Chapter XXXV

Jim tore himself away from Viola with an angry heart. It was too hard that she should choose this moment of his deepest abasement to taunt him with her friendliness. Couldn’t she see he was down and out?

Roused by the vehemence of his own speech he had sat by her side for half the evening, fighting with his love for her.

He had never dreamed human love was like this, a creature that took no denial, choked and tortured you for expression, flooded you like light, and retreated from you with the same astonishing rapidity, leaving you in utter darkness.

Jim had felt full of gentleness and chivalry for Viola one moment, and full of fierceness and stubborn anger against her the next. His shame about Eliza confused his judgment.

He wanted to let Viola alone and keep her ignorant of his despair, and then crowding in upon this want rushed a sharp desire to see her share his knowledge, and let her know, if only for a moment his own personal stress.

Well, he had let her know; he had shocked her like some savage, clumsy animal and frightened her away from him for ever.

Wivvle wouldn’t have shocked her. Wivvle could break your heart and be like a bog under your feet, but he wouldn’t, beneath any weight of ineptitude, turn nasty.

It was always Wivvle and not Ainley to whom Jim compared himself in his moments of abasement. Ainley hadn’t that indefinable charm which made the idea of shock or offence from Wivvle inconceivable.

In all moments of crisis Jim felt the roughness of his origin break out in him. The men spoke of his fierceness as powerful and splendid. ‘There’s old Jim roused at last!’ they would say appreciatively. But Jim dreaded his moments of passion, he knew them for what they were—dangerous defeats of the will.

His gusts of feeling shook him when he was at his weakest. Strength wasn’t violence, it was steadiness. It wasn’t shaking other people, it was keeping your own heart unshaken when everything else around you was unsteady.

The summer night soothed him like the touch of a hand. London, with all its trivial havoc of the day, was covered by the soft, friendly dark.

The air tasted of far away orchards, the buses had stopped and the swift, infrequent motors plunging through the night only broke for a moment the increasing silences.

Jim walked quickly across the Square and by the solid shadow of the Park. His anger flickered and went out. He turned his thoughts down into his heart till they found rest. His love for Viola went deeper than the hunger for possession.

After all, he did possess her still, however much he had lost her. She was beautiful enough to go on loving, even if she didn’t belong to him.

Life was no longer an impersonal job; once she had come to him for help, and once she had stood there and wanted him for herself—wanted him, however little, as a friend.

Some wall in his mind had broken down at her touch, and let in a new light upon the world. Jim had never understood lovers before. The foolish and the terrible things they did to satisfy their hearts had seemed unreal and puzzling to him.

His own controlled passions and steady common sense had recoiled before the blind and headlong eagerness of this strange hunger in the dark.

He had thought love a little thing to distract and ruin lives, and not enough to crown them. He would never feel it a little thing again, and if he could not have the love he wanted, he found that his love for men and women was quickened even by its loss.

He knew even now in this first quiet hour, that people were suddenly as important to him as causes. He cared with a new depth for the wisps of humanity, blown like thistledown across a field on to embankment benches.

The lost and fallen by the way did not seem to him despicable any more; he thought of them with tenderness. They had found all the lessons of life too hard to bear, and, slipping out of them, had reached the hardest of all—and were learning it.

Even his anger against Eliza seemed a less final thing. He wished that he could meet her now with this new feeling in him. But Eliza had not sunk to the embankment. She was not like thistledown, she was more like the wind that drove it.

Eliza had slipped into Piccadilly Circus and by an inconspicuous route worked her way home to the most evasive of her haunts. She supposed that Jim had found her out, but she thought that, for his own sake, he would hold his tongue.

She had no fear of Viola whatever. Viola was soft.

Eliza would have been as astonished as she would have been furious if she had known that Jim meant to report her to the police. She wouldn’t have seen the sense of it.

But not even his new tenderness for her deflected Jim. It was horrible to think of Eliza caught and behind bars, but his only alternative was more horrible still—always to see her predatory and hovering with the world her victim.

Jim knew the Yard well; he had gone there again and again to befriend criminals, but never to report them. He was not afraid or ashamed of the detectives’ keen impersonal knowledge.

It wasn’t people’s knowing that Jim minded most about Eliza, it was having to stand there as if he were different from her, and on the side of the world, and not her brother and on her side against all her enemies.

It was monstrous to him to have to tell against her—all his instinct was with Eliza and against the world. But his reason wasn’t. His reason pointed out that though the world was almost always wrong in its methods it was seldom wrong in its aims.

People like Eliza couldn’t be allowed to prey on the innocent. You had got, if you cared for any system of protection at all, to be on the side of protection against robbery. Eliza wouldn’t be any worse for going to prison; she would always be as bad as she could. The only limit Eliza set on crime was that of her own capacity for carrying it out.

The moon stood high above the river, catching the small gardens under Westminster. Rodin’s ‘Burghers of Calais,’ huddled against the dark mass of Parliament buildings, stood out sharp and clear on its small silvered patch of grass.

They knew what they were about, these patient, reluctant men, giving themselves up with halters on their necks (to save their free city) into the hands of Kings. They didn’t like it. Their wavering, huge hands and dragging feet revealed their natural shrinking from death. But they had perfectly agreed to it. They were the steadiest of champions, men who had counted the cost and knew that it was worth while to pay it.

It was a great comfort to Jim to see them, and to feel that they were going to do what they had to do without enthusiasm. They were the first heroes he had ever seen who hadn’t any charm.

They helped him to go to Scotland Yard and give his evidence against Eliza.

The Superintendent whom he saw was extremely considerate.

‘You’d be surprised,’ he said after he had taken down the details of Jim’s story, ‘what people have criminals in their families. It seems to go about like measles, stealing does, taking first one and then the other. A pity there isn’t a rash to trace them by, that’s all.

‘Now, about your sister, you’ll bring us all the information that comes your way, and when we’re on her track (and in the long run we catch out the neatest if they’re habitual) we’ll communicate with you. But don’t expect anything in a hurry, and I’ll advise Mr. Egerton not to advertise or make a fuss. Your sister won’t sell the necklace as a necklace—it’ll go pearl by pearl, and it’ll take some tracing, and if she thinks we aren’t moving she’ll be all the more likely to slip up. I only wish we knew as much as you do about river thieves, but I suppose you’d as soon tell me as take a dive off the Bridge?’

Jim nodded, but he winced as he turned away from the inspector. Every one, apparently, was safe with him, except his sister.

Jim had done what he had set out to do, but it would have been a good deal easier if he could have done it with the pride and anger he had felt when he left Viola. It was like paying Viola back to give up Eliza then, but to give her up when his love had got the better of his temper was like black treachery.

He felt as if nothing beautiful could ever happen to him again.

He was nearly thirty, and for the rest of his life he would do what he meant, and have nothing beyond what he expected.

After all, the Burghers of Calais, walking out to their doom with their halters around their necks, had got off better than Jim. They had worn their own halters and thought they were going to die, and Jim had put a halter on somebody else’s neck, and knew that he was going to face nothing so final or so adventurous as death.