"Dragged?" he said. "Dragged? We shall be in it without dragging—in the very thick."
From the instant the Germans broke into Luxembourg—and he gave them twenty-four hours—we should be in it. We couldn't keep out with a rag of honour to our names. France, he declared, would be in to-day. He gave us, I think—but I do not like to say positively that he gave us—three days; he couldn't have been as dead right as all that.
What struck me then as so extravagantly odd was, not that he had foreseen the war, and England's part in it, but that he should have seen himself there, in the thick—blazing away in the very middle of the conflagration. What on earth Jimmy conceived that he should have to do with it I couldn't think. And all of a sudden I had a reminiscence of Jevons as I had seen him nine years ago, talking to Reggie Thesiger in Viola's rooms at Hampstead, prophesying war, and lamenting that he wouldn't be in it because he was an arrant coward.
And as I looked at him again I saw that what made his face shine like that was the sweat that had broken out on it.
Then he made a remark about Charlie Thesiger. Thesiger, he said, knew all about it. He had gone up—he supposed I knew that?—to offer his services to the War Office in the event of England's coming in.
That Charlie had used the opportunity of going to make love to Jimmy's wife didn't seem to bother Jimmy in the least.
Sunday, I remember, was a fine day, with all the dust laid, and Jimmy made himself lovable by running me up to London in his sacred car. He still clung—I could see that he clung—to the superstition of its sanctity.
He left me at my door in Edwardes Square, which he refused to enter. I think he was afraid of seeing Viola. I thought at the time that this was because he was aware of her attitude; that he knew she was at the end of her tether, and that he wanted to be righteously fair, to give her time to think about leaving him, if she wanted to leave him; that he was behaving now as he had behaved at Bruges when he stood back and let me have my innings, and gave her her chance to free herself. And yet I was puzzled. Even he could hardly stand back to give Thesiger an innings. He may have had an inkling. There may have been something of his queer, scrupulous tenderness in this avoidance of her; there may have been his reckless propensity to take the risk; but I am convinced that even then his main object was—like Viola—to burn his boats. He was afraid that if he were to see Viola again he wouldn't be able to go through with it. He may even have been glad that she had left him, because it had made his way easier.
And so, when he had landed me at my door, he turned the black nose of his car round and ran out of Edwardes Square faster than he had run in; as if he were afraid that the place would catch and keep him.
He didn't go back to Amershott. He stayed in London in one of his clubs (he had several now, besides the club in Dover Street), and I saw him sometimes. I didn't say anything to Viola about him. I didn't tell her he was in town. It was as if there had been some tacit understanding among the three of us; there must have been some tacit agreement between him and me.