XIV
We had breakfast very early the next morning, for Jevons was under orders to start at eight o'clock for Termonde. We had a table reserved for us in a corner of the restaurant. The hotel was full of Belgian officers, and I found I was infinitely better off in attaching myself to Jevons than if I had joined the war-correspondents.
Viola (I may say that her rig-out which Jevons had admired so much, the khaki tunic and breeches, made us terribly conspicuous) had come down in a contrite mood. I heard her telling Jevons that he must be kind to me, for I had had an awful time with her and I had been an angel.
Well, I had had an awful time; I don't think I remember ever having had a worse time than the hours I had spent in her company since she had laid into me on Tuesday evening.
But I had not been an angel; far from it. Looking back on those hours, I can see that I behaved to her like a perfect brute.
She had her revenge. One of those revenges that are the more triumphant because they are unpremeditated. She had dished me as a war-correspondent.
For I declare that from the moment when we found Jevons and his General in the hotel I became the victim of her miserable point of view. I could only see the war through Jevons, and as a part of Jevons; I might have said, like Viola, that to me Ghent was Jevons, and Belgium was Jevons, and the war was Jevons. I suppose I saw as much of the War from first to last as any Special Correspondent at the front, and I know, that, barring the Siege of Antwerp, the three weeks when Jimmy was in it were by no means the most important or the most thrilling weeks in the war; and of the one event, the Siege of Antwerp, I didn't see as much as I ought to have seen, being most terribly handicapped by Viola. And yet—perhaps a little because of Viola, but infinitely more because of Jevons—those three weeks stand out in my memory before the battles of the Aisne and Marne and the long fight for Calais. Because of Jevons I have made them figure, in the columns of the Morning Standard and elsewhere, with a superior vividness; even now when I recall them I seem to have lived with Jevons in Flanders through long periods of time.
I have the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of the Morning Standard, dated October the twelfth. He says, "We are interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his performances seem to have been remarkable. You have written a very fine account of Melle, which I understand is a small village four and a-half miles from Ghent. But there are other events—the Fall of Antwerp, for instance."
Well, we got the story of the Fall of Antwerp all right. But Jimmy wrote it for me. It was the last thing he did write.
Yes: he had only three weeks of it, all told. He went out on Tuesday, September the twenty-second, and he came back on Tuesday, October the thirteenth. It was his infernal luck that he should have had no more of it.