And there he was scoring.

And it was as if he had said to himself long ago, “As for Viola, I know all about it.  I know I do things that make the poor child shudder; but I can put that all right.  I can make her forget it.  I give myself three weeks.”  As if he said, “She thought she was going to leave me.  I knew that, too, and I didn’t care.  She might have left me a thousand times and I should have brought her back.”

I used to think it pathetic that Jevons should have wanted Mrs. Thesiger to love him—­that he should have wanted Reggie to.  But I must say his pathos was avenged. They were pathetic now.  That big, hulking Major wasn’t happy unless he was writing Jimmy’s letters, or cutting up Jimmy’s meat for him, or helping him in and out of his clothes.  Mrs. Thesiger wasn’t happy unless she was doing things for him.  The Canon wasn’t happy (though, like Norah, he had nothing on his conscience) and Mildred and Millicent and Victoria weren’t happy, nor the Thesiger’s friends in the Cathedral Close.

And then—­after they had made a hero of him for six weeks—­on that Saturday night when we were all together in the Canon’s library, Jevons made his confession.

We had been, exchanging reminiscences.  Something had made Viola think of Jimmy’s General and the two Colonels at Ghent.  She began telling the Canon how we had watched them through the glass screen, and how funny General Roubaix had looked with his arm round Jimmy’s neck, and how he had said that Jimmy was a salamander, and that he didn’t know what fear is.

“Oh, don’t I!” said Jimmy.

And that sent Reggie back to the day when he had first seen Jimmy.

“Look here, old man, what made you say you were an arrant coward?”

“Because,” said Jimmy simply, “I am one.  Dear old Roubaix was talking through his hat.

“Not know what fear is!  I know a good many things, but I don’t know anything better than that.  You can’t tell me anything about fear I don’t know.

“You’ve no idea how I funked going out to the war.  Yes—­funked.

“It wasn’t any ordinary funk, mind you, the little, creepy feeling in your waist, and your tummy tumbling down, and your heart sort of fluttering over the place where it used to be.  I believe you can get over that.  And I never had that—­ever, except once when I saw Viola in a place where she’d no business to be.  It was something much worse.  It—­it was in my head—­in my brain.  A sort of madness.  And it never let me alone.  It was worse at night, and after I got up and began to go about in the morning—­when my brain woke and remembered, but it was there all the time.

“I saw things—­horrors.  And I heard them.  I saw and heard the whole war.  All the blessed time—­all those infernal five weeks before I got out to it, I kept seeing horrors and hearing them.  There was a lot of detail—­realism wasn’t in it—­and it was all correct; because I verified it afterwards.  Things were just like that.  Every morning when I got up I said to myself I’m going out to that damned war, but I wish to God somebody’d come and chloroform me before I get there.  There were moments when I could have chloroformed myself.  I felt as if it was the utter injustice of God that I—­I—­had to be mixed up in it.