The Belfry

by May Sinclair

IX

That we had made out something very like the truth of it I realized when
I met Burton Withers. For eventually I did meet him. It was at the end of
June, nineteen-ten, in the green room of the Crown Theatre on the
hundredth night of Jimmy's play. That is what I remember it by.

Norah and I were with Viola and Jimmy. Withers had come in with a friend, an important member of the cast, who was evidently under the impression that we had never met before, for he introduced him to us all round. Withers showed tact in not recognizing Viola or claiming the acquaintance he certainly had with Jevons. He had, in fact, a most reassuring air of starting again with a clean slate and no reminiscences. This was in the interval between the First and Second Acts. When the curtain rose on Act Two, I was alone in Jimmy's box. (Jimmy and Viola and Norah were trying the effect of the play from the stalls.) And at the next interval Withers came to me there. It was funny, he said, the way little Jevons had come on. He didn't suppose any of us had thought of this four years ago when we had all met together in Bruges.

I said, "Did we all meet together in Bruges?"

"Well, if it wasn't in Ghent. Oh—of course it was at Ghent you and I met. You hadn't joined the others then."

At first I was hopelessly mystified by these allusions. I couldn't think what point he was making for or where he would come out. He seemed to be trying uneasily to get somewhere. Then I saw that he had had it on his mind that when we had last met he had made a defamatory statement to me about the lady who had become my sister-in-law, and about a man who had become a celebrity (I knew Withers's little weakness for celebrities). And he was scared.

I must have seemed a bit lost among his allusions, for he blurted it out.

"D'you know, I've been most awfully sorry for chaffing you in that idiotic way—about—your sister-in-law. Silly sort of thing one says, you know. But of course you knew I was pulling your leg."

I said, "My dear Withers, of course I knew you were."

Of course I knew he was doing nothing of the sort, for Withers slandered right and left when it wasn't worth his while to grovel, and I had no doubt now that he believed his own dirty tale when he told it; but he had been impressed and thoroughly frightened, even at the time, by the calmness of my bluff, and the little beast was far more afraid of us than we ever could have been of him now. We could henceforth dismiss Withers from our minds. He was a "social climber" of the sort that would eat his own words if he thought they would do the smallest damage to his climbing.

As for the ladies, General Thesiger's friends, I rather think the General had settled with them at the time.

You might say we had nothing to fear from Reggie, if Reggie's silence—and his deafness—hadn't been more terrible than anything he could have heard or said.

I suppose nineteen-ten ought to stand as the year of Tasker Jevons's great Play, the play that ran for a whole year after the hundredth night, that ran on and on as if it would never stop, that, when it was taken off the Crown stage to make room for its successor, still careered through the provinces and the United States. It seemed the year of Jimmy's utmost affluence. If he kept it up, we said, he'd be a millionaire before he died of it. But it wasn't conceivable that he could keep it up for long. We thought he'd never write another play like this one. There never would be another year like nineteen-ten.

I believe that even Jimmy thought there'd never be another year like it, so far had he surpassed his own calculations, as it was.

But for me nineteen-ten is the year of other things, the things that happened in the family, the year of Reggie's return and all the misery that came from it, the year of Viola's struggle—the agony of which we, Norah and I, were the helpless spectators. She never said a word to us. It was Norah who conveyed to me the secret, intimate shock of it.

That year Jimmy rained boxes and stalls and theatre-parties for his play on all the Thesigers (except Reggie) and on all their friends, and on Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands when they came back from Simla and Gibraltar (it was the year of their return too); but we stood behind the scenes of a tragedy that mercifully was hidden from Jimmy's eyes. It was the year when Mildred broke off her engagement to Charlie Thesiger. It was the year when our little girl, Viola, was born; the year when we moved from our Bloomsbury flat into the little house in Edwardes Square, taking over the end of the lease and all the fixtures and some of the furniture from Jimmy. Jimmy hadn't a child, and he had sworn that he never would have one; he was so afraid (and this fear was the only thing that disturbed his optimism), so horribly afraid that Viola might die. But he had outgrown the house in Edwardes Square. It was the year of his first really startling expansion.

It was the year when he moved into the house in Mayfair.

Why Mayfair we really couldn't think. He said he liked the sound of it; it made him feel as if he was in the country when he wasn't, and as if it was the month of May, when there never was any month of May in England; as if there were a maypole where the fountain is in Park Lane; and as if processions, and processions of horses, splendid stallions and brood-mares and thoroughbreds and hacks and great Suffolk punches with their manes and tails tied up with ribbons were coming past his house to the fair.

He may have felt like that about it. I put no limits to Jimmy's imagination; but I suspected him of throwing out these airy fancies as a veil to cover the preposterous nature of his ambition.

It was also the year when he began to talk about motor-cars and think about motor-cars and dream about motor-cars at night.

And it was the year in which he and Viola went to the Riviera while the
plumbers and painters were at work on the house in Green Street, Mayfair.
They stayed away all autumn, and at the end of November they settled in.
And at Christmas they gave their house-warming.

It wasn't a large party—only a few friends of Viola's, and Jimmy's lawyer and his doctor and his agent, and a few picked members of the confraternity; the rest were Thesigers. If Jimmy had meant to give a demonstration proving that he could gather the whole of his wife's family round him at a pinch, he had all but succeeded. I suppose every available member had turned up that night, except Reggie. The General and his wife and daughters were there; and Charlie Thesiger and Bertie; and Canon and Mrs. Thesiger (they had come up from Canterbury on purpose, and were staying with the General); and Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands; and Victoria and Mildred, who stayed with Viola; and Millicent, who came to us; and a whole crowd of miscellaneous aunts and cousins; perhaps sixty altogether, counting outsiders.

Norah and I had been away for weeks in the country and had only got back that afternoon, so we had not seen the house in Green Street since it had been furnished. It burst, it literally burst, on us, without the smallest warning or preparation.

Like Jimmy's first novel, it was designed to startle and arrest, hitting you in the eye as you came in. The actual reception was held in the large hall, which had been formed by turning what had once been the dining-room loose into the passage and the stair-place.

So far the architect had done his work well. After that he had been left to struggle with and interpret as he best could the baronial idea that had been imposed on him. The hall was panelled half-way in dark oak, and above the oak the walls were hung with a rough papering of old gold. But what hit you in the eye as you came in was the oak staircase that went up royally along the bottom wall. It had scarlet-and-gold Tudor roses on the flank of the balustrade, and at every third banister there was a shield picked out in scarlet and gold. And at the bottom of the balustrade and at the turn a little oak lion sat on his haunches and held up yet another shield (picked out in scarlet and gold) in his fore-paws. The bare oak planks of the upper floor made the ceiling, and there was an enormous Tudor rose in the middle of it, where other people might have had a chandelier, and little Tudor roses blazed at intervals all along the cornice. And there was a great stone hearth and chimney-piece, a Tudor chimney-piece, mullioned, with a shield carved in the centre and the motto: "Dominus Defensor Domi," and on either side the rose and the grill, the rose and the grill, alternately. There were andirons on the hearth and an immense log burning, and swords and daggers and suits of armour hung on the gold walls above the panelling.

And I swear to you that the curtains and upholstery were in tapestry cloth, the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground. It was as if Jimmy had wanted to say to the Thesigers that if it came to being Tudor, he could be as Tudor as any of them, and more so. Thus deeply had he absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere.

When she saw the suits of armour Norah squeezed my arm and breathed "Oh—my darling Wally!"—in an ecstasy that was anguish. Poor Mildred's plump face turned as scarlet as the Tudor roses with an emotion that we could not fathom, but judged to be painful.

We had come early with the idea of making ourselves useful, if necessary; but there was hardly anybody there yet, only two or three guests drinking coffee or champagne-cup at the long table under the windows, and Jimmy, who stood in the middle of his Tudor hall, talking to one of the confraternity, and rocking himself gently from his toes to his heels and from his heels to his toes again, as a sign that he was not in the least elated, but only at his ease.

He was delighted to see us, and for quite three seconds he ceased his rocking and began to twinkle in a most natural and reassuring manner. Then I remember him scuttling away to greet another guest, and the confrère gazing after him with affection and turning to us in a sort of grave enjoyment of the scene. I remember Viola coming up to us and her little baffling smile and her look—the look she was to have for long enough—of detachment from Jimmy and his Tudor hall. I remember the dark blue, half-transparent gown she wore that was certainly not Tudor, and her general air of being an uninvited and inappropriate guest, and how she conveyed us to the table to get drinks "all comfy" before the others came. And when Viola had drifted away, I remember Charlie Thesiger strolling up to us. The supercilious youth had been, getting a drink "all comfy" on his own account, and his little stiff moustache was still wet with Jimmy's champagne-cup above the atrocious smile he met us with.

He asked us if we'd seen the drawing-room.

We said we hadn't, and he advised us to go up and look at it at once, before anybody else did. "You can't see it properly," he said, "unless you're alone with it."

I suppose we ought to have been grateful to Charlie for not letting us miss it, and it was perfectly true that the way to see it was to be alone with it; there would, indeed, have been a positive indecency in seeing it in any other way. He had spared our decency. And yet I think we hated him for having sent us there. It was as if he had sent us to look at something horrible, at an outrage, at violence done to shrinking, delicate things.

We looked at it, and we looked at each other. We didn't speak, and I don't think either of us smiled. I remember Norah going behind me and closing the door swiftly, as she might have closed it on some horror that she and I had to deal with alone. I remember her saying then, "This is too awful!" not in the least as if she meant what we were looking at, but as if she saw something invisible that lurked and loomed behind it, so that I asked her what she thought it meant.

"It means," she said, "that Jimmy's done it all himself. He's had to do it all himself. She hasn't cared."

I said, it looked as if he hadn't cared.

She moaned, "Oh, but he did—he did. He's cared so awfully. That's the dreadful part of it. You can see he has. Just look at those vases and those cabinets and things. And think of the money the poor thing must have spent on it!"

"But," I said, "it's so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable.
The old house was perfect. So, in its way, was the cottage."

"I'm afraid that wasn't Jimmy's taste—it was Vee-Vee's. She did everything."

"She told us he did."

"Poor darling—she wanted us to think he did."

"He appreciated it, anyhow."

"He'd appreciate anything if she did it."

"Then," I said, "why should he break loose like this now?"

"Because she hasn't cared. She hasn't cared a hang. She's left everything to him. And you can see, poor dear, how he's spread himself."

Oh, yes, you could see. It was as if he had never had scope before, and now, with no limit to his opportunity, he had simply run amok. It wasn't that the things he had gathered round him in his orgy were not fine things. It was the awful way he'd mixed them, yielding incontinently to each solicitation as it came along. Dealers had been on the look-out for Jimmy to exploit his fury.

In his Tudor hall he had been constrained to unity by a great idea. But not here. And reminiscences of the Canterbury drawing-room had suggested to him that you could mix things. So, using a satinwood suite with tinted marqueterie and old rose upholsterings (he had succumbed to it in the first freshness of his innocence) as a base, he had added Boule cabinets and modern Indian tables in carved open-work to Adams cabinets and Renaissance tables in ebony inlaid with engraved ivory, and eighteenth-century gilded bergère chairs to old oak and Chippendale. Cloisonné and Sèvres stood side by side on the same shelf. He had an Aubusson carpet in the middle of the floor, and his Bokhara rugs at intervals down the sides. Norah was sitting on the emerald-green brocade of an Empire sofa, clutching the gilt sphinx head of the arm-end. It was a double room, and emerald-green curtains hung at the tall windows in the front and at the large stained-glass window at the back, and at the wide archway between. And an Algerian lamp swung from the back ceiling, and an Early Victorian glass chandelier from the front.

"And the awfullest thing of all is," Norah was saying, "that he's done it to please her."

"Don't believe her. That's the beautiful part of it."

Viola had come in by the door of the back room and she was smiling at us.

Yet, even as she smiled, she had that look of being detached, of not caring.

We couldn't say anything—we were too miserable. She looked round the dreadful rooms as if she were trying to see them for the first time, as if some reverberation of the horror we had felt did penetrate to her in her remoteness. She smiled faintly.

"What does it matter," she said, "so long as it makes him happy? It would be sweet if you'd come down and help us now."

We went down, and the house-warming began.

It was Jimmy who told us what our business was. We were to stand by visitors, he said, as they came in and break the shock (he had observed it) of the Tudor hall. If we couldn't break it we must do what we could to help recovery. He had seen desperate cases yield to champagne-cup administered during the first paroxysm.

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.