The Belfry

by May Sinclair

VII

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

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

And they would have missed the spectacle of his struggle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She looked at me gravely before she smiled.

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

And then she showed me the house.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I didn't try to see her again alone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And Charlie was getting on his nerves.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Did I do anything?" he said presently.

Norah put her hand on his arm and stroked it.

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

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

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

Then Jevons explained it for me.

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

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

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

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

And he left us together.

Norah looked after him.

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

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

"Why shouldn't she?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"It must be still more awful for Viola."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Well?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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