And once or twice, under the strain of it, he dropped an aitch with the most disconcerting effect.

I often wonder what Pavitt thought of that family party. He certainly served Viola as if he loved her, and Jimmy as if he was sorry for him, calling his attention to a dish or a wine which, he seemed to say, it would be a pity for him to miss—it might prove a consolation to him.

Our agony became so unbearable that the women ended it when they could by leaving us at the stage of coffee and cigarettes. Then, with us three men the position became untenable, and Reggie found that he'd have to go out at nine; he had an appointment with a fellow. And at nine he went.

Viola and Jimmy left us very soon after.

She said, "It was dear of you to have us," not in the least humbly, but as if they had enjoyed it.

Up to the very last she was magnificent, and even Jimmy played up well. In fact, when Reggie's perfection was no longer there to damage him he was rather fine.

It was poor little Norah who broke down. I found her crying all by herself on the couch in my study when they'd gone.

She said, "Wally, this is awful. It's the most awful thing that could have happened."

I said, "Oh, come—" and she persisted. "But it is. She adored Reggie. He used to adore her—and—you've seen him, how he was to-night. It'll kill her if he keeps it up."

I said, "He won't keep it up."

"Oh, won't he! You don't know Reggie."

I said, "It's odd. He didn't seem to mind Jimmy so much the first day he met him."

"Oh, my dear—he didn't mind, because he never could have dreamed she'd marry him."

"He'll come round all right when he knows him," I said.

She shook her head and made little dabs at her face with her pocket-handkerchief.

"That's just it. He thinks he does know him. I mean he thinks he knows something. I'm sure he thinks it."

"My dear child, however could he? He couldn't even have heard. If you mean that Belgian business, it was all over and done with four years ago. Have we any of us thought of it since?"

"No—but I think he had an idea then. He guessed that there must be something. You see—we never told Vee-Vee, but—he thought it was awfully queer of her to go off—anywhere—just when he was sailing."

"Well," I said, "it was a bit odd. She must have been awfully gone on Jimmy."

"She was."

"Poor dear. She said she meant to burn her boats."

"Don't you see—that was part of the burning. She had to break the hold that Reggie had on her. You don't know what it was like, Wally. She had to break it or she could never have married Jimmy at all. It was a toss-up between them; and Jimmy won."

"Is it going to be a toss-up between them all over again, d'you think?" I said.

"No. It's going to be war to the knife. They won't either of them give in as long as Reggie's got that idea in his head."

"We must get it out of his head. Surely," I said, "we can do something."

"No, we can't. There's no way of getting it out. It's no good trying to make a joke of it. You can't joke with Reggie past a certain point. And it's not as if you could give him a hint. You can't hint at these things."

"What do you think he'll do?"

"He won't do anything. He won't say anything. He'll just go on like this all the time, and she won't be able to bear it. It'll break her heart."

Well, though I agreed with her, I still thought that something could be done. I tried to do it when Reggie got back that night after Norah had gone to bed. I couldn't of course assume that he had his idea. My plan was to present Jevons to him in a light that was incompatible with his idea. It was easy enough to say that Jevons might be rather startling, but that he was awfully decent and the soul of honour. The soul of honour covered it—absolutely ruled out his idea.

He didn't contradict me. He just sat there smoking amicably, just saying every now and then that he couldn't stand him; he was sorry—I might be perfectly right and Jevons might be everything I said—only he couldn't stand him; and he wasn't going to. Nothing would induce him to stop with Jevons. He didn't want to have anything to do with the little beast.

When I said, "I assure you, my dear fellow, it's all right," he only threw the onus of suspicion on me by replying suavely, "My dear fellow, I assure you I never said it wasn't."

It was as if he really knew it wasn't, knew something that we didn't know, and was determined to keep his knowledge to himself.

And when I'd finished he said, "The whole thing's a mystery to me. I thought she was going to marry you." And then—"How she can stick him I can't think. D'you mind, old man, if I go to bed? No, I don't want any whisky and soda, thanks."

It was Pavitt, of all people, who threw a light on it when he brought the whisky.

"Beg your pardon, sir," said Pavitt, "but I believe I never told you that the Captain called here one day when you was in Belgium."

"Are you quite sure, Pavitt? He called the day I left."

"Yes, sir, I remember his calling the day you left. It's only just come back to me that he called again, three days after, I think it was. I told him you was gone to Belgium, and he said that was all he wanted. He didn't leave no message, else I should have remembered. It was the young gentleman's likeness to Mrs. Jevons, sir, what fixed him in my mind."

I told Reggie this the next day as an instance of Pavitt's wonderful memory. "Only," I said, "he forgot to tell me that you called."

He smiled rather bitterly as if he remembered the incident well.

"Oh, I called all right," he said. "I wanted to know where you were."

After that Norah and I made it out between us. Not all at once, but bit by bit, as things occurred to us or as he suggested them.

He must have begun to suspect something when the time went on and Viola didn't turn up. Only he thought it was I who was at the bottom of it. Perhaps, so long as he thought it was I, he had made up his mind that there could be no great harm in it. He had been all right with her down at Canterbury those last few days. Anyhow, he hadn't said anything.

Then—when he heard that she had married Jevons—he had his idea. It wasn't necessary for him to have heard anything else. And then, even if he hadn't guessed it, there was Jimmy's book, the "Flemish Journal," to tell him she had been in Belgium with him. And he knew she didn't marry him till afterwards.

And so, he thought things. If he didn't think them of Viola he thought them of Jevons. (Even on the most charitable assumption he would consider his sister's passion for Jimmy a piece of morbid perversity.) And anyhow, he was left with an appalling doubt.

And he wasn't going to forgive either of them, ever.



IX

That we had made out something very like the truth of it I realized when I met Burton Withers. For eventually I did meet him. It was at the end of June, nineteen-ten, in the green room of the Crown Theatre on the hundredth night of Jimmy's play. That is what I remember it by.

Norah and I were with Viola and Jimmy. Withers had come in with a friend, an important member of the cast, who was evidently under the impression that we had never met before, for he introduced him to us all round. Withers showed tact in not recognizing Viola or claiming the acquaintance he certainly had with Jevons. He had, in fact, a most reassuring air of starting again with a clean slate and no reminiscences. This was in the interval between the First and Second Acts. When the curtain rose on Act Two, I was alone in Jimmy's box. (Jimmy and Viola and Norah were trying the effect of the play from the stalls.) And at the next interval Withers came to me there. It was funny, he said, the way little Jevons had come on. He didn't suppose any of us had thought of this four years ago when we had all met together in Bruges.

I said, "Did we all meet together in Bruges?"

"Well, if it wasn't in Ghent. Oh—of course it was at Ghent you and I met. You hadn't joined the others then."

At first I was hopelessly mystified by these allusions. I couldn't think what point he was making for or where he would come out. He seemed to be trying uneasily to get somewhere. Then I saw that he had had it on his mind that when we had last met he had made a defamatory statement to me about the lady who had become my sister-in-law, and about a man who had become a celebrity (I knew Withers's little weakness for celebrities). And he was scared.

I must have seemed a bit lost among his allusions, for he blurted it out.

"D'you know, I've been most awfully sorry for chaffing you in that idiotic way—about—your sister-in-law. Silly sort of thing one says, you know. But of course you knew I was pulling your leg."

I said, "My dear Withers, of course I knew you were."

Of course I knew he was doing nothing of the sort, for Withers slandered right and left when it wasn't worth his while to grovel, and I had no doubt now that he believed his own dirty tale when he told it; but he had been impressed and thoroughly frightened, even at the time, by the calmness of my bluff, and the little beast was far more afraid of us than we ever could have been of him now. We could henceforth dismiss Withers from our minds. He was a "social climber" of the sort that would eat his own words if he thought they would do the smallest damage to his climbing.

As for the ladies, General Thesiger's friends, I rather think the General had settled with them at the time.

You might say we had nothing to fear from Reggie, if Reggie's silence—and his deafness—hadn't been more terrible than anything he could have heard or said.

I suppose nineteen-ten ought to stand as the year of Tasker Jevons's great Play, the play that ran for a whole year after the hundredth night, that ran on and on as if it would never stop, that, when it was taken off the Crown stage to make room for its successor, still careered through the provinces and the United States. It seemed the year of Jimmy's utmost affluence. If he kept it up, we said, he'd be a millionaire before he died of it. But it wasn't conceivable that he could keep it up for long. We thought he'd never write another play like this one. There never would be another year like nineteen-ten.

I believe that even Jimmy thought there'd never be another year like it, so far had he surpassed his own calculations, as it was.

But for me nineteen-ten is the year of other things, the things that happened in the family, the year of Reggie's return and all the misery that came from it, the year of Viola's struggle—the agony of which we, Norah and I, were the helpless spectators. She never said a word to us. It was Norah who conveyed to me the secret, intimate shock of it.

That year Jimmy rained boxes and stalls and theatre-parties for his play on all the Thesigers (except Reggie) and on all their friends, and on Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands when they came back from Simla and Gibraltar (it was the year of their return too); but we stood behind the scenes of a tragedy that mercifully was hidden from Jimmy's eyes. It was the year when Mildred broke off her engagement to Charlie Thesiger. It was the year when our little girl, Viola, was born; the year when we moved from our Bloomsbury flat into the little house in Edwardes Square, taking over the end of the lease and all the fixtures and some of the furniture from Jimmy. Jimmy hadn't a child, and he had sworn that he never would have one; he was so afraid (and this fear was the only thing that disturbed his optimism), so horribly afraid that Viola might die. But he had outgrown the house in Edwardes Square. It was the year of his first really startling expansion.

It was the year when he moved into the house in Mayfair.

Why Mayfair we really couldn't think. He said he liked the sound of it; it made him feel as if he was in the country when he wasn't, and as if it was the month of May, when there never was any month of May in England; as if there were a maypole where the fountain is in Park Lane; and as if processions, and processions of horses, splendid stallions and brood-mares and thoroughbreds and hacks and great Suffolk punches with their manes and tails tied up with ribbons were coming past his house to the fair.

He may have felt like that about it. I put no limits to Jimmy's imagination; but I suspected him of throwing out these airy fancies as a veil to cover the preposterous nature of his ambition.

It was also the year when he began to talk about motor-cars and think about motor-cars and dream about motor-cars at night.

And it was the year in which he and Viola went to the Riviera while the plumbers and painters were at work on the house in Green Street, Mayfair. They stayed away all autumn, and at the end of November they settled in. And at Christmas they gave their house-warming.

It wasn't a large party—only a few friends of Viola's, and Jimmy's lawyer and his doctor and his agent, and a few picked members of the confraternity; the rest were Thesigers. If Jimmy had meant to give a demonstration proving that he could gather the whole of his wife's family round him at a pinch, he had all but succeeded. I suppose every available member had turned up that night, except Reggie. The General and his wife and daughters were there; and Charlie Thesiger and Bertie; and Canon and Mrs. Thesiger (they had come up from Canterbury on purpose, and were staying with the General); and Dorothy and Gwinny and their husbands; and Victoria and Mildred, who stayed with Viola; and Millicent, who came to us; and a whole crowd of miscellaneous aunts and cousins; perhaps sixty altogether, counting outsiders.

Norah and I had been away for weeks in the country and had only got back that afternoon, so we had not seen the house in Green Street since it had been furnished. It burst, it literally burst, on us, without the smallest warning or preparation.

Like Jimmy's first novel, it was designed to startle and arrest, hitting you in the eye as you came in. The actual reception was held in the large hall, which had been formed by turning what had once been the dining-room loose into the passage and the stair-place.

So far the architect had done his work well. After that he had been left to struggle with and interpret as he best could the baronial idea that had been imposed on him. The hall was panelled half-way in dark oak, and above the oak the walls were hung with a rough papering of old gold. But what hit you in the eye as you came in was the oak staircase that went up royally along the bottom wall. It had scarlet-and-gold Tudor roses on the flank of the balustrade, and at every third banister there was a shield picked out in scarlet and gold. And at the bottom of the balustrade and at the turn a little oak lion sat on his haunches and held up yet another shield (picked out in scarlet and gold) in his fore-paws. The bare oak planks of the upper floor made the ceiling, and there was an enormous Tudor rose in the middle of it, where other people might have had a chandelier, and little Tudor roses blazed at intervals all along the cornice. And there was a great stone hearth and chimney-piece, a Tudor chimney-piece, mullioned, with a shield carved in the centre and the motto: "Dominus Defensor Domi," and on either side the rose and the grill, the rose and the grill, alternately. There were andirons on the hearth and an immense log burning, and swords and daggers and suits of armour hung on the gold walls above the panelling.

And I swear to you that the curtains and upholstery were in tapestry cloth, the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground. It was as if Jimmy had wanted to say to the Thesigers that if it came to being Tudor, he could be as Tudor as any of them, and more so. Thus deeply had he absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere.

When she saw the suits of armour Norah squeezed my arm and breathed "Oh—my darling Wally!"—in an ecstasy that was anguish. Poor Mildred's plump face turned as scarlet as the Tudor roses with an emotion that we could not fathom, but judged to be painful.

We had come early with the idea of making ourselves useful, if necessary; but there was hardly anybody there yet, only two or three guests drinking coffee or champagne-cup at the long table under the windows, and Jimmy, who stood in the middle of his Tudor hall, talking to one of the confraternity, and rocking himself gently from his toes to his heels and from his heels to his toes again, as a sign that he was not in the least elated, but only at his ease.

He was delighted to see us, and for quite three seconds he ceased his rocking and began to twinkle in a most natural and reassuring manner. Then I remember him scuttling away to greet another guest, and the confrere gazing after him with affection and turning to us in a sort of grave enjoyment of the scene. I remember Viola coming up to us and her little baffling smile and her look—the look she was to have for long enough—of detachment from Jimmy and his Tudor hall. I remember the dark blue, half-transparent gown she wore that was certainly not Tudor, and her general air of being an uninvited and inappropriate guest, and how she conveyed us to the table to get drinks "all comfy" before the others came. And when Viola had drifted away, I remember Charlie Thesiger strolling up to us. The supercilious youth had been, getting a drink "all comfy" on his own account, and his little stiff moustache was still wet with Jimmy's champagne-cup above the atrocious smile he met us with.

He asked us if we'd seen the drawing-room.

We said we hadn't, and he advised us to go up and look at it at once, before anybody else did. "You can't see it properly," he said, "unless you're alone with it."

I suppose we ought to have been grateful to Charlie for not letting us miss it, and it was perfectly true that the way to see it was to be alone with it; there would, indeed, have been a positive indecency in seeing it in any other way. He had spared our decency. And yet I think we hated him for having sent us there. It was as if he had sent us to look at something horrible, at an outrage, at violence done to shrinking, delicate things.

We looked at it, and we looked at each other. We didn't speak, and I don't think either of us smiled. I remember Norah going behind me and closing the door swiftly, as she might have closed it on some horror that she and I had to deal with alone. I remember her saying then, "This is too awful!" not in the least as if she meant what we were looking at, but as if she saw something invisible that lurked and loomed behind it, so that I asked her what she thought it meant.

"It means," she said, "that Jimmy's done it all himself. He's had to do it all himself. She hasn't cared."

I said, it looked as if he hadn't cared.

She moaned, "Oh, but he did—he did. He's cared so awfully. That's the dreadful part of it. You can see he has. Just look at those vases and those cabinets and things. And think of the money the poor thing must have spent on it!"

"But," I said, "it's so unlike him. His taste for furniture's impeccable. The old house was perfect. So, in its way, was the cottage."

"I'm afraid that wasn't Jimmy's taste—it was Vee-Vee's. She did everything."

"She told us he did."

"Poor darling—she wanted us to think he did."

"He appreciated it, anyhow."

"He'd appreciate anything if she did it."

"Then," I said, "why should he break loose like this now?"

"Because she hasn't cared. She hasn't cared a hang. She's left everything to him. And you can see, poor dear, how he's spread himself."

Oh, yes, you could see. It was as if he had never had scope before, and now, with no limit to his opportunity, he had simply run amok. It wasn't that the things he had gathered round him in his orgy were not fine things. It was the awful way he'd mixed them, yielding incontinently to each solicitation as it came along. Dealers had been on the look-out for Jimmy to exploit his fury.

In his Tudor hall he had been constrained to unity by a great idea. But not here. And reminiscences of the Canterbury drawing-room had suggested to him that you could mix things. So, using a satinwood suite with tinted marqueterie and old rose upholsterings (he had succumbed to it in the first freshness of his innocence) as a base, he had added Boule cabinets and modern Indian tables in carved open-work to Adams cabinets and Renaissance tables in ebony inlaid with engraved ivory, and eighteenth-century gilded bergere chairs to old oak and Chippendale. Cloisonne and Sevres stood side by side on the same shelf. He had an Aubusson carpet in the middle of the floor, and his Bokhara rugs at intervals down the sides. Norah was sitting on the emerald-green brocade of an Empire sofa, clutching the gilt sphinx head of the arm-end. It was a double room, and emerald-green curtains hung at the tall windows in the front and at the large stained-glass window at the back, and at the wide archway between. And an Algerian lamp swung from the back ceiling, and an Early Victorian glass chandelier from the front.

"And the awfullest thing of all is," Norah was saying, "that he's done it to please her."

"Don't believe her. That's the beautiful part of it."

Viola had come in by the door of the back room and she was smiling at us.

Yet, even as she smiled, she had that look of being detached, of not caring.

We couldn't say anything—we were too miserable. She looked round the dreadful rooms as if she were trying to see them for the first time, as if some reverberation of the horror we had felt did penetrate to her in her remoteness. She smiled faintly.

"What does it matter," she said, "so long as it makes him happy? It would be sweet if you'd come down and help us now."

We went down, and the house-warming began.

It was Jimmy who told us what our business was. We were to stand by visitors, he said, as they came in and break the shock (he had observed it) of the Tudor hall. If we couldn't break it we must do what we could to help recovery. He had seen desperate cases yield to champagne-cup administered during the first paroxysm.

We had a little trouble with some of the minor confraternity—their emotions were facile and champagne intensified them. They would ask where the throne-room was and when our host was going to be measured for his suit of armour, and what did we think he'd done with the family portraits?

But the Thesigers (all except Charlie—and Charlie, Norah said, had no heart), the Thesigers offered an example of the most beautiful manners. I shall never forget the General's face as the suits of armour struck him—his sudden spasm of joy and the austere heroism that suppressed it. And the Canon—

The Canon rose to even greater heights. We were a bit afraid that he would overdo it and look as if he were trying to show us how a Christian gentleman could bear such things as Jimmy's furnishings. But no. He behaved as though he saw nothing in the least unusual in his furnishings, as though Jimmy's Tudor hall and miscellaneous drawing-room were his natural background.

But for sheer pluck and presence of mind not one of them could touch Jevons. He rose, he soared, he poised himself, he turned and swept above them; you could feel the tense vibration that kept him there, in his atmosphere of deadly peril. He volplaned, he looped the loop. His behaviour was unsurpassable. For his case, if you like, was desperate. I tell you he had seen the effect of his Tudor hall and drawing-room. He had been watching; and nothing, not a murmur, or a furtive snigger, not the quiver of an eyelash, had escaped him. And consider what it meant to him. In a furious climax of expenditure he had achieved the arresting spectacle of his house in Mayfair, and his first night, his house-warming, was turning under his eyes into a triumph for the Thesigers' manners and a failure for him. He had no illusions. Unless he did something to stop it, the whole thing would be one enormous and lamentable and expensive failure.

He had to do something. And he did it. He left off his uneasy swagger and his rocking. He met the heroic and beautiful faces of the Thesigers with his engaging twinkle. He sought out and ministered to two young girls who had been brought there by the minor confraternity and were hiding in a corner on the point of hysteria. We heard him telling them that the throne-room was being built out over the scullery leads (he must have known what the minor confraternity had been up to), that in the great fireplace in his kitchen you could roast three journalists whole, and that the question of the family portraits was receiving his attention. He had a deal on with the Trustees of the National Portrait Gallery for the purchase of the Holbein Henry the Eighth. By the time he had finished it was open to us to suppose that the house in Mayfair was his joke and not ours, that he had furnished it in this preposterous manner in order to be really and truly funny, and to keep himself and Viola in perfect and perpetual gaiety. It was as if he were trying to say to us, "None of you people—least of all the confraternity—knows how to live. Life isn't a calamity; it's a joke; and to live properly you should meet life in its own spirit; you should do exuberant and gay and gorgeous things, like me."

And then when we had all come round, he rearranged all the furniture in his drawing-room for charades (showing no respect whatever for his satinwood suite); and after the charades he rolled up his Aubusson carpet and cleared the place for a dance that was ruin to his parquet floor. And we had supper; and then more dancing till four o'clock in the morning.

Of the dancing I remember nothing but Viola whirling round and round, as it were for ever, in Charlie Thesiger's arms, and her dead-white face looking over his shoulder, as if she saw nothing, nothing whatever; as if she were detached even from the arms that held her.

My last recollection is of Jimmy's face when Norah said to him, "Oh, Jimmy, I love your dear little lions!"—and Jimmy's answer:

"Little lions—yes—they make me feel tall and majestic."

"He is going it, isn't he?" said Charlie Thesiger.

* * * * *

At this point, when I look back over what I've written, it seems to me that I've done nothing but record changes so many and so marked that their history has no sort of continuity. But in reality it was not so. Up to December, nineteen-ten, there was no break, not even a dividing line. Compared with what happened then I am compelled to think of Viola's marriage, not as a risky experiment that had so far defeated prophecy, but as an entirely serene and happy thing. Between the moment when they set up that four-post bed in that absurd little house in Hampstead and the day of their leaving Edwardes Square behind them I cannot point to any time and say, "That was the beginning of it," or put my finger on an event and show the difference there.

Unless it was Reggie's coming back.

But the results of that didn't appear till later.

Any difference I may have noted previously was an affair of shades, of delicate oscillations. There was no lapse without a recovery, no departure without a return.

And here, at the end of nineteen-ten, I got a line drawn sharply on either side of a break I cannot bridge. The minute Jimmy moved into that house in Mayfair things began to go wrong.

It was as if Jimmy, in his love of doing risky things, had cast, this time, a dreadful die.

From that evening onward I watched them with anxiety. I do not know how far Jevons was aware that the house in Mayfair was a blunder; I think he wouldn't have acknowledged that it was a blunder at all. His own attitude to it was not in the least disturbed by his humorous perception of other people's. With his dexterity in adjustments he was quite capable of reconciling them, quite capable of enjoying the effect it had on nervous organisms while he himself took it seriously. It was, after all, his own achievement, and a very astonishing achievement too. He continued to respect it as the immense sign of his material prosperity, the advertisement, you may say, of his arrival. His business instinct would never have allowed him to repent of an advertisement.

There was this gross element in his enjoyment.

And there was also the pure and charming happiness of a child that suddenly finds itself left, with boundless opportunity, to its own gorgeous caprice. You could no more blame Jevons for the bad taste of his drawing-room and his Tudor hall than you could blame a child for its joy in a treasure of tinsel and coloured glass.

But when we asked ourselves where, in this outbreak of Jimmy's fantasy, did Viola come in, we had to own that she came in nowhere. Not only had she stood by without lifting a finger to interfere with its tempestuous course; not only had she submitted without a protest; she seemed to show no adequate sense of what had happened. Her detachment was the unnatural and dreadful thing.

And this happiness of his was at Viola's mercy. It would last just so long as she could keep him from knowing that he had outraged the beauty, the fitness and the simplicity she loved. I thought how he had once boasted that he knew what she wanted, that he knew what she was thinking and feeling all the time. How could he have imagined that she wanted this? What was his knowledge worth if he didn't know what she would think and feel about it?

Unless, indeed, she had lied to him. Lied from first to last, deliberately and consummately, over each separate thing and over all the pretentious silliness and waste of it. Norah declared that it was so, and it looked like it. And more than anything it showed where my poor Viola had got to. It was so unlike her to lie, so unlike her to stand aside, where you would have thought she would have most wanted to plunge in; the calculation and the indifference both were so beyond her that you could only think one thing: she hated it; she hated the new turn his prosperity had taken; she almost hated him because of it; and her heart was broken because of Reggie, and it was hardening where it broke; she hated Reggie at moments; and she had moments of hating Jevons because he had come between them; and she was compounding with her conscience, punishing herself for all these hatreds and for a thousand secret criticisms and disloyalties and repugnances; avenging, as it were beforehand, all hatreds and criticisms, disloyalties and repugnances to come. For she saw it all now—how it was going to be. And she was trying to make up for it by giving Jimmy his own way in the things that, as she had said, "didn't matter."

And if Jimmy's way was to surround her with pretentious silliness instead of beautiful simplicity, then she must rise above her surroundings. Her spirit, at any rate, must refuse to be surrounded.

Her attitude was more lofty than you can imagine. As Norah had said, there would always be a Belfry—something high and unusual—in Viola's life. Well, she was going to live in the Belfry, that was all. And if she was to be perfectly safe in her Belfry, and Jimmy perfectly happy in his Tudor hall, he mustn't know that she was there.

I don't know how she really put it to herself; I don't suppose she "put" it any way; but subconsciously, as they say, it must have been like that. Anyhow, her behaviour amounted to an evasion of Jimmy, and this particular evasion was sad enough when you consider that in the beginning it had been Jimmy who had taken her to look at the Belfry—who was the one man who could be trusted to take her, and that she would never have dreamed of setting off on such an adventure by herself, and that she wasn't fitted for it. In fact, I can't think of anybody less fit.

It showed more than anything how the glamour must have worn off him.

It had worn off even for us to whom he came each time with a comparative freshness. And if it hadn't worn off for his public and for the confraternity, it was simply because as an engineer of literature he was inexhaustible. He had so perfected his machinery that the turning out of novels and of plays had become with him a sort of automatic habit, and if there was any falling off in his quality he was right when he said that nobody but himself would find it out. He had got an infinite capacity for plagiarizing himself; and in his worst things he imitated his best so closely that he might well defy you to tell the difference.

But you cannot work as he had worked for five years at a stretch and not suffer for it. And you cannot aim at material success as he had aimed, deliberately and continuously, for five years without becoming yourself a bit material. And you cannot be immersed and wallow in it as he wallowed without corruption.

There's no doubt that for the next, two—three—four years he wallowed. He was so deep in that, even after Viola's illness that came in nineteen-thirteen and purged him somewhat, he continued to wallow. And we had to stand by while he was doing it and pretend that we weren't shocked. There was no good trying to give him a hand to help him out, he was so happy wallowing.

I am far from blaming him. Personally, if it hadn't been for Viola, I should have liked to think that he was able to get all that ecstasy out of his sordid triumph. For it was sordid. If it wasn't for Viola you could tick off each year with a note of his preposterously increasing income, and say that was all there was in it.

I muddle up the first years of it. I know that in nineteen-eleven he brought out his fifth novel and his third play and that the run and the returns of both were astounding, even for him. I know that in nineteen-twelve he brought out two novels and two new plays that ran at the same time, and that he roped in Europe and the Colonies; and that his income rose into five figures. He couldn't help it. His business was a thing that had passed beyond his control. With infinite exertions he had set it spinning, and now it looked as if he had only to touch it now and then with his finger to keep it going. And if he did get a bit excited is it any wonder? There was the dreadful fascination of the thing that compelled him to watch it till its perpetual gyrations went to his head and made it reel.

His figure seems to me to reel slightly as it moves through those rooms in the house in Green Street, and before the footlights as he answered calls, and across the banquet-halls of the "Ritz" or the "Criterion" or the "Savoy," when—about three times a year—he celebrated his triumphs. I see those years as a succession of banquets running indistinguishably into each other. I see him buying more and more furniture and superintending its disposal with excitement. He seems to me to have been always buying things. I've forgotten most of them except the things he bought for Viola—the jewellery that frightened her, the opera cloak that made her hysterical, the furs that had to be sent back again (you'd have thought he couldn't have gone wrong with furs, but he did), and the hats that even Jimmy owned it was impossible to wear. I can see his face saddened by these failures and a little puzzled, as if he couldn't conceive how his star should have gone back on him like that. I can see him, and I can see Viola, kneeling on the floor in his study and packing some beastly thing up in paper, tenderly, as if it had been the corpse of a beloved hope; and I can hear him saying (it was after the opera cloak and the hysterics), "Walter, you can monkey with a woman's 'eart, and you can ruin her immortal soul, but if you meddle with her clothes it's hell for both of you. Don't you do it, my boy."

I remember scores of little things like that, things done and things said with an incorruptible sweetness and affection, but things accentuated with lapsed aitches and with gestures that only Jimmy was unaware of. Those years are marked for me more than anything by the awful increase in his solecisms. Their number, their enormity and frequency rose with his income, and for the best of reasons. It was as if, his object being gained, he could afford them. He was no longer on his guard. He had no longer any need to be. The strain was over—he relaxed, and in relaxation he fell back into his old habits.

All those years we seem to have been looking on at the slow, slow process of his vulgarization. By nineteen-twelve the confraternity had begun to regard Tasker Jevons as an outrageous joke. And in nineteen-thirteen, when both his plays were still running, even his father-in-law said that he was a disgusting spectacle. And Reggie (he was Major Thesiger now, with a garrison appointment at Woolwich) Reggie kept as far away from him as ever.

Sometimes I have thought that Viola's detachment helped his undoing. She wasn't there to pull him up or to cover his disasters; she had more and more the look of not being there at all.

And Charlie Thesiger was always there. There with a most decided look of being up to something.

Jevons didn't seem to mind him. You might have said that Charlie was another of the risks he took.



X

In nineteen-thirteen Jimmy bought a motor-car.

He was more excited about his motor-car than he had been about his house—any of his houses. Even Viola was interested and came rushing down from her Belfry when it arrived.

He bought it at the end of January. A good, useful car that would shut or open and serve for town or country. But it was no good to them till April.

For all February and March Viola was ill. She had been running down gradually for about two years, getting a little whiter and a little slenderer every month, and in the first week of February she got influenza and ignored it, and went out for a drive in the motor-car with a temperature of a hundred and four.

Nineteen-thirteen stands out for me as the year of Viola's illness.

It turned to pneumonia and she was dangerously ill for three weeks, in fact, she nearly died of it; and for more weeks than I can remember she lay about on sofas to which Jimmy and the nurse or one of us carried her from her bed. And in all that time Jimmy nursed and waited on her and sat up with her at night. If he slept it was with one eye and both ears open. And I never saw anybody as gentle as he was and as skilful with his hands and quiet. He didn't even breathe hard. And when she was convalescent and a little fretful and troublesome there wasn't anybody else who could manage her. The nurses would call him to feed her and give her her medicine and lift her. She couldn't bear anybody else to touch her.

I remember one day when she had been moved from her bed to the couch for the first time and she was so weak, poor darling, that she cried. I remember her saying, "Jimmy, if you'll only put your hands on my forehead and keep them there."

I think he must have sat for hours with his hands on her forehead.

I doubt if he was ever away from her for more than a few minutes except when one of us came and dragged him out for a walk in the Park against his will. It was always for a walk in the Park—the same walk, through Stanhope Gate to the end of the Serpentine and back again, so that he could time it to a minute. He wouldn't look at his motor-car. I think he hated it. Anyhow, I know he lent it to us until she was well enough to go out in it again.

She wasn't well enough till April. She never would have been well enough, she never would have been with us at all, the doctors and the nurses said, if it hadn't been for Jimmy. He swore that they were fools when they gave her up and said she couldn't live. He said he'd make her live. And I believe he made her.

He gave her till April to get well in; and when April came she did get well. And he took her away to the South of France, and to Switzerland when the months grew warmer (the doctor told him it was a risk, but he said he'd take it); he took her in the motor-car, and he brought her back in June, still slender but recovered.

That illness of hers saved them for the time. It reinstated him. It improved him. He couldn't, you see, be devoted and vulgar at the same time. All lighter agitations and excitements might be dangerous to Jevons, but passion and great grief and grave anxiety ennobled him. He came back from Switzerland chastened and purified of all offence. Even Reggie couldn't have found a flaw in him.

That had always been Jevons's way. Just when you had made up your mind that you couldn't bear him he would go and do something so beautiful that it made your heart ache. From the very fact that he was intolerable to-day you might be sure he'd be adorable to-morrow.

And when we saw him the night he brought Viola home, moving quietly about the house, giving orders in that gentle voice that he had in reserve, we thought, Really, it will be all right now. Viola's passion for him had been near death so many times, and each time he had saved it.

We hadn't allowed for the reaction—he was bound to feel it after three months' unnatural repression; we hadn't allowed for the reaction that Viola was bound to feel after three years' unnatural detachment; we hadn't allowed for the state of her nerves after her illness; there were all sorts of things we hadn't allowed for, and they all came at once; they burst out from under their covers one evening in June when Norah and I were dining in Green Street.

It was one of Jimmy's gestures that began it. Viola had never been able to control his gestures; she had never been able to get used to them; and there were two in particular that made her wince still as she had winced in the beginning. She had contracted the habit of wincing in response to them. Whenever Jimmy jerked his thumb over his shoulder you saw her blink; and whenever he cracked his knuckles she shrank back. The blink followed the jerk, and the shrinking followed the cracking as the flash follows the snap of the trigger.

I have never known Jimmy jerk as he jerked that evening. When Norah had no salad, when my glass was empty, when Viola wanted more potatoes, when he wanted more potatoes himself, Jimmy jerked his thumb. The butler seemed to have made it a point of honour to acknowledge no other signal. And every time it happened I noticed the increasing violence of Viola's reaction. What had once been a gentle flicker of the eyelashes was now a succession of spasms that left her eyebrows twisted.

And at the fifth jerk she covered her eyes with her hands and cried out, "Jimmy, if you do that once more I shall scream."

Poor Jimmy asked innocently, "What did I do?"

"You jerked your thumb. You jerked it five times, and I simply cannot bear it."

"All right—all right," said Jimmy. "I needn't jerk it again. It's quite easy not to."

"I was afraid it wasn't," she sighed.

I was thinking, "Whatever will she do if he cracks his knuckles?" and that very minute he cracked them. The butler, demoralized by Jimmy's methods, had gone out of the room just when he was wanted. That annoyed Jimmy. I have never known him produce such a detonation.

Viola started as if he had hit her. But she said nothing this time.

Jimmy didn't see her. He was looking over his shoulder to see whether the butler was or was not answering his summons. And then—I think that at one period of his life he must have been a little proud of his accomplishment—he did it again. He did it crescendo, fortissimo, prestissimo, strabato and con molto expressione; he played on his knuckles with a virtuosity of which I have never seen the like.

The sheer technique of the performance ought to have disarmed her. (It enchanted Norah. But then Norah hadn't had an illness.) She flung a wild look round the room as if she called on treacherous heavenly powers to save her, then rose and very slowly, in silence and a matchless dignity, she walked out, past me, past Jimmy, past the returning butler, and down the passage and into the Tudor hall.

"Well—I am blowed," said Jevons.

Norah put her hand on his arm.

"You were wonderful, Jimmy dear," she said. "I could have listened to you for ever. So could Walter. But then, we haven't any nerves."

"After all," said Jimmy, "what did I do?"

I said, "You made a most infernal noise, old chap, you know."

"I say! Come—"

We had heard the andirons go down with a clatter.

That was how we knew she was in the Tudor hall.

He found her there when he trotted out and took her some wine and a peach. He came back almost instantly.

"It's all right," he said. "She's eating it."

But it was very far from all right.

All the prisoned storms and the secret agonies of years were loose that night, and they had their way with her.

We found her dreadfully calm when we got back to her. She had peeled her peach and eaten it, and she had drunk her wine, and she was sitting by the great hearth where she had kicked down the andirons; she was sitting, I remember, on one of the Tudor chairs with the carved backs and the tapestry—the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground—sitting very upright, in her beautiful trailing gown that curled round her feet; and she was a little flushed (but that may have been the wine).

Jimmy went and stood next her in front of his hearth, with his hands in his trouser pockets—I mean with his thumbs in his waistcoat pockets, where he seemed to have put them to keep them out of mischief; and he twinkled as if he were still thinking of the andirons. And every now and then he glanced at his wife sideways out of his brilliant sapphire eyes, without moving his head a hair's-breadth.

And none of us said anything.

Then Jimmy rang for coffee, and that started her.

She said, "Are you going to do any work to-night?"

"No," said Jimmy, "I don't think so. Why?"

"Because, if you don't want your study I'll sit in it."

"All right." He said it vaguely. But he must have suspected something was up, for he turned his head round and looked at her straight; and again he said, "Why?"

"Because," she said, "it's the only tolerable room in the house."

He flushed faintly at this. "You mean," he said, "it's the only one I didn't bother about?"

"I said it was the only tolerable one."

"I see." His flush went deep, and his mouth closed over his teeth.

There was no doubt he saw.

She had hurt him badly. It was quite a minute before he spoke again, and when he did speak you felt that he had yielded, in spite of himself, to an overpowering curiosity. He must—he seemed to be saying to himself—sift this mystery to the bottom.

"D'you mean," he said, "that this room doesn't—er—appeal to you? What's wrong with it?"

"There's nothing wrong with it," she said, "if you like it."

"Never mind whether I like it or not. It's detestable. And the drawing-room?"

She did not answer. I think she was ashamed of herself.

"Even more so, I suppose. And—your boudoir?"

(I've forgotten the boudoir. She hardly ever let any of us go into it. It was pretty awful.)

"I do wish," she said, "you'd leave me alone. What does it matter?"

"Your boudoir," he went on, as if she hadn't said anything, "is, if possible, more detestable than the drawing-room."

"I never said so."

"Precisely. That's my grievance. Why, in Heaven's name, didn't you say so? Why did you tell me that you liked all these abominations?"

"Because they didn't matter."

"Why lie about them if they didn't matter?"

"I mean they didn't matter to me. They don't."

"My dear child, what on earth do you suppose they matter to me? What made you think they mattered?"

"The way you went on about them."

"Oh—the way I go on—Well, if that matters—"

She rose. I think she had heard the tinkle of the coffee-cups in the corridor and wanted to put an end to what in any hands but Jimmy's would have been an unseemly altercation.

"Will it matter if we go upstairs?"

"No. Not a bit." He snapped and twinkled at the same time.

She went, and Norah followed her.

Jevons settled himself in an armchair. I saw how unperturbed and deliberate he was as he took his coffee from the tray, and with what an incorrigible air he jerked his thumb towards the staircase. I can still hear him call up the staircase in a magisterial voice, "The ladies are in the study, Parker." When we were alone he fell into meditation.

It was apparently as the result of meditation that he said, "I suppose it is a bit crude, if you come to think of it. Only why couldn't she say so at the time?"

I said I supposed she was afraid of hurting his feelings.

"My feelings? How could I have any feelings about a blanketty drawing-room suite? Does she really think I'm such a fool that I can't live without lions on my staircase? I stuck the beastly things there because I thought she'd like 'em. If I thought she'd like a tame rhinoceros in her boudoir I'd have got her one, if I'd 'ad to go out and catch 'im and train 'im myself. If I thought now that the only way to preserve her affection was to wear that suit of armour every night at dinner I'd wear it and glory in wearing it. There isn't any damned silly thing I wouldn't do and glory in."

And then—"Her nerves must be in an awful state."

He meditated again.

"Tell you what—I'll get rid of this place. I'll let it go furnished for what it'll fetch. I'll only keep the things we had before—the things she liked. They are prettier."

He looked round him with his disenchanted eyes.

"I can see it's all wrong, this sort of thing. It's in bad taste. Rotten bad taste. I suppose I must have been a bit excited about it at the time—I must have thought it was all right or I couldn't have stood it.

"It's a phase I've gone through.

"I can understand perfectly well how she feels about it.

"Fact is, I hate the place myself—the whole beastly house I hate. I've hated it ever since she was ill in it. I can't get away from her illness. I shall always see her ill. She'll be ill again if we go on living in it.

"I'm tired of the whole business—I'll let it to-morrow and take a house in the country.

"You might go upstairs, old man, and see what she's doing."

I went upstairs.

She was sitting in one corner of the study with a book in her hand pretending to read. Norah was sitting in another corner with a book in her hand, pretending to read. I gathered that Norah had been talking to her sister. I took up a book and pretended to read too.

Presently, when she thought we were absorbed, Viola got up and left us. Norah waited till the door had closed on her. Then she spoke.

"Wally—it's more awful than we've ever imagined. I don't think she'll be able to stand it much longer."

"Well," I said, "she won't have to stand it much longer. He's going to chuck the place. It's got on his nerves, too. He understands exactly how she feels about it."

"Let's hope he doesn't understand how she feels about—It isn't the place, Wally."

"What is it, then?"

"I'm most awfully afraid it's Jimmy."

"Jimmy? You don't mean she doesn't care about him?"

"Oh, no, she cares about him, and it's because she cares so that she can't stand him."

"Well," I said, "whether she cares or not, it's rough on Jimmy."

"It's rough on her. It's rough on both of them. It's getting rougher and rougher, and it's wearing her out."

"Won't it wear him out too?"

"N-no. Nothing will wear Jimmy out. He's indestructible. He'll wear her out."

"He says he's going to take a house in the country. How do you think that'll answer?"

She shook her head.

"I don't know, Walter. I don't really know. It sounds risky."

"The whole thing," I said, "was risky from the start."

"There are two things," she said, "that would save them—if Reggie were to come round. Or if Jimmy were to have an illness; and neither of them is in the least likely to happen."

"There's a third thing," I said—"if Viola were to have a baby."

"That isn't likely either. He'd never let her. He says it would kill her. It's pitiful, it's pitiful. Can't you see," she said, "that he adores her?"

I said I didn't see what we were there for, and that it was time for us to go.

As I followed her down the stairs that led to the Tudor hall she paused suddenly on the landing where a second lion marked the turn. She had her finger to her lip. We drew back. But not before I had looked down over the balustrade into the hall and seen Jimmy sitting on one of the thrones with the lilies of France, and Viola crouching beside him on the rug with her head hidden on his knee.

He had his hands on her forehead and was saying, "It's all right. Do you suppose I don't understand?"



XI

It was late in August before Jevons found a country house large enough, yet not too large, and old enough, yet not too old—he would have nothing that even remotely suggested the Tudor period. And in the intervals of looking for his house he wrote another novel and two more plays. There was a decided falling-off in all of them, and I think Jevons himself was a little nervous. He said he'd have to be careful next time or they'd find him out. Once he had settled the affair of the house he would set to work and strengthen the position which, after all, he hadn't lost.

He had gained, if anything. Nineteen-thirteen stands as his year of maximum prosperity. Even the house in Mayfair justified itself when he let it, with all its principal rooms furnished, to an American railway magnate at a rent that enabled him to indulge the passion he had conceived for Amershott Old Grange.

He used to say he would never have been happy again if he couldn't have had Amershott Old Grange. Everything about it seemed propitious. They had found it by a happy accident when they weren't looking for it, weren't thinking of it, when they were trying to get out of Sussex and back to London after a long day's motoring in search of houses. Nothing that Essex or Kent or Buckinghamshire (Hertfordshire was ruled out by the presence in it of the Registrar) or Surrey or Hampshire or Sussex, so far, could do had satisfied them, and Jevons was beginning to talk rather wildly about Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire and Wilts, and even Devon and Cornwall, when they lost their way in the cross-country roads between Midhurst and Petworth and so came upon Amershott Old Grange. It was hidden behind an old rose-red brick wall in a lane, and it was only by standing up in the motorcar that they caught sight of its long line of red-tiled dormer windows. The very notice-board was hidden, staggering back in an ivy bush that topped the wall.

"I won't have a house," said Jimmy, "that's a day older than Queen Anne." No more would Viola.

And the Old Grange was not a day older than Queen Anne or a day younger. It was the most perfect specimen of a Queen Anne house you could have wished to see—the long, straight front, the slender door, the two storeys with their rows of straight, flat windows and the steep brows of the dormers over them. It was all rose-red brick and rose-red tiles, with roses and clematis bursting out in crimson and purple all over the front. It stood at right angles to the wall and to the lane, and there was a long grass-garden in front of it, with walls all round and herbaceous borders under the walls; and from the high postern door in the outer wall opening to the lane a wide flagged path went all the way in front of the house to the door in the inner wall that led into the kitchen garden and the orchard. Further down the lane were the doors of the courtyard at the back of the house where the outhouses and the stables and the dovecot were; and beyond the courtyard there was a paddock, and you would have thought that was enough. But, besides his Queen Anne house and his gardens and his orchard and his courtyard and his dovecot and his paddock, Jimmy had acquired ten acres of moorland, to say nothing of a belt of pinewood that ran the whole length of his estate behind the kitchen garden and the paddock and the moor. And the whole business of acquiring this property went without a hitch. He took it on the long tail-end of a lease from an impecunious landlord who couldn't afford to keep it up.

He obtained possession by September and in the early spring of nineteen-fourteen he was settled in Amershott Old Grange.

They furnished it as they had furnished the house in Edwardes Square, with the most complete return to beautiful simplicity.

Jimmy polished off a short novel and a play between October and June, and kept himself going on the proceeds of his old novels, his old plays, and his old short stories collected in a volume. Then I think he must have sat down to wait events.

For when we went down to stay with them we found him waiting. He was entirely prepared for certain contingencies. If anybody knew anything about English social conditions it was Tasker Jevons. He had calculated all the chances and provided for the ostracism that attends the inexpert invader of the country-side. He was aware that there were powers in and around Amershott that were not to be conciliated. The very fact that their territory lay so near the frontier (Amershott is only sixty-seven miles from London) kept them on their guard. To any good old county family, Tasker Jevons's celebrity was nothing, if it was not an added offence, and his opulence was less than nothing. In settling among them he ran the risk of being ignored. But when it came to ignoring, Jimmy considered that success lay with the party who got in first. So before he settled he took care to diffuse a sort of impression that the Tasker Jevonses were never at home to anybody, that it was not to be expected that a great novelist and playwright would have time for calling and being called on, even if he had the absurd inclination. He had one solitary introduction in the neighbourhood, and he worked it very adroitly, not to obtain other introductions, but to spread the rumour of retirement and exclusiveness.

His arrival, preceded by this attractive legend, became an event. You couldn't even affect to overlook it. And if it was not possible for Jimmy to subdue his features to an expression of complete ignoring, he had got in so promptly with his attitude that it took the wind out of the sails of any people who were merely proposing to ignore.

Then, having come amongst them as a shy recluse, Jimmy began instantly to focus attention on himself. He hadn't been six weeks in the county before he had become the most conspicuous object in it.

I don't know how he did it; you never really caught him at it; and yet, when you came down to stay with him, you felt all the time that he was doing it; you felt a sort of shame (a shame that he couldn't feel) in seeing that he did it so perpetually and so well. He had a way of making his privacy a public thing. There was something positively indecent in his detachment; it advertised him as no possible immersion could have done. I've seen him lying out on his moor basking all by himself in the sun; I've seen him meditating all by himself in his pinewood; I've seen him sitting in his walled garden, with the apparatus of his business all about him, when you would have said that if ever a man's life was hidden and withdrawn it was Tasker Jevons's. And yet it wasn't. You knew it wasn't; and he knew that you knew. He knew that his gardener and his chauffeur and his butler and his cook and his housemaid and his parlourmaid knew that he was sitting in his garden writing, or meditating in his pinewood or basking on his moor in the sun, and that their knowledge penetrated to every house in the village, to every house in the county within a radius of twenty miles. And when he was not doing any of these prominently tranquil things he was tearing about the country in his motor-car.

I have never seen anything like Jevons's motoring. It was in this new aspect of his that he was, I think, most remarkable. I say he made his privacy a public thing; but in the furious publicity of his motoring it was the other way round. He turned the public roads into a private track through paradise. I do not mean that he was a road-hog; far from it. He had the most exquisite manners of the road, He would slow down for a hen in the distance and upset himself into the ditch to avoid a rabbit. I have known him (with his first car) give a lift to any filthy tramp between Midhurst and Portsmouth. I mean that the act of motoring transported him; and he did these things instinctively, mechanically, without interruption to his rapture. Speed and the wind of speed, the air rushing by like a water-race as he ripped through it, the streaming past him of trees and hedges, the humming and throbbing of his engines, were ecstasy to Jimmy. He had learned to drive the thing, and his sense of power over it gave him the physical exaltation that he craved for. I believe that when he sat in his motor-car, driving it, he was filled, intoxicated, with the pride and splendour of life. He had power over everybody and everything that lay in his track, except other motor-cars; and he exulted in his knowledge that he could annihilate them and didn't. He enjoyed (voluptuously) his own mercy that spared them. Through his motor-car he attained such an extension of his personality that he became intolerable to other people and unrecognizable to himself.

And yet I do not think that even at the height of his ecstasy he ever really forgot that he was Tasker Jevons, the great novelist and playwright, in his motor-car. When he drove you through Portsmouth or Chichester, or even through little Midhurst, you felt that he thrilled from head to foot with self-consciousness. He knew and had acute pleasure in knowing that people noticed him as he went by; that the tradesmen turned out of their shops to stare after him; and that everybody said, "See that chap? That's Tasker Jevons. He always drives his own car."

He owned that he enjoyed it. I remember the first time we went down to stay with them (it was in May of nineteen-fourteen), when he was driving us through Midhurst from the station, how he said to us, "I'm glad I thought of living in the country. It makes me feel celebrated."

We asked him if he hadn't ever felt it before; and he answered solemnly, "Never for a minute. Never, I mean, like I do down here. In London, if you do gather a crowd round you, you're swallowed up in it. Besides, you can't always gather a crowd. D'you suppose, if I were to drive down Piccadilly in this car—short of standing on my head—I could attract the attention I've attracted to-day? You saw those fellows come out and look at me? Well—they do that pretty nearly every time, Furnival.

"No. London's no good. Too many houses—too many people—too many motor-cars. You can't stand out. What a man wants to set him off is landscape, Furny, landscape. You should see me on the goose-green at Amershott towards post-time."

Well, I did see him on the goose-green towards post-time, and I saw what he meant. It was really as if I'd never seen him before properly.

Heavens, how he stood out! It was as if a stage had been cleared for him, and for the figure he cut. He was quite right. You couldn't have done it in Piccadilly, or even in the suburbs. And he wasn't in his motor-car, mind you, then; he was simply strolling over from his house to post a letter in the village on the green, and I do not know how he contrived to infuse into so simple an act that subtle taint of advertisement. There was no necessity for him to post his own letters, he could easily have sent a servant. But I do believe he couldn't bear to miss the opportunity of being seen. When he passed the Vicarage, the Vicar and his wife and daughters were generally in their garden, and they turned to look at his passing, and he was exquisitely conscious of them. The villagers came out on to their doorsteps to look at him, and he was conscious of the villagers. The geese followed him in a long line across the common and stretched out their necks after him, and he was conscious of the geese. He enjoyed the publicity they gave him, and he said so.

And I began to wonder whether the funny frankness that had so disarmed us was really as funny as it looked (the idea of disarmament, you see, was serious), whether he didn't say these things because he knew we saw him as he really was; because he saw himself as he really was, and couldn't bear it; because there was no escape for him unless he could make believe that he was in fun when he really wasn't.

I do believe there was a time (any time before his Tudor period) when he was in fun, pure fun; and even through the Tudor period his enjoyment of himself was innocent. But as I walked home with him across his moor that evening it was borne in upon me that Jimmy's innocence was gone. Living in the country had killed it. I had never perceived so definite a taint of vulgarity in him before.

You would have thought it would have been all the other way, that living in the country would have made altogether for simplicity and purity. I believe that quite honestly he had thought it would, that he had come into the country to be purified and simplified, and to put himself right with Viola for ever. And the horrid irony of it was that the country didn't do any of these things to him; it complicated him, it saturated him with that taint I've mentioned, and instead of putting him right it showed him up. Quite horribly and cruelly it showed him up. I do not think there was a single weakness or a single secret meanness that he had that didn't suddenly rise up and stand out on the background of Amershott.

All through that summer there, quite frankly, I detested Jevons. I believe that Norah came near detesting him, that she felt something very like contempt for him.

And if Norah felt it you may imagine what Viola would feel.

She was with us one evening (it was June, I think, and our second visit), when Jimmy showed most unmistakably the cloven hoof. We had come in from a long motor drive, and he had made at once, as he always did, for the silver plate in the hall where cards left by callers were put, if any callers came. I can see him now, breathing hard. I can see the glance he cast at the cards, and the little jerky curb he put on his excitement—he had the grace to be ashamed of it. And then I see him holding four cards in his hand, sober and quiet and flushed like a man who has triumphed solemnly. And I hear him read out the names: "Lord Amerley, Lady Amerley, Lady Octavia Amerley, the Honourable Frances Amerley. That's all right. I gave them three months."

And I see Viola look at him, taking in his figure in its motor-dress, and his face, with the foolish, weak elation he couldn't for the life of him keep out of it.

Again I see him, with his little dreadful air of fervid solemnity—and I don't know whether I dreamed it or whether it was really there—very spruce and strutting about the lawns of Amerley Park at that garden-party they took us to.

And later on—in the very beginning of July it must have been—I see him on his own lawn at his own garden-party, and—I didn't dream it this time—he was really dreadful. Instead of carrying it off with the levity that had so often saved him from perdition, there was that revolting triumph about him and an uneasy eagerness, as if he knew that his triumph wasn't quite complete. But the garden-party was, as he would have said, all right. They were all there, those people he had given three months to. He had pulled it off precisely as he had schemed and calculated. Those legends of his detachment and his hermit habits had been worked so as to excite a supreme curiosity—and it was being satisfied.

And I cannot tell you whether he was really altered, or whether he had been like that all the time before Amershott had shown him up, and none of us had seen it except Viola.

Oh no—it's impossible. He had altered. If he had been like this we must have seen it. What Viola had seen—if she had seen anything—was only the foreshadowing, the bare possibility of this.

Charlie Thesiger was at that garden-party (he had retired from the service with the rank of Captain).

And it was at the garden-party that I first noticed a change in his manner to his cousin's husband. He used to treat Jevons with a certain superciliousness, and with as much amusement, as much perception of his absurdity, as was possible for Charlie, who perceived so few things. Now I was struck with the correct young man's deference to his host. It was really as if it had at last dawned on Charlie that Jevons was his host, and that he had other claims to distinction as well. The more dreadful Jimmy was, the more courteous Charlie showed himself to Jimmy. And this in spite of the fact that Jevons had a way of treating Charlie as if he didn't matter, as if for all recognizable purposes he wasn't there.

When I spoke of this to Norah, she said that Viola had told him that if he couldn't be decent to Jimmy she wouldn't have him there.

Well, there he was, hanging about Viola from morning till night; he had any amount of time on his hands now, and he spent most of it at Amershott. He was there when we weren't sometimes, so that we couldn't keep track of him. But his purposes ought to have been apparent to us. I think it was partly because he was aware of them himself that he went out of his way to be decent to Jimmy, almost as if he were sorry for him beforehand.

For it was evident enough that Viola liked his being there, and liked to have him hanging round her. There was nothing about him that shocked or grated. I've no doubt he made himself entirely charming. His manners could be as beautiful as any of the Thesigers' when he chose, and they soothed her. I think she had ceased to feel them as a reproach to Jimmy. She had given up his manners, poor dear, long ago, as a bad job. It was as if she had slaked her thirst for the unusual. Some secret and strong revulsion had thrown her back on the people and the things that she had been brought up amongst and that she had run away from. When Jimmy jarred on her she turned to Charlie for relief. And, after all, as Norah said, he was her cousin.

I don't think we either of us saw anything more in it than that. Without some such reaction she must have surrendered to Amershott. She couldn't defend Jevons against that showing up. She couldn't defend herself against those revelations, she could only stand by and look on at his enormity and shudder. Unless she had put her dear eyes out she must have seen that in the country he was not only a bounder but a snob. And she must have writhed in feeling that to see him that way was to be a bit of a snob herself. She had accused herself of snobbishness long ago, before she married him, when, in order to marry him, she had burned her boats.

What could she do? She couldn't put her eyes out. But I believe she would have been grateful to anybody who would have put them out for her.

I can't tell whether she was always unhappy. I rather think she had liked Amershott, the house and the garden and the pinewood and the bit of moor, and I am certain that she liked motoring almost as much as Jimmy did at first. She could even take pleasure in Jimmy's power over the car when they were alone with it in the open country, when his pleasure had no taint in it. I've heard her say, when he wanted to run down to Chichester or Portsmouth, "Oh, for Heaven's sake, let's go somewhere where nobody can look at us!"

She must have regarded the open country as the last refuge of his innocence. For her, more than for any of us, he had lost it.

* * * * *

How far he really lost it we shall never know. Even now, with all my lights, with that intense country light fairly beating on him, I can wonder: Am I saying these things because I think them? Or because I believe I must have thought them then? And I cannot answer my own wonder. I remember how at Amershott, when I sat beside him in that car of his and watched his ecstasy, I used to pull myself up and say to myself, "You know he isn't like that. Look at him—what woolly lamb could be more simple and innocent than he is now?" And if anybody had come to me and asked me if I didn't think that Jevons was a little awful I should have said that if you were a little awful yourself you might think so, but not otherwise. My conscience has told me that as he became more successful I became more critical; it has even suggested that I may have been jealous of his success.

* * * * *

But that was in the days (they were comparatively innocent) of his first motor-car. Round that car there really is a light of romance and of adventure, a glamour that isn't at all the glamour of his opulence. In those days he did look upon a motor-car mainly as an instrument of pleasure, and not as a vulgar advertisement of his income. In June, at any rate, he was still the master of his car and not—as we saw him later on—its servant. There never was anything like that first fury of his motoring.

It couldn't last. He was wearing himself out. Those early excesses exhausted his capacity for pleasure, and when we came to stay with him in the last two weeks of July we found him apathetic about motoring.

But not about motor-cars. As far as the cars went he had developed into an incurable motor-maniac. He was never tired of talking about carburetters, and tyres, and petrol, and garages and gear. He dreamed of these things at night. Every day he invented some extraordinary contrivance for increasing speed and lessening friction. He knew all that was to be known about the different kinds of cars; and he would roll their names on his tongue—Panhard and Fiat and Daimler and Mercedes and Rolls-Royce, as if the sound of them caressed him like music.

And the first car which he had mastered—it was a comparatively cheap one, but it wouldn't be fair to say what kind it was, for the poor thing had gone to pieces under his hand in six months; he had served her, his chauffeur said, something cruel—that first car had been sold for a hundred and fifty pounds, and Viola was mourning for it when we came down in July.

We couldn't think why she mourned, for he had bought another. We supposed that the new car had broken down, for we were met at Midhurst station by the local cab proprietor. But we were very soon to know that nothing had happened to the new car, and that something very serious indeed had happened to Jimmy.

He had gone mad—you can only call it mad—over his new car.

As soon as we had tea we were taken to see it where it stood in the coach-house that served as a garage.

It was a magpie car—the first, Jimmy told me, that had appeared down in that part of the country—white, with black bonnet and black splashboards, and black leather hood and cushions; so black that its body, in the matchless purity of its whiteness, staggered you. Anybody, Jevons said, could have an all-white car, and it wouldn't be noticed any more than a common taxi-cab. But one magpie in a countless crowd of cars annihilated all the rest. Lemon colour was good and so was scarlet; but for effect—for sheer destruction to other automobilists—there was nothing like a white car with black points. It was, Jimmy said and Kendal, the chauffeur, said, a perfect car. From their tone you wondered what you had ever done that you should be allowed to approach and see it where it stood.

Where it stood, I say. You couldn't see that car doing anything else. It stood like an immense idol in a temple; and it looked as if all its life it never had done anything else but stand in its perfection to be stared at. And by its air of self-consciousness, of majesty, of arrogant power in repose, you gathered that it knew it was there to be stared at. The thing was drawn up at the far end of the garage, where no breath could blow on it, over an open pit. You knew that Kendal, the chauffeur, went down on a ladder into the pit to examine the secret being of the car; you knew it and yet it was incredible. You refused to believe that an outrage to which common cars were subject ever had been or would be perpetrated on this holy one. You would have said that no spot of mud or dust or rain had ever lighted on it; it might have descended into the garage out of heaven for any sign of travel that it showed. It was surrounded by I know not what atmosphere of consecration and immunity.

So that Norah's first question sounded like a profanity.

"What speed is it?" she said.

It might have been fancy, but I thought that Jevons's face underwent a change. I certainly saw Kendal the chauffeur looking at it.

"Speed?" he said. "Speed? Well—you can speed her up to sixty miles an hour if you want to." (He seemed to say, "If she ever is speeded up," or "You jolly well may want.")

He ran his hand lovingly along the car's white flank as if it were alive and could respond to the caress.

"She's a beauty," he said.

The chauffeur looked at him again.

"You won't want to knock her about like you did the last one, Mr. Jevons," he said.

And Jimmy's face expressed a sort of horror.

The chauffeur looked at us then, and, if you can wink without any motion of the eyelids, he winked. He saw, and he was trying to indicate to us, the state that Jevons had fallen into.

It was infatuation; it was idolatry; it was the most extraordinary passion I have ever known a man otherwise sane to be possessed by. You would have said that that creature with the black-and-white body and the terrific bowels of machinery had some sinister and magic power over him. He loved it; he worshipped it; he was afraid of it. And when you think of how, as the chauffeur said, he had "served" the other car—

Knock her about, indeed! He daren't take her out of the garage for a fifteen-mile run without agonies of apprehension. He never took her out at all unless he was certain that it wouldn't rain and that there wouldn't be any mud or any dust or any wind (I don't know what harm he thought the wind would do her). Instead of taking her out he would spend hours in the garage standing still and looking at her, stooping sometimes to examine her for a spot or a crack on her enamel, but always with reverence. I believe he never touched her without washing his hands first.

We had been at Amershott a week and we hadn't been out in that car three times, though the weather was perfect. Jimmy never could see that it was perfect enough. If it hadn't rained for two days he was afraid of dust; if it did rain he was afraid of mud; what he wanted was one light shower to lay the dust; and when he got it he was afraid of another shower coming. And on hot days he was afraid the sun might do something. And he was afraid of us all the time lest we should ask him to take the car out on a day that wouldn't do.

I do not know how or why he had come to look on that car as his god. It wasn't, I do believe that it wasn't, because the thing was valuable, because he had sunk so much capital in that body and those engines (he had bought the most expensive kind of car you could buy). There was a sort of romance, a purity in his passion that redeemed it from the taint of grossness. It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself: "Motor-cars are perishable things. I did for my first beloved by my excesses. Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from motoring." And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune out of Jimmy's abstinence.

The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. (He too had come down for the last fortnight in July.) He was the only one of us who didn't protest, didn't clamour, didn't try to reason or to laugh Jimmy out of his insanity. And he went further. He refused to enter the car, to be taken in it on the few suitable days when Jimmy allowed it to go out. It was as if he were dominated by some scruple as morbid as his host's passion. We couldn't account for it at the time, for he liked motoring excessively, and he couldn't afford it.

I've wondered since whether this wasn't the way Charlie settled with his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency. He could eat Jimmy's bread and drink his wine and stay for weeks under his roof, since his necessity—the necessity of seeing Viola—compelled him, but to profit by him to that extent, to make use of Jimmy's opulence, was beyond him. His conscience may have even said to him, "If he loves his motor-car, for God's sake let him have that, at any rate, to himself."

And Viola seemed to share Charlie's scruple. She, too, shrank from using the new car. And I remember her saying to me one day as we crossed the courtyard and saw Jimmy, as usual, in the garage, worshipping his car, "I'm so glad he's got it. I think it makes him happier." As if she had confessed that it was all he had got; that she was not able to make him happy any more; and as if, in some day of unhappiness that she saw coming, it would be a consolation to the poor chap. At any rate, as if she were not in the least jealous of the power it had over him.

So, that July, Norah and I drove with Jimmy when the car, so to speak, let him drive it; and Viola walked through the woods and over the downs with Charlie Thesiger.

We often wondered what they found to talk about.

That wonder, of what Viola could see in Charlie, and how she could endure for so many hours the burden of his society, was all that Norah had allowed herself, so far, to express. If she felt any uneasiness she had not yet confided it to me. As for Jevons, he tolerated him as you only tolerate a thing that doesn't matter. I think honestly that to both of them, Charlie, in any serious connection with Viola, was as impossible as Jevons himself had been to her brother Reggie.

So little did he take him seriously that at the very end of July he went up to London for the inside of the week (he went by train so as to save the car) while Charlie was still at the Old Grange.

* * * * *

It was the week of the international crisis, and European mobilization was occupying Jimmy's mind to the exclusion of other matters. Still, you could hardly suppose that it was the crisis that was taking him up to London. I remember thinking he had run away from Charlie Thesiger, because he bored him.

He left on Tuesday, the twenty-eighth, and he was to be back on Friday, the thirty-first, and Charlie was to leave with Norah and me and our nurse and Baby on the Monday following, when our fortnight was up.

So on Friday afternoon I was a little astonished to find my sister-in-law, dressed in her town suit of white cloth, drinking tea at three o'clock before going up to London. She simply stated the fact that she was going up. Norah had said she might stay in our house and she hoped I wouldn't mind.

When I suggested that it would surely be nicer for us all to go up together on Monday she looked at me with a certain long-suffering expression that she had for me at times, and said that wouldn't suit her, since she had got to go to-day. She was of course awfully sorry to leave us, but Norah understood, and Jimmy would look after us very well.

No. She wasn't going up by Midhurst. She was going by Selham.

She rose. I noticed the impatient energy of her little hands as they knotted her veil under her chin. I looked up her trains and found that there was none from Selham till four forty-five. I pointed out to her that there was no hurry; she had missed the two fifty-five, which had left Selham fifteen minutes ago, and she had an hour to spare even if the car took half an hour getting to the station. (The day was fine and there was no dust. Even Jimmy couldn't have objected to her taking the car.)

But she said she hadn't missed the two fifty-five; she wasn't trying for it; and she wasn't going in the car; it would be wanted to meet Jimmy at Midhurst Station; and no—no—no—she didn't want a cab from Midhurst. She was going to walk.

I said it was absurd for her to walk four miles on a hot day like this, and she replied that the day would be cool enough if only I'd keep quiet. (She was still long-suffering.)

Then of course I said I'd walk with her.

But that was too much for her, and she stamped her foot and said I'd do nothing of the kind. She didn't want anybody to walk with her.

And when I inquired about her luggage—But I can't repeat what she said about her luggage!

Then she softened suddenly, as her way was, and kissed Norah, and said I was a dear, and she was sorry for snapping my head off, but it was all right. Norah knew all about it. She'd explain.

I can see her standing in the postern doorway and saying these things and then giving me her hand and holding mine tight, while she shook her head at me and smiled that little baffling smile that seemed to come up flickering from her depths of wisdom on purpose to put me in the wrong.

"The trouble with you, Furny," she said, "is that you're much too good."

She went; and we saw her tall, lithe figure swinging up the lane, past the courtyard and the paddock and the moor.

Then Norah plucked me in by the coat-sleeve as if she thought we oughtn't to be looking at her. We shut the door on her flight and turned to each other where we stood on the flagged path before the house.

"What does it mean?" I said.

"It means that she's at the end of her tether."

"The end—?" I think I must have gasped.

"The very end. She can't stand it any longer."

"But," I said, "she—she's got to stand it. After all—"

"There's no good talking that way. She can't, and that settles it. I knew she couldn't, once she got beyond a certain point."

"Do you mean to say," I said, "that she's going to leave him?"

"I—don't—know. I believe—she's going to think about it."

"But—it's out of the question. She mustn't think about it."

"You can't stop her thinking, Wally. She's gone away to think about it sanely. It's the best thing she can do."

"And you're helping her to get away?"

She was silent for a moment.

"I'm only helping her to think," she said.

I was stern with her. "You're not. You're just helping her to bolt," I said. "You're conniving at her bolting. You've lent her our house."

"Isn't it better she should come to us?"

"No, it isn't better. I don't like it. And I won't have it. I won't have you mixed up in it. Do you understand?"

"Dear Wally—there isn't anything to be mixed up in. We'll be back on Monday; then she'll only be staying with us."

"And till then—?"

"Till then—for Heaven's sake let the poor thing have peace for three days to think in."

"That's all very well," I said, "but what are we to say to Jimmy when he comes back this afternoon?"

"You say—you say she's tired of—of Amershott and wants three days in London to herself.—No, you don't. You don't say anything. You leave it to me. Vee-Vee said it was to be left to me."

"And I say I won't have you dragged into it. Good Heavens, have you any idea what you may be let in for, supposing—?"

"Supposing what?"

I couldn't say what. But I don't think I really had supposed anything—then.

"You needn't suppose things," she said. "Vee-Vee would never let us in. Look here, Wally—you've got to trust me this time. I'm going to see Vee-Vee through, and I'm going to see Jimmy through; but I can't do it if you don't trust me. I can't do it if you interfere."

I said I did trust her, and that God knew I didn't want to interfere, but was she quite sure she was doing a wise thing?

She said, "Quite sure. Let's go and lie down in the pine-wood till tea-time. I wonder if Jimmy would mind us going into Midhurst with the car. We shouldn't hurt it, sitting in it."

We lay out in the pine-wood till we heard the bell for tea, which we had ordered a little before four, in case Jevons should wire for the car to meet him by the early afternoon train that got to Midhurst at four-sixteen.

The table was set as usual in the garden on the lawn in front of the house.

By four o'clock no wire had come from Jevons; so we knew we needn't expect him till a later train. He nearly always came by Waterloo and Petersfield and was met at Midhurst, which gave him his public. But he might come, as Viola had gone, by Victoria and Horsham and be met at Selham.

I remember saying, in a startling manner as the idea struck me, "Supposing he comes by Victoria?"

And Norah said, "What if he does?"

And I, "They might meet at Horsham."

"Why shouldn't they?" she said. "You don't suppose he'll eat her for running up to town?"

"He might," I said, "think it odd of her."

"Not he. The beauty of Jimmy is that odd things don't seem odd to him. Do you know where Charlie is?"

I didn't. We had finished tea before either of us had thought of him. We shouted to him through the open windows of the house, for Charlie had a habit of mooning about indoors till Viola was ready to walk with him.

No answer came to our summons, but it brought Parker, the butler, out on to the lawn. He had a slightly surprised and slightly embarrassed look on his respectable and respectful face, no longer demoralized by Jimmy.

"Were you looking for the Captain, sir?" he said.

I said we were.

Something grave and a little sorrowful came into Parker's embarrassed look.

"Didn't you know he'd gone, sir?"

I said I didn't even know he was going; and then I saw Norah looking at me.

Parker was trying not to look at Norah. He began gathering up the tea-things as if to justify his presence and explain it.

"When did he go?" I said as casually as I could.

"Well, sir—the cab was ordered to catch the four thirty-five from Midhurst."

Now the four thirty-five from Midhurst is the four forty-five from Selham, the train that Viola had gone by. We knew this; and Parker knew that we knew it. That was why, instead of stating outright that Captain Thesiger had gone by that train, he tried to soften the blow to us by saying that the cab had been ordered to catch it, and leaving it open to us to suppose that perhaps, after all, it might have missed it.

"Did he say when he was coming back?" I asked, again casually.

"He isn't coming back, sir," said Parker. "He's took his luggage with him and all."

"Of course," said Norah. "He's gone to see what they're doing at the War Office. He said he would."

But I knew and she knew and Parker knew he hadn't—or, if he had, it was only one of the things he had gone for. Because, if the War Office had been all that he had in his mind he would have told us, and Viola would have told us, and they would have gone openly together, instead of dodging about like two clumsy criminals, one at Midhurst and the other at Selham.

When Parker had left (he did it very quickly) Norah got on her feet.

She said, "Go and find Kendal and tell him to bring the car around at once."

I asked her what she was going to do?

"Do?" she flashed at me. She had changed all in a moment into a woman whom I did not know.

"I'm going to fetch her back," she said. She had wriggled into her coat. "We'll overtake her before she gets to Selham, if you're quick."

I looked at my watch. It was barely half-past four. Yes, if we were quick, if we started at once, if we let the new car rip we should overtake her on the road, or at the station before she could get into that train with Charlie Thesiger in it. I meant, and Norah's eyes meant, that we would stop her going with him, if we had to drag her from the platform.

We ran to the garage to find Kendal. The new car, the superb black and white creature, stood in the middle of the courtyard, ready to start when Jimmy's wire came. So far it was all right.

But we had reckoned without Kendal, the chauffeur.

Kendal, absolved from the four-sixteen train at Midhurst, was at his tea in the servants' hall, and at my summons he came out slowly, munching as he came. He was visibly outraged at our intrusion on his sacred leisure. And when he was ordered to start at once for Selham, he refused. There was no train from Victoria, he said, between the four-four that Mr. Jevons hadn't come by and the five fifty-two. If, Kendal said, he did come by Victoria, and he always came by Waterloo.

What was the sense, said Kendal, with his mouth full, of going to Selham when we hadn't got a wire?

The sense of it, Norah told him, was that we had a message—an important message—for Mrs. Jevons, which she must get before she started.

At this Kendal left off munching and looked at my wife. Even in my eagerness I was struck by the singular intelligence of that look. There was nothing covert in it. On the contrary it was a most straightforward and transparent look. Kendal's knowledge—which might have sought cover if you had hunted it—had come out to meet ours on equal terms.

It only lasted for the fraction of a second. Kendal repeated firmly, but this time respectfully, that she was Mr. Jevons's car and he couldn't take her out without Mr. Jevons's orders, for if he did Mr. Jevons would give him the sack.

To which Norah replied that Mr. Jevons would give him the sack if he didn't, or if he made us miss that train by arguing. I told him sternly to look sharp. He looked it and we got off. I had begun to crank up the car myself while I spoke.

But he had wasted three minutes of our valuable fifteen. Though on the open road we speeded up the car to her sixty miles an hour, we had to slow down in the narrow lanes. Once we were held up by a country cart, and once by cows in our track, and Norah was beside herself at each halt.

As we careened into the station yard I thought that my wife would have hurled herself out of the car.