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Updated: June 27, 2025
There was no doubt about it; his name, James Tasker Jevons, was in the visitors' list. Viola's was not. From the enthusiasm of the fat proprietor and his wife you would have supposed that Jevons and I had roamed the habitable globe for months in search of one another; and that Jevons, at any rate, would be overpowered with joy when he found that I was here. They said nothing about Viola.
"Oh, by the way!" he said, as though suddenly recollecting. "Have you met your friend Ambler Jevons lately?" "No," I replied. "He's been away for some weeks, I think. Why?" "Because I saw him yesterday in King's Road. He was driving in a fly, and had one eye bandaged up. Met with an accident, I should think." "An accident!" I exclaimed in consternation.
Viola couldn't attend to him properly; and if the stranger happened to be rather stupid, like Charlie Thesiger, Jevons didn't blaze and so cover himself; he got bored; and when he was bored he got jumpy; and it was when he got jumpy that he did things. And Charlie was getting on his nerves.
"Come out now," I said, "let's enjoy this lovely afternoon. I should like to paint you under that tree," I added musingly, looking out on the tree in its white glory. "In your usual style?" she returned laughing. "I don't think you could here. Mrs. Jevons would turn me out as not being respectable; not even being Mrs. Lonsdale would save me."
"Ah! You don't take the matter at all seriously!" I observed, a trifle annoyed. "Why should I?" asked my friend, Ambler Jevons, with a deep pull at his well-coloured briar. "What you've told me shows quite plainly that you have in the first place viewed one little circumstance with suspicion, then brooded over it until it has become magnified and now occupies your whole mind.
He said he'd have me sent home to-morrow and kept there, and Viola should go with me. And when he'd finished he told us that Antwerp had fallen. That was how Jevons came to write the story of the Fall of Antwerp instead of me. Well, he didn't sack Colville; and he didn't get me packed off with the other war-correspondents who left Ghent in a body the next day.
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.
We had a table reserved for us in a corner of the restaurant. The hotel was full of Belgian officers, and I found I was infinitely better off in attaching myself to Jevons than if I had joined the war-correspondents. I heard her telling Jevons that he must be kind to me, for I had had an awful time with her and I had been an angel.
It was as if, his object being gained, he could afford them. He was no longer on his guard. He had no longer any need to be. The strain was over he relaxed, and in relaxation he fell back into his old habits. All those years we seem to have been looking on at the slow, slow process of his vulgarization. By nineteen-twelve the confraternity had begun to regard Tasker Jevons as an outrageous joke.
And before I could ask myself what earthly motive Withers could have had for lying to me, I concluded that he had lied. Or perhaps it was more than likely he had been mistaken. Jevons, I said to myself, was bound to turn up at dinner. If Viola was in Bruges, Viola would probably be with him.
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