I said it generally came from chill.

She frowned, as if she were not satisfied with that explanation.  And there was another silence.  Then she began again: 

“Would being unhappy—­very, very unhappy—­give it you?”

I thought I saw how her mind was working and I advised her to put that idea out of her head.  Happiness, I said, wouldn’t be good for Jevons.

She said, “Oh, wouldn’t it!” And, after prolonged meditation, “I wonder if he’ll stay that funny yellow colour all his life.”

I found out from her that he had been living in that top room above hers for three weeks—­ever since he had finished his book.  It looked as if he had become frantic when he saw the end of his pretexts and occasions for meeting her, and had cast off all prudence and had followed her, determined to live under the same roof.

I looked on it as a madness that possessed him.

But that it should ever possess her—­that was inconceivable.

II

He recovered.

The brilliant orange of his jaundice faded to lemon, and the lemon to a sallow tint that cleared rapidly as it was flooded by his flush.

I did not realize then what sources he was drawing on.  Looking back on it all, I am amazed at my own stupidity.  I was, of course, aware that Viola was sorry for him; but I might have known that a girl’s pity was not a stimulant that would keep a man like Jevons going for very long.  I am sure he would never have lowered himself by any appeal to it.  Why, the bare idea of pity would have been intolerable to him, bursting, as he was, with vitality and invading with the courage and energy and genius of a conqueror a world that was not his.

He laid before me very soon what I can only call his plan of campaign.  Journalism with him was a purely defensive operation; but the novel and the short story were his attack.  The work that Viola had typed for him was his first novel.  He had dug himself in very securely that winter, and each paper that he had occupied and left behind him was a line of trenches that shifted nearer and nearer towards the desired territory.  He didn’t begin his assault on the public before he had secured his retreat.

I know I am writing about a man whom many people still consider a great novelist and a great playwright.  God knows I don’t want to disparage him.  But to me what he has written matters so little; it has no interest for me except as his vehicle, the vehicle in which he arrived; which brought him to his destination quicker perhaps than any other which he could have chosen.  His talent was so adroit that he might have chosen almost any other; chance and a happy knack and a habit of observation determined his selection of the written word.  Compared with the spectacle of his arrival, what he has written is neither here nor there.  What I have written myself is neither here nor there.  For the purposes of this history it counts only as the means which enabled me to witness the last act of his drama.