We had a little trouble with some of the minor confraternity--their
emotions were facile and champagne intensified them. They would ask where
the throne-room was and when our host was going to be measured for his
suit of armour, and what did we think he'd done with the family
portraits?

But the Thesigers (all except Charlie--and Charlie, Norah said, had no
heart), the Thesigers offered an example of the most beautiful manners.
I shall never forget the General's face as the suits of armour struck
him--his sudden spasm of joy and the austere heroism that suppressed it.
And the Canon--

The Canon rose to even greater heights. We were a bit afraid that he
would overdo it and look as if he were trying to show us how a Christian
gentleman could bear such things as Jimmy's furnishings. But no. He
behaved as though he saw nothing in the least unusual in his furnishings,
as though Jimmy's Tudor hall and miscellaneous drawing-room were his
natural background.

But for sheer pluck and presence of mind not one of them could touch
Jevons. He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above
them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his
atmosphere of deadly peril. He volplaned, he looped the loop. _His_
behaviour was unsurpassable. For _his_ case, if you like, was desperate.
I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room.
He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger,
not the quiver of an eyelash, had escaped him. And consider what it
meant to him. In a furious climax of expenditure he had achieved the
arresting spectacle of his house in Mayfair, and his first night, his
house-warming, was turning under his eyes into a triumph for the
Thesigers' manners and a failure for him. He had no illusions. Unless he
did something to stop it, the whole thing would be one enormous and
lamentable and expensive failure.

He had to do something. And he did it. He left off his uneasy swagger and
his rocking. He met the heroic and beautiful faces of the Thesigers with
his engaging twinkle. He sought out and ministered to two young girls who
had been brought there by the minor confraternity and were hiding in a
corner on the point of hysteria. We heard him telling them that the
throne-room was being built out over the scullery leads (he must have
known what the minor confraternity had been up to), that in the great
fireplace in his kitchen you could roast three journalists whole, and
that the question of the family portraits was receiving his attention. He
had a deal on with the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery for the
purchase of the Holbein Henry the Eighth. By the time he had finished it
was open to us to suppose that the house in Mayfair was his joke and not
ours, that he had furnished it in this preposterous manner in order to be
really and truly funny, and to keep himself and Viola in perfect and
perpetual gaiety. It was as if he were trying to say to us, "None of you
people--least of all the confraternity--knows how to live. Life isn't a
calamity; it's a joke; and to live properly you should meet life in its
own spirit; you should do exuberant and gay and gorgeous things, like
me."

And then when we had all come round, he rearranged all the furniture in
his drawing-room for charades (showing no respect whatever for his
satinwood suite); and after the charades he rolled up his Aubusson carpet
and cleared the place for a dance that was ruin to his parquet floor.
And we had supper; and then more dancing till four o'clock in the
morning.

Of the dancing I remember nothing but Viola whirling round and round, as
it were for ever, in Charlie Thesiger's arms, and her dead-white face
looking over his shoulder, as if she saw nothing, nothing whatever; as if
she were detached even from the arms that held her.

My last recollection is of Jimmy's face when Norah said to him, "Oh,
Jimmy, I _love_ your dear little lions!"--and Jimmy's answer:

"Little lions--yes--they make me feel tall and majestic."

"He _is_ going it, isn't he?" said Charlie Thesiger.

       *       *       *       *       *

At this point, when I look back over what I've written, it seems to me
that I've done nothing but record changes so many and so marked that
their history has no sort of continuity. But in reality it was not so. Up
to December, nineteen-ten, there was no break, not even a dividing line.
Compared with what happened then I am compelled to think of Viola's
marriage, not as a risky experiment that had so far defeated prophecy,
but as an entirely serene and happy thing. Between the moment when they
set up that four-post bed in that absurd little house in Hampstead and
the day of their leaving Edwardes Square behind them I cannot point to
any time and say, "That was the beginning of it," or put my finger on an
event and show the difference there.

Unless it was Reggie's coming back.

But the results of that didn't appear till later.

Any difference I may have noted previously was an affair of shades, of
delicate oscillations. There was no lapse without a recovery, no
departure without a return.

And here, at the end of nineteen-ten, I got a line drawn sharply on
either side of a break I cannot bridge. The minute Jimmy moved into that
house in Mayfair things began to go wrong.

It was as if Jimmy, in his love of doing risky things, had cast, this
time, a dreadful die.

From that evening onward I watched them with anxiety. I do not know how
far Jevons was aware that the house in Mayfair was a blunder; I think he
wouldn't have acknowledged that it was a blunder at all. His own attitude
to it was not in the least disturbed by his humorous perception of other
people's. With his dexterity in adjustments he was quite capable of
reconciling them, quite capable of enjoying the effect it had on nervous
organisms while he himself took it seriously. It was, after all, his own
achievement, and a very astonishing achievement too. He continued to
respect it as the immense sign of his material prosperity, the
advertisement, you may say, of his arrival. His business instinct would
never have allowed him to repent of an advertisement.

There _was_ this gross element in his enjoyment.

And there was also the pure and charming happiness of a child that
suddenly finds itself left, with boundless opportunity, to its own
gorgeous caprice. You could no more blame Jevons for the bad taste of his
drawing-room and his Tudor hall than you could blame a child for its
joy in a treasure of tinsel and coloured glass.

But when we asked ourselves where, in this outbreak of Jimmy's fantasy,
did Viola come in, we had to own that she came in nowhere. Not only had
she stood by without lifting a finger to interfere with its tempestuous
course; not only had she submitted without a protest; she seemed to show
no adequate sense of what had happened. Her detachment was the unnatural
and dreadful thing.

And this happiness of his was at Viola's mercy. It would last just so
long as she could keep him from knowing that he had outraged the beauty,
the fitness and the simplicity she loved. I thought how he had once
boasted that he knew what she wanted, that he knew what she was thinking
and feeling all the time. How could he have imagined that she wanted
_this_? What was his knowledge worth if he didn't know what she would
think and feel about it?

Unless, indeed, she had lied to him. Lied from first to last,
deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the
pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and
it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola
had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside,
where you would have thought she would have most wanted to plunge in; the
calculation and the indifference both were so beyond her that you could
only think one thing: she hated it; she hated the new turn his prosperity
had taken; she almost hated him because of it; and her heart was broken
because of Reggie, and it was hardening where it broke; she hated Reggie
at moments; and she had moments of hating Jevons because he had come
between them; and she was compounding with her conscience, punishing
herself for all these hatreds and for a thousand secret criticisms and
disloyalties and repugnances; avenging, as it were beforehand, all
hatreds and criticisms, disloyalties and repugnances to come. For she saw
it all now--how it was going to be. And she was trying to make up for it
by giving Jimmy his own way in the things that, as she had said, "didn't
matter."

And if Jimmy's way was to surround her with pretentious silliness instead
of beautiful simplicity, then she must rise above her surroundings. Her
spirit, at any rate, must refuse to be surrounded.

Her attitude was more lofty than you can imagine. As Norah had said,
there would always be a Belfry--something high and unusual--in Viola's
life. Well, she was going to live in the Belfry, that was all. And if she
was to be perfectly safe in her Belfry, and Jimmy perfectly happy in his
Tudor hall, he mustn't know that she was there.

I don't know how she really put it to herself; I don't suppose she "put"
it any way; but subconsciously, as they say, it must have been like that.
Anyhow, her behaviour amounted to an evasion of Jimmy, and this
particular evasion was sad enough when you consider that in the beginning
it had been Jimmy who had taken her to look at the Belfry--who was the
one man who could be trusted to take her, and that she would never have
dreamed of setting off on such an adventure by herself, and that she
wasn't fitted for it. In fact, I can't think of anybody less fit.

It showed more than anything how the glamour must have worn off him.

It had worn off even for us to whom he came each time with a comparative
freshness. And if it hadn't worn off for his public and for the
confraternity, it was simply because as an engineer of literature he was
inexhaustible. He had so perfected his machinery that the turning out
of novels and of plays had become with him a sort of automatic habit, and
if there was any falling off in his quality he was right when he said
that nobody but himself would find it out. He had got an infinite
capacity for plagiarizing himself; and in his worst things he imitated
his best so closely that he might well defy you to tell the difference.

But you cannot work as he had worked for five years at a stretch and not
suffer for it. And you cannot aim at material success as he had aimed,
deliberately and continuously, for five years without becoming yourself a
bit material. And you cannot be immersed and wallow in it as he wallowed
without corruption.

There's no doubt that for the next, two--three--four years he wallowed.
He was so deep in that, even after Viola's illness that came in
nineteen-thirteen and purged him somewhat, he continued to wallow. And we
had to stand by while he was doing it and pretend that we weren't
shocked. There was no good trying to give him a hand to help him out, he
was so happy wallowing.

I am far from blaming him. Personally, if it hadn't been for Viola, I
should have liked to think that he was able to get all that ecstasy out
of his sordid triumph. For it _was_ sordid. If it wasn't for Viola you
could tick off each year with a note of his preposterously increasing
income, and say that was all there was in it.

I muddle up the first years of it. I know that in nineteen-eleven he
brought out his fifth novel and his third play and that the run and
the returns of both were astounding, even for him. I know that in
nineteen-twelve he brought out two novels and two new plays that ran at
the same time, and that he roped in Europe and the Colonies; and that his
income rose into five figures. He couldn't help it. His business was a
thing that had passed beyond his control. With infinite exertions he had
set it spinning, and now it looked as if he had only to touch it now and
then with his finger to keep it going. And if he did get a bit excited is
it any wonder? There was the dreadful fascination of the thing that
compelled him to watch it till its perpetual gyrations went to his head
and made it reel.

His figure seems to me to reel slightly as it moves through those rooms
in the house in Green Street, and before the footlights as he answered
calls, and across the banquet-halls of the "Ritz" or the "Criterion" or
the "Savoy," when--about three times a year--he celebrated his triumphs.
I see those years as a succession of banquets running indistinguishably
into each other. I see him buying more and more furniture and
superintending its disposal with excitement. He seems to me to have been
always buying things. I've forgotten most of them except the things he
bought for Viola--the jewellery that frightened her, the opera cloak that
made her hysterical, the furs that had to be sent back again (you'd have
thought he couldn't have gone wrong with furs, but he did), and the hats
that even Jimmy owned it was impossible to wear. I can see his face
saddened by these failures and a little puzzled, as if he couldn't
conceive how his star should have gone back on him like that. I can see
him, and I can see Viola, kneeling on the floor in his study and packing
some beastly thing up in paper, tenderly, as if it had been the corpse of
a beloved hope; and I can hear him saying (it was after the opera cloak
and the hysterics), "Walter, you can monkey with a woman's 'eart, and you
can ruin her immortal soul, but if you meddle with her clothes it's hell
for both of you. Don't you do it, my boy."

I remember scores of little things like that, things done and things said
with an incorruptible sweetness and affection, but things accentuated
with lapsed aitches and with gestures that only Jimmy was unaware of.
Those years are marked for me more than anything by the awful increase
in his solecisms. Their number, their enormity and frequency rose with
his income, and for the best of reasons. It was as if, his object being
gained, he could afford them. He was no longer on his guard. He had no
longer any need to be. The strain was over--he relaxed, and in relaxation
he fell back into his old habits.

All those years we seem to have been looking on at the slow, slow process
of his vulgarization. By nineteen-twelve the confraternity had begun to
regard Tasker Jevons as an outrageous joke. And in nineteen-thirteen,
when both his plays were still running, even his father-in-law said that
he was a disgusting spectacle. And Reggie (he was Major Thesiger now,
with a garrison appointment at Woolwich) Reggie kept as far away from him
as ever.

Sometimes I have thought that Viola's detachment helped his undoing. She
wasn't there to pull him up or to cover his disasters; she had more and
more the look of not being there at all.

And Charlie Thesiger was always there. There with a most decided look of
being up to something.

Jevons didn't seem to mind him. You might have said that Charlie was
another of the risks he took.




X


In nineteen-thirteen Jimmy bought a motor-car.

He was more excited about his motor-car than he had been about his
house--any of his houses. Even Viola was interested and came rushing down
from her Belfry when it arrived.

He bought it at the end of January. A good, useful car that would shut or
open and serve for town or country. But it was no good to them till
April.

For all February and March Viola was ill. She had been running down
gradually for about two years, getting a little whiter and a little
slenderer every month, and in the first week of February she got
influenza and ignored it, and went out for a drive in the motor-car with
a temperature of a hundred and four.

Nineteen-thirteen stands out for me as the year of Viola's illness.

It turned to pneumonia and she was dangerously ill for three weeks, in
fact, she nearly died of it; and for more weeks than I can remember she
lay about on sofas to which Jimmy and the nurse or one of us carried her
from her bed. And in all that time Jimmy nursed and waited on her and sat
up with her at night. If he slept it was with one eye and both ears open.
And I never saw anybody as gentle as he was and as skilful with his hands
and quiet. He didn't even breathe hard. And when she was convalescent and
a little fretful and troublesome there wasn't anybody else who could
manage her. The nurses would call him to feed her and give her her
medicine and lift her. She couldn't bear anybody else to touch her.

I remember one day when she had been moved from her bed to the couch for
the first time and she was so weak, poor darling, that she cried. I
remember her saying, "Jimmy, if you'll only put your hands on my forehead
and keep them there."

I think he must have sat for hours with his hands on her forehead.

I doubt if he was ever away from her for more than a few minutes except
when one of us came and dragged him out for a walk in the Park against
his will. It was always for a walk in the Park--the same walk, through
Stanhope Gate to the end of the Serpentine and back again, so that he
could time it to a minute. He wouldn't look at his motor-car. I think he
hated it. Anyhow, I know he lent it to us until she was well enough to go
out in it again.

She wasn't well enough till April. She never would have been well enough,
she never would have been with us at all, the doctors and the nurses
said, if it hadn't been for Jimmy. He swore that they were fools when
they gave her up and said she couldn't live. He said he'd _make_ her
live. And I believe he made her.

He gave her till April to get well in; and when April came she did get
well. And he took her away to the South of France, and to Switzerland
when the months grew warmer (the doctor told him it was a risk, but he
said he'd take it); he took her in the motor-car, and he brought her back
in June, still slender but recovered.

That illness of hers saved them for the time. It reinstated him. It
improved him. He couldn't, you see, be devoted and vulgar at the same
time. All lighter agitations and excitements might be dangerous to
Jevons, but passion and great grief and grave anxiety ennobled him. He
came back from Switzerland chastened and purified of all offence. Even
Reggie couldn't have found a flaw in him.

That had always been Jevons's way. Just when you had made up your mind
that you couldn't bear him he would go and do something so beautiful that
it made your heart ache. From the very fact that he was intolerable
to-day you might be sure he'd be adorable to-morrow.

And when we saw him the night he brought Viola home, moving quietly about
the house, giving orders in that gentle voice that he had in reserve, we
thought, Really, it will be all right now. Viola's passion for him had
been near death so many times, and each time he had saved it.

We hadn't allowed for the reaction--he was bound to feel it after three
months' unnatural repression; we hadn't allowed for the reaction that
Viola was bound to feel after three years' unnatural detachment; we
hadn't allowed for the state of her nerves after her illness; there were
all sorts of things we hadn't allowed for, and they all came at once;
they burst out from under their covers one evening in June when Norah and
I were dining in Green Street.

It was one of Jimmy's gestures that began it. Viola had never been able
to control his gestures; she had never been able to get used to them; and
there were two in particular that made her wince still as she had winced
in the beginning. She had contracted the habit of wincing in response to
them. Whenever Jimmy jerked his thumb over his shoulder you saw her
blink; and whenever he cracked his knuckles she shrank back. The blink
followed the jerk, and the shrinking followed the cracking as the flash
follows the snap of the trigger.

I have never known Jimmy jerk as he jerked that evening. When Norah had
no salad, when my glass was empty, when Viola wanted more potatoes, when
he wanted more potatoes himself, Jimmy jerked his thumb. The butler
seemed to have made it a point of honour to acknowledge no other signal.
And every time it happened I noticed the increasing violence of Viola's
reaction. What had once been a gentle flicker of the eyelashes was now a
succession of spasms that left her eyebrows twisted.

And at the fifth jerk she covered her eyes with her hands and cried out,
"Jimmy, if you do that _once_ more I shall scream."

Poor Jimmy asked innocently, "What did I do?"

"You jerked your thumb. You jerked it five times, and I simply cannot
bear it."

"All right--_all_ right," said Jimmy. "I needn't jerk it again. It's
quite easy not to."

"I was afraid it wasn't," she sighed.

I was thinking, "Whatever will she do if he cracks his knuckles?" and
that very minute he cracked them. The butler, demoralized by Jimmy's
methods, had gone out of the room just when he was wanted. That annoyed
Jimmy. I have never known him produce such a detonation.

Viola started as if he had hit her. But she said nothing this time.

Jimmy didn't see her. He was looking over his shoulder to see whether the
butler was or was not answering his summons. And then--I think that at
one period of his life he must have been a little proud of his
accomplishment--he did it again. He did it _crescendo, fortissimo,
prestissimo, strabato and con molto expressione_; he played on his
knuckles with a virtuosity of which I have never seen the like.

The sheer technique of the performance ought to have disarmed her. (It
enchanted Norah. But then Norah hadn't had an illness.) She flung a wild
look round the room as if she called on treacherous heavenly powers to
save her, then rose and very slowly, in silence and a matchless dignity,
she walked out, past me, past Jimmy, past the returning butler, and down
the passage and into the Tudor hall.

"Well--I _am_ blowed," said Jevons.

Norah put her hand on his arm.

"You were wonderful, Jimmy dear," she said. "I could have listened to you
for ever. So could Walter. But then, we haven't any nerves."

"After all," said Jimmy, "what _did_ I do?"

I said, "You made a most infernal noise, old chap, you know."

"I say! _Come_--"

We had heard the andirons go down with a clatter.

That was how we knew she was in the Tudor hall.

He found her there when he trotted out and took her some wine and a
peach. He came back almost instantly.

"It's all right," he said. "She's eating it."

But it was very far from all right.

All the prisoned storms and the secret agonies of years were loose that
night, and they had their way with her.

We found her dreadfully calm when we got back to her. She had peeled her
peach and eaten it, and she had drunk her wine, and she was sitting by
the great hearth where she had kicked down the andirons; she was sitting,
I remember, on one of the Tudor chairs with the carved backs and the
tapestry--the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground--sitting very
upright, in her beautiful trailing gown that curled round her feet; and
she was a little flushed (but that may have been the wine).

Jimmy went and stood next her in front of his hearth, with his hands in
his trouser pockets--I mean with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets,
where he seemed to have put them to keep them out of mischief; and he
twinkled as if he were still thinking of the andirons. And every now and
then he glanced at his wife sideways out of his brilliant sapphire eyes,
without moving his head a hair's-breadth.

And none of us said anything.

Then Jimmy rang for coffee, and that started her.

She said, "Are you going to do any work to-night?"

"No," said Jimmy, "I don't think so. Why?"

"Because, if you don't want your study I'll sit in it."

"All right." He said it vaguely. But he must have suspected something was
up, for he turned his head round and looked at her straight; and again he
said, "Why?"

"Because," she said, "it's the only tolerable room in the house."

He flushed faintly at this. "You mean," he said, "it's the only one I
didn't bother about?"

"I _said_ it was the only tolerable one."

"I see." His flush went deep, and his mouth closed over his teeth.

There was no doubt he saw.

She had hurt him badly. It was quite a minute before he spoke again,
and when he did speak you felt that he had yielded, in spite of
himself, to an overpowering curiosity. He must--he seemed to be saying to
himself--sift this mystery to the bottom.

"D'you mean," he said, "that _this_ room doesn't--er--appeal to you?
What's wrong with it?"

"There's nothing wrong with it," she said, "if you like it."

"Never mind whether I like it or not. It's detestable. _And_ the
drawing-room?"

She did not answer. I think she was ashamed of herself.

"Even more so, I suppose. And--your boudoir?"

(I've forgotten the boudoir. She hardly ever let any of us go into it. It
was pretty awful.)

"I do wish," she said, "you'd leave me alone. What _does_ it matter?"

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

"I never said so."

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

"Because they didn't matter."

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

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

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

"The way you went on about them."

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

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

"Will it matter if we go upstairs?"

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

She went, and Norah followed her.

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

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

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

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

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

He meditated again.

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

He looked round him with his disenchanted eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

I went upstairs.

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

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

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

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

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

"What is it, then?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Won't it wear him out too?"

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

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

She shook her head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




XI


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

       *       *       *       *       *

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