The Belfry

by May Sinclair

XI

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* * * * *

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

* * * * *

But that was in the days (they were comparatively innocent) of his first motor-car. Round that car there really is a light of romance and of adventure, a glamour that isn't at all the glamour of his opulence. In those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income. In June, at any rate, he was still the master of his car and not—as we saw him later on—its servant. There never was anything like that first fury of his motoring.

It couldn't last. He was wearing himself out. Those early excesses exhausted his capacity for pleasure, and when we came to stay with him in the last two weeks of July we found him apathetic about motoring.

But not about motor-cars. As far as the cars went he had developed into an incurable motor-maniac. He was never tired of talking about carburetters, and tyres, and petrol, and garages and gear. He dreamed of these things at night. Every day he invented some extraordinary contrivance for increasing speed and lessening friction. He knew all that was to be known about the different kinds of cars; and he would roll their names on his tongue—Panhard and Fiat and Daimler and Mercédès and Rolls-Royce, as if the sound of them caressed him like music.

And the first car which he had mastered—it was a comparatively cheap one, but it wouldn't be fair to say what kind it was, for the poor thing had gone to pieces under his hand in six months; he had served her, his chauffeur said, something cruel—that first car had been sold for a hundred and fifty pounds, and Viola was mourning for it when we came down in July.

We couldn't think why she mourned, for he had bought another. We supposed that the new car had broken down, for we were met at Midhurst station by the local cab proprietor. But we were very soon to know that nothing had happened to the new car, and that something very serious indeed had happened to Jimmy.

He had gone mad—you can only call it mad—over his new car.

As soon as we had tea we were taken to see it where it stood in the coach-house that served as a garage.

It was a magpie car—the first, Jimmy told me, that had appeared down in that part of the country—white, with black bonnet and black splashboards, and black leather hood and cushions; so black that its body, in the matchless purity of its whiteness, staggered you. Anybody, Jevons said, could have an all-white car, and it wouldn't be noticed any more than a common taxi-cab. But one magpie in a countless crowd of cars annihilated all the rest. Lemon colour was good and so was scarlet; but for effect—for sheer destruction to other automobilists—there was nothing like a white car with black points. It was, Jimmy said and Kendal, the chauffeur, said, a perfect car. From their tone you wondered what you had ever done that you should be allowed to approach and see it where it stood.

Where it stood, I say. You couldn't see that car doing anything else. It stood like an immense idol in a temple; and it looked as if all its life it never had done anything else but stand in its perfection to be stared at. And by its air of self-consciousness, of majesty, of arrogant power in repose, you gathered that it knew it was there to be stared at. The thing was drawn up at the far end of the garage, where no breath could blow on it, over an open pit. You knew that Kendal, the chauffeur, went down on a ladder into the pit to examine the secret being of the car; you knew it and yet it was incredible. You refused to believe that an outrage to which common cars were subject ever had been or would be perpetrated on this holy one. You would have said that no spot of mud or dust or rain had ever lighted on it; it might have descended into the garage out of heaven for any sign of travel that it showed. It was surrounded by I know not what atmosphere of consecration and immunity.

So that Norah's first question sounded like a profanity.

"What speed is it?" she said.

It might have been fancy, but I thought that Jevons's face underwent a change. I certainly saw Kendal the chauffeur looking at it.

"Speed?" he said. "Speed? Well—you can speed her up to sixty miles an hour if you want to." (He seemed to say, "If she ever is speeded up," or "You jolly well may want.")

He ran his hand lovingly along the car's white flank as if it were alive and could respond to the caress.

"She's a beauty," he said.

The chauffeur looked at him again.

"You won't want to knock her about like you did the last one, Mr.
Jevons," he said.

And Jimmy's face expressed a sort of horror.

The chauffeur looked at us then, and, if you can wink without any motion of the eyelids, he winked. He saw, and he was trying to indicate to us, the state that Jevons had fallen into.

It was infatuation; it was idolatry; it was the most extraordinary passion I have ever known a man otherwise sane to be possessed by. You would have said that that creature with the black-and-white body and the terrific bowels of machinery had some sinister and magic power over him. He loved it; he worshipped it; he was afraid of it. And when you think of how, as the chauffeur said, he had "served" the other car—

Knock her about, indeed! He daren't take her out of the garage for a fifteen-mile run without agonies of apprehension. He never took her out at all unless he was certain that it wouldn't rain and that there wouldn't be any mud or any dust or any wind (I don't know what harm he thought the wind would do her). Instead of taking her out he would spend hours in the garage standing still and looking at her, stooping sometimes to examine her for a spot or a crack on her enamel, but always with reverence. I believe he never touched her without washing his hands first.

We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn't been out in that car three times, though the weather was perfect. Jimmy never could see that it was perfect enough. If it hadn't rained for two days he was afraid of dust; if it did rain he was afraid of mud; what he wanted was one light shower to lay the dust; and when he got it he was afraid of another shower coming. And on hot days he was afraid the sun might do something. And he was afraid of us all the time lest we should ask him to take the car out on a day that wouldn't do.

I do not know how or why he had come to look on that car as his god. It wasn't, I do believe that it wasn't, because the thing was valuable, because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself: "Motor-cars are perishable things. I did for my first beloved by my excesses. Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from motoring." And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune out of Jimmy's abstinence.

The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. (He too had come down for the last fortnight in July.) He was the only one of us who didn't protest, didn't clamour, didn't try to reason or to laugh Jimmy out of his insanity. And he went further. He refused to enter the car, to be taken in it on the few suitable days when Jimmy allowed it to go out. It was as if he were dominated by some scruple as morbid as his host's passion. We couldn't account for it at the time, for he liked motoring excessively, and he couldn't afford it.

I've wondered since whether this wasn't the way Charlie settled with his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency. He could eat Jimmy's bread and drink his wine and stay for weeks under his roof, since his necessity—the necessity of seeing Viola—compelled him, but to profit by him to that extent, to make use of Jimmy's opulence, was beyond him. His conscience may have even said to him, "If he loves his motor-car, for God's sake let him have that, at any rate, to himself."

And Viola seemed to share Charlie's scruple. She, too, shrank from using the new car. And I remember her saying to me one day as we crossed the courtyard and saw Jimmy, as usual, in the garage, worshipping his car, "I'm so glad he's got it. I think it makes him happier." As if she had confessed that it was all he had got; that she was not able to make him happy any more; and as if, in some day of unhappiness that she saw coming, it would be a consolation to the poor chap. At any rate, as if she were not in the least jealous of the power it had over him.

So, that July, Norah and I drove with Jimmy when the car, so to speak, let him drive it; and Viola walked through the woods and over the downs with Charlie Thesiger.

We often wondered what they found to talk about.

That wonder, of what Viola could see in Charlie, and how she could endure for so many hours the burden of his society, was all that Norah had allowed herself, so far, to express. If she felt any uneasiness she had not yet confided it to me. As for Jevons, he tolerated him as you only tolerate a thing that doesn't matter. I think honestly that to both of them, Charlie, in any serious connection with Viola, was as impossible as Jevons himself had been to her brother Reggie.

So little did he take him seriously that at the very end of July he went up to London for the inside of the week (he went by train so as to save the car) while Charlie was still at the Old Grange.

* * * * *

It was the week of the international crisis, and European mobilization was occupying Jimmy's mind to the exclusion of other matters. Still, you could hardly suppose that it was the crisis that was taking him up to London. I remember thinking he had run away from Charlie Thesiger, because he bored him.

He left on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, and he was to be back on Friday, the thirty-first, and Charlie was to leave with Norah and me and our nurse and Baby on the Monday following, when our fortnight was up.

So on Friday afternoon I was a little astonished to find my sister-in-law, dressed in her town suit of white cloth, drinking tea at three o'clock before going up to London. She simply stated the fact that she was going up. Norah had said she might stay in our house and she hoped I wouldn't mind.

When I suggested that it would surely be nicer for us all to go up together on Monday she looked at me with a certain long-suffering expression that she had for me at times, and said that wouldn't suit her, since she had got to go to-day. She was of course awfully sorry to leave us, but Norah understood, and Jimmy would look after us very well.

No. She wasn't going up by Midhurst. She was going by Selham.

She rose. I noticed the impatient energy of her little hands as they knotted her veil under her chin. I looked up her trains and found that there was none from Selham till four forty-five. I pointed out to her that there was no hurry; she had missed the two fifty-five, which had left Selham fifteen minutes ago, and she had an hour to spare even if the car took half an hour getting to the station. (The day was fine and there was no dust. Even Jimmy couldn't have objected to her taking the car.)

But she said she hadn't missed the two fifty-five; she wasn't trying for
it; and she wasn't going in the car; it would be wanted to meet Jimmy at
Midhurst Station; and no—no—no—she didn't want a cab from Midhurst.
She was going to walk.

I said it was absurd for her to walk four miles on a hot day like this, and she replied that the day would be cool enough if only I'd keep quiet. (She was still long-suffering.)

Then of course I said I'd walk with her.

But that was too much for her, and she stamped her foot and said I'd do nothing of the kind. She didn't want anybody to walk with her.

And when I inquired about her luggage—But I can't repeat what she said about her luggage!

Then she softened suddenly, as her way was, and kissed Norah, and said I was a dear, and she was sorry for snapping my head off, but it was all right. Norah knew all about it. She'd explain.

I can see her standing in the postern doorway and saying these things and then giving me her hand and holding mine tight, while she shook her head at me and smiled that little baffling smile that seemed to come up flickering from her depths of wisdom on purpose to put me in the wrong.

"The trouble with you, Furny," she said, "is that you're much too good."

She went; and we saw her tall, lithe figure swinging up the lane, past the courtyard and the paddock and the moor.

Then Norah plucked me in by the coat-sleeve as if she thought we oughtn't to be looking at her. We shut the door on her flight and turned to each other where we stood on the flagged path before the house.

"What does it mean?" I said.

"It means that she's at the end of her tether."

"The end—?" I think I must have gasped.

"The very end. She can't stand it any longer."

"But," I said, "she—she's got to stand it. After all—"

"There's no good talking that way. She can't, and that settles it. I knew she couldn't, once she got beyond a certain point."

"Do you mean to say," I said, "that she's going to leave him?"

"I—don't—know. I believe—she's going to think about it."

"But—it's out of the question. She mustn't think about it."

"You can't stop her thinking, Wally. She's gone away to think about it sanely. It's the best thing she can do."

"And you're helping her to get away?"

She was silent for a moment.

"I'm only helping her to think," she said.

I was stern with her. "You're not. You're just helping her to bolt," I said. "You're conniving at her bolting. You've lent her our house."

"Isn't it better she should come to us?"

"No, it isn't better. I don't like it. And I won't have it. I won't have you mixed up in it. Do you understand?"

"Dear Wally—there isn't anything to be mixed up in. We'll be back on
Monday; then she'll only be staying with us."

"And till then—?"

"Till then—for Heaven's sake let the poor thing have peace for three days to think in."

"That's all very well," I said, "but what are we to say to Jimmy when he comes back this afternoon?"

"You say—you say she's tired of—of Amershott and wants three days in London to herself.—No, you don't. You don't say anything. You leave it to me. Vee-Vee said it was to be left to me."

"And I say I won't have you dragged into it. Good Heavens, have you any idea what you may be let in for, supposing—?"

"Supposing what?"

I couldn't say what. But I don't think I really had supposed anything—then.

"You needn't suppose things," she said. "Vee-Vee would never let us in.
Look here, Wally—you've got to trust me this time. I'm going to see
Vee-Vee through, and I'm going to see Jimmy through; but I can't do it if
you don't trust me. I can't do it if you interfere."

I said I did trust her, and that God knew I didn't want to interfere, but was she quite sure she was doing a wise thing?

She said, "Quite sure. Let's go and lie down in the pine-wood till tea-time. I wonder if Jimmy would mind us going into Midhurst with the car. We shouldn't hurt it, sitting in it."

We lay out in the pine-wood till we heard the bell for tea, which we had ordered a little before four, in case Jevons should wire for the car to meet him by the early afternoon train that got to Midhurst at four-sixteen.

The table was set as usual in the garden on the lawn in front of the house.

By four o'clock no wire had come from Jevons; so we knew we needn't expect him till a later train. He nearly always came by Waterloo and Petersfield and was met at Midhurst, which gave him his public. But he might come, as Viola had gone, by Victoria and Horsham and be met at Selham.

I remember saying, in a startling manner as the idea struck me,
"Supposing he comes by Victoria?"

And Norah said, "What if he does?"

And I, "They might meet at Horsham."

"Why shouldn't they?" she said. "You don't suppose he'll eat her for running up to town?"

"He might," I said, "think it odd of her."

"Not he. The beauty of Jimmy is that odd things don't seem odd to him. Do you know where Charlie is?"

I didn't. We had finished tea before either of us had thought of him. We shouted to him through the open windows of the house, for Charlie had a habit of mooning about indoors till Viola was ready to walk with him.

No answer came to our summons, but it brought Parker, the butler, out on to the lawn. He had a slightly surprised and slightly embarrassed look on his respectable and respectful face, no longer demoralized by Jimmy.

"Were you looking for the Captain, sir?" he said.

I said we were.

Something grave and a little sorrowful came into Parker's embarrassed look.

"Didn't you know he'd gone, sir?"

I said I didn't even know he was going; and then I saw Norah looking at me.

Parker was trying not to look at Norah. He began gathering up the tea-things as if to justify his presence and explain it.

"When did he go?" I said as casually as I could.

"Well, sir—the cab was ordered to catch the four thirty-five from
Midhurst."

Now the four thirty-five from Midhurst is the four forty-five from Selham, the train that Viola had gone by. We knew this; and Parker knew that we knew it. That was why, instead of stating outright that Captain Thesiger had gone by that train, he tried to soften the blow to us by saying that the cab had been ordered to catch it, and leaving it open to us to suppose that perhaps, after all, it might have missed it.

"Did he say when he was coming back?" I asked, again casually.

"He isn't coming back, sir," said Parker. "He's took his luggage with him and all."

"Of course," said Norah. "He's gone to see what they're doing at the War
Office. He said he would."

But I knew and she knew and Parker knew he hadn't—or, if he had, it was only one of the things he had gone for. Because, if the War Office had been all that he had in his mind he would have told us, and Viola would have told us, and they would have gone openly together, instead of dodging about like two clumsy criminals, one at Midhurst and the other at Selham.

When Parker had left (he did it very quickly) Norah got on her feet.

She said, "Go and find Kendal and tell him to bring the car around at once."

I asked her what she was going to do?

"Do?" she flashed at me. She had changed all in a moment into a woman whom I did not know.

"I'm going to fetch her back," she said. She had wriggled into her coat.
"We'll overtake her before she gets to Selham, if you're quick."

I looked at my watch. It was barely half-past four. Yes, if we were quick, if we started at once, if we let the new car rip we should overtake her on the road, or at the station before she could get into that train with Charlie Thesiger in it. I meant, and Norah's eyes meant, that we would stop her going with him, if we had to drag her from the platform.

We ran to the garage to find Kendal. The new car, the superb black and white creature, stood in the middle of the courtyard, ready to start when Jimmy's wire came. So far it was all right.

But we had reckoned without Kendal, the chauffeur.

Kendal, absolved from the four-sixteen train at Midhurst, was at his tea in the servants' hall, and at my summons he came out slowly, munching as he came. He was visibly outraged at our intrusion on his sacred leisure. And when he was ordered to start at once for Selham, he refused. There was no train from Victoria, he said, between the four-four that Mr. Jevons hadn't come by and the five fifty-two. If, Kendal said, he did come by Victoria, and he always came by Waterloo.

What was the sense, said Kendal, with his mouth full, of going to Selham when we hadn't got a wire?

The sense of it, Norah told him, was that we had a message—an important message—for Mrs. Jevons, which she must get before she started.

At this Kendal left off munching and looked at my wife. Even in my eagerness I was struck by the singular intelligence of that look. There was nothing covert in it. On the contrary it was a most straightforward and transparent look. Kendal's knowledge—which might have sought cover if you had hunted it—had come out to meet ours on equal terms.

It only lasted for the fraction of a second. Kendal repeated firmly, but this time respectfully, that she was Mr. Jevons's car and he couldn't take her out without Mr. Jevons's orders, for if he did Mr. Jevons would give him the sack.

To which Norah replied that Mr. Jevons would give him the sack if he didn't, or if he made us miss that train by arguing. I told him sternly to look sharp. He looked it and we got off. I had begun to crank up the car myself while I spoke.

But he had wasted three minutes of our valuable fifteen. Though on the open road we speeded up the car to her sixty miles an hour, we had to slow down in the narrow lanes. Once we were held up by a country cart, and once by cows in our track, and Norah was beside herself at each halt.

As we careened into the station yard I thought that my wife would have hurled herself out of the car.

The station-master stood by the booking-office door. He had an ominous air of leisure. And when he saw us coming he looked at his watch.

He told us that we had missed the train by three minutes (the three minutes that Kendal had wasted).

I had jumped out of the car and was telling Kendal that it was all his fault, and that if he'd done what he was told we should have caught the train, when he turned on me as only a chauffeur convicted of folly can turn.

"Stand away from the car, sir," he shouted. He jerked her nose round with the savage energy of a chauffeur in the wrong; he seemed to impart his own fury to the car. She snorted and screamed as he backed her and drove her forward and backed her again.

And again he shouted to me. "You get in, sir, if you don't want to be left be'ind."

As he seemed to be animated chiefly by the fear of Jevons (whom, by the way, he adored), we could only suppose that his idea was to fly back to Amershott in time for Jimmy's wire.

On the high road past the station he took the wrong turn.

I shouted then, "What do you think you're doing, you confounded fool?"

"Ketch the London train at 'Orsham, sir," said Kendal. And he grinned.

"You can't do it," we said.

"I'll 'ave a try," said Kendal.

His honour as a chauffeur was at stake. His blood was up. His knowledge had begun to work in him and he adored his master. He knew what he was trying to do.

We could do it if we kept our heads; if we exceeded the speed limit; if we had luck; if we didn't break down; if neither the county constabulary nor the country traffic held us up.

Kendal declared we could do it easily and allow for accidents. At Horsham Junction you have nearly half an hour to wait between the arrival of the Midhurst and Selham train and the departure of the London express. And the local trains take more than half an hour to get from Selham to Horsham. At a pinch you could speed the car up to the limit of the local train. And, as we had to allow for accidents, we did speed her up whenever we saw a clean track before us.

The run to Selham was nothing to it. It was as if we were racing the train with its three minutes start, as if, positively, we might overtake it at any of the intermediate stations, as if it were in this hope that we dashed up the long white slope to Petworth.

The heat of the day gathered over our heads and smouldered in the east.

And as we ran I realized at last why we were running and what the race was and the hunt, and what our quarry. I remembered that other slower chase that was yet so keen and so agonizing; that hunting down of the same tender flesh and blood, over the Channel and across a foreign country. That was bad enough; but it was not like this. For then I was alone in my hunting of Viola; there was nobody but me, who loved her, to see her run to earth and caught crouching in her corner. That she would crouch, this time, and hide herself, I had no doubt. This hunt that I shared with her sister and her servant was abominable to me and shameful. And between the shame of that flight of hers and this flight there was no comparison. You don't go looking at belfries with Charlie Thesiger. I could not reconcile that enchanting and enchanted Viola of the garden of Bruges with this dreadful flying figure.

I hated myself; I hated Kendal, the chauffeur, as I sat behind his tight, efficient body that quivered with the fury of the hunt. (To think that his blood should be up and against Viola!) I hated the car that seemed more than ever a living thing, that breathed and snorted and vibrated with the same passion, and was endowed with this incredible speed and this superhuman power. With its black nose and white flanks, and its black hood and the black wings of its splash-boards, it was some terrible and sinister and malignant monster of prey hunting down Viola. Its body had been built, its engines had been forged, to hunt down Viola. The infernal thing had been invented to hunt down Viola.

Somewhere between Petworth and Fittleworth Kendal stopped to water his engine. It was then that we noticed how the gathering heat was piled into a bank of cloud over the east. At the back of our necks we could feel a little hot puff of wind that came up from the west.

"Shouldn't wonder if there was a storm," said Kendal. He added, with the ghost of a grin, "If Mr. Jevons sees that cloud, sir, he'll not wire to be met at Midhurst. He'd crawl home on his 'ands and knees first."

He slipped into his seat and we dashed on.

At Fittleworth, within a stone's-throw of the railway and the road, there is a patch of moor where the ground rises in a hillock. In July and August when the heather's out this hillock is a crimson landmark above the water meadows.

When we came within sight of it Kendal suddenly slowed down, then jammed his brakes hard, and with an awful grinding and snorting the car came to a stand-still.

Kendal stood up. He muttered something about being blowed. Then he turned.

"Got the glasses there, sir?"

I found the glasses, but I didn't give them to Kendal. I stood up too and looked through them.

I couldn't see anything at first.

"There, sir," said Kendal, pointing. "No. You're looking too much to the left. You got to get right o' thet sandy patch—against thet there clump of heather. Now d'you see, sir?"

I did.

Kendal had made out with the naked eye a figure, the figure of a woman, seated on the hillside, a white figure that showed plainly against the red background of the heather.

"It's Mrs. Jevons, sir," he stated.

It was.

I could see her quite distinctly through the field-glasses. She was sitting on the clump of heather to the right of the sandy patch, settled and motionless, in the attitude of one who waited at her ease, with hours before her. And she was alone.

We went on as far as we could towards the moor. Norah and I left the car and struck across the moor by the sandy track that led to the bare patch and the clump of heather.

The seated figure must have been aware of us from the first moment of our approach. You couldn't miss that black and white car as it charged along the highway, or as it stood now, with its engines still humming, by the roadside. But the figure remained seated in its attitude of waiting. It waited while we crossed the moor; and as we climbed the hillock we became intensely aware of it and of its immobility.

We saw its face fixed on us with an expression of tranquil patience and expectation. I may say that I felt an intolerable embarrassment before this quietness of the hunted thing that we had run to earth; especially as it was on me, and not Norah, that Viola's face was fixed as we came nearer.

Then she smiled at me; there was neither conciliation nor defiance in her smile, but a sort of serene assurance and—yes, it was unmistakable—contempt.

She said, "Whatever do you think you're doing now?"

I said we might not know what we were doing, but we knew what we were going to do. We were going to take her back with us in the car.

At that she asked us (but without any sign of perturbation) if we had got
Jimmy there?

Norah said No, our idea was to run back to Amershott before Jimmy got there.

"Where were you running to when you saw me sitting up here?" she said.

I said we'd meant to catch her at Selham but we missed the train and were trying to get to Horsham before the London train started.

She was looking at me now with a sort of compassion, the tenderness of her contempt.

"I see," she said. "You were clever, weren't you?"

She looked at her watch. "Well, as you are here," she said, "I'd let you run me down to Horsham, if you want a run, only I can't very well use Jimmy's car."

I think it was Norah who asked her what on earth she was doing at
Fittleworth.

"Can't you see," she said, "that I'm waiting for the next train?"

"Did you walk here from Amershott, or what?" I said.

She said, "Rather not. I was in the train."

Then Norah said, "What happened?"

It had dawned on us both how odd it was that Viola should be here, apparently alone, at Fittleworth. It was also odd how we were all ignoring Charlie. I believe I had a sort of idea that she had got him hidden somewhere in the landscape.

Viola smiled a reminiscent smile. "If you must know," she said, "what happened was that Charlie was in that train, too—he came bursting out on to the platform at Selham, awfully pleased with himself, because he'd picked my luggage up at Midhurst and bagged a corner seat for me, and made faces at people to keep them out."

"Did you know he was going up to town?" I said.

"No, of course I didn't. He didn't know it himself. There was no reason why he shouldn't go. And you'd have thought there was no reason why we shouldn't go together. He was all right till we got to Petworth. But after that he lost his head and made such an ass of himself that I had to get out here and make him go on by himself. Silly idiot!"

We were sitting in the heather, one on each side of her, and I saw my wife slip her arm into hers and hug it to her.

"Did you know," she said, "that Charlie'd gone?"

We didn't answer. We simply couldn't.

And then Viola said, "Poor little Norah!"

And she told her to run away for ten minutes while she talked to me.

"Why poor little Norah?" I asked when we were alone.

"Because," she said, "you frightened her."

"I? Frightened her?"

"Yes," she said. "You made her think I was going to run away with Charlie. There's no good trying to look as if you didn't. You're quite awful, Furny, in the things you think. You can't help it, I know. You're so good, so shockingly good, and you can't bear other people to be naughty. You thought I'd run away to Belgium with Jimmy and you came rushing after me and fetched me back. You thought I'd run away with Charlie and you came rushing—in your dreadful rectitude, and in Jimmy's motor-car that he won't let anybody look at. You'll have an awful time with Jimmy when you get back. It's going to rain, and there'll be mud on the car, and he'll dance with rage when he sees it. And he won't think it's any excuse if you tell him you thought I was running away with Charlie, and you took the car to fetch me back; he'll say you'd no business to think it and in any case you'd no business to take the car out. And poor Kendal will be sacked.

"That's all you've done," she said, "by your fussy interference."

She went on. "It wouldn't matter what you think about me—but it was beastly of you to go and make Norah think it."

I said I didn't suppose either of us thought anything, except that since she was going up to town with the idea of leaving her husband, it was not desirable that she should go up with Charlie Thesiger.

"Who could possibly have supposed," she said, "that Charlie would be such an ass?"

I said I for one could.

"Oh, you—haven't I told you you're always supposing things?"

"Surely?" I said, "you must have seen—yourself—"

She smiled. "My dear—I couldn't see anything but poor Jimmy."

"And yet," I said, "you could think of leaving him?"

She moaned. "You fool—you fool—that's why I'm thinking of it."

She pressed her hands to her eyes as if she shut back the sight of him.

"You aren't thinking of it," I said. "You haven't left him. You've only been for a good long walk to Fittleworth, and we've come to fetch you back in the car."

"Haven't I told you that I can't and won't use Jimmy's car?"

"You can't use it to run away from him in; but you can very well use it to go back to him."

"I'm not going back to him," she said. "Can't you see that I've burnt my boats?"

"You may have burnt the old ones, Viola," I said. "But you can build new."

"You must give me time, Wally. It'll take a long time. And you don't understand me. I want to get away from Jimmy. That's why I'm going away now, while he isn't there. That's what I mean by burning my boats. If I go back to him—if I see him—I shall never get away. I shan't have the courage. I shall just crumple up with the first sight of him—with the first word he says—"

"Why not," I said, "crumple up?"

She lifted her head as I had seen her lift it before.

"Because," she said, "I wish to be straight."

I asked her if running away behind Jimmy's back was her idea of straightness? To which she replied that my rectitude was excruciating and that I'd twist anything to a moral purpose, but it was twisting all the same. Couldn't I see that the awful thing would be to come sneaking back and pretend to Jimmy that she hadn't run away from him?—If that was my idea of straightness she was sorry for me.

I said, "My dear child, you must see that running away by yourself is one thing, and running away with Charlie Thesiger is another. It would be all very well if Charlie hadn't got into that train."

She wanted to know what that mattered when she had got out of the train? I suggested that the people who saw Charlie get in hadn't seen her get out, and that she must look at the thing as it appeared to other people.

"Look," I said, "at the facts. Mrs. Jevons walks to Selham Station for the London train. Captain Thesiger joins her there, presumably by pre-arrangement, leaving by Midhurst station so that they may not be seen going away together. She is, however, seen entering his compartment at Selham. At Fittleworth she is seized with prudence and with panic. She is seen getting out on to the platform. And she is seen two hours later following the Captain up to London by the next train."

She seemed to be considering it.

"How many people," she said, "know that Charlie was in that train? People that matter—I don't mean you and Norah."

"Your butler, your parlourmaid, your housemaid, your cook, your gardener—by this time—and Baby's nurse—"

("And Baby," she interrupted.)

"—The guard of the train, the booking clerks and porters at Midhurst and Selham, and the station-masters at Midhurst and Selham and Petworth (probably) and Fittleworth. Quite a number of important people, to say nothing of Kendal, who is perhaps the most important of them all."

"And who was it who brought Kendal into it?"

I was silent.

"Nobody but you, Furny, or a born fool, would have dreamed of bringing
Kendal in."

I said that a little reflection would show her that it was impossible to keep him out. To this she said, "Please go and find Norah. I want her."

I found Norah. I warned her that Viola was going to be extremely difficult. She said it would be all right if I left Viola to her.

As we approached, Viola turned to her sister with an air of outraged and long-suffering dignity.

"Norah," she said. "I do wish you would make Wally see what an ass he's making of himself."

My wife said, in her admirable, judicial way, "How an ass?"

"Well—trying to make me go back and bringing Kendal out here to fetch me. He doesn't seem to see that if I do go back with him it'll be as good as proclaiming to everybody that I ran away with Charlie and was found out by my clever brother-in-law who tracked me down in my husband's motor-car and brought me back in it. Whereas, if I go quietly on to London, as I meant to and as everybody knows I meant to, it'll be all right."

"It won't," I said, "as long as Charlie's there. It will be if you come home with us in the car now, and go up to town with Norah and me on Monday."

"I've told you," she said wearily, "that I can't go back because I shall never get away if I do. And I must—I must—and I will."

"Yes, dear, and you shall," my wife said, as if she were humouring somebody who was mad.

But for a mad woman Viola, I must say, was extraordinarily lucid.

"What excuse did you give to Kendal for following me in this way?"

"We told him we had an important message to give you before you started."

"Important message! That was pretty thin. I'd have thought of something cleverer than that if I'd been you. You are a precious pair of conspirators. Can't you see that it's you—with your ridiculous suspicions—that have given me away?"

Norah answered her.

"Oh, Vee-Vee," she said, "we hadn't any suspicions. The message was to tell you that Charlie was in the train. We knew you didn't know it."

To this Viola said coldly, "Walter didn't."

I tried to reassure her, but she waved me away with her hands and implored me to "let her think."

"Well," she said presently, "it isn't as bad as you've tried to make it, even with Kendal thrown in. You came rushing after me to give me a message, and you have given me a message, and now you'll go and tell Kendal that it's all right, and thank him nicely for catching me up, and you rush home again, and I go on quietly to London by the next train."

"Yes, dear," said Norah. "And I'm going up with you while Wally rushes home and follows with Nurse and Baby and the luggage by the morning train."

"That's all very well," said Viola, "but who explains to Jimmy?"

"Oh," said my wife, "Wally does that. You can trust him. Besides you haven't got to explain things to Jimmy."

Well, we settled it that way. It was the only possible solution. The more she thought of it, Viola said, the more she liked it. And she rubbed it into me that it was Norah's solution, and not mine.

Her last words to me as I saw them off at Fittleworth Station were that I needn't worry. It was going to rain. And when poor Jimmy saw his car come in all splashed with rain and covered with mud—"It won't be me," she said, "you'll have to explain about."

And it wasn't.

The storm came down just as we were leaving Fittleworth, and we brought that car back in an awful state. You wouldn't have known it had ever been a black-and-white car. And Jevons (in a mackintosh) was waiting for me in the lane by the courtyard gates. He had caught the early train, but he had seen the storm coming and had walked up from Midhurst, and, as I say, he was waiting for us.

Well—neither Viola nor Norah was with us, and the language, that Jimmy poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly, a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur was prostrated with admiration.

"When Mr. Jevons lays himself out to express himself, sir," he said to me as we retreated, "he pulls it off what you may call a bleedin' masterpiece."

I tried to explain about Viola an hour later. But he wouldn't listen to me. That was all right, he said. He was going to ask us to take her for a month or so anyhow. It was getting a bit stuffy for her down here.

Then he fixed me with "Did Thesiger go up with her?"

There was no good trying to lie to Jevons, so I said that had been Thesiger's idea, but Viola hadn't cared much about having him, for she had got out at Fittleworth and taken Norah on with her.

"I suppose the young ass tried to make love to her. He's fool enough for anything," said Jimmy. But he reverted. "I still can't see why you took the car out. Anybody but an idiot would have known it was going to rain."