He didn't press it.
"Well," he said, "it looks as if he was inevitable. I suppose we've got to make the best of him. What do you want me to do?"
I said I wanted him to ask them down. Very soon.
He said, "All right, Furnival. I'll ask them down next week. But if I do you must stop on and see me through. I won't be left alone with him."
I stopped on, playing chess with the Canon and lawn tennis with Norah, who was more than ever determined to beat me.
And on Tuesday of the next week they came down.
* * * * *
The whitewashing of Jevons had not been an easy matter. It took such a lot of coats to make a satisfactory job of him. And it was not a job I would have chosen. But I was serving Mrs. Jevons, and if my service had demanded miracles I should have had to have worked them somewhere, that was all. And perhaps it was a miracle to have turned Jevons out as a morally presentable person according to the requirements of a Cathedral Close.
But up to that Tuesday afternoon in August my private grievance against Jevons remained what it had been. In his absence—even while I whitewashed him—I could not extend a Christian forgiveness and forbearance to Jevons, any more than Mrs. Thesiger could. I think I hated Jevons. I ought to have hated him—by every glorious and manly code, pagan or barbarous, I ought to have hated him. And I did—every minute that he wasn't there. He had made me a figure of preposterous suffering. Because of him I trailed a fatuous tragedy through the Thesigers' house and over the green lawns of the Close, under the eyes of the young subalterns and of Victoria and Norah. (Canon and Mrs. Thesiger I didn't mind so much.) It mattered nothing that they were all extremely kind to me, since my suffering was responsible for their kindness and Jevons was responsible for my suffering.
Well, on that Tuesday he arrived. He was asked for a week and he stayed three days; and in those three days I had forgiven him everything for the sake of his performance.