The Belfry. Sinclair May

blighter should suppose it's necessary to stick in a storm at sea when it's quite obvious he hasn't seen one—he talks about a brig when he means a bark, and from the way he navigates her you'd say the wind blew all ways at once in the Atlantic."

      I said it might for all I knew; and I asked him if he'd ever seen a storm at sea himself.

      It seemed he had. He'd been ordered a sea-voyage for his health after his spell of printing; and his uncle, who was a sea-captain, took him with him to Hong-Kong in his ship. And he had been all through a cyclone in the Pacific.

      I got him—with some difficulty, for he had become extremely shy—I got him to tell us about it.

      He did. And by the time he had finished with us we had all been through a cyclone in the Pacific.

      It was too much. The little beast could talk almost as well as he wrote.

       A fellow who can write like Tasker Jevons has no business to talk at all.

      Viola left soon after six. He had outstayed her. I went downstairs with her. When I came back to him he was still staring at the doorway she had passed through.

      "Who's that girl?" he said.

      I said she was my typist.

      He meditated, and brought out as the result: "Do you mind telling me how much she charges you?"

      I told him. He looked dejected.

      "I can't afford her," he said presently. "No. I can't possibly afford her. Not yet." He paused. "Do you mind giving me her address?"

      "I thought you said you couldn't afford her?"

      "I can't. Not yet. But I will afford her. I will. I give myself another—" He stopped. His mouth fell ajar, and I saw his lips moving as he went through some inaudible calculation—"another six months."

      He hid his face in his hands and ran his fingers through his hair. Then, as if he conceived himself to be unobserved behind this shelter, he let himself go; and I became the witness of an agony, a passion, a self-abandoned nakedness, to the utter shedding of all reticences and decencies, with nothing but those thin hands and that hair between me and it.

      "I'll work," he said. "I'll work like a hundred bloody niggers. Like ten hundred thousand million sweated tailors in a stinking cellar. I'll pinch. I'll skimp and save. I'll deny myself butter. I'll wear celluloid collars and sell my dress-suit. My God! I'd sell the coat off my back and the shoes off my feet; I'd sell my own mother's body off her death-bed, and go without my dinner for nine months to see her again for five minutes. Just to see her for five minutes. Five (unprintable) little minutes that another man wouldn't know what to do with, wouldn't use for tying up a bootlace in."

      Pause.

      "I didn't know it hurt. I didn't know a girl's face could land you one like this, and her eyes jab you, and her voice turn round and round in your stomach like a circular saw. That's what it feels like. Exactly.

      "Dry up, you old Geyser, yourself. I'm getting it, not you. You'd spout if you'd had to sit tight with all the gas in the shop blazing away under you for the last hour. If you can turn it off at the meter, turn it. I can't. No, I won't have another cup of tea. And I won't get up and clear out, I'm going to sit here another five minutes. I'm not well, I tell you, and it relieves me to talk about it. I don't care if you don't listen. Or if you do. I'm past caring.

      "D'you notice that I didn't speak a word to her—not one blessed word the whole time? I should have choked if I'd tried to. I didn't want to look at her, to think of her. That's why I told that rotten story, just to keep myself going. What a blethering idiot she must have thought me! What a putrid ass! The sea—And me!

      "And the way she looked at me—"

      I said, "D'you mean to say, Jevons, it didn't happen?"

      And he groaned. "Oh, it happened all right. I can't invent things to save my life.

      "God! It isn't even as if she was pretty. I could understand that."

      He grabbed his throat suddenly and began to cough.

      I tried to be kind to him. "Look here," I said, "old chap. I'm awfully sorry if it takes you this way. But it's no good."

      He turned on me coughing and choking. I cannot remember all he said or half the things he called me, but it was something like this: "You snivelling defective." (Cough) "You septic idiot." (Cough) "You poisonous and polluted ass." (Cough, cough, cough) "You scarlet imbecile." (I have to water down the increasing richness of his epithets.) "You last diminutive purple embryo of an epileptic stock, do you suppose I don't know that? No good? Of course it's no good—yet. I got to wait for another six months. And you can take it from me, if a fellow knows what he wants, and doesn't try to get it—doesn't know how to get it—in six months—and doesn't find out—he's no good, if you like."

      These words didn't strike me at the time as having any personal application. He was to repeat them later on, however, in circumstances which I defy anybody to have foreseen.

      * * * * *

      I cannot recall the precise phases of their remarkable friendship. I wasn't present at its earliest stages.

      I had my first intimation of its existence one evening in the winter of nineteen-five, when he dropped in on me to consult me, he said, about a rather delicate matter, in which I gathered there lurked for his inexperience the most frightful pitfalls of offence. That he should come to me in this spirit was evidence that a certain chastening had been going on in him.

      The delicate matter was this. He had given Miss Thesiger a lot of work, the typing of a whole book, in fact. And—he had immense difficulty in getting to this part of it—she had refused to take any payment. She had got it into her head that he was hard up. He had sent her a cheque three times, and three times she had returned it. She was as obstinate as a mule about it. And now she was saying that she had never meant him to pay her; she had done the whole thing out of friendship, which, of course, was very pretty of her, but it put him in a beastly position. He'd never been precisely in that position before and he didn't know what to do about it. He didn't want to offend her and yet he didn't see—did I?—how he could let her do it. It was, he said, all the wrong way about, according to his notions. And for the life of him he didn't know what to do. It might seem to me incredible that such virgin innocence as his should exist in a world where the rules for most sorts of conduct were fairly settled. He had lived all his life in an atmosphere of births, marriages and deaths, and he knew all the rules for the registration of them. And that was about all he did know. And it was the most infernally hard luck to be stumped like this at the very beginning, just when he wanted most awfully to do the right thing.

      Besides, it had knocked him all to bits—the sheer prettiness of it.

      He laid bare for me all the curious intricacies of a soul tortured by its own delicacy. There was agony in his eyes.

      If he were to take this kindness from a lady—would it, in my opinion, or would it not, be cricket?

      I didn't like to tell him that he had brought his agony on himself by his imprudence in employing a typist when he couldn't afford one. So I only said that, if I knew the lady, he would find her uncommonly hard to move.

      He hadn't any hope, he said, of moving her; but did I think that if he made her a present—say, the Collected Works of George Meredith, it would meet the case?

      I said it would meet the case all right, but that in my opinion it would spoil its prettiness. If Miss Thesiger didn't want to be paid in one way, she wouldn't at all care about being paid in another. Perhaps Miss Thesiger liked being pretty. Hadn't he better leave it at that, anyhow, for the present?

      You see I looked on Viola and Viola's behaviour as infinitely more my concern than his. I found myself replying for her as she would have wished me to reply, as if I could claim an intenser appreciation of her motives than was his, as if she and I were agreed about this question of helping Tasker Jevons and I were the custodian of her generosity.