The Belfry

by May Sinclair

Unless, indeed, she had lied to him. Lied from first to last, deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside, where you would have thought she would have most wanted to plunge in; the calculation and the indifference both were so beyond her that you could only think one thing: she hated it; she hated the new turn his prosperity had taken; she almost hated him because of it; and her heart was broken because of Reggie, and it was hardening where it broke; she hated Reggie at moments; and she had moments of hating Jevons because he had come between them; and she was compounding with her conscience, punishing herself for all these hatreds and for a thousand secret criticisms and disloyalties and repugnances; avenging, as it were beforehand, all hatreds and criticisms, disloyalties and repugnances to come. For she saw it all now—how it was going to be. And she was trying to make up for it by giving Jimmy his own way in the things that, as she had said, "didn't matter."

And if Jimmy's way was to surround her with pretentious silliness instead of beautiful simplicity, then she must rise above her surroundings. Her spirit, at any rate, must refuse to be surrounded.

Her attitude was more lofty than you can imagine. As Norah had said, there would always be a Belfry—something high and unusual—in Viola's life. Well, she was going to live in the Belfry, that was all. And if she was to be perfectly safe in her Belfry, and Jimmy perfectly happy in his Tudor hall, he mustn't know that she was there.

I don't know how she really put it to herself; I don't suppose she "put" it any way; but subconsciously, as they say, it must have been like that. Anyhow, her behaviour amounted to an evasion of Jimmy, and this particular evasion was sad enough when you consider that in the beginning it had been Jimmy who had taken her to look at the Belfry—who was the one man who could be trusted to take her, and that she would never have dreamed of setting off on such an adventure by herself, and that she wasn't fitted for it. In fact, I can't think of anybody less fit.

It showed more than anything how the glamour must have worn off him.

It had worn off even for us to whom he came each time with a comparative freshness. And if it hadn't worn off for his public and for the confraternity, it was simply because as an engineer of literature he was inexhaustible. He had so perfected his machinery that the turning out of novels and of plays had become with him a sort of automatic habit, and if there was any falling off in his quality he was right when he said that nobody but himself would find it out. He had got an infinite capacity for plagiarizing himself; and in his worst things he imitated his best so closely that he might well defy you to tell the difference.

But you cannot work as he had worked for five years at a stretch and not suffer for it. And you cannot aim at material success as he had aimed, deliberately and continuously, for five years without becoming yourself a bit material. And you cannot be immersed and wallow in it as he wallowed without corruption.

There's no doubt that for the next, two—three—four years he wallowed. He was so deep in that, even after Viola's illness that came in nineteen-thirteen and purged him somewhat, he continued to wallow. And we had to stand by while he was doing it and pretend that we weren't shocked. There was no good trying to give him a hand to help him out, he was so happy wallowing.

I am far from blaming him. Personally, if it hadn't been for Viola, I should have liked to think that he was able to get all that ecstasy out of his sordid triumph. For it was sordid. If it wasn't for Viola you could tick off each year with a note of his preposterously increasing income, and say that was all there was in it.

I muddle up the first years of it. I know that in nineteen-eleven he brought out his fifth novel and his third play and that the run and the returns of both were astounding, even for him. I know that in nineteen-twelve he brought out two novels and two new plays that ran at the same time, and that he roped in Europe and the Colonies; and that his income rose into five figures. He couldn't help it. His business was a thing that had passed beyond his control. With infinite exertions he had set it spinning, and now it looked as if he had only to touch it now and then with his finger to keep it going. And if he did get a bit excited is it any wonder? There was the dreadful fascination of the thing that compelled him to watch it till its perpetual gyrations went to his head and made it reel.