May Sinclair

“ Of the dancing I remember nothing but Viola whirling round and round, as it were for ever, in Charlie Thesiger's arms, and her dead-white face looking over his shoulder, as if she saw nothing, nothing whatever; as if she were detached even from the arms that held her.
My last recollection is of Jimmy's face when Norah said to him, "Oh,
Jimmy, I love your dear little lions!"—and Jimmy's answer:
"Little lions—yes—they make me feel tall and majestic." ”

“ I looked at Viola. She was sitting on part of Jimmy's chair, with her arm round his shoulder.
"Did Norah tell you, after all?" I said.
Viola pushed out her chin at me and shook her head.
"No, Furny dear, she didn't tell me a thing. It was your face."
"Don't you believe her," Jimmy said. "Your face hasn't anything to do with it. Your face is a tomb of secrets—a beautiful, white tomb. And you are all rectitude and discretion. We knew it ages ago."
"How could you possibly know it, when I didn't?"
"Because it's one of those things" (he twinkled) "that other people always do know." ”

“ I do not remember its name, if I ever knew it; but I know and remember every house in it and every tree in the avenue at the turn of the grey road that led to Lokeren, and even now, in my worst dreams, I find myself in the little plantation at the end of the village on the left where the railway siding is, and where the trains came in loaded with wounded. I am always waiting for Jimmy and looking for Jimmy and not finding him. And at one point I always stumble over Viola's body. I find her lying wounded in a ditch that runs through the plantation. And when I find her I know that Jimmy is dead. ”

“ It always bored Viola to do what her family did, and what her family, just because they did it, expected her to do. And somehow, in the long hours spent in the Cathedral Close, she had acquired a taste for what she called "literature," what she innocently believed to be literature. She was of an engaging innocence in this respect; so that typing authors' manuscripts appealed to her as a vocation that combined one of the highest forms of cerebral activity with I don't know what glamour of romantic adventure.
Her enthusiasm, her veneration for the written word made her an admirable typist. ”

“ 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.
When she saw the suits of armour Norah squeezed my arm and breathed "Oh—my darling Wally!"—in an ecstasy that was anguish. Poor Mildred's plump face turned as scarlet as the Tudor roses with an emotion that we could not fathom, but judged to be painful.
We had come early with the idea of making ourselves useful, if necessary ”

“ It was all very well for Viola to nurse Jevons through his jaundice, she might have done that out of pure humanity; but she had no business to be going for walks with the little bounder. Even the charm of his conversation and his personality (and it had a charm) couldn't conceal the fact that he was a little bounder. Why, in moments of excitement he had gestures that must have made her shudder all down her spine, and more than once I have known his aitches become fugitive, though, on the whole, I must say he was pretty careful. And Viola was letting herself in for him. ”

“ And yet I do not think that even at the height of his ecstasy he ever really forgot that he was Tasker Jevons, the great novelist and playwright, in his motor-car. When he drove you through Portsmouth or Chichester, or even through little Midhurst, you felt that he thrilled from head to foot with self-consciousness. He knew and had acute pleasure in knowing that people noticed him as he went by; that the tradesmen turned out of their shops to stare after him; and that everybody said, "See that chap? That's Tasker Jevons. He always drives his own car." ”

“ And Viola seemed to share Charlie's scruple. She, too, shrank from using the new car. And I remember her saying to me one day as we crossed the courtyard and saw Jimmy, as usual, in the garage, worshipping his car, "I'm so glad he's got it. I think it makes him happier." As if she had confessed that it was all he had got; that she was not able to make him happy any more; and as if, in some day of unhappiness that she saw coming, it would be a consolation to the poor chap. ”

“ This isn't really me. It's just Them. I'm what I've made myself. I'm what you've made me. I'm uglier than they are. I'm uglier than anything here, but I'm much, much more alive."
"You surely don't suggest," said Jevons, "that I've made you uglier?"
"You've made me stronger and cleverer and bigger—ever so much bigger than I was."
"Much better in every way," I said, "than your youngest sister here, hasn't he?"
"Poor little Norah! I didn't mean that—you beast—Furny!—Of course I didn't. Jimmy—what did I mean?" ”

“ Her figure moves through the grey Flemish cities and the grey Flemish landscape with an adorable innocence and naïveté, a trifle slenderer and tenderer than the Viola I remember, who always had for me an air of energy and obstinacy and defiance, but for Jevons, perhaps, not more slender or more tender than the Viola he knew. ”

“ I've wondered since whether this wasn't the way Charlie settled with his conscience, his own sacrifice to decency. He could eat Jimmy's bread and drink his wine and stay for weeks under his roof, since his necessity—the necessity of seeing Viola—compelled him, but to profit by him to that extent, to make use of Jimmy's opulence, was beyond him. His conscience may have even said to him, "If he loves his motor-car, for God's sake let him have that, at any rate, to himself." ”

“ Nineteen-thirteen stands out for me as the year of Viola's illness.
It turned to pneumonia and she was dangerously ill for three weeks, in fact, she nearly died of it; and for more weeks than I can remember she lay about on sofas to which Jimmy and the nurse or one of us carried her from her bed. And in all that time Jimmy nursed and waited on her and sat up with her at night. If he slept it was with one eye and both ears open. And I never saw anybody as gentle as he was and as skilful with his hands and quiet. He didn't even breathe hard. ”

“ There's no doubt that when he was tired he got careless. I have known him come upstairs after dinner, entirely sober, but looking rather drunk, with his hair curling over his forehead and his tie crooked and the buttons of his irreproachable little waistcoat all undone. I have known him do the oddest things with chairs and get into postures inconceivable to ordinary men. I have known him drop his aitches for a whole evening because he was too dead beat to hang on to them. And Norah, going home with me, would say, "Poor Jimmy—he does get it very badly when he's tired." ”

“ By the time he had finished it was open to us to suppose that the house in Mayfair was his joke and not ours, that he had furnished it in this preposterous manner in order to be really and truly funny, and to keep himself and Viola in perfect and perpetual gaiety. It was as if he were trying to say to us, "None of you people—least of all the confraternity—knows how to live. Life isn't a calamity; it's a joke; and to live properly you should meet life in its own spirit ”

“ Three weeks would have been nothing to any other man. But Jevons could do more with three weeks than another man could do with a three years' campaign, and he contrived to crowd into his term the maximum of glory and of risk. And when it was all over it was less as if Fate had foiled him than as if he had "given" himself three weeks.
But Jimmy was discontented, and every morning at breakfast we listened to the most extraordinary lamentations. His job, he said, wasn't at all the jolly thing it looked. ”

“ I had to take Norah to Lancaster Gate in a taxi, and I walked back across the Serpentine between Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, spinning out the time so that Viola and Jimmy might be in bed when I got to Edwardes Square.
I found them sitting up for me in Jimmy's study.
I dreaded telling them more than I can say. I don't know with what countenance a man can come and tell the woman he has loved (and proposed to three times running) that he has consoled himself with her younger sister. I wanted to avoid every appearance of a fatuous triumph in my success with Norah. ”

“ Besides, even if I had come with the proofs of her innocence in my hands, and removed their private sorrow, that wouldn't have repaired their public wrong. Nobody was going to believe in Viola's innocence. Appearances were dead against her.
It was awful for them every way they looked at it; awful if she married Jevons just because she had to; awful even if she hadn't to, so long as people thought she had; awful if she married him for any reason; more awful if she didn't marry him at all. ”

“ It was the car's own purity, her unique and staggering beauty that had captivated him. And mixed with his passion there was the remorse and terror caused by the memory of his first car, the victim of his intemperance in motoring. He had evidently said to himself: "Motor-cars are perishable things. I did for my first beloved by my excesses. Rather than knock this divinity about I will abstain from motoring." And the cab-proprietor of Midhurst must have made a fortune out of Jimmy's abstinence.
The odd thing was that Charlie Thesiger respected it. ”

“ It didn't begin, really, for another three months, the end of those six months that Jevons had given himself. Not even then. Not, you may say, for a whole year; because he gave himself another six months as soon as he saw her. He was always giving himself these periods of time, as if, with his mania for taking risks, he was always having some prodigious bet on himself. I never knew a man back his own enterprises as he did.
But until he turned up again I was happy. I say I, not we. I don't know whether Viola was happy or not, though she looked it. ”

“ The brilliant orange of his jaundice faded to lemon, and the lemon to a sallow tint that cleared rapidly as it was flooded by his flush.
I did not realize then what sources he was drawing on. Looking back on it all, I am amazed at my own stupidity. I was, of course, aware that Viola was sorry for him; but I might have known that a girl's pity was not a stimulant that would keep a man like Jevons going for very long. I am sure he would never have lowered himself by any appeal to it. ”

“ 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. ”