CHAPTER SIX

"I didn't deny it."

"But why didn't you? Youshouldhave denied it. It was absurd for you to be blamed. You didn't persuade me at all—I made up my mind myself. It wasn'tyourfault."

"You thanked me in your letter for what I had said, anyhow."

"Did I? Did I?" His eyes sharpened as if searching for something inside his own head. "I don't remember that letter. I only remember sitting up all night and making up my mind that I couldn't—Icouldn't..." Some spasm of memory seemed to give him eagerness; he went on: "Don't you see why wemusthelp Severn? ...Icouldn'tthen—hemustn'tnow—don't youfeelhow it is? ... Wemusthelp him—he's unhappy—he's been driven into all this by his unhappiness. It's nothisfault."

At any rate, we had come back to the main argument. That was something. "I'm afraid," I said, "that you're in danger of flying to the other extreme about Severn. I believe, as you do, that he's fundamentally a decent fellow, but the fact remains that he's infernally clever and can lie beautifully whenever it suits him. It seems to me that it's hardly likely that the right'sallon his side. Most probably Helen has a case, if she were here to tell it."

"Oh, I know ... it's notherfault."

"You say it's not her fault, and not Severn's fault either. Then whose fault do you suppose it is?"

I was a fool to ask that question. It made him suddenly crumple up—made him lean forward with his head in his outstretched hands and yield himself up to desolate, hysterical sobbing. "Myfault," he cried, as soon as he had power to utter a word. "Not his—or hers either—but mine—mine—allmine...."

VII

And that, after seven years, was what he had been driven to....

No more brave talk about putting all that part of his life away from him; no more assurances that he didn't care, that he had forgotten, that he didn't want to be reminded. He hadn't forgotten; he couldn't forget; the past was all over him, obsessing and dominating. And with the past was bound up somehow or other his own guilt. Wherever and whenever we began to argue, that was always where we ended.Hewas guilty.Hehad been the cause of all the trouble—of Helen's coolness to Severn, of my estrangement from Helen, of Severn's escapade with the 'other' woman, of all that had gone amiss. His guilt forced itself on him—gave him no rest or peace—was both a cause and a symptom of the disaster that was so close to him. He had never been especially religious, in the sense of attending church and so on; yet this consciousness of guilt was a thing of almost religious fervour—but without the peace of forgiveness that religion would have given him. There was some odd streak in him that would never let him do anything by halves; in love, in work, even in repentance, his spirit knew no moderation. When I tried to argue away the extremity of what he felt, he shook his head and answered: "You don't know what happened.... When we get back to Vienna you can see the letters she sent me. They'll tell you more than I ever can. They'll show you how the guilt of all this ismine...."

We missed lunch; we had no appetite. I packed my things, and Terry's as well; Severn was elsewhere, conducting, no doubt, somewhat delicate negotiations with Madame. The time crawled sombrely through that almost impossibly hot day; Terry and I adjourned to the writing-room, where I scribbled a note to Bentley, telling him with an air of casualness that the woman whom he had seen in Severn's company wasn't Mrs. Severn, but a Hungarian friend. Bentley would have no reason to doubt it, and it would prevent him from chattering awkwardly. Terry's idea was that only the three of us should ever know the details, and even we, he said, must try to forget. "He's going back to Helen—that's the main thing. This other business is only an incident—closed from now onwards."

"But suppose Helen doesn't want him?" I said. "What then?"

He shook his head as a theologian might shake away the momentary temptation of heresy. "Shewillwant him," he said, at length. "Shemustwant him.... When we get back to Vienna I'm going to write to her—about Severn and about you. It's terrible that she's gone on blaming him and you for what is allmyfault. I shall write to her and tell hereverything."

"But you can't. You can't tell her about Severn and this woman."

"I can tell her everythingexceptthat."

"If Severn's going back to her, it seems to me there's no need to write at all. Even to mention him would look suspicious. In fact, to write a letter of any kind, after your long silence, would probably make her wonder what had been happening."

He said, sombrely: "Imustwrite—but it's true what you say—I ought to have written before—long before—only I was a fool—a coward—I thought I had done with it all...."

Back again, inexorably and inevitably, at his own guilt....

VIII

Severn agreed with me that he was ill. I had a short but amazing conversation with him as we stood at the bureau counter to settle our respective bills. He began immediately: "Look here, Hilton, has it ever struck you that our friend's not quite himself at times?"

"You mean Terry?"

"Yes. I don't lay claim to be a mental expert, but I reckon I can see trouble when it's staring me in the face.... It struck me he might have been overworking—I'm told Karelsky's rather a slave-driver—and then with this affair on top of it all.... Of course it's all perfectly stupid and none of his business, but then how can you argue with a man whose eyes keep on telling you that he's trembling on the brink of the beyond? ... That's a fact—I'm not exaggerating. He was like that with me this morning when you left us—I felt Ihadto humour him, or else he might have gone right off his head there and then.... And, as it happens, it doesn't particularly matter to me whether I go back now or next week, as I had intended."

Sothatwas what had happened. Terryhadn'treally conquered, and Severnhadn'treally given in.... I said: "And when you get to England I suppose you'll carry out your original intentions?"

He shrugged his shoulders and replied that he didn't really know what he should do. It all depended on Helen. If she wanted her freedom she'd have to have it. There wasn't much fun in staying with a woman who didn't want you, was there? It was a pity, he said, that there had been this meeting—it would have been far better if we had waited until the sensational news came in the Sunday papers—if it ever did. "You don't suppose I'd do all this without good reasons, do you? The only thing I didn't bargain for was a meeting with a mad missionary. Yes, I mean that. And the trouble is that I like him too much to be able to tell him to go to the devil.... As a matter of fact, the thing's damned serious, by the look of it. What he wants is rest—absolute rest—for weeks and months—otherwise there's going to be a serious smash-up. Know what I mean?"

I said I thought I did, and he relapsed into his semi-facetious humour. "Thank heaven," he said, "that Madame presents no problem. Dear, kind creature—she will be delighted to go back to Bukarest for a slightly larger sum than she charged me for bringing her away.... What a pity we cannot settle everything in life by money!"

Nothing of all this surprised me. It was plausibility itself compared with the theory that Terry had persuaded Severn by some miracle of eloquence or importunity.

Those few remaining hours in Buda-Pesth stay in my memory with nightmarish vividness. The heat—the dust—the smells of cooking;Blattae Orientalesplaying hide-and-seek on the floor; porters sweating and straining under loads of luggage; the Vienna train at the platform like a row of sweltering ovens, reeking with paprika and human bodies and half-molten varnish. Shade temperature in the station—thirty-four Centigrade.... And over and around the torture of it was the tragic atmosphere of illusion—Terry thinking all the time that he had really convinced and converted Severn, and Severn, on his side, having no suspicion of the Terry-Helen episode. Their crumpled heat-soaked unawareness was an infinitely pathetic thing.

Only Severn was cheerful. He talked to us endlessly, and without getting much in the way of answers, for even to open one's mouth to speak a single word was to cause an extra bead of perspiration to trickle disagreeably down one's forehead. But Severn seemed not to care, and when we reached Vienna, with a few hours' interval before the departure of the Paris express from another station, it was perhaps inevitable that he should take command. He knew Vienna well (what citydidn'the know well?) and I rather wished he were staying on with us. Even the night was almost unbearably warm, and with sure instinct he led us to the cool Rathaus-Keller and ordered iced drinks. Terry spoke hardly at all, and neither did I; the ordeal of the train-journey had been too much for us. But Severn, of all the men I ever met, was the most impervious to physical surroundings; neither heat, nor train-journeys, nor even all-night sittings at the House could disturb that marvellous equanimity. He seemed, indeed, as he sat there in the Rathaus-Keller with his tankard of lager before him, a lithe and entrancingly-mannered boy; and even the stories he told of his life in Vienna twenty years before did not take away from him that extraordinary air of youthfulness. He had spent a year in the city, he said, picking up the language and having a good time. He hadlived, and his eyes, seeing again the old familiar scenes, shone with it. This Rathaus-Keller—what times he had had there! ... And then on the wall he caught sight of an advertisement of a variety-show at Ronacher's, and it reminded him of the old Ronacher's, where he had seen Rannin, the Cingalese with the Iron Skin, who had climbed a ladder of sword-blades barefoot, and the Chevalier Cliquot, whose pastime had been to swallow twenty-two-inch cavalry sabres, and the Human Ostrich, and Madame Elise, the Parisian Strong Lady, and the rest of them.... Ah, those old days! ...

But the time drew near for the departure of the Paris train. The holiday season was at its height, and when we reached the East Station we found it packed with tourists bound for the Tyrol. Severn had not reserved a seat, and for a few moments it seemed doubtful whether he would even secure a cramped position in a first-class compartment. A berth in thewagon-litwas out of the question; all had been reserved weeks before. It was then, faced with these unexpected privations, that he suggested staying in Vienna till the morning train, which would probably be less crowded. "Supposing," he said, "we look in at Ronacher's, and then I'll take you the round of the sights—the Prater's rather worth seeing after midnight...."

"Mizzi could probably give him a room," I whispered to Terry. The postponement of the journey until the morning seemed to me perfectly reasonable, apart from the attractiveness of the alternative programme that Severn had sketched out.

But Terry said: "You promised you would get back at the very earliest moment you could, didn't you?"

And Severn then, with his most charming smile, replied: "Idid, Terry, and I'll keep my word.... Perhaps there'll be more room on the train the other side of Innsbrück. Anyhow, don't wait for it to go out—it'll probably be hours late. And besides, I'm just as anxious really to get comfortable in my seat as you are to go back to your hotel.... Ronacher's and the rest will do the next time we are all of us here together...." (But there hasn't been, so far, and probably never will be, a next time.)

I liked him at that last moment more, I think, than I had ever done before. It's true, though odd perhaps, that it's not the big things that people do that win your heart to them, but often the very smallest. And so it is that all the big important things that Severn had done to help me hadn't made me like him so much as this gay, almost nonchalant farewell, and the thought I had of him sweltering the night through in a packed train, and then sweltering through the next day and the night after that—and all for no other reason than to help Terry. His last words, as he shook hands with me, were: "Ring me up as soon as you get back to town, and we'll fix up a lunch together."

There was a curious sadness after we had left him, and the warm streets were full of it. We strolled back to the Laudon Gasse with hardly a word between us. I wondered what Mizzi would say to our unexpected return, but she wasn't there when we arrived and the hall-porter told us she probably wouldn't be back until late.

He showed me Helen's letters that night. I had expected a small bundle, but there were only three; and he asked me to read them, not while I was with him, but later on when I was alone. The chance came after I had bidden him good-night; I went downstairs into the lounge, switched on one of the shaded table-lamps, lit a cigarette, and read the letters very carefully. They were none of them long, and all had been written and posted within a month of his arrival in Vienna. It was an odd sensation to sit in a hotel-lounge at two o'clock in the morning and disentangle a mystery; there was something eerie, almost, in trying to build up from a few sheets of handwriting the complete picture of what had happened seven years before. But there it was, in clear focus at last, and one glance was enough to show how wrong my ideas had been.

Those letters were a revelation. They seemed to me the sort of letters that Helen could never have written, but perhaps that is the usual experience of outsiders who read other people's love-letters. Yes, theywerelove-letters, except that the description is a shade too temperate.... And—to put the matter quite frankly—they werenotthe wayward, semi-harmless chits that a married woman might send to a young exile in whom she was sentimentally interested. They were, on the contrary, highly damaging and incriminating documents; and all the time I was reading them I was picturing a packed Divorce Court in which some cool, smooth-voiced advocate (like Severn) was doling them out, sentence by sentence, and pausing with uplifted eyebrows at the end of each.

The earliest of the trio had evidently been written and posted within a few hours of that quarrel with me in the Fleet Street tea-shop. There was, of course, no mention of it in the letter, and at least half the sentences were indignant questions. For instance:

"... Terry, whatdoesyour scrappy little note really mean? Why have you gone after all? What need was there for you to go? I feel dazed by it, so far; I cannot understand how or why you could have done it, after what we had arranged. Surely it was wonderful enough for us to be together, meeting so often, and with all the summer before us that we had planned—how could youdareto break it all to pieces by going away? Terry, I'm angry with you—Ididthink you would keep your word to me. Tell me what made you go—tell mewhy. And for God's sake, if you find there's nothing for you in Vienna, have the courage to come back. I'm frightened to think of you with that man Karelsky—he seems to me to be everything you'll never guess he is till it's too late.... Oh, youarea fool for running away like this—it was our wonderful chance, and you've bungled all of it. I don't know whether I can ever forgive you...."

A pause of ten days, and then the next, evidently in answer to a letter from him:

"Your letter arrived this morning at breakfast-time. Geoffrey said: 'Who's it from?', and I said: 'It's from Terry, saying he's arrived safely and is settling down.' Then he said 'Good!' in a loud voice, and I felt I wanted to knife him for saying 'good' when everything was so bad.... Terry, it's almost killing me to think that I could have had you that last night if only I had had the courage. I wish to God Ihadhad, but what's the good of that to me now? Terry, thereweredifficulties—money and so on—and you oughtn't to have thought I didn't love you enough, just because I didn't agree straightway. I love you enough foranything, and I know it now that you've gone.... I just feel I can't endure it—it's inhuman of you to give me no second chance—and yet you always were like that, I know. Everything or nothing—and now, I suppose, it's nothing.... What you say about being sorry shows how different you are;I'mnot sorry, except that I didn't seize the chance when it was offered me...."

And as a postscript the single sentence: "I don't think I can everlivewithout you, and you know what I mean byliving, don't you?"

The third and last letter was the longest. Dated almost exactly a calendar month after Terry's departure, it began:

"Your letter made me feel that I shall never want to write to you again, and if, as you threaten, you don't reply to this, I certainly shan't. What sort of a man are you that you can change so quickly? Your letter might have been written by a parson—or did you, perhaps, get some parson to collaborate with you? Please let me inform you that the old Terry that I loved, and that I love still, was the only man on earth who could ever have made me 'live usefully,' and that the new Terry, with his moralisings and platitudes, only makes me feel I want to go straight to the Devil. Howdareyou mention Geoffrey's career as a reason whyIshould sacrifice my happiness? And even June—what hasshegot to do with it? I suppose you think that the 'che-ild' comes in rather usefully, or else your parson collaborator put you up to the idea.... As for your work—devote yourself to it by all means, but why should you try to make me believe that you can't have more thanonething in life? My advice to you (since you have given yours so plentifully to me) is to marry some Viennese girl who loves you and is also a business woman—someone who'll stop you from making an utter fool of yourself. I go white with rage when I read over parts of your letter. What do you mean by saying that love dies soon when the mind is occupied by work? Doesyours?Minedoesn't. And what do you mean by talking of your great sin? Therewasno sin, and if what might have been is a sin, then it was I and not you who stopped short of it. Not that I want any credit for that.... I can't understand you. I can't understand how you could behave as you did that night and then, a month later, send me a sermon. I don't feel that it isyou—the realyou—that wrote me that letter at all, but somebody else—somebody I have never known. Did you ever really love me at all, I wonder, or was it, on your side, merely the passion you now profess to be ashamed of? It wasn't that onmyside; I really loved you, more than I could love anybody else in the world; I loved even your work and your ideals because they were yours.... Idon'tfeel ashamed, and youdo, and there's an end of it...."

While I was reading over that last letter for the second time, Mizzi came in. She had seen the light through the window, and had wondered who could be staying up so late. We shook hands gravely, and she said that the porter had told her of our return, and that she was not altogether surprised since Buda-Pesth in midsummer was so hot and—andunheimlich.That—her using a German word instead of puzzling out an English one—showed me that she was perturbed; and when she asked me how Terry was, a sudden impulse made me place a chair for her opposite to mine and tell her everything about him.Everything. And also I showed her the letters.

Perhaps I was wrong to do that without his permission, but there are times when you risk being wrong. I wanted Mizzi to know everything about Terry because, in the end, I wanted her to marry him. I talked to her especially about the letters; they showed, I said, the tragic difference between Terry and Helen. "She was right when she said it was all or nothing with him.... Apparently she was quite willing to carry on a more or less decorous affair with him whilst still living with her husband. But hewasn't."

Mizzi nodded and asked me about the 'last night' mentioned in the second of the letters. I described briefly the Karelsky party and the odd way in which Terry and Helen had managed to separate themselves from the rest of the crowd. "I imagine," I said, "that sometime or other during that evening he asked her point-blank to come away with him. No doubt she either refused or else hesitated, and in the end it was arranged that he should decline the Vienna job and stay in London where they could go on meeting each other.... Then afterwards he felt the intolerableness of the situation. He couldn't bear at all what she, apparently, could bear quite easily—the having of things by halves. It wasn't in his nature.... So he cut the knot and came out here."

"I can understand ... I can understand him wanting all of her—or else none of her."

"So can I. And, in a way, I can understandherside, as well. After all, he had no money, and neither had she.... It would have been sheer madness for them to run away, and it was her nature to think of that, just as it was his nature not to."

Then we discussed the third and most extraordinary of the three letters. What sort of stuff must Terry have sent her to have evoked such a stinging reply? I suggested that he might have deliberately written her a rather caddish letter in order to kill her love for him, but Mizzi thought he wasn't calculating or clever enough for that. "I think," she said, "that he was perfectly sincere. Hedidthink, then, that love would die when the mind was occupied by work. Hedidthink that he had committed a sin, and that his love for her had been just a passion.... I think he meant every word of what he wrote."

"It's a pity we can'tseehis letter," I said, but she replied: "I don't think I want to see it. I feel I know what it would be like. Rather stiff and—and awful ... can't you imagine it?"

I tried to, but I'm afraid I hadn't, and never have had, her clairvoyant knowledge of Terry. I went on to explain the difficulties he was in, and how he felt responsible for the trouble between Helen and her husband, as well as for my quarrel with Helen, and Severn's "affair" in Buda-Pesth, and Heaven knew what else. "He's in a mood to take upon himself responsibility for all the suffering in the world," I said, "and it would be comic if it wasn't tragic. Everything ishisfault—nothing anybody else's."

She said: "I can so easily believe that. He has a spirit in him—that makes him try to do perfect things—and then blames him when they aren'tquiteperfect...."

We were silent for a while, and then she went on: "All through the time I haf known him he has been like that—trying for the perfect goal and flogging himself because he couldn't reach it.... He would have made a great saint—in the Middle Ages ... but not to-day." She smiled as she added: "I remember when he taught me English—he taught me as if I were a sinner, and English the true faith...."

We talked on for a while about what we could do to help him, but at the end of it all only a few desirabilities emerged—that he should take a long holiday and make more friends and work less hard. As we shook hands at the foot of the stairs she said: "It iss so hard to help people who will not haf what they want. If only I could write to this Helen and ask her to come to him! Or if only some fate would send him back to her! ... But no—he will not haf what he wants. Nor will he want what he could haf.... He iss born to beunglücklich...."

Sunday.

Terry looked better in the morning; I asked him if he had slept well, and he replied: "Oh, yes, I was so very tired after last night....Last night! Doesn't it seem years away? And isn't it comfortable to be back here?"

"Yes," I agreed. "Mizzi has a genius for making things comfortable."

He seemed surprised at my mentioning her. "I suppose itisMizzi," he said, after a pause, and seemed to ponder over the matter.

Not till breakfast was over did he mention the letters, and then only because I took the opportunity of handing them back to him. He seemed afraid that I might discuss them with him; he told me that he didn't want me ever to mention them; but that he hoped they had made me realize. What he hoped they had made me realize he didn't say, but I presumed he meant his own overwhelming guilt.... But he wouldn't discuss the matter further. The thing of immediate importance, he said, was the letter to Helen that he was going to write.

I seized the opportunity then of giving him a straight talk about his health. I told him frankly that he seemed to me to be on the verge of a serious breakdown, and rather to my surprise he didn't indignantly deny it. He even admitted that he had been working too hard and that he needed a holiday. "I'll take one," he said, "as soon as all this business is settled. I'll go to Salzburg or Ischl or somewhere—Mizzi will advise me...." He smiled his familiar half-smile and added: "You needn't worry—Ishall be all right."

He didn't mention his work, and when I ventured a remark, he said: "Just now—for the time—I can't think of it. That's why I daresay you're right—Idoneed a rest.... But before I have it, I must earn it—I must undo, if I can, some of the harm I've done...."

Soon after that I left him to compose his letter to Helen. It was something, at any rate, that he had agreed to take a holiday, but Mizzi, when I told her, was less impressed. "He has promised scores of times," she said, "but always—at the last moment—there has been an excuse."

The morning dragged on, and then literally, as well as metaphorically, came the clouds. It was raining hard at mid-day, and when I went up to his room I found him with a blank writing-pad in front of him and weariness in his eyes. For two hours he had been trying to write, and not a word would come—not a word.

Nor could I help him. The more I pondered, the more impossible seemed the idea of writing to her at all. And yet, for his own sake, it was necessary, his only hope lay in supposing that he could undo what he believed himself to have done. I urged him not to worry about it—to leave it for a while, at any rate. And he turned to me then with a look of sad finality and replied: "But you see, it must—itmust—catch to-night's mail...."

We had lunch, and then, inexorably, he went back to his desk. I tried once or twice to make suggestions, but he seemed to mistrust them. Words, he said, came easily to me because I was a journalist, but they were no good to him unless they were the wordshewanted.... He didn't want her to think this ... or that ... but something in between—something elusive and perfect—something in his own mind that ever evaded pursuit. If only he could make her see everything ashesaw it.... If only the words would come, one after the other in a constant stream, without any agonizing search for them.... But I wondered myself if therewereany words for what he felt.

XII

The time of posting for the night-mail was seven at the latest, and at five I went down to fetch Mizzi. "For God's sake," I told her, "come up and tell him that letters for England don't go on a Sunday. He's trying to write something, and if he doesn't get it done in time, he'll collapse.... Tell him anything you like that'll put him off."

She did. She did it rather well. She waited for a few moments till after I had rejoined him, and then came up with some idle chatter about the weather. He was still at his desk, taking hardly any notice of anything but the paper in front of him; and at last, with an excellently assumed air of casualness, she remarked that he seemed busy. He said he was writing a letter. And then she remarked: "If it iss a letter to England, you know of course that there iss no post to-night." He turned round suddenly, astonished, but perhaps, beyond his astonishment, relieved. And she went on: "It iss a new rule. No mails for foreign lands from Saturday night until Monday night." Her tone was just right; he put down his pen, walked across the room, and said, with a sort of moody resignation: "Nothing for it but to wait, then." Then a further idea seemed to occur to him; he exclaimed sharply: "What was it you came up to see me about, Mizzi?"

She wasn't altogether prepared for that. She said: "Iss it necessary that I must always haf a special reason when I come up to see you?" And before he could reply she went on: "But of course, Ihada reason—it was to ask you—both of you—if you would care to come with me now to the Cathedral...."

So we went—the three of us.

It was, as she told me afterwards, the only thing she had been able to think of on the spur of the moment. She even apologized, then, and hoped that the service at the Stefans-Dom hadn't bored me. I assured her it hadn't; but all the same, she might have been surprised if she had known my thoughts during that solemn candle-lit hour. They weren't especially religious, and yet—devout Catholic as she was—Mizzi might have been thinking them too. Perhaps she also, lured by the singing and the twilight, came under the spell of the one perfect solution—that she should become Terry's wife; perhaps she also remembered Helen's advice that he should marry some Viennese girl who loved him and was a business woman.

That night, after we came back from the Cathedral, Terry seemed calmer. I even spoke to him about my return to England, and he renewed his promise that he would take a long and complete holiday "as soon as this business is settled." Then we talked about Mizzi. He thought it odd that she had invited us to the Cathedral with her. "She's rather religious," he said, "but she never talks about it or tries to force it on you. When I first came here she asked me if I were a Catholic, but that was all." He paused for a while, and then, in a different tone, continued: "I suppose a Catholic doesn't care to marry a Protestant?"

I must have shown my astonishment when he said that. "It rather depends who the Protestant is," I answered, hoping he would say more. He didn't, however, and even when I asked him why he had put the question, he only answered that there hadn't been any particular reason.

But there had.

That night was very hot, and neither he nor I was in the mood for sleep. About midnight I left him still pondering over the letter he would write to Helen; I said I would go for a short walk to make myself drowsy. But when I got downstairs the lounge was so cool and so fragrant with the scent of the flowers in the window-boxes, that I sank into one of the largest armchairs and lit a cigar. I didn't trouble to press any of the switches, for the moonlight was streaming in, and besides, I could see through the open doorway the little office in which Mizzi, that night as on most nights, was working late over her bills and ledgers. I didn't wish to interrupt her, yet I was just beginning to wonder if she would mind very much, if I did, when I heard Terry's voice in the hall. He was asking her if she could spare him a moment, and she replied, with her quiet and never-altering cordiality: "Why, of course I can. Come in and sit down."

The office was a small affair of glass partitions, and I could see as well as hear all that took place. I wasn't consciously eavesdropping at first, and later when I must confess to a certain eagerness of ear and eye, I had the excuse that it would have been impossible for me to move away without creating a distinctly awkward situation. So I sat there quiet and still, hardly daring even to smoke lest the smell of the cigar should drift across into the hall and betray me.

For he was proposing to her! There in that little hotel-office, with his face as pale as chalk and his voice half-trembling, he was asking her to marry him! At first he spoke in German, but after a short while relapsed into stammering staccato English.

Most men, when they propose, are doubtless optimists—not only about the proposal, but about themselves and the world in general. But Terry wasn't an optimist. The whole business would have been just comic, if one had allowed oneself to see the joke of it. He informed her in a series of short sentences that he was entirely ineligible—he had no money, and poorish prospects, and it might and probably would be years before he could afford to marry her. Altogether he was a pretty hopeless sort of suitor, and he even reminded her that she could always give him up if she had the good sense to change her mind while there was yet time. All he wanted, apparently, was a vague assurance that some day, if and when he could afford it, and if and when she wished, she would marry him.

While he was talking in this stumbling, sorrowful way, she was all the time sitting at her desk, pen in hand, looking up at him. She didn't say a word; she let him talk on, and then, when he had said everything, she just lifted up her hands and arms and pulled him down to her. I never saw anything so swift and sudden. A second afterwards she was in his arms and kissing him....

Where I was I could feel the sharp slackening of tension as they clung together. And then, after the ecstasy of that first embrace, she seemed to recover a certain self-protective calmness; she was the business woman again, chary of committing herself. "Terry," she whispered, "you must not ask me for an answer now. It would not be possible after this.... To-morrow I will give it you—when I have thought it over calmly...."

He didn't protest. He didn't seem to care greatly whether she gave him an answer or not. His mind and body were reeling; he could only stammer: "Oh, Mizzi—Mizzi——"

He threw himself into a chair and buried his face in his hands, and she stooped over him like a mother over a child. It was unbearable, somehow, to be spying on them then. I took the risk of tip-toeing out of the room and across to the foot of the staircase. They neither saw nor heard. And it was later—much later—when he came up to bed.

XIII

Monday....

I think I must have dreamed that Terry and Mizzi were married, for I woke up thinking of it. Even now the memory of that morning comes to me enveloped in the dream of the two of them; somehow it is all bright sunlight—the sunlight on the geraniums in the wooden boxes, the sunlight on Terry's face as I left him sleeping, and the sunlight drenching Mizzi's little office....

"Morgen," she said, as I entered, and I told her that Terry was asleep, and that I had come down to have a chat with her, if she wasn't too busy.

(I know now almost exactly what I was going to say to her, for I had planned it all very carefully. I was going to talk about Terry—to lead the conversation up to a point at which she might, if she cared, confide in me. I was going to say and do so many clever things, if I had had the chance. But I didn't have the chance.)

She said to me suddenly: "What was the train that your friend Mr. Severn travelled by?"

I told her; and then she said: "Do you think he would break the journey at all—at Innsbrück, say, or Zürich, or Basle?"

"I don't think so. He said he was going to get to England as soon as he could."

"And his train is due to arrive in Paris early this morning?"

"Yes ... I rather think so."

Then she said, very quietly: "I am sorry.... There iss bad news—an accident.... No details yet, but a bad accident—near Paris.... I heard on the telephone just now.... Will you sit down while I ring up again?"

ISAT by the window while she telephoned, and I smoked cigarette after cigarette, and I tried to think—tried to think—tried to think of Paris, and early morning, and what a train-accident would be like, and whether, if Severn.... It was all numbing and bewildering at first; but behind it, amazingly constant, was the thought of Terry.... How would it affecthim? Somehow I had the feeling that even in a train-accident Severn could be relied on to look after himself.

I think I made some sort of stammering remark about the first reports being probably exaggerated; and Mizzi answered, turning her face momentarily away from the instrument: "It may be. We must wait till there is further news. There will be the newspaper soon."

We waited. I see now in my mind that crowded little box of a room with the sunlight streaming into it, and the map of Austria-Hungary on the wall, and Mizzi's pale-golden hair shimmering against its background ofJahrbücherandWohnungsanzeiger, and—most important of all—the telephone. The telephone dominated—was no sooner put down than taken up again; its shrill ringing pitched the highest and most excruciating keynote of tension. "Everybody is telephoning," said Mizzi, after she had rung up theStundeoffices. "They do not know much, but it is believed that several Wien people have been killed. Now I will try the railway office."

And so on, telephoning here and there, and then here again, without definite result. And, in the midst of it all, through her little glass partition, she saw Terry coming down the stairs. "You had better go with him," she told me hastily. "He must not know of this. Afterwards there may be need to tell him, but not yet—not till we know ourselves...."

Breakfast in his room.... By the most terrible of ironies, he was almost cheerful; he told me he had thought out his letter to Helen and had practically decided every word that he would write. The change in him was extraordinary; the old despondency had given way to a feverish sort of optimism; he saw a future in which Severn and Helen, at his behest, lived happily ever after; he saw himself staying in Vienna to pursue research-work in Karelsky's laboratories; and he saw Mizzi—but how, exactly,didhe see Mizzi?

He said, anyhow: "Before I write my letter to Helen, I want to go down and have a chat with Mizzi." I suppose he wanted the answer to his proposal. Not that he looked as eager about it as a man ought to be about such a momentous affair. My own impressions of that meal are rather vague, anyhow; I was too agitated to notice anything very carefully. I remember theStundebeing pushed under the door; it was my copy, and there was no fear that he would want to read it. I picked it up as casually as I could, and somehow expected to find headlinesin Englishabout a railway accident.... Ah, a short, dimly printed paragraph in the stop-press column.... Something about "der Pariser Schnellzug" and "schreckliches Eisenbahnungluck".... I remember glancing through it as I had done years before at translation-pieces in examination-papers—with just that feeling of mingled eagerness and apprehension. I saw the words and knew most of them, yet somehow I missed the meaning of the whole.... What did "entgleisung" mean?....

We went downstairs after breakfast, and I was too dazed to have any plans. If he talked to Mizzi and there had by that time been bad news about Severn, perhaps she would tell him; if there had been no news, probably she wouldn't. The matter, anyhow, was in her hands, and so, of course, was the answer to his proposal.... The hall, when we reached it, was unexpectedly full of a chattering crowd, and in the midst of it a news-boy was selling copies of theStunde—a later edition. Terry, who never took more than the very slightest interest in newspapers, asked me what all the commotion was about, and I tried to satisfy him with a vague answer while I led him across the hall towards Mizzi's office. I might have succeeded—I think I should have succeeded—had not a portly Viennese who was reading the paper muttered something as we passed by. What it was I don't know, but Terry heard it; and the news-boy, with the sure instinct of his tribe, at that moment thrust a paper towards him....

III

That altered everything. He staggered into Mizzi's office reading the headlines incredulously, and I left him there, believing that she would manage things better than I could.

He didn't write to Helen after all. He tried to, afterwards; but when, towards dusk, the news came through that Severn was among the seriously injured, he gave it up in despair. It was hopeless; there were no words in his vocabulary to cope with this new and more terrible situation—no words except the words he kept uttering to me in eager, half-frightened gasps. "Shemusthelp him now, Hilton—shemuststay with him and help him now—oh, shemust—shemust—she couldn't do anything else.... She couldn't leave him now, could she?" He spoke almost as if he were pleading with himself to try to believe in the essential goodness of her. "He's never needed her before, but he'll need her now, and she'll realize it—she's bound to, isn't she? ..." And then, like the bursting of a dark cloud, came the inevitable—the feeling, deeper and blacker than ever, thathewas responsible for all that had happened, and especially for all that had happened to Severn. "Imade him go by that train—you remember? He wanted to go to Ronacher's and wait till the morning train—but I told him to keep to his promise—you remember that?Imade him go—all this would never have happened to him but for me.... You can see how it is, can't you?"

I was almost impressed myself by the horror of the coincidence, though I took care not to let Terry see it. I told him briskly that it was absurd for him to feel responsible, and that to anybody except himself the idea would appear ridiculous. Severn would be the first to say so.

He buried his head in his hands and was silent. My assurances hadn't helped him. It didn't matter to him what anybody else in the world said or thought. It didn't matter what Severn said or thought. It was he himself who held himself responsible. He was his own accuser. It really seemed to him, in that moment of obsessing guilt, that he had encompassed the ruin entirely by his own tragic efforts—that even, in some dreadfully obscure way, the whole accident, and all its results, lay to his charge. That, of course, was madness; and I think he saw it just in time. He went to his desk and tried again—pitiably, frenziedly—to write to Helen; but everything was wordless, voiceless; there was nothing—nothingthat he could put down. I said, with an attempt to comfort him, that Helen would almost certainly help Severn all she could; but he answered: "I don't want her just tohelphim. I want her towantto help him—I want her to"—he faced me with eyes like swords and added: "I can't tell you what I mean, but IknowI could tell her."

I asked no questions, for I knew he couldn't say more than he was saying. His nerves were in shreds, racked between that dreadful sense of personal responsibility and the still passionate ideal that made him hope that by some stupendous effort he could put everything right.... And then, quite suddenly, he threw down his pen and walked across the room. "Iwilltell her," he said. "Imust—there's no hope any other way.... I'll leave to-night—by the express—and be in London by Wednesday.... Oh, Imustgo—can't you see that Imust—can'tyou?"

I couldn't—I couldn't see anything for a while; it had all happened too suddenly.... And then, when I began to realize, it was too late; arguing was no use. Of the countless reasons why he shouldn't go, not one was apparent to him; he spoke of going as a sinner might speak of his conversion. "Somehow or other," he said, "I shall be able to help." He was certain of it. And with the certainty came, once again, optimism—a childish optimism that made him hope that Severn wasn't badly hurt (although the report most distinctly stated that he was), and that all would be well in some vague and shadowy future. Of course I raised objections; in fact, the more I thought of it, the more monstrous it seemed that he, of all people, and then, of all times, should meet Helen. What good, I asked him, did he think he could achieve by seeing her? He repeated that he couldhelp. But how? Was it likely that she would fail her husband in such an emergency, and wasn't it far more likely that she would be insulted at the mere suggestion of such a thing?

He said that I hadn't understood him. He paused for a while, and I could almost see him struggling physically to put what he felt into words. Then victory came to him like a sharp explosion; he went on, with staccato excitement: "You see—I've made such a terrible hash of everything—right from the beginning. It's all led up to this—just one mistake after another.... I began it, and I've got to end it. I tell you, I'vegotto end it. Nobody can end it but me.... We were all friends once, and we've all got to be friends again—whatever happens. It doesn't work—to put people outside your life. You can't do it, even when you try, and you daren't do it, even if you could...."

"So it all amounts to this—that you're going to put Helen back into your life?"

HelenandSevern, he replied. And also evenIwas involved, because of my quarrel with Helen.Thathad to come to an end. We were all going to be friends again, and he would show Helen that true affection wasn't narrow and personal, but something that—that—something that.... In fact, to put the whole matter a good deal more plainly than he did, everything that was not perfect was to be summarily abolished, and the reign of universal love to begin forthwith. He was once more the eager missionary; the pendulum of his mood had swung again, and it was the future now that he saw, perfectly obliterating the imperfect past.

But everything that night that I shall never forget belongs to Mizzi more than to him. I went to see her in blank despondency and told her what had happened; I expected her to be at least as anxious as I was that Terry shouldn't meet Helen. But she wasn't; she merely nodded her head and remarked, at the end of it all: "So I had better reserve for you two berths in thewagon-litto-night, is it not?"

"Good heavens, no!" I cried, just in time to keep her away from the telephone. And then I asked her if she really supposed that wecouldgo.

She answered: "Well, he's going, isn't he?"

"Hesayshe is. But it seem to me we've got to persuade him out of it."

"Why?"

"Why? Well, can't you see all the hundreds of reasons why?"

"I can see this," she answered quietly, "that hewillgo, whatever we do or say. Do you remember how—the night before last—I said I wished some fate would send him back to her? ... Well, this is fate."

Her supreme calmness astonished me. I said that whether it was fate or not, his going back could only have the result of turning bad into worse. "Think of it, Mizzi—think of him meeting her for the first time after those awful letters—andpreachingto her—that's what it'll amount to—about her duty to her husband! ... She'll feel like killing him."

"And if he stays here, he'll feel like killing himself."

"Not if you look after him."

"Ilook after him? How can I?"

"There are ways."

She looked at me with tightened lips for a moment, and then said: "It is what you call an irony—is it not?—that I should have understanding of him but no power—whileshe—this woman in England—has power but no understanding."

"But youhavepower, Mizzi."

She shook her head, smiling. "As much as you have—as much as anybody has, maybe, excepther. You see, I understand him." She added, with no change in the level calmness of her tone: "You will be surprised, no doubt—when I tell you that last night he asked me to marry him."

I had to try to seem surprised, and Iwassurprised, quite genuinely, at her manner of telling me. She went on, almost casually: "I know why he asked me to marry him. It was so that if I said 'yes,' he would feel bound tome—and therefore less bound to her. Hewantsto love me, and he doesn't want to love her."

"I know he's very fond of you, Mizzi."

"Oh, yes, I daresay. But that is not quite good enough for me. I am a business woman, and I do not think the bargain is fair unless he loves me."

"You think he doesn't?"

"I am certain he doesn't."

"Why?"

"Firstly—because he tries so hard.... And then, also, there is another reason. This morning, when I told him that I would not marry him, he was glad."

"Glad? No—no——"

"He was. I could see the relief come into his eyes. His mind was full of thoughts about his friends in England, and about the railway accident—he really didn't want to bother aboutme. And when I refused him he looked so grateful. He was glad because it made it easier for him to go to England. Hedoeswant to go to England. And I—allIwant is for the best to happen—the best forhim."

I told her frankly that I was disappointed, and that I thought she was making a great mistake. She ought, I said, to have accepted him; he would soon have come to love her afterwards.

"Or else to hate me," she said quietly.

"Oh, that's absurd, Mizzi."

"No, no. He cannot help lovingher—maybe, some day, if we were married, he could not help hatingme. You see, I am cautious. I look to the future."

"And you really think that the best future for him is that he should see Helen?"

"I think the worst future is that he should stay here when all his body and soul are craving to be away."

"But I can't understand why you are so willing to let him go."

She said then, with a half-ironical shrug of the shoulders: "Ah, that is very hard to understand, I know. Maybe it is because I am selfish and care nothing for these two people whom I have never seen—nothing at all in comparison withhim."

And that was as far as I could get with her. She had refused him, and all the arguing in the world wouldn't convince her that she oughtn't to have done, or me that she ought.

I saw her again for a few moments while I paid my bill. I said that it was quite within the bounds of possibility that Terry would return to Vienna after a short interval, and that therefore it might be advisable to keep his room for him. Would she do this, and let me pay the charge without his knowing?

She told me that there would be no charge, and when I protested she said: "You can think of it, if you like, as my farewell gift to him, for I think I shall never see him again."

I demurred to that, but she only shrugged her shoulders and said: "It is a feeling I have." I asked her then if she would see Karelsky and give him some explanation of Terry's sudden departure; and she nodded all-comprehendingly. Never had she been more the calm, business woman; and it wasthat—the utter perfection of her pose—that I shall never forget.

She came with us to the station and saw us to our places on the train. The temperature had fallen slightly, and there was a cool breeze with the hint of rain in it. Terry, before the train started, thanked her for all the kindness she had shown him during those seven years, and said that he hoped he would meet her again before long. And she answered, in her coolest and most professional tones: "Oh, of course any time you are in Vienna you must be sure to come and see me. I am so pleased you have been satisfied here. Perhaps you will be good enough to recommend me to your English friends." (And yet how well she knew he hadn't any!) She was wonderful then, but the pose, because it was too perfect, gave itself away. The thought came to me at that moment overpoweringly—how extraordinary it was that Terry, with all hispenchantfor self-accusation, hadn't long ago accused himself of making her love him! For she did love him, as much as any woman who ever lived, and the love was like a fire in her eyes as the train began to move. She shook hands with us and said, not "Good-bye," but "Wiedersehen." That, I think, was just the pose, guarding her faithfully till we were gone. And what then? There's no knowing, but I remember that when the train was almost out of the station I looked out of the window and saw her still standing on the platform where we had left her, and I think, though I can't be sure, that she saw me and waved a last farewell.

It was I, perhaps, who was the more depressed during that slow, rumbling night-journey towards the mountains. Terry had his alternate moods of optimism and despondency, but I was uniformly oppressed with a sort ofWehmutorWeltschmerzor whatever untranslatable thing the Germans call it. The cold dawn came as we ran into Salzburg, and by noon the sun was blazing on the red-roofed chalets above Innsbrück. All the time I was thinking far more of the past than of the future; the parting with Mizzi seemed to me far more pitiable than anything that had or could have happened to Severn. I didn't talk to Terry about it, for he, who never understood a woman at all, had certainly never understood Mizzi. Only once, indeed, was she even mentioned, and that was when he said, quite casually: "Odd, wasn't it, that Mizzi should ask me to recommend her hotel? She might have known I should do, if ever I got the chance. But I suppose the hotel's always in her mind—it seems to be what she lives for, anyhow."

"Do you think so?"

"She told me so herself, only yesterday. She said she didn't care for anything or anybody in the world except her hotel."

I didn't argue the point. But I guessed then (and I still think my guess was right) that that had been her way of refusing him. And perhaps, after all, it was the best way—the best because it could not but leave him with a tinge of disappointment in her. After such words, it would be hard for him to feel pity for her loneliness. Sometimes now I wonder what would have happened if I had said to him outright: "Mizzi loves you, despite her refusal, and her misery now that you've gone is more your fault than any of these other things, and also far easier to undo. Go back and love her and be happy...." He mightn't have believed me, and he certainly wouldn't have obeyed me; but perhaps, in his moments of deepest remorse, he would have tacked on Mizzi's unhappiness to the already heavy enough load of his own responsibilities. And that, of course, was the chief reason why I didn't tell him.

VII

The long journey passed, and by the time we reached the Swiss frontier, we knew all that the newspapers knew, at any rate, concerning the tragedy. It was an ordinary enough story of a driver trying to make up lost time and negotiating a curve ten miles an hour too fast. Result: derailment and a death-roll, so far, of twenty-four. The Basle newspapers, though they took great care to be incorrect about Severn's life and career (one of them even called him "l'avocat général de l'Angleterre"), gave no information as to the nature or extent of his injury. Somehow the absence of detail, and the fact that we were already nearer Paris than Vienna, overwhelmed me with a sense of this sharper and more instant tragedy; perhaps for the first time I ceased to think about Mizzi. I told Terry, as we stood at the buffet-counter at Troyes, that I was glad we had come, because if we could help Severn even a little, it would be worth while. He gripped my arm eagerly and replied: "Iknewyou would think that—I knew you would."

Early in the morning we passed very slowly the scene of the accident (only a few miles from the Gare de l'Est), and saw the gigantic litter of wreckage, and the break-down cranes still working over the shattered and telescoped coaches. A dull drizzling rain was falling, and a grinning baby advertising a famous soap looked down on the scene from the wall of a near-by factory. Ten minutes later we were pacing the long platform of the terminus. The entire station and precincts were packed with English conducted tourists to the popular Swiss resorts; uniformed guides were shepherding them into groups, and I heard one of them promise his party that very soon they would be able to see "the place where the train ran off the lines." A gratuitous tit-bit added by Providence to their Ten Days in Lovely Lucerne.

We joined the crowd of anxious and grief-stricken inquirers in the information bureau. The small, ugly room seethed, as it were, with its burden of misery; and there was something hideously incongruous in the wall-posters of smiling red-cheeked holiday-makers perched on the summits of impossibly precipitous Alps. Women sobbed and chattered amidst their sobbing; men shouted and gesticulated; the wholeensemble, with the noises of trains and beating rain as an accompaniment, made me understand how men can sometimes lose control of themselves and run suddenly amok. The waiting lasted three-quarters of an hour, and then, when our turn came, the official would hardly listen when he found that we weren'trelatedto anyone concerned. We argued (so far as my limited French would allow), and all the while the official's nerves, as well as my own, were being strained nearer and nearer to breaking-point. Who were we? We gave our names. What was our connection with Severn? What were we—professionally? I took the liberty of labelling Terry "médecin," but when I went on to describe myself as "journaliste," everything everywhere seemed to snap suddenly. The official shouted and waved his arms about; he appealed to the crowd; the crowd shouted; I shouted; and Terry stood by me all the while, silent and very pale. He knew so little French that the row could only have puzzled him. It puzzled me, indeed, until I realized afterwards that I had been mistaken for some newspaper ghoul in search of copy.

At last, after explaining over and over again that we were both near friends of Severn and had travelled from Vienna especially to see him, I was reluctantly allowed to learn that he had been taken to a hospital in the Avenue Friedland. And five minutes after that, as we sat in the cab that was bearing us at breakneck speed along the boulevards, Terry collapsed.

That squabble in the station inquiry-office had been the last straw. Till then he had never wholly given way, but that—that almost trivial thing—shattered all the final strength he possessed. In the semi-darkness of the cab he made total surrender. It seemed a sort of fainting-fit; I wasn't skilled enough to diagnose exactly. But I realized immediately that it was no use going on with him to the hospital. He recovered when I opened both windows of the cab and let in the wind and rain; and then I shouted to the driver to take us to the nearest hotel. We pulled up almost straightway outside a large establishment in the Place du Hâvre, and for the next hour I worked like an automaton—getting Terry comfortable, calling in a doctor, and making all the necessary arrangements with the hotel people. The doctor reported a complete nervous collapse, and prescribed a long and absolute rest-cure; it was what I had expected. What I hadnotexpected was Terry's childlike acquiescence; all desire, it seemed, had gone out of him. He didn't even want to see Severn. "Youcan go," he said, with a sort of tired sadness.

I said that I certainly would, and he smiled and closed his eyes. The doctor had given him a draught, and within a few minutes he was heavily asleep.

VIII

I went to the hospital that evening, and after prolonged difficulties and much tipping of porters, managed to reach Severn at last. He was in a small, comfortably-furnished separate room with a crucifix over the mantelpiece and a view of the brilliantly-lit Champs Elysées through the window. They had stretched him out on a sort of suspended platform, and the whole of his head and face, with the exception of apertures cut for his eyes, was a mass of bandages. Only his left hand was free to move, but as soon as I approached he held it out and pressed mine with the old sharp grip that he had always had. And then, while his eyes sparkled like black gems, he wrote in pencil on a writing-pad: "Delighted to see you. I can't talk, but I'm learning to write with my left hand. What's brought you here? Do you want a special interview with the man who had a carriage-door pushed into his spine?"

I stared at him and saw his eyes dancing (so it seemed to me) with merriment.Couldit have been that? I stammered: "My dear Severn, I came—wecame—Terry and I—to see how you were.... Are you—are you very badly hurt?"

He wrote: "There's a nasty kink in my spine, I'm afraid. Also a few face-scratches and a knock on the posterior third of the left parietal bone. Right arm sprained. Spirits excellent. Where's Terry?"

I told him the truth—that Terry was in bed at the hotel (which I named), and that he would have come with me if he had been at all well enough.

He wrote instantly: "So he's ill? I'm not surprised. What he needs is a long rest cure. Are you going to take him back to England?"

Was I? I had hardly thought what I was going to do, but I said: "Most likely, if I can manage to persuade him to come with me." Then Severn wrote: "That's right. We're both crocked up, Terry and I, and you've jolly well got to help us. You're the ministering angel. I'm the interesting mangle. The doctors think so, anyway."

I laughed hysterically. Then I made inquiries about Helen, and he wrote that she and June had been cabled for from New York, where they had been on holiday. They were already on their way. All this questioning and answering took time, for he insisted on writing down everything exactly as he would have spoken it. At the last moment, when the sister had entered to indicate that I must go, I asked him if there was anything I could do, and he wrote, in large block capitals: "Yes. Come and see me again before you go to England. But don't bring Terry—it would only upset him. And also, if you've time, you might run down into the basement of the Magasins du Louvre and buy me one of their BBB pencils with cork holders."

I wanted to laugh again—to burst into loud, unchecked laughter; but the sister was patiently waiting for me at the door. It was she who told me, as she led the way along the corridor to the head of the stairs, that most likely Severn would have to be wheeled about in a chair for the rest of his life. Somehow, even in my most despondent moments, I had never thought of anything so bad as that. I had pictured him dying of injuries; I had been prepared for even amputations and disfigurements; but this grim foreshadowing of death within life struck me with freezing bewilderment.

And so again into the heavy-scented night. The whole visit to Severn had lasted less than half an hour and I have set down everything I can remember of it. If the result seems rather slight and scrappy, make allowance for the fact that I had spent two successive nights in a train, and was fatigued to the point of faintness. I remember standing on the kerb facing the Arc de Triomphe and wondering if I too were going to crock up; I know that I walked the whole length of the Champs Elysées down to the Place de la Concorde before deciding finally that I wasn't. At a café in the Rue Royale I fortified myself with coffee and cognac and was glad of the few moments' rest; besides, I had to make up my mind what I should tell Terry.

He was still fast asleep when I reached the hotel, and I sat up reading and smoking in his room until very late. About two in the morning he awakened, but seemed too dazed to ask questions; I gave him a simple, straightforward account of my visit, stressing what was favourable and ignoring the worst. He thanked me when I had finished, but that was all. No questions; no comments even; it was as if he were too weary even to be interested. I told him that Helen and June were on their way back from America, but even then he only nodded his comprehension. And the next moment, with a whispered "Good-night," he closed his eyes and slept.

But there was no sleep for me. Despite an overwhelming tiredness I lay awake till the early morning traffic made sleep impossible. I smoked cigarette after cigarette in bed; and then, on sudden impulse, I got up and wrote a letter to Roebuck, telling him to prepare a second bed in my bedroom. "It is possible," I wrote, "that when I come back I shall bring with me a friend who will stay some time...." After all, that was the only thing to do. Terry had no English friends except me and Severn, and Severn had enough trouble of his own without being called upon to help Terry. There was really no alternative to his coming to stay with me, unless he went back to Vienna, which he probably wouldn't do in any case. Fortunately my rooms, though few, were fairly commodious, and Roebuck was the sort of man who would rise to an emergency. The only thing I feared was that Terry would find London, and especially the part I lived in, too bustling and noisy for him; apart from that, I was confident I could make him feel comfortable and at home.

The letter to Roebuck was never sent, for before the ink on the envelope was dry, the chambermaid brought me my morning pot of coffee, and with it the following letter from Severn, posted late the night before:

"MY DEAR HILTON,—I must write to thank you for your visit yesterday; it made me more cheerful than any hospital patient has a right to be; but the result, unfortunately, has been a strict order from the doctor that I'm to be kept perfectly quiet and to be allowed no more visitors till Helen and June arrive. He (the doctor) swore that you excited me, and so, by God, you did, and I wouldn't have missed a moment of it. Anyhow, I'm not in any severe pain, and I'm allowed to read and think, so I've nothing much to grumble about. Perhaps, if you remember, you could call at Brentano's in the Avenue de l'Opéra and have sent to me a copy of Brieux's play,Les Hannetons, which a friend advised me to read a few weeks ago."And now about Terry. I really think you had better get him to England as soon as you can, for breakdowns are serious things, and Paris at midsummer is the very last place to cure them. I happen to have a controlling interest in a small but decent hotel-pub near Hindhead, and if you will send (or, better still, take) the enclosed letter to the manager he will no doubt be pleased to accommodate Terry and yourself for as long as you like. I think it would be a good thing if you took Terry there the minute he is fit to travel."Just one thing more. I wonder if you could possibly arrange to meet Helen and June at Liverpool? They are due to arrive by theFranconianext Monday, and it would be a kindly act to cheer them on the way here. Besides, you and Helen might make it an excuse for becoming good friends again. Please try to manage it, will you?"Some of these requests are a sad trespass on your good nature, but, as I remarked before, you're already cast for the rôle of ministering angel! Ever yours,"GEOFFREY SEVERN."

"And now about Terry. I really think you had better get him to England as soon as you can, for breakdowns are serious things, and Paris at midsummer is the very last place to cure them. I happen to have a controlling interest in a small but decent hotel-pub near Hindhead, and if you will send (or, better still, take) the enclosed letter to the manager he will no doubt be pleased to accommodate Terry and yourself for as long as you like. I think it would be a good thing if you took Terry there the minute he is fit to travel.

"Just one thing more. I wonder if you could possibly arrange to meet Helen and June at Liverpool? They are due to arrive by theFranconianext Monday, and it would be a kindly act to cheer them on the way here. Besides, you and Helen might make it an excuse for becoming good friends again. Please try to manage it, will you?

"Some of these requests are a sad trespass on your good nature, but, as I remarked before, you're already cast for the rôle of ministering angel! Ever yours,

"GEOFFREY SEVERN."

I have that letter still, and if I'm ever asked what sort of a man Severn is, I should like to show it and say: He's the sort of man who could write that sort of letter three days after being crippled for life....

I read it through to Terry, and when I had finished he looked almost as if he were going to cry. "It's awfully good of him," he said, and I took that to mean that he would accept the hotel offer. So that was one thing settled, anyhow. After a pause I said tentatively that I thought it mightn't be a bad idea if Ididmeet Helen at Liverpool, and I suggested that he and I could travel together as far as Hindhead. He nodded tranquilly, and the whole thing seemed beautifully arranged until the doctor came and absolutely forbade him to travel so soon. In vain my protests about the comparative quietude of Paris and Hindhead; even Paris, he insisted, was better than crowding on trains and steamers. Perhaps by the middle of the following week the journey could be attempted, but certainly not before....

It was Terry, after that, who suggested that I should leave him in Paris while I went to meet Helen. He would be all right, he assured me; he would just potter about the hotel and do nothing at all. And when I looked doubtful he said, with the first sign of eagerness that I had seen in him since his collapse: "Oh, youmustgo, Hilton. It's time somebody did the right thing...."

It was time somebody did the right thing. That, I think, was the saddest thing he ever said, for it showed his spirit at its pitiable lowest—without pride and without hope.

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