THE BELFRY

by

MAY SINCLAIR

Author of the _Three Sisters_, etc.

1916







BOOK I

MY BOOK




I


Of course this story can't be published as it stands just yet. Not--if
I'm to be decent--for another generation, because, thank Heaven, they're
still alive. (They've had me there, as they've always had me everywhere.)
How they managed it I can't think. I don't mean merely at the end, though
that was stupendous, but how they ever managed it. It seems to me they
must have taken _all_ the risks, always.

I suppose if you asked him he'd say, "That's how." It was certainly the
way they managed the business of living. Perhaps it's why they managed it
on the whole so well. I remember how when I was shilly-shallying about
that last job of mine he said, "Take it. Take it. If you can risk living
at all, my dear fellow, you can risk that."

And he added, "If I'd only _your_ luck!"

Well, that's exactly what he did have. He had my luck, I mean the luck I
ought to have had, all the time, from the beginning to the very end. But
there is one thing he can't take from me, and that is the telling of this
story. He can hold it up as long as he lives--as long as _she_ lives--as
he has held up pretty nearly everything where I was concerned. But he
can't take it from me. He doesn't "want" it. Even he with his infernal
talent couldn't do anything with it. Unscrupulous as he was, and I assure
you he'd stick at nothing (he'd "take" his mother's last agony if he
"wanted" it badly enough), indecent as he was, he'd stick at that.

I don't mean he couldn't take his wife, part of her, anyhow, at a pinch.
And I don't mean he couldn't take himself, his own emotions, his own
eccentricities, if he happened to want them, and his own meannesses, if
nobody else's, so to speak, would do. But he couldn't and wouldn't take
his own big things, particularly not that last thing.

When I say that I can't publish this story yet as it stands, I'm not
forgetting that I _have_ published the end of it already. But only in the
way of business; to publish that sort of thing was what I went out for;
it was all part of my Special Correspondent's job.

And when you think that it was just touch and go--Why, if I hadn't bucked
up and taken that job when he told me to I might have missed him. No
amount of hearing about him would have been the same thing. I had to see
him.

What I wrote then doesn't count. I had to tell what I saw just after I
had seen it. I had to take it as I saw it, a fragment snapped off from
the rest of him, and dated October 11th, 1914, as if it didn't belong to
him; as if he were only another splendid instance. And of course I had
to leave _her_ out.

Told like that, it didn't amount to much.

This is the real telling.

I must get away from the end, right back to the beginning.

I suppose, to be accurate, the very beginning was the day I first met him
in nineteen-six--no, nineteen-five it must have been. It was at
Blackheath Football Ground, the last match of the season, when Woolwich
Arsenal played East Kent and beat them by two goals and a try. He was
there as a representative of the Press, "doing" the match for some
sporting paper.

He held me up at the barrier (yes, he held me up in the first moment of
our acquaintance) while he fumbled for his pass. He had given the word
"Press" with an exaggerated aplomb that showed he was young to his job,
and the gate-keeper challenged him. It was, in fact, the exquisite
self-consciousness of the little man that made me look at him. And he
caught me looking at him; he blushed, caught himself blushing and smiled
to himself with the most delicious appreciation of his own absurdity. And
as he stood there fumbling, and holding me up while he argued with the
gate-keeper, who didn't know him, I got his engaging twinkle. It was as
if he looked at me and said, "See me swank just then? Funny, wasn't it?"

He hung about on the edge of the crowd for a while with his hands in his
pockets, sucking his little blond moustache and looking dreamy and rather
incompetent. I was a full-blown journalist even then, and I remember
feeling a sort of pity for his youth. He was so obviously on his maiden
trip, and obviously, I fancied, doomed never to arrive in any port.

Well--well; I came upon him afterwards at a crisis in the game. He was
taking notes in shorthand with a sort of savagery between his tense and
concentrated glares at the scrimmage that was then massed in the centre
of the field. Woolwich Arsenal and East Kent, locked in each other's
bodies, now struggled and writhed and butted like two immense beasts
welded together by the impact of their battle, now swayed and quivered
and snorted as one beast torn by a solitary and mysterious rage.

Self-consciousness had vanished from my man. He stood, leaning forward
with his legs a little apart. His boyish face was deeply flushed; he had
sucked and bitten his blond moustache into a wisp; he was breathing
heavily, with his mouth ajar; his very large and conspicuous blue eyes
glittered with a sort of passion. (He wore those eyes in his odd little
ugly face like some inappropriate decoration.)

All these symptoms declared that he was "on." They made up a look that I
was soon to know him by.

I remember marvelling at his excitement.

I remember also discussing the match with him as we went back to town. It
must have been then that he began to tell me about himself: that his name
was James Tasker Jevons; that he lived, or hoped to live, by going about
the country and reporting the big cricket and football matches.

At least he called it reporting. I shouldn't think there has ever been
any reporting like it before or since.

I told him I was out for my paper, the _Morning Standard_, too. Not
exactly reporting, in _his_ sense (I little knew what _his_ sense was
when I put it that way); and there left it. You see, I didn't want to rub
it into the poor chap that the stranger he had been unfolding himself to
so quaintly was a cut above his job.

But he saw through it. I don't know how he managed to convey to me that
my delicacy needn't suffer. Anyhow, he must have had some scruples of his
own, since he waited for another context before remarking quietly that
what I was doing now he would be doing in another six months. (And he
was.) These things, he said, took time, and he gave himself six months.
(Yes; in less than six months he was holding me up, again, in my own
paper. I had to wait till he was "out" before I could get in.) He didn't
seem to boast so much as to trace for my benefit the path of some natural
force, some upward-tending, indestructible Energy that happened to be
him.

All this I remember. But I cannot remember by what stages we arrived at
dining together, as we did that night in a little restaurant in Soho.
Perhaps there were no stages; we may have simply leaped by one bound at
that consummation. He had swung himself into my compartment as the train
was leaving the platform at Blackheath; so I suppose it was destiny.
After that I was tempted to conceive that he fastened on me as on
something that he had need of; but I think it was rather that I fell to
his mysterious attraction.

While we dined he informed me further that he had been reporting football
matches for six weeks. Before that he had been proof-reader for a firm of
printers for about a year. Before that he had been a compositor. And
before that again he had worked in an office with his father, who was
Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths for some parish down in
Hertfordshire. He chucked that because he found that the registration of
births, marriages and deaths was spoiling his handwriting quite as much
as his handwriting was spoiling the registration of births, marriages and
deaths. (He was, he said, cultivating a careless, scholarly hand.) He
liked his present job, because it took him out pretty often into the open
air. Also he liked looking on at football matches and prize fights.

He said it made him feel manly.

You should have seen him sitting there and telling me these things in a
gentle, throaty and rather thick voice with a cockney accent and a sort
of tenor ring in it and a queer, humorous intonation that was like an
audible twinkle, as if he saw himself as he thought I must see him,
mainly in the light of absurdity. You should have seen his face, its thin
cheeks, its vivid flush, its queer, inquisitive, contradictory nose that
had a slender, high bridge and a tilted, pointed end in profile and
three-quarters, and turned suddenly all broad and blunt in a full view;
and his mouth that stood ajar with excitement, and even in moments of
quiescence failed to hide the tips of two rather prominent white teeth
pressed down on the lower lip. I don't say there was anything unmanly
about Jevons's figure (he wasn't noticeably undersized), or about his
mouth and jaw. I knew a great General with a mouth and jaw like that, and
he was one of the handsomest figures in the Service. I'm not hinting at
anything like effeminacy in Jevons, only at a certain oddity that really
saved him. If he'd been handsome he'd have been dreadful. His flush, his
decorative eyes, his dark eyebrows and eyelashes, his sleek, light brown
hair, would have made him vulgar. As it was, his queerness gave them a
sort of point.

I dwell on these physical details because, afterwards, I found myself
continually looking at him as if to see where his charm lay. To see, I
suppose, what _she_ saw in him.

If anybody had asked me that night what I saw in him myself beyond an
ordinary little journalist "on the make," I don't suppose I could have
told them. But there's no doubt that I felt his charm, or that night
would have been the end instead of the beginning.

We sat in the restaurant when he had done telling me about himself; I
remember we sat quite a long time discussing an English writer--our
contemporary--whom I rather considered I had discovered. In those days I
used to apply him as an infallible test. Jevons had read every word of
him; it was he, in fact, who brought him into the conversation. He
confessed afterwards that he had done it on purpose. He had been testing
_me_.

Even so our acquaintance might have lapsed but for the thing that
happened when the waiter came up with the bill. My share of it was three
and twopence, and I found myself with only ninepence in my pocket. I had
to borrow half a crown, from Jevons. You mayn't see anything very
dreadful in that. I didn't at the time, and there wasn't. The dreadful
thing was that I forgot to pay him back.

Yes. Something happened that put Jevons and his half-crown out of my head
for long enough. I forgot to pay him, and he had to go without his dinner
for three nights in consequence. It was his last half-crown.

He told me this as an immense joke, long afterwards.

And Viola Thesiger cried.

That crying of hers, that child-like softening and breaking down under
him, in itself so unexpected (I didn't know she could do it), that
sudden and innocent catastrophe, was the first sign to me that I was done
for--wiped out. There wasn't any violence or any hysteria about it, only
grief, only pity. It was an entirely simple, gentle and beautiful
performance, and it took place in my rooms after Jevons had left us. But,
as I say, this was long afterwards. The agony of my undoing was a
horribly protracted affair.

I needn't say that what happened--I mean the thing that made me forget
all about Jevons and his half-crown--was Viola Thesiger.

I had his address, but the next day--the day after the match--was Sunday,
so I couldn't get the postal order I had meant to send him. And on Monday
she walked into my rooms at ten in the morning.

The appointment, I may remark, was for nine-thirty. I had fixed that
early hour for it because I wanted to get it done with. I wasn't going to
have my morning murdered with violence when it was two hours old; neither
did I intend it to be poisoned by the thought of this interview hanging
over me at the end.

I had just sent for Pavitt, my man, and told him that if Miss Thesiger
called he was on no account to let her in. He was to say that the
appointment was for nine-thirty and that Mr. Furnival was now engaged.
She would have to call again at three if she wished to see him. When
engaging a typist it is as well to begin as you mean to go on, and I was
anxious to let Miss Thesiger know at once that I was not a man who would
stand any nonsense. I was abominably busy that morning.

And Pavitt let her in. (It was the first time he had failed in this way.)
He never explained or apologized for it afterwards. He seemed to think
that when I had seen Miss Thesiger I would see, even more vividly than he
did, how impossible it was to do otherwise, unless he had relinquished
all claim to manhood and to chivalry. The look he sent me from the
threshold as he retreated backwards, drawing the door upon himself like a
screen and shutting me in alone with her, said very plainly, "You may
curse, sir, and you may swear; but if you think you'll get out of it any
better than I have you're mistaken."

Yes: it was something more than her appearance and her manner, though
they, in all conscience, were enough.

I do not know what appearance and what manner, if any, are proper to a
young woman calling on a young man at his rooms to seek employment. The
mere situation may, for all I know, bristle with embarrassments. Anyhow,
I can imagine that in some hands it might have moments, let us say, of
extreme difficulty on either side. Miss Thesiger's appearance and her
manner were perfect; but they didn't suggest by any sign or shade that
she was a young woman seeking employment, that she was a young woman
seeking anything; but rather that she was a young woman to whom all
things naturally came.

She approached me very slowly. Her adorable little salutation, with all
its maturity, its gravity, was somehow essentially young. She was rather
tall, and her figure had the same serious maturity in youth. She carried
her small head high, and held her shoulders well back, so that she got a
sort of squareness into the divine slope of them (people hadn't begun to
slouch forward from the hips in those days), a squareness that agreed
somehow with the character of her small face. I didn't know then whether
it was a pretty face or not. I daresay it was a bit too odd and square
for prettiness, and, as for beauty, that had all gone into the lines of
her body (which _was_ beautiful, if you like). When you looked carefully,
you got a little square, white forehead, and straight eyebrows of the
same darkness as her hair, and very distinct on the white, and eyes also
very dark and distinct, and fairly crystalline with youth; and a little
white and very young nose that started straight and ended absurdly in a
little soft knob that had a sort of kink in it; and a mouth which would
have been too large for her face if it hadn't made room for itself by
tilting up at the corners; and then a little square white chin and jaw;
they were thrust forward, but so lightly and slenderly that it didn't
matter. It doesn't sound--does it?--as if she could have been pretty, let
alone beautiful; and yet--and yet she managed that little head of hers
and that little odd face so as to give an impression of beauty or of
prettiness. It was partly the oddness of the face and head, coming on the
top of all that symmetry, that perfection, that made the total effect of
her so bewildering. I can't find words for the total effect (I don't know
that you ever got it all at once, and I certainly didn't get it then),
and if I were to tell you that what struck me first about her was
something perverse and wilful and defiant, this would be misleading.

She smiled in her mature, perfunctory manner as she took the chair I gave
her. She cast out her muff over my writing-table, and flung back the furs
that covered her breast and shoulders, as if she had come to stay, as if
it were four o'clock in the afternoon and I had asked her to tea for the
first time.

I remember saying, "That's right. I'm afraid this room is a bit warm,
isn't it?"--as if she had done something uninvited and a little
unexpected, and I wished to reassure her. As if, too, I desired to assert
my position as the giver of assurances.

(And it was I who needed them, not she.)

She hadn't been in that room five minutes before she had created a
situation; a situation that bristled with difficulty and danger.

To begin with, she was so young. She couldn't have been, then, a day
older than one-and-twenty. My first instinct (at least, I suppose it was
my first) was to send her away; to tell her that I was afraid she
wouldn't do, that she was too unpunctual, and that I had found, between
nine-thirty and ten o'clock, somebody who would suit me rather better.
Any lie I could think of, so long as I got out of it. So long as I got
her out of it.

I don't know how it was she so contrived to impress me as being in for
something, some impetuous adventure, some enterprise of enormous
uncertainty. It may have been because she looked so well-cared-for and
expensive. I do not understand these matters, but her furs, and her
tailor-made suit of dark cloth, and the little black velvet hat with the
fur tail in it were not the sort of clothes I had hitherto seen worn by
typists seeking for employment. So that I doubted whether financial
necessity could have driven her to my door. Or else I had a premonition.
She herself had none. She was guileless and unaware of taking any risks.
And that, I think, was what disturbed me. The situation bristled because
she so ignored all difficulty or danger.

Please don't imagine that I regarded myself as dangerous or even
difficult, or her as being, in any vulgar sense, out for adventure, or as
balancing herself even for amusement on any perilous edge. It was not
what she was _out_ for, it was, as I say, what she might possibly be in
for; and what she would, in consequence, let me in for too. She made me
feel responsible.

"Let me see," I said; "it's typing, isn't it?"

I began raking through drawers and pigeon-holes, pretending to find her
letter and the sample of her work that she had sent me, though I knew all
the time that they lay under my hand hidden by the blotter. I wanted to
give myself time; I wanted to create the impression that I was old at
this game; that I had to do with scores and scores of young women seeking
employment; to make her realize the grim fact of competition; to saturate
her with the idea that she was only one of scores and scores, all
docketed and pigeon-holed, any one of whom might have superior qualities;
when it would be easy enough to say, "I'm sorry, but the fact is, I
rather think I've engaged somebody already."

"Yes," she said, "it's typing. I can't do anything else. But if you want
shorthand, I could learn it."

This gave me an opening. "Well--I'm sorry--but the fact is--"

"Did you like what I sent you?"

That staggered me. I hadn't allowed for her voice. For a moment I
wondered wildly what _had_ she sent me?

"Oh, yes. I liked it. But--" I began it again.

She leaned forward this time, peering under my elbow (the minx! I'm
convinced she knew the infernal thing was there).

"I see," she said. "You've lost it. Don't bother. I can do another. As
long as you liked it, that's all right."

I remember thinking violently: "It isn't all right. It's all wrong. And
the more I like it (if I _do_ like it) the worse it's going to be." But
all I said was, "You wrote from Canterbury, didn't you?"

"Yes."

It was as if she challenged me with: "Why not? Why shouldn't one write
from Canterbury?" And she stuck out her little chin as her eyes opened
fire on me at close range.

"Do you live there?" I said.

"Yes." She corrected herself. "My people live there."

"Oh! Because--in that case--I'm sorry--but--the fact is, I'm afraid--" I
floundered, and she watched me floundering. Then I plunged. "I must have
a typist who lives in London." (And I might have added "a typist who
won't open fire on me at close range.")

"But," she said, "I do--at least, I'm going to to-morrow evening."

I must have sat staring then quite a long time, not at her, but at one of
Roland Simpson's sketches on the wall in front of me.

She followed, but not quite accurately, the direction of my thoughts.

"If you want references, I can give you heaps. General Thesiger's my
uncle. Why? Do you know him?"

I had ceased staring. He was not the General I knew, but she had spoken a
sufficiently distinguished name. I said as much.

"Of course lots of people know him," she went on with a sort of radiant
rapidity. "And he knows lots of people. But I wouldn't write to him if I
were you. He'll only be rude, and ask you who the devil _you_ are.
There's my father, Canon Thesiger. It's no good writing to him, either.
It'll worry him. And there's--no, you mustn't bother the Archbishop. But
there's the Dean. You might write to _him_! And there's Colonel
Braithwaite and Mrs. Braithwaite. They're all dears. You might write to
any of them. Only I'd much rather you didn't."

"Why?" I said. I thought I was entitled to ask why.

"Because," she said, "it'll only mean a lot more bother for me."

I believe I meditated on this before I asked her, "Why should it?"

"Because it isn't easy to get away and earn your own living in this
country. And they'll try, poor dears, to stop me. And they can't."

"If they don't," I said, "are you sure it won't mean a lot of bother for
_them_?"

"Not," she said gravely, "if they're left alone and not worried. It will,
of course, if you go and write and stir them all up again."

"I see. For the moment, then, they are placated?"

"Rather." (I wondered on what grounds.) "We settled _that_ last night."

"Then--" I said, "forgive my asking so many questions--your people know
you had this appointment with me?"

Her eyebrows took a little tortured twist in her pity for my stupidity.

"Oh no. That would have upset them all for nothing. It doesn't do to
worry them with silly details. You see, they don't know anything about
you."

It was exquisite, the innocence with which she brought it out.

"But," I insisted, "that's rather my point. _You_ don't know anything
about me either, do you?"

"Yes, I do. I knew," she said, "the minute I came into the room. If it
comes to that, you don't know anything about _me_."

I said I did; I knew the minute _she_ came into the room. And she faced
me with, "Well then, you see!" as if that settled it.

I suppose it did settle it. I must have decided that since nobody could
stop her, and I wasn't, after all, a villain, if she insisted on being
somebody's typist, she had very much better be mine. You see, she was so
young. I wanted to protect her. Not that there was anything helpless and
pathetic about her, anything, except her innocence, that appealed to me
for protection. On the contrary, she struck me as a creature of high
courage and defiance. That, of course, was what constituted the danger.
She would insist on taking risks. Presently I heard myself saying, "Yes,
the Close, Canterbury. I've got that. But where am I to find you here?"

She gave me an address that made me whistle.

I asked her if she knew anything, anything whatever, about the people of
the house?

She said she didn't. She had chosen it because it had a nice green door,
and there was an Angora cat on the door-step. A large orange cat with
green eyes.

Had she actually taken rooms there?

No. But she had chosen them (I think she said because they had pretty
chintz curtains.) She was going to take them _now_.

She had her hand on the door. She was eager, like a child that has got
off at last, after irritating delay.

I closed the door against her precipitate flight. I said I thought we
could settle that here, over the telephone.

And I settled it.

Having settled it, I sent Pavitt, my man, to get rooms for her that
afternoon in Hampstead, with his sister-in-law, in a house overlooking
the Heath. I said I couldn't promise her chintz curtains and a green door
and an orange Angora cat with green eyes, but I thought she would be
fairly comfortable with Mrs. Pavitt.

She was.

She told me a week later that the Hampstead rooms _had_ chintz curtains
and there was a Persian kitten too. A blue Persian, with yellow eyes.

There was. But I didn't tell her who put them there.

The kitten alone (it was a pure-bred Persian) cost me three guineas; and
to this day she thinks that Pavitt, who brought it to her, found it on
the Heath.

Yet, with all my precautions, there was trouble when Canterbury heard
about my typist. (She had become my typist, though I had never said a
word about engaging her.)

This, of course, was owing to the criminal secrecy with which Viola
conducted her affairs. The Minor Canon wrote to me as if I had seduced,
or was about to seduce, his daughter. (He had upset himself by rushing up
to take her back to Canterbury, and finding that she wouldn't go with
him.) I think, in his excitement, he ordered me to give her up. He was a
guileless and indeed a holy man; and it's always the guileless and the
holy people who raise the uncleanest scandals. And Mrs. Thesiger wrote,
and the General and the Dean; and I've no doubt the Archbishop would have
written too, if I hadn't unearthed _my_ General at his club, and asked
him if he knew the Thesigers, and found out that he did, and implored him
to arrange the horrid business for me as best he could. I said he might
tell them that if the girl had been left to them to look after her, she
would have got into rooms in--I named the street, and testified to the
sinister character of the house. And my General wrote and explained to
the other General and to the Minor Canon what a thoroughly nice chap I
was, and how lamentably they had misunderstood what I believed he was
pleased to call my relations with Miss Thesiger. I'm not at all sure that
he didn't even go farther and stick in a lot about my family, and suggest
that I was eligible to the extent that, though my fortunes were still
to make, I had (besides private means that enabled me to live in spite of
journalism) considerable expectations (he knew an aunt of mine--better,
it would seem, than I did). In short, that I was a thoroughly nice chap,
and that the father of seven daughters (five unmarried) might do far
worse than cultivate my acquaintance. He must have gone quite as far as
that, or farther, otherwise I couldn't account for the peculiarly tender
note that the Minor Canon put into the letter of apology that he wrote
me, still less for the invitation I received by the same post from Mrs.
Thesiger to spend Whitsuntide with them at Canterbury. (Viola had said
she was going home for Whitsuntide.)

Dear lady, she was herself the daughter of a Canon, and she had lived all
her life in a cathedral close, and the atmosphere of a cathedral close
may foster innocence, but I cannot think it could have been entirely
responsible for the kind of indiscretion Mrs. Thesiger was guilty of.
Neither do I think Mrs. Thesiger was entirely responsible herself. She is
a nice woman, and I am sure she couldn't have written as she did unless
my friend the General had led her to believe that there was some sort of
an understanding between me and Viola. But still, for all she knew about
me, I might have been a villain. Not perhaps the gross villain the Minor
Canon took me for, but a villain in some profound and subtle way
inappreciable to my friend the General.

Well, of course I didn't spend Whitsuntide with the Thesigers at
Canterbury. It would have been sheer waste of Viola. For the worst of all
this confounded rumpus was that it made me put off proposing to Viola
till she had forgotten all about it. She would never have listened to me
while the trail of the scandal still lingered.

In fact, it was only the marked coldness of my manner to her just then
that saved me.

       *       *       *       *       *

It saved me to suffer. I didn't know it was possible to suffer as she
made me suffer--I mean as _they_ made me, between them.

It didn't begin all at once. It didn't begin, really, for another three
months, the end of those six months that Jevons had given himself. Not
even then. Not, you may say, for a whole year; because he gave himself
another six months as soon as he saw her. He was always giving himself
these periods of time, as if, with his mania for taking risks, he was
always having some prodigious bet on himself. I never knew a man back his
own enterprises as he did.

But until he turned up again I was happy. I say I, not we. I don't know
whether Viola was happy or not, though she looked it. I had enough sense
to see that her happiness, if she was happy, had nothing to do with me
except in so far as I was the humble means, under Providence, of the
definite escape from Canterbury.

For I very soon saw what had been the matter with her. She was one of
nine, the youngest but one of seven daughters. The Minor Canon had only
been able to educate one of the seven properly, because he had had a son
at Sandhurst, and the other was still reading for the Bar, which is
pretty expensive too if you're as amiably stupid as Bertie Thesiger. (I
mention Bertie because, though he doesn't come into this story, his
stupidity and his amiability combined to tighten the situation
considerably for Viola.) And Mrs. Thesiger had only been able to marry
off two of her seven daughters. Of the others, one (the one who had been
to Girton) was a High School teacher in Canterbury and she lived at home;
one was a trained nurse and lived at home between cases; that left three
girls living continually at home and, as Viola put it, eating their
heads off.

These were the circumstances which Viola (with some omissions) recited by
way of justification for her revolt; the fact being that she would have
revolted anyway. She was, as I have said, a creature of high courage and
vitality and she was tied up much too tight in that Cathedral Close,
besides being much too well fed; and she longed to do things. To do them
with her hands and with her head. She was tired of playing tennis on the
velvet lawns of the Canons' gardens; she was tired of calling on the
Canons' wives and talking to their daughters. I am aware that Canterbury
is a garrison town and that other resources, and other prospects, I
suppose, were open to Viola. But Viola was tired of talking to the
garrison. I think she would have been tired in any case, even if the
garrison hadn't been bespoken, as it were, by her unmarried sisters. (It
is, humanly speaking, impossible that, even in a garrison town, seven
sisters will _all_ marry into the Service, as I fatuously supposed Mrs.
Thesiger must have realized when she asked me to Canterbury.) It always
bored Viola to do what her family did, and what her family, just because
they did it, expected her to do. And somehow, in the long hours spent in
the Cathedral Close, she had acquired a taste for what she called
"literature," what she innocently believed to be literature. She was of
an engaging innocence in this respect; so that typing authors'
manuscripts appealed to her as a vocation that combined one of the
highest forms of cerebral activity with I don't know what glamour of
romantic adventure.

Her enthusiasm, her veneration for the written word made her an admirable
typist. But not all at once. To say that she brought to her really
horrible task a respect, a meticulous devotion, would give you no idea of
the child's attitude; it was a blind, savage superstition that would have
been exasperating if it had not been so heart-rending. It cleared
gradually until it became intelligent co-operation.

I trained her for six months.

I don't suppose I ever worked harder than I did in that first half year
of her. I mean my output was never greater. For every blessed thing I
wrote was an excuse for going to see her, or for her coming to see me. It
was a perpetual journeying between my rooms in Brunswick Square, and her
rooms in Hampstead overlooking the Heath. The more I wrote the more I saw
of her.

I trained her for six months--until Jevons was ready for her.

When I tell you that she reverenced my performances you may imagine in
what spirit she approached his.

For their meeting, as for what happened afterwards, I alone am
responsible. I brought it on myself. By sheer quixotic fuss and
interference with what, after all, wasn't my affair. For little Jevons
most decidedly was not. I might easily have let that sleeping dog lie. He
certainly did sleep, in some obscure kennel of London; he had slept ever
since I had left him at the door of that restaurant in Soho. He slept
almost for the six months he had then given himself.

And then, before (according to his own schedule) he was quite due, he
appeared in the columns (in my columns) of the _Morning Standard_. I had
almost forgotten his existence; but when I saw his name, James Tasker
Jevons, stick out familiarly under the big headlines, I remembered that
that name, on a card with an address, had been lying in my left-hand
writing-table drawer all this time; I remembered that it was there
because he had lent me half a crown, and that I had never paid him.
Then he came back to me--he lived again.

I sent him a postal order and an apology. I referred, very handsomely as
I thought, to his cuckoo's nesting in my paper. (I informed him, in fact,
that he "did it" better than I did); and because I had worked myself up
to a pitch of affability and generosity, I asked him to come and see me
at such time as he should be free. And because, also, I was indifferent
and lazy and didn't want to be seriously bothered with him, instead of
asking him to lunch or dine with me, I said I was generally free myself
between four and five.

Between four and five was an hour when Viola was very apt to come in.

In the instant that followed the posting of that letter I saw what I had
done. And I wrote to him the next day asking him to dinner, in order that
he should not come in between four and five. For some weeks, whenever I
fancied he was about due at four o'clock, I wrote and asked him to
dinner. That was how I fastened him to me. There wasn't any sense in
which he fastened on me. I wasn't by any means his only hope.

I may say at once I was prostrated as any slave before his conversation.

I shall never forget the radiance of his twinkle when he told me he had
been sacked three weeks ago from the sporting paper that had provided him
with his sole visible means of subsistence. It was his blessed (only he
didn't call it blessed) style that had dished him: the suicidal _Г©lan_
that he brought to the business. He was warned, he said. He was aware
that his existence as a reporter hung by the bare thread of statement
(wearing thinner and thinner) on which he weaved his fantastic web. His
editor told him he was engaged to report football, not to play it with
the paper. But he couldn't help it. He had got, he said, the ensanguined
habit. Still, I was not to imagine that he bungled things. He jolly well
knew his way about. In his wildest flights there was a homing impulse; he
was preparing a place for himself all the time (that it happened to be
_my_ place didn't seem to afflict him in the least). Like St. Paul, he
knew how to abound and he knew how to abstain. His abstinence, in fact,
gave the measure of his abundance. He held himself in for five perilous
weeks; and when he let himself rip again it was with a burst that landed
him in the front page of the _Morning Standard_.

What he sketched for me had no resemblance to the career of a peaceful
man of letters. It was a hot race, a combat as bloody (his own word) as
those contests of which he was the delighted eye-witness.

He had come thin and worn out of the struggle, but you gathered that he
had borne himself in it with coolness and deliberate caution. His phrases
produced a false effect of vehemence and excitement. You saw that he had
simply followed out a calculated scheme, not one step of which had
miscarried. And you felt that his most passionate affairs would be
conducted with the same formidable precision.

I ought to have felt it. For we were precious soon in the thick of it--of
his most passionate affair.

I had dined him, I suppose, about three times, and I had lunched him
twice. And I had had tea with him once in his bedroom. He was living in
one room in a street off the Euston Road, and he called it his bedroom
because it looked so much more that than anything else. I might have let
it go at that. But I didn't. I had seen his bedroom. I took the liberty
of inquiring into his finances. They were, he said, as yet undeveloped.
He had a scheme of his own for improving them, but while it was maturing
he was, he certainly _was_ open to offers of work. I got him some
translation. (He was a fairly good French scholar.)

Then--it was the fatality of the proceedings that impressed them on my
memory--then (I forgot to say that at that time I was reader to a firm of
publishers; these things are in themselves so inessential to this story)
I turned over to him any books that came more into his province than
mine. His province, I can tell you, was pretty extensive, too.

He began by doing me the honour to consult me about any instances that
seemed doubtful.

And so--you see how carefully I had prepared his path for him--one
afternoon he turned up at my rooms, uninvited, between four and five. He
said he remembered I had told him I should be free at that hour.

He remembered. Yes; I don't think Tasker Jevons ever forgot anything,
anything likely to be useful to him, in his life.

And he hadn't been with me ten minutes before Viola Thesiger came in.

He was saying, "Why the Heaven-afflicted idiot" (his author) "should
think it necessary--" when Viola came in.

She came in, and suddenly I made up my mind that she was beautiful. I
hadn't seen it before. I don't know why I saw it now. It may have been
some turn of her small, squarish head that surprised me with subtle
tendernesses and curves; or more likely it may have been her effect on
him. I may have seen her with his eyes. I don't know--I don't know. I
hardly like to think he saw anything in her I hadn't seen first.

He stopped talking. They looked at each other. I introduced him. Not to
have introduced him would have struck him as a slight.

I ordered tea at once in the hope of hastening his departure. He had been
curiously silent since she had come in.

But he didn't go. He just sat there, saying nothing, but looking at her
furtively now and again, and blinking, as if looking at her hurt him.
Whenever she said anything he stared, with his mouth a little open,
breathing heavily.

She hadn't paid very much attention to him. Then, suddenly, as if
intrigued by his silence, she said:

"Who is the Heaven-afflicted idiot?"

I said, "Ask Mr. Jevons."

She did.

Jevons didn't answer her. He simply looked at her and blinked. Then he
looked away again.

"Come," I said, "you might finish what you were going to say."

"I don't know," he muttered, "that I was going to say anything--Oh
yes--that thing you sent me. Why the silly blighter should suppose it's
necessary to stick in a storm at sea when it's quite obvious he hasn't
seen one--he talks about a brig when he means a bark, and from the way he
navigates her you'd say the wind blew all ways at once in the Atlantic."

I said it might for all I knew; and I asked him if he'd ever seen a storm
at sea himself.

It seemed he had. He'd been ordered a sea-voyage for his health after his
spell of printing; and his uncle, who was a sea-captain, took him with
him to Hong-Kong in his ship. And he had been all through a cyclone in
the Pacific.

I got him--with some difficulty, for he had become extremely shy--I got
him to tell us about it.

He did. And by the time he had finished with us we had all been through a
cyclone in the Pacific.

It was too much. The little beast could talk almost as well as he wrote.
A fellow who can write like Tasker Jevons has no business to talk at all.

Viola left soon after six. He had outstayed her. I went downstairs with
her. When I came back to him he was still staring at the doorway she had
passed through.

"Who's that girl?" he said.

I said she was my typist.

He meditated, and brought out as the result: "Do you mind telling me how
much she charges you?"

I told him. He looked dejected.

"I can't afford her," he said presently. "No. I can't possibly afford
her. Not yet." He paused. "Do you mind giving me her address?"

"I thought you said you couldn't afford her?"

"I can't. Not yet. But I _will_ afford her. I will. I give myself
another--" He stopped. His mouth fell ajar, and I saw his lips moving as
he went through some inaudible calculation--"another six months."

He hid his face in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair.
Then, as if he conceived himself to be unobserved behind this shelter,
he let himself go; and I became the witness of an agony, a passion, a
self-abandoned nakedness, to the utter shedding of all reticences and
decencies, with nothing but those thin hands and that hair between
me and it.

"I'll work," he said. "I'll work like a hundred bloody niggers. Like ten
hundred thousand million sweated tailors in a stinking cellar. I'll
pinch. I'll skimp and save. I'll deny myself butter. I'll wear celluloid
collars and sell my dress-suit. My God! I'd sell the coat off my back and
the shoes off my feet; I'd sell my own mother's body off her death-bed,
and go without my dinner for nine months to see her again for five
minutes. Just to see her for five minutes. Five (unprintable) little
minutes that another man wouldn't know what to do with, wouldn't use for
tying up a bootlace in."

Pause.

"I didn't know it hurt. I didn't know a girl's face could land you one
like this, and her eyes jab you, and her voice turn round and round in
your stomach like a circular saw. That's what it feels like. Exactly.

"Dry up, you old Geyser, yourself. I'm getting it, not you. You'd spout
if you'd had to sit tight with all the gas in the shop blazing away under
you for the last hour. If you can turn it off at the meter, turn it. I
can't. No, I won't have another cup of tea. And I won't get up and clear
out, I'm going to sit here another five minutes. I'm not well, I tell
you, and it relieves me to talk about it. I don't care if you don't
listen. Or if you do. I'm past caring.

"D'you notice that I didn't speak a word to her--not one blessed word the
whole time? I should have choked if I'd tried to. I didn't want to look
at her, to think of her. That's why I told that rotten story, just to
keep myself going. What a blethering idiot she must have thought me! What
a putrid ass! The sea--And _me_!

"And the way she looked at me--"

I said, "D'you mean to say, Jevons, it didn't happen?"

And he groaned. "Oh, it _happened_ all right. I can't invent things to
save my life.

"God! It isn't even as if she was pretty. I could understand _that_."

He grabbed his throat suddenly and began to cough.

I tried to be kind to him. "Look here," I said, "old chap. I'm awfully
sorry if it takes you this way. But it's no good."

He turned on me coughing and choking. I cannot remember all he said or
half the things he called me, but it was something like this: "You
snivelling defective." (Cough) "You septic idiot." (Cough) "You poisonous
and polluted ass." (Cough, cough, cough) "You scarlet imbecile." (I have
to water down the increasing richness of his epithets.) "You last
diminutive purple embryo of an epileptic stock, do you suppose I don't
know that? No good? Of course it's no good--yet. I got to wait for
another six months. And you can take it from me, if a fellow knows what
he wants, and doesn't try to get it--doesn't know how to get it--in six
months--and doesn't find out--_he_'s no good, if you like."

These words didn't strike me at the time as having any personal
application. He was to repeat them later on, however, in circumstances
which I defy anybody to have foreseen.

      *       *       *       *       *

I cannot recall the precise phases of their remarkable friendship. I
wasn't present at its earliest stages.

I had my first intimation of its existence one evening in the winter of
nineteen-five, when he dropped in on me to consult me, he said, about a
rather delicate matter, in which I gathered there lurked for his
inexperience the most frightful pitfalls of offence. That he should come
to me in this spirit was evidence that a certain chastening had been
going on in him.

The delicate matter was this. He had given Miss Thesiger a lot of work,
the typing of a whole book, in fact. And--he had immense difficulty in
getting to this part of it--she had refused to take any payment. She had
got it into her head that he was hard up. He had sent her a cheque three
times, and three times she had returned it. She was as obstinate as a
mule about it. And now she was saying that she had never meant him to pay
her; she had done the whole thing out of friendship, which, of course,
was very pretty of her, but it put him in a beastly position. He'd never
been precisely in that position before and he didn't know what to do
about it. He didn't want to offend her and yet he didn't see--did I?--how
he could let her do it. It was, he said, all the wrong way about,
according to his notions. And for the life of him he didn't know what to
do. It might seem to me incredible that such virgin innocence as his
should exist in a world where the rules for most sorts of conduct were
fairly settled. He had lived all his life in an atmosphere of births,
marriages and deaths, and he knew all the rules for the registration of
them. And that was about all he did know. And it was the most infernally
hard luck to be stumped like this at the very beginning, just when he
wanted most awfully to do the right thing.

Besides, it had knocked him all to bits--the sheer prettiness of it.

He laid bare for me all the curious intricacies of a soul tortured by its
own delicacy. There was agony in his eyes.

If he were to take this kindness from a lady--would it, in my opinion, or
would it not, be cricket?

I didn't like to tell him that he had brought his agony on himself by his
imprudence in employing a typist when he couldn't afford one. So I only
said that, if I knew the lady, he would find her uncommonly hard to move.

He hadn't any hope, he said, of moving her; but did I think that if he
made her a present--say, the Collected Works of George Meredith, it would
meet the case?

I said it would meet the case all right, but that in my opinion it would
spoil its prettiness. If Miss Thesiger didn't want to be paid in one way,
she wouldn't at all care about being paid in another. Perhaps Miss
Thesiger liked being pretty. Hadn't he better leave it at that, anyhow,
for the present?

You see I looked on Viola and Viola's behaviour as infinitely more my
concern than his. I found myself replying for her as she would have
wished me to reply, as if I could claim an intenser appreciation of her
motives than was his, as if she and I were agreed about this question of
helping Tasker Jevons and I were the custodian of her generosity.

He said he supposed it wouldn't hurt him to leave it at that. It wasn't
as if it wouldn't be all one in the long run. He gave himself three
months.

I supposed he meant to pay her in.

Three weeks later I heard that Jevons was actually living up in Hampstead
in the same house as Viola. I didn't hear it from Viola, but from my man,
Pavitt, who had it from his sister-in-law. And what Pavitt came to tell
me was that Mr. Jevons had been ill.

I went up to Hampstead that afternoon to see him.

I found him in a back room, at the top of the house, sitting by the fire
in an easy-chair, wrapped in a blanket. He was as thin as a lath and his
face was a bright yellow. The very whites of his eyes were yellow. I
would have said you never saw a more miserable object, but that Jevons
was not miserable. He was happy. And as far as his devastated condition
would allow him, he looked happy. This face, yellow with jaundice, was
doing its best to smile. The smile was a grimace, not an affair of
the lips at all, but of the deep crescent lines drawn at right angles to
them. Still, he was smiling. In a sort of ecstasy.

He was smiling at Viola, who sat in the chair facing him on the other
side of the hearth. She looked as if she had been there for ages. Also,
as if she had been sitting up all night.

She was smiling too, straight at Jevons. What I saw was the beatitude of
his response.

He tried to smile at me, too, as I came in, but the effort was a failure.
He wasn't really a bit glad to see me. Viola got up and left me with him.
I wasn't to stay with him for more than ten minutes, she said. It was the
first day he had been allowed to sit up.

I sat with him for fifteen minutes.

He was lodged, as before, in one room; but its domestic character was
disguised by many ingenious devices giving you the idea that it was
nothing but his study.

Well, there he was, haggard and yellow with jaundice, utterly pitiable as
to his appearance and surroundings; and yet he looked at me in,
positively, a sort of triumph, as much as to say, "Yes. Here I am. And
you, with all your superior resources, haven't managed half so well."

And I thought that he (not knowing Viola so well as I did) was suffering
from a lamentable delusion.

He said she had been awfully good to him. But it was rather hard luck on
him, wasn't it, that he should have gone and turned this beastly colour?

I said rather loftily I didn't suppose it mattered to Viola what colour
he turned.

(What _could_ it matter to her?)

She came in presently and took me down to her sitting-room, and gave me
tea. She owned to having sat up three nights with Jevons. She couldn't
have believed it possible that anybody could be so ill. For three days
and three nights the poor thing hadn't been able to keep anything
down--not even a drop of water. But to-day she had been feeding him on
the whites of eggs beaten up with brandy.