The Belfry

by May Sinclair

Unless it was Reggie's coming back.

But the results of that didn't appear till later.

Any difference I may have noted previously was an affair of shades, of delicate oscillations. There was no lapse without a recovery, no departure without a return.

And here, at the end of nineteen-ten, I got a line drawn sharply on either side of a break I cannot bridge. The minute Jimmy moved into that house in Mayfair things began to go wrong.

It was as if Jimmy, in his love of doing risky things, had cast, this time, a dreadful die.

From that evening onward I watched them with anxiety. I do not know how far Jevons was aware that the house in Mayfair was a blunder; I think he wouldn't have acknowledged that it was a blunder at all. His own attitude to it was not in the least disturbed by his humorous perception of other people's. With his dexterity in adjustments he was quite capable of reconciling them, quite capable of enjoying the effect it had on nervous organisms while he himself took it seriously. It was, after all, his own achievement, and a very astonishing achievement too. He continued to respect it as the immense sign of his material prosperity, the advertisement, you may say, of his arrival. His business instinct would never have allowed him to repent of an advertisement.

There was this gross element in his enjoyment.

And there was also the pure and charming happiness of a child that suddenly finds itself left, with boundless opportunity, to its own gorgeous caprice. You could no more blame Jevons for the bad taste of his drawing-room and his Tudor hall than you could blame a child for its joy in a treasure of tinsel and coloured glass.

But when we asked ourselves where, in this outbreak of Jimmy's fantasy, did Viola come in, we had to own that she came in nowhere. Not only had she stood by without lifting a finger to interfere with its tempestuous course; not only had she submitted without a protest; she seemed to show no adequate sense of what had happened. Her detachment was the unnatural and dreadful thing.

And this happiness of his was at Viola's mercy. It would last just so long as she could keep him from knowing that he had outraged the beauty, the fitness and the simplicity she loved. I thought how he had once boasted that he knew what she wanted, that he knew what she was thinking and feeling all the time. How could he have imagined that she wanted this? What was his knowledge worth if he didn't know what she would think and feel about it?