He couldn't tell the Canon why he'd chosen it. He couldn't disclose to him his plan of campaign.
"You see, sir, I haven't seen many beautiful things."
He still pondered. Then he said, very slowly, as if he dragged it out of himself with difficulty, "That book was written—written in my head—before I knew my wife."
You could literally see his score running up. By nine o'clock the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger had roped him into their game of whist.
I sat out with Viola and Norah in the garden, when Norah told us that she thought Jimmy was a dear. She was the only one of them that called him Jimmy.
About ten o'clock next morning Viola came to me and asked me to go up to
Jimmy, in his room. He wanted to speak to me.
I found him packing, packing with a sort of precise and concentrated fury.
He was going. Going up to town. He had torn through Canterbury, eaten his way through Canterbury, through the beauty and peace of it; he had absorbed and assimilated it in three days. And he had had enough. If he stayed in it another hour the beauty and the peace of it would kill him. The Canon's beauty was, he said, adorable; so was Mrs. Thesiger's.
"But if I stay here I shall ruin it. I can't," he said, "go on giving that dear old clergyman clergyman's sore throat. I frighten him so that he can't sing. He doesn't know what to do with me, or say to me. He doesn't know what to call me. He can't call me Jevons, and he won't call me Jimmy, and he knows it would be ridiculous to call me James. Besides, he agitates me and makes me drop my aitches.
"So I've had a wire. You'll explain to him the sort of wire I've had."