Jaffery

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