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Updated: May 16, 2025
I may be mixing up with my first vague dread the certainty that came later. But sometimes I wonder why Reggie didn't suspect me. I suppose my rectitude that had dished me with Viola saved me with her brother. He took me to lunch with him at his club, and went off quite happily afterwards to the Army and Navy Stores to see about his kit. I went straight to Jevons's rooms in Bernard Street.
I told him that it hadn't happened; but that to repudiate Jevons was the way to make everybody think it had. And whether it had happened or not, he must surely want other people to forget it. And once start the abominable impression, Jevons's celebrity would cause it to be remembered for ever, or at any rate for this generation.
Since Jevons's time the method which he initiated has been steadily extended; economic and statistical processes have become more nearly assimilated, and problems of fatigue or acquired skill, of family affection and personal thrift, of management by the entrepreneur or the paid official, have been stated and argued in quantitative form.
This was different. There was anguish in it; and it was only in her eyes. And Jevons's entry, this time, was simultaneous. Little Jimmy came behind her, holding himself rather absurdly straight and breathing hard. And there was Reggie Thesiger waiting for them, standing by the hearth between Norah and me. Oh yes, India had changed him.
He came back from Switzerland chastened and purified of all offence. Even Reggie couldn't have found a flaw in him. That had always been Jevons's way. Just when you had made up your mind that you couldn't bear him he would go and do something so beautiful that it made your heart ache. From the very fact that he was intolerable to-day you might be sure he'd be adorable to-morrow.
It came, if it came at all, in brief spurts, never with the passionate rush, the gorgeous colour, the sustained crescendo of his first runnings. It was a thing of feeble clichés that might have passed in any drawing-room. We didn't, then, talk about Viola. But I know that he heard from her and that I didn't. The first week of Jevons's fortnight was up when I got a wire from Canterbury.
I hear her crying out suddenly with no relevance, "Hasn't he got stunning eyes, Daddy?" and the Canon saying that Jevons's eyes would look better in a pair of earrings than in Jevons's head, and her answering, "Wouldn't I like to wear them!" That night he called me into the library when they had all gone to bed. Clearly he wanted to know how it had gone off how he, in particular, had behaved.
"What sort of age is he?" I told him, "About thirty-one or two." "Ah!" And then: Did I know anything about the young man's morals? I assured him I had never heard a word against them. He looked at me keenly and I remembered the words of Withers which I had heard. Still, I knew nothing against Jevons's morals, and I said they were all right for all I knew. "Never mind what you know," he answered.
I had realized so well what wringing Jevons's neck would mean to Viola that I was determined to get at him before Reggie Thesiger could. Besides I doubt very much if you could have wrung the neck of anybody so abjectly penitent as Jevons was that evening. I felt as if I were shut up with a criminal in the condemned cell, and Jevons no doubt felt as if he had murdered Viola.
And to all these shades Jevons was acutely sensitive. They considered that Jevons's marriage was a disaster, not for the Thesigers, but for Jevons, and that his only safe and proper course was to leave the Thesigers alone. But it wasn't so easy to leave them alone when he had married into them; and to have left them would have been for Jevons a confession of failure.
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