The Belfry

by May Sinclair

And yet, I don't know. I don't see how he could have held out much longer at his pitch of intensity. Three weeks would have been nothing to any other man. But Jevons could do more with three weeks than another man could do with a three years' campaign, and he contrived to crowd into his term the maximum of glory and of risk. And when it was all over it was less as if Fate had foiled him than as if he had "given" himself three weeks.

But Jimmy was discontented, and every morning at breakfast we listened to the most extraordinary lamentations. His job, he said, wasn't at all the jolly thing it looked. For he was under orders the whole blessed time. He'd no more freedom, hadn't Jimmy, than that poor devil of a waiter. He'd got to go or to stay where a fussy old ram of a Colonel sent him. So here he was in Ghent, an open city, when he wanted to be in Antwerp. He hadn't been anywhere—anywhere at all. As for what he'd done, he couldn't see what the fuss was all about. He hadn't done anything. He'd seen a little fight in a turnip-field, and a little squabble for a bridge you could blow up to-day and build again to-morrow, and a little tin-pot town peppered. And look at the war! Just look at the war!

And when we tried to cheer him up with the prospect of a second Waterloo, the Waterloo that all the war-correspondents said was coming off next week, he refused to listen to what he called our putrid gabble. There wouldn't be any Waterloo next week or the week after, he said. "There won't be any Waterloo for another two years, if then."

He wasn't always lugubrious. It was only when he thought that he was missing the Siege of Antwerp that his happiness was incomplete.

It was on our third morning, when he rushed off joyously (to Quatrecht, I think), that I said to Viola, "You thought it would hurt him more than other people. You needn't have come out after him. You see how much it's hurting him."

"I'm glad I came," she said. "I don't mind as long as I can see."

"Do you remember him telling Reggie that he wouldn't be in the war because he was a coward? Don't you wish Reggie could see him now?"

She didn't answer, and I saw that there was still a sting for her in Reggie's name. The war might have made her forgive him, but there were things that the war couldn't wipe out from her memory. And there was her own rather appalling injustice to Jimmy. I wondered whether she was thinking of how she had tried to stop his going to the front, and how she had said he didn't want to go.

But I had to own that she had done the best thing for her peace of mind by coming out.

My peace of mind, I was told quite frankly, didn't matter. Jevons, though he admitted that I couldn't have stopped her coming out, made me responsible for her presence at the seat of war. The trouble was that she insisted on following him wherever he went. And as it wasn't to be expected that he would take her with him into the tight places that he managed to get into in his own car, I had to have her in mine. Not that Viola consented to my putting it that way. It was clear that she made herself mistress of the situation when she obtained possession of that car and manoeuvred (as I am convinced she did manoeuvre) for my own failure with the firm that supplied it. On our first morning in Ghent we came to what she called an understanding, when she rubbed it well into me that it was her own car and her own chauffeur that she had brought out, and that the man was under her orders, not mine. If I liked to come with her, why, of course I could. Otherwise, I could go halves with one of the other correspondents in one of their cars. But she pointed out that I could hardly do better than come with her, for by simply following Jimmy I should get nearer to the firing-line than anybody else. (She had assumed that the firing-line was the goal of every war-correspondent's ambition.) I would find, she said, that it would work quite well.