Well, on that Tuesday he arrived. He was asked for a week and he stayed
three days; and in those three days I had forgiven him everything for the
sake of his performance.

He arrived in the middle of a tennis-party.

The Thesigers hadn't meant to have a party. The subalterns must have
known that he was coming and turned up simply to look at him. (I wondered
afterwards whether Norah could have told them. She was dangerously demure
that afternoon.)

I ought to have said that for the last two days the Canon had been
preparing himself for Jevons by reading him. He had ordered--in defiance
of his political principles--the _Morning Standard_, and I had found him
reading Jevons's novel and surrounded by numbers of the _Blue Review_,
which, if you remember, published the best of Jevons's earlier work. He
had no difficulty in getting hold of them; his youngest daughter had been
able to supply him with more Jevons than he wanted. In fact, in the study
of Tasker Jevons the Canon was weeks behind the rest of his acquaintance.
There was hardly a family in Canterbury of any education in which Tasker
Jevons was not by this time a household word. The garrison club library
had bought him in quantities. The bookseller in the precincts did not
stock him (he was not allowed to); but he could order him for you, and
did. And the book-sellers in the High Street displayed him in their
windows by the half-dozen.

I have forgotten, in the blaze of his later fame, that (apart from this
purely local reputation) he passed in the provinces as a fair-sized
celebrity even then. Only, as Jevons judged himself at every stage with
accuracy, he hadn't begun to take himself at all seriously yet.

So he arrived in a perfect simplicity, without any of that rather dubious
aplomb with which he tried to carry off his celebrity when it really
came.

It was very nasty for him.

He had to come out of the house, following Viola and her mother all
the way to the far end of the lawn, where the Canon was ready for him
with a face which, try as he would--and he tried his hardest--he could
not unstiffen. It must be said of the Canon that he nothing common
did or mean upon that memorable scene; but he had--as Jevons said
afterwards--rather too much the air of walking up to the gun's mouth and
calling on us to observe how beautifully a Christian could die.

And there was Victoria standing beside the Canon and holding herself
well, and Colonel and Mrs. Braithwaite beside Victoria, trying to look as
if there was nothing unusual about Jevons or the situation. There was
Norah at the tennis-net quivering with excitement, and (by the time
Jevons had caught up with his convoy) there was Mrs. Thesiger alongside
the others, turned round to present him, and watching him as he came on.
Viola had turned and was looking at him too. And there were the
subalterns at the tennis-net with Norah, doing unnecessary things to the
net and trying _not_ to look at him.

I wondered: How on earth will he carry it off? How is he going to get
across that tennis-ground?

He was getting across it somehow, holding himself not quite so well as
Victoria or the subalterns, but still holding himself, coming on, a
little flushed and twinkling and self-conscious, but coming.

The situation was, for him, most horrible; but it was worse for Viola. I
wondered: Is she shivering all down her spine? Is she going to flinch?
Why _will_ she _look_ at the poor chap?

And then I saw. She was looking at him with a little tender smile, a
smile that helped him across, that said: "Come on. Come on. It's
difficult, I know, but you're doing it beautifully."

Well, so he was. He was doing it more beautifully than the Canon or any
of them. For that group on the lawn were like a rather eager rescue
party, holding out hands to a struggling swimmer in the social surf. They
expected him to struggle and he didn't. He landed himself in the middle
of them with an adroitness that put them in the wrong. What's more, he
held his own when he got there. He looked about as different from any of
the men on that tennis-ground as a man well could look. He looked odd;
and that saved him. They with their distinction had not achieved absolute
difference from each other. His difference from all of them was so
absolute that it was a sort of distinction in itself.

As soon as he got there Norah came up with the subalterns in tow. She
made a little friendly rush at him. She said, "I'm Norah, the youngest. I
expect Viola's told you about me. She's told me lots about _you_."

She meant well, dear child. But she overdid it. She hadn't allowed--none
of us except Viola had allowed--for his appalling sensitiveness. The poor
chap told me afterwards that he could bear up against the Canon's stiff
face and what he called Mrs. Thesiger's ladylike refinements of
repudiation, and the poker that Victoria had swallowed, but that that
kid's kindness, coming on the top of it all, floored him. He took her
hand (I think he squeezed it), and his mouth opened, but he couldn't
speak; he just breathed hard and flushed furiously; and his eyes looked
as if he were going to cry. But of course he didn't cry. He was, he said,
far too much afraid of the subalterns.

It was a good thing, perhaps, after all, that it took him that way. His
emotion made him quiet and subdued; it toned him down, so that he started
well from the very beginning.

After tea he recovered and talked to the Colonel and the subalterns while
the rest of us listened. He said, I remember, that the building of
Dreadnoughts was of more importance to the country than Disestablishment.
And even more important than the building of Dreadnoughts was the
building of submarines. The submarine was the ship of the future. There
should be, he said, at least fifty submarines for every Dreadnought
turned out.

That made them all sit up. (It was not a platitude in nineteen-six, but a
prophecy.) The Colonel and the subalterns hung on his words; and when the
Canon saw them hanging, his mouth began to relax a little of its own
accord. In his first hour Jevons had scored, notably.

It was as if he had said to himself, "I'll bring these people round, see
if I don't. I give myself an hour."

Dinner passed without any misadventure, but you could see that he was
careful. Also you could see by his twinkle that he was amusing himself by
his own precautions, as if, again, he had said to himself, "They're all
expecting me to make noises over my soup, and they'll be disappointed. I
just won't make any."

We had coffee in the garden afterwards. And it was then that the Canon
asked him what his politics were?

Jevons said he had no politics. Or rather, he had a great many politics.
He was a sort of Socialist in time of peace and a red-hot Imperialist in
time of war, and a Tory for purposes of Tariff Reform, and a Liberal when
it came to Home Rule.

And when the Canon objected that you couldn't run a Government on those
lines, little Jevons told him that that was precisely how Governments
were run. It was a fallacy to suppose that Oppositions didn't rule.

And again he scored. He did it all with a twinkling, dimpling urbanity
and deprecation, as if the Canon had been a beautiful lady he was paying
court to, as if he thought it was rather a pity that beauty should lower
itself to talk politics; but since he insisted on politics, he should
have them; as if, in short, he loved the Canon, but didn't take him very
seriously.

Yes; he certainly scored. He gave Viola no cause to flinch.

That evening comes back to me by bits. It must have been that evening
that the Canon walked round the garden with me. I see him walking round
and round, with Norah hanging on to his arm, teasing him and chattering.
I hear her crying out suddenly with no relevance, "Hasn't he got stunning
eyes, Daddy?" and the Canon saying that Jevons's eyes would look better
in a pair of earrings than in Jevons's head, and her answering, "Wouldn't
I like to wear them!" I see his little mock shiver (as if he felt that it
was those great chunks of unsuitable sapphire that had charmed Viola
across the Channel), and Norah's funny face as she said, "Oh, come, he
isn't half bad."

That night he called me into the library when they had all gone to bed.
Clearly he wanted to know how it had gone off--how he, in particular, had
behaved. I assured him that his behaviour had been perfect. And I asked
him what he thought of Jevons?

He said, "Well--he might be worse. He might be much, much worse. He's a
clever chap. Where does he get it all from?"

But I noticed that the next day he shut himself up in his library
all morning, was silent at lunch, and never emerged properly till
dinner-time. Mrs. Thesiger also fought shy of her son-in-law.

Norah and Victoria took him by turns that day. I noticed that he got on
very well with Norah. She knocked balls over the net for him all morning.
(He couldn't play, but professed a great eagerness to learn.) In the
afternoon Victoria took him to look at the Cathedral and the old quarters
of the town. In the evening, after dinner, we all sat out in the garden.
Canon and Mrs. Thesiger soon left us; Victoria followed them; and Viola
and Norah and Jevons and I sat on till long after dark.

Viola and Norah, I remember, sat close together on the long seat under
the elm tree. Jevons was on the other side of Viola. I sat on a cushion
at her feet.

The night had a rhythm in it. Stillness and peace. The Cathedral chimes.
Stillness and peace again. And there was a smell of cut lawn grass with
dew on it from the ground, and of roses from the borders, and of lichen
and moss and crumbling mortar from the walls. Sometimes these smells
pierced the peace like sound; and sometimes they gathered close and
wrapped us like warmth.

Then Jevons spoke.

"All this," he said, "is very beautiful. Very beautiful indeed."

And Viola sighed.

"Yes, Yes," she said. "I suppose it _is_ beautiful."

"You _know_ it is," he said.

"I know all right. But I don't think I can see it as you do. I've been
shut up in it so long. It's all this that you've taken me out of."

"It's all this," he said, "that's made you what you are."

"It isn't. This isn't really me. It's just Them. I'm what I've made
myself. I'm what you've made me. I'm uglier than they are. I'm uglier
than anything here, but I'm much, much more alive."

"You surely don't suggest," said Jevons, "that I've made you uglier?"

"You've made me stronger and cleverer and bigger--ever so much bigger
than I was."

"Much better in every way," I said, "than your youngest sister here,
hasn't he?"

"Poor little Norah! I didn't mean that--you beast--Furny!--Of course I
didn't. Jimmy--what _did_ I mean?"

He said nothing. But I heard an inarticulate murmur, and I saw that in
the darkness his arm went round her and drew her closer.

And that, God forgive him, was his heaviest score up till now.

In two days he had absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere. He was in it. In
it as I wasn't and couldn't be.

And the next day Canon and Mrs. Thesiger took him in hand by turns. The
Canon showed him the town all over again all morning. And in the
afternoon Mrs. Thesiger showed him the Cathedral all over again; and took
him with her to the service. And all dinner-time Jevons was very pensive
and subdued.

After dinner the Canon talked to Jevons about his novel. (He had retired
into his library all afternoon in order to finish it.) He asked him why
he had chosen an ugly subject when he might have found a beautiful one?

And Jevons was more pensive than ever. He said, "Well--that's a
question--"

He couldn't tell the Canon why he'd chosen it. He couldn't disclose to
him his plan of campaign.

"You see, sir, I haven't seen many beautiful things."

He still pondered. Then he said, very slowly, as if he dragged it
out of himself with difficulty, "That book was written--written in my
head--before I knew my wife."

You could literally see his score running up. By nine o'clock the Canon
and Mrs. Thesiger had roped him into their game of whist.

I sat out with Viola and Norah in the garden, when Norah told us that she
thought Jimmy was a dear. She was the only one of them that called him
Jimmy.

About ten o'clock next morning Viola came to me and asked me to go up to
Jimmy, in his room. He wanted to speak to me.

I found him packing, packing with a sort of precise and concentrated
fury.

He was going. Going up to town. He had torn through Canterbury, eaten his
way through Canterbury, through the beauty and peace of it; he had
absorbed and assimilated it in three days. And he had had enough. If he
stayed in it another hour the beauty and the peace of it would kill him.
The Canon's beauty was, he said, adorable; so was Mrs. Thesiger's.

"But if I stay here I shall ruin it. I can't," he said, "go on giving
that dear old clergyman clergyman's sore throat. I frighten him so that
he can't sing. He doesn't know what to do with me, or say to me. He
doesn't know what to call me. He can't call me Jevons, and he won't
call me Jimmy, and he knows it would be ridiculous to call me James.
Besides, he agitates me and makes me drop my aitches.

"So I've had a wire. You'll explain to him the sort of wire I've had."

"And Viola?" I said. "Is she going too?"

"No. Viola's going to stay till our week's up. By that time she'll be
bored stiff and longing to get back to me."

       *       *       *       *       *

He went, and I'm not at all sure that he didn't score by going.

And that night and the next and the next I thought of little Jevons alone
in his little house in Hampstead, lying all by himself in his four-post
bed between his rosebud chintz curtains and under his rosebud chintz
tester, and saying to himself that he had scored.




VII


The Thesigers lived to be grateful to me for reconciling them to Jevons,
if it was I who reconciled them. I don't think Mrs. Thesiger ever really
forgave him, ever really liked him till the end; but the Canon very soon
owned to a surreptitious regard for him. Luckily he acquired it while
Jevons was still struggling, otherwise I do not think I could have saved
their faces.

In the first year of his marriage Jevons made them see how right I was
when I told them it would be impossible to ignore him. In the second year
they saw that he had only just given them time to come round before it
was too late. The minute he became prosperous it would have been too
late, much too late for their dignity and beauty. And yet they couldn't
very well have gone on repudiating Viola for ever. A year would have seen
them through that attitude. And Jevons's great _coup_ had come off in
the year he "gave" it; so that if they had been left to themselves their
revulsion of tenderness must have coincided with his prosperity. They
would have had every appearance of having surrendered to his income.

And they would have missed the spectacle of his struggle.

I believe it was his struggle, the doggedness, the heroism, the wild
humour that he put into it that brought them round. They didn't like his
early celebrity and they deplored the cause of it--his first novel.

That book justified everything that Jevons had said of it. It did
startle. It did arrest. It _was_ unpleasant. So vividly and powerfully
unpleasant that it nailed your eyes to it and kept them there. It made a
break and a stain in your memory.

When I say it was unpleasant I mean, and he meant, not that it was
unclean, but that it was brutal. I shall have written this tale to very
little purpose if it isn't transparent that Jevons's mind, Jevons's whole
nature was scrupulously clean. Even his brutality was not spontaneous.
He broke his neck to get it. You could see him putting his tongue out as
he laboured the brutality. You could see him sweating as he went over it
again, removing all the marks of labour, making for his effect of
sincerity and gorgeous simplicity and ease.

I've said it's doubtful how far Jevons took himself seriously. He
certainly had no illusions as to the nature of his success. But whenever
I come to this side of him I feel myself untrustworthy. I cannot see him
properly. I am prejudiced by knowing him so well. I daresay if I hadn't
known him, if he hadn't been so frank in his disclosures, if he hadn't
explained so many times the deliberate calculations of his method, I
should think him a great novelist. I daresay to a generation that knows
nothing about him or his disclosures or his method he will seem a great
novelist again. I daresay he _is_ a great novelist. I don't know.

Anyhow there were three great stages in his career: the Slow Advance; the
Grand Attack; and Victory. (He had been advancing slowly ever since the
day I met him on the football-ground at Blackheath).

All these stages are marked for me by the increasing size and splendour
of the houses that he occupied in turn; the four-roomed cottage at
Hampstead; the little house in Edwardes Square; the large house in
Mayfair; the still larger country house he acquired last of all. And the
Jevons I like to think of is the Jevons of the little whitewashed
cottage, of the whitewashed rooms, the one sitting-room where we dined;
the kitchen at the back where we cooked and washed up; the absurd little
bedroom in the front where the four-post bed was set up like a tent with
its curtains and its tester; the study at the back where Jevons worked
and Norah Thesiger slept when she came to stay. I remember Jevons darting
from the kitchen and the dining-room with steaming dishes in his hands;
Jevons with a pipe in his mouth and his feet on the chimney-piece,
talking, talking, talking about anything--Dreadnoughts, submarines, the
War (he had given it nine years now)--from nine till eleven, and then
flinging himself out of his chair to turn the settee into a bed for the
Kiddy. Whatever he was saying or doing, in the middle of a calculation,
he would break off at eleven and drag sheets and blankets out of a
coffin-like box under the settee and make up the Kiddy's little bed for
her, because Kiddies must on no account be allowed to sit up late at
night. I remember Viola and Norah coming in to help and Jevons shooing
them away. And Norah would come back again and put her head round the
door and look at him where he knelt on the floor absurdly, tucking in
blankets and breathing hard as he tucked. And she would say, "Look at
him. Isn't he sweet?" as if Jevons had been a rabbit or a guinea-pig, and
go away again.

Somehow I always see him like that, making beds, stooping over something,
doing something for one of them or for me.

Sometimes they would burst in on him suddenly in his bedmaking and throw
pillows at him, or it might be sponges, and there would be madness: two
girls running amok and little Jevons flying before them through the
house and squealing in his excitement. Once he went out to post a letter
in the Grove before midnight and they locked him out and looked at him
from the window of the front bedroom and defied him to enter, and he
skipped round to the back and climbed up by the water-butt on to the
drainpipe of the bathroom, and from the drainpipe, perilously, in through
the window of his study, where they found him putting hair-brushes in
Norah's bed.

After the drainpipe adventure (when they saw how game he was) they
sobered down. I think it was that night that Norah said, "We mustn't
_kill_ Jimmy. That would never do."

And there would be theatre-parties when Jimmy had tickets given him, and
eighteenpenny dinners at the "Petit Riche," going and returning by the
Hampstead Tube.

It seems to me that Norah must have stayed a great deal with them at
Hampstead, and yet she couldn't have; they were only two years in the
little four-roomed house. Anyhow, we were all immensely happy in those
two years; even I was happy. Jevons I know was--and Viola. Viola had
never been so happy in her life. She cooked: she washed up with Jimmy to
help her; she mended his clothes and made her own; she did his
typewriting; she took down his articles in shorthand and typed them; and
through all his funny little social lapses she adored him.

When you think of it, poverty and close quarters for two years, and the
menace of some of those lapses hanging over her all the time--it was a
pretty severe test. You would have said that if she could stand that she
could stand anything, and she certainly stood it.

But Jimmy hadn't begun yet to unbend. He was still on the defensive,
holding himself in, every nerve strung up to the Grand Attack. This
tension affected his behaviour. He knew his danger. He knew there were
certain gestures that he must restrain, and he restrained them; there
were certain things he did with spoons and forks and table napkins that
would wreck him if he were caught doing them, and in those two years he
kept a very sharp look-out. You would have thought that this life, on the
edge of an abyss, with full knowledge of his danger, would have made him
nervous and produced the very disaster that he dreaded. But no. Jevons
was a fighting man, and he rose to these crises and prevailed. You felt
that for him the real test would come when he was prosperous, when the
strain was taken off him and he let himself go.

Meanwhile it was terrifying to see him balancing himself on the edge.

       *       *       *       *       *

They moved into the Edwardes Square house in the September quarter
of nineteen-eight. This was the year of the weeks of consolidation,
his second novel and his "Journal," that were to precede the Grand
Attack. The novel did exactly what he said it would. It did counteract
the effect its predecessor; and the "Journal" gave him a place in
_Belles-Lettres_ where he was safe from the legend of his own brutality.

But it strained his relations with the Thesigers for the time being. The
Rosalind of the "Journal" is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful
to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said
to have travelled together before they were married. Her figure moves
through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an
adorable innocence and naГЇvetГ©, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the
Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy
and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender
than the Viola he knew. You couldn't say she wasn't charming. The Canon
couldn't say it; what he did say was that Jevons should have kept her out
of it. Jevons's defence was that if he had kept her out of it there
wouldn't have been any book.

But he never did it again. Having once for all drawn her portrait as a
young girl, he left it, as if he would have kept her youth immortal. You
will not find any woman of his novels who suggests even a fugitive
likeness to the Viola he married.

The house in Edwardes Square stands for the second period: the period of
sober energy that led up to the Grand Attack. It was also the period of
deliberate yet vehement refinement. Jevons was determined at all cost to
be refined. And at considerable cost, with white-painted panelling
throughout, with blue-and-white Chinese vases here and there, and more
and more Bokhara rugs everywhere, and tussore silk curtains in the
windows and every stick of furniture chosen for its premeditated
chastity, the little brown house was made to serve him as a holy
standard. He said he had only got to live up to it and he would be all
right.

And so, in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his
surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the
diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers
laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at
the back. I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his
beginnings, how he did it so well. Of course he gave Viola a free hand,
he let her have what she wanted; but when I complimented her on any
result she let me know at once that it was Jimmy's doing. She was
pathetically anxious that I should see that he knew how. She let me know,
too, the secret of his passionate absorption in gardens and interiors,
lest I should think it argued any unmanliness in him.

I remember so well her showing me that house in Edwardes Square. I had
called one afternoon when I had known that Jevons wasn't there. I had
left him at his club in Dover Street. (He had a club in Dover Street now;
it was my club; I had put him up for it. He enjoyed his club as he
enjoyed everything else that he had acquired by conquest; his membership
marked another step in his advance, another strip of alien territory
gained. And he had chosen this club, he said, because most of the members
had retired, to cultivate adipose tissue on pensions, and they made him
feel adolescent and slender and energetic.) I had left him in the library
writing letters (he said he found a voluptuous pleasure in writing
letters on the club paper under that irreproachable address), and I
rushed off in a taxi to Viola in Edwardes Square.

She was very glad to see me, and she gave me tea, poured out of an
early eighteenth-century silver teapot, in beautiful old blue-and-white
Chinese teacups. She wore one of those absurd narrow coats with tails
that made women look like long, slender birds that year, and she had done
something unexpected with her hair; it was curls, curls, curls all over,
the way they did it then, and she sat on a wine-coloured sofa with a
wine-coloured rug at her feet.

She began straight away by talking about Jimmy's last book, the
"Journal."

"Don't you see _now_," she said, "why I went out to him, and how
beautiful it all was?"

I asked her did she think I'd ever doubted? She said: "No. But Daddy
hates the book. So does Mummy. They all hate it except Norah and me. I'm
glad he wrote it. I'm glad he put me into it. I never knew I was so nice,
did you?"

"Oh, come," I said, "surely I always knew?"

But she didn't pay any attention to me. She didn't care to know what I
thought or what I knew. She wasn't thinking of me or of herself. She was
defending Jimmy with little jerky, stabbing thrusts of defiance. You
could see that the smallest criticism of him made her suffer; that she
was capable of infinite suffering where Jimmy was concerned. Also you saw
that she would have to suffer, and that she knew it, and that it was this
suffering that she repulsed and thrust from her with her stabs. He was
making a tender place in her mind that might some day become a wound.

"You know I did," I insisted--I think, to turn her mind from him.

She looked at me gravely before she smiled.

"Nobody but Jimmy really thinks me nice. Nobody but Jimmy knows how nice
I _am_."

And then she showed me the house.

I praised some detail that Jevons had devised (not that there was much
detail; it was all extremely simple). And I believe she saw criticism of
Jimmy in that.

"I know it looks as if he cared a lot about this sort of thing. And I
daresay you think it's silly of him. But he doesn't really care."

"It certainly looks," I said, "as if he cared about something."

"It's me he cares about," she said.

"And do you care about--this sort of thing, Viola?"

"I care about his caring. But I was every bit as happy in that little
four-roomed house, if that's what you mean."

"Aren't you glad to have more room to move about in?"

"I'm glad to have room for Daddy and Mummy when they come to stay."

It was as if she had said, "If you think I'm glad to have room to get
away from him you're mistaken."

And there was another impression that she gave me. It was also as if she
wanted to warn me not to form the habit of coming to see her when she was
alone. I should gain nothing by it. If I insisted on seeing her alone I
should get Jimmy, Jimmy, all the time.

I didn't try to see her again alone.

But I saw her often. Jevons was always asking me there. He made a point
of it whenever they had what Viola called "anybody interesting." By this
she meant somebody belonging to the confraternity of letters. Jevons had
a sort of idea that I liked meeting these people and that it did me good.
The house in Edwardes Square might have become a haunt of Jimmy's
_confrГ©res_ if Jimmy had had time to attend to them and if he hadn't been
so deliberately exclusive. He was trying for the best--not for the great
names so much as for the great achievements, and they were few. And there
were one or two of them who rejected Jevons.

And then you had to reckon with Mrs. Jevons's rejections. She was as
fastidious in her way as he was in his; and besides, she guarded him, so
that the circle around him was rather tight and small.

Oh, he was faithful; he kept me in it; he gave me of his best; and if he
could have made me shine I should have blazed among them all.

It doesn't matter now which of them I met there. Jevons was charming to
them all. He set them blazing. I don't think he cared much whether _he_
blazed or not, but if he felt like it he could make a bigger blaze than
any of them. He enjoyed them; he enjoyed them vastly, violently. Having
once acquired the taste, he couldn't have lived without the intellectual
excitement they gave him. But except for that, for the stimulus, the
release of energy, it's surprising how little they really counted for
him.

And so it's not those evenings and that brilliance that I remember.

In the house in Edwardes Square I seem to have been always meeting Norah
Thesiger. Now that they had a room to put her in, she would be there for
months at a time. And whenever she was there they would be sure to ask
me. If Jevons didn't, Viola did.

There was that summer, too, when Norah and Mildred came together with
Charlie Thesiger, their cousin, who was engaged to Mildred. Charlie was
then a lieutenant in the South Kent Hussars. He was a large young man,
correct, handsome, rather supercilious and rather stupid. He seemed to
fill the house in Edwardes Square when he was in it.

He doesn't matter. At least, he didn't matter then. God knows he never
really mattered, poor boy, at any time. But he is important. He fixes
things for me. He brings me to the incident of June, nineteen-nine.

It was a very slight incident. It wouldn't be worth recording except that
it stood for others like itself, a whole crowd. And it was of such slight
things that Viola's torments were to be made.

We were at dinner in the little dining-room looking on the flagged court,
a party of six: Viola at the head of the round table, with her back to
the light; Jevons at the foot, facing her, with the light full on him;
Charlie Thesiger was on Viola's right, I was on her left, facing him.
Norah sat next to me on Jevons's right, and Mildred sat next to Charlie
on Jevons's left, facing Norah. We were all so close together that it
would be difficult for one of us to have missed anything that happened or
was said. And Viola, with the light behind her, commanded us all.

She had been very gay. I don't suppose Charlie felt anything strained
about her gaiety--he was not observant--but I did, and I put it down to
Charlie's presence, to the rather flat correctness that made Jevons stand
out. Another thing I noticed was that, in labouring for refinement in his
surroundings, Jevons hadn't allowed for the effect of contrast. It hadn't
occurred to him that an interior that harmonized with Viola would be
damaging to him. And it was. Just how damaging I hadn't realized until
to-night (which shows how careful he must have been at Canterbury). He
didn't stand out. He burst out. He never sank into his background for a
single minute. You had to be aware of him all the time.

And yet in a party of the confraternity you were not aware of him like
this. For then he blazed; and in the flare he made you didn't notice
whether he tilted his soup-plate the right way or not, or care if he
couldn't use his table napkin or his pocket-handkerchief and look you
square in the face at the same time. Neither did you notice these things
if you were alone with him or if only Norah and Viola were there. He was
happy with us, and happiness was becoming to him, and he had all sorts of
endearing ways that would have disarmed us. And then there's no doubt
that Viola protected him. She watched over him; she smoothed his social
path for him; she removed his worst pitfalls; she ran, as it were, to
pick him up before he fell. He didn't know she was watching him; neither,
I think, did she. It was a blind instinct with her to help him. And Norah
and I helped him too. And as he wasn't nervous with us everything went
well. But when strangers got into our party it was different. Viola
couldn't attend to him properly; and if the stranger happened to be
rather stupid, like Charlie Thesiger, Jevons didn't blaze and so cover
himself; he got bored; and when he was bored he got jumpy; and it was
when he got jumpy that he did things.

And Charlie was getting on his nerves.

Still, everything went well until the table was cleared for dessert; and
there was no reason why everything shouldn't have gone well even then.
Viola had guarded against his most inveterate failing--a habit of
stretching for things across the table--by putting everything he wanted
within his reach. Within Jevons's reach to-night was a little dish
containing among other things chocolate nougat. And he was fond of
nougat. He was fond also of chaffing Norah. And he was not prepared to
forego one amusement for the other. And Norah had taken a mean advantage
of him. She had timed a provocation at the moment when for any other man
retort would have been impossible; and she hadn't reckoned with Jevons's
ingenuity of resource.

I am not going to say what he did. It wouldn't be fair to him. It was a
little thing, but you couldn't pretend for one moment that you hadn't
seen it, any more than Jevons could do anything to cover the fantastic
horror of it. We simply sat and stiffened; all but Norah, who burst out
laughing in Jimmy's face.

Mildred, trying to help him, made matters worse by asking for a peach
when she had got a large one on her plate. Charlie Thesiger looked down
his nose. I don't know where I looked, but I know that I was conscious
of Viola's face and of the flush that darkened it to the tip of her chin
and the roots of her hair. And I could feel the shudder down her back
passing into mine.

After all, Viola did cover it. She lit a little Roman lamp they had and
sent it travelling down the table with the cigarette-box. Then she got up
and went to Jevons and stooped over his shoulder and took the little dish
from him.

"If anybody wants any more chocolates," she said, "they must come
upstairs for them."

"She won't trust me with them," said Jevons. (He _had_ a nerve.)

Viola trailed off upstairs with her dish, and Mildred and Charlie
followed her.

Norah and I held watch with Jevons, who leaned back in his chair and
smoked and rubbed the forefinger of his right hand--the innocent
instrument (may I say it?) of his crime--with his table napkin, and
contemplated Norah in a drowsy imperturbability.

"Did I do anything?" he said presently.

Norah put her hand on his arm and stroked it.

"No, Jimmy dear," she said, "of course you didn't."

It was then that I was aware for the first time of the beauty of Norah's
face. Norah's, not Viola's. Up till then I could never see anything but
Viola's face in it, coloured wrong, so that it rather worried me to look
at it, I resented the everlasting reminder of that likeness under that
perverse and disconcerting difference. If her eyes hadn't been so blue
and her cheeks so pink; if only her hair had been a little darker and if
it hadn't crinkled--

Now, as I looked at her, I wondered how anybody could think she was
like Viola. There was only her forehead and the odd turn of her jaw and
nose--her profile, if you like, was Viola's--but (when she wasn't
laughing) Norah's full face had something that Viola's hadn't and never
would have. I had caught it now and then and couldn't make up my mind
what it was. Now I saw that it was a sort of wisdom, a look of soberness
and goodness that I couldn't quite account for.

Then Jevons explained it for me.

"The Kiddy's growing up," he said (he said it to himself). "She'll be
twenty to-morrow. She won't throw wet sponges at me any more."

That was it. Norah was growing up. Her soft face was setting and the
expression I had noticed had come to stay.

Presently Jevons got up. He said he had work to do.

"The Grand Attack, Furnival, the Grand Attack!"

And he left us together.

Norah looked after him.

"Poor little Jimmy," she said. "I don't think he ever did a _bad_ thing
in his life."

And then, with what seemed a daring irrelevance, "I wish Charlie wasn't
here. I can't think why Viola ever asked him."

"Why shouldn't she?"

"Because he's bad for Jimmy. He puts him in the wrong."

I'm afraid I laughed a little brutally at the extravagance of this.

"Well," she said. "I can't bear him to suffer."

"You've got a very tender little heart, haven't you?" I said.

"It isn't half as tender as Viola's. But I've got more common sense."

"Then why," I said, "did you laugh at Jimmy just now?"

"That's why. Because it was the best thing you could do. He doesn't mind
it half so much when you laugh at him. It's people looking down their
noses, like Charlie, that he minds. It must be awful for the poor little
chap, when you come to think of it, living on the edge, never knowing
when he's going to do something that'll make Viola's blood run cold."

"It must be still more awful for Viola."

To that she said, "It isn't. You don't know how Viola feels about Jimmy.
None of my people do. They simply don't understand it."

"Oh, come," I said, "they've accepted it, haven't they?"

"They've accepted it _because_ they don't understand her. They say they
never know what she'll do next, and Jimmy's come as a sort of relief to
them. They thought she might do something much worse. You see, she isn't
a bit like any of us. If she wants to do a thing she'll do it, no matter
what it is. She wanted to go to Bruges with Jimmy and look at the Belfry,
and she did it like a shot. What they can't see is that she'll never
_want_ to do anything wrong, so she'll never do it. They can't see that
there was just as much Belfry as Jimmy in it. There always will be a
Belfry in Viola's life, and when she hears the bells going she'll run off
to see. And Jimmy's the only man who'll ever take her to a Belfry.

"She's all right. Because she knows that Jimmy's really ten times more
refined than any of us. His little soul's all made of beautiful clean
white silk. But Viola can't go on telling people how beautiful he is.
They've got to see it for themselves.

"I wish _you_ could see it as she does. I wish you could see how she
feels about it--"

"My dear Norah," I said, "I've been trying for three years to see as
Viola sees, and feel as Viola feels. But how can I? I'm not Viola."

"But," she said, "you _do_ understand her. If I thought you didn't--if I
thought that you could go back on her--and if you go back on Jimmy you go
back on _her_--"

"Well?"

"Well, I don't think I could ever speak to you again."

"My dear child," I said, "you're absurd. I haven't gone back on either of
them. Won't it do if I see Jimmy as _you_ see him?"

"Ye-es," she said. "But--I wonder if you do."

"Norah," I said then, "I wonder if Viola's as sorry for him as you are. I
hope she isn't."

"She isn't, then. She isn't sorry for him a bit. No more am I. You'll
make me sorry for _you_ if you don't take care."

When we went to say good night to Jevons we found Viola sitting on the
arm of his chair with the little dish in her hand, feeding him with
chocolate nougat. Her posture was one of supple contrition, and we heard
her say:

"Cheer up, Jimmy. It doesn't really matter what you do. Nobody would ever
take you for more than four years old."

Yes. Norah, the youngest, was the one who had grown up.




VIII


Norah has often told me that I exaggerated the importance of the Nougat
Incident; that my weakness is a tendency to dwell with a morbid
concentration on small, inessential details. When I tell her that if I
succeed in surviving Jimmy I shall write his biography, she tilts her
chin and says I'm the last person who should attempt it.

"Between us," she says, "we might manage it. But if you're left to
yourself you'll make him _all_ nougat."

When I retort that if _she_ were left to _her_self she'd eliminate the
very things that make him the engaging animal he is, and remind her that
a straw will show the way the wind's blowing, she asks me, "Did any big
wind ever blow a straw before it all the way?"

Well, perhaps I _am_ the very last person--he made me the last person by
what he did to me--but when it comes to exaggeration I haven't attached
more importance to the Nougat Incident than Jevons did himself. Why, when
he shut himself up in his study that night, instead of hurling himself
forward in the Grand Attack, he must have sat with his head in his hands
brooding over it and wondering what he'd done; he must have gone straight
upstairs to ask Viola what he'd done, or there'd have been no earthly
sense in what we heard her saying. The detail may have been small, but it
was not inessential when it could turn Tasker Jevons from the Grand
Attack as he was turned that night.

I tell you, and Jevons would tell you, it is of such small things that
tragedies are made--the bitterest, the most insidious.

And when Jevons did finally hurl himself, when he shut himself up,
morning after morning and night after night, to labour violently on his
greatest work, though (for just as long as he was actually engaged) he
might be staving off his tragedy, he was nevertheless precipitating the
event. You may say that when you get him there in his study on his
battlefield you are among the big forces at once; but the interesting
thing is that those big forces by their very expenditure released a whole
crowd of little, infinitely little ones that, in their turn, in their
miniature explosion, worked for his destruction. Jevons, struggling with
his social disabilities, was like a giant devoured by microscopically
minute organisms over whose generation he had no control.

And the greater the man, mind you, the greater the tragedy.

Still, for those two years in Edwardes Square, he staved it off. It was
the very violence of his labour, the prodigious front of the battle he
delivered, that saved him. Then there was his victory, his Third Novel,
that for the time threw all minor happenings into the background.

He was right again in his forecast. It _was_ his best work, and (I use
his own phrase) it did the trick.

When it came, the Grand Attack (which was bolder even than his first
assault) carried, you may say, the whole position, after demolishing at
one stroke the enemy's defences. For he had enemies. He was the sort of
man who does have them. He didn't _make_ them, at least, not
deliberately, he couldn't have been bothered to make them; but he drew
them; they seemed to rise out of the ground after every one of his
appearances.

Well, they couldn't say he hadn't done it this time.

_Done_ it. There's no good trying to express such a phenomenon as Jevons
in terms of literature. You can only think about him in terms of action,
every book of his being an onslaught by which he laid his public low.

And this time he had conquered America.

Don't ask me how many thousands he made by it. I've forgotten. They've
melted into the tens of thousands that he made before he had finished.
Even in the years of the Grand Attack he was making his old father an
allowance and investing large sums in case of accidents. (He had been
putting by even in the Hampstead days.) How he did it I can't think,
though he has tried to explain it to me more than once. The whole thing
for him was as obvious as any business transaction (he had the sort of
mind for which business transactions _are_ obvious). He had studied
the public he set out to capture. He presented the life it knew--the
moving, changing, fantastically adventurous life of the middle classes.
Until Jevons rushed on them and forced their eyes open, you may say at
the point of the bayonet, the middle classes didn't know they were moving
and changing and being adventurous. Nobody knew. It was Jevons's
discovery.

Then, as he pointed out, there were innumerable discretions in his
valour. He knew to a hairbreadth how far he might go, and he went no
farther. He respected existing prejudices because they existed. He didn't
ask awkward questions; he didn't raise problems; he had the British
capacity for doing serious things with an air of not taking himself
seriously and frivolous things with an astounding gravity.

"You can do anything, Furnival," he said, "if you're only funny enough."

Norah tells me that that really _is_ his secret.

But, he said, the whole thing was as calculable as any successful deal on
the Stock Exchange. When you asked him: "Then why can't other people do
it?" he said: "God knows why. They must be precious fools if they want to
do it and don't find out how. _I_'ve had to find out."

For one year--the last year in Edwardes Square--he enjoyed pure fame. And
he _did_ enjoy it--I think he enjoyed everything--like a child with a
mechanical toy, or a girl with a new gown, playing with it and trying it
on by snatches when he could spare half an hour from his appalling toil.

Heavens, how he worked that year! With a hard, punctual passion, a
multiplied energy, like five financiers engaged on five separate
transactions. After victory in the campaign he had settled down to
business and the works of peace. There was the business of the short
story; the business of the monograph; the business of the magazine
article and the newspaper column, and the speculations that developed
into the immense business of his plays. (I've forgotten how much he
netted by his first curtain-raiser.) That's five.

As I look back on him he seems to have torn through his stages at an
incredible pace. There are several that I haven't counted, so suddenly
did he leave them behind him: the stage when he was literary adviser to a
firm of publishers, who wouldn't believe him when he said the thing was
calculable; the stage when he ceased to be sub-editor of _Sport_ and
became editor, an appointment so lucrative that you may judge the risk he
took when he abandoned it. And in between there was his stage of cruelty,
when he did reviewing. It was a brief stage, but he contrived to strew
the field with the reputations he had slaughtered (Viola used to plead
with him for certain authors, like Queen Philippa for the burghers of
Calais), until his job was taken from him in the interests of humanity.

Now--I am speaking in the light of my later knowledge--the first effect
of these prodigious and passionate labours was beneficent, and I
shouldn't wonder if Jevons, who had calculated everything to a nicety,
hadn't allowed for this too. To say nothing of the peculiar purity of his
earlier fame, which set him in a place apart and assured beyond all
possible depreciation, so long as he elected to stay there, the very
conditions of his business saved him. He enjoyed in those two desperate
years the immunities of a recluse. The results were prominently before
the public, but Jimmy wasn't. His study was literally his sanctuary.
Sitting there nearly all day and half the night, he was removed from the
world's observation at the precise moment when it became inimical. I
don't mean the observation of the confraternity of letters, which was and
always had been kindly to his personality, and had taken little or no
notice of his disabilities; I mean the observation of the world he
married into, for which disabilities like Jimmy's count.

He was also removed from Viola's observation at a time when I think,
almost unconsciously, she was beginning to criticize him. When he came to
her out of his sanctuary he came with its consecration on him. And then
there was the appeal he made to her tenderness. If the shudders down her
back began they were checked by the spectacle of his exhaustion. She
couldn't shudder at the tired conqueror when he flung himself on the
floor beside her and laid his head in her lap.

I've seen her with him like that--once, one evening when Norah was
with them, and I had turned in after dinner; it was upstairs in that
drawing-room in Edwardes Square that they had made, back and front, in an
L. Norah and I were in the long, narrow part at the back; you know how
those little town rooms go when they're knocked into one--the fireplaces
in the same wall and windows opposite each other, so that the back rakes
the fireplace end of the front part.

Viola and Jevons were by the fireplace in the front, she in her low chair
and he stretched out on the rug at her feet. And we raked them.

They didn't know they were observed. I think they'd made up their minds
that when Norah and I were together we couldn't hear or see anything
except ourselves.

And so we heard Viola saying, "What do you do it for?"

And Jimmy, "Oh, for the fun of the thing, I suppose. What does one do
things for?"

And she, "It'll be fine fun for me, won't it, when you've killed
yourself? When you've burst the top of your head off like the kitchen
boiler?"

"I should have to run dry first," said Jevons.

"Well, you will, boiling away seven--eight--nine hours a day for weeks on
end. Nobody else does it."

"Nobody else _can_ do it," said Jimmy arrogantly.

"It's all very well; but if you don't burst your head open you'll get
neuritis, or cramp. Look at that hand."

"Which hand?"

"Your right hand, silly." She took it and poised it from the wrist. "Look
how it wobbles."

He looked.

"It does wobble a bit. Like a drunkard's. And I don't drink."

He was interested in his hand.

"You goose, where's the fun of letting your right hand go to pieces?"

"Easy on. They won't amputate it," said Jimmy.

That was in nineteen-nine. This is nineteen-fifteen. And only yesterday
Norah asked me if I remembered what Jimmy said about his hand the night
we were engaged.