Her enthusiasm, her veneration for the written word made her an admirable typist. But not all at once. To say that she brought to her really horrible task a respect, a meticulous devotion, would give you no idea of the child's attitude; it was a blind, savage superstition that would have been exasperating if it had not been so heart-rending. It cleared gradually until it became intelligent co-operation.
I trained her for six months.
I don't suppose I ever worked harder than I did in that first half year of her. I mean my output was never greater. For every blessed thing I wrote was an excuse for going to see her, or for her coming to see me. It was a perpetual journeying between my rooms in Brunswick Square, and her rooms in Hampstead overlooking the Heath. The more I wrote the more I saw of her.
I trained her for six months—until Jevons was ready for her.
When I tell you that she reverenced my performances you may imagine in what spirit she approached his.
For their meeting, as for what happened afterwards, I alone am responsible. I brought it on myself. By sheer quixotic fuss and interference with what, after all, wasn't my affair. For little Jevons most decidedly was not. I might easily have let that sleeping dog lie. He certainly did sleep, in some obscure kennel of London; he had slept ever since I had left him at the door of that restaurant in Soho. He slept almost for the six months he had then given himself.
And then, before (according to his own schedule) he was quite due, he appeared in the columns (in my columns) of the Morning Standard. I had almost forgotten his existence; but when I saw his name, James Tasker Jevons, stick out familiarly under the big headlines, I remembered that that name, on a card with an address, had been lying in my left-hand writing-table drawer all this time; I remembered that it was there because he had lent me half a crown, and that I had never paid him. Then he came back to me—he lived again.
I sent him a postal order and an apology. I referred, very handsomely as I thought, to his cuckoo's nesting in my paper. (I informed him, in fact, that he "did it" better than I did); and because I had worked myself up to a pitch of affability and generosity, I asked him to come and see me at such time as he should be free. And because, also, I was indifferent and lazy and didn't want to be seriously bothered with him, instead of asking him to lunch or dine with me, I said I was generally free myself between four and five.
Between four and five was an hour when Viola was very apt to come in.
In the instant that followed the posting of that letter I saw what I had done. And I wrote to him the next day asking him to dinner, in order that he should not come in between four and five. For some weeks, whenever I fancied he was about due at four o'clock, I wrote and asked him to dinner. That was how I fastened him to me. There wasn't any sense in which he fastened on me. I wasn't by any means his only hope.
I may say at once I was prostrated as any slave before his conversation.
I shall never forget the radiance of his twinkle when he told me he had been sacked three weeks ago from the sporting paper that had provided him with his sole visible means of subsistence. It was his blessed (only he didn't call it blessed) style that had dished him: the suicidal élan that he brought to the business. He was warned, he said. He was aware that his existence as a reporter hung by the bare thread of statement (wearing thinner and thinner) on which he weaved his fantastic web. His editor told him he was engaged to report football, not to play it with the paper. But he couldn't help it. He had got, he said, the ensanguined habit. Still, I was not to imagine that he bungled things. He jolly well knew his way about. In his wildest flights there was a homing impulse; he was preparing a place for himself all the time (that it happened to be my place didn't seem to afflict him in the least). Like St. Paul, he knew how to abound and he knew how to abstain. His abstinence, in fact, gave the measure of his abundance. He held himself in for five perilous weeks; and when he let himself rip again it was with a burst that landed him in the front page of the Morning Standard.
What he sketched for me had no resemblance to the career of a peaceful man of letters. It was a hot race, a combat as bloody (his own word) as those contests of which he was the delighted eye-witness.
He had come thin and worn out of the struggle, but you gathered that he had borne himself in it with coolness and deliberate caution. His phrases produced a false effect of vehemence and excitement. You saw that he had simply followed out a calculated scheme, not one step of which had miscarried. And you felt that his most passionate affairs would be conducted with the same formidable precision.
I ought to have felt it. For we were precious soon in the thick of it—of his most passionate affair.
I had dined him, I suppose, about three times, and I had lunched him twice. And I had had tea with him once in his bedroom. He was living in one room in a street off the Euston Road, and he called it his bedroom because it looked so much more that than anything else. I might have let it go at that. But I didn't. I had seen his bedroom. I took the liberty of inquiring into his finances. They were, he said, as yet undeveloped. He had a scheme of his own for improving them, but while it was maturing he was, he certainly was open to offers of work. I got him some translation. (He was a fairly good French scholar.)
Then—it was the fatality of the proceedings that impressed them on my memory—then (I forgot to say that at that time I was reader to a firm of publishers; these things are in themselves so inessential to this story) I turned over to him any books that came more into his province than mine. His province, I can tell you, was pretty extensive, too.
He began by doing me the honour to consult me about any instances that seemed doubtful.
And so—you see how carefully I had prepared his path for him—one afternoon he turned up at my rooms, uninvited, between four and five. He said he remembered I had told him I should be free at that hour.
He remembered. Yes; I don't think Tasker Jevons ever forgot anything, anything likely to be useful to him, in his life.
And he hadn't been with me ten minutes before Viola Thesiger came in.
He was saying, "Why the Heaven-afflicted idiot" (his author) "should think it necessary—" when Viola came in.
She came in, and suddenly I made up my mind that she was beautiful. I hadn't seen it before. I don't know why I saw it now. It may have been some turn of her small, squarish head that surprised me with subtle tendernesses and curves; or more likely it may have been her effect on him. I may have seen her with his eyes. I don't know—I don't know. I hardly like to think he saw anything in her I hadn't seen first.
He stopped talking. They looked at each other. I introduced him. Not to have introduced him would have struck him as a slight.
I ordered tea at once in the hope of hastening his departure. He had been curiously silent since she had come in.
But he didn't go. He just sat there, saying nothing, but looking at her furtively now and again, and blinking, as if looking at her hurt him. Whenever she said anything he stared, with his mouth a little open, breathing heavily.
She hadn't paid very much attention to him. Then, suddenly, as if intrigued by his silence, she said:
"Who is the Heaven-afflicted idiot?"
I said, "Ask Mr. Jevons."
She did.
Jevons didn't answer her. He simply looked at her and blinked. Then he looked away again.
"Come," I said, "you might finish what you were going to say."
"I don't know," he muttered, "that I was going to say anything—Oh