Jaffery

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Jaffery, by William J. Locke

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Title: Jaffery
Author: William J. Locke
Release Date: January 11, 2005 [EBook #14669]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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[Illustration: It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with extraordinary sureness and gentleness. (See page 165)]

JAFFERY
BY
WILLIAM J. LOCKE
ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. MATANIA
NEW YORK: JOHN LANE COMPANY
1915
Press of J.J. Little & Ives Company New York, U.S.A.

TO MY WIFE
This book on which it has pleased you to bestow your especial affection I dedicate to you with my love. It is a memory of many happy hours and many dreams that we have shared.
You remember how it was begun, one spring morning two years ago, with the opening scene of the first chapter gay before my eyes as I wrote. You remember the excitement of ending it before the Christmas of 1913; so that we could start with free consciences, early in the New Year, on our Egyptian journey.
C'est bien loin, tout cela! War overtook it in its serial course; and now, in book form, it must go out to the world as an expression of the moods and fancies almost of a past incarnation.
These dream figures with whom we delighted, like children, to people our home, are now replaced by other guests tragically real, as big-hearted as those most loved of our shadow-folk. Yet sometimes they seem still to live. . . . While correcting the final proofs we have been tempted to modify the end, to bring the story of Jaffery more or less up to date; but we have felt that any addition would be out of key, so far are we from that happy Christmastide when, in gaiety of heart, I wrote the last words.
Yet we know, you and I, that Jaffery Chayne is even now over there, across the Channel; no longer writing of war, but doing his soldier's work in the thick of it, like a gallant gentleman. And don't you feel that one day he will come again and we shall hear his mighty voice thundering across the lawn. . . ?
W.J.L.

ILLUSTRATIONS
FACING PAGE
It was his great arms that lifted her feather-weight with extraordinary sureness and gentleness Frontispiece
Where the lonely figure in black and white sat brooding 64
Jaffery, considerably disconcerted, handled the cleek 78
He drew out a great thick clump of galley-proofs 186
"Go! You're nothing but a brute" 228
Before I realized the danger . . . I was flung aside 300
And there, in a wilderness of ransacked drawers and strewn papers, . . . lay a tiny, black, moaning heap of a woman 316
There is war going on in the Balkans. Jaffery is there as war correspondent. Liosha is there, too 350

THE WILLIAM J. LOCKE YEAR-BOOK
A bon-mot for each day in every year, selected from this popular author's works.
Decorated Cloth. $1.00 net
CHAPTER I
I received a letter the day before yesterday from my old friend, Jaffery Chayne, which has inspired me to write the following account of that dear, bull-headed, Pantagruelian being. I must say that I have been egged on to do so by my wife, of whom hereafter. A man of my somewhat urbane and dilettante temperament does not do these things without being worried into them. I had the inspiration, however. I told Barbara (my wife), and she agreed, at the time, dutifully, that I ought to record our friend Jaffery's doings. But now, womanlike, she declares that the first suggestion, the root germ of the idea, came from her; that the "egging on" is merely the vain man's way of misdefining a woman's serene insistence; that she has given me, out of her intimate knowledge, all the facts of the story--although Jaffery Chayne and Adrian Boldero and poor Tom Castleton, and others involved in the imbroglio, counted themselves as my bosom cronies, while she, poor wretch (a man must get home somewhere), was in the nursery; and that, finally, if she had been taught English grammar and spelling at school, she would have dispensed entirely with my pedantic assistance and written the story herself. Anyhow, man-like, I am broad minded enough to proclaim that it doesn't very much matter. Man and wife are one. She thinks they are one wife. I know they are one husband. Between speculation and knowledge why so futile a thing as a quarrel? I proceed therefore to my originally self-appointed and fantastic task.
But on reflection, before beginning, I must honestly admit that if it had not been for