his stick, their entrance would have been simultaneous.

That pause saved them.

His stick slipped and tumbled down on the landing with a clatter. We heard him prop it up again. Our eyes met. I'm afraid mine said: "What are you going to do _now_?"

Then he came in and I saw the gallant Reggie take the shock of him. I don't suppose he had ever before met anything like Jevons--I mean really met him, at close quarters--in his life. But he was gallant, and he had his face well under control. Only the remotest, vanishing quiver and twinkle betrayed the extremity of his astonishment.

Viola, with an admirable air of detachment from Jevons, introduced them. I don't know how she did it. It was as if, without any actual repudiation, she declined to hold herself responsible for Jevons' appearance; for the extraordinary little bow he made; for his jerky aplomb and for his "Glad to meet you, Captain." And for the rest, she just handed him over to her brother and trusted Reggie to be decent to him.

I had wondered: Are they going to let on that they've been out together? She cannot--she cannot own up to that. But how are they going to get out of it, and will he betray her?

I saw how they were going to get out of it. If they didn't say in as many words that they'd met on the doorstep they implied it in everything they said. They asked each other polite questions, all to the tune of: "What have you been doing since I last saw you?"--to convey the impression that they had met thus casually after a long interval. Jevons played up to her well, almost too well; so well, in fact, did he play, that not long afterwards I was to ask myself: Was this perfection the result of collusion? Had they anticipated just such a sudden, disconcerting encounter? Had they thought it all out and arranged with each other beforehand how they should behave? I don't know. I never cared to ask her.

The game lasted some little time. I didn't like to see her driven to these shifts (I was afraid, in fact, they'd overdo it), and I came to her help by telling Jevons that Captain Thesiger was an enthusiastic admirer of his work; and Reggie burst in jubilantly--he was evidently glad to be able to meet Jevons on this happy ground--with: "Are you the chap who wrote those things I've been reading? I say, Vee-Vee, you might have told me."

He fastened upon Jevons then and there. He started him off on the boxing match. There was very little about boxing that Reggie didn't know, but he appealed to Jevons with a charming deference as to an expert. The dear boy had a good deal of his sister's innocent veneration for the chaps who wrote the things they'd been reading, who could, that is to say, do something they couldn't do.

And Jevons, once started on the boxing match, fairly let himself go. He careered over the field of sport, interrupting his own serious professional _élan_ with all sorts of childlike and spontaneous gambols. In some of his turns he was entirely lovable. It was clear that Reggie loved him as you love a strange little animal at play, or any vital object that diverts you. From his manner I gathered that, provided he were not committed to closer acquaintance with Jevons, he was willing enough to snatch the passing joy of him.

I do not know by what transitions they slid together on to the Boer War. The Boer War happened to be Reggie's own ground. He had served in it. You would have said that Jevons had served in it too, to hear him. He traced the course of the entire campaign for Reggie's benefit. He showed him by what error each regrettable incident (as they called them then) had occurred, and by what strategy it might have been prevented.

And Reggie--who had been there--listened respectfully to Jevons.

Viola had lured me into a corner where only scraps of their conversation reached us from time to time. So I do not know whether it was in connection with the Boer War that Jevons began telling Reggie that journalism was a rotten game; that from birth he had been baulked of his ambition. He had wanted to be tall and handsome. He had wanted to be valorous and athletic. And here he was sent into the world undersized and not even passably good-looking. And what--he asked Reggie--_could_ he do with a physique like his?

I remember Reggie telling Jevons his physique didn't matter a hang. He could be a war correspondent in the next war. I remember Jevons saying in an awful voice: That was just it. He couldn't be anything in the next war--and, by God, there was a big war coming--he gave it eight years--but he couldn't be in it. He was an arrant coward.

That, he said, was his tragedy. His cowardice--his distaste for danger--his certainty that if any danger were ever to come near him he would funk.

And I remember Reggie saying, "My dear fellow, if you've the courage to say so--" and Jevons beating off this consolation with a funny gesture of despair. And then his silence.

It was as if suddenly, in the midst of his gambolling, little Jevons had fallen into an abyss. He sat there, at the bottom of the pit, staring at us in the misery of the damned.

I looked at Viola. Her eyelids drooped; her head drooped. Her whole body drooped under the affliction of his stare, and she would not look at me.

Reggie (he really _was_ decent) tried to turn it off. "I wouldn't worry, if I were you," he said. "Wait till the war comes."

"Oh, it's coming all right," said little Jevons. "No fear."

And as if he could no longer bear to contemplate his cowardice, he said good-bye to us and left. Reggie's eyes followed his dejected, retreating figure.

"How quaint!" he said. "But he's a smart chap, anyway. And, mind you, he's right about that war."

I said (Heaven knows why, except that I think I must have wanted Reggie's opinion of Jevons): "D'you think he's right about his own cowardice?"

Reggie said, "Ask me another. You can't tell. I only know I've seen men look like that and talk like that before an engagement."

Viola raised her head. Her voice came with the clear tremor of a bell: "And did they funk?"

"They didn't run away, if that's what you mean. I daresay they felt like Jevons. I've felt like Jevons myself."

Of course, knowing Jevons as I do now, I have sometimes fancied his talk about cowardice may have been mere bravado, the risk he took with Reggie. But here again I am not quite sure. I don't really know.

I am, however, entirely enlightened as to the game Viola played with me that night.

Jevons had stayed till half-past six. He had talked for two hours and a half. When I got up to go, Reggie suggested that his sister should come and dine with him somewhere in town and do a play afterwards.

She said, All right. She was on. And Furny would come too.

He said, of course I was coming too. That was what he had meant (it wasn't).

And in the end I went. I say in the end--for of course I protested. It was his one evening with his sister. But Viola's poor eyes signalled to me and implored me: "Don't leave me alone with him, whatever you do." She wanted to put off the dreadful moment that must come when he would ask her: "Where on earth did you pick up that shocking little bounder?"

But the question never came. To begin with, Reggie was so enthralled by the funny play we went to that he forgot all about Jevons. And then Viola's game, that started in the restaurant and went on all through dinner, began again and continued in the taxi after the play. And though Reggie was discretion itself, you could see that he had taken it for granted--and no wonder--that she and I were, well, on the brink of an engagement if we hadn't fallen in. As for Jevons, he simply couldn't have conceived him in that connection. To Reggie, Jevons was simply an amusing little scallywag who could write. That Viola should have taken Jevons seriously surpassed his imagination of the possible. So that she never was in any danger of discovery, and there was no need for her manoeuvres. He couldn't have so much as found out that she had gone for a walk with Jevons, because it wouldn't have entered his head that you could go for a walk with him. People didn't do these things.

Besides, he never was alone with her that evening. She took good care of that. She insisted on dropping him at his hotel, which we passed on our way northwards. She actually said to him, "You must get out here. Furny'll see me home. I want to talk to him."

And instead of talking to me, she sat leaning forward with her back half turned to me, staring through the window at nothing at all.

That was how I came to propose to Viola in the taxi. I had been afraid to do it before. I wasn't going to do it at all unless I was sure of her. But it seemed to me that she had been trying all afternoon and all evening to tell me that I might be sure.

* * * * *

Well--she wouldn't have me. She was most decided about it. I had no hope and no defence and no appeal from her decision. Unless I was prepared to be a bounder--and a fatuous bounder at that--I couldn't tell her that she had given me encouragement that almost amounted to invitation. To do her justice, until the dreadful moment in the taxi she hadn't known that she had given me anything. She confessed that she had been trying to convey to Reggie the impression that if her affections were engaged in any quarter it was in mine. She had been so absorbed in calculating the effect on Reggie that she had never considered the effect on me. She said she thought I knew what she was up to and that I was simply seeing her through. She spoke of Jevons as if he was a joke--a joke that might be disastrous if her family took it seriously. It might end in her recall from town. She intimated that there were limits even to Reggie's enjoyment of the absurd; she owned quite frankly that she was afraid of Reggie--afraid of what he might think of her and say to her; because, she said, she was so awfully fond of him. As for me, and what _I_ might think, it was open to me to regard her solitary stroll with Jevons as a funny escapade.

I do not believe the poor child was trying to throw dust in my eyes. It was her own eyes she was throwing dust in. She didn't want to think of herself what she was afraid of Reggie thinking.

As to the grounds of my rejection (I was determined to know them), she was clear enough in her own little mind. She liked me; she liked me immensely; she liked me better than anybody in the world but Reggie. She admired me; she admired everything I did; she thought me handsome; I was the nicest-looking man she knew, next to Reggie. But she didn't love me.

"What's more, Furny," she said, "I can't think why I don't love you."

I couldn't see her clearly and continuously in the taxi. The lamp-posts we passed on the way to Hampstead lit her up at short, regular intervals, and at short, regular intervals she faded and was withdrawn from me. And in the same intermittent way, her soul, as she was trying to show it to me, was illuminated and withdrawn.

"I ought to love you," she went on. "I know I ought. It would be the very best thing I could do."

The folly in me clutched at that admission and gave tongue. "If that's so," I said, "don't you think you could try to do what you ought?"

The lamp-light fell on her then. She was smiling a little sad, wise smile. "No," she said. "No. I think that's _why_ I can't love you--because I ought."

And then she went on to explain that what she had against me was my frightful rectitude.

"You're too nice for me, Furny, much too nice. And ever so much too good. I simply couldn't live with integrity like yours." She paused and then turned to me full as we passed a lamp-post.

"I suppose you know my people would like me to marry you?"

I said a little irritably that I had no reason to suppose anything of the sort.

"They would," she said. "Why, bless you, that's what they asked you down at Whitsuntide for! I don't mean that they said to each other: Let's ask him down and then he'll marry Viola. They wouldn't even think it--they're much too nice. Poor dears--they'd be horrified if they knew I knew it! But it was underneath their minds, you know, pushing them on all the time. I believe they sent Reggie up to have a look at you, though they don't know that either. They think they sent him to see what I was up to. You see, Furny dear, from their point of view you _are_ so eligible. And really, do you know, I think that's what's dished you--what's dished us both, if you like to put it that way. I'm sure you may."

I said it didn't matter much what dished me or how I put it, provided I _was_ dished. But--was I?

Oh yes! She left me in no doubt that I was dished. And I saw--I still see, and if anything more clearly--why.

I was everything that Canterbury approved of. And Viola, in her young revolt, was up against everything of which Canterbury approved. Her people were dear people; they were charming people, well-bred people; they had unbroken traditions of beautiful behaviour. And they had tied her up too tight in their traditions; that was all. Viola would never marry anybody on whom Canterbury had set its seal.

And seeing all that, I saw that I had missed her by a mere accident. It was my friend the General who had dished me when he testified to my entire eligibility. That's to say, it was my own fault. If I had let well alone; if I hadn't turned the General on to them, _I_ should have been in the highest degree ineligible; _I_ should have been a person of whom Canterbury most severely disapproved; when I've no doubt that Viola, out of sheer perversity, would have insisted on marrying me.

She said as much. So far she saw into herself and no farther.

The Northern Heights were favourable to this interview, for the taxi broke down in an attempt to scale East Heath Road, so that we walked the last few hundred yards together to her door.

It was while we were walking that--stung by a sudden fear, a reminiscence of the afternoon--I asked her: Was there anybody else?

No, she said, there wasn't. How could there be? Hadn't she told me she liked me better than anybody else, next to Reggie?

"Are you sure?" I said. "Are you quite sure?"

She stopped in the middle of the road and looked at me.

"Of course," she said. "There _isn't_ anybody. Except poor, funny little Jevons. And you couldn't mean him."

That was as near as we got to him then.

But a week later--the week before Easter--he came to us suddenly in my rooms where Viola was correcting proofs for me.

He had come to tell us of his good luck. His novel had been accepted.

I was glad, of course. But Viola was more than glad. She was excited, agitated. She jumped up and said: "Oh, Jimmy!" (She called him Jimmy, and her voice told me that it was not for the first time.) "Jimmy! How simply spiffing!"

And I saw him look at her with a grave and tender assurance, as a man looks at the woman he loves when he knows that the hour of his triumph is her hour.

And I thought even then: It's nothing. It's only that she's glad the poor chap has pulled it off.

Then she said: "Let's all go and dine somewhere together. You don't mind, Furny dear, do you? I'll take it home and sit up with it."

Oh, I didn't mind. We all went somewhere and dined together. We went, for the sheer appropriateness of it, to that restaurant in Soho where I had dined with Jevons for the first time. That was how it happened--what did happen, I mean, afterwards, in my rooms where Jevons had left us.

We had gone back there for coffee and cigarettes. (Canterbury wouldn't have approved of this.)

He had said good night to us when he turned on the threshold with his reminiscence. The restaurant in Soho had aroused it.

"I say, Furnival, do you remember that half-crown you borrowed from me?"

I said I did. And that to remind me of it now was a joke in very questionable taste.

He said, "You never really knew the joke. I kept it from you most carefully. That little orgy of ours had just about cleared me out and the half-crown was my last half-crown. I had to go without any dinner for three days."

I mumbled something about his not meaning it.

He said, "Of course I meant it. Why, my dear chap, that's the joke!"

He stood there in the doorway, rocking with laughter. Then he saw our faces.

"I say, I wouldn't have told you if I'd thought it would harrow you like that. Thought you'd think it funny. It _is_ funny."

I said, "No, my dear fellow, it's just missed being funny."

I put my hand on his shoulder and pushed him from the room. (I had seen Viola's face and I didn't want him to see it.) I led him gently downstairs with a hand still on his shoulder. He was a little grieved at giving pain when he had hoped to give pleasure.

At the bottom of the stairs he turned and looked at me with his ungovernable twinkle. "It _was_ funny," he said. "But it wasn't half so funny, Furnival, as your face."

I found Viola sitting at my writing-table, with her arms flung out over it and her head bowed on them. And she was crying--crying with little soft sobs. I've said that I didn't think she could do it. And I didn't. She wasn't the sort that cries. I'm convinced she hadn't cried like this for years, perhaps never since she was a child.

I put my arms round her as if she had been a child; I held her soft, warm, quivering body close to mine; I wiped her tears away with her pocket-handkerchief. And like a child she abandoned herself to my--to my rectitude. She trusted in it utterly. I might have been her brother Reggie.

I said: "You mustn't mind. He was only rotting us." And she said: "He wasn't. It was true. He told me that six months ago he was starving."

I said: "Vee-Vee, if he _was_, you mustn't think about him. You mustn't, really."

Then she drew away from me and dried her eyes herself, carefully and efficiently, and said in a calm and measured voice: "I'm not thinking about him."

I went on as if I hadn't heard her: "You mustn't be sorry for him. Jevons is quite clever enough to take care of himself. He isn't a bit pathetic. You mustn't let him get at you that way."

She raised her head with her old, high defiance. "He isn't trying to get at me. I'm not sorry for him--any more than he's sorry for himself."

I said, "You don't know. You're just a dear little ostrich hiding its head in the sand."

"No," she said. "No. I'm not a fool, Furny. Even an ostrich isn't such a fool as it looks. It doesn't imagine for a moment that it isn't seen. It hides its head because it knows it's going to be caught, anyway, and it's afraid of seeing what's going to catch it."

I asked her then, Was _she_ afraid?

She was standing beside me now, leaning back against my writing-table. Her two hands clutched the edge of it. Her eyes had a far-seeing, candid gaze.

"I'm not afraid," she said, "of anything outside me. Only of things inside me--sometimes."

"What sort of things?"

She smiled, the queerest little, far-off smile.

"Oh, funny things--things you wouldn't understand, Furny."

To that I said, "I wish you'd marry me, Viola."

She shrugged her shoulders and said, so did she, and it was much worse for her than it was for me. And then: "Do you know, Reggie liked you immensely. He told me so."

I said it would be more to the point if _she_ did. But since she didn't, since she couldn't marry me, I wished--"I wish," I said, "you'd go back to Canterbury and marry some nice man like Reggie."

"Can't you see," she cried, "that I shall never marry a nice man like Reggie?"

III

The next thing that happened was that she went off with Jevons.

At least, to all appearances she went off with him. They were in Belgium, at Bruges and Antwerp and Ghent and Bruges again together. I found them at Bruges after having tracked them through all the other places.

It was Captain Thesiger who started me. Reggie (whose family seemed to employ him chiefly to find out what Viola was up to) had called at my rooms after Easter to ask me if I could give him his sister's address. He said they hadn't got it at Hampstead, where he had been to see her, and they didn't know where she was staying. They thought it was in the country somewhere, and that she wouldn't be very long away, as she told them not to forward any letters. He thought I might possibly have her address.

I told him that I hadn't, and that I didn't know how to get it, either.

He said, "It's a rotten habit she's got of sloping off like this without telling you." It wouldn't matter, only his regiment was ordered off to India. He was sailing next week. She was to have come down to Canterbury for Easter and she hadn't. If he only knew the people she was stopping with--if he'd any idea of the town or the village or the county, he'd try and find her. But she might be in the Hebrides for all he knew.

I said I was sorry I couldn't help. All I knew was she had gone into the country (I didn't know it, but I assumed the knowledge for her protection). She had told me she might be going (she had), and I didn't think she'd be away for more than a day or two. I was pretty sure she'd be back before he sailed.

I'd no reason, you see, to suppose she wouldn't be. Anyhow, I satisfied him.

I marvel now at the ease with which I did it. But he was used to Viola's casual behaviour; and the monstrous improbability of the thing she had done this time was her cover. Who in the world would have dreamed that she would go off with Jevons? I don't really know that I dreamed it myself at the moment. I may be mixing up with my first vague dread the certainty that came later. But sometimes I wonder why Reggie didn't suspect _me_. I suppose my rectitude that had dished me with Viola saved me with her brother.

He took me to lunch with him at his club, and went off quite happily afterwards to the Army and Navy Stores to see about his kit.

I went straight to Jevons's rooms in Bernard Street. Jevons was away. Had been away since Easter. His landlady couldn't give me his address. He hadn't told them where he was going to, and they rather thought he was abroad. His letters were all forwarded to his publishers. _They_ might give me his address.

I went to his publishers. They wouldn't give me his address. They weren't allowed to give addresses, but they would forward any letters to Mr. Jevons. I said I was a friend of Mr. Jevons's. Could they at least tell me whether he was or was not in England? They said that when they had last heard from him he was not.

Then I went down to Fleet Street, to his editor, my editor. He couldn't give me Jevons's address because he hadn't got it. He rang up the office. In the office they rather thought Jevons was in Belgium. They'd had a manuscript from him posted at Ostend. They looked up the date. It was three days ago.

I sailed that night for Ostend.

Of course I had no business to follow Jevons. He had a perfect right to travel--to travel anywhere he liked, without interference from anybody. And in fixing on a time to travel in, nothing was more likely than with his mania upon him he would choose a time that had become valueless to him--a time that he had no other use for, the time when Viola Thesiger was away. The poverty of his resources was such that he couldn't afford to waste any opportunity of seeing her. So that I really could not have given any satisfactory answer if I had been asked why I had jumped to the preposterous conclusion that, because they were away at the same time, they were away together. It ought to have been as inconceivable to me as it was to Reggie. I can only say that in following him I acted on an intimation that amounted to certainty, founded on I know not what underground flashes of illumination and secret fear.

I must have trusted to more flashes in pursing his trail. For when I reached Folkestone there wasn't any trail at all. My only clue was that three days ago Jevona had posted a manuscript at Ostend. He might not be in Belgium at all. He might be in Holland or in France or Germany by this time.

When we got to Ostend I made systematic inquiries at the Post Office and at all probable hotels. At the eleventh hotel (a very humble one) I heard that a "Mr. Chevons" had stayed there one night, three nights ago. No, he had nobody with him. He had left no address. They didn't know where he was going on to. I found out under another rubric that Englishmen never came to this hotel. There was no point in making a separate search for Viola; if my intuition held good, all I had to do was to find out where Jevons was.

I went on to Bruges. Why, I cannot tell you. I had never heard either Viola or Jevons say they would like to see Bruges. But Bruges was the sort of place that people did like to see.

No trace of Jevons or of Viola in Bruges.

I went on to Antwerp (it was another of the likely places), and then, in sheer desperation, to Ghent.

And in Ghent, in a certain hotel in the _Place d'Armes_, I ran up against Burton Withers, the man who used to be on the old _Dispatch_, and the very last person I could have wished to see. I didn't ask him if he'd seen Jevons; I didn't mention Jevons; but before we'd parted he had told me that, by the way, he'd come across Jevons in Bruges. He was going about with my typist, Miss Thesiger. They were staying in the same hotel.

I tried to say as casually as I could that Miss Thesiger had wired to me that she was staying in that hotel with her people.

The little bounder then intimated that when he saw Miss Thesiger her people were less conspicuous than Jevons.

I replied that that was probably the reason why they'd asked me to join them when I'd seen Ghent.

Withers advised me to go on seeing Ghent if I wanted to be popular. They--Jevons and Miss Thesiger--didn't look at all as if they wanted to be seen, much less joined.

He had the air of knowing a good deal more than he cared to tell me; but then he always had that air; you may say he lived on it.

I asked him presently (in a suitable context) whether he was going back soon; and to my relief I learned that he had only just come out--for his paper--and was going on into Germany through Brussels. He wouldn't be back in England for another three weeks or more.

He wouldn't be back, I reflected, to tell what he knew or what he didn't know, till Reggie Thesiger had sailed.

I got rid of the little beast on the first likely pretext, having dealt with him so urbanely that he couldn't possibly think he had told me anything I saw reason to believe and therefore to resent.

Then I went back to Bruges.

This time my quest was fairly easy. I didn't know what hotel Jevons was staying in; but I did know the sort of hotel that Withers stayed in when he was travelling for his paper. My errand was narrowed down to three or four (good, but not too good), and the first I struck in the Market-Place was Withers's hotel. It was one of those that three days ago had known nothing of Jevons.

I inquired this time for Withers and was told that he had left that morning. I engaged a room and strolled out into the Market-Place. I visited the Cathedral, the Belfry, and the Béguinage, in the hope of coming suddenly across Viola and Jevons.

I did not come across them in any of those places; but I was not very earnest about the search. I was so sure that if Withers had not lied to me they would presently come across me at their hotel. I meant that it should be that way, if possible: that they should come across me in a place where they could not evade me. God only knows what I meant to say to them when they had found me.

As I entered the hotel again I saw the proprietor's wife make a sign to her husband. They conferred together, and sent the _concierge_ upstairs after me. He wanted to know if I was the gentleman who had inquired the other day for Mr. Chevons, because, if I was, Mr. Chevons had arrived the day before yesterday and was staying in the hotel.

There was no doubt about it; his name, James Tasker Jevons, was in the visitors' list.

Viola's was not.

From the enthusiasm of the fat proprietor and his wife you would have supposed that Jevons and I had roamed the habitable globe for months in search of one another; and that Jevons, at any rate, would be overpowered with joy when he found that I was here. They said nothing about Viola.

And before I could ask myself what earthly motive Withers could have had for lying to me, I concluded that he _had_ lied.

Or perhaps--it was more than likely--he had been mistaken.

Jevons, I said to myself, was bound to turn up at dinner. If Viola was in Bruges, Viola would probably be with him. I chose a table by the door behind a screen, where I could see everybody as they came in without being seen first of all by anybody.

Jevons didn't turn up for dinner.

I found him later on in the evening, on the bridge outside the eastern gate of the city. He stood motionless and alone, leaning over the parapet and looking into the water. Away beyond the Canal a long dyke of mist dammed back the flooding moonlight, and the things around Jevons--the trees, the water, the bridge, the gate and its twin turrets--were indistinct. But the man was so poured out and emptied into his posture that I could see his dejection, his despair. The posture ought to have disarmed me, but it didn't.

He moved away as he saw me coming, then, recognizing me, he stood his ground. It was as if almost he were relieved to see me.

"Oh, it's you, is it?" he said.

I asked him who he thought it was, and he said he thought it was that little beast Withers.

I said, "I daresay you did. I saw Withers this morning."

He said quite calmly he supposed that was why I was here.

I said I had been here before I had seen Withers.

"I see," he said. "He's told you."

I said Withers had told me nothing I didn't know.

"You didn't know anything," he said. "You simply came here to find out."

I said: Yes, that was what I had come for.

"Well," he went on; "there isn't much to find out. She's here. And I'm here. And Withers saw us yesterday. As he told you."

He spoke in the tired, toneless voice of a man stating for the thirty-first time an obvious and uninteresting fact. He knew that I had tracked him down, but he didn't resent it. I felt more than ever that this encounter was in some way a relief to him; things, he almost intimated, might have been so much worse. I didn't know then that his calmness was the measure of his trust in me.

"The really beastly thing," he said, "was Withers seeing us."