The Belfry

by May Sinclair

To begin with I was afraid of seeing her, because I conceived that she would be afraid of seeing me. I felt as if I had hunted her down and caught her in a trap. I didn't want the bright, defiant creature to crouch and flinch before me in her corner. And, as I tried to realize our encounter, that was how I saw her—crouching and flinching in a corner. It wouldn't have been quite so awful if the man had been any other man but Jevons. I could not imagine a worse position for a girl like Viola Thesiger than to be caught running off to Belgium, or anywhere, with Jevons, and told to leave him and go home. Put brutally, that was what I had to tell her.

The only way to do it was to ignore the unspeakable element in the affair—to ignore Jevons. To behave as if I'd never heard of him; as if she were just travelling in Belgium on her own account and staying in Bruges alone.

And that—if she had only let me—was what I tried to do.

I remember vividly everything that passed in that interview, but I do not know how to reproduce it, how to give anything like an impression of the marvellous thing it was, or that it turned into under her hands. It ought, you see, to have been so ugly, so humiliating, so absolutely intolerable for both of us. And it wasn't. She took it from me, at the end, and held it up, as it were a little way out of my grasp; and before I knew where I was, with some sudden twist or turn she had brought beauty out of it. Clear and exquisite beauty.

I found her in her room at the pension. It was at the back, on the ground floor; and had long windows opening into a little high-walled garden. The room, I remember, was rather dingy and stuffed up with furniture. Large Flemish pieces, bureaus, chests and cabinets stood against the walls. There was a bed behind the door; she had put her travelling-rug over it. And there was a washstand in an alcove with a curtain hung across it; and some of her coats and gowns hung behind another curtain in a corner, and some were on hooks on the door. And her little trunk was on the floor by the foot of the bed. And her shoes stood by the stove.

Somehow, when I saw these things—especially the shoes—my heart melted inside me with a tenderness that was infinitely more painful than the rather austere disapproval of her which I had relied on for support.

I was prepared, as I said, for a cowed and frightened Viola, or for Viola in a mood at least in keeping with the poignant and somewhat humbling pathos of her surroundings; but not for the Viola I found.

The garçon of the pension closed the door of this room in my face as he went in with my card to inquire whether she would receive me. I thought, "If she refuses I shall have to insist; and that will be unpleasant."

But she didn't refuse. On the other side of the door I heard a subdued, but curiously reassuring cry.

She had been sitting outside the open window. Her chair was on the flagged path of the garden. As I came in she had risen and was standing in the window, with the intense blue darkness of the garden behind her and the light of the room on her face. She was smiling in a serene and candid joy. For one second I imagined that she had not read the name on the card and that she thought I was Jevons. And then I must have looked away quite steadily so as not to see her shock of recognition; for her voice recalled me.