The Belfry

by May Sinclair

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.