I remember how, in one of those silences, Norah, who sat facing me,
leaned forward and addressed me. She said, "Mr. Furnival, you've come
from Belgium, haven't you? Do tell me about it! I can't get a word out of
Viola."

I supposed they hadn't told Norah. They had spared the youngest. She was
only seventeen.

The butler and the parlourmaid, standing rigid by the sideboard, looked
at each other in their fright. Mrs. Thesiger saw them and flushed. But
Canon Thesiger, who had his back to them, observed that Belgium was a
large order, and that Mr. Furnival would have to tell her about it
afterwards.

But there was never any afterwards for Norah. She said, "I believe
there's a joke about Belgium, and that Mr. Furnival's in it."

Viola laughed. It was, on the whole, the best thing she could do. If I'd
giggled, too, it might have helped, but I didn't dare to, sitting there
beside Mrs. Thesiger.

The Canon pushed a dish of chocolates in front of his youngest daughter
to keep her quiet, and then plunged like a hero into the tendencies of
modern music, which he deplored. He asked my opinion of Richard Strauss,
a composer of whom he was profoundly ignorant. Scarlatti and Corelli
tided us over dessert, and Purcell floated us tenderly into the
drawing-room and coffee. After coffee the Canon took me into the library
(he said) for a smoke.

I could see by the fuss he made about his cigarettes that he was nervous,
staving off the moment.

It came with the silence of the first cigarette. There were no
transitions. He simply settled himself a little deeper into his chair and
said, "I'm a little anxious about that girl of mine."

I said, "_Are_ you, sir?" as if I were surprised.

"Well"--he was evidently trying to steer between his decision to ignore
and his desire for knowledge--"you see, she's rather reckless and
impulsive."

I agreed. She was--a little.

"More than a little, I'm afraid. Do you know anything of this man Jevons
she talks about?"

That was masterly of the Canon, the subtle suggestion that Viola did no
more than talk about Jevons, the still more subtle implication that if
she _could_ talk about him all was well.

I said that Jevons was a very decent fellow, and added that Captain
Thesiger had met him.

It was mean of me to shovel the responsibility on to Reggie, but I wanted
to gain time, too.

The Canon remembered that Reggie had said something. And then suddenly he
discarded subtlety and told me straight out that Reggie had said Jevons
was a bit of a bounder, and he supposed he was.

I could see him watching me, trying to break down my defences.

I dodged him with "These things are comparative," and he floored me with
a sudden thrust:

"No, my dear boy, they are _not_."

He meditated. "What sort of age is he?"

I told him, "About thirty-one or two."

"Ah!"

And then: Did I know anything about the young man's morals?

I assured him I had never heard a word against them.

He looked at me keenly and I remembered the words of Withers which I
_had_ heard. Still, I knew nothing against Jevons's morals, and I said
they were all right for all I knew.

"Never mind what you _know_," he answered. "What do you think?"

I said I thought that Jevons had as clean a record as any man I knew.

"You mean," he said, "these things are comparative?"

I said I meant I only wished my morals were as clean. (I went as far as
that for Viola--to save her. Besides, there was Jevons to be thought of.
I was there to take a fair advantage of him, not an unfair one.)

He took another look at me that seemed to satisfy him, for he said:
"Thank you. That's all I want to know."

We smoked in silence. Presently we went into the drawing-room "for a
little music." Victoria played. The Canon and Mildred and Norah sang.
Millicent went upstairs to prepare a lecture.

When the music was over Viola and Mildred and Norah and I went into the
garden, and very soon Mildred and Norah drifted back into the house again
and left me with Viola.

She began at once, "Well--did you make him understand?"

I said I hadn't had much opportunity.

Did he ask me about Bruges? No, but he had asked me about Jevons. I told
her more or less how I had answered, and she said it was dear of me.

"But it's no use telling them anything about _me_, Wally."

I asked her, Had they said much?

She said, "No. It's what they think. Or rather, what they don't think.
They'll never think the same of me again. And they'll never trust me."

I said, Come, it wasn't so bad as all that.

But she stuck to it.

"There!" she said. "Didn't I tell you?"

Mrs. Thesiger from the drawing-room window was calling to us to come in.
The grass was damp.

"They won't trust me even with you."

I thought: "Poor little Viola--she's burned her boats with a vengeance."

Presently it was Bertie's room again, and moonlight, and the Cathedral
chimes. They kept me awake all night.

       *       *       *       *       *

Of course I hadn't made them understand. How could I? The peculiar
awfulness of their calamity was that they knew so little about it. They
didn't know, after all, what had happened at Bruges; they didn't know
what lengths Viola had gone to. And though they evidently thought that I
knew, that wasn't any good to them. They couldn't ask me what had
happened at Bruges. They couldn't cross-question me about Viola's
"lengths." I couldn't tell them that, according to my lights, nothing
_had_ happened, that Viola's lengths were not likely to be very long.
Besides, even if I had come with the proofs of her innocence in my
hands, and removed their private sorrow, that wouldn't have repaired
their public wrong. Nobody was going to believe in Viola's innocence.
Appearances were dead against her.

It was awful for them every way they looked at it; awful if she married
Jevons just because she had to; awful even if she hadn't to, so long as
people thought she had; awful if she married him for any reason; more
awful if she didn't marry him at all. And supposing she married him. They
might go on ignoring for ever and ever, but who else would, with that
marriage staring them in the face and perpetuating the disgraceful
memory?

It struck me that Viola herself must see that there was only one way in
which I could make them understand, only one thing that I could do for
her, and that I had come to do it.

The next morning I asked Canon Thesiger if he could give me half an hour.
He gave it with a sort of sad alacrity. I didn't anticipate the smallest
difficulty with him or with any of Viola's family. They seemed to be
looking to me pathetically to save them. I had every reason to know that
my one chance was good, and that poor Jevons, with all his chances,
wasn't anywhere. In fact, I found in that half-hour with the Canon that
my very fairness to Jevons had worked against him to abase him, while it
raised me several points in the Canon's estimation. He had seen what I
had been driving at. The cleaner I made out Jevons's record to be, the
better I succeeded in shielding Viola. He expressed in the most moving
terms his admiration of my moral beauty.

And yet (I suppose I must have overdone it) it was my moral beauty that
dished me with the Canon. I had reckoned, you see, without his, without
Mrs. Thesiger's.

I told him straight out that if he and Mrs. Thesiger would allow me, I
meant to ask Viola to marry me. His lip stiffened.

I said I hoped it wouldn't be a violent shock to them--they must have had
some idea of what I had come for.

He said, Yes. They had been afraid I had come for that.

And then--oh, it was a terrible half-hour!

They had been afraid, and they had talked it over. He didn't tell me all
they'd said, but I could imagine most of it: how they had seen that my
marrying Viola was the one way out for them, the one way out for her, and
how it had occurred to them that perhaps I didn't know what I was doing,
and how they had decided--dear, simple, honourable people--that it would
be very wrong to deceive me, and that in any case they had no right to
accept so great a sacrifice, even if it _was_ the one way out. I daresay
they said to each other that they couldn't put such a burden on an
innocent young man; it was their child's doing and they must bear the
whole ghastly ruin and shame of it themselves. They even went further.
What Jevons had done to Viola (they'd made up their minds about him) was
devil's work. What Viola had done to them was in some way the
expression--the very singular and unintelligible and bizarre
expression--of God's will. It was the cross they had to bear. God, I
suppose, knew the kind of cross that would hurt them most.

A great deal of this he did say to me. He said it very simply, without
phrases.

Nothing, he said, would have pleased them better than that I should marry
Viola. But--he didn't think that he could let me do it. If I had only
come to him three weeks ago--

He hadn't been able--naturally--to talk about it last night. He had hoped
he wouldn't have to say anything about it at all, but I had forced him.

It couldn't have been worse if I'd seen him about to put a knife into his
breast. I tried to stop him, but he would do it, he _would_ put the knife
in.

"We don't know," he said, "what may have occurred at Bruges."

"Nothing occurred," I said, "nothing that you need mind."

He said, "That's what the child tells me."

And I, "Surely, sir, you believe her word?"

Of course--of course he believed her word. Viola, he said, might keep the
truth from them if (he smiled in spite of himself) if she thought it
would not be good for them to know it. But she had never told them an
untruth. Never. She was--essentially--truthful.

"Only," he said, "we don't know what she may have been driven to. She may
have been trying to shield that man Jevons."

I said I was convinced that, technically, Jevons was innocent. It looked
as if he had been criminally reckless and inconsiderate; but he seemed to
have honestly thought that there was no harm in Viola's joining him in
Bruges.

But the Canon didn't want to know what Jevons had thought, honestly or
otherwise. Or what Viola had thought. "It's what they've done," he said.
"You can't get over it."

I said what they'd done didn't amount to more than, looking at the
Belfry. I could very easily get over that.

He said that I was an Israelite indeed. But the world wasn't all
Belfries, and we must look at it like men of the world.

"They travelled together, Furnival. They travelled together."

I said, "Yes. And it wasn't till they'd got to Bruges the second time
that Jevons realized that they never ought to. As soon as he did realize
it, he cleared out."

He did that too late, the Canon insisted. It was no good my trying to
shield Jevons. It wasn't easy to believe that Jevons was as innocent as
Viola, and, as nobody was going to believe it, the injury the brute had
done her was irreparable.

"Not," I said, "if she marries me."

He said, "My dear boy, supposing--supposing it isn't all as innocent as
you think? You can't marry her."

I said that made no difference. It was all the more reason.

All the more reason, he insisted, for her marrying Jevons.

That, he said, was what they'd have to go into.

But there I took a high stand. I said it was for me to go into it, and if
I didn't, why should they? If I believed in Viola, surely they might? If
I knew that she could do nothing and feel nothing that was not beautiful,
wasn't my knowledge good enough for them? I said, "I shall go to her at
once and ask her to marry me."

He got up and laid his hand on my arm. "No," he said. "Not at once. Wait.
Far better wait."

I asked him, "How long?"

He said, "Till she's had time to get over him."

Mrs. Thesiger (I had half an hour with her, too) said the same thing.
"Wait," she said, "at any rate, another week."

She had given her, as Jevons would have said, a week.

       *       *       *       *       *

I waited.

I stayed with the Thesigers a week. In fact, I stayed ten days. I got
used to the chimes and slept through them. I played chess with Mrs.
Thesiger; I played golf and tennis with the girls and the young
subalterns of the garrison; I played violent hockey with Mildred and
Norah; I walked with Viola and Victoria; I tried to talk to Millicent
(Millicent, I must own, was a bit beyond me); I played tennis again
(singles) against Norah, who was bent on beating me. We all went for
picnics with the subalterns into Romney Marshes and visited Winchelsea
and Rye. And in between I was taken by Canon and Mrs. Thesiger to lunch
or dinner or tea in the other Canons' houses, and was introduced to the
Dean and the Archbishop. I attended the Cathedral services to an extent
that provoked Viola to denounce me as a humbug.

I told her I did it in order to look at the finest spectacle of defiance
I had ever seen--the Canon in his stall in the chancel singing the solo
in the anthem with his beautiful voice, in the very teeth of disaster, as
if nothing had happened.

She said, "Daddy is beautiful, isn't he? He had a sore throat for a
fortnight after Aunt Vicky died. And he thinks this is far worse, but he
won't go back on me. So he sings."

I was sitting with her in the garden on the Sunday evening. I said to
her, "Viola, you were caught with the beauty of Bruges. Why can't you see
the beauty of all this?"

She looked at me with her great dark eyes (they were very young and
brilliant), and she answered, "Dear Walter, I've been seeing the beauty
of it all my life."

I was seeing it for the first time.

I made the most of it, of the Canterbury atmosphere. I sank into it and
felt it sinking into me. I was, as Jevons had said I should be, "in it."

And, as I made my running, I thought with some remorse of that
unfortunate one, languishing in Bruges on his parole. But Canterbury
would have been no use to Jevons if he had been there.

There's no doubt that I did something for the Thesigers in those ten
days. I had effaced Jevons's legend. I had even effaced my own legend
(for the scandal, if you remember, had begun with me). And the Thesigers
were tackling their catastrophe with dignity and courage and, I think,
considerable success. By having me there, by being charming to me, by
presenting me openly and honourably to all their friends, they gave
slander the most effective answer. People asked each other: Was it likely
that the Thesigers would receive young Furnival with open arms if young
Furnival had been the man they'd heard about?

At the end of my week the whole seven of them were almost merry. (I may
say Norah, the youngest, had been merry all the time.) My visit lapped
over into another week.

At the end of ten days my relations with Canon and Mrs. Thesiger became
so intimate that we could discuss the situation. They could even smile
when I reminded them that there was one good thing about it--Canterbury
didn't, and _couldn't_, realize Jevons.

They hoped devoutly that it never would.

And they thought it wouldn't. By this time, poor darlings, they believed
that I had saved them; that Jevons was an illness and that Viola had got
over him; that I had cured Viola of Jevons.

I believed it myself. She had avoided me most of the time; she had left
me to her sisters, particularly the youngest, Norah. And when I was alone
with her she was silent and embarrassed. I thought: "She is beginning to
be afraid of me. And that is an excellent sign."

The night before I left Canterbury I asked her, for the third time, to
marry me.

She said, "I know why you're asking me, and it's dear of you. But it's no
good. It can't be done. Not even that way."




V


The next day I went back to Bruges to release Jevons from his parole.

I found him sitting tight in his hotel in the Market-Place, waiting my
return with composure.

He had recovered in my absence and had been making the best of his
internment. He had written a series of articles on "The Old Cities of
Flanders." He worked them up afterwards into that little masterpiece of
his, "My Flemish Journal," which gave him his European celebrity (it must
have made delightful reading for the Thesigers). There was no delay, no
reverse, no calamity that Jevons couldn't turn into use and profit as it
came. Yes, I know, and into charm and beauty. Viola Thesiger lives in his
"Flemish Journal" with an enduring beauty and charm.

I said I was sorry for keeping him shut up in Bruges so long. He said it
didn't matter a bit. He had been very busy.

I thought it was his articles and his book (he had been dreaming of it)
that had made Jevons so happy. But I was mistaken.

We spent half the night in talking, sitting up in my big room on the
first floor for the sake of space and air.

Jevons went straight to the point by asking me how I had got on at
Canterbury.

I felt that I owed him a perfect frankness in return for the liberties I
had taken with him, so I told him how I had got on.

He said, "I'm not going to pretend to be astonished. But you can't say I
didn't play fair. I gave you your innings, didn't I?"

I said I'd had them, anyhow. We'd leave it at that.

He said, No. We couldn't leave it at that. He'd _given_ me my innings. He
could have stopped my having them any minute, but he'd made up his mind I
should have them. So that nobody should say afterwards he hadn't played
fair.

I remember perfectly everything that Jevons said to me that night. I am
putting it all down so that it may be clear that what the Thesigers
called the beauty of my behaviour was nothing to the beauty of his. Think
of him, shut up there in his hotel in Bruges, giving me my innings, when
he could have struck in and won the game without waiting those horrible
ten days.

Well, I suppose he knew that he had it in his hands all the time.

"You see," he went on, "I knew you'd got one chance, and I meant you to
have it. I meant you to make the most of it. There are things, Furnival,
I haven't got the hang of--yet--little, little things like breeding and
good looks, where you might get the pull of me still if you had a free
hand.

"Well, I gave you a free hand.

"You needn't thank me. I wasn't thinking of you so much. I was thinking
of Viola. I wanted to be perfectly fair to _her_. If there _was_ a chance
of her liking you better than she liked me, and being happier with you, I
wanted her to have her chance. I wanted, you see, to be rather more than
fair. If I was going to win this game I was going to win it hands over,
not just to sneak in on a doubtful point. I wanted Viola to know what she
was doing. I wanted her to see exactly what she was giving up if she
married me--to go home and see it all over again in case she had
forgotten.

"And of course I was thinking of myself too. I'm an egoist. For my own
sake I wanted her to be quite sure she hadn't any sort of hankering after
you."

I said if it was any comfort to him he could be. Viola hadn't any
hankering after me at all. This--if he cared to know it--was the third
time that I had proposed to her and been turned down.

He said he _did_ care to know it, very much. It was most important.

"I," he said, "have never proposed to her at all.

"That," he went on, "is just the one risk I wouldn't take.

"And there," he explained, "is where I've scored. I knew that Viola is
obstinate, and that if she starts by turning you down she'll keep it up
out of sheer cussedness.

"So I never let her start. Women," he generalized, "admire success. If I
were to give you your innings all over again, Furnival--and I will if you
like--you couldn't make anything of them with those three howlers to your
account. There isn't any record of failure against _me_. Good God! D'you
suppose _I_'d be such a damn fool as to muff it three times with the same
woman? Not me!"

I said he needn't rub it in.

He said he was rubbing it in for my good, so that I shouldn't go and do
the same thing next time.

"Because--_now_ we're coming to the point--there will be a next time for
you, Furnival. That's why I don't even pretend to be sorry for you.
There'll be other women. But there aren't any next times for me, and
there aren't any other women. This--I mean _she_--was my one chance. It
was pretty jumpy work, I can tell you, sitting tight and gambling with it
for ten blasted days. Any other man would have gone clean off his chump
with worrying over it. There've been times when I've felt like it myself.
It was infernal--when you think what I stood to lose."

I said that was all rot. It was his beastly egoism. He didn't stand to
lose more than I did.

He said it wasn't a question of more or less. And it wasn't his egoism.
It was his sweetness and his heart-rending humility. He'd stood to lose
everything. He'd be done for if Viola wouldn't have him. He couldn't look
at any other woman after her. And he put it to me: What other woman would
look at him? Whereas my resources were practically inexhaustible. Almost
any nice woman would know that I would give her what she wanted. And
almost any nice woman would give me what I wanted, too. When I insisted
that I didn't see it, he said I'd see it shortly. He gave me six months.

Viola, he declared, would never have given me what I wanted. I could
never give her what she wanted. And he could.

He said he admitted that it was odd that he should be able to succeed
where I failed; but so it was, and he went on to expound to me all the
reasons for my failure.

"To begin with, you're not her sort; or, rather, you're too much her
sort. You with your integrity are one of the beautiful works of God, and
she's been used to that sort of beauty all her life and she's tired of
it. But she isn't used to me. She never will be. She's never seen
anything in the least like me before, and she never will see anything
quite like me again as long as she lives. I'm the queer, unexpected thing
she wants and always will want.

"But let that pass.

"You couldn't get her because you didn't give your mind to it. You didn't
know how to get her and you didn't try to find out. You set about it the
wrong way. I told you ages ago that a man's a fool if he wants a thing
and doesn't find out how to get it. You should have begun by trying to
find out something about _her_. But you didn't try. With all your
opportunities you haven't found out anything. You don't know the least
thing about her. You don't know what she wants, you don't know what she's
thinking, or what she's feeling, or what she'll do--how she'll behave if
you propose to her three times running. She's told you things and you
haven't understood them or tried to understand. Because the whole blessed
time you were thinking about yourself, or what she was thinking about
you, or was going to think. Whereas I haven't been thinking about
anything but her--I've been studying her straight on end for ten months
and I've found out a little bit about her. At any rate, I jolly well know
what she wants and I jolly well know how to give it her.

"You see, I was determined to get her, and I left no stone unturned. I
took trouble."

I suggested that _I_'d taken trouble enough in all conscience. He
laughed.

"_You_ only took trouble to get her away, old man, when she wanted to be
here with me. What do you suppose I brought her here for? Would _you_
have ever thought of letting her come with you? Of giving her what she
wanted to that extent? Not you! You'd only have thought of shutting her
up and protecting her for your own wretched sake--which was the last
thing she wanted. She'd had about enough of that."

I replied that certainly I should have thought of protecting a young girl
before everything else; that it never would have occurred to me to
compromise her in order to marry her--even if I did find I couldn't marry
her in any other way.

I had hit him there. He was quiet for a little while after it. I didn't
look at him--I didn't want to look at him--but I could feel him there,
breathing hard from the shock of it, with his mouth a little open.

Presently he took the thing up again. He went on, placably, quietly
explaining. "I thought of protecting her too. Only I wasn't such an idiot
as to think of it before everything else."

"No. You were clever enough to think of it afterwards--when you'd got
what you wanted. When you had compromised her."

"I suppose you mean there was only one thing I wanted? There, Furnival,
you lie."

I said I only meant that she _was_ compromised. At any rate, that was
what it looked like to her people and to everybody to whom it mattered.

"If you will persist in taking the ugliest view of it, of course it'll
look like that. I can't help how it looks to a set of old ladies and
clergymen in Canterbury. Come to that, it matters a damned sight more to
_me_ than it can to any of you people."

I said he wouldn't say so if he knew how he had made them suffer.

He laughed out at that.

"Suffer? They haven't suffered a quarter as much as I have. Not a
hundredth part as much. They've suffered thinking of themselves--of their
precious respectability. I've suffered thinking of _her_.

"Suffer? I've been through all _that_. It wasn't right, Furnival, it
wasn't right for anybody to have to go through what I did. But I've come
out of it. You've been pretty hard on me with your infernal virtue; but
if you think you can make me suffer more, you can't. I'm past it."

I said I was sorry if I seemed too hard on him. But it would be well if
he tried to look at his really very outrageous behaviour as it was bound
to appear to other people.

"You admit, then," he said, "that it appears more outrageous than it is?"

I said, "You see, my dear fellow, I don't yet know what it is."

He asked me if I'd like to know what it was? And I told him that,
certainly, some sort of an account was owing and that he'd better perhaps
make a clean breast of it while he was about it.

Well--he made his clean breast.

He confessed that the sting of a great deal that I had said to him was in
its truth. I needn't be frightened. Nothing had happened. Nothing beyond
what I knew. But--there was a point, he said, when everything might have.
When he had meant that it should happen.

He hadn't meant it at first. Nothing had been further from him when he
let her come to Bruges. He had meant nothing--nothing beyond looking at
the Belfry. He had thought--as she did--that it would be quite possible
to be content with looking at the Belfry. That was where the damned folly
of the thing had come in. They began to be aware of the folly when they
found themselves going together to Antwerp. He wasn't aware even then of
what he meant. But he knew what he meant when he left Antwerp and took
her to Ghent.

Because he _did_ take her there. He meant--_then_--exactly what Viola's
father and her brother and her uncles and her male cousins would mean if
they took a woman to Ghent.

"I meant," he said, "to compromise her. But--here's where you went
wrong--I didn't mean to compromise her in order to marry her. I didn't
mean to marry her at all. There was a moment when I thought that marrying
me--tying herself up to me for ever--was a risk I ought not to let her
take. I thought--I thought I could make her happy without all that awful
risk. It seemed to me that after the risk we _had_ taken we had a right
to happiness. Certainly _she_ had. And I thought she thought the same.

"So I took her to Ghent.

"I say I thought she knew what I meant when I took her.

"I ought to tell you that we _did_ have rooms in the same hotel in
Antwerp and Ghent. There weren't any English there that mattered--nobody
that either of us knew.

"But when I'd got her to Ghent I couldn't--I don't know how it was--but
it came over me that I couldn't--I hadn't the courage. I think I found
out that she was afraid or something. We'd taken rooms in that hotel
you were in in the _Place d'Armes_. We were sitting together in the
lounge--you know that big lounge on the first floor with the glass
partition in it along the staircase--you can see people through it going
up and down stairs. She'd got up suddenly and stuck out her hand and said
good night. And there was a look in her eyes--Fright, a sort of fright.

"I saw her through the glass going up the stair. When she got to the
landing I saw her turn her head over her shoulder and look down into the
lounge, to make sure I was still there.

"She looked so helpless somehow--and so pretty--that for the life of me I
couldn't.

"No.

"I took her back to Bruges the next morning and put her in the _pension_
with those women."

I thought of the irony of it.

If Jevons had really been the blackguard he seemed we could have hushed
it up. If he hadn't repented, if he hadn't taken her back to Bruges and
put her in the _pension_ with those women, ten to one Withers wouldn't
have seen them and General Thesiger's friends wouldn't have heard of
them. I should have got her quietly away from Ghent without Canterbury
being a bit the wiser.

But I didn't tell Jevons that. I hadn't the heart to.

We stayed three days longer in Bruges. There were still some odd corners
of the city that he hadn't had time to look up.

Jevons was very kind to me all those three days.

After we got back to England Jevons's affairs picked up and went forward
with a rush. His novel came out at the end of May. In June he was made
sub-editor of _Sport_, and thus acquired a settled income. And one
morning in July I got a letter from Viola written at Quimpol in Brittany:

"MY DEAR WALTER:

"I married Jimmy five days ago. Nobody but Norah knew anything about it
till it was all over. But I wrote and told Daddy before we left England.
I'm afraid he's had a sore throat ever since. I wish you'd go down to
Canterbury and tell them that it's all right and that I'm ever so happy.
There really isn't any reason why Daddy shouldn't sing.

"As Norah says: 'It's his not singing that gives the show away.' Yours
ever,

"V. J."




BOOK II

HER BOOK




VI


I did not go down to Canterbury all at once. I was vowed, of course, to
Mrs. Jevons's everlasting service (I think I've succeeded in making
_that_ clear), but I could not--under the whacking blow of her marriage I
could _not_ do as she asked me then and there. The reminiscences of
Canterbury were poignant. I had to have a little time to recover in. And
in those first terrible weeks I didn't see why Jevons should have all the
amusement and I all the hard work and the suffering. I knew that Jevons
had suffered, too--quite horribly--but his anguish, after all, was a
thing of the past; while mine, in full career, devastated the present and
the future. I had done my best for them, and I could not share Viola's
view that it was my business to go on whitewashing Jevons for ever. There
was a limit, at any rate, to the number of coats I could contract to put
on him.

So I waited. I waited till they came back from their half honeymoon in
Brittany (a fortnight was all the editor of _Sport_ could spare to his
subordinate). Then at her invitation I went up to Hampstead to see them.

They had found an old four-roomed cottage that had once been a
labourer's. It was whitewashed (Viola was fond of whitewash), and all the
wood-work was painted green, and there was a strip of green garden in
front with a green paling round it.

A furniture van that you could have packed the house in stood in the
Grove outside it, and big, burly men in white aprons were taking
furniture out of the van and dumping it down in the garden. Some of it
wouldn't go in at the gate and had to be lifted over the palings.

Jevons in an old Norfolk suit and with his hair rumpled was standing on a
ten-foot plot of grass contemplating a bed-tester and four bed-posts that
leaned up against the palings in the embrace of a bedstead turned upon
its side, and Viola in the upper window was contemplating Jevons.

He called to her, "Have you measured?" And she answered, "Yes. He says it
can't be done. Oh, there's Furny!"

Jevons turned to me with a smile addressed to the bed-tester rather than
to me. Viola came down to us followed by a tall stout carpenter, visibly
her slave.

The carpenter was saying: "That there room is out by a good four
inches--by a good four inches 'tis. An' the way you've got to look at
it is this, m'm. Not as this 'ere tester is too 'igh fer that ceilin',
but how as that there ceilin' is too low fer this tester."

"Quite so," said Jevons. "And in that case you've got to raise the
ceiling four inches."

"No, sir," said the carpenter (he spoke severely to Jevons). "You 'ave
_not_. If I take you off a two inch from each leg of that there bedstead,
and a two inch from each of them there postsis, it'll be the same as if
the builder 'e raised you the ceilin' a four inch."

"By Jove," said Jevons. "So it will."

"Ay, and it'll corst you somethin' like four shillin', instead of p'raps
a matter of forty pound. W'en it comes to tamperin' with ceilin's, you
never know where you are."

"I don't know where I am now," said Jevons, "but it might be better to
leave the ceiling alone. They haven't started tampering, have they?"

"No, sir. They have not."

Viola ordered the carpenter to go into the study again and measure for
those bookshelves. He was her slave and he went.

"Jimmy's been going on like that all day," she said. "He's taken up hours
of that man's time. We shall never get him out of the house."

"I don't want to get him out of the house," said Jevons. "I'm awfully
happy with him."

He was happy (like a child) with everything, with his house and his
garden and his furniture, his oak chests and the dresser and the bureau,
above all he was happy with his bed-tester. He said be had never slept
under a bed-tester in his life, and he was dying to know what it would be
like--to lie there with hundreds of dear little, shy little chintz
rosebuds squinting down at you.

"You'll not lay under them rosebuds, not for a twenty-four hour--"

The carpenter had come back to us. He treated Jevons exactly like a
child.

"That tester can't be set up to-night. Not unless, as I say, you squeeges
of it jam tight between the ceilin' and the floor. An' _then_ you'll 'ave
to prise the ceilin' up every time you moves of it, else you'll start
them postsis all a twistin' and a rockin', an' 'ow'll you feel then?"

Jevons said he felt frightened to death as it was, and the carpenter
could have it his own way provided he didn't hurt the little rosebuds or
frighten _them_; and the carpenter sighed and said that the study was ten
by thirteen and would take a hundred and sixteen feet of bookshelves.

"Let's go and look at the study," said Viola. And we went and looked at
it. And the carpenter came up and looked at _us_. And the foreman and the
other men came in with furniture and things out of the garden, and _they_
looked at us. There wasn't one really large and heavy piece of furniture
except the four-post bed and the tester, and they treated the whole thing
as a joke, as a funny game they were helping two small children to play
at. And when Viola and Jevons ought to have been telling the men what
things were to go into which room and where, they ran back into the
garden to see what flowers they would plant in it and where.

Then they took me to look all over the house. It was an absurd house. Of
its four rooms there was one in front that served as a dining-room and a
drawing-room and a boudoir for Viola, and there was a kitchen at the
back, and a bedroom over the front room, and Jevons's study was over the
kitchen. Viola said there were six rooms if you counted the pantry and
the bathroom, and they were going to put a settee in Jimmy's study that
would turn into a bed when anybody came to stay. And Mrs. Pavitt knew
a nice woman who would come in and scrub for them, and sleep in the
kitchen when they weren't there.

They showed me the little bits of furniture they'd got. Jevons had a
passion for beautiful old things, for old rosewood bureaus and chests of
drawers with brass handles. She pointed out the brass handles.

I felt that the poor child was showing me her absurd house and telling me
all these things because there wasn't and there hadn't been, and perhaps
there never would be anybody else to tell them to. I thought of the
mother and the four sisters down at Canterbury and of the other two who
were married, who had been married so differently. There was something
queer, something wrong about it all. I believe the very workmen felt that
it was so and were sorry for her.

When they had all gone away at six o'clock Jevons and I took our coats
off and settled down for three solid hours to the serious work of moving
furniture, while Viola tried to find the china, to wash it, and sorted
all the linen and the blankets. And at nine o'clock we dined on bacon
that Jevons fried over the gas-stove in the kitchen and cocoa that Viola
and I made in a white-and-pink jug we found in the bath; it was a buxom,
wide-pouting jug with an expression that Jevons said reminded him of his
mother's sister who had brought him up. He said that jug was all that
Viola would be allowed to see of his relations.

I was left with Viola in the kitchen to wash up while Jevons finished
what he called his man's job upstairs.

She took advantage of his absence to implore me to go down to Canterbury
and make it right for her with her people. She said they'd believe
anything I told them and there wasn't anything they wouldn't do for me.

"Tell them," she said, "that Jimmy's going to be so horribly celebrated
that they'll look perfect asses if they don't acknowledge him."

I owned there was something in it. She said there was everything in it.
And I promised her I'd go and do what I could.

Then I went upstairs to help Jevons to finish his man's job. I found him
in the bedroom, making up a bed on the floor. The carpenter had taken
away the bedstead and the posts and left him nothing but the mattress and
the tester with its roof of rosebud chintz. He had propped the tester up
against the wall where he said he could see it last thing before he went
to sleep and first thing when he woke up.

The room was very hot, for he'd lit the gas fire to air the sheets and
things. He had thought of everything. He had even thought of hanging
Viola's nightgown over the back of a chair before the fire, and setting
her slippers ready for her feet. He had laid her brush and comb on the
little rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles, in the recess. He
had unpacked her little trunk and put her things away all folded in the
big rosewood chest of drawers with brass handles. He had hung the rosebud
chintz curtains at the window and fitted its rosebud chintz cover on
the low chair by the fire. And now he was kneeling on the floor, tucking
in the blankets and smoothing the pillow for her head. His mouth was just
a little open. And he was smiling.

You couldn't hate him.

He said he'd come and see me off at the Tube Station. But he didn't
start. He began walking about, opening drawers and looking at things.

Presently he gave a cry of joy. He had found what he was looking for, a
rosebud chintz coverlet. He spread it on the bed and said, "There!" He
brought in an old Persian rug (small but very beautiful) from the landing
and spread it on the floor by the mattress and said, "That's a bit of all
right." And he told me he was going to beeswax the floor to-morrow. There
was nothing to beat oak-stain and beeswax for a floor.

He stood there gazing. He was so pleased with his work that he couldn't
tear himself away.

He said, "The joke is that she thinks she's going to find this room
looking like a Jew pawnbroker's shop when, she turns in, and that she'll
have the time of her life putting it straight for _me_."

Then he took my arm and led me away, shutting the door carefully, so that
nothing, he said, should break the shock of her surprise.

But there was one drop of bitterness in his cup--"If only I could have
set up that tester!"

I said he'd had quite enough excitement for one day and that he really
must leave something for to-morrow.

On our way to the Tube Station I told him that I was going down to
Canterbury in a day or two. I told him what I was going for. He had been
so happy thinking about his house and his furniture and Viola that I
don't believe he'd ever thought about the Thesigers. At the word
"Canterbury" he thrust out his lower jaw so that the tips of his little
white teeth were covered (they always disappeared when he was angry).

He said: "Tell that old sinner I don't care a copper damn whether he
recognizes _me_ or not. What I can't stand and won't stand is the slur
he's putting on my wife."

       *       *       *       *       *

And that is more or less what I did tell him.

I wired to the Canon to let him know I was coming, and he replied by
asking me to stay for the week-end.

I found the family diminished. Mildred had gone to a case; Millicent was
away for her Midsummer holiday; only Canon and Mrs. Thesiger and Norah
and Victoria were left. They had the air of survivors of an appalling
disaster. The Canon and Mrs. Thesiger were aged by about ten years; poor
Victoria looked tired and haggard; even Norah was depressed. You felt
that the trouble in the house was irreparable this time. They had held
their heads up against the scandal that was supposed to have occurred in
Belgium; they couldn't realize it; it was the sort of thing that occurred
to other people, not to them. And, after all, they didn't _know_ that it
had occurred. But the scandal of a _mГ©salliance_ which really had
occurred in England three weeks ago was well within their range, and
it had crushed them. It wasn't, as Jevons cynically maintained, that they
objected to a _mГ©salliance_--any _mГ©salliance_--more than to the other
thing; I think they had never really believed in the other thing, and
this marriage, so far from effacing it, had rubbed it in, had made it
appear publicly as if, after all, it might have been so. It was not only
excessively disagreeable to them in itself, but it left them in that
ghastly doubt.

And this time they couldn't look to me to save them.

Still it was evident that they looked to me for something. I was tackled
by each one of them in turn. The Canon wanted to know if I had anything
to tell him. Mrs. Thesiger wondered whether Viola would have enough to
live on. Victoria, in the absence of her parents, took me into a corner
to inquire under her breath, "Is he really very awful?" Norah--she had
known all about it; they hadn't spared her, they hadn't kept it from her;
you couldn't keep anything from Norah; she had got it all out of Viola
the day before I came down the first time--Norah told me I'd have to make
her father ask them down. She took Jevons's view that it was the Canon
who was causing all the scandal now (only she called it fuss). There
never would have been any if Mummy and Daddy had had the sense to take it
properly and treat it as a joke. Nobody who knew Viola could take it as
anything else.

"But," she said, "if Daddy goes about pulling a long face and keeping up
his sore throat over it, everybody'll think there must be something in
it. I could have got it all right for them in a jiffy if they'd left it
to me."

"What would you have done, then?" I was really anxious to know.

"Oh, I'd have run round telling everybody about it--as a joke. A
thundering good joke. If they'd turned me on to it in time I could have
easily overtaken those shocking old cats who got in first. As it is," she
said, "I've stopped a lot of it--though Daddy doesn't know it--just that
way. You should have seen me with the Colonel and the Dean! But if
somebody doesn't stop Daddy he'll go and mess it all up again. Don't you
remember how he dished my game at dinner the first night you were here?"

Yes. I remembered. It came back to me, that startling indiscretion at
the dinner-table which was, after all, so deliciously discreet. Knowing
Norah as I know her now, I wouldn't mind betting that Jevons owes his
position, in Canterbury (and he has one) to-day far more to his youngest
sister-in-law's manoeuvres with the Dean and Chapter than to my handling
of his case--No; I'm forgetting what he does owe that to. Let's say,
then, his position in Canterbury yesterday--a year ago.

Well, I had an hour's talk with the Canon.

There was some awkwardness in having to point out to a man of his beauty
and dignity that his duty lay in any other direction than the one he was
so plainly heading for. I put it on the grounds of pity. I pleaded for
Viola, I said she was unhappy.

He replied that that was not the account she had given of herself.

I said, Perhaps not. But if she wasn't unhappy now she very soon would be
if he persisted in refusing to acknowledge them.

But his lip went stiffer and stiffer. He was too unhappy himself to be
got at that way. So I took him on the ground of expediency. I said after
all Jevons was his son-in-law. He couldn't go on ignoring Jevons. I used
Viola's argument. He wasn't dealing with an ordinary man. In a few years'
time Tasker Jevons would be so celebrated that it would be absurd to
pretend to ignore him.

The Canon stuck to it that he didn't care how celebrated the fellow was.

I said, "You can't keep it up for ever. You'll have to recognize him in
the end. You don't want to cut the poor chap while he's struggling and
accept him when he rolls, as he probably will roll."

The Canon said he wasn't going to accept him at all. He said that Jevons
rolling would he if anything more odious than Jevons as he was. He
couldn't forget what had happened. And that was the end of it.

I told him that it hadn't happened; but that to repudiate Jevons was the
way to make everybody think it had. And whether it had happened or not,
he must surely want other people to forget it. And once start the
abominable impression, Jevons's celebrity would cause it to be remembered
for ever, or at any rate for this generation. Whereas he could put a stop
to the whole thing at once by behaving as if nothing had happened. He had
only got to ask them down next week.

"Does _he_ want to be asked down?"

I said, No, he didn't. I told him what Jevons had said--that he didn't
care whether he was recognized or not, but that he "couldn't stand the
slur that was being put upon his wife."

I saw him wince at that.

"That's how it strikes him?" he said.

I answered that that was how it would strike most people.

"_I'm_ putting the slur on my daughter, am I?"

I was pitiless. I said, Certainly he was. If he persisted.

Then, after telling me that I had hit him hard, he fell back on another
line of defence. He owed it to his priesthood not to condone his
daughter's conduct.

"All the more--all the more, Furnival, if she _is_ my daughter."

I said he owed it to his priesthood to stand up for an innocent girl,
even if she _was_ his daughter. I couldn't see anything in it but her
innocence--her amazing innocence. I only wished I had his chance of
proving it.

He shook his head. "That's it, my dear fellow. We can't prove it."

I said at least we could believe in it and act on our belief.

He said it was all very well for me. I was prejudiced.

"My sort of prejudice," I said, "might work the other way."

"You must have been afraid, or you wouldn't have gone out to bring her
back."

"Jevons was afraid himself, for that matter. When things got dangerous he
took her back to Bruges and put her in a _pension_ to be safe from him."

He looked up sharply.

"She never told me that--that he took her there to be safe from him."

"I don't suppose she knew. She was as innocent as all that."

"And how do _you_ know?"

"Because he told me so."

I gave him something of what Jevons had told me, but not all.

"That," said the Canon, "seems to make him more credible."

I pictured for him the night of Jevons's remorse.

He said, "That's the best thing I've heard about him yet. You believe
him?"

I said, "Yes. The man is extremely sensitive and almost insanely frank."

I let it sink in. Presently he owned that it was the platonic version of
the affair that--as a man of the world--he had found it so hard to
swallow--"All that nonsense, you know, about the Belfry."

He meditated a while. Then he began to ask questions:

"Where does he come from? Who are his people? What do they do?"

I said his father was a Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths in a
village somewhere in Hertfordshire.

And then: "Is he--is he _very_ impossible?"

I said, No. Only from their point of view a little improbable.

He didn't press it.

"Well," he said, "it looks as if he was inevitable. I suppose we've got
to make the best of him. What do you want me to do?"

I said I wanted him to ask them down. Very soon.

He said, "All right, Furnival. I'll ask them down next week. But if I do
you must stop on and see me through. I won't be left alone with him."

I stopped on, playing chess with the Canon and lawn tennis with Norah,
who was more than ever determined to beat me.

And on Tuesday of the next week they came down.

       *       *       *       *       *

The whitewashing of Jevons had not been an easy matter. It took such a
lot of coats to make a satisfactory job of him. And it was not a job I
would have chosen. But I was serving Mrs. Jevons, and if my service had
demanded miracles I should have had to have worked them somewhere, that
was all. And perhaps it was a miracle to have turned Jevons out as a
morally presentable person according to the requirements of a Cathedral
Close.

But up to that Tuesday afternoon in August my private grievance against
Jevons remained what it had been. In his absence--even while I
whitewashed him--I could not extend a Christian forgiveness and
forbearance to Jevons, any more than Mrs. Thesiger could. I think I hated
Jevons. I ought to have hated him--by every glorious and manly code,
pagan or barbarous, I ought to have hated him. And I did--every minute
that he wasn't there. He had made me a figure of preposterous suffering.
Because of him I trailed a fatuous tragedy through the Thesigers' house
and over the green lawns of the Close, under the eyes of the young
subalterns and of Victoria and Norah. (Canon and Mrs. Thesiger I didn't
mind so much.) It mattered nothing that they were all extremely kind to
me, since my suffering was responsible for their kindness and Jevons was
responsible for my suffering.