Chapter III: Book I: My Book (3)

I answered that the really beastly thing was his being there; his having brought her there; and that it would give me pleasure to pitch him over the canal bridge, only that the canal water was too clean for him.

He said, "The canal water is filthy. But it isn't filthier than--it isn't half so filthy as your imagination. Your imagination, Furnival, is like the main sewer of this city."

He said it without any sort of passion, in his voice of utter weariness, as if he was worn-out with struggling against imaginations such as mine.

"But," he went on, "even your imagination isn't as obscene as Withers's. You may as well tell me what he said to you about Miss Thesiger."

"He said that she--that you were staying together in the same hotel."

"Why shouldn't we? It's a pretty big hotel. Do you mind my going back to it?"

I said grimly that I was going back to it myself. I wasn't going to let Jevons out of my sight. I felt as if I had taken him into custody.

We went back.

We didn't speak till we came into the Market-Place. Then Jevons said quietly:

"As it happens, we aren't staying together in that damned hotel. I'm staying in it by myself. We were dining there and having breakfast when Withers spotted us. You don't suppose she'd let me take her to the same hotel, do you? I got a room for her in a boarding-house. Kept by some ladies."

"What do you mean by bringing her here at all? If," I said, "you _did_ bring her."

He meditated as if he too wondered what he had meant by it.

"I brought her all right. That's to say, I made her come."

"You mean you didn't bring her? She followed you?"

(I _had_ to know what they had done, how they had arranged it.)

We stood for a moment in the middle of the vast foreign Market-Place, talking in voices whose softness veiled our hostility.

He answered with a little spurt of anger. "You can't call it following. She came."

"Don't prevaricate," I said. "She came because you made her come. I'm not going to ask you why you made her. It's obvious."

"Is it?" he said. "I wish I knew why. I wish to God I knew."

"Don't talk rot," I said. "You knew all right. And she didn't."

He looked at me. Standing there in the lighted Marketplace, under the shadow of the monument, he looked at me with shining, tragic eyes.

"No, Furnival," he said. "Before God I didn't know. Neither of us knew. But I know now. And I'm going to-morrow."

* * * * *

He stuck to it that he was going. He seemed to think that his going would make it all right. He had just realized--he had only just, after six days of it, mind you, realized--that he had compromised her. I said I supposed he realized it after Withers had seen them?

He said, No, it had come over him before that. Neither of them really cared a damn about Withers. Who was going to care what a beast like Withers thought or said? It had come over him that he oughtn't to have brought her here. He wished he'd hung himself before he'd thought of it, but the fact was that he didn't think. He just felt when he got out here himself that it would be a jolly thing for her to come too; it would do her good to cut everything--all the mimsy tosh she'd been brought up in and hated--to get out of it all--just to do one splendid bunk. That, he said, was all it amounted to.

We talked it over, sitting up in his little bedroom under the roof, the cheapest room in the hotel. You may wonder how I could have endured to talk to him instead of wringing his horrid little neck for him; but there wasn't anything else to be done. After all, it wouldn't have done Viola or me any good if I had wrung his neck. It was, in fact, to save precisely that sort of violent scandal that I had come out here. I had realized so well what wringing Jevons's neck would mean to Viola that I was determined to get at him before Reggie Thesiger could.

Besides I doubt very much if you could have wrung the neck of anybody so abjectly penitent as Jevons was that evening. I felt as if I were shut up with a criminal in the condemned cell, and Jevons no doubt felt as if he had murdered Viola.

And yet, sitting there on his bed, leaning forward with his head in his hands and his eyes staring, staring at the horror he had raised round her, he asserted persistently his innocence.

"Practically," he said, "I brought her out to look at Bruges--the Belfry."

I said: "Good God! Couldn't she look at the Belfry without _you_?"

He shook his head and replied very gravely: "Not in the same way, Furnival. Not in the same way. It wouldn't have been the same thing at all."

"You mean it wouldn't have been the same for you, you little bounder."

"It wouldn't have been the same thing for _her_. I wasn't thinking only of myself. Who does?"

It was as if he had said: "Who that loves as I love thinks only of himself?" But I missed that. I was too angry.

At least I suppose I was too angry. I must have been. Jevons's offence was unspeakable, or seemed so. He had outraged all decencies. He had done _me_ about the worst injury that one man can do to another--at any rate, I wasn't sure that he hadn't. How could I have been sure! Every appearance was against him. Even his funny candour left me with a ghastly doubt. It was preposterous, his candour. His innocence was preposterous. But it is impossible to write about this singular adventure as it must have appeared to me at the time. I am saturated with Jevons's point of view. I have had to live so long with his innocence and I have forgiven him so thoroughly any wrong he ever did to me. All this is bound to colour my record and confuse me. I have impression upon impression of Jevons piled in my memory; I cannot dig down deep enough to recover the original; I cannot get back to that anger of mine, that passion of violent integrity, that simple abhorrence of Jevons that I must have felt.

He didn't care a rap about me and my abhorrence. He asked me what I thought I was doing when I came out here? He simply smiled when I told him I'd come out to send Viola back to her people before Reggie Thesiger got hold of him and thrashed him within an inch of his life, not because I in the least objected to his being thrashed within an inch of his life--far from it--but because advertisement in these affairs was undesirable. I didn't want Viola's family or anybody else to know about this instance. It was to be hushed up on her account and on their account alone.

He replied pensively (almost too pensively) that he had supposed that was the line I would take. It was his little meditative pose that made me call him a thundering scallywag and accuse him of having calculated on the line that would be taken.

He said quietly, "The word thundering is singularly inappropriate. There's nothing thundering about me. I haven't calculated anything. As for hushing it up, I'm hushing it up myself, thank you. Haven't I told you I'm going to-morrow? Can't you see that I'm packing?"

He had evidently been trying to pack.

"And what," I asked, "is Miss Thesiger doing?"

"She's staying on here by herself a bit. In the _pension_. As if she'd come by herself."

He seemed entirely satisfied with his plan.

I said, "Look here, Jevons, that won't do. It's no good _your_ going. You've been seen here. You're supposed to be staying in this hotel together. If you go and she stays--in that _pension_--you've deserted her. You've seduced her. You're tired of her--in five days--and you've left her."

"You don't suppose I have _really_?" said Jevons.

"I don't suppose anything. I don't know what you've done. I don't think I want to know. That's what it'll look like. Do, for God's sake, remember you've been _seen_."

He gathered a portion of his cheek into his mouth and sucked it.

"I suppose," he said, "it _would_ look like that."

I said of course it would. And he asked me then, quite humbly, what I thought he'd better do.

I said I thought he'd better do exactly what I told him. He was to stay here till Captain Thesiger had sailed for India (I wasn't going to let him get back to England till Reggie was out of it). Miss Thesiger was to go back to her people to-morrow, and he was not to see her or write to her before she went.

He asked me was I thinking of taking her back myself?

I said I wasn't. Miss Thesiger had behaved as if she had disappeared. There was no good in my behaving as if she had disappeared with _me_.

That seemed to pacify him.

I said I should take her to Ostend to-morrow and put her on board the boat. I could see that he didn't at all care about this part of the programme, but his intelligence accepted the whole as the best thing that could be done in the circumstances.

Then I left him to his misery and went round to the _pension_ to see Viola.

All my instincts revolted against what I had to do.

* * * * *

She has since told me that I did it beautifully. I don't, of course, believe her, and it doesn't matter. The wonder is how I did it at all.

To begin with I was afraid of seeing her, because I conceived that she would be afraid of seeing me. I felt as if I had hunted her down and caught her in a trap. I didn't want the bright, defiant creature to crouch and flinch before me in her corner. And, as I tried to realize our encounter, that was how I saw her--crouching and flinching in a corner. It wouldn't have been quite so awful if the man had been any other man but Jevons. I could not imagine a worse position for a girl like Viola Thesiger than to be caught running off to Belgium, or anywhere, with Jevons, and told to leave him and go home. Put brutally, that was what I had to tell her.

The only way to do it was to ignore the unspeakable element in the affair--to ignore Jevons. To behave as if I'd never heard of him; as if she were just travelling in Belgium on her own account and staying in Bruges alone.

And that--if she had only let me--was what I tried to do.

I remember vividly everything that passed in that interview, but I do not know how to reproduce it, how to give anything like an impression of the marvellous thing it was, or that it turned into under her hands. It ought, you see, to have been so ugly, so humiliating, so absolutely intolerable for both of us. And it wasn't. She took it from me, at the end, and held it up, as it were a little way out of my grasp; and before I knew where I was, with some sudden twist or turn she had brought beauty out of it. Clear and exquisite beauty.

I found her in her room at the _pension_. It was at the back, on the ground floor; and had long windows opening into a little high-walled garden. The room, I remember, was rather dingy and stuffed up with furniture. Large Flemish pieces, bureaus, chests and cabinets stood against the walls. There was a bed behind the door; she had put her travelling-rug over it. And there was a washstand in an alcove with a curtain hung across it; and some of her coats and gowns hung behind another curtain in a corner, and some were on hooks on the door. And her little trunk was on the floor by the foot of the bed. And her shoes stood by the stove.

Somehow, when I saw these things--especially the shoes--my heart melted inside me with a tenderness that was infinitely more painful than the rather austere disapproval of her which I had relied on for support.

I was prepared, as I said, for a cowed and frightened Viola, or for Viola in a mood at least in keeping with the poignant and somewhat humbling pathos of her surroundings; but not for the Viola I found.

The _garçon_ of the _pension_ closed the door of this room in my face as he went in with my card to inquire whether she would receive me. I thought, "If she refuses I shall have to insist; and that will be unpleasant."

But she didn't refuse. On the other side of the door I heard a subdued, but curiously reassuring cry.

She had been sitting outside the open window. Her chair was on the flagged path of the garden. As I came in she had risen and was standing in the window, with the intense blue darkness of the garden behind her and the light of the room on her face. She was smiling in a serene and candid joy. For one second I imagined that she had not read the name on the card and that she thought I was Jevons. And then I must have looked away quite steadily so as not to see her shock of recognition; for her voice recalled me.

"Wally--how ripping! However _did_ you get here?"

I don't know what I said. I probably didn't say anything. The sheer surprise of it so staggered me that I must have muttered or grunted or choked instead. But I know I took her hand and did my best to smile back at her with the stiff mouth she noticed later.

She went on: "I _am_ glad to see you. Have you had any dinner?"

I said I had.

"Then," she said, "let's sit in the garden."

I took her hat off a chair and stuck it on a bust on the bureau (Viola laughed). I set the chair on the flagged path of the garden.

"Have you had coffee?" she said then.

I had.

"So have I. But I haven't had it in the garden. We'll have some more."

I rang for coffee.

We sat down and faced each other. She was smiling again as if the delight of seeing me fairly bubbled out of her. One thing struck me then, that at this rate it would be easy enough to ignore Jevons. In fact, if Jevons hadn't given Viola away just now I should have thought that she _was_ travelling in Belgium on her own account and that his being here in the same town with her was a coincidence, an accident. I could have got over Withers and his story.

Then she said, "Have you come across Mr. Jevons yet? He's here."

I answered, with what I knew to be a very stiff mouth, "We're staying in the same hotel."

"You might have brought him along with you," she said.

I said I didn't want to bring him along with me.

She raised her eyebrows in delicate reproof of my rudeness and said, "Why not?"

"Because," I said, "I want to talk to you."

"Oh--" I don't think I imagined the faint embarrassment in her tone. But it was very faint.

"_And_" I went on, "I don't want to talk about Jevons."

She looked at me then steadily. The look held me, then defied me to pass beyond a certain limit. I understood now the terms of our encounter. As long as I met her on the ground of a friendship that recognized and included Jevons she was glad to treat with me; but any attitude that repudiated Jevons, or merely ignored him, was a hostile attitude that she was prepared to resent.

"What has he done?" she said.

"I don't know what he's done." I paused. "Why drag in Jevons?"

"Because," she said, "it's his last night. He's going to-morrow."

I said, "And it's my first night. And as it happens he isn't going to-morrow. He's arranged to stay here another fortnight."

Her face softened. "Then it's all right," she said.

I had to dash her down from _that_ ground and I did it at once.

I said, "I saw your brother the other day."

I could see her face darken then with a flush of pain. We were sitting close to the window, and the light from the room inside showed me all the changes of her face.

She asked, "What day?"

"Let me see. This is Friday. It must have been Monday. I came over that night, as soon as I'd seen him."

"What did you go and see him for?"

"I didn't go. He came to see me."

She looked at me again, if possible, more steadily than before, but without defiance. It was as if she were measuring the extent of my loyalty before she committed herself again to speech.

"Why did he come?" she asked presently.

"He wanted to know if I knew where you were."

"You didn't know," she said.

"I didn't or I wouldn't have lost three days in looking for you. But I made a good shot, anyhow, when I came to Bruges."

Even in her anguish--for she was in anguish--she smiled at the wonder of my shot.

"What made you think of Bruges?"

"I don't know."

I couldn't tell her what had made me think of it. I couldn't tell her that I had tracked her down through Jevons. I was going to keep him out of it, if she would only let me. But she wouldn't.

"I suppose," she meditated gently, "he must have told you."

I answered quite sternly this time, to impress on her the propriety of keeping Jevons out of it:

"He didn't tell me anything."

"Then"--she was still puzzled--"what made you come?"

"You."

"Me?"

"Your brother, if you like."

"He should have come himself."

"That," I said, "is what I'm trying to prevent. He doesn't know you're here. I want to get you back to England before he does know. Besides--he's sailing for India next week."

Then she broke down; that's to say, she lowered her flags. Her head sank to her breast; her eyes stared at the stone path; their lids reddened and swelled with the springing of tears that would not fall.

"Didn't you know?" I said.

"I suppose I must have known--once."

Up till this moment she had not said one word, she had not made one sign, that had really given her away. And nothing could have given her away more completely than the thing she had said now. She had confessed to a passion so dominating and so blind as to be unaware of anything but itself. It was not so much that it had swept before it all the codes and traditions she had been brought up in--codes and traditions might well have been nothing to Viola--it had struck at her strongest affection and her memory. She adored her brother. He was sailing for India next week; she must have known it; and she had forgotten it.

Her confession was not made to me (she had forgotten _my_ existence utterly); it was made to herself--the old self that had adored Reggie; that at this evocation of him arose and sat in judgment on the strange, perverted, monstrous self that could forget him. I've called it a confession; but it wasn't a confession. It was a cry, a muttering, rather, of secret, agonized discovery.

"He wants to see you before he goes," I said.

Her eyelids spilled their tears at that; but only those they had gathered; no more came. Her self-control was admirable.

"It's all right," I said. "You've heaps of time. I'm going to take you to Ostend in the morning. You'll be in Canterbury to-morrow night."

"Is that what you came for?"

"Yes."

"It was awfully nice of you."

"There was nothing else," I said, "to do."

"You're coming with me to Canterbury." She stated it.

"No, my dear child," I said, "I am not. You don't want them to think you went to Bruges with _me_."

This was by implication a reference to Jevons. It was as near as I had let myself get to him.

She said, "What are you going to do, then?"

"I'm going to put you on the boat at Ostend, and then I'm coming back here."

It must have been at this point that the _garçon_ brought the coffee. For I remember our sitting out there and drinking it amicably until the aroma of it gave Viola an idea.

"What time shall we have to start to-morrow?"

I said, "First thing in the morning."

"Then," she said, "it does seem a pity not to send for Jimmy."

I could see now that there was some deadly purpose in her persistence. But this time I couldn't bear it, and I lost my temper.

I said, "Send for him. Send for him, if you can't live ten minutes without him."

I was sorry even at the time; I have been ashamed since. For, so far from resenting my abominable rudeness--as, under any conclusion, she had a perfect right to--she merely said, "I'm only thinking that if I've got to go so soon to-morrow it'll be horribly lonely for him over there."

"He doesn't expect to see you. We arranged all that."

She pondered it, still with that curious absence of resentment. It was as if, recognizing the danger of the situation, she submitted to any steps, however disagreeable, that were necessary for her safety. It was clear that she trusted me; less clear that she trusted Jevons.

One thing remained mysterious to her.

"What are you coming back here for?" she asked.

I let her have it straight: "To look after Jevons."

"What do you suppose he'd do?"

"He might get into England before your brother got out of it."

She smiled. _"What do you suppose, then, Reggie'd do?"_

I said I knew what I'd do if I were Reggie.

She smiled again. "I see. You're saving him from Reggie."

"I'm not thinking of him, I can assure you."

At that she said, "Dear Wally, so you think you're saving me."

"I'm trying to," I said. "As far as your people are concerned. You don't want them to know you've been here. If you'll only leave it to me, they won't know."

"I'm not going to lie about it. I shall tell them if they ask me."

"Not Reggie," I said.

"Yes, Reggie. If he asks me. Reggie's the very last person I should think of lying to."

It was this attitude of hers that first shook me in my conclusions. For I'm afraid I'd come to certain very definite conclusions.

Why, I asked her, hadn't she told them before she came?

"Because," she said, "there's no use worrying them. They'd have tried to stop me. You can't imagine what an awful fuss they'd have made. I daresay I might never have got off at all."

What I couldn't understand was her attitude. I mean I couldn't reconcile the secrecy she had practised with her amazing frankness now.

Her manner was supremely assured.

It wasn't, mind you, the brazen assurance of a woman who has been found out and flings up the game; it was a curiously tranquil and patient candour, with something mysterious about it, as if she had knowledge that I couldn't have, and bore with me through all my ignorance and blundering. In fact, from beginning to end, except for the one moment when I upset her by telling her about Reggie's sailing, she showed an extraordinary tranquillity.

But as I couldn't understand her I simply said, "I wish you hadn't got off."

She said in that same quiet way, "I had to."

"Because," I said, "he made you."

Since she had dragged Jevons in she should have him in. I wasn't going to keep him out now to spare her. I had a right to know the truth. She had shaken my conclusions. She had left me in a doubt more unbearable than any certainty, and I considered that I had a right to know. I was determined to know now and end it. That shows that I must have trusted her; that I knew she wouldn't lie to me.

"But," she said, with the least perceptible surprise, "he didn't make me."

"He told me he did."

"He told you?--What did he say exactly?"

"He said--if you must know--that he hadn't brought you, but that he had made you come."

"He didn't. He didn't really. But supposing he had--what then?"

"You _want_ me to tell you what I think of it?"

"Yes."

"I think it was a beastly thing to make you do. He couldn't have done it--you _know_ he couldn't have done it--if he hadn't been a bit of a blackguard."

I was going to say, "as well as a bounder"; but I didn't want to rub that in. I judged that when the poor child came to her senses her cup would be full enough without my pouring.

"But, you see," she said, still peaceably, "he didn't do it. He only _said_ he did. That was his niceness. He wanted to save me."

"My dear child, if it's saving you to bring you out here without your people knowing anything about it, and to let you be seen with him everywhere--"

"He didn't bring me. He said he wished I could come with him. And I said I wished I could. I almost asked him to take me; and he said he couldn't. Then he went off by himself. He was all right till he got to Bruges. Then he wrote and said that the beauty of it hurt him, that it was awful being here without me, and that he was coming back at the end of the week without seeing any more of it, because he couldn't bear to know what I was missing. He was going to keep the other places till we could see them together. So I wired to say I was coming, and I came."

"What did you do it for, Viola?"

"Wally, I asked myself that as soon as I got into the train. And it wasn't till I was half across the Channel that I knew why."

She stopped and stared as if at the wonder of herself explained.

"I did it to burn my boats."

I suppose _I_ stared at that. For she expounded:

"To make it impossible to go back."

I said, "My dear child, that was very reckless of you."

She said she wanted to be reckless. I asked her if it didn't occur to her that some day she might want her boats?

She said: No. It was just her boats that she was afraid of. She didn't really want them. She didn't want--really--to go back.

Then she looked at me and said, "You know Jimmy wants to marry me." And then, "Did you know?"

I said I was not in Jevons's confidence, but I had guessed as much. I said, "Do you want to marry him?"

She said, "Yes. I want to marry him more than anything. I don't want to marry anybody else. I never shall marry anybody else. Most of me wants to marry Jimmy. But there's a little bit of me that doesn't. It's mean and snobbish--and dreadful, and it's afraid to marry him. And, you see, if I were to go to my people and say, 'I'm not going to marry Mr. Furnival; I'm going to marry Mr. Jevons,' and I were to show Jimmy to them, they'd all get up and side with that horrid and shameful little bit of me. Reggie would, too. It wouldn't be in the least horrid or snobbish of them, you know, because they wouldn't know what Jimmy's really like. They're just very fastidious and correct. But it's simply awful of me, because I do know."

"It isn't awful. It simply means that he isn't your sort. _You_'re fastidious and correct. You _can't_ marry him, and you know it. You won't be able to bear it. He'll make you shudder all down your spine."

"All that doesn't prevent my caring for him. I care for him more than for anything on earth, even Reggie. That's why I've burned my boats. So that I may have what I care for without their tearing me to pieces over it."

So far was I from understanding her that it struck me that what she was telling me was as ugly a thing as could be told in words; that she was confessing that, being too weak to stand up against her family, she had deliberately compromised herself with Jevons so that she might marry him without their opposition; just as I was sure that Jevons had compromised her so that he could marry her without opposition from herself.

"But--what you are saying is horrible," I said. "I don't believe you know how horrible it is."

So far was she from understanding _me_ that she answered: "Yes, it is horrible. But it was only a little bit of me. And it's all over. Burned away, Wally. I burned it when I burned my boats. Don't think of me as if I were really like that."

You see? We had been talking about different things. My mind had been fastened on an external incident, ugly in itself, ugly in its apparent purpose, ugly in its consequences, ugly every way you looked at it. Hers had been concentrated on the event that had happened in her soul, an event to her altogether beautiful--the destruction of the cowardice that would have brought her back, that shrank from taking the risk that her soul dared.

This, she seemed to say, is how I deal with cowardice.

That she had compromised herself by dealing with it in this way had simply never occurred to her. It couldn't. She didn't know and wouldn't have believed it possible that people did these things.

What had frightened her, she said, was Jimmy's saying that about keeping the other places till they could see them together. He meant, you see, till they were married. It brought it so home to her. And it brought home to her what it meant to him. Because he couldn't afford to marry yet for ages.

If she'd gone back, she said, it would have been so cruel to him. And it would have been so cruel to herself, too.

Then she told me what they had done together. Heavens! How she must have trusted him. She joined him here in Bruges. And they'd gone to Antwerp, then to Ghent, then back to Bruges. (I had followed close on their traces, a day behind them at each city.)

And it had all been so beautiful. She simply couldn't tell me how beautiful it had been. It was as if she had never seen anything properly before.

Jimmy had made her see things. "I can understand," she said, "what he meant when he said that the beauty of this place hurt him. It hurts _me_."

I reminded her that Jimmy had said it hurt him because she wasn't there.

She looked up and smiled. "He isn't here _now_, Furny."

I took her to Ostend first thing in the morning and saw her on to the boat. I advised her to remove the foreign labels from her trunk at Dover, and to contrive so that she shouldn't be seen arriving by the up platform at Canterbury.

"Oh," she said. "You have to take _some_ risk!"

We were on the gangway, saying good-bye. And from the boat's gunwale she flung me buoyantly, "If I'm caught I'll say it was _you_ I went off with. They won't mind that half so much."

I went back to Bruges the same day and found Jevons disconsolate where I had left him in his hotel. I took him to Brussels in the hope of finding Withers there and confusing him in his ideas. We didn't find him. He had gone on into Germany, carrying with him his impression of Viola and Jevons staying together at Bruges in the same hotel.

It was at Bruges that I said to Jevons, "By the way, Miss Thesiger says you _didn't_ make her come. She proposed coming herself."

He flushed furiously and denied it. "Of course I made her come. It wasn't likely she'd propose a thing like that."

His chivalry was up in arms to defend her. But I could see also that his vanity wasn't going to relinquish the manly role of having made her come to him.

Well, I suppose in a sense he _had_ made her.

IV

We didn't stay in Brussels more than a day or two. Jevons didn't like it. He had become sentimentally attached to Bruges, and he wasn't happy till I took him back there. I can't say he was exactly happy then except in so far as he may have enjoyed his own suicidal gloom. I wasn't very happy either. All my recollections of Bruges are poisoned by Jevons's gloom and by my own miserable business of looking after him and seeing that he didn't walk gloomily into any of the canals. As for seeing Bruges, I don't know to this day whether the Belfry is beautiful or not. I only know that it stood there in the grey sky like an immense monument to the melancholy of Jevons. He made me horribly uneasy. I thought every day that if he didn't walk into a canal he'd have another fit of jaundice.

He seemed to be suffering chiefly from remorse, and oddly enough it was this remorse of his that gave me the measure of his essential innocence, as if Viola hadn't given it me already.

It was in his dejection that he showed his tact. He had, for our remarkable circumstances, the right manner. If Jevons had been jaunty; if he had tried to brazen it out, I should have hated him. As it was, his misery might be poisonous, but it was most disarming. So was his trust in me. He realized that he had got Viola into the devil of a mess, and he looked, intelligently, to me to get her out of it. And with the same confiding simplicity he put himself into my hands now. The adventure had shaken his nerve and he was afraid of himself, afraid of doing some supremely foolish thing like following Viola to Canterbury. I believe he would have consented to stay in Bruges long after the term I had imposed if I had told him it was necessary.

I said I took him to Brussels and brought him back to Bruges. He submitted to be brought and taken; to be banged about in trains and omnibuses, to be fetched and carried like a parcel. He let me feel in the most touching manner that my presence was a comfort to him, while he recognized that his might be anything but a comfort to me. I know I had nothing to do with Jevons's melancholy. The fat proprietor and his wife (who smiled at us by way of encouragement in our passages to and fro before their bureau), these thralls of Jevons's odd fascination, had confided to me that he had been much worse the day before I came. The poor gentleman could neither eat nor sleep; other guests in the hotel had come upon him wandering by himself at strange hours on the quays. (There were a good many English in Bruges that spring.)

I was greatly relieved by these disclosures; they testified to the fact that Jevons, at any rate on Viola's last day, had been seen very much by himself.

We had not spoken of Viola since the day when I had come back from Ostend after seeing her off. I can't recall much of what we did talk about, but I remember that Jevons's remarks were always interesting, and that in his lucid intervals he laid himself out to be amusing. In one respect only he had deteriorated. Jevons's strong language was no longer strong. It came, if it came at all, in brief spurts, never with the passionate rush, the gorgeous colour, the sustained crescendo of his first runnings. It was a thing of feeble _clichés_ that might have passed in any drawing-room.

We didn't, then, talk about Viola. But I know that he heard from her and that I didn't.

The first week of Jevons's fortnight was up when I got a wire from Canterbury. It said: "Reggie sailed yesterday. Trouble. Can you come Canterbury at once. Viola."

Of course the word that stuck out of it was "Trouble." For the rest it was ambiguous. I couldn't tell, neither could Jevons, whether the trouble was connected somehow with Reggie's sailing, or whether in announcing his departure she meant to intimate that Jevons might now return to England; the coast was clear. Jevons, I may say, took this view of it and I did not. It was I and not Jevons who was asked to come at once. Jevons, for Viola's present purposes, was ignored.

With his usual intelligence he saw my point. We made out that the message suggested trouble with Viola's family, and he agreed heartily that he was not precisely the person to deal with that.

Oh yes, he trusted me. He gave me his word of honour that he would stay in Bruges until I either sent for him or came back to fetch him.

Before I left I had a straight talk with him.

I pointed out to him (what he said he knew as well as I did) that on the most lenient view of his case he had compromised Miss Thesiger very seriously. But, I said, he would have had to have compromised her more seriously still before her people would consent to her marrying him. He must see that, with what he had done, by stopping short of what he might have done, he had made himself, if anything, more unacceptable than he was to begin with. She might--she probably would in her present mood--insist on marrying him without their consent. On the other hand, she just mightn't. And it wasn't as if he could afford to marry her at once, while her present mood was on.

He said, No. But in six months he could afford it. He gave himself six months.

I said, Anything might happen in six months. Miss Thesiger's present mood (which, I put it to him, was very much made up of old Flemish glamour) might change. And if it did, it was just conceivable that she might marry _me_. He was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if he got the chance. _I_ was determined to marry Miss Thesiger if _I_ got the chance. At the present most of the chances, I owned, were in his favour. But there was just the off-chance in mine.

And that off-chance, I told him plainly, I meant to make the most of. I wouldn't be human if I didn't. I wasn't taking any unfair advantage of him, considering the tremendous innings he had had in Flanders, with the Flemish atmosphere to help him. If I could make any running in Canterbury, with the Canterbury atmosphere to help _me_ (he owned very handsomely that it would help me, that I'd be "in it" quite beautifully) why, I'd make it.

Had he anything to say?

He looked at me very straight, with just the least perceptible twinkle, and he said, "All right, old man, cut in, and take your chance. I'll risk it."

I got to Canterbury in the early evening and went straight from my Fifteenth Century hotel to the Thesigers' house in the Close. I spotted it at once. It was all old red brick and grey stone like the Tudor houses in John's and Margaret's Quad.

I asked for Miss Viola Thesiger and was shown into the Canon's library. To my great relief the Canon wasn't in his library. It looked out on to a perfect garden with a thick green lawn, and an old red-brick wall, very high, all round it, and tall elms topping the wall, and long beds of wallflowers and tulips blazing away underneath it. I said to myself, "If I want atmosphere I've got it. Bruges is nothing to the Thesigers' garden in Canterbury Close." I'd time to take it all in, for Viola kept me waiting.

I was glad of the peace of the garden, for I'd taken in more atmosphere than I wanted already as I came through the house. You went upstairs to the Canon's library, and along a narrow black-oak corridor. And in passing I was aware of a peculiar quietness everywhere. It wasn't simply the quietness and laziness of the Cathedral Close. It was something in the house. I felt it as I crossed the threshold and the hall. It was the sum of slight but definite impressions: the sudden silence of voices that were talking somewhere when I came in; the shutting of a door that stood ajar; the withdrawal of footsteps approaching on the landing.

It was as if there had been a death in the house; as if its people shrank and hid themselves in their bereavement. I might have been the undertaker called in to help them to bury their dead.

The trouble was strictly confined to the Thesigers' house. From the tennis-lawns under the high walls of other gardens there came shouts of girls and of young men at play.

Presently Viola came to me. She held her head if anything higher than usual, and the expression of her face was out of keeping with the trouble in the air. But as she came nearer I saw that this gay face was white, its tissue had a sort of sick smoothness, and there were dark smears under her eyes.

The poor child had paid her tribute to the Trouble.

She said, "It _is_ good of you to come. Did you mind awfully?"

I said, of course I didn't. She smiled again, the little white, blank smile she had for me in those days, and I asked her what had happened.

She said, "Everything's happened. It's been awful."

Her smile took on significance--the whole wild irony of disaster. Then she said, "They know."

"All of them? Your brother?"

"No. Not Reggie. He got away in time. They won't tell him. They won't even tell Bertie. They'll never talk about it. But they know."

I said, "Supposing they _do_ know--as long as other people don't--"

"But, Wally, that's just it. Everybody does know."

I couldn't take her quite seriously yet. I asked her: Was it the labels? and she said, No, she'd picked all the foreign ones off at Dover, and she got the Dover ones off in the cab coming home, and she'd had Heaven's own luck at the station, nobody'd seen her on the up platform, and her people thought she'd come from London. Of course they all asked her where she'd been, and she told them she wasn't going to let on just yet, that it wasn't good for them to know too much, and that if they behaved themselves they'd know some day. She meant to tell them as soon as ever Reggie'd gone. "Really and truly, Wally, I meant to tell them."

"And do you know," she said, "they thought I was rotting them, that I'd been in some stuffy place in the country all the time."

"Then how on earth," I said, "did they find out?"

"They didn't. They never do find out things. They heard--last night. Somebody saw us."

"Withers?" I said. I'd thought of Withers at once. But he didn't seem likely. He wasn't back yet.

"No. Not Withers. Some women who knew my uncle, General Thesiger. They were in your hotel in Bruges, and they knew some other women staying in the _pension_. They saw my name in the visitors' book and it excited them. It all comes, you see, of my uncle being so beastly distinguished, so that they _had_ to say they knew him. And then of course the other people chipped in and told them all they knew about _me_. Can't you see them doing it?"

I could indeed.

"I never thought the _pension_ was a good scheme," she said; "but poor Jimmy _would_ make me go to it. He said it was safe. You see how safe it was."

I wasn't quite clear yet as to where Jevons came in.

"You say these people saw you. You mean they saw you and Jevons?"

She smiled more than ever. "No, Wally. It was _you_ they saw."

I don't know whether I was glad or sorry. I believe I was both. I was glad that Jevons--the ugly element--was disposed of. I was sorry--sorry, indeed, is hardly the word for what I felt--when I thought of the impression Viola's family had of me _now_; of the terms on which I should be received into it if I were received into it at all. I couldn't clear myself entirely, you see, without dragging in Jevons, and for Viola's sake Jevons had at any cost to be suppressed.

"What on earth," I said, "must your people think of me?"

She said surprisingly, "They think you a perfect dear."

"What, for carrying you off to Belgium? That's what I seem to have done. I don't quite see how I'm to get out of it unless we can persuade them that we met by accident."

"Oh," she said, "_I_ got you out of it all right."

I asked her, "How?"

She said, "I told them the truth. I said it wasn't you; it was Jimmy."

"What did you do that for?"

"Because it _was_ Jimmy I went off with. You're all right. They _know_ it's Jimmy."

I groaned. "That's precisely what I've been trying to prevent them knowing."

"They know that, _too_. I told them that you came out to look for me--like a lamb, to save me--and that you made me come back. They think that was dear of you."

She paused on it with a tenderness that touched me.

"You see," she said, "I've saved you."

I could only say, "My dear child--have you saved _yourself_?"

She was visibly troubled.

"I think--I _think_ they believe me. They say they do. But they don't understand. That's why I sent for you. I want you to make them see."

"Make them see what?" I said. (It was clumsy of me.)

"What it really was," she said.

I asked her if they knew I was there. She said, Yes, they were coming in to see me.

"They want to see you. They want to know."

I saw then what my work was to be. I was not only to witness to her innocence and Jevons's--if they doubted it; I was to show them what she had shown me in the garden at Bruges, the beauty of the whole thing as it appeared to her. I was to show them Jevons's beauty.

Well, I thought, it'll take some showing.

"Do they," I asked her, "at all realize Jevons?"

"Yes. They asked me if he was the man Reggie met at my rooms. Of course I had to say he was. It's almost a pity Reggie met him. That's what's frightened them. You see, he only saw the funny part of him."

(I could imagine what Reggie's description of the funny part of Jevons had been.)

I said she was asking me to do a rather difficult thing.

She said, "Yes. And I've made it worse by telling them I'm going to marry Jimmy."

"And I'm to persuade them that that's the best thing you can do, am I?"

She said, Yes--if I could do that--

I said I couldn't. I couldn't persuade myself. How could I, when I was convinced that the best thing she could do was to marry _me_?

She said she'd forgotten that and that I could leave the marrying part of it to her. "It's about Bruges," she said, "that I want you to tell them."

"I can't very well if they don't ask me," I expounded.

"Oh, but," she said, "they _will_ ask you. At least Daddy will."

* * * * *

It was at this point (when, I must say, we had thrashed it out pretty thoroughly) that Mrs. Thesiger came in. Viola left me to her.

I noticed that, except for the moment of Viola's formal introduction of me, neither of them spoke to or looked at the other.

I have said that Mrs. Thesiger was a charming woman. I may have said other things that imply she was not so charming; those things, if I really said them, I take back, now that I have come to my first meeting with her. When I recall that ten minutes--it didn't last longer--I cannot think of her as otherwise than perfect. It took perfection, of a sort, to deal creditably with the situation. Nothing could well have been more painful for Mrs. Thesiger. I, an utter stranger, was supposed to know all about her daughter, to know more than she or any of them knew. I held the secret of those dubious seven days in Belgium. That the days would be dubious I must have known when I set out to bring Viola back from Belgium. I must, the poor lady probably said to herself, have known Viola. And my knowledge of her, so dreadful and so intimate, was a thing she was afraid of; she didn't want to come too near it. But it was also a thing that must be exceedingly painful to me. She conceived that I would dread her approach every bit as much as she dreaded mine.

And so--and so Mrs. Thesiger ignored my knowledge; she ignored the situation. Beautifully and consistently, from the beginning to the end of my stay in Canterbury, she ignored it.

She had come in now to bring me her invitation, and her husband's invitation, to stay. Her husband, she said, expected me. He was out; he had had to go to a Diocesan Meeting--but it would be over by now, the tiresome meeting, and he would be here in a few minutes.

I protested. I had taken rooms at my Fifteenth Century hotel.

She insisted. They could make that all right. They knew the hotel-keeper. He was used to having people taken from him at the last minute. They would send round for my things. My room was waiting for me.

I said, Really?--But they were too kind--

She said, No. It was the least they could do.

This, with its faint suggestion of indebtedness, was as near as she got to the situation.

She must have sighted it in the distance, for she slanted away from it with a perilous and graceful sweep. She had heard so much about me from her daughter. She had wanted to make my acquaintance. She was glad of this opportunity--

(We smiled at each other to show that there was nothing to wince at in her phrase.)

I said I was glad of it too, and what a charming garden they had.

Wasn't it? And did I know Canterbury? I wished I did. Well--I would know it now. And if I didn't mind ringing the bell the butler would fetch my things over from the "Tabard." And so on, charmingly, till the Canon came in and relieved her.

She had done very well.

He, dear, charming man, did the same thing, and did it even better. That's to say, he had a beautiful voice and he was happier in his phrases. He could ignore with the greater ease because he wouldn't have to keep it up so long.

He kept it up till dinner-time. Only now and then his kind, keen look at me told me that he was going to have it out with me, and that he was measuring the man with whom he would have to do.

But before dinner they had taken me to my room. They hoped I wouldn't mind having Bertie's room. The house was full; all the girls were at home, so they had had to give me Bertie's room.

As I dressed in Bertie's room (the drawback of it was that it looked bang out on to the Cathedral Tower and was fairly raked by the chimes), with the Cathedral Tower before my eyes and the Cathedral chimes in my ears, and Canon Thesiger's beautiful voice and Mrs. Thesiger's beautiful face and the beautiful manners of both of them in my memory, it came over me with renewed conviction that Jevons was impossible; that Viola's people knew and felt he was impossible; that Viola knew and felt he was impossible herself; and that in the face of all this impossibility I had a chance. Bruges might back Jevons, but Canterbury would never back him; whereas it was quite evident that Canterbury was backing me.