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There were people like the Thesigers from whom heroism was expected as a matter of course; and there were people like Jevons. You know what she said about his going to the front.
And that night and the next and the next I thought of little Jevons alone in his little house in Hampstead, lying all by himself in his four-post bed between his rosebud chintz curtains and under his rosebud chintz tester, and saying to himself that he had scored. The Thesigers lived to be grateful to me for reconciling them to Jevons, if it was I who reconciled them. I don't think Mrs.
I looked at the Thesigers and I looked at all these things, and I thought again of Jevons of Jevons as absolutely impossible. You may say it was pure snobbishness to think of him in that way, and I daresay it was; but there wasn't any other way. It wasn't their tradition, you see, that appealed to me so much as their behaviour. I don't think I ever met people who knew so well how to behave.
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 wasn't a large party only a few friends of Viola's, and Jimmy's lawyer and his doctor and his agent, and a few picked members of the confraternity; the rest were Thesigers. If Jimmy had meant to give a demonstration proving that he could gather the whole of his wife's family round him at a pinch, he had all but succeeded. I suppose every available member had turned up that night, except Reggie.
And I swear to you that the curtains and upholstery were in tapestry cloth, the lilies of France in gold on a crimson ground. It was as if Jimmy had wanted to say to the Thesigers that if it came to being Tudor, he could be as Tudor as any of them, and more so. Thus deeply had he absorbed the Canterbury atmosphere.
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.
Because of him I trailed a fatuous tragedy through the Thesigers' house and over the green lawns of the Close, under the eyes of the young subalterns and of Victoria and Norah. Well, on that Tuesday he arrived. He was asked for a week and he stayed three days; and in those three days I had forgiven him everything for the sake of his performance. He arrived in the middle of a tennis-party.
The Thesigers hadn't meant to have a party. The subalterns must have known that he was coming and turned up simply to look at him. I ought to have said that for the last two days the Canon had been preparing himself for Jevons by reading him.
And none of the Thesigers, or anybody connected with the Thesigers, could take Jimmy seriously for one moment.
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