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Ebook has 2187 lines and 98581 words, and 44 pages

THE BELFRY

MAY SINCLAIR

BOOK I

MY BOOK

I suppose if you asked him he'd say, "That's how." It was certainly the way they managed the business of living. Perhaps it's why they managed it on the whole so well. I remember how when I was shilly-shallying about that last job of mine he said, "Take it. Take it. If you can risk living at all, my dear fellow, you can risk that."

I don't mean he couldn't take his wife, part of her, anyhow, at a pinch. And I don't mean he couldn't take himself, his own emotions, his own eccentricities, if he happened to want them, and his own meannesses, if nobody else's, so to speak, would do. But he couldn't and wouldn't take his own big things, particularly not that last thing.

And when you think that it was just touch and go--Why, if I hadn't bucked up and taken that job when he told me to I might have missed him. No amount of hearing about him would have been the same thing. I had to see him.

Told like that, it didn't amount to much.

This is the real telling.

I must get away from the end, right back to the beginning.

I suppose, to be accurate, the very beginning was the day I first met him in nineteen-six--no, nineteen-five it must have been. It was at Blackheath Football Ground, the last match of the season, when Woolwich Arsenal played East Kent and beat them by two goals and a try. He was there as a representative of the Press, "doing" the match for some sporting paper.

He held me up at the barrier while he fumbled for his pass. He had given the word "Press" with an exaggerated aplomb that showed he was young to his job, and the gate-keeper challenged him. It was, in fact, the exquisite self-consciousness of the little man that made me look at him. And he caught me looking at him; he blushed, caught himself blushing and smiled to himself with the most delicious appreciation of his own absurdity. And as he stood there fumbling, and holding me up while he argued with the gate-keeper, who didn't know him, I got his engaging twinkle. It was as if he looked at me and said, "See me swank just then? Funny, wasn't it?"

He hung about on the edge of the crowd for a while with his hands in his pockets, sucking his little blond moustache and looking dreamy and rather incompetent. I was a full-blown journalist even then, and I remember feeling a sort of pity for his youth. He was so obviously on his maiden trip, and obviously, I fancied, doomed never to arrive in any port.

Well--well; I came upon him afterwards at a crisis in the game. He was taking notes in shorthand with a sort of savagery between his tense and concentrated glares at the scrimmage that was then massed in the centre of the field. Woolwich Arsenal and East Kent, locked in each other's bodies, now struggled and writhed and butted like two immense beasts welded together by the impact of their battle, now swayed and quivered and snorted as one beast torn by a solitary and mysterious rage.

Self-consciousness had vanished from my man. He stood, leaning forward with his legs a little apart. His boyish face was deeply flushed; he had sucked and bitten his blond moustache into a wisp; he was breathing heavily, with his mouth ajar; his very large and conspicuous blue eyes glittered with a sort of passion.

All these symptoms declared that he was "on." They made up a look that I was soon to know him by.

I remember marvelling at his excitement.

I remember also discussing the match with him as we went back to town. It must have been then that he began to tell me about himself: that his name was James Tasker Jevons; that he lived, or hoped to live, by going about the country and reporting the big cricket and football matches.

At least he called it reporting. I shouldn't think there has ever been any reporting like it before or since.

But he saw through it. I don't know how he managed to convey to me that my delicacy needn't suffer. Anyhow, he must have had some scruples of his own, since he waited for another context before remarking quietly that what I was doing now he would be doing in another six months. These things, he said, took time, and he gave himself six months. He didn't seem to boast so much as to trace for my benefit the path of some natural force, some upward-tending, indestructible Energy that happened to be him.

All this I remember. But I cannot remember by what stages we arrived at dining together, as we did that night in a little restaurant in Soho. Perhaps there were no stages; we may have simply leaped by one bound at that consummation. He had swung himself into my compartment as the train was leaving the platform at Blackheath; so I suppose it was destiny. After that I was tempted to conceive that he fastened on me as on something that he had need of; but I think it was rather that I fell to his mysterious attraction.

While we dined he informed me further that he had been reporting football matches for six weeks. Before that he had been proof-reader for a firm of printers for about a year. Before that he had been a compositor. And before that again he had worked in an office with his father, who was Registrar of Births, Marriages and Deaths for some parish down in Hertfordshire. He chucked that because he found that the registration of births, marriages and deaths was spoiling his handwriting quite as much as his handwriting was spoiling the registration of births, marriages and deaths. He liked his present job, because it took him out pretty often into the open air. Also he liked looking on at football matches and prize fights.

He said it made him feel manly.

You should have seen him sitting there and telling me these things in a gentle, throaty and rather thick voice with a cockney accent and a sort of tenor ring in it and a queer, humorous intonation that was like an audible twinkle, as if he saw himself as he thought I must see him, mainly in the light of absurdity. You should have seen his face, its thin cheeks, its vivid flush, its queer, inquisitive, contradictory nose that had a slender, high bridge and a tilted, pointed end in profile and three-quarters, and turned suddenly all broad and blunt in a full view; and his mouth that stood ajar with excitement, and even in moments of quiescence failed to hide the tips of two rather prominent white teeth pressed down on the lower lip. I don't say there was anything unmanly about Jevons's figure , or about his mouth and jaw. I knew a great General with a mouth and jaw like that, and he was one of the handsomest figures in the Service. I'm not hinting at anything like effeminacy in Jevons, only at a certain oddity that really saved him. If he'd been handsome he'd have been dreadful. His flush, his decorative eyes, his dark eyebrows and eyelashes, his sleek, light brown hair, would have made him vulgar. As it was, his queerness gave them a sort of point.

If anybody had asked me that night what I saw in him myself beyond an ordinary little journalist "on the make," I don't suppose I could have told them. But there's no doubt that I felt his charm, or that night would have been the end instead of the beginning.

Even so our acquaintance might have lapsed but for the thing that happened when the waiter came up with the bill. My share of it was three and twopence, and I found myself with only ninepence in my pocket. I had to borrow half a crown, from Jevons. You mayn't see anything very dreadful in that. I didn't at the time, and there wasn't. The dreadful thing was that I forgot to pay him back.

Yes. Something happened that put Jevons and his half-crown out of my head for long enough. I forgot to pay him, and he had to go without his dinner for three nights in consequence. It was his last half-crown.

He told me this as an immense joke, long afterwards.

And Viola Thesiger cried.

That crying of hers, that child-like softening and breaking down under him, in itself so unexpected , that sudden and innocent catastrophe, was the first sign to me that I was done for--wiped out. There wasn't any violence or any hysteria about it, only grief, only pity. It was an entirely simple, gentle and beautiful performance, and it took place in my rooms after Jevons had left us. But, as I say, this was long afterwards. The agony of my undoing was a horribly protracted affair.

I needn't say that what happened--I mean the thing that made me forget all about Jevons and his half-crown--was Viola Thesiger.

I had his address, but the next day--the day after the match--was Sunday, so I couldn't get the postal order I had meant to send him. And on Monday she walked into my rooms at ten in the morning.

The appointment, I may remark, was for nine-thirty. I had fixed that early hour for it because I wanted to get it done with. I wasn't going to have my morning murdered with violence when it was two hours old; neither did I intend it to be poisoned by the thought of this interview hanging over me at the end.

I had just sent for Pavitt, my man, and told him that if Miss Thesiger called he was on no account to let her in. He was to say that the appointment was for nine-thirty and that Mr. Furnival was now engaged. She would have to call again at three if she wished to see him. When engaging a typist it is as well to begin as you mean to go on, and I was anxious to let Miss Thesiger know at once that I was not a man who would stand any nonsense. I was abominably busy that morning.

And Pavitt let her in. He never explained or apologized for it afterwards. He seemed to think that when I had seen Miss Thesiger I would see, even more vividly than he did, how impossible it was to do otherwise, unless he had relinquished all claim to manhood and to chivalry. The look he sent me from the threshold as he retreated backwards, drawing the door upon himself like a screen and shutting me in alone with her, said very plainly, "You may curse, sir, and you may swear; but if you think you'll get out of it any better than I have you're mistaken."

Yes: it was something more than her appearance and her manner, though they, in all conscience, were enough.

I do not know what appearance and what manner, if any, are proper to a young woman calling on a young man at his rooms to seek employment. The mere situation may, for all I know, bristle with embarrassments. Anyhow, I can imagine that in some hands it might have moments, let us say, of extreme difficulty on either side. Miss Thesiger's appearance and her manner were perfect; but they didn't suggest by any sign or shade that she was a young woman seeking employment, that she was a young woman seeking anything; but rather that she was a young woman to whom all things naturally came.

She approached me very slowly. Her adorable little salutation, with all its maturity, its gravity, was somehow essentially young. She was rather tall, and her figure had the same serious maturity in youth. She carried her small head high, and held her shoulders well back, so that she got a sort of squareness into the divine slope of them , a squareness that agreed somehow with the character of her small face. I didn't know then whether it was a pretty face or not. I daresay it was a bit too odd and square for prettiness, and, as for beauty, that had all gone into the lines of her body . When you looked carefully, you got a little square, white forehead, and straight eyebrows of the same darkness as her hair, and very distinct on the white, and eyes also very dark and distinct, and fairly crystalline with youth; and a little white and very young nose that started straight and ended absurdly in a little soft knob that had a sort of kink in it; and a mouth which would have been too large for her face if it hadn't made room for itself by tilting up at the corners; and then a little square white chin and jaw; they were thrust forward, but so lightly and slenderly that it didn't matter. It doesn't sound--does it?--as if she could have been pretty, let alone beautiful; and yet--and yet she managed that little head of hers and that little odd face so as to give an impression of beauty or of prettiness. It was partly the oddness of the face and head, coming on the top of all that symmetry, that perfection, that made the total effect of her so bewildering. I can't find words for the total effect , and if I were to tell you that what struck me first about her was something perverse and wilful and defiant, this would be misleading.

She smiled in her mature, perfunctory manner as she took the chair I gave her. She cast out her muff over my writing-table, and flung back the furs that covered her breast and shoulders, as if she had come to stay, as if it were four o'clock in the afternoon and I had asked her to tea for the first time.

I remember saying, "That's right. I'm afraid this room is a bit warm, isn't it?"--as if she had done something uninvited and a little unexpected, and I wished to reassure her. As if, too, I desired to assert my position as the giver of assurances.

She hadn't been in that room five minutes before she had created a situation; a situation that bristled with difficulty and danger.

To begin with, she was so young. She couldn't have been, then, a day older than one-and-twenty. My first instinct was to send her away; to tell her that I was afraid she wouldn't do, that she was too unpunctual, and that I had found, between nine-thirty and ten o'clock, somebody who would suit me rather better. Any lie I could think of, so long as I got out of it. So long as I got her out of it.

I don't know how it was she so contrived to impress me as being in for something, some impetuous adventure, some enterprise of enormous uncertainty. It may have been because she looked so well-cared-for and expensive. I do not understand these matters, but her furs, and her tailor-made suit of dark cloth, and the little black velvet hat with the fur tail in it were not the sort of clothes I had hitherto seen worn by typists seeking for employment. So that I doubted whether financial necessity could have driven her to my door. Or else I had a premonition. She herself had none. She was guileless and unaware of taking any risks. And that, I think, was what disturbed me. The situation bristled because she so ignored all difficulty or danger.

"Let me see," I said; "it's typing, isn't it?"

I began raking through drawers and pigeon-holes, pretending to find her letter and the sample of her work that she had sent me, though I knew all the time that they lay under my hand hidden by the blotter. I wanted to give myself time; I wanted to create the impression that I was old at this game; that I had to do with scores and scores of young women seeking employment; to make her realize the grim fact of competition; to saturate her with the idea that she was only one of scores and scores, all docketed and pigeon-holed, any one of whom might have superior qualities; when it would be easy enough to say, "I'm sorry, but the fact is, I rather think I've engaged somebody already."

"Yes," she said, "it's typing. I can't do anything else. But if you want shorthand, I could learn it."

This gave me an opening. "Well--I'm sorry--but the fact is--"

"Did you like what I sent you?"

"Oh, yes. I liked it. But--" I began it again.

She leaned forward this time, peering under my elbow .

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