The Belfry

by May Sinclair

I suppose the dressing-down I'd got from Viola two nights before had rankled. I must have felt that I was getting my own back that time, when I threw it up to her that she wasn't my wife.

Norah, I said, had too much sense to want to go where she wasn't wanted.

But Viola only laughed again and said, "Please remember that I'm taking you, not you me. And Norah wants to go as much as I do, and it isn't altogether on your account. You needn't think it. As for keeping her back, you couldn't do it if she meant to go. It's Baby that's keeping her, not you."

And then she thanked God she hadn't got a child.

And so, sparring and chaffing by turns, half in play and half in earnest—for a secret subterranean anger smouldered still in both of us—we got off. I remember at the last moment Norah—dear little Norah—telling her that she was not to bully me. She was to let me sit in the motor-car as much as I liked; and she was to see that I didn't get into any danger.

Danger? Danger? As the great fans of the screws churned the harbour water into foam that the waves thinned and flattened out again till the green lane broadened between our track and the pier head where Norah stood, and the little, slender, dark blue figure became a dot on the pier and lost itself in the crowd of dots and disappeared, then, for the first time, it struck me that to be going off like this, alone, with Viola, was danger in itself.

Because, the other night she had made me see myself as I really was—a man, not of an irreproachable rectitude, an immaculate purity (had I ever, had anybody ever really supposed that I was such a man?) but quite deplorably human, and blind—yes, my dear Viola, blind as any bat—and vulnerable, so vulnerable that I think you might have spared me, you might have had some pity.

I found myself addressing her like that, in my heart, as I walked up and down, up and down the deck, not looking at her, but acutely aware of her, where she sat in her deck-chair, bundled up in her great khaki motor-coat and in the rugs I had wrapped round her.

I resented the power she had over me to make me aware of her—at such a time, or at any time, for that matter. Here was I, a Special Correspondent, going out to the war; and there, on the other side of the Channel, was the war; in the fields of France and of Flanders men were fighting, men were slaughtering each other every day by thousands. I was a man and I should have been thinking of those men; and here I was, compelled against my conscience and my will to think of this woman. She had come out with me against my conscience and my will, and against my judgment and my good taste and my honour and my common sense, against everything in me that I set most store by. I hadn't meant to take her with me, and she had made me take her.

And when my common sense told me that she hadn't; that I wasn't taking her, and that she had as much right to be on the Ostend boat as I had, I still resented her being there. I still raged as I realized the power she had over me. She had always had it. She had had it the first day I ever saw her, when she had walked into my rooms against my orders, half an hour behind the time I had appointed, and had made herself my secretary against my will. She had had it when she used me as a stalking-horse to draw her brother's suspicions away from her and Jevons; she had had it when she drew me after her to Belgium, and when I followed her from Bruges to Canterbury at her bidding; she had had it when I married Norah (hadn't she told me, in the insolence of it, that she had meant that I should marry Norah?). She had had it, this malign power over me, the other night, and she had it now. She always would have it.