owed to come and
stay with us?"

I said I was sure she was mistaken. Canon Thesiger--

"Oh," she said, "it wasn't Daddy. He wouldn't have minded. It was Mummy.
She never _could_ bear poor Jimmy."

"But," she went on, "you're his friend. And he worked it for you. They
can't get over those two things."

I remember wondering whether deep down in her heart she meant that my
marriage would knit her and Jimmy closer?

I wondered whether Jimmy, in his wisdom, had calculated on that, too?

* * * * *

At that time I didn't realize the innocence that went with Jimmy's
wisdom. I think I credited him with insight that I know now he never had.
I know now that, even afterwards--at the very worst--he had no
misgivings. All the Hampstead time, all through the Edwardes Square time
he was happy. And afterwards--well--happiness wasn't the word for it; he
lived in a sort of ecstasy. Which shows how little in those days she had
let him see.

It was in nineteen-ten, their last year in Edwardes Square, that the
tension began. Norah and I were married in the autumn of nineteen-nine,
and we were living in my flat in Brunswick Square. In what I made out
during this period I had Norah to help me, and she had wonderful lights.

I never could keep track of Jimmy's accelerating material progress, but
the Year-Books tell me that his fourth novel came out in the spring of
nineteen-nine, and his first successful play was produced in the summer
of that year, and ran for the whole season and on through the winter, and
I remember that in nineteen-ten he was attacking another novel and
another play, which--But it's the attack that is the important thing, the
thing that fixes nineteen-ten for me.

You cannot go on attacking, for years on end, with concentrated and
increasing violence, and not suffer for it. The first effects of Jimmy's
appalling travail may have been beneficent, but its later workings were
malign. There's no other word for it. In nineteen-ten Jimmy was beginning
to show signs of exhaustion. Not of his creative energy or anything
belonging to it, though he prophesied a falling off after Novel Three,
and declared that he could detect it. Nobody else could have detected it.
The exhaustion was in Jimmy himself, and more especially and fatally in
the Jimmy who struggled against what he called "the damnable tendency to
do the sort of thing your father does."

He couldn't keep it up. He couldn't stand fo