She had her revenge.  One of those revenges that are the more triumphant because they are unpremeditated.  She had dished me as a war-correspondent.

For I declare that from the moment when we found Jevons and his General in the hotel I became the victim of her miserable point of view.  I could only see the war through Jevons, and as a part of Jevons; I might have said, like Viola, that to me Ghent was Jevons, and Belgium was Jevons, and the war was Jevons.  I suppose I saw as much of the War from first to last as any Special Correspondent at the front, and I know, that, barring the Siege of Antwerp, the three weeks when Jimmy was in it were by no means the most important or the most thrilling weeks in the war; and of the one event, the Siege of Antwerp, I didn’t see as much as I ought to have seen, being most terribly handicapped by Viola.  And yet—­perhaps a little because of Viola, but infinitely more because of Jevons—­those three weeks stand out in my memory before the battles of the Aisne and Marne and the long fight for Calais.  Because of Jevons I have made them figure, in the columns of the Morning Standard and elsewhere, with a superior vividness; even now when I recall them I seem to have lived with Jevons in Flanders through long periods of time.

I have the proof of my obsession before me in a letter from the editor of the Morning Standard, dated October the twelfth.  He says, “We are interested, of course, in anything relating to Mr. Tasker Jevons, and his performances seem to have been remarkable.  You have written a very fine account of Melle, which I understand is a small village four and a-half miles from Ghent.  But there are other events—­the Fall of Antwerp, for instance.”

Well, we got the story of the Fall of Antwerp all right.  But Jimmy wrote it for me.  It was the last thing he did write.

Yes:  he had only three weeks of it, all told.  He went out on Tuesday, September the twenty-second, and he came back on Tuesday, October the thirteenth.  It was his infernal luck that he should have had no more of it.

And yet, I don’t know.  I don’t see how he could have held out much longer at his pitch of intensity.  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.  For he was under orders the whole blessed time.  He’d no more freedom, hadn’t Jimmy, than that poor devil of a waiter.  He’d got to go or to stay where a fussy old ram of a Colonel sent him.  So here he was in Ghent, an open city, when he wanted to be in Antwerp.  He hadn’t been anywhere—­anywhere at all.  As for what he’d done, he couldn’t see what the fuss was all about.  He hadn’t done anything.  He’d seen a little fight in a turnip-field, and a little squabble for a bridge you could blow up to-day and build again to-morrow, and a little tin-pot town peppered.  And look at the war!  Just look at the war!