The Belfry

by May Sinclair

When I saw Norah in the morning she asked me whether Jimmy had said he knew it was coming?

I said he had.

"And I suppose he thinks he made it come?"

That, I said, was Jimmy's attitude.

"Well, then," she said, "he didn't. You don't believe him, do you?"

Did I? Not perhaps at the moment, and never at any time as Jimmy believed it himself. But I do think he meant it to happen. It was one of the moves in his difficult game. He couldn't afford to neglect any means of strengthening his position in his wife's family. When it came to acknowledging Jimmy his wife's family was divided. Portions of it, strange cousins whom I never met till after my marriage, refused to acknowledge him at all. At Lancaster Gate he was received coldly in accordance with the discreet policy by which the Thesigers had avoided the appearances of scandal. Down at Canterbury there were degrees and shades of recognition. Norah openly loved him. The Canon had what he called "a morbid liking for the fellow." Mildred and Victoria tolerated him. Millicent endured him as an infliction. Mrs. Thesiger concealed under the most beautiful manners and the most Christian charity an inveterate repugnance.

I have forgotten Bertie. Bertie, who could generally be found at Lancaster Gate when he wasn't in his chambers in the Temple, was apathetic and amiably evasive. He took the line that Lancaster Gate took when he referred to his brother-in-law as a clever little beast.

And to all these shades Jevons was acutely sensitive.

I have known men (they were of the confraternity of letters) who declared that they could not understand why a man like Jevons, in Jevons's position, should have bothered his head for two minutes about his wife's family. They considered that Jevons's marriage was a disaster, not for the Thesigers, but for Jevons, and that his only safe and proper course was to leave the Thesigers alone. But it wasn't so easy to leave them alone when he had married into them; and to have left them would have been for Jevons a confession of failure. He might just as well have laid down his arms or pulled down the shutters of his shop. From the very beginning, ever since the day when he had met Reggie Thesiger, he conceived that the whole world of Thesigers had challenged him to hold his own in it, and he was too stubborn a fighter to retire on a challenge. Besides, he couldn't have retracted without taking Viola with him.

And you must remember that he was thirty-two when he married her, and that he had behind him an unknown history of struggle and humiliation and defeat. The Thesigers stood for the whole world of things that he had missed, the world of admired refinements and beautiful amenities, that, without abating one atom of its refinement and amenity, had persistently kicked him out. Besides—and this was the pathetic part of it—he had an irrepressible affection for the Canterbury Thesigers, and it hungered and thirsted for recognition. It nourished itself in secret on any scraps that came its way. He met tolerance with grace, and any sort of kindness with passionate gratitude. I think he would have broken his neck to give Norah or the Canon or even Mrs. Thesiger anything they wanted. And the Canon and Mrs. Thesiger wanted Norah to marry me. It wouldn't become me to say what Norah wanted.