The Belfry

by May Sinclair

At that time I didn't realize the innocence that went with Jimmy's wisdom. I think I credited him with insight that I know now he never had. I know now that, even afterwards—at the very worst—he had no misgivings. All the Hampstead time, all through the Edwardes Square time he was happy. And afterwards—well—happiness wasn't the word for it; he lived in a sort of ecstasy. Which shows how little in those days she had let him see.

It was in nineteen-ten, their last year in Edwardes Square, that the tension began. Norah and I were married in the autumn of nineteen-nine, and we were living in my flat in Brunswick Square. In what I made out during this period I had Norah to help me, and she had wonderful lights.

I never could keep track of Jimmy's accelerating material progress, but the Year-Books tell me that his fourth novel came out in the spring of nineteen-nine, and his first successful play was produced in the summer of that year, and ran for the whole season and on through the winter, and I remember that in nineteen-ten he was attacking another novel and another play, which—But it's the attack that is the important thing, the thing that fixes nineteen-ten for me.

You cannot go on attacking, for years on end, with concentrated and increasing violence, and not suffer for it. The first effects of Jimmy's appalling travail may have been beneficent, but its later workings were malign. There's no other word for it. In nineteen-ten Jimmy was beginning to show signs of exhaustion. Not of his creative energy or anything belonging to it, though he prophesied a falling off after Novel Three, and declared that he could detect it. Nobody else could have detected it. The exhaustion was in Jimmy himself, and more especially and fatally in the Jimmy who struggled against what he called "the damnable tendency to do the sort of thing your father does."

He couldn't keep it up. He couldn't stand for ever the double strain of attacking and defending himself against his tendency. There's no doubt that when he was tired he got careless. I have known him come upstairs after dinner, entirely sober, but looking rather drunk, with his hair curling over his forehead and his tie crooked and the buttons of his irreproachable little waistcoat all undone. I have known him do the oddest things with chairs and get into postures inconceivable to ordinary men. I have known him drop his aitches for a whole evening because he was too dead beat to hang on to them. And Norah, going home with me, would say, "Poor Jimmy—he does get it very badly when he's tired."

And I have had to see Viola's face while these things were happening. Sometimes, when he was too outrageous, she would look up and smile with the queerest little half-frightened wonder, and I would be reminded of the time when Jimmy had jaundice and she asked me if I thought he would stay that funny yellow colour all his life? It was as if she were asking me, Did I think he would keep on all his life doing these rather alarming things? Sometimes he would catch himself doing them and say, "See me do that? That's because I'm agitated." Or, "There's another aitch gone. Collar it, somebody." Or, "I suppose that's what Norah would call one of my sillysosms." Sometimes Viola would catch him at it and reprove him. And then he would simply throw the responsibility on the poor old Registrar down in Hertfordshire.

I have heard him say to her with extreme sweetness and docility: "My dear child, if I'd had a father and mother like yours I shouldn't do these things." And I have heard him say almost with bitterness: "Does that shock you? Good Heavens, you should see my father!"

But he took good care she shouldn't see him. I used to think this wasn't very nice of him. But what can a man do in a case so desperate? There were risks that even Jevons couldn't take. I used to think that he salved his conscience by making the Registrar an allowance that increased in proportion to his income and by going down into Hertfordshire regularly every three months to see him himself. I used to think that Jimmy's father must have admirable tact, because he never seemed to have inquired why Jimmy always came alone. But Jimmy said it wasn't tact. It was pure haughtiness. The old bird, he said, was as proud as a peacock with his tail up. I used to think it wasn't very nice of him to talk like that about his father. And I used to think it wasn't very nice of Viola never to go with Jimmy on his pilgrimages.

I was with them once when she was seeing him off at Euston, and I said to her, "Do you never go with him to see the poor old man?"

She turned to me. (I hadn't seen her look stern and fiery before.)