The station-master stood by the booking-office door. He had an ominous air of leisure. And when he saw us coming he looked at his watch.

He told us that we had missed the train by three minutes (the three minutes that Kendal had wasted).

I had jumped out of the car and was telling Kendal that it was all his fault, and that if he'd done what he was told we should have caught the train, when he turned on me as only a chauffeur convicted of folly can turn.

"Stand away from the car, sir," he shouted. He jerked her nose round with the savage energy of a chauffeur in the wrong; he seemed to impart his own fury to the car. She snorted and screamed as he backed her and drove her forward and backed her again.

And again he shouted to me. "You get in, sir, if you don't want to be left be'ind."

As he seemed to be animated chiefly by the fear of Jevons (whom, by the way, he adored), we could only suppose that his idea was to fly back to Amershott in time for Jimmy's wire.

On the high road past the station he took the wrong turn.

I shouted then, "What do you think you're doing, you confounded fool?"

"Ketch the London train at 'Orsham, sir," said Kendal. And he grinned.

"You can't do it," we said.

"I'll 'ave a try," said Kendal.

His honour as a chauffeur was at stake. His blood was up. His knowledge had begun to work in him and he adored his master. He knew what he was trying to do.

We could do it if we kept our heads; if we exceeded the speed limit; if we had luck; if we didn't break down; if neither the county constabulary nor the country traffic held us up.

Kendal declared we could do it easily and allow for accidents. At Horsham Junction you have nearly half an hour to wait between the arrival of the Midhurst and Selham train and the departure of the London express. And the local trains take more than half an hour to get from Selham to Horsham. At a pinch you could speed the car up to the limit of the local train. And, as we had to allow for accidents, we did speed her up whenever we saw a clean track before us.

The run to Selham was nothing to it. It was as if we were racing the train with its three minutes start, as if, positively, we might overtake it at any of the intermediate stations, as if it were in this hope that we dashed up the long white slope to Petworth.

The heat of the day gathered over our heads and smouldered in the east.

And as we ran I realized at last why we were running and what the race was and the hunt, and what our quarry. I remembered that other slower chase that was yet so keen and so agonizing; that hunting down of the same tender flesh and blood, over the Channel and across a foreign country. That was bad enough; but it was not like this. For then I was alone in my hunting of Viola; there was nobody but me, who loved her, to see her run to earth and caught crouching in her corner. That she would crouch, this time, and hide herself, I had no doubt. This hunt that I shared with her sister and her servant was abominable to me and shameful. And between the shame of that flight of hers and this flight there was no comparison. You don't go looking at belfries with Charlie Thesiger. I could not reconcile that enchanting and enchanted Viola of the garden of Bruges with this dreadful flying figure.

I hated myself; I hated Kendal, the chauffeur, as I sat behind his tight, efficient body that quivered with the fury of the hunt. (To think that his blood should be up and against Viola!) I hated the car that seemed more than ever a living thing, that breathed and snorted and vibrated with the same passion, and was endowed with this incredible speed and this superhuman power. With its black nose and white flanks, and its black hood and the black wings of its splash-boards, it was some terrible and sinister and malignant monster of prey hunting down Viola. Its body had been built, its engines had been forged, to hunt down Viola. The infernal thing had been invented to hunt down Viola.

Somewhere between Petworth and Fittleworth Kendal stopped to water his engine. It was then that we noticed how the gathering heat was piled into a bank of cloud over the east. At the back of our necks we could feel a little hot puff of wind that came up from the west.

"Shouldn't wonder if there was a storm," said Kendal. He added, with the ghost of a grin, "If Mr. Jevons sees that cloud, sir, he'll not wire to be met at Midhurst. He'd crawl home on his 'ands and knees first."

He slipped into his seat and we dashed on.

At Fittleworth, within a stone's-throw of the railway and the road, there is a patch of moor where the ground rises in a hillock. In July and August when the heather's out this hillock is a crimson landmark above the water meadows.

When we came within sight of it Kendal suddenly slowed down, then jammed his brakes hard, and with an awful grinding and snorting the car came to a stand-still.

Kendal stood up. He muttered something about being blowed. Then he turned.

"Got the glasses there, sir?"

I found the glasses, but I didn't give them to Kendal. I stood up too and looked through them.

I couldn't see anything at first.

"There, sir," said Kendal, pointing. "No. You're looking too much to the left. You got to get right o' thet sandy patch—against thet there clump of heather. Now d'you see, sir?"

I did.

Kendal had made out with the naked eye a figure, the figure of a woman, seated on the hillside, a white figure that showed plainly against the red background of the heather.

"It's Mrs. Jevons, sir," he stated.

It was.

I could see her quite distinctly through the field-glasses. She was sitting on the clump of heather to the right of the sandy patch, settled and motionless, in the attitude of one who waited at her ease, with hours before her. And she was alone.

We went on as far as we could towards the moor. Norah and I left the car and struck across the moor by the sandy track that led to the bare patch and the clump of heather.

The seated figure must have been aware of us from the first moment of our approach. You couldn't miss that black and white car as it charged along the highway, or as it stood now, with its engines still humming, by the roadside. But the figure remained seated in its attitude of waiting. It waited while we crossed the moor; and as we climbed the hillock we became intensely aware of it and of its immobility.

We saw its face fixed on us with an expression of tranquil patience and expectation. I may say that I felt an intolerable embarrassment before this quietness of the hunted thing that we had run to earth; especially as it was on me, and not Norah, that Viola's face was fixed as we came nearer.

Then she smiled at me; there was neither conciliation nor defiance in her smile, but a sort of serene assurance and—yes, it was unmistakable—contempt.

She said, "Whatever do you think you're doing now?"

I said we might not know what we were doing, but we knew what we were going to do. We were going to take her back with us in the car.

At that she asked us (but without any sign of perturbation) if we had got Jimmy there?

Norah said No, our idea was to run back to Amershott before Jimmy got there.

"Where were you running to when you saw me sitting up here?" she said.

I said we'd meant to catch her at Selham but we missed the train and were trying to get to Horsham before the London train started.

She was looking at me now with a sort of compassion, the tenderness of her contempt.

"I see," she said. "You were clever, weren't you?"

She looked at her watch. "Well, as you are here," she said, "I'd let you run me down to Horsham, if you want a run, only I can't very well use Jimmy's car."

I think it was Norah who asked her what on earth she was doing at Fittleworth.

"Can't you see," she said, "that I'm waiting for the next train?"

"Did you walk here from Amershott, or what?" I said.

She said, "Rather not. I was in the train."

Then Norah said, "What happened?"

It had dawned on us both how odd it was that Viola should be here, apparently alone, at Fittleworth. It was also odd how we were all ignoring Charlie. I believe I had a sort of idea that she had got him hidden somewhere in the landscape.

Viola smiled a reminiscent smile. "If you must know," she said, "what happened was that Charlie was in that train, too—he came bursting out on to the platform at Selham, awfully pleased with himself, because he'd picked my luggage up at Midhurst and bagged a corner seat for me, and made faces at people to keep them out."

"Did you know he was going up to town?" I said.

"No, of course I didn't. He didn't know it himself. There was no reason why he shouldn't go. And you'd have thought there was no reason why we shouldn't go together. He was all right till we got to Petworth. But after that he lost his head and made such an ass of himself that I had to get out here and make him go on by himself. Silly idiot!"

We were sitting in the heather, one on each side of her, and I saw my wife slip her arm into hers and hug it to her.

"Did you know," she said, "that Charlie'd gone?"

We didn't answer. We simply couldn't.

And then Viola said, "Poor little Norah!"

And she told her to run away for ten minutes while she talked to me.

"Why poor little Norah?" I asked when we were alone.

"Because," she said, "you frightened her."

"I? Frightened her?"

"Yes," she said. "You made her think I was going to run away with Charlie. There's no good trying to look as if you didn't. You're quite awful, Furny, in the things you think. You can't help it, I know. You're so good, so shockingly good, and you can't bear other people to be naughty. You thought I'd run away to Belgium with Jimmy and you came rushing after me and fetched me back. You thought I'd run away with Charlie and you came rushing—in your dreadful rectitude, and in Jimmy's motor-car that he won't let anybody look at. You'll have an awful time with Jimmy when you get back. It's going to rain, and there'll be mud on the car, and he'll dance with rage when he sees it. And he won't think it's any excuse if you tell him you thought I was running away with Charlie, and you took the car to fetch me back; he'll say you'd no business to think it and in any case you'd no business to take the car out. And poor Kendal will be sacked.

"That's all you've done," she said, "by your fussy interference."

She went on. "It wouldn't matter what you think about me—but it was beastly of you to go and make Norah think it."

I said I didn't suppose either of us thought anything, except that since she was going up to town with the idea of leaving her husband, it was not desirable that she should go up with Charlie Thesiger.

"Who could possibly have supposed," she said, "that Charlie would be such an ass?"

I said I for one could.

"Oh, you—haven't I told you you're always supposing things?"

"Surely?" I said, "you must have seen—yourself—"

She smiled. "My dear—I couldn't see anything but poor Jimmy."

"And yet," I said, "you could think of leaving him?"

She moaned. "You fool—you fool—that's why I'm thinking of it."

She pressed her hands to her eyes as if she shut back the sight of him.

"You aren't thinking of it," I said. "You haven't left him. You've only been for a good long walk to Fittleworth, and we've come to fetch you back in the car."

"Haven't I told you that I can't and won't use Jimmy's car?"

"You can't use it to run away from him in; but you can very well use it to go back to him."

"I'm not going back to him," she said. "Can't you see that I've burnt my boats?"

"You may have burnt the old ones, Viola," I said. "But you can build new."

"You must give me time, Wally. It'll take a long time. And you don't understand me. I want to get away from Jimmy. That's why I'm going away now, while he isn't there. That's what I mean by burning my boats. If I go back to him—if I see him—I shall never get away. I shan't have the courage. I shall just crumple up with the first sight of him—with the first word he says—"

"Why not," I said, "crumple up?"

She lifted her head as I had seen her lift it before.

"Because," she said, "I wish to be straight."

I asked her if running away behind Jimmy's back was her idea of straightness? To which she replied that my rectitude was excruciating and that I'd twist anything to a moral purpose, but it was twisting all the same. Couldn't I see that the awful thing would be to come sneaking back and pretend to Jimmy that she hadn't run away from him?—If that was my idea of straightness she was sorry for me.

I said, "My dear child, you must see that running away by yourself is one thing, and running away with Charlie Thesiger is another. It would be all very well if Charlie hadn't got into that train."

She wanted to know what that mattered when she had got out of the train? I suggested that the people who saw Charlie get in hadn't seen her get out, and that she must look at the thing as it appeared to other people.

"Look," I said, "at the facts. Mrs. Jevons walks to Selham Station for the London train. Captain Thesiger joins her there, presumably by pre-arrangement, leaving by Midhurst station so that they may not be seen going away together. She is, however, seen entering his compartment at Selham. At Fittleworth she is seized with prudence and with panic. She is seen getting out on to the platform. And she is seen two hours later following the Captain up to London by the next train."

She seemed to be considering it.

"How many people," she said, "know that Charlie was in that train? People that matter—I don't mean you and Norah."

"Your butler, your parlourmaid, your housemaid, your cook, your gardener—by this time—and Baby's nurse—"

("And Baby," she interrupted.)

"—The guard of the train, the booking clerks and porters at Midhurst and Selham, and the station-masters at Midhurst and Selham and Petworth (probably) and Fittleworth. Quite a number of important people, to say nothing of Kendal, who is perhaps the most important of them all."

"And who was it who brought Kendal into it?"

I was silent.

"Nobody but you, Furny, or a born fool, would have dreamed of bringing Kendal in."

I said that a little reflection would show her that it was impossible to keep him out. To this she said, "Please go and find Norah. I want her."

I found Norah. I warned her that Viola was going to be extremely difficult. She said it would be all right if I left Viola to her.

As we approached, Viola turned to her sister with an air of outraged and long-suffering dignity.

"Norah," she said. "I do wish you would make Wally see what an ass he's making of himself."

My wife said, in her admirable, judicial way, "How an ass?"

"Well—trying to make me go back and bringing Kendal out here to fetch me. He doesn't seem to see that if I do go back with him it'll be as good as proclaiming to everybody that I ran away with Charlie and was found out by my clever brother-in-law who tracked me down in my husband's motor-car and brought me back in it. Whereas, if I go quietly on to London, as I meant to and as everybody knows I meant to, it'll be all right."

"It won't," I said, "as long as Charlie's there. It will be if you come home with us in the car now, and go up to town with Norah and me on Monday."

"I've told you," she said wearily, "that I can't go back because I shall never get away if I do. And I must—I must—and I will."

"Yes, dear, and you shall," my wife said, as if she were humouring somebody who was mad.

But for a mad woman Viola, I must say, was extraordinarily lucid.

"What excuse did you give to Kendal for following me in this way?"

"We told him we had an important message to give you before you started."

"Important message! That was pretty thin. I'd have thought of something cleverer than that if I'd been you. You are a precious pair of conspirators. Can't you see that it's you—with your ridiculous suspicions—that have given me away?"

Norah answered her.

"Oh, Vee-Vee," she said, "we hadn't any suspicions. The message was to tell you that Charlie was in the train. We knew you didn't know it."

To this Viola said coldly, "Walter didn't."

I tried to reassure her, but she waved me away with her hands and implored me to "let her think."

"Well," she said presently, "it isn't as bad as you've tried to make it, even with Kendal thrown in. You came rushing after me to give me a message, and you have given me a message, and now you'll go and tell Kendal that it's all right, and thank him nicely for catching me up, and you rush home again, and I go on quietly to London by the next train."

"Yes, dear," said Norah. "And I'm going up with you while Wally rushes home and follows with Nurse and Baby and the luggage by the morning train."

"That's all very well," said Viola, "but who explains to Jimmy?"

"Oh," said my wife, "Wally does that. You can trust him. Besides you haven't got to explain things to Jimmy."

Well, we settled it that way. It was the only possible solution. The more she thought of it, Viola said, the more she liked it. And she rubbed it into me that it was Norah's solution, and not mine.

Her last words to me as I saw them off at Fittleworth Station were that I needn't worry. It was going to rain. And when poor Jimmy saw his car come in all splashed with rain and covered with mud—"It won't be me," she said, "you'll have to explain about."

And it wasn't.

The storm came down just as we were leaving Fittleworth, and we brought that car back in an awful state. You wouldn't have known it had ever been a black-and-white car. And Jevons (in a mackintosh) was waiting for me in the lane by the courtyard gates. He had caught the early train, but he had seen the storm coming and had walked up from Midhurst, and, as I say, he was waiting for us.

Well—neither Viola nor Norah was with us, and the language, that Jimmy poured out over me and Kendal recalled all the freshness and the vigour of his earliest inspirations; it was steeped, you might say, in all the colours of the sunset; it had flashes of tropic splendour; it was such a gorgeous specimen of an art in which Kendal dabbled, as he said modestly, a little himself, that it "fair took the shine out of him." The chauffeur was prostrated with admiration.

"When Mr. Jevons lays himself out to express himself, sir," he said to me as we retreated, "he pulls it off what you may call a bleedin' masterpiece."

I tried to explain about Viola an hour later. But he wouldn't listen to me. That was all right, he said. He was going to ask us to take her for a month or so anyhow. It was getting a bit stuffy for her down here.

Then he fixed me with "Did Thesiger go up with her?"

There was no good trying to lie to Jevons, so I said that had been Thesiger's idea, but Viola hadn't cared much about having him, for she had got out at Fittleworth and taken Norah on with her.

"I suppose the young ass tried to make love to her. He's fool enough for anything," said Jimmy. But he reverted. "I still can't see why you took the car out. Anybody but an idiot would have known it was going to rain."



BOOK III

HIS BOOK



XII

At this period, and even now when I go back to it, I am completely puzzled by Jevons. Here was a man who professed to understand his wife, to know what she was feeling and thinking in every moment of her existence; he would tell you that a man was a fool if he couldn't get the woman he wanted; and yet, having got her, he didn't seem to know in the most elementary way how to keep her. He didn't seem to care. He adored her, and yet he didn't seem to care. I believe he knew that she was leaving him, that she had left him; and yet, here he was, treating her departure as if it didn't matter, as if it were the most natural and reasonable thing in the world, and lashing himself into a fury about his wretched motor-car. And he was treating the dangerous element in the case, Charlie Thesiger, as if it didn't matter either; as if it didn't exist. He must have known we'd taken his car out to bring his wife back—he knew we wouldn't have touched the beastly thing for anything short of saving her life or his honour; and yet he had flown into a passion and sworn at his chauffeur because we'd taken it. He adored his wife and yet he behaved as if she were of no importance compared with the god he'd made of his motor-car.

All that evening, I remember, he was absorbed in the solitary problem of how he could save his god from further outrages. He settled it towards midnight by saying that he'd buy another car that we could do what we damn-pleased with—a car that wouldn't matter—that you could take out in all weathers.

"I'll not have that black-and-white car used as it was used this afternoon," he said. And after lashing himself up again he ended quite sweetly by saying, "It's my fault, Furny. I ought to have had two cars all along."

I said it would be a good plan, if a black-and-white car was only to be looked at.

He admitted (with a recrudescence of his old childlike innocence) that he liked looking at it. I've no doubt he said it made him feel something, but I forget what.

But when the morning came he wouldn't hear of my going. I was to stay out my fortnight. It was a fine day and the dust was laid; perhaps he could take me for a spin across the Downs to the coast or somewhere. He'd send Parker up to town to look after Nurse and Baby and the luggage. He didn't want, he said, to be left alone.

Oh yes, it was plain to me that he didn't want to be left—that he couldn't bear it. He was trying to lure me to stay with him by holding out this prospect of a spin. I have since believed that he would have agreed to take his car out in almost any weather, if that had been the only way to keep me. He clung to me desperately, pathetically, as he had clung nine years ago at Bruges when Viola had left him there. He might, possibly, this time, have clung to anybody; he was so afraid of being left alone. I think he felt that loneliness here, in the vast, unfamiliar landscape that he had invaded, would be as bad as loneliness in Bruges. He would be abandoned, as he had been then, in a foreign country.

So till Sunday morning I stayed with him.

It was on my last evening, the evening of Saturday, August the first, that he spoke of Viola.

He asked me if I thought that Norah and I could keep her with us, if necessary, for—he hesitated—for six months? (It was as if he had given her six months.) It would, he said, be better.

I said that Norah would be delighted to keep her for any number of months. But did he think she'd stay?

He said why shouldn't she stay? Of course she'd stay. She was awfully fond of us and it was the best thing she could do. And it would make it so much easier for him. He'd feel more comfortable as long as he knew she was with us.

He spoke as if it were he and not Viola who was leaving.

I said then that though we were glad to have her we couldn't, of course, accept any responsibility—

He smiled slightly and asked, "For what?"

I said, "Well—" And he answered his own question in the pause I made.

"I suppose you mean for anything she may take it into her head to do?"

I put it to him that Viola's movements were not always exactly calculable. She might take it into her head to do anything. I really couldn't answer for her.

"You can't," he said. "But I can. She may go off and look at a belfry or two." (I should have said that "looking at the belfry" was a phrase the family had adopted for any queer thing that any of us might do.) "If there's a belfry anywhere to be seen you may depend upon it she'd want to look at it."

"Whether," I said, "it's in a dangerous place or not?"

"Whether it's in a dangerous place or not. But I'll trust you to keep her out of dangerous places. That's rather what I wanted to talk to you about."

I protested. "There's no good talking about it. I've told you that's just precisely the responsibility I won't take. And I won't let Norah take it. If you think there's going to be any danger you must look after your own wife yourself."

"My dear fellow, how can I look after her if I'm not here?"

"You're as much here as I am," I said. "More so. And she's your wife, not mine."

I can say now—there's no reason why I shouldn't; it would only amuse Jimmy if he were to see it written—I can say now that for one awful moment I suspected Jimmy of meditating an infidelity. Perhaps he was; but not as we count infidelity.

He ignored what I took to be the essence of the thing.

"We don't know," he said, "where any of us are going to be for the next four months—or the next four years. I know that I jolly well shan't be here. What I want to propose is this: that you'll look after Viola and let her have your house when she wants to be in town; and that you have this house for yourself and Norah and Baby when you want to be in the country—just as if it was your own. There'll be that other motor-car you can have—as if it was your own. You can run up to town in it. And you'll probably find that the country will be the best place for you. It'll be much the best place for them, and the safest—if you aren't here."

I couldn't see it even then. I said, "My dear chap, why shouldn't I be here? I certainly mean to be here."

And he considered it and said, "I don't see why not. It's different for you. You've got a child and I haven't."

I said I couldn't see what Baby had to do with it.

And he replied that a young child was an infernal complication, and that he was jolly glad he hadn't got one. What Baby had to do with it was to keep me out of it.

Then I asked him what on earth he was talking about.

He said, "I'm talking about the European conflagration. What are you?"

He had been talking about it all the time, he had been thinking of nothing but the European conflagration for the last four days. It was the thing, he said, that he had prophesied nine years ago—didn't I remember? (Oh yes, I remembered; but then, he was always prophesying something.) Well then, here it was. And it had come, by God, at the very date he had given it.

I can see him sitting there in his study at Amershott Old Grange. He was deadly quiet. Not a gesture came to disturb my sense of his tranquil triumph in the fulfilment of his prophecy. To say that he enjoyed the European conflagration because it had proved him so abundantly right would give a false impression of an extraordinary and complicated state of mind. There was a sort of exaltation about him (his face positively shone, as if the European conflagration illuminated it from afar); but it was a holy and a sacred exaltation, pure from egoism, except that he saw himself—there's no doubt that already he did see himself—figuring.

I remember saying, as lots of people were saying then, that I didn't suppose for a moment we should be dragged into it.

"Dragged?" he said. "Dragged? We shall be in it without dragging—in the very thick."

From the instant the Germans broke into Luxembourg—and he gave them twenty-four hours—we should be in it. We couldn't keep out with a rag of honour to our names. France, he declared, would be in to-day. He gave us, I think—but I do not like to say positively that he gave us—three days; he couldn't have been as dead right as all that.

What struck me then as so extravagantly odd was, not that he had foreseen the war, and England's part in it, but that he should have seen himself there, in the thick—blazing away in the very middle of the conflagration. What on earth Jimmy conceived that he should have to do with it I couldn't think. And all of a sudden I had a reminiscence of Jevons as I had seen him nine years ago, talking to Reggie Thesiger in Viola's rooms at Hampstead, prophesying war, and lamenting that he wouldn't be in it because he was an arrant coward.

And as I looked at him again I saw that what made his face shine like that was the sweat that had broken out on it.

Then he made a remark about Charlie Thesiger. Thesiger, he said, knew all about it. He had gone up—he supposed I knew that?—to offer his services to the War Office in the event of England's coming in.

That Charlie had used the opportunity of going to make love to Jimmy's wife didn't seem to bother Jimmy in the least.

Sunday, I remember, was a fine day, with all the dust laid, and Jimmy made himself lovable by running me up to London in his sacred car. He still clung—I could see that he clung—to the superstition of its sanctity.

He left me at my door in Edwardes Square, which he refused to enter. I think he was afraid of seeing Viola. I thought at the time that this was because he was aware of her attitude; that he knew she was at the end of her tether, and that he wanted to be righteously fair, to give her time to think about leaving him, if she wanted to leave him; that he was behaving now as he had behaved at Bruges when he stood back and let me have my innings, and gave her her chance to free herself. And yet I was puzzled. Even he could hardly stand back to give Thesiger an innings. He may have had an inkling. There may have been something of his queer, scrupulous tenderness in this avoidance of her; there may have been his reckless propensity to take the risk; but I am convinced that even then his main object was—like Viola—to burn his boats. He was afraid that if he were to see Viola again he wouldn't be able to go through with it. He may even have been glad that she had left him, because it had made his way easier.

And so, when he had landed me at my door, he turned the black nose of his car round and ran out of Edwardes Square faster than he had run in; as if he were afraid that the place would catch and keep him.

He didn't go back to Amershott. He stayed in London in one of his clubs (he had several now, besides the club in Dover Street), and I saw him sometimes. I didn't say anything to Viola about him. I didn't tell her he was in town. It was as if there had been some tacit understanding among the three of us; there must have been some tacit agreement between him and me.

Sunday passed, and Monday somehow; and on Tuesday, the fourth, we were all holding our breaths under the tension of the Ultimatum.

I have no doubt that in those three days I had some opinion of my own about the European conflagration, that I must have stared with my own eyes sometimes at the fate of Europe and the fate of England, that I must have felt some horror and anxiety and excitement that was my own. But as I look back on it all I am aware chiefly of Jevons, of his opinions, his vision, his horror and excitement. I seem to have spent the greater part of those three days with Jevons, and there are moments, in looking back, when he fills the scene. He is the largest and most prominent figure in the crowd that walked the streets with me on the evening of the Ultimatum, that waited with me outside Buckingham Palace, when London let itself loose in madness; he seems the only sane figure in that crowd or in the processions that moved for hours on end up and down Parliament Street, between Trafalgar Square and Palace Yard. It is as if I had stood alone with Jevons before the Mansion House at midnight when the Ultimatum was declared.

And when I say that it was his horror and anxiety and excitement—and his defiance and exaltation, if you like—that I felt, I do not mean that Jevons talked about it. He was, for those three days, mostly silent. It is that I saw him consumed and burned up by the fever of patriotism and war, and that beside his passion any emotion I may have felt hardly counted.

And every minute we expected to hear him say that he liked the War because it made him feel manly. Norah and I pretended to each other that he would say it—it was our idea of a joke, God forgive us.

It was on Wednesday, the fifth, very early in the morning, that he began trying to enlist. It was the first thing he did; and we thought that funny.

We thought it so funny that even if he hadn't told us not to tell Viola we wouldn't have told her; we felt that it wouldn't have been quite fair to either of them.

And none of the Thesigers, or anybody connected with the Thesigers, could take Jimmy seriously for one moment. With General Thesiger waiting to be sent to the Front, and Reggie Thesiger preparing to go, and Charlie Thesiger who might be called on any day, with Bertie and all his male cousins enlisting and pulling all the ropes they could lay their hands on to get their commissions, they hadn't time for Jimmy and his importunity. He was importunate; and I'm afraid that in those weeks Jimmy didn't exist for them or any of us, except as a jest that lightened our labours now and then. They were so busy getting their kits that they couldn't even think of the fate of Europe.

And Viola—what she was thinking and feeling God (or Jevons) only knew. She didn't tell us. But I was pretty sure that with Reggie starting for the front in two weeks it wasn't Jevons she was thinking of. I suspected that she wasn't far from feeling that secret hatred of Jimmy that had come to her once or twice before, when she had thought of Reggie. Remember that all this time, even after that illness of hers last year, when she and Reggie met they met as well-bred strangers. She had never lowered her flag or made one sign. She had just suffered in secret with the thought of Reggie biting deeper and deeper into her mind, till, wherever the memory of Reggie was there was a wound. And she had been ill of her wounds and had nearly died of them.

And in those two weeks she had begun to look as if she were going to be ill again. It was bad enough for Norah and for all of them, but conceive what it must have been for her!

And so we came to Reggie's last day and the night when he came to us to say good-bye.

I think she must have written to him or made some sign. But I'm not sure. I only know that he was prepared for her; and that when she came into the room at the last minute, as he turned from Norah's arms, he closed on her, and that they held each other an instant—tight, like lovers—and that neither of them said a word.

* * * * *

After that the War must have seemed to her, as it seemed to all of us, to have wiped Jimmy out.

Just at first we thought that this was the secret of Jimmy's agony, of his rushings round and round, and of his ceaseless manoeuvring. He knew that the War was going to wipe him out; he knew that the world had no use for his sort, the men who only wrote things. There was an end of his writing, of his novels and his short stories and his plays, and if he didn't look out and do something there would be an end of him. And he couldn't bear it. He couldn't bear to be reduced to inactivity and insignificance—to be wiped out. He wasn't going to be made an end of if he could help it. These were the things we said about him. What we saw, or thought we saw, was the revolt of his egoism. It didn't look quite sane.

He was furious when he found out that, even if he enlisted, he couldn't buy a commission. He didn't seem to realize that there were things he couldn't buy. He was still more furious when he found that the Thesigers wouldn't help him. They could help him, he declared, if they liked. Commissions were being given every day to the wrong people, by influence.

Up till now, with his talk about commissions, he had been purely funny, and we had laughed at him. But when he found that he couldn't enlist, that they wouldn't have him, that he wasn't strong enough—they'd discovered a leaky valve in his heart or something—and that in any case he was too old, when he broke down as he tried to tell me this, he wasn't funny at all. He'd been to every recruiting station in London and his own county, and they all said the same thing. He was too old.

This, he said, was where his beastly celebrity had gone back on him. He could very easily have lied about his age (he didn't look it), in fact, he had lied about it freely, to every one of them; but his age was recorded against him in the Year-Books of his craft. And he couldn't lie about his heart, he didn't know it had a valve that leaked. He didn't believe it. He had given the man who examined it the lie; and he had gone to a heart-specialist to get the report (which he regarded as a libel) contradicted, and the heart-specialist had confirmed it, and told him he wasn't the first man who had come to him to get an opinion overruled. He said he was to keep quiet and avoid excitement. He mustn't dream of going to the front. I think the specialist must have been sorry for Jevons, for he went on to tell him that there were other ways in which he could serve his country. He seems to have talked a lot of rot about the pen being mightier than the sword, and to have advised Jimmy to "use his wonderful pen." And at that Jimmy seems to have broken from him in a passion.

And here he was, in a passion still, ramping up and down that private room he had at his club, and saying, "Damn my powerful pen, Furny! Damn my powerful pen!" The whole system, he said, was rotten. He'd a good mind to expose it. He'd expose it in the papers. That was the use he'd make of his powerful pen. See how they'd like that.

I remember it because it was then that I laid before him my own problem. The Daily Post had asked me if I'd go out as its War-Correspondent. I was to wire "Yes" or "No" in the next half-hour, and if I went I should have to start to-night.

I said I didn't know what to do about it.

He stared. "You don't know what to do?"

I said: No. It wasn't so simple when you had a wife and child dependent on you. I didn't know whether I ought to take the risk.

And then he said his memorable thing: "If you can take the risk of living—My God," he said, "if I only had your luck!"

His luck, I told him, was a dead certainty. There wasn't a paper that would refuse Tasker Jevons as War-Correspondent. He'd only got to volunteer. Why on earth, I asked him, didn't he?

He became very grave. He seemed to be considering it.

"No," he said, "no. That isn't quite good enough for me. I don't want to go out to the war to write about it. I want to do things.

"Perhaps—if there's no other way—I may be driven to it."

For a moment, then, I suspected him. I doubted his sincerity. He was making all this fuss about enlisting to cover up his cowardice. He must have known all the time they wouldn't take him. He was safe. But put before him a thing he could do—do better than anybody else—a thing that would take him into the thick and keep him there, if he wasn't killed, and he said, No, thank you. That wasn't quite good enough for him.

I didn't believe in his "Perhaps—if there was no other way—he might be driven to it." I saw him driven to do anything he didn't mean to do!

Meanwhile he drove me. Before I had seen him I hadn't really meant to take that job. He did something to me that changed my mind.

That was how I went out to Belgium as a War-Correspondent.

* * * * *

I was out for a month. Then—I was in Ghent at the same old hotel in the Place d'Armes—I got a touch of malaria and had to come home, and the Daily Post sent another man out instead of me.

That was how I managed to see Jevons in what Norah called his second war-phase. He had been trying hard to get out with the Red Cross volunteers, and it had been even funnier, she said, and more pathetic, than his enlisting. I don't know what Viola thought of his war-phases; to Norah they were just that—funny and pathetic. To the other Thesigers he was purely offensive. They resented Jevons's trying to have anything to do with the war, as if it had been some sort of impertinent interference with their prerogative. His mother-in-law, I know, had no patience with him. His frantic efforts to get to the front were nothing, she declared, but a form of war-panic. It took some people like that. She said the only really cruel thing I had ever heard her say of him. She said he looked panic-stricken. (He was lean and haggard by this time, and had a haunted look which may have been what she meant.) And well—if it wasn't panic that was the matter with him it was self-advertisement, and if I'd any regard for him or any influence with him I'd stop it. The little man was simply making himself ridiculous.

I was staying in Canterbury with Norah for the weekend, and I heard all about it. He did seem to have been rather funny. He had begun with a scheme for taking out a Red Cross Motor Field Ambulance which he proposed to command in person. He had offered himself with his convoy first to the War Office, then to the Admiralty, then to the War Office again, and the War Office and the Admiralty kicked him out. Then he had gone round to each of the Red Cross Societies in turn, the American included. And they had all got their own schemes for Motor Field Ambulances, and didn't want his. What they did want was his subscriptions and his powerful pen to support their schemes. And Jevons had said, "Damn my powerful pen!" to every one of them. As for subscriptions, he subscribed enormously to his own Motor Ambulance Corps. He had actually raised his unit, found his volunteers, his surgeons, his chauffeurs and his stretcher-bearers, he had bought and equipped a Motor Ambulance car, the one he had proposed to go with himself. And they took his subscriptions and his Ambulance Car and his volunteers; but they wouldn't take him; no, not at any price. They put one of his surgeons at the head of the thing instead of him and sent it out without him, and Jimmy had to see it go. But when they proposed that Jimmy should use his powerful pen to maintain it in the field, he swore that he would use it to expose the whole system. And when he found that the responsibility for rejecting his services rested with the War Office, he went down to the War Office and complained, and to the Admiralty and complained, and to the Home Office and complained. After that he seems to have visited all the Embassies in turn—the American, the French, the Belgian, and I suppose the Russian and the Japanese.

When I asked the Thesigers what he was doing now they said they didn't know. They hadn't heard of him and his activities for quite a fortnight, and they didn't bother about him. They were too much wrapped up in Bertie and in Reggie, even if they hadn't been too busy—every one of them up to their necks in work for the Army or the hospitals. They admitted that he had sent them large subscriptions.

It seemed to me, as far as I could make out, that Viola hadn't seen or heard of him since she had left Amershott. She was too busy and too much wrapped in Reggie to bother about him either; at least, it looked like it. She seems to have known in a vague way that he had talked about going to the front, but I didn't believe she thought he would ever get there.

And he had lain low for a fortnight.

When we had got back to London at noon on Tuesday, which was the end of Jimmy's fortnight, I found a wire from Amershott waiting for me. It had been sent that morning. It said: "Leaving to-morrow. Must see you urgent business. Can you come down this evening. JEVONS."

I knew that he wouldn't send a wire like that without good reason; so I went.

* * * * *

A light rain was falling when I reached Midhurst. A hired dog-cart met me at the station, so I gathered that Jimmy's mad passion for his motor-car had survived the war.

And at Amershott everything seemed to have survived. If it had not been for troops on the high road, and for the stillness of the coverts, and for the recruiting posters stuck everywhere on the barn-doors, and for the strange figure of old Perrott driving the mail-cart from Midhurst to Amershott instead of his son, you wouldn't have known that the war had anything to do with England. And I expected to find Jimmy in his old Norfolk suit standing in the garage and looking with adoration at his motor-car.

As I thought all this I smiled when Parker told me that Mr. Jevons was in the garage. Parker, I noticed, didn't smile.

And in another minute it was Jevons who did all the smiling.

I found him in the garage—no, I can't say I found him, for I didn't recognize him, but I heard his voice assuring me that it was he. He was in khaki; from head to foot, from his peaked military cap to his puttees he was in faultless, well-fitting khaki; even his shirt and his neck-tie were khaki. Jimmy's colours showed up wonderfully out of all that brownish, greyish, yellowish green. His flush fairly flamed, and his eyes, his eyes looked enormous and very bright—great chunks of dark sapphire his eyes were. They were twinkling at me.

"It's me all right, old man," he said, and turned from me in his deep preoccupation. And as he turned I saw that he wore round his right arm a white brassard with a red cross on it.

At the far end of the coach-house where the great black and white idol used to stand there was a khaki car with a huge red cross on a white square on its flank and on its khaki canvas hood. This was what his eyes turned to.

"But—where's the black-and-white god?" I asked.

"There she is," he said, "you're looking at her."

"You haven't—"

"Yes, I have. She's had her new coat on for the last three weeks. You couldn't take her out as she was, all black and white. She'd have been knocked to bits before we'd begun our job. So I had her painted. She's a good enough target for shell-fire as she is."

"You don't mean," I said, "that you're going out?"

"What else have I been meaning ever since there was a war?"

"But—where are you going to?"

"Belgium," he said. He added that it was the only blessed place he could get to.

"And what are you going to do when you get there?"

He said he was going to scout for wounded, of course.

And as he saw me still incredulous he told me how he'd managed it. He had gone every day for three weeks to the Belgian Legation and worried the Belgian Minister into a state of nervous prostration. And when the Minister was at his worst and was obliged to leave things a bit to his secretaries, he'd gone to the secretaries and worried them till the First Secretary had given him his passport and a letter of introduction to the President of the Belgian Red Cross Society at Ghent. And he had gone to Ghent—went there last week—and he had seen the President and talked to him. He had talked for ten minutes before his services had been accepted by the Belgian Red Cross.

And he was going out to-morrow.

"It's just taken me six weeks to do it. I gave myself six weeks."

Of course I congratulated him. But I couldn't realize it. The whole thing seemed incredible. Jevons in his khaki was incredible. The transformed motor-car was incredible, as a thing that Jevons was concerned with. Above all, it was incredible that he should have sacrificed his god.

I couldn't believe it until Kendal, the chauffeur, turned up, also in khaki and with a Red Cross brassard on his right arm. Kendal was credible enough; he looked as if he had been going to the war all his life. It was evident that he was keen on the adventure. It was also evident that he adored Jevons more than ever. By watching Kendal in the act of adoration and keeping my eyes fixed on him I was able to take it in, and to assent to the statement that Jevons was going to the war.

He was of course if Kendal said so.

Kendal was asking me what I thought of the car.

"She's not the beauty she was, sir," said Kendal. "I don't suppose Mr. Jevons will care much how he knocks her about now. And they do say the Belgium roads is fair destruction to cars."

I said they were. I'd motored on them. Kendal looked at me as he might have looked at the survivor of a shattering experience. Then he looked at his car. He seemed to be seeing all the roads in Belgium in a hideous vision.

Then he spoke. "Well, they may be bad roads, but Mr. Jevons isn't going to be done. He'll take out ten cars before 'e turns back. Ten cars, he will."

Yes, yes, I might have known it. Was there ever anything Jevons had made up his mind to do and didn't? Had I ever known him turn back from any adventure that he had set out on? If he said he was going to the war, why couldn't I have known that he would go? The more incredible the thing was, the more likely he was to do it.

When I said so he shook his head and said it wasn't really as likely as it looked.

We were sitting together after dinner in his garden. Though it was the third week in September the nights were still warm. Without Viola, the stillness of the place was strange to me, almost uncanny, as if Viola were dead and had come back and was listening to us somewhere. I had just told him it was splendid of him going out like this, and he had smiled back at me and asked, "Like what?" And then I had said I might have known it; it was the sort of thing he would do.

No, he went on, it wasn't likely. It had been touch and go, he had only just pulled it off by the skin of his teeth. It had given him more trouble than anything he'd ever tried for. It had bothered him more. It had bothered him most damnably.

I thought he was referring to his struggles with the recruiting depots and the War Office and the Home Office and the Embassies and all the rest of it. And I said it was pretty hard luck his own Ambulance Corps being sent out without him. But he said, No; it wasn't. He hadn't been very keen on the Ambulance Corps. He hadn't really wanted to go out with all that beastly crowd. This quick scouting game—by himself—was more in his line. All he regretted was the time he'd lost.

Well, I said, anyhow he was a lucky beggar to have got what he wanted after six weeks.

At that he looked at me suddenly and his face went all sharp and thin. Or else I hadn't noticed till then how sharp and thin it was. His flush had seemed to flood it and fill it out somehow, and his eyes struck your attention like two great flashes of energy. The flash had gone out now as he looked at me.

I reminded him: "Haven't you always said you could get what you wanted?"

"Oh yes, I've said it, and I've done it. That's nothing. Any fool can do that. The great thing is to make yourself get what you don't want. I didn't want to do this. I had to."

"No. You wanted to enlist. But I'm not sure that from your point of view this isn't better."

"Jolly lot you know," he said, "about my point of view."

"Your idea," I explained, "of doing things on your own. Isn't that what you wanted?"

He answered very slowly: "I don't think—it matters—what I wanted—or what I didn't want. It's enough—isn't it?—if I want to now—if I want it more than anything else?"

I said, No, I didn't think it did matter.

But I hadn't a notion what he meant. I didn't know that he was on the edge of a confession. I couldn't see that he was trying to tell me something about himself, and that I had started him off by telling him he was splendid. It was as if—then—he too had felt that Viola was there and listening to us, as if he were speaking to her and not to me.

For the next thing he said was, "I want you to tell Viola about it. Tell her it's all right. Tell her I'm all right. See?"

"But shan't you," I said, "be seeing her? Isn't she going to see you off or something?"

He said, "No. Much better not. She wouldn't be content with seeing me off. She'd try to come out with me. She'd worry me to take her. And I'm not going to take her. She isn't to know I'm going till I've gone. And she isn't to know where I've gone to. I won't have her coming out to me. You've got to see to that, Furny. You've got to stop her if she tries to get out. They're all trying. You should just see the bitches—tumbling, and wriggling and scrabbling with their claws and crawling on their stomachs to get to the front—tearing each other's eyes out to get there first. And there are fellows that'll take them. They'll even take their wives.

"Not me. Not much. I wouldn't let Viola cross in the same boat with that lot.

"It ought to be put a stop to.

"The place I'm going to—the things I'm going to see—and to do—aren't fit for women—aren't fit for women to come within ten miles of. Whatever you do, Furny—and I don't care what you do—you're not to let her get out."

I suppose—I suppose I made him some sort of promise. He says I did. I don't remember.

I do remember telling him I thought it was a pity—if he meant to go out—that he hadn't seen Viola all this time.

And I remember his answer. "I haven't seen her—all this time—because I meant to go out. I meant that nothing on this earth should stop me."

"How do you know," I said, "that she'd have stopped you?"

"How do I know? How do I know anything?—It's you who don't know. You don't know anything at all."

* * * * *

Well, he went—like that—without telling any of them.

I ran down on the car with him to Folkestone and saw him off on the boat to Ostend, he and Kendal, his chauffeur—he, as he pointed out to me, superior to Kendal only in the perfect fitting of his khaki. "Otherwise there isn't a pin to choose between us. Except," he said, "that Kendal doesn't funk it and I do."

And with Kendal grinning from ear to ear over Mr. Jevons's delicious joke, and Jimmy waving his khaki cap in a final valediction, and Kendal's grin dying abruptly as he achieved the military salute he judged appropriate, we parted.

Jimmy's last words to me, thrown over the gunwale, were, "Don't run after me, Furny. You won't catch me this time."



XIII

Then I went back and told Viola about it. I took her into my library that had once been Jevons's study, where he had delivered the Grand Attack. I gave her a letter that Jevons had scribbled before lunch in the hotel at Folkestone. I suppose he had explained things in it.

But as for me, or any power I had to break it to her, I might just as well have told her that he was dead.

Except that perhaps then she wouldn't have turned on me.

"You knew this," she said, "you knew he was going and you never told me?"

I said I had only known it last night—how could I have told her?

She persisted. "You knew—at what time last night?"

I hesitated and she drove it home.

"You might have wired. It wasn't too late."

I said it was, and that I didn't know that she didn't know till it was too late to wire.

"Do you suppose," she said, "—if I'd known—that I should be here?"

I couldn't tell her—she was so white under her wound and the shock of it—I couldn't tell her that she had given me no reason to suppose that she would be with him.

And she went on. "Why couldn't you have wired in the morning, then? I could have caught that boat."

"Because, my dear girl, he doesn't want you to go out."

"It doesn't matter what he wants—or thinks he wants—I'm going.

"And what's more," she said, "you've got to take me. That's all you've gained by trying to stop me."

I replied that nothing would induce me to take her out, that I'd promised Jimmy she shouldn't go.

She said that didn't matter. Jimmy'd know I couldn't keep a silly promise like that, and if I wouldn't take her she'd simply go by herself.

I tried to explain to her very gently that her going—at all—was out of the question. She would do no good to anybody by going; she would annoy Jimmy most frightfully; untrained women were not wanted at the front.

Untrained? She had got her certificate three days ago. What did I suppose she had wanted it for—if it wasn't to go out with Jimmy if he went?

"You knew he was going, then?" I said.

"I knew he wanted to go. But I didn't think he'd go so soon. I didn't really think he'd go at all. They told me I needn't worry, that he hadn't a chance."

"Who told you?"

"Oh, everybody. The General and Colonel Braithwaite and Charlie, and Bertie, and Reggie—at least he told Norah—and the people at the War Office and the Admiralty and the Embassies."

"You went to them? You went to the War Office?"

"I went everywhere where he did, or as near as I could get. And they all told me the same thing—he hadn't a chance. Not the ghost of a chance. I really thought he hadn't. When you think of the men—men who can do things, who are dying to go and are being kept back—"

"You were helping him to go?" I said. I saw a vision, or I tried to see it, a pathetic vision of Viola following poor Jimmy in his pursuit of secretaries and ambassadors, doing insane, impossible things to help him.

And then I saw Viola herself. She was looking at me, with all her features tilted in that funny way she had.

"Well—no," she said; "I wasn't exactly helping."

"What were you doing, then?"

"I'm afraid I was trying to stop him."

The sheer folly of it took my breath away.

"Surely," I said, "if he hadn't the ghost of a chance, it wasn't necessary?"

"Well—it was necessary, you see. He's so awfully clever. He was very nearly off once or twice. Only we just managed to get in in time."

"Who got in in time?"

"Oh, it wasn't only me, Furny, it was all of us. We were all out trying to stop him—Charlie and Reggie and Uncle Billy—he pulled all the ropes—we couldn't do much."

"But what—what did General Thesiger do?"

"He didn't 'do' anything. He hadn't got to. He just said things. Told them about Jimmy."

I don't know whether my face expressed horror or admiration. It must have been a sort of horror, for she began to excuse herself.

"Why not? Why should poor little Jimmy go?"

"Because he wants to. You'd no business to stop him when he wanted to go."

"But—that was it. He didn't want to go. He only thought he ought to go."

"How," I said sternly, "do you know what he wanted?"

"Because," she said, "he told Uncle Billy. He kept on saying he ought to go. And we told him he oughtn't. What earthly good can Jimmy do out there, with his poor little heart all dicky? He'll simply die of it. You don't suppose I'd have stopped him if I'd thought it was good for him to go? Or if I'd thought he really wanted to? We told him all that—Uncle Billy and I did—we told him straight that if he tried to get out we'd try and stop him."

"Oh," I said, "you told him. That's a different thing."

"Things, Furny, always are different to what you think them. At least they're never half so nasty. Of course we told him. And of course he laughed in our faces. We thought we had stopped him. But—he's slipped through our fingers.

"We might," she said, "have known."

I heard her say all that, though I wasn't listening. It comes back to me that she said it. It was dawning on me that in this queer business there were details, quite important details, that had escaped me. The war had taken up my attention to the exclusion of Viola's affairs. But it was evident that things had happened while I was away. I was thinking of something that she let out.

"Look here," I said, "when you say you told him, do you mean that you and he have been seeing each other?"

"Of course we've been seeing each other. Until he stopped it. He said he couldn't stand the strain."

"And you?" I said. "Did you stand it?"

She looked at me straight and hard.

"You've no right to ask me that," she said.

* * * * *

Well, perhaps I hadn't. And if I had owned frankly that I hadn't all might have been well. But, as it was, before I knew where we both were, we had quarrelled.

Yes. I quarrelled with Viola; or she quarrelled with me; it really doesn't matter how you put it; and it shows the awful tension we must have been living in.

When I heard her say that I had no right to ask her that question I answered that I thought I had.

She said, "What right?"

And I said if she would think a little she would see what right.

And at that she fired up and the blaze was awful. We two were up there alone and she had me at her mercy. She held me in the blaze.

"I suppose," she said, "I'm to think of your everlasting meddling with my affairs?"

I pointed out that a charge of meddling came rather oddly from a lady who honoured me by staying in my house because she preferred it to her husband's.

"You know perfectly well why I'm staying in your house; and if you don't, Norah does. I could have stayed with my father, for that matter."

I said I thought that that was extremely doubtful—in the circumstances.

I had her there, and she knew it, for she retired in bad order on an irrelevant point. She said I was no judge of the circumstances.

I said peaceably that perhaps I wasn't, but that she must own that I had behaved as if I were. At any rate I'd given her the benefit of the doubt.

She said, "You talk as if I'd been through the Divorce Court. Perhaps that's where you think I ought to be. The benefit of the doubt! You certainly have given it me. It's been nothing but doubt with you, Walter, ever since I knew you. You always thought awful things about me. I know you have. I could see you thinking them. You thought vile things about me, and vile things about Jimmy. You came rushing out to Belgium because you thought them. And the other day you thought the same thing of me and Charlie Thesiger, and you came rushing after me again and giving me away, and behaving so that everybody else would think me awful too."

"My dear child, you owned yourself that Charlie—"

"Oh—Charlie! As if he mattered! He was only being an ass—the war upset him, or something. I don't care what you think about Charlie—he doesn't either—but why you should go out of your way to think me awful—"

I said I thought we'd done with that.

"No," she said, "we haven't done with it. I want to get to the bottom of it. What makes you do these things? I believe you want to make out that I'm horrid, just as you wanted to make out that poor little Jimmy was, when I went to him in Bruges."

She went on. "I can understand that, because I did go to him, and I—I cared for him and you didn't like it. I can even understand your wanting me to be horrid then, because it made it easier for you. I had the sense to see that that was all that was the matter with you then, so I didn't mind. But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can it matter to you now whether I'm nice or horrid?"

She had rushed on, carried away by her own passion, without seeing where she was going. I don't think she had seen, any more than I had, that for nine years I had been living behind a screen. A screen that had hidden me from myself. I don't think she saw even now when she came crashing into it.

It was I who saw.

The thing was down about my ears; and it wasn't the violence of its fall that terrified me; it was my own nakedness. I wasn't prepared to find myself morally undressed.

I turned away from her. I began fiddling with my pens and papers. I trailed long slip-proofs under her eyes, pretending that I had work to do. But she saw through my pretences and her voice followed me.

It was softer, though. It seemed to be pleading, as if she knew nothing about me and my screen.

"What harm did I ever do you? Or poor Jimmy either? I didn't let you marry me. You ought to be grateful to Jimmy. At least he saved you from that."

I said I thought we needn't drag her husband into it, and I haven't a notion what I meant. I had to say something, and if it sounded disagreeable, so much the better.

And she said there I was again—thinking that I had to remind her that Jimmy was her husband.

"You certainly seem to have forgotten it," I said.

"He knows how much I've forgotten."

With that last word she left me.

I tried hard to shake the horror of it off. I remember I sat down to my proofs, and I suppose I tried to correct them. But all the time I heard Viola's voice saying, "I can understand your wanting me to be horrid then, because it made it easier for you.... But why on earth you should keep it up like this! What can it matter to you now whether I'm nice or horrid?"

It went on in my head till the words ceased to have any meaning. I had only a dreadful sense that I should remember them to-morrow, and that perhaps when to-morrow came I should know what they meant.

* * * * *

And when to-morrow came the war took up my attention again, so that I actually forgot that Viola had said she was going out to it.

She had let the subject drop abruptly. She didn't even refer to it when my friend the editor of the Morning Standard rang me up the next day to ask me if I'd go out to Belgium as their Special Correspondent.

He was charmingly frank about it. He told me that it was Tasker Jevons he wanted, and Tasker Jevons he had asked to go, but since he couldn't get him (and his powerful pen) why then, he'd had to fall back on me. Jevons, he said, had let him down pretty badly; he'd understood from Jevons that he was prepared to go for them at twelve hours' notice. And he'd given him twenty-four hours; and he'd found that he'd gone out there two days ago. Chucked them, my friend the editor supposed, for another paper. Could I, at twenty-three hours' notice, take his place?

I said I could and I would, and I put him right about Jevons.

And then I went to see about my motor-car.

It was when Viola began to bother me about her passport that the fight began.

First of all, she asked me what I was doing about a motor-car? I told her she needn't worry herself about my motor-car. It wasn't any concern of hers. She grinned at that and said, All right. What she really wanted was to consult me about her passport.

And when I refused to be consulted about her passport, to hear a word about her passport or about her going, she walked straight out of the house into a passing taxi that took her to the Belgian Legation, where she saw that weak-minded secretary that Jevons had handled; and she came back in time for tea, very cheerful and dressed in a sort of khaki uniform she had ordered, with a tunic and knee-breeches and puttees and a Red Cross brassard on her right arm.

She said it had been a very tight squeeze, but she'd worked it, down to her uniform, and it was all right, and if I'd had any difficulty with my motor people (I had had awful difficulty, but how she knew it I haven't to this day found out. Sometimes I think she'd worked that too; she knew the firm, and she wasn't Mrs. Tasker Jevons for nothing)—if I'd had any difficulty she could put that straight for me. She'd got her car—Jimmy'd ordered it for Amershott and forgotten about it—and her chauffeur, and I could go in it with her if I liked.

It was a better car than the one I'd had in Belgium before or, she said significantly, than the one I was going to take out with me. It was true that I didn't know anything about cars.

Then Norah, my wife, stood up beside her sister, flagrantly partisan, and said, Couldn't I see it wasn't any use trying to stop her? She had me at every point. If I wouldn't take her she'd go by herself with the chauffeur.

And when I said, How about my promises—my word of honour? Viola laughed.

"Your honour's all right, Wally," she said. "You're not taking me out; I'm taking you."

And very early in the morning we motored down to Folkestone to catch the midday boat for Ostend. And Norah came with us to see us off. If I'd given her the smallest encouragement she'd have come too. I might take her, she said; it was beastly being left behind.

I said, like a savage, that Belgium was no place for women. I'd take my sister-in-law there, but not my wife.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It wasn't my fault, I told myself, if she compelled me to look at her, this time, as I passed her deck-chair.

I looked at her, and she sent me a little sad interrogative smile that asked me why I walked the decks thus savagely and alone? And I paid no attention to her or to her smile. In the very arrogance of isolation I continued to walk the decks. I meant her to see that I could be alone and savage if I liked.

And when I looked at her again (she couldn't have made me this time, for she was unaware of me, lost in some profound meditation of her own), when I looked at her again my anger and my resentment died with a sort of struggle and a pang.

She had, after all, the grace of her ignorance and innocence. If she had had no pity on me, it was because she was as blind as she had said I was. She didn't, she couldn't see me as she had made me see myself. She didn't know that she had any power over me, or else she wouldn't have used her power; she was too honourable for that, too chivalrous. You could trust her to play the game until she threw it up and left it.

And I passed again in my sullen tramping, and I looked at her for the third time, urged by the remorse that stung me. And this time she drew me so that I went over to her and sat by her. I looked at my watch, we had been two hours on board.

I had left her two hours alone; and in those two hours she had suffered. Her face was set now in a sort of brooding fear and anguish; her breathing had a tremor in it, as if her heart dragged at her side. It was better, far better, that we should quarrel than she should suffer and sit quivering in silence and see frightful things.

But I saw that she wasn't going to quarrel, she wasn't going to pitch into me; she wasn't going to assert herself and domineer over me just now. This agony of hers had made her gentle, so that she spoke to me as if she were sorry for me after all.

"Are you tired," she said, "of tramping up and down?"

"Horribly tired."

"Put my rug round you if you're going to sit still. Norah wouldn't let you sit still without a rug."

"Norah wouldn't let me do anything I shouldn't do."

She smiled down at me, still sad, but with the least little flicker of irony on the top of her sadness. "Norah's job isn't very hard. You don't ever want to do anything you shouldn't."

"Oh—don't I?"

"No, never. That's the pull you have over naughty people like me. You're so good."

"It wasn't my goodness you were rubbing into me the other night."

"Never mind the other night. It doesn't matter what I said the other night. Only what I'm saying now this minute has any importance. But it was your goodness, if it comes to that."

"Queer sort of goodness." I was still, you see, a little stung.

"All goodness," she said, "is queer, carried to that pitch. But you're a dear in spite of it. I won't bully you."

We made the last part of the crossing on the highway of the sunset. The propeller lashed through crimson and fiery copper, and the white wake tossed on to the highway turned to rose and gold and its edges to purple.

I had left her again and I called to her to look at this wonder of the sky and sea; but she shook her head at me. There was no need to call her. She had looked. I could see by her eyes that the intolerable beauty had brought Jevons back to her. He was there for her in all beauty and in all wonder.

Then she called to me. "Wally, come here. I want to speak to you."

I came.

"You thought I was going to leave Jimmy. But I wasn't. He knew I wasn't. Why, the first night I knew how impossible it was."

I said, Yes. Of course it was impossible. And of course he knew.

"I shan't mind if only we can get to him before anything happens."

I said nothing would happen, and of course we should get to him.

She was silent so long that I was startled when she said, "Wally—your nervous aren't you, are they?"

I said, No. No. Of course they weren't.

I knew what she was thinking. Out of the intolerable beauty she had seen Jimmy rise with all his gestures. She heard the cracking of his knuckles and saw the jerking of his thumb. And these things became tender and pathetic and dear to her as if he were dead.

And she had seen herself shudder at them as if it had been another woman who shuddered, a strange and pitiless woman whom she hated.

"It wouldn't matter so much if he had wanted to go," she said.

"Why do you keep on saying that he didn't want to go?"

"Because he said so. He said he was only going because he couldn't go."

"I think you're doing him a great injustice. He told me he wanted to go; I've no doubt he did want to go—just like any other man."

"Yes. To be just like any other man—that's what he wanted. But he couldn't be. He isn't like any other man. And so it's worse for him. Can't you see that it's worse for him? It'll hurt him more."

I said I didn't see it, and that she was absurd and morbid and utterly unreasonable, and that she was making Jimmy out unreasonable and morbid and absurd.

She told me then I didn't understand either of them; and we were silent, as if we had quarrelled again, until we came in sight of the Flemish coast.

We sailed into Ostend on the tail-end of the sunset. What was left of it was enough to keep up for us the intense moment of transfiguration, so that we didn't miss it. The long white Digue, the towers, the domes of the casinos and hotels, the high, flat fronts of the houses showed soaked in light, quivering with light. Ostend might have been some enchanted Eastern city. It was as if the heroic land faced us with the illusion of enchantment, to cover the desolation that lay beyond her dykes.

And we who looked at it were still silent, not now as if we had quarrelled, but as if this beauty had made peace between us.

Viola's face had changed. It reminded me in the oddest way of her brother Reggie's. I think that for the moment, while it lasted, she had forgotten Jimmy, she had forgotten her brother Reggie; she had touched the fringe of the immensity that had drawn them from her and swallowed them up. And in forgetting them she had forgotten her unhappy self.

In Ostend, at any rate, I was to have no more of her brooding. We had no sooner landed than she became the adorable creature who had run away with Jevons nine years ago and led me that dance through the cities of Flanders. She showed the same wholehearted devotion to the adventure, the same innocence, the same tact in ignoring my state of mind. She seemed to be making terms with me as she had made them then, suggesting that if I would ignore a few things I should find her the most delightful companion in my travels. We must, she seemed to say, of course forget everything that she had said to me the other night or that I had said to her before or since; and, as she swung beside me in her khaki, her freedom and her freshness declared how admirably she had forgotten. It wasn't as if we didn't know what we were really out for.

Except that she was a maturer person—thirty-one and not twenty-two—I might have mistaken her for Viola Thesiger, my secretary, setting out, in defiance of all conventions, with little Jevons, to look for Belfries in Belgium, and taking the war, since there was a war on, in her stride.

And as I walked with her through the same streets where nine years ago I had hunted for her and Jevons, it struck me as a strange, unsettling thing that I should be taking her out to look for Jevons and at the same time playing precisely Jevons's part in the adventure. She too must have been aware of this oddness—for she stopped suddenly to say to me, "Do you remember when I ran away with Jimmy? Isn't it funny that I should be running away with you?"

I said it was. Very funny indeed. And I wondered why she had drawn my attention to it just now? Did she want to make me judge by the transparent innocence of this running the not quite so transparent innocence of that? I think so. Remember, it was Reggie Thesiger's apparent doubt as to her innocence that had been at the bottom of all the trouble of the last five years. It accounted for her attack on me the other night. It was as if she had turned to say to me triumphantly, "Now, perhaps, when I'm running away with your precious perfection, at last you understand?"

We had some difficulty in finding quarters and Viola insisted on our staying in the Station Hotel, which had been bombarded by an aeroplane the night before. She pointed out that it was almost entirely empty. "And so," she said, "there won't be anybody to see us."

It was as if she wished to remind me by how thin a thread my reputation hung.

The business of our passports kept us in Ostend the next morning. I had made up my mind there would be difficulty about Viola's military pass, I was even contemplating the possibility of her being sent back to England by the next boat; but no; she had forestalled obstruction, and the pocket of her khaki coat was stuffed with letters from the War Office, the British Red Cross, and the French and Belgian Embassies. In fact, there was one horrid moment at the depot when it looked as if the Special Correspondent would be smuggled through under Viola's protection.

"You see, Furny," she said, "nobody's going to stop me. Nobody wants to stop me."

At last we got off, and early in the afternoon we were in Bruges.

We had run into the Market-Place before we knew where we were; and yonder in the street at the back of it was Viola's pension, and here on our right hand was Jimmy's hotel, and there, towering before us, was the Belfry. We looked at each other. And through the war and across nine years, it all came back to us.

"The Belfry's still there," I said.

"It always was." She said it a little sternly. But she had smiled at the allusion, all the same—the smile that had never been denied to it.

We stayed an hour in Bruges and lunched there in Jimmy's hotel. The fat proprietor and his wife were still there and they remembered us. They remembered Jimmy. And they had seen him three days ago. Mr. Chevons had passed through Bruges in his Red Cross motor-car. They seemed uncertain whether Viola was Mrs. Chevons or Mrs. Furnival, and they addressed her indifferently as either. An awful indifference had come to them. Of the war they said, "C'est triste, nest-ce pas?" We left them, sitting pallid and depressed behind the barricade of their bureau, gazing after us with the saddest of smiles.

That hour in Bruges was a mistake; so was our lunching at Jimmy's hotel. It was too much for Viola. It brought Jimmy so horribly near to her. I don't know what she was thinking, but I am convinced that from the moment of our entering Bruges the poor child had made up her mind that Jimmy had been killed. The smile she had given to the Belfry was the last flicker of her self-control, and halfway through lunch the grey melancholy that Bruges had absorbed from Jimmy nine years ago came down on her, as nine years ago it had come down on me, and it swallowed her up. By the time the waiter brought the coffee she was done for. Her eyes stared, hard and hot, over the cup she tried to drink from. She couldn't drink because of the spasm in her throat.

"Come," I said, "we must clear out of this."

We cleared out.

I too was invaded by the grey melancholy as we came to the bridge by the eastern gate where I had found Jevons that night leaning over and looking into the Canal. It was the sentry's sudden springing up to challenge us that saved me. I hoped that it would save Viola. She enjoyed the sentries.

But not this time. Her nerves were all on edge and she showed some irritation at the delay. I felt then that I had to take her in hand.

"My dear child," I said (we were running out on the road to Ghent now), "do you realize that there's a war?"

She answered, "Yes, Wally, yes, I know there is."

"Do you know that Antwerp's over there, a little way to the north? And that they've dragged up the big guns from Namur for the siege of Antwerp?"

"Oh, Wally—have they?"

She turned her face to the north as if she thought she could see or hear the siege-guns.

"But you said Jimmy was in Ghent."

"Jimmy," I said, "is probably in Ghent. If he isn't, he's in Antwerp. Do you know that the battlefields are down there—no—there—to the south, where I'm pointing? There's fighting going on there now."

She said, "Yes, dear, I know, I know," very gently; and she put her hand on my knee, as if she recognized the war as my private tragedy and was sorry for me. Then she fell back to her brooding.

Somewhere on the great flagged road between Bruges and Ecloo we met a straggling train of refugees—old men and women and children, bent double under their enormous bundles, making for Bruges and Ostend. They stared, not at us, but at the road in front of them, with a dreadful apathy, as we passed.

"This," I said, "is what finishes me—every time I see it."

She said nothing.

"Do you realize," I said, "that those women and those little children are flying for their lives? That they've come, doubled up like that, for miles—from Termonde or Alost? That they've lost everything they ever had?" (I can hear my own voice beating out the horror of it in hard, cruel jerks.) "That their homes—their homes—are burned to ashes somewhere down there?"

At my last jerk she turned.

"No," she said. "I'm cold and hard and stupid, and I do not realize it. Neither do you. If either of us realized it for two seconds we should be either cutting our throats in that ditch or going back to Ostend now with a load of those women and children, instead of tearing past them like devils in this damned car.

"I can't realize anything till I know whether Jimmy's all right or not. I can't see anything, or feel anything, or think of anything but Jimmy. Bruges is Jimmy and Belgium is Jimmy and the whole war is Jimmy—to me. I don't care if you are horrified. I can't help it if I am callous. It is so. And you can't make it different."

I remember saying quite abjectly that I was sorry—that I was only trying to turn her mind to other things as a relief.

"I'm to turn my mind to that—as a relief!"

She showed me a woman I was trying not to see, a woman who carried the bedding of her household on her back and dragged a four-year-old child by the hand. The child slipped to its knees at every other yard, and at every other yard was pulled up whimpering and dragged again—not with anger or any emotion whatever, but with a sickening repetition, as if its mother's arm was a mechanism set going to pull and drag.

If ever there was a weathercock it was my sister-in-law. Without even pretending to consult me, she made Colville, the chauffeur, turn the car round. (He was her chauffeur, after all, she said.)

"I don't know," she said, "whether I realize that woman or not, or whether you do. But I'm going to take her into Bruges."

And we took her. (Viola nursed the four-year-old child all the way.) We also took an old man and a young woman with a baby at her breast, and two small children. It was the only thing to be done, Viola said.

It was nearly half-past five when we left Bruges the second time.

"God only knows," I groaned, "what time we'll get to Ghent!"

"He does," she said. "He knows perfectly well we shall get there by half-past seven."

And we did.

It was dark when we turned into the Place d'Armes and drew up before the long, grey Hotel de la Poste. I jumped out and stood by the kerb to give Viola my hand.

"But—" she said, "I know this place."

"You ought to."

I don't know where she expected us to go. She still sat in the car as if held there by the shock of recognition. She ignored my outstretched hand.

"You'd better take your things," she said at last, "if you want to get out here. I'm going on to look for Jimmy."

I had then my first full sense of what I was in for. I saw that she was perfectly prepared to throw me over, to dump me down here or anywhere else and go on by herself with the car and the chauffeur that were, or ought to have been, mine.

She didn't care if I was Special Correspondent to the Morning Standard, and she had that beastly chauffeur in her pocket all the time. (I discovered afterwards that she'd laid in food for him and hidden it in the locker under the front seat, so that they might be ready for any sort of adventure.) And yet in the very moment that I realized her disastrous obstinacy I found her intolerably pathetic.

"If you want to look for Jimmy," I said, "you'd better get out too. He'll be here if he's anywhere in Ghent."

But she was already on the kerb, brushing me aside. She had seen behind my back the approach of the concierge and she made for him.

"Is Mr. Jevons in this hotel—Mr. Tasker Jevons?"

Yes, Mr. Chevons was in the hotel. Madame would find him in the lounge.

She had swept past him to the stair of the lounge, and I was following her discreetly when the proprietor dashed out of his bureau to intercept us. The lounge, he said, was reserved from seven till nine o'clock for the officers of the General Staff.

Viola had paid no attention to the proprietor and was sweeping up the stair. I gave Jevons's name and explained that the lady was Mrs. Jevons.

The proprietor, a portly and pompous Belgian, positively dissolved in smiles and bows and apologetic gestures. Mille pardons, monsieur, mille pardons. It would be all right. Monsieur Chevons was dining with the officers of the General Staff.

He did not know that Madame was expected. He was to reserve a room for Monsieur?

I told him to reserve rooms for me and the chauffeur, and to consult Mr. Jevons about Madame. And I hurried up the stair after Viola.

She was waiting for me at the turn, on the landing, by the wide archway of the lounge, where the great glass screen began that shut off the staircase. She stood back from the entrance, looking in, and smiling at what she saw. It was clear by her attitude and her absorption that something was happening in there.

As I approached she made a sign to me and withdrew farther back and up the stair.

"He's there," she whispered. "Over there. In that corner."

For a moment we stood together on the stair, looking down through the glass screen into the lounge.

The far end of the lounge had been turned into a dining-place for the officers of the Belgian General Staff. Most of the tables were cleared now and deserted. But from our place on the stair we had a clear view slantwise of one small table in the corner. And we saw Jimmy seated at that table.

At least we made him out.

All but Jimmy's head was hidden by the figures of a Belgian General and two Colonels. They had closed in on him (they were evidently all four at the end of their dinner); they had closed in on him in an access of emotion and enthusiasm. The General (the one who sat beside him) had his arm round Jimmy's shoulder; the two who sat facing him leaned towards Jimmy over half the table, and one grasped Jimmy's right hand in his; the other was making some sort of competitive demonstration. The disengaged arms of the three held up the glasses in which they were about to pledge him. And at the other end of the room a scattered group of soldiers rose to their feet and looked on smiling and signalling applause.

What was happening down there was public homage to Jimmy.

And in between the two dark Belgian uniforms that obscured him you could just see a bit of Jimmy's khaki, and from among the white and grizzled heads that pressed on him you saw Jimmy's face and Jimmy's flush and Jimmy's twinkle; his incredible, irrepressible twinkle. You could even see the tips of Jimmy's little front teeth trying to bite down his lip into some sort of composure. You could see that he was very shy and very modest; you could see that in spite of his shyness and his modesty he was frightfully pleased; but more than anything you could see that he was amused.

Positively, positively, he had the air of not taking his Belgian officers very seriously.

"We mustn't go down yet," said Viola, "or we'll spoil it."

So we waited, looking at Jimmy through the screen, while the officers clinked their glasses and drank to him and called his name; and the group that looked on echoed it; and the waiters who had come in to see what was happening, repeated it among themselves.

"Vive l'Angleterre! Vive les Anglais! Vive Chevons! Chevons! Chevons!"

"I wonder," said Viola, "what Jimmy has been up to? You can take me to him."

When we got to the table we found Jimmy trying to explain to the General and the two Colonels in execrable French that he didn't know what it was all about. He hadn't done anything.

Then he saw Viola.

For one second, while he stared at her across the room, he appeared to be suffering from a violent shock. He was so visibly hit that the two men who had their backs to us turned round to see what it was that had affected him. His flush had gone suddenly and he was breathing hard, with his mouth a little open.

I heard him saying something in French about his wife.

He recovered, however, in a second, and disentangled himself from the General and the Colonels and from the dinner-table, and came forward.

And as he came, I noticed something odd about him. He limped slightly. His khaki had a battered look; it was soiled and torn in places, and the Red Cross brassard on his sleeve was simply filthy.

And he had only been out three days, mind you. He was only three days ahead of us. But he had lost no time.

As they strolled up to each other and met midway in the big public room, in the fraction of time that passed before their hands touched I heard him draw a hard, quivering breath and let it out in a long sigh. That breath was a suppressed cry of trouble and of acquiescence.

Then (I could have blessed him for it) he twinkled.

Viola said, "What have you been up to?"

And Jimmy, "I say, I like that! What are you doing here? Have you come to look at the Belfry?"

"No. I've come to look at you!" She put her hand on his shoulder.

He said, "That's a jolly rig-out you've got," and that was all.

The General and the two Colonels came forward and were presented to Mrs. Jevons; and Mr. Walter Furnival ("one of our war-correspondents") was presented to the General and the two Colonels. They saluted Madame; they begged Madame to accept their profoundest congratulations; they regretted that Madame had not been present just now when they were drinking her husband's health.

And the old General (the one with the white hair and imperial) informed her that Monsieur her husband had a very poor opinion of the Belgian Army.

"He has saved the lives of three Belgian officers and I do not know how many Belgian soldiers—and he says that it is nothing!"

And the stout, florid Colonel, who had been trying to look young and rakish ever since he had turned and caught sight of Viola, suggested that "Perhaps, if he had saved your British, he would not have said that it was nothing."