The Belfry

by May Sinclair

When you think of it, poverty and close quarters for two years, and the menace of some of those lapses hanging over her all the time—it was a pretty severe test. You would have said that if she could stand that she could stand anything, and she certainly stood it.

But Jimmy hadn't begun yet to unbend. He was still on the defensive, holding himself in, every nerve strung up to the Grand Attack. This tension affected his behaviour. He knew his danger. He knew there were certain gestures that he must restrain, and he restrained them; there were certain things he did with spoons and forks and table napkins that would wreck him if he were caught doing them, and in those two years he kept a very sharp look-out. You would have thought that this life, on the edge of an abyss, with full knowledge of his danger, would have made him nervous and produced the very disaster that he dreaded. But no. Jevons was a fighting man, and he rose to these crises and prevailed. You felt that for him the real test would come when he was prosperous, when the strain was taken off him and he let himself go.

Meanwhile it was terrifying to see him balancing himself on the edge.

* * * * *

They moved into the Edwardes Square house in the September quarter of nineteen-eight. This was the year of the weeks of consolidation, his second novel and his "Journal," that were to precede the Grand Attack. The novel did exactly what he said it would. It did counteract the effect its predecessor; and the "Journal" gave him a place in Belles-Lettres where he was safe from the legend of his own brutality.

But it strained his relations with the Thesigers for the time being. The Rosalind of the "Journal" is so obviously Viola, and though he is careful to refer to her as his wife, the book reminded people that they were said to have travelled together before they were married. Her figure moves through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an adorable innocence and naïveté, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender than the Viola he knew. You couldn't say she wasn't charming. The Canon couldn't say it; what he did say was that Jevons should have kept her out of it. Jevons's defence was that if he had kept her out of it there wouldn't have been any book.

But he never did it again. Having once for all drawn her portrait as a young girl, he left it, as if he would have kept her youth immortal. You will not find any woman of his novels who suggests even a fugitive likeness to the Viola he married.

The house in Edwardes Square stands for the second period: the period of sober energy that led up to the Grand Attack. It was also the period of deliberate yet vehement refinement. Jevons was determined at all cost to be refined. And at considerable cost, with white-painted panelling throughout, with blue-and-white Chinese vases here and there, and more and more Bokhara rugs everywhere, and tussore silk curtains in the windows and every stick of furniture chosen for its premeditated chastity, the little brown house was made to serve him as a holy standard. He said he had only got to live up to it and he would be all right.

And so, in the quest of purging and salvation through the beauty of his surroundings, he had made his place perfect inside and out, from the diminutive flagged court in the front (with one brilliant mat of flowers laid down in the middle) to the last lovely border of the grass-garden at the back. I wondered, I have never ceased to wonder, knowing his beginnings, how he did it so well. Of course he gave Viola a free hand, he let her have what she wanted; but when I complimented her on any result she let me know at once that it was Jimmy's doing. She was pathetically anxious that I should see that he knew how. She let me know, too, the secret of his passionate absorption in gardens and interiors, lest I should think it argued any unmanliness in him.

I remember so well her showing me that house in Edwardes Square. I had called one afternoon when I had known that Jevons wasn't there. I had left him at his club in Dover Street. (He had a club in Dover Street now; it was my club; I had put him up for it. He enjoyed his club as he enjoyed everything else that he had acquired by conquest; his membership marked another step in his advance, another strip of alien territory gained. And he had chosen this club, he said, because most of the members had retired, to cultivate adipose tissue on pensions, and they made him feel adolescent and slender and energetic.) I had left him in the library writing letters (he said he found a voluptuous pleasure in writing letters on the club paper under that irreproachable address), and I rushed off in a taxi to Viola in Edwardes Square.