The whole thing is difficult to put into words because to this day I don't really know what happened. All I surmise is that the work of mutual conversion proceeded during the months of late winter and early spring—she attending his bacteriology lectures and he accompanying her to theatres, pianoforte recitals, and so on. Their meetings were frequent enough to stir gossip, no doubt, but hardly scandal, especially as it was so obvious that Severn knew and approved. Helen had always been in the throes of some fad or other, and he probably assumed that Terry was an unusually congenial successor of Christian Science, Dalcroze eurhythmics, highbrow drama, and a dozen other enthusiasms that had had their day and one by one crept silently to rest. It was he, more often than not, who might say to her: "Oh, by the way, I've got a card for Wolferton's private view—it's next Tuesday at the Savile Galleries. I shan't have time to go myself, but you might take Terry and show him the latest painted pot-boilers...." And she would take him, of course.
When I asked him if he had enjoyed going to that or some similar function, he would usually reply: "Yes, very much." Never more, and hardly ever less. It was Helen who assured me that the work of "humanizing" him was proceeding successfully.
"And," I said to her once, "you're still in love with him?"
She replied: "More than ever. Oh,muchmore. And—as I told you before—it'swonderful."
"Maybe, but is it wise?"
She pursed her lips and then answered: "Well, what harm can there be in it? It isn't sharing anything with Geoffrey.... It's nothing to do with anybody how I feel—nobody will ever know it except you, and you wouldn't if I hadn't told you."
"Suppose Terry were to find it out?"
"You mean—suppose I'm a fool, eh? ... Well, I assure you, I'm not."
"All right, then—take another supposition. What will happen if Terry falls in love with you?"
"My dear Jimmy—hecouldn't. It wouldn't occur to him. Oh, don't—don't—" she was beginning to laugh—"don't imagine it. Itcouldn'thappen."
"Then whatwillhappen—eventually?"
She gave me her loveliest smile. "I shall teach him and watch over him, and then, when the right girl comes along, I shall just hand him over ... in good condition."
"And when do you think that will be?"
She shrugged her pretty little shoulders and laughed outright. "How can I tell?—Perhaps in ten days—or ten months—or ten years. But it will happen—it is bound to happen—some day...."
The pages of my diary about this time bear witness to the number of times Terry and I dined at the End House. Generally we went on Wednesdays, and as time passed the "generally" became "always" and the dinners a habit. Once Helen was slightly unwell during one of Terry's Wednesday lectures, and he broke his fixed rule so far as to see her afterwards and escort her home in her car. And then, the following Wednesday, although she wasn't unwell at all, he repeated the courtesy, and that also became a habit.
They were always very jolly, informal affairs, those dinners. More often than not, Severn wasn't there; he was busy at his chambers, or dining at one of his clubs, or on duty in the House. Sometimes, by way of compensation, June, aged eleven, was home from her boarding-school, and Terry used often to amuse her by performing small chemical and physical experiments. I can remember him fixing a Bunsen burner on to the kitchen gas-stove, and to cook's amazement as well as June's, blowing a piece of glass tubing into various shapes. On another occasion he solemnly changed the colour of litmus-paper before our eyes.... He seemed very fond of the child, and she, I believe, thought he was some sort of magician.
All this happened while spring was deepening into summer. Even in my own most unsalubrious district of Camden Town the change of season was unmistakable; nay, even also in Gower Street, and even at the top of the Physics Building and along the corridor where the name "Dr. M. Terrington" rewarded the ardent bacteriological pilgrim after his six flights of labour. But the chief sign of change along that corridor was the fact that sometimes, and more often as the season progressed, the pilgrim knocked at the door, looked inside, and found the room empty.
VIII
He let go his work. It all happened so suddenly—as if some barrier inside him had collapsed. And also, to make the problem of analysis more difficult for me, it happened when I was away. I was only away a week, but a week was long enough to change everything; and when I came back, everythingwaschanged.
He would tell me hardly anything, except that he felt he had been working too hard and needed a rest. (And that, of course, was plausible enough.) He also, in an unguarded moment, admitted to a certain spiritual change. "It was what Severn said—that night we went to dinner and we all argued about civilizations and progress and morality and what not—do you remember? Somehow it made me think of things I'd never thought of before.... In a sense, I was blind till then."
That also, I think, may very well have been true. Hehadbeen blind till then; he had been blind to the beauty of the world all around him; he had shut himself up in his laboratory attic, refusing pleasure and friendship and even, so far as he was able, contact with the world outside. Even his Sunday recreation had, in those old days, been taken medicinally; it had been nothing to him but so many miles walked and so much fresh air breathed. He had been wantonly blind, and it was quite possible that Severn's facile pessimism had given him the first sight-creating disturbance. But was there no middle course between being blind and working far too hard, and having sight and not working at all? And had not Helen helped to remove the blindness?
The weeks passed quickly, and I saw less and less of both of them, for the simple reason that they saw more and more of each other. One felt, instinctively, that whatever was happening could not go on for long. And then, towards the end of July, Severn wrote that he had been in communication with Karelsky, and that the latter was coming to England for a short visit and would be glad to take Terry back to Vienna with him. "It seems a good opening," Severn wrote, "and on the whole I think you would do well to accept it, though of course you must please yourself. Karelsky will be in London this week, and I am giving a dinner to him at the End House on Friday. You will come, of course...."
By the same post an invitation arrived for me, and as soon as I read it I hastened over to Terry's lodgings. I found him reading Severn's letter without, so far as I could judge, either pleasure or displeasure. He handed it to me without comment, and then went on with his dressing, for he had a theatre engagement that night with Helen.
I hardly knew what to say to him. I think I remarked that Vienna was reputed a pleasant city, and then, when he still was silent, I asked him point-blank: "Will you go?"
Almost truculently, as he stood before the mirror adjusting his dress-tie, he answered: "Whyshouldn'tI go?"
IX
I didn't see him again until the evening of Severn's party. I shall never forget that evening. It was, according to the newspapers (which hadn't anything else to make a headline of), the hottest weather for forty-seven years, or something like that. It was a damp and steamy heat, and even at Hampstead hardly a breath of air was stirring when I arrived there about seven o'clock. In those days I couldn't afford taxis, and by the time I had climbed to the top of the hill the boiled shirt was clinging to me like a particularly nauseating poultice.
The party was the sort that Severn loved most of all—a gathering of a dozen or so "big names" from various spheres of activity, with himself as the lowest common denominator—or would it be the highest common factor? ... A sort of social cocktail, to vary the metaphor; and in this particular concoction the preponderating flavour was naturally that of science, pure and applied. It was a distinguished crowd—terrifyingly distinguished. Besides Helen, there were only two women—Doctor Isidora Hadden (who lectured on anatomy and wrote about six-legged dogs in the scientific journals), and Lady Muriel Spencer, whom Severn had asked, presumably, because of her recent explorations amongst the buried cities of Honduras. Of the men, about three-quarters were sixty; two-thirds wore evening-dress of Victorian design; a half were bearded; and at least a quarter were varyingly deaf. No doubt their combined titles, qualifications, degrees, diplomas, and so on, would have filled a quarter-column of theTimes. Severn, behind his perfect exterior of charm, was in a sardonic mood, for as he passed me in the drawing-room before dinner, he whispered into my ear: "Beware! Here are lions!"
Terry, perhaps, was impressed. He was also very nervous. He was given a place of honour between Karelsky and Lady Muriel (Severnwoulddo things like that), and most of the others were probably wondering who he was and why the devil he wasn't somewhere else. Particularly as he didn't seem able or willing to make the slightest use of his opportunities. Karelsky hardly spoke to him at all, and Lady Muriel tried him once about Aztecs and then gave him up.
As for Karelsky, he was an enigma, and not perhaps wholly a pleasant one. He couldn't help perspiring, I admit; but he needn't have mopped his forehead continually with his table-napkin. He talked most of all to Severn, who was always ready to translate a difficult phrase into German for his comprehension; but occasionally, and with completely bad manners, he shouted across the table in response to some remark, not addressed to him, that he chanced to have overheard. "Dat iss one goot price," he bellowed at a couple of aged professors who were discussing confidentially the amount of money they had made out of certain text-books. But it wasn't hard to believe that he was clever, and he certainly showed signs of being well-informed about other matters besides science. "I haf heard of Hampstead before," he said once. "It iss where—iss it not?—you haf your 'Arry and your 'Arriet on the holiday of the banks." That, I thought, was not bad for a Russian-born Austrian.
My own position at table was between Helen and the greatest living authority on palaeobotany, who, being dyspeptic as well as deaf, must have had a rather miserable time. But Helen talked most of the while to her other neighbour, a middle-aged professor of physics. Once she turned to me and said, very softly: "I don't think I like Karelsky very much.... Is Terry going to go to Vienna with him?"
"I think so," I answered, and then she said, lightly: "I wonder how he'll like it—being abroad...."
X
All that time the temperature was rising. I mean the actual, physical temperature; somebody who, as befitted a scientist, carried a pocket thermometer about with him, informed us that the mercury stood at eighty-three. Because of the heat, coffee and liqueurs were served on the lawn beyond the French windows, and there, without the artificial breeze of electric fans, the air seemed even hotter. Collars were limp; beads of sweat ran down scientific noses and beards; even scientific tempers were not too equable. Only Severn, talking more than anybody, managed to give an impression of coolness; it reminded him, he said, of an evening he had once spent in Colombo. He told an exciting story (possibly a true one) about a Cingalese who, maddened by the heat, ran amok and killed half-a-dozen passers-by. Then Karelsky discussed with him in German-English the effect of intense heat upon the human brain.... Of the whole crowd of us there in the garden, only those two seemed thoroughly alive—Karelsky with his huge face streaming with perspiration, and Severn like a lithe sharp-eyed panther. The rest were puppets, sagging in their armchairs and moving only to sip their brandy and iced coffee. The smell of vegetation rose up like steam out of the warm earth, but even the palaeobotanist was not enthusiastic about it. And Karelsky, with an immense bellow of "It iss verr hot" suddenly tore off his collar and tie and stuffed them in his pocket. I admired him for that; it was the sort of thing that needs courage of the kind that few of us possess. Severn, of course, laughed. It sounded to me like the mocking, diabolical laughter of a madman lost amidst tropical jungle; but that, no doubt, was only the combined effect of brandy, heat, and Severn's story of the maniac Cingalese.
Then at last the first streak of lightning flooded the garden and showed us the heavy trees, reaching over us like gigantic grasping arms. And it was in that sharp and blinding glow that I caught sight of Terry and Helen; they had completely separated themselves from the rest and were walking slowly across the further end of the lawns towards the kitchen-gardens....
The moments crawled on, and each was a little hotter, or seemed it, than the one before. Whenever there came a lightning-flash I tried to take in at a glance the whole vista of lawns and gardens, but I did not see the two of them again. By that time, I suppose, I was partially drunk; and I hardly recollect what happened except that after a seemingly immense gap of drowsiness Severn himself was next to me, dragging his cane chair nearer to mine. "I'm so pleased Terry's decided to accept Karelsky's offer," he said.
"Hehastold you, then?"
"Yes ... Karelsky goes to Vienna to-morrow night, and Terry will accompany him, if he can make arrangements in time."
"That's rather quick work, isn't it?"
"It is, I admit. But it's vacation-time and it ought to be possible.... By the way, what do you think of Karelsky, eh? Rather a rough diamond——"
"I'll tell you this much," he went on, without waiting for my opinion, "Karelsky's a man of business as well as a man of science. He'll get his value out of Terry, you can bet your life. But then, what Terry must do is to get his value out of Karelsky. See?"
"And on the whole you think it'll be a good thing for Terry?"
"If he uses his chances it will be a splendid thing. And, of course, if hedoesn'tuse his chances, nothing will do him very much good. I like him a great deal, you know. So does Helen. I'm sure she'll miss him when he's gone.... By the way, where is she? Have you seen her?"
I told him I hadn't seen her for some while, and soon afterwards he had to leave me to bid the first of the good-byes.
XI
Iwasdrunk. I had a persistent and rather ridiculous desire to lean back in my chair and go to sleep. This, in fact, is what I actually did, until a terrific peal of thunder awoke me—or was it Severn laughing? Anyway, hewaslaughing. He was leaning over the back of the chair next to mine, like a wild animal waiting to spring; and Helen was standing close to him, with her eyes fixed on me. "So you're another victim, are you?" he said.
I stammered an apology and he interrupted hurriedly: "My dear chap, you needn't say all that. It has been an interesting example of what Karelsky was talking about—the effects of heat on the human brain. Or was it something else as well as the heat?... Anyhow, Professor Foljambe could hardly walk to his taxi. Even Terry the teetotaller had to clear off in a hurry."
"Did he?—Wh—why?"
It was Helen who answered. She said, very quietly: "He said the heat made him feel ill, so he just slipped away without making any fuss."
"And without even seeing me," Severn added.
I said something about calling at his lodgings to see how he was, and Helen remarked: "Oh, you needn't be alarmed about him—it was only the heat."
I wasn't alarmed, but I wanted to see him. Ten minutes later I was on my way to the tube station, and in half-an-hour I was at the door of the house in Swinton Street. It was hotter in London than at Hampstead, and the night was full of lightning and rumblings of thunder. I remember how, in the poorer districts that I passed, whole families were sitting out on the pavement, chattering amongst themselves and waiting for the storm to begin.
I
THE heat of that night is a sort of canvas on which everything is painted in my memory. Terry, when he came to the door and admitted me, was rather pale, and something in his eyes made me wonder if he were sorry I had come. Probably, if I hadn't been fairly drunk, I should soon have left him; but I was in a talkative, comradely mood, and hints were lost on me. He must have been very patient and forbearing.
We made coffee, I remember, and I smoked cigarettes and chattered about the party and Severn and Karelsky and so on. Perhaps he listened, but I think (and rather hope) that he didn't. He told me that the heat had "got at him," but that after a cold bath he felt much better. All the time we talked the thunder rolled and rumbled over the roofs, and the numerous cracks in the window-blind sparkled with vivid lightning. In the green-yellow gas-light the bed-sitting-room looked dingier and more forlorn than ever. Heaped up in one corner were books and papers that he had begun to sort out in readiness for removal, and about half-past midnight, wanting an excuse to stay longer, I said: "It's not a bit of good either of us trying to sleep on a night like this. We might just as well get to work and finish packing your things. I hear you're going to-morrow night...."
Then came the shock that made me suddenly sober. He answered quietly—almost casually: "No, no ... I'mnotgoing."
"Not—not going—to-morrow?"
And he answered: "I'm not going—at all."
I think I was dazed at first. Then I was angry that he hadn't told me before, and then, for a fraction of a second, I was selfishly glad that our friendship had been reprieved. After that bewilderment came again, and finally I was calm but immensely puzzled. I asked him if he meant that the whole arrangement with Karelsky was cancelled, and he said: "Yes—that's right."
"But—butwhy?"
"Because I—I can't go."
"Whycan't you?"
"I—I justcan't, that's all."
"But theremustbe a reason!"
"Thereisa reason."
"What?"
"Well ... to begin with ... it was never absolutely settled that Ishouldgo."
"But you told Severn to-night that you were going."
"Yes ... I thought Iwasgoing then."
"And you've changed your mind since?"
"Yes ... I suppose I have."
"But—why?"
"Well, I've a right to change my mind, haven't I?"
"Of course, but ..."
And so on.... For a long time I could get nothing at all out of him except that he had changed his mind and wasn't going. The cleverest subtleties of cross-examination were wasted on him; whenever I thought I had manœuvred him into a corner, he just shook his head and said: "I don't know what there is to argue about. Severn told me I must please myself.... I'm pleasing myself, that's all." Then, as a last and not too scrupulous resort, I tried a method that had sometimes succeeded before; it consisting in pretending to infer from his silences something that I knew he wouldn't like me to infer. I said: "Well, I daresay you have good reasons, whatever they are. Karelsky seems rather a keen business man, and if the terms he offers aren't high enough——"
"Karelsky," he sharply interrupted, "had nothing to do with it."
"Whether he had or not, you haven't any money of your own, and you obviously can't afford to——"
I guessed that would stir him. He protested with sudden indignation: "I tell you it isn't a matter of money at all. Good heavens! do you think I'd let a question of money interfere with—with anything I had thought of doing?"
"Whatwouldyou let interfere, then?"
He shook his head. "It's just.... Oh, I can't go—I keep on telling you I can't go.... That's all."
"It isn't me you ought to be telling. It's Severn. He doesn't know yet, does he?"
"Not yet."
"Don't you think he'll be rather disappointed?"
"Perhaps. I'm sorry about that.... But all the same, I can't help it. It's nothing to do with him—the reason, I mean.... I can't help it—I shall tell him I can't help it!"
So the reason had nothing to do with Severn, and nothing to do with Karelsky. Then whowasthe person involved?
II
It took about an hour to extort a few meagre fragments of the truth. Only a few, even then. I talked and questioned, and he answered and sometimes didn't answer, and out of it all, very gradually indeed, there came a very blurred picture of whatmighthave happened that night at the End House.... It was obvious, of course, that Helen had persuaded him not to go, and that he had given her a promise. He even admitted as much in the end, in order that he could entrench himself on the much stronger ground that he had pledged his word and must keep to it. Hewasn'tgoing to Vienna, he said again; that was final; and he didn't see what there was to argue about.
I answered that there was a great deal to argue about. There was what Severn would think, to begin with. Was he going to tell Severn that he had cancelled the arrangement with Karelsky in order to please Helen?... He replied doggedly, as before, that he couldn't helpwhatSevern thought; he was grateful to him, but gratitude didn't and couldn't mean going anywhere in the world he suggested. Besides, hadn't Severn urged him to please himself?
Pleasing himself, I pointed out, was a far different thing from changing his mind at the last minute. Then he said, with a touch of sharpness: "Look here, I'm fed up with all this talk. I don't understand what you're arguing about.... What's the game? Why are you so damned keen on getting me sent off to Vienna?"
I told him that I wasn't keen at all, but rather the contrary, so far as I personally was concerned. "It's just," I said, "that I don't want you to make a hash of things."
"Ahashof things? What do you mean?"
His less passive attitude made it easier for me to come to the somewhat delicate point. I asked him straightforwardly if he were going to continue seeing Helen as much as he had been doing. The question seemed to galvanize him into something like fierceness; he retorted instantly: "Yes, just as much, and perhaps even more!"
We were both silent for a while, and I wondered hazily what I should say, what arguments I could use, how the matter ought to be tackled. In the end I began where the argument should have stopped; I said, almost in desperation: "But, Terry—can't you see how—how utterlyimpossibleit is?"
"What is utterly impossible?"
"That you and Helen—should go on—as you are doing." I waited for him to reply, and when he didn't, I continued: "Can't you see that when a woman asks you—makes you promise—to putherbefore your work.... Can't you see that her asking younotto go to Vienna is just a reason—an additional reason—why youshouldgo?"
He tried to see; I could see him trying to see; but what he saw was something different—some strange and secret vision of his own. "You don't understand," he said haltingly. "There's nothing I can say to make you understand, either. You'd far better not worry about it.... Helen—in a sort of way—needs me—here, and I'm going to stay."
"She needs you?"
"Yes."
"How does she need you?"
He flashed back: "You're forcing me to say something that sounds conceited. But it's true, all the same. She needs me because—because I'm teaching her—I'm helping her to realize—that life isn't—just money—and pleasure—and idleness!"
And there he was, revealed at last—in his own eyes the missionary, the evangelist, converting her from frivolity to the true faith in Koch, Kelvin, and Lister. There was pride and triumph in his voice, and, looking back on it now, I believe that he was perfectly sincere. But at the time it angered me; I lost my temper. "Damn it all," I cried, "Iwilltell you what I think, whether it offends you or not. You're behaving like a fool—or else like a cad—I can't be quite certain which.... Talk aboutteachingher andhelping her to realize—why don't you tell the truth and admit that you're head over ears in love with her? ... It's bad enough to play the fool with another man's wife, but to talk highbrow bunkum about it seems to me pretty near the limit!"
He looked for a moment as if he were going to rush at me. But the fierceness soon passed, and behind it was the half-truculent doggedness of his earlier mood. "You don't understand," he said, after a pause. "I couldn't expect you to understand. I don't know why I began telling you anything about this at all...." Then he suddenly stood erect and wiped the perspiration from his streaming forehead. "This heat!" he cried, waving his arms. "Oh, for God's sake, let's get out of it—anywhere—anywhere."
III
We went out together into the street. It was nearly two o'clock, and the very slight breeze seemed only to make the night hotter. We walked down Gray's Inn Road and across Holborn and through a labyrinth of alleys and side-streets towards Fleet Street and the river. All the time there was the lightning and the heavy-rolling thunder; the storm would break very soon, and the blackness of the sky was something that could almost be seen. Everything seemed grotesquely unreal, including what he said and what I said. Perhaps we were both possessed; perhaps the whole night was agog with demons and angels, and we, with our problem, were their pitiful sport....
We went on arguing. I told him that if I didn't understand, it was his fault for obscuring everything in a fog of reticence. I had made deductions from what I could see with my eyes, and that was what he must expect other people, including Severn, to do. If these deductions were all wrong, then it washisplace to assure and convince me of it. But he said: "No, not at all. If your deductions are wrong, then it's your own fault for having made them."
"Will you tell that to Severn, ifhisdeductions are wrong?"
"I don't know what I shall tell Severn."
"You admit he has some right to object to what's going on?"
"As much as a man who boasts of doing what he likes hasanyright to object to other people doing what they like."
He was a shrewder disputant than I had suspected. "Look here, Terry," I said, rather more cordially, "why don't you try to see my point? It isn't just nosiness that's making me ask you all these infernally awkward questions. You know that, or at any rate, you ought to.... It's just what I feel—I have an idea—that you may be on the verge of doing something that you'll afterwards regret. Naturally, I want to warn you—to help you, if I can. But you won't let me get near the subject—you won't even let me know what it is you're going to do."
"I'm going to stay in London," he said resolutely. "That's what I'm going to do, and I've been telling you that for the last hour."
"But what does it mean? Does it mean that you and Helen——? ... Look here, will you give me your assurance that there's nothing in your relationship but this—this teaching business that you spoke of?"
"Which you called highbrow bunkum."
"Well, if I did——"
"Youdid, anyhow. And now you want my assurance that there's nothing in my relationship with Helen except highbrow bunkum. Do you really expect me to give it to you? And would you believe it if I did?"
"Never mind that. Come to the point.... Is your relationship with her perfectly all-square and above board?"
"I don't quite know what you mean."
"Is it the sort of thing you could let Severn know about?"
"No.... It isn't the sort of thing I could let anybody know about."
"You mean you're in love with her?"
"No—don't ask me that. Don't ask me any more. I can't and I shan't answer any more."
Deadlock—and then the storm broke. But the rain seemed to change the feeling of the world; it opened, as it were, a window in the sky, and a cool breeze floated through, scouring and freshening every corner. We were cool at last, and then cold, and then, with tremendous suddenness, tired. Too tired to go on arguing, too tired to think of how to get back, too tired to do anything but stand under the Embankment tramway shelter and wait for the clouds to exhaust themselves.
When the rain had nearly stopped we hastened northwards through the swirling and deserted streets. It was three o'clock. We spoke very little on the way, and by tacit agreement the argument was not resumed. Only once was it so much as referred to, and that was when, bidding him good-bye at the door of his lodgings, I said: "I don't retract anything I said a little while ago, but I'm sorry I lost my temper over it."
And he answered, with shy cordiality: "Oh,that'sall right. Don't trouble aboutthat...."
IV
All the next day I was away in the Midlands on newspaper work, but my mind, even when it shouldn't have been, was full of thinking about Terry and Helen and their relationship. I couldn't escape from it; it dominated me like an unsolved word-puzzle. Whathadhappened at the End House on that night of the dinner to Karelsky? And what had been happening for weeks and months before? It was, as a matter of fact, seven years later when I found out, and as most of my conjectures were then shown to be wrong, there doesn't seem to be much reason for setting them down. All that need be recorded is that I returned to town late in the evening and found this short note awaiting me:
"Of course you were right after all, and I shall always thank you for what you did and said. I don't know what has been possessing me lately, but I think I must have been off my head. I'm going to Vienna with Karelsky to-night, and when I'm there I'm going towork. Come over and see me as soon as you can spare time for a holiday. Yrs.,TERRY."
"Of course you were right after all, and I shall always thank you for what you did and said. I don't know what has been possessing me lately, but I think I must have been off my head. I'm going to Vienna with Karelsky to-night, and when I'm there I'm going towork. Come over and see me as soon as you can spare time for a holiday. Yrs.,
TERRY."
V
And the next day I saw Helen. I came out of theMessengernewspaper-office about half-past three in the afternoon, and found her standing on the kerb outside. "Hello!" I exclaimed. "Fancy seeing you round here. Where are you going?"
She said: "Nowhere. I was waiting for you to come out."
"Who told you I was here?"
"Your landlady. I called at your rooms."
"But why on earth didn't you send up a message to the office? Or 'phone me? I could have been with you half an hour ago if I'd known."
She answered: "I should have done, but—I thought you might not want to see me."
"Notwantto see you? Good heavens, why shouldn't I?"
She shrugged her shoulder and then said: "Oh, never mind.... Let's go somewhere—where we can talk."
So she wanted to talk. Looking back on it now, it seems incredible that I didn't guess what her attitude would be. I suppose that Terry's letter had made me feel ever so slightly a hero, with its "I shall always thank you for what you did and said." Perhaps, subconsciously, I was in the mood that expects congratulation; at any rate, I wasn't prepared for censure. I looked out for a taxi, thinking I would take her to tea somewhere in the West End; but she said impatiently: "We can gothere," and pointed to a Lyons tea-shop on the other side of Fleet Street. "But surely——" I began; and she interrupted sharply: "There, I tell you. This is business, not pleasure."
We threaded our way amongst the marble-topped tables, and as she passed a waitress she gave a rather defiant order for two cups of tea. Then she selected a table, sat down, and began immediately, with a sort of point-blank hostility: "So—after all—you've managed to persuade him?"
"You—you mean—Terry?"
And she answered, with that peculiar greenish glint in her eyes that made her look rather more wonderful than ever: "Yes, I mean Terry."
She was watching me mercilessly across the table; yet, even then, I couldn't see what cause she had to be displeased with me. I said, with genuine sincerity: "Well—honestly—don't you really think it'll be a good chance for him—going to Vienna with Karelsky?"
And she answered, with a bitter, mocking laugh: "Honestly—Idon'tthink it'll be a good chance for him—and—honestly—I think you'd far better have minded your own business...."
That was a bad beginning. The whole interview lasted less than ten minutes. Then, metaphorically, it broke up in disorder. If she had been a man, we might even have come to blows; as it was, I could do nothing but sit and listen. She wasn't so much burning as burned with indignation; her words came out in an even flow that seemed alternately scorching and freezing. She was passionately certain that I had blundered. "Terry will havenochance in Vienna," she said, "except the chance of slogging away for someone else's benefit. You reckon to be a writer and to understand people and yet you don't understand either Karelsky or Terry.... Geoffrey's just as stupid—he thinks it's a great chance for Terry because, ifhewere in Terry's place, he wouldmakeit a great chance for him. No doubt it is a great chance, for anybody who can watch that he gets as much as he can out of Karelsky, and lets Karelsky get as little as possible out of him.... But Terry's not that sort. It'll never occur to him that Karelsky's out to get all the things in life thathedoesn't care about at all.... But it's true—I know the Karelsky sort—I've met dozens of him before. All over the world there is the quiet type of man like Terry, and the acquisitive type like Karelsky and Geoffrey, and whenever they meet there's tragedy.... And yet you've deliberatelymadethem meet."
She gave me no time either to explain or protest, but went on: "I know, of course,whyyou persuaded him. Not because you had any ideas at all about Vienna or Karelsky (you wouldn't stop to think aboutthat), but simply because, with your trained, novelettish eye" (the phrase struck me as rather good) "you scented an intrigue, and wanted to get him out of the way at all costs. I believe you'd have banished him to the North Pole if there hadn't been anywhere else.... As if there ever was, or could have been an intrigue! Butyou, of course—your morality was shocked...."
I couldn't stand that. "Look here," I said quietly, "I'm not going to have you calling me a prig. It wasn't morality at all, though why, even if it was, you should sneer at it, I don't know.... But, as a matter of fact, it was nothing more than simple commonsense. You told me once that you were in love with him. Then, after he had accepted what seemed, on the face of it, a good post, you begged him not to go. And he gave in and promised he wouldn't. Do you blame me if I thought the situation rather dangerous? Whatwereyou to him that he should change his mind on such an important matter just because you asked him to?"
She answered, with a curious, far-away sadness in her voice: "I wasn't—anything—to him—except a teacher. I was teaching him all sorts of little things that he'll need to know in the world—little tricks of the trade of living—I was trying to lessen the probability that wherever he goes and whatever he does, he'll be the prey of men not half as strong and not a tenth as good. And I was trying to show him how big the world was, and how, even with his ideals, it couldn't all be seen from a laboratory window.... I took him to all sorts of places—educating him, in a sort of way—trying to—to——"
Oh, that talk ofteachingandeducating! From her lips it exasperated me as much as it had from his; it drove me into saying something that I have regretted ever since. "You may have tried," I interrupted sharply, "but you didn't succeed. Even you can't change the nature of him, and all the time you thought he was learning to be a social success, he was merely learning to love you....That'swhat you taught him—nothing else. And that's why I judged the situation to be so dangerous that the sooner he cleared out of it the better."
I say I have regretted it ever since, and that's the bitter truth. I began regretting about a second after I had spoken, for she answered, with a calm smile and a thrill of pride in her voice: "I knew, of course, that he loved me, because he told me so. But he didn't tellyouto tell me, and I despise you utterly for doing it. You have abused his confidence.... It's no good arguing after a thing like that.... I think you'd better get me a taxi and let me go...."
VI
I got her a taxi, and she went, and I didn't see or speak to her again for years. That is the sort of thing which, when one writes it down, gives one a sense of bewilderment. Such a little, paltry quarrel to have caused such a long estrangement! I wrote down in my diary on the evening of the day it happened: "Met H. in Fleet Street. Tiff over T." I was so sure, at the time, that it was only a tiff. I had to leave London the next morning for a week's reporting job in South Wales, and I never doubted that by the time I returned the quarrel would be forgotten.
Yet it wasn't. I remember in particular one hot August afternoon shortly after I came back. Severn had invited me to lunch with him at White's, and during the meal he talked and discussed in his usual brilliant way. But afterwards, while we mellowed ourselves with port, he said suddenly: "I say, Hilton, old chap, what on earth have you been saying to my wife?"
How could I tell himanything, much lesseverything? I laughed to gain time to think, and then I asked him rather stammeringly what exactly he meant. He answered: "It's rather queer. She seems to have taken a sudden dislike to you.... I'm giving a farewell party next week—just a little dinner before we go out of town. I suppose you got the invitation?"
"Yes. I was intending to reply to it to-night."
"Accepting?"
"Well—yes."
He filled up my glass and said: "Can't understand it a bit—why she's taken up such an extraordinary attitude. But she won't have you—won't have you up to the house at any price—not even for this party. Says she'll walk out if you come.... Awkward, eh?"
Of course I suggested that I should consider the invitation cancelled, and after formally protesting, he agreed. (It was what he had intended me to suggest, I could see.) "Decent of you not to mind," he said. "If you ever marry, you'll find it's always best to humour a woman when she begins to take absurd dislikes.... We're going for a month to the Canaries—perhaps that'll do her good."
We talked for a while on other topics, and then, just before we separated, he said: "By the way—not been making love to Helen or anything like that, have you?"
I assured him that I hadn't, and he laughed. "Thought I'd just ask you, that's all. Don't know that I'd blame you altogether if youhadbeen—she's a wonderful woman, only capricious—absolutely capricious.... Anyhow, no need to worry about it—probably just an attack of nerves. You and I can always meet here when we want, can't we? ... Dam silly creatures, women, eh? Whydowe marry them? ..."
VII
Letters from Terry began to arrive with marvellous regularity every fortnight. If they were a post late I knew there had been an avalanche in the Tirol or a storm in mid-Channel or some other act of God. They were always very short, and nearly always quite uninteresting. They never mentioned Severn or Helen, and never referred to the argument we had had upon the night of the storm. They were, in fact, the sort of letters a public-school boy might write to his mother. Two items they very rarely lacked—a brief reference to continued good health, and a rough summary of the weather. On the few occasions that the former item was omitted, I was free to guess rather than to know that he had been unwell.
He didn't mention that he had made or was making any friends; but then, of course, that wasn't the sort of thing that he ever would mention. He didn't even say whether he liked Vienna as a city to live in. One or two people wandered in and out of his letters like characters in a Russian play; there was Karelsky, naturally, and Frau Scholz, who kept the apartment-house where he lodged, and "Mizzi," her daughter... Besides these few—absolutely nobody.... Of miscellaneous information, the most frequent reference was to his progress in the German language. No mention ever of theatres or concerts or operas. He was, I gathered, living the sort of life he had had before meeting Helen, and the fact that it had a Viennese instead of a London setting was not, perhaps, so very important.
And meanwhile I, who, thank heaven, am not attempting to present a history of myself, lived on in London, still exiled from the End House, and still seeking a precarious livelihood in the Street of Peradventure. I lunched with Severn at White's from time to time, and I worked hard, so that the months passed quickly; and then, just when I was about to plan my yearly holidays in Vienna, Severn got me aMessenger: commission that sent me roving round Honolulu and the South Seas instead. And so, without seeing Terry, as I had intended, there came another crowded year of work.
That was the year, you may remember, in which Karelsky burst upon the world with his astonishing Longevity Theory. In a slack season it descended upon Fleet Street like manna from heaven. Karelsky in the course of a lecture at the Sorbonne, announced the discovery of what he called "a new method of revitalizing life-force," and to this he added the startling assertion that, having experimented with it upon himself, he had every hope of beating the famous record of Methusaleh. Naturally the newspapers went wild about it, and so did joke-manufacturers and music-hall comedians all over the world. For a few months Karelsky was almost a household word. Then after a Brixton gentleman had cut his wife into six small pieces, it was generally recognized in Fleet Street that the Karelsky-Methusaleh episode was finished.... I remember asking Terry in a letter what he thought about it all, and receiving a non-committal reply that he couldn't express any opinion because his own work hadn't brought him into any contact with it. Karelsky, I gathered, was a man of many-sided activities.
Severn was more outspoken. "Whether it's all rot or not," he said, "you must admit that Karelsky's played the game rather well. You newspaper-men ought to pass him a vote of thanks. He's saved you from having to rake up the Sea-serpent, anyhow."
But all that is really by the bye. The newspapers of the time are full of the Methusaleh business, just as they are of Severn's speeches in the House, and anybody deeply interested in either can search the files and read till he is tired.
VIII
I went to Vienna in the summer of that second year.
Terry had sent me a most cordial letter of welcome; I had engaged through Cook's a room at the Bristol; I had amassed a fair sum of money after a profitable year, and I was prepared to spend as much as need be on a deserved holiday. I chose the middle weeks of July, and it was gloriously sunny on the morning I arrived at Vienna. All the way from London I had been looking forward to that moment, for I felt confident that Terry would be on the platform to meet me. Yet he wasn't. I loitered for a while about the station precincts, thinking he might have been delayed on the way; and then, when he still didn't come, I took a cab to the address in the Laudon Gasse where he lodged.
It was only a short journey, hardly long enough for disappointment to turn into apprehension. I hadn't, of course,askedhim to meet me, but he knew the train by which I should arrive, and it seemed so very unlikely that, if he were able, he wouldn't turn out for me.
The streets, I remember, were crowded with early-morning workers, and with the sun shining down upon it all, the panorama of blue sky and green trees and red trams and yellow houses might almost have been especially designed to cheer the traveller who hadn't been met. Even the tall apartment-house in the Laudon Gasse struck a cheerful note; it had been recently painted, and window-boxes of bright flowers gave it an almost gay appearance. But there was no sign of Terry. I waited some moments in the hall, and then, just when I was on the point of making as much row as I could on the door-bell, a girl emerged from somewhere in the interior.
"You wish to see Meester Terrington?" she said, with an atrocious accent.
I told her I did, and she answered, with a rather peremptory gesture: "Then you please to come with me."
She led me furlongs, I should think, along winding passages and up and down crooked stairways. Two or three houses had evidently been joined together, and the result, if a trifle bewildering, was certainly homely. I could have been quite happy in such a place myself.
Then, of course, I was thinking chiefly about Terry. "Is he ill?" I ventured to ask, as I followed the girl, and in case she might be unsure of my meaning, I translated the question into schoolboyish German. But she ignored it, and answered, with an absurd but comforting precision: "He iss not ill, but he hass a temperature...."
IX
A minute later I was with him.
I suppose he was bound to look slightly different after two years. He was sitting in an armchair with the sun on his face, and that, no doubt, gave him a look of thinness and pallor that wasn't real. Anyhow, he was delighted to see me. His eyes lit up with his delight—I could see that. He had been perfectly well, he said, until two days before, when somehow or other he had caught a chill. His temperature had been at one time as high as a hundred and two, but was now down to ninety-nine point five, which showed that he was almost better. He was so sorry I had had to find my own way from the station; he had badly wanted to come and meet me, but his doctor (who, incidentally, lived in the set of rooms immediately below) had absolutely forbidden him to go out. But he would be all right, he was certain, in a day or so.
There comes always, soon after the meeting of long-absent friends, a sudden hiatus when the first rapture of reunion is over and the quiet joy of companionship has hardly yet resumed its sway. At such a moment one says anything—anything—to break the awkward and intolerable silence. I, for example, when that moment came, made some remark about the comfort of his surroundings. "Better than Swinton Street, eh? ... And even a girl who speaks English—of a sort."
And he said: "Oh, yes, that's Mizzi." (He pronounced it "Mitzi.")
Then we began to talk about his work, and that finally bridged the hiatus. He said that he had plenty to do; and that he was working hard. I asked him if he were doing more than he could have done in London, and he said that he thought so. Then I asked him how he liked Karelsky, and he replied cautiously that he thought he was very clever.... He seemed even more than usually reticent, and when I hinted that I would like to be taken over Karelsky's laboratories, he told me that it wouldn't be possible. They were secret, apparently, and he had had to sign a paper that he wouldn't divulge anything of what went on in them. "Anybody would think you were inventing submarines, not serums!" I said laughingly and there the matter ended.
X
I hadn't seen him for two years. That fact, so simple and so obvious, was yet the hardest of all to realize. I kept on being startled by the revelation of what it meant; it gave me almost a shock, for instance, when I first heard him talking in fluent colloquial German. Those two years ... howhadhe managed to live them through? What had they meant to him?
I should never have known but for Mizzi. Mizzi, I soon found, was a person of great intelligence and even greater industry. It was she who practically ran the apartment-house (her mother being a semi-invalid), and it was under her energetic management that the general tone of the establishment was being constantly improved. She rose at six in the morning and worked till about midnight, and she had sent to her every week from Chicago an immense portfolio of a magazine calledHotel-Keeping. In appearance she might have been called good-looking had not that elusive thing, personality, made you forget her looks altogether. She was, as a matter of fact, rather an odd mixture of Latin and Teutonic physical attributes; her broad and essentially German forehead was balanced by dark eyes that might have been Spanish or Italian. But it was her personality that counted. She could bring you a cup of coffee and somehow, by the slightest of gestures, convey the fact that she was not a servant, but rather a hostess honouring her guests.
"Meester Terrington," she told me, as on that first evening she unlocked the front-door to let me out, "iss always at work. Too hard, I think.... You must tell him not to be so hard at work. He wished to go to work even with hiss temperature, but I call the doctor, and he said not. He not let him go even this morning to the station to meet you."
I said that I thought both she and the doctor had acted very rightly, and she went on, aloofly accepting my approval: "Iwould have come to meet you, but I did not know how you looked."
That was our first conversation. We had many others afterwards, and it was from them that I began to have an idea of what had been happening to Terry during those two years.
Theleit-motifof it all had been Work. He had been working day after day for two years, and except on Sunday afternoons he had taken no holidays and had allowed himself no respite. "I tell him always to go to the Semmering, but he will not, because it iss necessary to go for the whole day." His hours in the laboratories were quite long enough in themselves, but he supplemented them by extra hours of work in his own room at night. He never went to theatre or concert or opera; he might have been exiled in a backwoods village, instead of in the gayest city in Europe. "He says to me that he likes not music," she said. But she thought there might also be another reason—that he hadn't enough money. "Karelsky," she said, "iss a very rich man, but he does not pay much to anybody else. There iss a doctor here who knows him." I said that I didn't know that Karelsky was rich, and she answered: "He gets the money from America—where all the money comes from."
She told me also that Terry had made no friends. "He says to me that he hass no father or mother or fiancée, and I am sorry for that. He also says that he hass no friend except you, but I think that iss his own fault, for there are many very nice people in Wien.... But he will not make friends. I think he likes nothing except hiss work. That iss why I give him the big room at the top of the new house, so that the others, if they come in a little drunken, shall not derange him."
I said to her: "Well, anyhow, he's not going to work so hard while I'm here. And next Sunday, whether he wants or not, he's coming with me to that place you mentioned—what was it?"
"The Semmering," she replied. "It hass wonderful mountains, but—do not forget—it iss necessary to haf the whole day. And he will say to you what he says always to me—that he cannot go because he must feed hiss mice at eleven o'clock.... Every Sunday at eleven o'clock he goes to feed hiss mice! What would you do to him?" There was a touch of indignation in her voice.
XI
She was right about the mice. They put a veto on the Semmering excursion. It was absolutely impossible, he said, to leave the delicate creatures for a whole twenty-four hours. If they were not fed regularly, the whole value of the experiments conducted on them would be destroyed. Could not, I suggested, somebody else feed them for once? He said there was nobody else on the premises on a Sunday. I asked who fed them while he had been away, and he said: "Some of the other men, but it would be impossible for them to do it on a Sunday." And so the mountains of the Semmering lay beyond our reach—barred from us by mice.
In the meantime there were the evenings. He couldn't, he said, however hard he tried, take time off during the day-time. Perhaps, if he hadn't been ill, he might have stolen a day, but as it was .... And so, with a regretful smile, he left me every morning to spend the warm and sunny hours as best I could, lounging about the cafés and boulevards, and occasionally, when such a busy person could spare me a moment, gossiping with Mizzi. Her accent was certainly atrocious, but her knowledge of English idiom and grammar surprised me by its completeness. It was only quite accidentally that I learned that Terry had taught her.
There comes to me now, as I write, the memory of a remark made years afterwards by someone who looked at Terry from a different angle. "Leave him alone with somebody," was this remark, "and in a quarter of an hour he'll either have said nothing at all, or else he'll have begun to teach. He loves teaching because he loves giving more than taking away, and teaching isthat."
I wasn't, even at the time, surprised that he had taught Mizzi. It seemed natural, since she had wanted to learn English and he had wanted to learn German. She told me that English was her third foreign language—French and Italian being already known to her. I asked her once why she was so keen to be a linguist. I was standing in the porch, smoking my after-breakfast cigar in the sunlight, and Mizzi's hands, everlastingly busy, were tending the flowers in the ground-floor window-boxes. She said, with a little shrug of her shoulders: "It will be very useful to me—someday...." And then, as if she had suddenly made up her mind that I could be trusted, she added: "I tell you this in confidence. Some day, when I haf the money, I shall buy all the houses along here and make them into one big hotel.... And then I will haf an omnibus at the station, and I will talk to English and French and Italian in their own language, so that it will all be very—what do you say?—heimlich...."
XII
The time passed quickly enough, but in a sort of way I was disappointed. I had expected to see much more of Terry; I had had in mind all kinds of excursions, including, if possible, a week-end trip along the Danube to Buda-Pesth. But his Work—his almighty Work—stood in the way. Not, of course, that either he or I was in the least bored. He was so simply and obviously delighted to be with me that I was all the more enraged that he couldn't manage to be with me oftener. But it was no use attempting to persuade him; his Work was a jealous god.
Only once did he mention Helen. It was on the last evening before my return to England, and we had strolled into the Burg-garten, where the heavy dusk-smelling trees were like a belt of magic separating us from the dazzling boulevards. There was a high moon overhead, and an orchestra playing the overture toEgmontin the open-air, and a crowd of Viennese, of all ages and classes, listening in silent rapture. Many of them followed the score from large folios, and if a careless foreigner so much as whispered a word or struck a match, shocked eyes stared at him and quelled him into silence. After the day's heat and bustle the kiss of the muted violins seemed to stir the air into cool waves and ripples; it was all delicious, enchanting and utterly unlike anything that could possibly happen in Hyde Park.
After the final chord he asked me suddenly how Helen was. I thought I had better not tell him of our quarrel, so I replied merely that I believed she was all right, although I hadn't seen much of her lately. And then, emboldened by his broaching of the subject, I asked him if he had heard from her.
He said: "Yes. She has written to me several times."
"Recently?"
"Over a year ago was the last time."
"And why not since?"
He shook his head and did not answer for a moment. And then, with the same odd suddenness, he added: "I don't want you to misunderstand.... She gave up writing to me—no doubt—because I gave up answering her."
"Why did you?"
"Because—Icouldn'tanswer. The letters she wrote were the sort I didn't knowhowto answer."
The orchestra struck up again, and we walked stealthily away through the trees. It seemed to me that the opportunity had arrived for saying a good deal that I had intended to say some time or other. I told him outright that I thought he was in great danger of making a hash of his life. "Still?" he said; and the word was an answer to everything. I said that perhaps I had put the matter a shade too tragically, although, undoubtedly, it was serious. He was, to be quite frank about it, working too hard. "I don't care," I said, "how important your work is; there are two things you ought never to sacrifice to it—friendship and recreation."
"Well?"
The word was disconcerting. "Of course, I know it isn't any of my business, but still—youareworking too hard—youmustrealize that. Why don't you take a holiday—a month, say—and come to England? My landlady could easily put you up."
He shook his head. It was good of me, he said, but he couldn't possibly manage it. He couldn't leave his work, and besides that, there were other reasons. It would cost too much, for one thing.... And then (with a sudden agitation of voice) whyshouldhe go to England? What was there in England for him?
"I'm only suggesting a holiday," I said.
He said that he had no time for holidays, and that if he had he wouldn't think of wasting four days of them in travelling to England and back.
I let myself go when he said that. I told him that it was absurd to say that he had no time for holidays—that a manmusthave time for holidays, unless he wants to kill himself from overwork. "And this extraordinary work of yours—which might be a sort of conjuring trick from the way you're bound to secrecy about it——"
I let myself go for five minutes, and then, for less than one minute he did just the opposite of letting himself go; he spoke very slowly and quietly, weighing up each word as he uttered it. "It's no good," he said, "thinking like that. You don't understand anything about my work.... You don't understand how I've given myself to it. I must give myself to something.... Imust—always—and that's what you don't understand."
"But Idounderstand it," I answered. "It's simply that I don't agree with it. I say that you oughtn't to give yourself like that.... It would be a good thing if you were married, for then your wife wouldn't let you."
He said, for the second time: "I shall never marry."
"Why not?"
"Because—really—I don't like women. And when—if—Idolike them, I hate liking them.... The ones I don't dislike are the ordinary ones—like Mizzi."
I said that it hadn't occurred to me that Mizzi was at all an ordinary woman.
He said: "Perhaps 'ordinary' isn't the word. What I mean is that we don't—Idon't, at any rate—think of Mizzi as a woman exactly. She's business-like and does things—she's more like a man."
I said that it hadn't occurred to me that Mizzi was in the least like a man. Really, I must have been rather irritating, but he bore it all with exemplary patience. "She's the sort of woman I can stand, anyhow," he asserted.
"Then you'd better marry her," I replied jocularly, but he seemed to take it in all seriousness. "I don't want to marry at all," he repeated, "and neither does Mizzi. She doesn't bother with men. Her dream is to own a hotel, and she thinks a man would only get in her way...."
XIII
I find now that I have set down everything that I can definitely remember about that visit to Vienna. My diary doesn't help me, because I carelessly left it in London, and when I got back I just scrawled "Vienna" across the blank pages. All I can do is to think of a certain scene or place, and then, nine times out of ten, it's just a picture that comes to me, and not a happening at all. I can see, for instance, the tall yellow-painted houses in the Laudon Gasse, and the "Durchgang Verboten" notice on the door of Mizzi's private entrance, and the masses of velvet-red geraniums on the sills. Almost, as I write, I can smell those geraniums, and also the curious, half-musty aroma that haunts even the cleanest of those old Viennese houses.... I can see the wide, park-bordered boulevards, with the vermilion trams sparkling through the alternate sunlight and shadow, and (most clearly of all, this) the wrinkled old lady at the corner of the Opern Ring, who used to sell me citronnade. And I can see Mizzi standing in the porch to see me off, and automatically (since it was not her nature to waste even a moment) kicking away a few dead leaves that had blown on to the step. It was the night express that I was making for, and the evening sunlight was dancing on Mizzi's sherry-coloured hair as I turned and waved to her just as the car swung us round the corner into the Skoda Gasse. And Terry said: "The next time you come you won't need to put up at the Bristol. Mizzi told me that in future she'd always be glad to find you a room."
That "next time".... We had suggested that it should be at the end of another year, but it wasn't; it was at the end of five. So many things happened in the interval—things important enough in their own scheme of things, but not here. I got a decent sub-editorship, for instance, and chiefly owing to that the vaguely arranged trip fell through. It wasn't postponed; it was just cancelled; for a sub-editorship, more than anything else perhaps, curtails a man's freedom to roam over Europe on visits to even his most intimate friends. I sent Terry, however, a cordial invitation to visit me instead, but he declined for the usual reason—his Work.
To me, of course, those five years are anything but a gap; they're so crowded with business happenings that have no claim to be set down here. More than once I planned a visit to Vienna, but at the last moment something happened to prevent it; nor was I free even on holidays, for I usually combined them with business commissions that took me almost everywhere except to Central Europe. Terry's still regular letters expressed no disappointment, but then, they never expressed any emotion at all. Once he ended with "Mizzi sends you her kind regards," and then, after that, Mizzi always sent me her kind regards. No doubt he acquired the habit of writing it; and, anyhow, I regarded it as no more than an indication that Mizzi was still alive.
My diaries are rather a help to me here. I find in them quite a number of mentions of Severn, and even of Karelsky. Both men were almost continually in the limelight; if you take up anyMessengerof the period the odds are that you will find either a Severn cross-examination or an account of Karelsky's rejuvenation of some illustrious personage. Fleet Street loved them both, the former for the constancy with which he yielded stimulating copy, and the latter for the uncanny accuracy with which he dropped sensations into the very heart of dead periods. I am thinking, of course, of the great Thibetan monastery sensation. Karelsky travelled, apparently, in Thibet, and somehow or other obtained an entrance into an old and inaccessible monastery in which, to his astonishment, he found that his own methods of rejuvenation had been practised for hundreds of years; so that, in fact, many of the monks were actually in their third and fourth centuries! Fleet Street "wrote up" the story in great glee, with maps of Thibet and excerpts from Sven Hedin and Younghusband all complete; but naturally Fleet Street did not believe a single word of it.
I remember discussing the matter with Severn at a sort of "house-warming" party I gave at my new rooms overlooking Lincoln's Inn Fields. Somebody said that Karelsky would have made a better journalist than scientist; and I think I answered that from my own professional point of view I would rather he remained a scientist, since as a journalist he would only be one liar amongst so many. Perhaps I said outright that in my opinion he was very little better than a charlatan and an impostor. But Severn shook his head. "Karelsky's more than that," he answered. "I shouldn't have recommended Terry with him if he'd been a mere market-place quack. Of course, there is something of the quack in him, and he's obviously running this Thibetan stuff for his own advertisement.... But I shouldn't like to call anything that Karelsky says an absolute lie. In my opinion he's one of the very few first-class geniuses the world possesses...."
"And you really think this story of his——"
Severn smiled. "I prefer to express no opinion," he said. "I am far from saying that Karelsky could not, if he wished, tell the most thundering of lies. But in this case ... well, I just don't know. Oddly enough, I met a well-known Harley Street physician only yesterday and he assured me, from his own personal and rather secret knowledge of Thibet, that Karelsky was perfectly right—although, of course, he deplored the sensationalism of it...."
And there the matter ended. I have mentioned it to show how impossible I found it to make up my mind about Karelsky. He had been, and remained still, an enigma.
During those years Severn and I contrived to meet fairly often—sometimes in town and less often, when Helen was away, at the End House. If ever I were tempted to think the worst of him, I should only need to ask myself the question: Whyshouldhe have troubled to help me as much as he did? I know, of course, what his reply would be—a suave smile and an assurance that he did it merely for the pleasure he got in doing it, like any other voluptuary. I am to suppose, therefore, that he voluptuously interviewed the editor of theMessengerand persuaded him that I was worth a sub-editorship. "My dear fellow," he told me once, "I really do what I like, whatever it happens to be. You'd be surprised if you knew what I was capable of.... For God's sake, don't think of me as a sort of maundering philanthropist."
All this time he was rising rapidly in his profession. He loved publicity for its own sake, and he specialized in cases that gave him it—divorce, criminal, and civil. One year, it was freely rumoured, he earned over fifty thousand pounds. At the same time in the House he had made a first-class reputation, and was almost certain of the Solicitor-Generalship when his party came into office. He had had marvellous, almost incredible good fortune, andhe kept on having it. He couldn't write a book without it going into seven editions. He couldn't dabble in art without exhibiting at the Paris Salon, and, under a pseudonym, attracting a considerable amount of attention. A newspaper friend of mine once summed him up rather neatly. We were speculating on which of his many activities represented his real natural bent. "All of them and none of them," was my friend's enigmatic opinion. "He's just born to be one thing and one thing only—asuccess. It's only an accident that he paints, writes, and harangues a jury. If he'd been a rag-and-bone man down the Mile End Road he'd have been just as big a success.... While other men, perhaps far better and just as clever, are born to be failures...."
When I look back on those years, I see Severn most clearly of all in his surroundings at White's. It is as if all the memories of meeting him there were laid one on top of another to form a composite picture of a single typical meeting. There were sherry, oysters, port, coffee, cigars, and talk. The talk was always brilliant and the port was always strong. Nothing very much was ever said about Helen, but Severn's attitude to me was so cordial that I knew he must think her's rather absurd. Sometimes he would tell me that she hadn't been well and that she had gone abroad to recuperate. She must have been out of England a very large proportion of those five years. I seem to remember asking the question, "How's Helen?" and receiving always the answer: "Oh, she's at Ostend...." (Or Etretat, Cannes, Biarritz, Palm Beach, or wherever it was.) June, meanwhile, was at her boarding-school, and later on, at Newnham. I met her only once, during a summer vacation; she had grown up into a normal, healthy, sport-loving youngster with freckled cheeks and just a touch of her mother's prettiness. She talked about nothing but tennis.
XIV
And so the gap (if it is a gap) is bridged, and at the further side of it there stands out in my memory a bright June day with the breeze from the river rushing up Bouverie Street and the sunlight glinting in the distance on the cross of St. Paul's. I had lunched at theCheshire Cheese, and when I returned to theMessengeroffice the 'phone boy told me that my man Roebuck (whom, to be quite accurate, I shared with two other tenants) had been trying to get me on the telephone. I rang him up immediately and heard, without the least surprise, that a telegram had arrived for me at my rooms. But then he said: "It's signed 'Mizzi'" (he pronounced it to rhyme with "dizzy") "and it comes from Vienna, sir. And it says, 'Please come immediately Terrington ill'...."