Chapter VIII: Book II: Her Book (4)

"Your boudoir," he went on, as if she hadn't said anything, "is, if possible, more detestable than the drawing-room."

"I never said so."

"Precisely. That's my grievance. Why, in Heaven's name, didn't you say so? Why did you tell me that you _liked_ all these abominations?"

"Because they didn't matter."

"Why lie about them if they didn't matter?"

"I mean they didn't matter to me. They don't."

"My dear child, what on earth do you suppose they matter to me? What made you think they mattered?"

"The way you went on about them."

"Oh--the way I go on--Well, if _that_ matters--"

She rose. I think she had heard the tinkle of the coffee-cups in the corridor and wanted to put an end to what in any hands but Jimmy's would have been an unseemly altercation.

"Will it matter if we go upstairs?"

"No. Not a bit." He snapped and twinkled at the same time.

She went, and Norah followed her.

Jevons settled himself in an armchair. I saw how unperturbed and deliberate he was as he took his coffee from the tray, and with what an incorrigible air he jerked his thumb towards the staircase. I can still hear him call up the staircase in a magisterial voice, "The ladies are in the study, Parker." When we were alone he fell into meditation.

It was apparently as the result of meditation that he said, "I suppose it is a bit crude, if you come to think of it. Only why couldn't she say so at the time?"

I said I supposed she was afraid of hurting his feelings.

"My feelings? How could I have any feelings about a blanketty drawing-room suite? Does she really think I'm such a fool that I can't live without lions on my staircase? I stuck the beastly things there because I thought she'd like 'em. If I thought she'd like a tame rhinoceros in her boudoir I'd have got her one, if I'd 'ad to go out and catch 'im and train 'im myself. If I thought _now_ that the only way to preserve her affection was to wear that suit of armour every night at dinner I'd wear it and glory in wearing it. There isn't any damned silly thing I wouldn't do and glory in."

And then--"Her nerves must be in an awful state."

He meditated again.

"Tell you what--I'll get rid of this place. I'll let it go furnished for what it'll fetch. I'll only keep the things we had before--the things she liked. They _are_ prettier."

He looked round him with his disenchanted eyes.

"I can see it's all wrong, this sort of thing. It's in bad taste. Rotten bad taste. I suppose I must have been a bit excited about it at the time--I must have thought it was all right or I couldn't have stood it.

"It's a phase I've gone through.

"I can understand perfectly well how she feels about it.

"Fact is, I hate the place myself--the whole beastly house I hate. I've hated it ever since she was ill in it. I can't get away from her illness. I shall always see her ill. She'll be ill again if we go on living in it.

"I'm tired of the whole business--I'll let it to-morrow and take a house in the country.

"You might go upstairs, old man, and see what she's doing."

I went upstairs.

She was sitting in one corner of the study with a book in her hand pretending to read. Norah was sitting in another corner with a book in her hand, pretending to read. I gathered that Norah had been talking to her sister. I took up a book and pretended to read too.

Presently, when she thought we were absorbed, Viola got up and left us. Norah waited till the door had closed on her. Then she spoke.

"Wally--it's more awful than we've ever imagined. I don't think she'll be able to stand it much longer."

"Well," I said, "she won't have to stand it much longer. He's going to chuck the place. It's got on _his_ nerves, too. He understands exactly how she feels about it."

"Let's hope he doesn't understand how she feels about--It isn't the place, Wally."

"What is it, then?"

"I'm most awfully afraid it's Jimmy."

"Jimmy? You don't mean she doesn't care about him?"

"Oh, no, she cares about him, and it's because she cares so that she can't stand him."

"Well," I said, "whether she cares or not, it's rough on Jimmy."

"It's rough on her. It's rough on both of them. It's getting rougher and rougher, and it's wearing her out."

"Won't it wear him out too?"

"N-no. Nothing will wear Jimmy out. He's indestructible. He'll wear her out."

"He says he's going to take a house in the country. How do you think that'll answer?"

She shook her head.

"I don't know, Walter. I don't really know. It sounds risky."

"The whole thing," I said, "was risky from the start."

"There are two things," she said, "that would save them--if Reggie were to come round. Or if Jimmy were to have an illness; and neither of them is in the least likely to happen."

"There's a third thing," I said--"if Viola were to have a baby."

"That isn't likely either. He'd never let her. He says it would kill her. It's pitiful, it's pitiful. Can't you see," she said, "that he adores her?"

I said I didn't see what we were there for, and that it was time for us to go.

As I followed her down the stairs that led to the Tudor hall she paused suddenly on the landing where a second lion marked the turn. She had her finger to her lip. We drew back. But not before I had looked down over the balustrade into the hall and seen Jimmy sitting on one of the thrones with the lilies of France, and Viola crouching beside him on the rug with her head hidden on his knee.

He had his hands on her forehead and was saying, "It's all right. Do you suppose I don't understand?"

XI

It was late in August before Jevons found a country house large enough, yet not too large, and old enough, yet not too old--he would have nothing that even remotely suggested the Tudor period. And in the intervals of looking for his house he wrote another novel and two more plays. There was a decided falling-off in all of them, and I think Jevons himself was a little nervous. He said he'd have to be careful next time or they'd find him out. Once he had settled the affair of the house he would set to work and strengthen the position which, after all, he hadn't lost.

He had gained, if anything. Nineteen-thirteen stands as his year of maximum prosperity. Even the house in Mayfair justified itself when he let it, with all its principal rooms furnished, to an American railway magnate at a rent that enabled him to indulge the passion he had conceived for Amershott Old Grange.

He used to say he would never have been happy again if he couldn't have had Amershott Old Grange. Everything about it seemed propitious. They had found it by a happy accident when they weren't looking for it, weren't thinking of it, when they were trying to get out of Sussex and back to London after a long day's motoring in search of houses. Nothing that Essex or Kent or Buckinghamshire (Hertfordshire was ruled out by the presence in it of the Registrar) or Surrey or Hampshire or Sussex, so far, could do had satisfied them, and Jevons was beginning to talk rather wildly about Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and Wilts, and even Devon and Cornwall, when they lost their way in the cross-country roads between Midhurst and Petworth and so came upon Amershott Old Grange. It was hidden behind an old rose-red brick wall in a lane, and it was only by standing up in the motorcar that they caught sight of its long line of red-tiled dormer windows. The very notice-board was hidden, staggering back in an ivy bush that topped the wall.

"I won't have a house," said Jimmy, "that's a day older than Queen Anne." No more would Viola.

And the Old Grange was not a day older than Queen Anne or a day younger. It was the most perfect specimen of a Queen Anne house you could have wished to see--the long, straight front, the slender door, the two storeys with their rows of straight, flat windows and the steep brows of the dormers over them. It was all rose-red brick and rose-red tiles, with roses and clematis bursting out in crimson and purple all over the front. It stood at right angles to the wall and to the lane, and there was a long grass-garden in front of it, with walls all round and herbaceous borders under the walls; and from the high postern door in the outer wall opening to the lane a wide flagged path went all the way in front of the house to the door in the inner wall that led into the kitchen garden and the orchard. Further down the lane were the doors of the courtyard at the back of the house where the outhouses and the stables and the dovecot were; and beyond the courtyard there was a paddock, and you would have thought that was enough. But, besides his Queen Anne house and his gardens and his orchard and his courtyard and his dovecot and his paddock, Jimmy had acquired ten acres of moorland, to say nothing of a belt of pinewood that ran the whole length of his estate behind the kitchen garden and the paddock and the moor. And the whole business of acquiring this property went without a hitch. He took it on the long tail-end of a lease from an impecunious landlord who couldn't afford to keep it up.

He obtained possession by September and in the early spring of nineteen-fourteen he was settled in Amershott Old Grange.

They furnished it as they had furnished the house in Edwardes Square, with the most complete return to beautiful simplicity.

Jimmy polished off a short novel and a play between October and June, and kept himself going on the proceeds of his old novels, his old plays, and his old short stories collected in a volume. Then I think he must have sat down to wait events.

For when we went down to stay with them we found him waiting. He was entirely prepared for certain contingencies. If anybody knew anything about English social conditions it was Tasker Jevons. He had calculated all the chances and provided for the ostracism that attends the inexpert invader of the country-side. He was aware that there were powers in and around Amershott that were not to be conciliated. The very fact that their territory lay so near the frontier (Amershott is only sixty-seven miles from London) kept them on their guard. To any good old county family, Tasker Jevons's celebrity was nothing, if it was not an added offence, and his opulence was less than nothing. In settling among them he ran the risk of being ignored. But when it came to ignoring, Jimmy considered that success lay with the party who got in first. So before he settled he took care to diffuse a sort of impression that the Tasker Jevonses were never at home to anybody, that it was not to be expected that a great novelist and playwright would have time for calling and being called on, even if he had the absurd inclination. He had one solitary introduction in the neighbourhood, and he worked it very adroitly, not to obtain other introductions, but to spread the rumour of retirement and exclusiveness.

His arrival, preceded by this attractive legend, became an event. You couldn't even affect to overlook it. And if it was not possible for Jimmy to subdue his features to an expression of complete ignoring, he had got in so promptly with his attitude that it took the wind out of the sails of any people who were merely proposing to ignore.

Then, having come amongst them as a shy recluse, Jimmy began instantly to focus attention on himself. He hadn't been six weeks in the county before he had become the most conspicuous object in it.

I don't know how he did it; you never really caught him at it; and yet, when you came down to stay with him, you felt all the time that he was doing it; you felt a sort of shame (a shame that he couldn't feel) in seeing that he did it so perpetually and so well. He had a way of making his privacy a public thing. There was something positively indecent in his detachment; it advertised him as no possible immersion could have done. I've seen him lying out on his moor basking all by himself in the sun; I've seen him meditating all by himself in his pinewood; I've seen him sitting in his walled garden, with the apparatus of his business all about him, when you would have said that if ever a man's life was hidden and withdrawn it was Tasker Jevons's. And yet it wasn't. You knew it wasn't; and he knew that you knew. He knew that his gardener and his chauffeur and his butler and his cook and his housemaid and his parlourmaid knew that he was sitting in his garden writing, or meditating in his pinewood or basking on his moor in the sun, and that their knowledge penetrated to every house in the village, to every house in the county within a radius of twenty miles. And when he was not doing any of these prominently tranquil things he was tearing about the country in his motor-car.

I have never seen anything like Jevons's motoring. It was in this new aspect of his that he was, I think, most remarkable. I say he made his privacy a public thing; but in the furious publicity of his motoring it was the other way round. He turned the public roads into a private track through paradise. I do not mean that he was a road-hog; far from it. He had the most exquisite manners of the road, He would slow down for a hen in the distance and upset himself into the ditch to avoid a rabbit. I have known him (with his first car) give a lift to any filthy tramp between Midhurst and Portsmouth. I mean that the act of motoring transported him; and he did these things instinctively, mechanically, without interruption to his rapture. Speed and the wind of speed, the air rushing by like a water-race as he ripped through it, the streaming past him of trees and hedges, the humming and throbbing of his engines, were ecstasy to Jimmy. He had learned to drive the thing, and his sense of power over it gave him the physical exaltation that he craved for. I believe that when he sat in his motor-car, driving it, he was filled, intoxicated, with the pride and splendour of life. He had power over everybody and everything that lay in his track, except other motor-cars; and he exulted in his knowledge that he could annihilate them and didn't. He enjoyed (voluptuously) his own mercy that spared them. Through his motor-car he attained such an extension of his personality that he became intolerable to other people and unrecognizable to himself.

And yet I do not think that even at the height of his ecstasy he ever really forgot that he was Tasker Jevons, the great novelist and playwright, in his motor-car. When he drove you through Portsmouth or Chichester, or even through little Midhurst, you felt that he thrilled from head to foot with self-consciousness. He knew and had acute pleasure in knowing that people noticed him as he went by; that the tradesmen turned out of their shops to stare after him; and that everybody said, "See that chap? That's Tasker Jevons. He always drives his own car."

He owned that he enjoyed it. I remember the first time we went down to stay with them (it was in May of nineteen-fourteen), when he was driving us through Midhurst from the station, how he said to us, "I'm glad I thought of living in the country. It makes me feel celebrated."

We asked him if he hadn't ever felt it before; and he answered solemnly, "Never for a minute. Never, I mean, like I do down here. In London, if you do gather a crowd round you, you're swallowed up in it. Besides, you can't always gather a crowd. D'you suppose, if I were to drive down Piccadilly in this car--short of standing on my head--I could attract the attention I've attracted to-day? You saw those fellows come out and look at me? Well--they do that pretty nearly every time, Furnival.

"No. London's no good. Too many houses--too many people--too many motor-cars. You can't stand out. What a man wants to set him off is landscape, Furny, landscape. You should see me on the goose-green at Amershott towards post-time."

Well, I did see him on the goose-green towards post-time, and I saw what he meant. It was really as if I'd never seen him before properly.

Heavens, how he stood out! It was as if a stage had been cleared for him, and for the figure he cut. He was quite right. You couldn't have done it in Piccadilly, or even in the suburbs. And he wasn't in his motor-car, mind you, then; he was simply strolling over from his house to post a letter in the village on the green, and I do not know how he contrived to infuse into so simple an act that subtle taint of advertisement. There was no necessity for him to post his own letters, he could easily have sent a servant. But I do believe he couldn't bear to miss the opportunity of being seen. When he passed the Vicarage, the Vicar and his wife and daughters were generally in their garden, and they turned to look at his passing, and he was exquisitely conscious of them. The villagers came out on to their doorsteps to look at him, and he was conscious of the villagers. The geese followed him in a long line across the common and stretched out their necks after him, and he was conscious of the geese. He enjoyed the publicity they gave him, and he said so.

And I began to wonder whether the funny frankness that had so disarmed us was really as funny as it looked (the idea of disarmament, you see, was serious), whether he didn't say these things because he knew we saw him as he really was; because he saw himself as he really was, and couldn't bear it; because there was no escape for him unless he could make believe that he was in fun when he really wasn't.

I do believe there was a time (any time before his Tudor period) when he _was_ in fun, pure fun; and even through the Tudor period his enjoyment of himself was innocent. But as I walked home with him across his moor that evening it was borne in upon me that Jimmy's innocence was gone. Living in the country had killed it. I had never perceived so definite a taint of vulgarity in him before.

You would have thought it would have been all the other way, that living in the country would have made altogether for simplicity and purity. I believe that quite honestly he had thought it would, that he had come into the country to be purified and simplified, and to put himself right with Viola for ever. And the horrid irony of it was that the country didn't do any of these things to him; it complicated him, it saturated him with that taint I've mentioned, and instead of putting him right it showed him up. Quite horribly and cruelly it showed him up. I do not think there was a single weakness or a single secret meanness that he had that didn't suddenly rise up and stand out on the background of Amershott.

All through that summer there, quite frankly, I detested Jevons. I believe that Norah came near detesting him, that she felt something very like contempt for him.

And if Norah felt it you may imagine what Viola would feel.

She was with us one evening (it was June, I think, and our second visit), when Jimmy showed most unmistakably the cloven hoof. We had come in from a long motor drive, and he had made at once, as he always did, for the silver plate in the hall where cards left by callers were put, if any callers came. I can see him now, breathing hard. I can see the glance he cast at the cards, and the little jerky curb he put on his excitement--he had the grace to be ashamed of it. And then I see him holding four cards in his hand, sober and quiet and flushed like a man who has triumphed solemnly. And I hear him read out the names: "Lord Amerley, Lady Amerley, Lady Octavia Amerley, the Honourable Frances Amerley. _That's_ all right. I gave them three months."

And I see Viola look at him, taking in his figure in its motor-dress, and his face, with the foolish, weak elation he couldn't for the life of him keep out of it.

Again I see him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity--and I don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there--very spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party they took us to.

And later on--in the very beginning of July it must have been--I see him on his own lawn at his own garden-party, and--I didn't dream it this time--he was really dreadful. Instead of carrying it off with the levity that had so often saved him from perdition, there was that revolting triumph about him and an uneasy eagerness, as if he knew that his triumph wasn't quite complete. But the garden-party was, as he would have said, all right. They were all there, those people he had given three months to. He had pulled it off precisely as he had schemed and calculated. Those legends of his detachment and his hermit habits had been worked so as to excite a supreme curiosity--and it was being satisfied.

And I cannot tell you whether he was really altered, or whether he had been like that all the time before Amershott had shown him up, and none of us had seen it except Viola.

Oh no--it's impossible. He had altered. If he had been like this we must have seen it. What Viola had seen--if she had seen anything--was only the foreshadowing, the bare possibility of this.

Charlie Thesiger was at that garden-party (he had retired from the service with the rank of Captain).

And it was at the garden-party that I first noticed a change in his manner to his cousin's husband. He used to treat Jevons with a certain superciliousness, and with as much amusement, as much perception of his absurdity, as was possible for Charlie, who perceived so few things. Now I was struck with the correct young man's deference to his host. It was really as if it had at last dawned on Charlie that Jevons _was_ his host, and that he had other claims to distinction as well. The more dreadful Jimmy was, the more courteous Charlie showed himself to Jimmy. And this in spite of the fact that Jevons had a way of treating Charlie as if he didn't matter, as if for all recognizable purposes he wasn't there.

When I spoke of this to Norah, she said that Viola had told him that if he couldn't be decent to Jimmy she wouldn't have him there.

Well, there he was, hanging about Viola from morning till night; he had any amount of time on his hands now, and he spent most of it at Amershott. He was there when we weren't sometimes, so that we couldn't keep track of him. But his purposes ought to have been apparent to us. I think it was partly because he was aware of them himself that he went out of his way to be decent to Jimmy, almost as if he were sorry for him beforehand.

For it was evident enough that Viola liked his being there, and liked to have him hanging round her. There was nothing about him that shocked or grated. I've no doubt he made himself entirely charming. His manners could be as beautiful as any of the Thesigers' when he chose, and they soothed her. I think she had ceased to feel them as a reproach to Jimmy. She had given up _his_ manners, poor dear, long ago, as a bad job. It was as if she had slaked her thirst for the unusual. Some secret and strong revulsion had thrown her back on the people and the things that she had been brought up amongst and that she had run away from. When Jimmy jarred on her she turned to Charlie for relief. And, after all, as Norah said, he was her cousin.

I don't think we either of us saw anything more in it than that. Without some such reaction she must have surrendered to Amershott. She couldn't defend Jevons against that showing up. She couldn't defend herself against those revelations, she could only stand by and look on at his enormity and shudder. Unless she had put her dear eyes out she must have seen that in the country he was not only a bounder but a snob. And she must have writhed in feeling that to see him that way was to be a bit of a snob herself. She had accused herself of snobbishness long ago, before she married him, when, in order to marry him, she had burned her boats.

What could she do? She couldn't put her eyes out. But I believe she would have been grateful to anybody who would have put them out for her.

I can't tell whether she was always unhappy. I rather think she had liked Amershott, the house and the garden and the pinewood and the bit of moor, and I am certain that she liked motoring almost as much as Jimmy did at first. She could even take pleasure in Jimmy's power over the car when they were alone with it in the open country, when his pleasure had no taint in it. I've heard her say, when he wanted to run down to Chichester or Portsmouth, "Oh, for Heaven's sake, let's go somewhere where nobody can look at us!"

She must have regarded the open country as the last refuge of his innocence. For her, more than for any of us, he had lost it.

* * * * *

How far he really lost it we shall never know. Even now, with all my lights, with that intense country light fairly beating on him, I can wonder: Am I saying these things because I think them? Or because I believe I must have thought them then? And I cannot answer my own wonder. I remember how at Amershott, when I sat beside him in that car of his and watched his ecstasy, I used to pull myself up and say to myself, "You _know_ he isn't like that. Look at him--what woolly lamb could be more simple and innocent than he is now?" And if anybody had come to me and asked me if I didn't think that Jevons _was_ a little awful I should have said that if you were a little awful yourself you might think so, but not otherwise. My conscience has told me that as he became more successful I became more critical; it has even suggested that I may have been jealous of his success.

* * * * *

But that was in the days (they were comparatively innocent) of his first motor-car. Round that car there really is a light of romance and of adventure, a glamour that isn't at all the glamour of his opulence. In those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income. In June, at any rate, he was still the master of his car and not--as we saw him later on--its servant. There never was anything like that first fury of his motoring.

It couldn't last. He was wearing himself out. Those early excesses exhausted his capacity for pleasure, and when we came to stay with him in the last two weeks of July we found him apathetic about motoring.

But not about motor-cars. As far as the cars went he had developed into an incurable motor-maniac. He was never tired of talking about carburetters, and tyres, and petrol, and garages and gear. He dreamed of these things at night. Every day he invented some extraordinary contrivance for increasing speed and lessening friction. He knew all that was to be known about the different kinds of cars; and he would roll their names on his tongue--Panhard and Fiat and Daimler and Mercédès and Rolls-Royce, as if the sound of them caressed him like music.

And the first car which he had mastered--it was a comparatively cheap one, but it wouldn't be fair to say what kind it was, for the poor thing had gone to pieces under his hand in six months; he had served her, his chauffeur said, something cruel--that first car had been sold for a hundred and fifty pounds, and Viola was mourning for it when we came down in July.

We couldn't think why she mourned, for he had bought another. We supposed that the new car had broken down, for we were met at Midhurst station by the local cab proprietor. But we were very soon to know that nothing had happened to the new car, and that something very serious indeed had happened to Jimmy.

He had gone mad--you can only call it mad--over his new car.

As soon as we had tea we were taken to see it where it stood in the coach-house that served as a garage.

It was a magpie car--the first, Jimmy told me, that had appeared down in that part of the country--white, with black bonnet and black splashboards, and black leather hood and cushions; so black that its body, in the matchless purity of its whiteness, staggered you. Anybody, Jevons said, could have an all-white car, and it wouldn't be noticed any more than a common taxi-cab. But one magpie in a countless crowd of cars annihilated all the rest. Lemon colour was good and so was scarlet; but for effect--for sheer destruction to other automobilists--there was nothing like a white car with black points. It was, Jimmy said and Kendal, the chauffeur, said, a perfect car. From their tone you wondered what you had ever done that you should be allowed to approach and see it where it stood.

Where it stood, I say. You couldn't see that car doing anything else. It stood like an immense idol in a temple; and it looked as if all its life it never had done anything else but stand in its perfection to be stared at. And by its air of self-consciousness, of majesty, of arrogant power in repose, you gathered that it knew it was there to be stared at. The thing was drawn up at the far end of the garage, where no breath could blow on it, over an open pit. You knew that Kendal, the chauffeur, went down on a ladder into the pit to examine the secret being of the car; you knew it and yet it was incredible. You refused to believe that an outrage to which common cars were subject ever had been or would be perpetrated on this holy one. You would have said that no spot of mud or dust or rain had ever lighted on it; it might have descended into the garage out of heaven for any sign of travel that it showed. It was surrounded by I know not what atmosphere of consecration and immunity.

So that Norah's first question sounded like a profanity.

"What speed is it?" she said.

It might have been fancy, but I thought that Jevons's face underwent a change. I certainly saw Kendal the chauffeur looking at it.

"Speed?" he said. "Speed? Well--you _can_ speed her up to sixty miles an hour if you want to." (He seemed to say, "If she ever is speeded up," or "You jolly well may want.")

He ran his hand lovingly along the car's white flank as if it were alive and could respond to the caress.

"She's a beauty," he said.

The chauffeur looked at him again.

"You won't want to knock her about like you did the last one, Mr. Jevons," he said.

And Jimmy's face expressed a sort of horror.

The chauffeur looked at us then, and, if you can wink without any motion of the eyelids, he winked. He saw, and he was trying to indicate to us, the state that Jevons had fallen into.

It was infatuation; it was idolatry; it was the most extraordinary passion I have ever known a man otherwise sane to be possessed by. You would have said that that creature with the black-and-white body and the terrific bowels of machinery had some sinister and magic power over him. He loved it; he worshipped it; he was afraid of it. And when you think of how, as the chauffeur said, he had "served" the other car--

Knock her about, indeed! He daren't take her out of the garage for a fifteen-mile run without agonies of apprehension. He never took her out at all unless he was certain that it wouldn't rain and that there wouldn't be any mud or any dust or any wind (I don't know what harm he thought the wind would do her). Instead of taking her out he would spend hours in the garage standing still and looking at her, stooping sometimes to examine her for a spot or a crack on her enamel, but always with reverence. I believe he never touched her without washing his hands first.

We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn't been out in that car three times, though the weather was perfect. Jimmy never could see that it was perfect enough. If it hadn't rained for two days he was afraid of dust; if it did rain he was afraid of mud; what he wanted was one light shower to lay the dust; and when he got it he was afraid of another shower coming. And on hot days he was afraid the sun might do something. And he was afraid of _us_ all the time lest we should ask him to take the car out on a day that wouldn't do.

I do not know how or why he had come to look on that car as his god. It wasn't, I do believe that it wasn't, because the thing was valuable, because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself: "Motor-cars are perishable things. I did for my first beloved by my excesses. Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from motoring." And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune out of Jimmy's abstinence.

The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. (He too had come down for the last fortnight in July.) He was the only one of us who didn't protest, didn't clamour, didn't try to reason or to laugh Jimmy out of his insanity. And he went further. He refused to enter the car, to be taken in it on the few suitable days when Jimmy allowed it to go out. It was as if he were dominated by some scruple as morbid as his host's passion. We couldn't account for it at the time, for he liked motoring excessively, and he couldn't afford it.

I've wondered since whether this wasn't the way Charlie settled with his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency. He could eat Jimmy's bread and drink his wine and stay for weeks under his roof, since his necessity--the necessity of seeing Viola--compelled him, but to profit by him to that extent, to make use of Jimmy's opulence, was beyond him. His conscience may have even said to him, "If he loves his motor-car, for God's sake let him have _that_, at any rate, to himself."

And Viola seemed to share Charlie's scruple. She, too, shrank from using the new car. And I remember her saying to me one day as we crossed the courtyard and saw Jimmy, as usual, in the garage, worshipping his car, "I'm so glad he's got it. I think it makes him happier." As if she had confessed that it was all he _had_ got; that she was not able to make him happy any more; and as if, in some day of unhappiness that she saw coming, it would be a consolation to the poor chap. At any rate, as if she were not in the least jealous of the power it had over him.

So, that July, Norah and I drove with Jimmy when the car, so to speak, let him drive it; and Viola walked through the woods and over the downs with Charlie Thesiger.

We often wondered what they found to talk about.

That wonder, of what Viola could see in Charlie, and how she could endure for so many hours the burden of his society, was all that Norah had allowed herself, so far, to express. If she felt any uneasiness she had not yet confided it to me. As for Jevons, he tolerated him as you only tolerate a thing that doesn't matter. I think honestly that to both of them, Charlie, in any serious connection with Viola, was as impossible as Jevons himself had been to her brother Reggie.

So little did he take him seriously that at the very end of July he went up to London for the inside of the week (he went by train so as to save the car) while Charlie was still at the Old Grange.

* * * * *

It was the week of the international crisis, and European mobilization was occupying Jimmy's mind to the exclusion of other matters. Still, you could hardly suppose that it was the crisis that was taking him up to London. I remember thinking he had run away from Charlie Thesiger, because he bored him.

He left on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, and he was to be back on Friday, the thirty-first, and Charlie was to leave with Norah and me and our nurse and Baby on the Monday following, when our fortnight was up.

So on Friday afternoon I was a little astonished to find my sister-in-law, dressed in her town suit of white cloth, drinking tea at three o'clock before going up to London. She simply stated the fact that she was going up. Norah had said she might stay in our house and she hoped I wouldn't mind.

When I suggested that it would surely be nicer for us all to go up together on Monday she looked at me with a certain long-suffering expression that she had for me at times, and said that wouldn't suit her, since she had got to go to-day. She was of course awfully sorry to leave us, but Norah understood, and Jimmy would look after us very well.

No. She wasn't going up by Midhurst. She was going by Selham.

She rose. I noticed the impatient energy of her little hands as they knotted her veil under her chin. I looked up her trains and found that there was none from Selham till four forty-five. I pointed out to her that there was no hurry; she had missed the two fifty-five, which had left Selham fifteen minutes ago, and she had an hour to spare even if the car took half an hour getting to the station. (The day was fine and there was no dust. Even Jimmy couldn't have objected to her taking the car.)

But she said she hadn't missed the two fifty-five; she wasn't trying for it; and she wasn't going in the car; it would be wanted to meet Jimmy at Midhurst Station; and no--no--_no_--she didn't want a cab from Midhurst. She was going to walk.

I said it was absurd for her to walk four miles on a hot day like this, and she replied that the day would be cool enough if only I'd keep quiet. (She was still long-suffering.)

Then of course I said I'd walk with her.

But that was too much for her, and she stamped her foot and said I'd do nothing of the kind. She didn't want anybody to walk with her.

And when I inquired about her luggage--But I can't repeat what she said about her luggage!

Then she softened suddenly, as her way was, and kissed Norah, and said I was a dear, and she was sorry for snapping my head off, but it was all right. Norah knew all about it. She'd explain.

I can see her standing in the postern doorway and saying these things and then giving me her hand and holding mine tight, while she shook her head at me and smiled that little baffling smile that seemed to come up flickering from her depths of wisdom on purpose to put me in the wrong.

"The trouble with you, Furny," she said, "is that you're much too good."

She went; and we saw her tall, lithe figure swinging up the lane, past the courtyard and the paddock and the moor.

Then Norah plucked me in by the coat-sleeve as if she thought we oughtn't to be looking at her. We shut the door on her flight and turned to each other where we stood on the flagged path before the house.

"What does it mean?" I said.

"It means that she's at the end of her tether."

"The end--?" I think I must have gasped.

"The very end. She can't stand it any longer."

"But," I said, "she--she's got to stand it. After all--"

"There's no good talking that way. She _can't_, and that settles it. I knew she couldn't, once she got beyond a certain point."

"Do you mean to say," I said, "that she's going to leave him?"

"I--don't--know. I believe--she's going to think about it."

"But--it's out of the question. She mustn't think about it."

"You can't stop her thinking, Wally. She's gone away to think about it sanely. It's the best thing she can do."

"And you're helping her to get away?"

She was silent for a moment.

"I'm only helping her to think," she said.

I was stern with her. "You're not. You're just helping her to bolt," I said. "You're conniving at her bolting. You've lent her our house."

"Isn't it better she should come to us?"

"No, it isn't better. I don't like it. And I won't have it. I won't have you mixed up in it. Do you understand?"

"Dear Wally--there isn't anything to be mixed up in. We'll be back on Monday; then she'll only be staying with us."

"And till then--?"

"Till then--for Heaven's sake let the poor thing have peace for three days to think in."

"That's all very well," I said, "but what are we to say to Jimmy when he comes back this afternoon?"

"You say--you say she's tired of--of Amershott and wants three days in London to herself.--No, you don't. You don't say anything. You leave it to me. Vee-Vee said it was to be left to me."

"And _I_ say I won't have you dragged into it. Good Heavens, have you any idea what you may be let in for, supposing--?"

"Supposing what?"

I couldn't say what. But I don't think I really had supposed anything--then.

"You needn't suppose things," she said. "Vee-Vee would never let us in. Look here, Wally--you've got to trust me this time. I'm going to see Vee-Vee through, and I'm going to see Jimmy through; but I can't do it if you don't trust me. I can't do it if you interfere."

I said I did trust her, and that God knew I didn't want to interfere, but was she quite sure she was doing a wise thing?

She said, "Quite sure. Let's go and lie down in the pine-wood till tea-time. I wonder if Jimmy would mind us going into Midhurst with the car. We shouldn't hurt it, sitting in it."

We lay out in the pine-wood till we heard the bell for tea, which we had ordered a little before four, in case Jevons should wire for the car to meet him by the early afternoon train that got to Midhurst at four-sixteen.

The table was set as usual in the garden on the lawn in front of the house.

By four o'clock no wire had come from Jevons; so we knew we needn't expect him till a later train. He nearly always came by Waterloo and Petersfield and was met at Midhurst, which gave him his public. But he might come, as Viola had gone, by Victoria and Horsham and be met at Selham.

I remember saying, in a startling manner as the idea struck me, "Supposing he comes by Victoria?"

And Norah said, "What if he does?"

And I, "They might meet at Horsham."

"Why shouldn't they?" she said. "You don't suppose he'll eat her for running up to town?"

"He might," I said, "think it odd of her."

"Not he. The beauty of Jimmy is that odd things don't seem odd to him. Do you know where Charlie is?"

I didn't. We had finished tea before either of us had thought of him. We shouted to him through the open windows of the house, for Charlie had a habit of mooning about indoors till Viola was ready to walk with him.

No answer came to our summons, but it brought Parker, the butler, out on to the lawn. He had a slightly surprised and slightly embarrassed look on his respectable and respectful face, no longer demoralized by Jimmy.

"Were you looking for the Captain, sir?" he said.

I said we were.

Something grave and a little sorrowful came into Parker's embarrassed look.

"Didn't you know he'd gone, sir?"

I said I didn't even know he was going; and then I saw Norah looking at me.

Parker was trying not to look at Norah. He began gathering up the tea-things as if to justify his presence and explain it.

"When did he go?" I said as casually as I could.

"Well, sir--the cab was ordered to catch the four thirty-five from Midhurst."

Now the four thirty-five from Midhurst is the four forty-five from Selham, the train that Viola had gone by. We knew this; and Parker knew that we knew it. That was why, instead of stating outright that Captain Thesiger had gone by that train, he tried to soften the blow to us by saying that the cab had been ordered to catch it, and leaving it open to us to suppose that perhaps, after all, it might have missed it.

"Did he say when he was coming back?" I asked, again casually.

"He isn't coming back, sir," said Parker. "He's took his luggage with him and all."

"Of course," said Norah. "He's gone to see what they're doing at the War Office. He said he would."

But I knew and she knew and Parker knew he hadn't--or, if he had, it was only one of the things he had gone for. Because, if the War Office had been all that he had in his mind he would have told us, and Viola would have told us, and they would have gone openly together, instead of dodging about like two clumsy criminals, one at Midhurst and the other at Selham.

When Parker had left (he did it very quickly) Norah got on her feet.

She said, "Go and find Kendal and tell him to bring the car around at once."

I asked her what she was going to do?

"Do?" she flashed at me. She had changed all in a moment into a woman whom I did not know.

"I'm going to fetch her back," she said. She had wriggled into her coat. "We'll overtake her before she gets to Selham, if you're quick."

I looked at my watch. It was barely half-past four. Yes, if we were quick, if we started at once, if we let the new car rip we should overtake her on the road, or at the station before she could get into that train with Charlie Thesiger in it. I meant, and Norah's eyes meant, that we would stop her going with him, if we had to drag her from the platform.

We ran to the garage to find Kendal. The new car, the superb black and white creature, stood in the middle of the courtyard, ready to start when Jimmy's wire came. So far it was all right.

But we had reckoned without Kendal, the chauffeur.

Kendal, absolved from the four-sixteen train at Midhurst, was at his tea in the servants' hall, and at my summons he came out slowly, munching as he came. He was visibly outraged at our intrusion on his sacred leisure. And when he was ordered to start at once for Selham, he refused. There was no train from Victoria, he said, between the four-four that Mr. Jevons hadn't come by and the five fifty-two. _If_, Kendal said, he did come by Victoria, and he always came by Waterloo.

What was the sense, said Kendal, with his mouth full, of going to Selham when we hadn't got a wire?

The sense of it, Norah told him, was that we had a message--an important message--for Mrs. Jevons, which she _must_ get before she started.

At this Kendal left off munching and looked at my wife. Even in my eagerness I was struck by the singular intelligence of that look. There was nothing covert in it. On the contrary it was a most straightforward and transparent look. Kendal's knowledge--which might have sought cover if you had hunted it--had come out to meet ours on equal terms.

It only lasted for the fraction of a second. Kendal repeated firmly, but this time respectfully, that she was Mr. Jevons's car and he couldn't take her out without Mr. Jevons's orders, for if he did Mr. Jevons would give him the sack.

To which Norah replied that Mr. Jevons would give him the sack if he didn't, or if he made us miss that train by arguing. I told him sternly to look sharp. He looked it and we got off. I had begun to crank up the car myself while I spoke.

But he had wasted three minutes of our valuable fifteen. Though on the open road we speeded up the car to her sixty miles an hour, we had to slow down in the narrow lanes. Once we were held up by a country cart, and once by cows in our track, and Norah was beside herself at each halt.

As we careened into the station yard I thought that my wife would have hurled herself out of the car.

The station-master stood by the booking-office door. He had an ominous air of leisure. And when he saw us coming he looked at his watch.

He told us that we had missed the train by three minutes (the three minutes that Kendal had wasted).

I had jumped out of the car and was telling Kendal that it was all his fault, and that if he'd done what he was told we should have caught the train, when he turned on me as only a chauffeur convicted of folly can turn.

"Stand away from the car, sir," he shouted. He jerked her nose round with the savage energy of a chauffeur in the wrong; he seemed to impart his own fury to the car. She snorted and screamed as he backed her and drove her forward and backed her again.

And again he shouted to me. "You get in, sir, if you don't want to be left be'ind."

As he seemed to be animated chiefly by the fear of Jevons (whom, by the way, he adored), we could only suppose that his idea was to fly back to Amershott in time for Jimmy's wire.

On the high road past the station he took the wrong turn.

_I_ shouted then, "What do you think you're doing, you confounded fool?"

"Ketch the London train at 'Orsham, sir," said Kendal. And he grinned.

"You can't do it," we said.

"I'll 'ave a try," said Kendal.