The Belfry

by May Sinclair

XV

I think I have said that Jevons made me suffer. He did. I can say that before those three weeks of his all my contacts with him were infected by the poison of my suffering. But all that was nothing to what he made me suffer since, what I suffer now when I remember the things I have said of him, the things I have thought and felt—my furtive belittling of him, my unwilling admiration, the doubt that I encouraged in the mean hope that it would become a certainty.

I would give anything to be like the Canon or my wife, the only two of us whose conscience doesn't reproach them when they see Jimmy's right sleeve.

I remember Norah saying to me once, "I shall be sorry for you if you don't take care." Well, I am sorry for myself.

But I am still sorrier for Mrs. Thesiger.

I know there's a great deal to be said for her. I had wired to them from Dunkirk to tell them that Reggie was slightly wounded but recovering, and that the four of us would be in Canterbury that evening. It wasn't my fault if Reggie, being a British officer, was taken from us at Dover, and sent to a military hospital; but I admit I ought to have wired again to the Thesigers to inform them of the fact. I ought to have remembered that Reggie was more important to Mrs. Thesiger than Jevons, even if Jevons had done what Mrs. Thesiger didn't yet know he'd done.

The maternal passion is a terrible thing. It has made women commit crimes. It made my mother-in-law push Viola from her on her threshold and turn on me as I was helping Jimmy out of the car. It made her say, "You've brought my son-in-law. What have you done with my son?"

(To do her justice, she hadn't seen what had happened to Jimmy. Though he was tired and weak, he could still stand up and stagger along if you held him tight.)

And the maternal passion is not more terrible than the passion that Viola had for Jevons. It made her say to her mother as the Canon and I brought Jimmy in (the dear old man had seen in an instant why he wore his coat slung loose over his right shoulder), "You can see what we're doing with my husband."

And when we were all in the drawing-room and I was explaining gently that Reggie was all right, but that we'd had to send him to the military hospital, it made her say, "If it wasn't for your son-in-law your son wouldn't be alive."

God knows what thirst she satisfied, what bitterness she exhausted, what secret anguish she avenged.

They were all there, the Thesiger women—they had come, you see, to meet Reggie—Victoria and Millicent and Mildred; and they heard her. But it was Mildred who saw. She spoke to her mother.

"Can't you see?" she said.

Viola was kneeling by the sofa where her father had made Jimmy lie, and she had unbuttoned and taken from him his heavy coat. She looked at me and said, "Please take them away somewhere and tell them. Jimmy is so tired."

I know that must seem awful. It was awful to come back from the battlefields of Flanders, from sieges and sackings and slaughter, and see the women flashing fire at each other. And they were mother and daughter. But, you see, they were women. I know that the war should have purged them of their passions (perhaps it did purge them); but your lover is your lover and your son your son for all that.

And it wasn't easy for Mrs. Thesiger to see how her son-in-law could have saved her son. I am not sure that she wouldn't have thought it presumption in Jevons to suppose that he could save anybody, let alone her son. There were people like the Thesigers from whom heroism was expected as a matter of course; and there were people like Jevons. You know what she said about his going to the front.

When I had finished the tale—and I let her have the whole of it, from the first shell that hit the Town Hall to the bit of the third shell that hit Jimmy—she said, "You mean that if he hadn't gone back for his car—" She had broken down and was sobbing quietly, but you could see how her mind worked.

I said, "I mean that if he hadn't gone back to the Town Hall to look for
Reggie he wouldn't have been hit."

Then I told her how they took Jimmy's hand off.

I heard the Canon groan. Millicent and Victoria began to sob as their mother had sobbed. Mildred set her teeth firmly; and Mrs. Thesiger turned to me a queer, disordered face, and spoke.

"They—they gave the anaesthetic to—Reggie?"

"They did," I said. "Because Jimmy made them."

Yes. I am very sorry for Mrs. Thesiger.

She cried, softly, and with a great recovery of beauty and dignity, for about fifteen seconds (the Canon had gone back to Jevons); then she rose and addressed her daughter.

"Mildred dear, I think Jimmy had better have Reggie's room."

Then she went to him; and I am told that she kissed him for the first time. She kissed him as if he had been her son. (Poor Jimmy, I may say, was so tired that he didn't want to be kissed by anybody.)

* * * * *

He still had Reggie's room six weeks later when I came back from France for a week-end. Reggie had recovered, and was with them for a fortnight's leave before he went out again.

Norah and I went down on Saturday to see him. (His leave was up on Sunday night.)

Without Reggie I don't think I should have realized Jevons in his final phase.

He had been happy, I know, at Hampstead in the first two years of his marriage; he had been happy most of the time in Edwardes Square; even in Mayfair he had had moments; and Amershott had been, on the whole, an improvement on Mayfair. And he had lived through his three weeks in Ghent in a sort of ecstasy. And before that, all the time, there had been his work, which I am always forgetting, and his fame, when he didn't forget it.

But there had always been something.

At first it had been the Thesigers. As long as Mrs. Thesiger—as long as one Thesiger—held out against him he had felt defeat. And then there had been Reggie's return and his appalling doubt. He had pretended not to see his doubt and not to mind it. And he had seen it, as he saw everything, and he had minded awfully. Then came Viola's illness, which you could put down to Reggie's doubt. And after that it had been Viola pretty nearly all the time. And even at Ghent, by the tortures of anxiety she had caused him, you may say that she had spoiled his ecstasy.

And now, without any effort, or any calculation or foresight, by a stupendous accident, he had found happiness and peace and certainty. The thing was so consummately done, and so timed to the minute, that when you saw him there enjoying it, you could have sworn that he had played for it and pulled it off. It was as if he had said to himself, "Give me time, and I'll bring all these people round, even Mrs. Thesiger, even Reggie. I'll make them love me. Wait, and you'll just see how I shall score."

And there he was scoring.

And it was as if he had said to himself long ago, "As for Viola, I know all about it. I know I do things that make the poor child shudder; but I can put that all right. I can make her forget it. I give myself three weeks." As if he said, "She thought she was going to leave me. I knew that, too, and I didn't care. She might have left me a thousand times and I should have brought her back."

I used to think it pathetic that Jevons should have wanted Mrs. Thesiger to love him—that he should have wanted Reggie to. But I must say his pathos was avenged. They were pathetic now. That big, hulking Major wasn't happy unless he was writing Jimmy's letters, or cutting up Jimmy's meat for him, or helping him in and out of his clothes. Mrs. Thesiger wasn't happy unless she was doing things for him. The Canon wasn't happy (though, like Norah, he had nothing on his conscience) and Mildred and Millicent and Victoria weren't happy, nor the Thesiger's friends in the Cathedral Close.

And then—after they had made a hero of him for six weeks—on that Saturday night when we were all together in the Canon's library, Jevons made his confession.

We had been, exchanging reminiscences. Something had made Viola think of Jimmy's General and the two Colonels at Ghent. She began telling the Canon how we had watched them through the glass screen, and how funny General Roubaix had looked with his arm round Jimmy's neck, and how he had said that Jimmy was a salamander, and that he didn't know what fear is.

"Oh, don't I!" said Jimmy.

And that sent Reggie back to the day when he had first seen Jimmy.

"Look here, old man, what made you say you were an arrant coward?"

"Because," said Jimmy simply, "I am one. Dear old Roubaix was talking through his hat.

"Not know what fear is! I know a good many things, but I don't know anything better than that. You can't tell me anything about fear I don't know.

"You've no idea how I funked going out to the war. Yes—funked.

"It wasn't any ordinary funk, mind you, the little, creepy feeling in your waist, and your tummy tumbling down, and your heart sort of fluttering over the place where it used to be. I believe you can get over that. And I never had that—ever, except once when I saw Viola in a place where she'd no business to be. It was something much worse. It—it was in my head—in my brain. A sort of madness. And it never let me alone. It was worse at night, and after I got up and began to go about in the morning—when my brain woke and remembered, but it was there all the time.

"I saw things—horrors. And I heard them. I saw and heard the whole war. All the blessed time—all those infernal five weeks before I got out to it, I kept seeing horrors and hearing them. There was a lot of detail—realism wasn't in it—and it was all correct; because I verified it afterwards. Things were just like that. Every morning when I got up I said to myself I'm going out to that damned war, but I wish to God somebody'd come and chloroform me before I get there. There were moments when I could have chloroformed myself. I felt as if it was the utter injustice of God that I—I—had to be mixed up in it.

"Not know what fear is!

"Just conceive," said Jimmy, "a man living like that, in abject, abominable terror, in black funk—keeping it up, all day and half the night, for five solid weeks—before he got there."

"And when you did get there," said Reggie, "were you in a funk?"

"Oh, well, you see, by the time I'd got there it had pretty well worn itself out. There wasn't any funk left to be in."

And when I saw Reggie look at him I knew he had scored again.

Still, I wondered how it really stood with them; and whether Reggie had settled with his doubt, or whether sometimes, when you caught him looking at Jimmy, it had come over him again. The kind of virtue his brother-in-law had displayed in Flanders wouldn't help him, you see, to that particular solution. And with the Thesigers—when they took after their mother—things died hard.

He must have felt that he had to settle it before he went.

Viola told us what happened.

It was his last evening, and the three were together in that room of Reggie's. He had just said that Viola wouldn't care how many Town Halls he was buried under, as long as Jimmy didn't go and dig him out. And then, suddenly, he went straight for it.

"Jimmy," he said, "did you run away with my sister, or didn't you? I don't care whether you did or not, but—did you?"

"No, I didn't," said Jimmy.

"Then what the dickens," Reggie said, "were you doing together in
Bruges?"

"We were looking at the Belfry," said Jimmy.

And Reggie shook his head. "That's beyond me," he said.

"Yes," said Viola. "But it wasn't beyond Jimmy."

That's the real story of Tasker Jevons and his wife.

Don't ask me what would have happened to them if there hadn't been a war.

I've tried to show you the sort of man he was. He knew his hour even before it found him. And you cannot separate him from his hour.