The Belfry. Sinclair May

the innocence with which she brought it out.

      "But," I insisted, "that's rather my point. You don't know anything about me either, do you?"

      "Yes, I do. I knew," she said, "the minute I came into the room. If it comes to that, you don't know anything about me."

      I said I did; I knew the minute she came into the room. And she faced me with, "Well then, you see!" as if that settled it.

      I suppose it did settle it. I must have decided that since nobody could stop her, and I wasn't, after all, a villain, if she insisted on being somebody's typist, she had very much better be mine. You see, she was so young. I wanted to protect her. Not that there was anything helpless and pathetic about her, anything, except her innocence, that appealed to me for protection. On the contrary, she struck me as a creature of high courage and defiance. That, of course, was what constituted the danger. She would insist on taking risks. Presently I heard myself saying, "Yes, the Close, Canterbury. I've got that. But where am I to find you here?"

      She gave me an address that made me whistle.

      I asked her if she knew anything, anything whatever, about the people of the house?

      She said she didn't. She had chosen it because it had a nice green door, and there was an Angora cat on the door-step. A large orange cat with green eyes.

      Had she actually taken rooms there?

      No. But she had chosen them (I think she said because they had pretty chintz curtains.) She was going to take them now.

      She had her hand on the door. She was eager, like a child that has got off at last, after irritating delay.

      I closed the door against her precipitate flight. I said I thought we could settle that here, over the telephone.

      And I settled it.

      Having settled it, I sent Pavitt, my man, to get rooms for her that afternoon in Hampstead, with his sister-in-law, in a house overlooking the Heath. I said I couldn't promise her chintz curtains and a green door and an orange Angora cat with green eyes, but I thought she would be fairly comfortable with Mrs. Pavitt.

      She was.

      She told me a week later that the Hampstead rooms had chintz curtains and there was a Persian kitten too. A blue Persian, with yellow eyes.

      There was. But I didn't tell her who put them there.

      The kitten alone (it was a pure-bred Persian) cost me three guineas; and to this day she thinks that Pavitt, who brought it to her, found it on the Heath.

      Yet, with all my precautions, there was trouble when Canterbury heard about my typist. (She had become my typist, though I had never said a word about engaging her.)

      This, of course, was owing to the criminal secrecy with which Viola conducted her affairs. The Minor Canon wrote to me as if I had seduced, or was about to seduce, his daughter. (He had upset himself by rushing up to take her back to Canterbury, and finding that she wouldn't go with him.) I think, in his excitement, he ordered me to give her up. He was a guileless and indeed a holy man; and it's always the guileless and the holy people who raise the uncleanest scandals. And Mrs. Thesiger wrote, and the General and the Dean; and I've no doubt the Archbishop would have written too, if I hadn't unearthed my General at his club, and asked him if he knew the Thesigers, and found out that he did, and implored him to arrange the horrid business for me as best he could. I said he might tell them that if the girl had been left to them to look after her, she would have got into rooms in—I named the street, and testified to the sinister character of the house. And my General wrote and explained to the other General and to the Minor Canon what a thoroughly nice chap I was, and how lamentably they had misunderstood what I believed he was pleased to call my relations with Miss Thesiger. I'm not at all sure that he didn't even go farther and stick in a lot about my family, and suggest that I was eligible to the extent that, though my fortunes were still to make, I had (besides private means that enabled me to live in spite of journalism) considerable expectations (he knew an aunt of mine—better, it would seem, than I did). In short, that I was a thoroughly nice chap, and that the father of seven daughters (five unmarried) might do far worse than cultivate my acquaintance. He must have gone quite as far as that, or farther, otherwise I couldn't account for the peculiarly tender note that the Minor Canon put into the letter of apology that he wrote me, still less for the invitation I received by the same post from Mrs. Thesiger to spend Whitsuntide with them at Canterbury. (Viola had said she was going home for Whitsuntide.)

      Dear lady, she was herself the daughter of a Canon, and she had lived all her life in a cathedral close, and the atmosphere of a cathedral close may foster innocence, but I cannot think it could have been entirely responsible for the kind of indiscretion Mrs. Thesiger was guilty of. Neither do I think Mrs. Thesiger was entirely responsible herself. She is a nice woman, and I am sure she couldn't have written as she did unless my friend the General had led her to believe that there was some sort of an understanding between me and Viola. But still, for all she knew about me, I might have been a villain. Not perhaps the gross villain the Minor Canon took me for, but a villain in some profound and subtle way inappreciable to my friend the General.

      Well, of course I didn't spend Whitsuntide with the Thesigers at Canterbury. It would have been sheer waste of Viola. For the worst of all this confounded rumpus was that it made me put off proposing to Viola till she had forgotten all about it. She would never have listened to me while the trail of the scandal still lingered.

      In fact, it was only the marked coldness of my manner to her just then that saved me.

      * * * * *

      It saved me to suffer. I didn't know it was possible to suffer as she made me suffer—I mean as they made me, between them.

      It didn't begin all at once. 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. I had enough sense to see that her happiness, if she was happy, had nothing to do with me except in so far as I was the humble means, under Providence, of the definite escape from Canterbury.

      For I very soon saw what had been the matter with her. She was one of nine, the youngest but one of seven daughters. The Minor Canon had only been able to educate one of the seven properly, because he had had a son at Sandhurst, and the other was still reading for the Bar, which is pretty expensive too if you're as amiably stupid as Bertie Thesiger. (I mention Bertie because, though he doesn't come into this story, his stupidity and his amiability combined to tighten the situation considerably for Viola.) And Mrs. Thesiger had only been able to marry off two of her seven daughters. Of the others, one (the one who had been to Girton) was a High School teacher in Canterbury and she lived at home; one was a trained nurse and lived at home between cases; that left three girls living continually at home and, as Viola put it, eating their heads off.

      These were the circumstances which Viola (with some omissions) recited by way of justification for her revolt; the fact being that she would have revolted anyway. She was, as I have said, a creature of high courage and vitality and she was tied up much too tight in that Cathedral Close, besides being much too well fed; and she longed to do things. To do them with her hands and with her head. She was tired of playing tennis on the velvet lawns of the Canons' gardens; she was tired of calling on the Canons' wives and talking to their daughters. I am aware that Canterbury is a garrison town and that other resources, and other prospects, I suppose, were open to Viola. But Viola was tired of talking to the garrison. I think she would have been tired in any case, even if the garrison hadn't been bespoken, as it were, by her unmarried sisters. (It is, humanly speaking, impossible that, even in a garrison town, seven sisters will all marry into the Service, as I fatuously supposed Mrs. Thesiger must have realized when