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

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

I said it generally came from chill.

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

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

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

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

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

I looked on it as a madness that possessed him.

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




II


He recovered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He'd be writing plays.

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That pause saved them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That was as near as we got to him then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I mumbled something about his not meaning it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I asked her then, Was _she_ afraid?

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

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

"What sort of things?"

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

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

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

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

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

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




III


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I sailed that night for Ostend.

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

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

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

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

No trace of Jevons or of Viola in Bruges.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then I went back to Bruges.

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

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

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

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

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

Viola's was not.

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

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

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

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

Jevons didn't turn up for dinner.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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."