Chapter ONE: I

I FIRST met him outside the Tube Station at Hampstead; he had travelled on my train, and I had noticed him particularly because, like me, he was wearing a rather shabby overcoat over a dress-suit. At the corner of Rosslyn Hill I went into a shop for some tobacco, and when I came out he was waiting for me. He asked me in a rather shy voice if I could direct him to the End House.

I told him that I could, and that since I was going to the End House myself he had better come with me. We walked quite a long way without saying a word. Every now and then as we neared lamp-posts or brilliantly-lit shops I glanced sideways at him, and each time he was looking grimly ahead, as if life were a tremendous ordeal. He was rather good-looking, in a restrained sort of way; tall, well-proportioned, fair-haired and blue-eyed, he had all the attributes of the matinee idol except that he didn't look like one. Towards the top of Heath Street I tried to get him into conversation. "I suppose we're both guests at Severn's dinner-party to-night?" I remarked. "I suppose so," he answered rather gloomily, and then suddenly, with a sort of shy vehemence, he added: "I hate dinner-parties."

"Oh, but you won't hate this one," I assured him. "Severn's people are always interesting.... By the way, haven't you been before?"

"No. I didn't meet Severn till last week--didn't particularly want to, either. Somebody introduced us at the College--just casually, that was all--and then, a couple of days later, he sent me this invitation."

"Just what he _would_ do. But you needn't worry--you won't be bored."

He answered, with heavy despair: "I shall be worse than bored."

And he was. It would have been funny if it hadn't been rather pathetic. Severn had just won Manchester South in a bye-election, and that, no doubt, gave the party a predominantly political flavour. But there was, all the same, a fair seasoning of art and music, and I noticed that my shy acquaintance had been put between Mildred Gorton, the novelist, and Mrs. Hathersage (Olga Trepine, of the Caucasian Ballet). At that time, of course, I didn't know anything at all about him--whether he were a writer, a painter, a politician, a pianist, or just plain nothing-at-all. All I could see was that both Mildred and Olga were having a dreadful time trying to get a word out of him.

It was Mrs. Severn who enlightened my ignorance. I was next to her, and during a sudden gust of chatter all about us, she whispered to me: "You see that man over there next to Mildred Gorton? ... His name's Terrington. I want you to talk to him afterwards. You'll find him very reserved."

I told her then of my previous meeting with him, and she said: "It's a shame, really, to have put him next to Mildred; she'll scare him to death.... Geoffrey got to know him somehow or other last week. He says he's fearfully clever in his own line--he's a research-lecturer in bacteriology at University College."

"That sounds tremendously impressive, anyhow," I replied, and I promised I would take him under my wing when we adjourned to the drawing-room afterwards.

End House dinners were long and good, but I always liked most of all the hour or so after, when Mrs. Severn, if she were sufficiently persuaded, would play Chopin or sing. She was really more of a _diseuse_ than a singer; indeed, the thing to do was to tell her that she reminded you of Yvette Guilbert. She did, and she just loved being told it.

That evening she yielded to persuasion earlier than usual, and it was just as she sat down at the piano that I managed to squirm my way across the room to Terrington. He was standing by the French windows examining (but hardly, I should think, admiring) a recent portrait of Severn by a celebrated artist, and when I asked him how things were going he stared at me reproachfully and replied: "I oughtn't to have come here. I don't know what on earth to say to all these people. They're all terribly big guns--except me."

"And me too," I responded cheerfully. "But then, don't forget, we represent young and unknown genius--the hope of the future and all that sort of thing. Severn's idea, you know, to give us a chance of mixing with the top-dogs."

That didn't seem to console him especially, but just then Mrs. Severn began to sing. It was an old French ballad (I remember that the chorus consisted of the word "Rataplan" repeated many times), and it was exactly what suited her voice and style. I gathered, more from the way she sang it than from the words, that it was about a court intrigue, a wicked lord chamberlain, poisoned goblets, and so on--"divinely medieval," as I heard Mildred Gorton whispering to somebody.

When it was over I looked at my companion. "Not bad, eh?" I said, and he shrugged his shoulders with a gesture that might have meant anything. A few moments later, having apparently analysed himself, he remarked that it was the sort of thing that made him feel uncomfortable.

Those were the last words he spoke to anybody until he stood in the hall conventionally assuring Mr. and Mrs. Severn that he had had a most delightful time. We left the End House together about half-past ten, and walked back along the edge of the Heath. There was a frost glistening on the roadway, and a pale haze hung over the valley towards London. He was anything but talkative. I don't think we spoke a dozen words all the way down to the Tube Station. We both had return tickets, and it wasn't till we reached Mornington Crescent (my own station) that I said, feeling curiously reluctant to bid him good-bye: "Look here, I live just round the corner. Why not come in and have a drink with me before you go home? It isn't late at all, you know."

"If--if you like," he answered doubtfully.

He thawed a little when I lit the gas-fire in my room and made him sit in front of it. He said he didn't care for whisky, so I made strong coffee. Then I offered him cigarettes, but he said he didn't smoke. At last, by the simple method of not seeming to care what he did or didn't do, I got him to talk. He began abruptly: "I made a fool of myself to-night."

I replied: "I don't think you did. It's by talking a lot rather than by not talking enough, that people most often make fools of themselves."

"Severn must have thought me a complete ass."

"Nonsense. I know Severn. He'd make sure you weren't a complete ass before he invited you."

"Why _did_ he invite me, anyway?"

"Probably because he liked you when he first met you, and because he had heard good things about you. He likes young men with no money and heaps of brains--like you and me, that's to say. (I presume you haven't any money--_I_ haven't, anyway.) He takes us up just as he might buy a low-priced share that he fancied might treble in value if he waited long enough.... Please don't think I'm being _really_ cynical about him. He's a damned good fellow, and there isn't a trace of offensive patronage in his attitude. He's too young to be a snob."

"Young, is he?"

"Well, thirty-five. That's young for a man in his line. I suppose you know what he is--K.C., and so on?"

"I don't know anything about him at all."

"But the Stapleton case--surely you remember all that in the newspapers?"

"I don't. I never read the newspapers."

"Good Lord--you must be a hermit! ... Anyhow, Severn's quite a big man, and likely as not he'll end on the Woolsack. He knows everybody worth knowing, and positively rolls in money and influence. And all that at thirty-five, mind you, and with a wife still in her twenties and one child aged ten. He did everything early."

He seemed startled, and I went on, satisfied that he was interested: "Severn married her when she was eighteen--and a shop-girl in Paris. Still, she must have been rather an exceptional shop-girl. Severn probably spotted her just as he spots all the other winners. But his people are Eton and Oxford to the teeth, and they wouldn't look at her, or him either, for a long while afterwards. He'll tell you the whole story of his early struggles if you give him half a chance--he's awfully proud of them."

We chatted on till nearly midnight, and then, since the last tube train had gone, I walked with him to his rather dingy lodgings in Swinton Street, near King's Cross. (Evidently he _was_ poor; perhaps even poorer than I.) "You must come to tea with me soon," I said, shaking hands with him at the door. I suggested the following Wednesday, but he answered: "I'm afraid I could never come for tea--I work at the College until seven."

"Even on Saturdays?" I queried, and he nodded.

"And Sundays?" He smiled then and said: "On Sundays I go out for the day. Next Sunday I'm going for a tramp across the hills from Dorking to Reigate, and if you'd care to come with me...."

II

He didn't drink, he didn't smoke, he didn't read newspapers, and he didn't ever go out to tea. Then what on earth _did_ he do? I found out one thing, at any rate, on that following Sunday; he _walked_. He called it tramping, but no tramp that ever lived went at his pace. By the time we reached Reigate I longed for a corner seat in a railway compartment. All he said was: "Ten miles isn't really enough. I usually do twelve or fifteen."

We didn't talk much during the walk. I was far too breathless most of the time to gasp more than a few words consecutively, but I thought a good deal. I thought, for instance: Why am I running myself out of breath on these confounded hills with a man who, so far, has shown himself to be no more than a conglomeration of abstinences? And the only answer I could arrive at was: You want to get to know him, and this, apparently, is the only way.

I believe it _was_ the only way. I believe that nobody--no man, at any rate--could have become his friend without those long preliminary periods of silence. He was a locked box, and you had to believe, rather than know, that there was something in it. I believed, and later on I knew; but the revelation was very slow. Within a couple of months, perhaps, I knew the ordinary obvious things about his life that most people would have let me know within a couple of hours. Even then he didn't exactly tell me anything. I deduced, or picked up information by accident, or else asked a deliberate question and received a rather embarrassed or grudging answer. The first time I went up to his room at the College, for example, I saw "Dr. M. Terrington" painted on the outside of the door. Till then I hadn't had the least idea that he was a doctor, and nor had Severn, for at the dinner-party he had introduced him as plain "mister." Anyhow, the information on the door seemed clear enough to me, though it wasn't till a week after that I really learned the truth, and then only by chance. I had cut my hand, and he bandaged it for me very skilfully, which led me to make some complimentary remark about his "doctor's skill." He told me then that he wasn't a medical doctor at all, but a "mere Ph.D." He spoke of it as if it were quite a minor distinction instead of being (as I afterwards found out) almost unique for a man of his age.

Gradually, in such ways as this, I got to know the truth about him. It wasn't at all exciting. He had sprung from poor parents (both of them now dead), and had worked his way up to the university by a series of scholarships and exhibitions which, though distinguished enough in themselves, would be tedious to record. He had no relatives who ever troubled about him, and I think I can say that until he came into contact with me and the Severns he had no friends either. He worked hard, knew nobody, went nowhere, and cared for nothing but his microscopes and slides. Twice a week he lectured to a very small class, and the fees from this, along with certain scholarship monies, made his existence just financially possible.

He had so little to do with anybody that I can recall only three remarks made about him by people who knew him before I did. The first was made by a girl-student at his lectures; she said, very doubtfully: "He looks as if he _might_ be interesting"--evidently a different thing from looking interesting. The second came quite casually from the lips of an A.B.C. waitress at the tea-shop where he took a midday roll and glass of milk. I had arranged to meet him there one day and arrived too early; whereat the waitress, who had seen us together before, looked at the clock and said: "It's only seven minutes past one, and he never comes in till ten past. We tell the time by him here." And the third remark was his landlady's. She was a faded, respectable creature burdened by a husband who drank, and to her the young gentleman lodger was clearly the one central rock of stability in a world of bewildering fluctuations. "He appreciates me," she said, with an implied resentment against the rest of the world, "and I _do_ like to be appreciated."

III

Mrs. Severn also liked to be appreciated. But she was so well accustomed to admiration that a compliment had to be either very adroit or very original to stir her. If I had told her that somebody had said her singing was delightful, she would probably have shrugged her shoulders and changed the subject. But instead of that, on my next meeting with her some weeks after the party, I told her that the shy man and I had become friendly as a result of our End House visit, and that he had been greatly impressed by her singing. "He said it made him feel uncomfortable."

"Did he?" She was interested. "Did he really say that? ... But--but why is he so easily made uncomfortable? I kept noticing him that night--he _was_ unhappy, I could see. But why?"

"He can't help it. Company and crowds make him feel like that. I shouldn't be surprised if women have the same effect."

"You know you're making him sound fearfully attractive. He isn't engaged, then--or anything of that sort?"

"_Engaged_? Good heavens, he never speaks to any woman except his landlady."

She paused in thought for a moment, and then said: "I think Geoffrey had better ask him here again. Don't you agree? ... Some time when we're just _en famille_. _You'll_ come, of course."

I said I should be very pleased to, but that I was rather doubtful whether he would accept the invitation. She replied then, with a touch of imperiousness: "Oh, but he _must_. It is absurd for a young man to be shy. I shall ask Geoffrey to send him an invitation to-night."

The invitation was sent, and I chanced to be in his bed-sitting-room when it arrived. After reading it through very slowly and carefully, he said: "Severn wants me to go there again. On Friday. You're coming too, but there'll be nobody else.... That shows he _did_ notice what a fool I was at the party."

"It also shows that he doesn't think any less of you for it," I said.

He was silent for quite a couple of minutes before he announced his decision. "I shall go," he said, "although I don't want to go."

IV

There was certainly no excuse for any guest being uncomfortable at the End House. Of all places I know it was the homeliest; it was, like Hampstead itself, cheerful without vulgarity. Severn's immense wealth (and he was rumoured to be making twenty thousand a year) never bullied or forced itself; it rather hid behind things and came upon the visitor at some moment when he was ready for it. Most wealthy houses make a poor man feel poorer than ever; Severn's made you feel rich.

At the last moment I was ill and couldn't turn up on that following Friday. But from two sources I heard what had taken place. First from Terrington himself, who said merely: "I enjoyed it, and I like Severn ... and also Mrs. Severn."

Mrs. Severn, a few days later, gave me a somewhat lengthier report. "He was quiet," she said, "and he spoke very little, but he didn't look quite so awfully miserable as before. After dinner we even got him to sing--he's got rather a good baritone voice, but he only knew songs like 'Annie Laurie' and 'Auld Lang Syne'.... And then he played with June--_she_ liked him. As a matter of fact, we _all_ liked him--there seems to be something about him you can't help liking--don't you think so?"

I agreed, and she added, as if it finally clinched the matter: "Have you noticed his eyes? They are rather nice."

It was then that I first of all learned that he was at work on cancer research. Mrs. Severn had been told so by her husband, and he had learned it from one of the senior men at the College; it was typical, indeed, of my entire relationship with Terrington that I acquired this rather important information by such a roundabout route. But when I tackled him on the subject he would do no more than confirm; he wouldn't discuss. He said, smiling: "You're a journalist and everything seems sensational to you. But there's nothing sensational in the work I'm doing.... You and Severn seem bent on making a howling success of me, but I don't want it. I just want to be left alone--to do my own work." He added, in a tone that robbed his words of any sting: "Please don't think I mean anything unkind."

But his summing-up of Severn's intention had been true enough. Severn always wanted to make a howling success of everybody. I suppose, at rock-bottom, it was a form of conceit--an assumption that everybody's ideal must be his own. And yet there was nothing blatant or vulgar in him. His taste was impeccable to the point of being finicky, and he had charming manners. He never in his life bullied either judge or witness, but his suavity was deadly enough; with calm, almost friendly questions, he would lead a man to confess murder or a woman adultery. In private life he was courteous to all; in fact (as somebody once said) he always talked to you as if his life had been incomplete until he met you. It was an oriental gift, and twenty thousand a year was no more than the figure of its rarity.

I owed him then, and owe him still, more than he would ever care for me to say. He enjoyed pulling strings on behalf of his protégés; he pulled the strings for Terrington, though the latter was too innocent to realize it. Severn talked about him to various editors of scientific journals, and the result was a few commissions. He even persuaded the editor of a "daily" to start a popular science "feature," and that Terrington's contributions to this were moderately successful was due to the fact that _I_ wrote them. _He_ could never have achieved the popular vein, but his science and my journalism made a profitable amalgam. We shared the income, devoting it to more ambitious Sunday rambles, until at last he decided that the job was taking up too much of his time. He was like that--a sudden swerve to right or left, and then an inexorable straight line.

All that time I was getting to know him, and all that time I was liking him more.

V

One afternoon of that late winter he came to my rooms and asked me if I thought he ought to return the invitations of the Severns. I told him that they knew he wasn't well off, and that they certainly wouldn't expect to be invited to dinner at an expensive hotel or anything like that. He answered that he hadn't been thinking of dinner, but of tea.

"But I thought tea was always impossible for you?"

"Not if I--if I managed it."

"I see.... Well, I think you'd better manage it. It's a good idea."

"Do you really think so?" He seemed pleased. "As a matter of fact, I met Mrs. Severn in the street just now, and I hinted at it--vaguely."

"Well? Did she accept?"

"Yes. She's coming--next Thursday. And Severn as well."

So it was all settled, and I was merely being asked to register approval. I duly registered, and was then rewarded by an invitation myself. "I'll be delighted to come," I assured him. "But where are you going to have them? You can't very well----"

I paused, hardly caring to stress the unsuitability of bed-sitting-rooms. He saw, however, that Swinton Street would not do. He could have used my own room, but it was not very much better than his; and to take them to some hotel or café would seem rather odd. In the end we decided on the laboratory. "It's a large room," I said, "and it's private, more or less, and there's water laid on, and a gas-ring, and other handy things. Besides, they'll forgive any amount of mess there."

It was fun making preparations for them. We borrowed armchairs from the lecture-platforms, and I carefully selected all my best crockery and transferred it to the top of the Physics building in a suitcase. We cleaned the windows and the lamp-shade, and made the place as habitable as possible. Then we bought the food. Last of all, from half-past three till nearly half-past four on a glowering March afternoon, we waited. He stood by the window keeping an eye on the porter's lodge, while I sat by the fire and tried to think of any possible hitch in the arrangements.

Suddenly he said: "They're here!" and went downstairs to meet them and show them the way. But when he came back there was only Mrs. Severn with him. She was profusely apologetic. She was sorry she was so late, and she was sorry Geoffrey wasn't with her (he hadn't been able to get away from the Law Courts in time), and she was especially sorry about the toasted scones. "You men oughtn't to have waited for me," she said, as she allowed me to remove her fur coat. Then she looked appraisingly round the room, as any woman will, and made remarks about it. "What a jolly little place! How comfortable you must be here--so high up among the roofs! And all those wonderful-looking instruments--really, you _must_ tell me about them."

And the extraordinary thing was that he did. He went round the room with her, exhibiting and explaining, answering in full and patient detail even the silliest of her questions, and all without the slightest sign of either nervousness or reticence. It looked like a miracle. I had been struggling for weeks to overcome the mere outposts of his reserve, and here was a woman who had only seen him for a few hours striding miles beyond me into the unknown territory.

But of course she was no ordinary woman. She was astoundingly pretty, and I suppose that a good many of her most fervent admirers would spend hours in describing her copper-gold hair and her brown eyes with their curious, slanting glint of green; but for me there was always something beyond that. There was a way she sometimes looked, especially if you saw her face in profile against the sky or window--a way that was beyond prettiness. I'm not certain it wasn't beyond even beauty. It challenged, and yet, by some marvellous paradox, it was serene as well.

We had tea. I listened to their talk and said very little myself. It was pleasant to sit back in a chair and, without any effort at all, to add large fragments to my scanty collection of facts about Terrington. She asked him most of the questions I had always wanted to ask him, and he answered them all. He told her, for instance, that his father had been a country parson, and that his mother had died at his birth. He told her also that the total amount he earned was two hundred pounds a year, and that he lived on it. She was astonished. "But of course you will earn a lot of money some day," she said, with vague comfort; and he answered: "I don't want to make a lot of money. I admit that two hundred isn't enough, but I don't want a lot. If I could get two hundred and fifty or three hundred I'd be perfectly satisfied and never want any more."

"You couldn't marry on that," she said.

And he replied: "I don't want to marry."

"You might do some day."

"No."

"How can you be certain?"

"I have my work, and it takes up so much of my time that it wouldn't be fair to any woman to marry her."

"She mightn't let it take up so much of your time."

"Then it wouldn't be fair to my work."

"I see.... You feel it as a sort of priesthood, with a vow of celibacy attached?"

He thought for a moment and then answered: "I don't know--maybe I _do_ feel that. I don't very often think about it."

But the oddest thing was yet to come. About five o'clock the tousled head of the laboratory-boy intruded itself round the corner of the door. He was a rough-mannered youngster, and, ignoring the presence of visitors, he boldly asked if he could go home. "I've cleaned all the cages," he said, "and I've fed your mice and Mr. Hensler's cats."

The permission was given him and he withdrew. But I could see instantly that the matter would not be allowed to end there. As soon as he had gone Mrs. Severn exclaimed: "I say, what's all this about cats and mice and cages? Do you keep a menagerie?"

Terrington smiled. "No--only what you said--cats and mice and cages. Oh, and a few rats also, I believe."

"But what do you have them for?"

"We--we need them, you know."

"For your work?"

"Yes."

"You mean you----" The blood rushed to her face and she bit her lip. "Vivisection," she said slowly, after a pause. Then she added: "It's only a word after all--and why should one be hypnotized by a word? I'd like to see your Chamber of Horrors. Will you take me now?"

I tried valiantly to signal him to make an excuse, but he didn't or wouldn't see. He was so transparently honest with her. He replied: "Certainly, if you're really interested. But you'll not find it at all horrible--only just a trifle smelly."

We walked down the dark stone corridor towards the room where the animals were kept. I had a sickening feeling that we were walking into catastrophe--that this part of the programme was going to prove a dreadful mistake; I had certainly seen something in Mrs. Severn's eyes that he had missed. But the room, when he unlocked it and switched on the light, was cheerful enough. It was airy and spacious, and the various cages were placed methodically on platforms all round the walls. The cats had all had their milk and were sleepily washing themselves and blinking their eyes in the sudden glow of light. They purred in joyous anticipation and rubbed their heads against the cage-bars when he went near them. (All animals took to him instantly.)

The dreadful thing was that Mrs. Severn said nothing at all. She had used the word "hypnotized," and that was exactly what she looked--hypnotized. She followed him round from cage to cage, and all the while he kept on explaining just the very things he oughtn't to have explained. "Most of them are strays," he told her. "Nobody seems to know how they're obtained, but they're nearly all half-starved when they first come here. We feed them well, of course--they have to be healthy before you can do anything with them."

Still she said nothing. But suddenly, as by an impulse, she opened the door of one of the cages, and a black-and-white cat squirmed eagerly into her arms--a small, glossy-coated animal with a large shaven patch on the underside of its body. She fondled it for a moment, and then said quietly: "I suppose you can't do anything with the fur on?"

He explained the matter in detail, while the cat purred violently, and, rearing itself up, tried to rub its head against her chin.

"What will happen to it?" she asked, almost casually, when he had finished.

He shook his head doubtfully. "I couldn't say--it's not mine, you know. One of Hensler's--he's our best biology man. I don't know what it is exactly that he's doing at present--some sort of research work, no doubt. The cats and rats are all his--I've only got the mice."

"And all _they_ have to do," I said, anxious at any cost to reduce the tension of the atmosphere, "is to feed well and propagate their species. You can't really call _them_ unlucky."

But she said nothing; she didn't even smile. And then, by the very greatest of good fortune, he had to rush away to a six o'clock lecture. We hadn't expected she would stay so long, and when the hour came he made rather abrupt apologies and left her in my charge. Her good-bye, as she shook hands with him, was hardly audible.

VI

We went back to his room, Mrs. Severn and I, and sat by the fire. She brought the cat with her, and all the while we were talking it sat on her knee and purred contentedly. After I had offered her a cigarette and lit it for her, she asked suddenly: "Do you think you understand him?"

"I certainly don't think I do," I answered. "But I've been wondering all the time if _you_ did."

"Why _me_?"

"Because he tells you more in five minutes than he'd tell me in five years."

She half smiled. "That's true. In some ways I can twist him round my little finger.... But in other ways he's just rock--solid rock--don't you feel that?" She caressed the cat and went on: "I'm not a sentimentalist. I don't believe it's a sin to experiment on animals if by doing so you have a chance of benefiting human lives, and I'm not so absurd as to believe that vivisectors are all sadists. So it isn't anything to do with _that_.... But, all the same, I feel that he's not human. I don't mean that he's _in_human. I mean that he's just _un_human--the humanity in him hasn't ever yet been stirred. He just lives for that high ideal--at two hundred a year. It's splendid, I know, but from a woman's point of view, at any rate, it's just a shade unsatisfactory."

"I don't suppose he ever considers the woman's point of view."

"Of course he doesn't. That's part of the trouble. He's got his eyes fixed on this distant goal and he doesn't see the other things nearer his eyes. He doesn't see that if a man's going to be a success in this world he's got to make friends and go about and not be satisfied with two hundred pounds a year." (The money seemed to obsess her.)

"He'd tell you he didn't want to be that sort of success."

"But he _must_ be, if he's going to be any other sort of success in addition. Even the medieval saints, who made a virtue of poverty, used to make an advertisement of it as well. He doesn't do even that. Of course I don't say he need be an absolutely worldly success like Geoffrey. He couldn't be if he tried, I'm sure. But I think he might compromise."

She added after a pause: "It would do him good to fall in love."

I laughed then. "He's not likely to do that. He's scared of women altogether, and--excepting you--I've never known him to be at ease in a woman's presence. When some of his girl students come to ask him about their work, he stammers and looks uncomfortable till they're gone."

We talked on for a short time longer, and then she said she must go. She put the cat into a chair and gave a final stroke to its sleek head. "A saucer of milk after I've gone," she said, "is the best I can do for him, isn't it? Will you give it him?" I promised I would, and then, as I helped her on with her coat, she added: "I'm going to try to convert him. Terrington, I mean, not the cat.... And I shall begin by calling him Terry. Do you think he'll mind?"

I said laughingly that I didn't suppose he would encourage the liberty. We walked out to Gower Street together, and I got her a taxi. "I daresay it'll be a hard job," she said finally, as she shook hands, "but I mean to do it."

VII

I was relieved when she had gone. The whole atmosphere had been curiously tense, and from the moment that the laboratory-boy had made his unwelcome intrusion, I had been thoroughly uncomfortable. After seeing her off I walked a short distance to buy an evening paper, and it was nearly seven when I climbed up again to the top storey of the Physics Building. The cat was asleep in front of the fire, and when, remembering my promise, I placed a saucer of milk on the floor beside it, one green eye slowly opened and then disdainfully closed again.

At seven he returned, after delivering his lecture on (I think) the Mycology and Bacteriology of Foods. The first thing he noticed was the cat and the saucer of milk. Explanations were necessary, and he accepted them as a wise adult might listen to the charming vagaries of a child. "How like her!" he said, but no more. And within half-an-hour the cat was back in its cage.

I remember that night because then, for the first time since I had known him, he permitted himself to break the iron routine of his labours. Perhaps he felt that since the tea invitation had already interfered with his day, he might just as well walk a further step on the long road to perdition. Anyhow, as I was leaving London early the following morning on some special newspaper work, I asked him if he would come with me to a show of some sort, and, to my immense astonishment, he agreed immediately.

We dined at a small, unfashionable place off Regent Street, and after trying in vain at several theatres, managed to get in at the Coliseum two or three turns late. He was very quiet at first, but the sound and colour of the music-hall roused him completely. He laughed a good deal, and at the simplest things. As we walked home afterwards a reaction set in and he was quiet again; he even went so far as to say that he disliked "gadding about" as a general rule, although it was pleasant on rare occasions. I told him that it wasn't good for anybody to work without any pleasure intermixed, and he retorted, with a curious enthusiasm in his voice: "My work _is_ my pleasure. I _mean_ that. I'm really looking forward to to-morrow--because I shall be able to work then without any interruptions."

I suppose he remembered that I was going away, for he added hastily: "I don't mean you, of course."

It was so glaringly obvious whom he did mean. Only once did he mention her by name, and that was just before we separated outside his lodgings in Swinton Street. He said then: "Do you think she was bored by all the talk about my work?"

I assured him that I thought she had been very deeply interested, and he replied: "I hope she was. She makes it so easy for me to tell her things."

VIII

I have always kept a diary of sorts, and the tattered and shabby records of those years lie before me now as I write. Many of the days are blank, thus testifying to the uneventfulness of my life in general; for I would never write, even in a diary, merely for the sake of writing. Terrington, or "Terry," as I as well as Mrs. Severn came to call him, makes his appearance on the very day I met him first; I find the record: "Went to dinner with the S's at Hampstead. Met a man there named Terrington. Scientific something at London Univ. Very shy. Took him home afterwards."

The entry for the day on which Mrs. Severn came to tea is similarly brief. "Tea in T's lab. Mrs. S. T. showed her the cats. Afterwards Mrs. S. and I talked about T. Finished up at Frigolin's and the Coliseum. Little Tich and some good wrestlers."

And for the next day: "T. waked me at 6 a.m. Wanted to know my opinion about the cat. Agreed after discussion, though surprised at T. suggesting it. Caught 9.15 to Manchester. Queen's."

The diary, you will observe, is hardly a Bashkirtseff affair. It was written in good faith, not as a literary exercise, and most of its entries are mere reminders, unintelligible to outsiders, but significant to me even to this day. Terry _did_ waken me that morning at 6 a.m. And the cat business, with which I agreed after discussion, although surprised at his suggesting it, was simply this: he wanted to give the black-and-white cat to Mrs. Severn. He thought it would be a "nice" thing to do. The principal objection, as I pointed out to him, was the awkward circumstance that the cat didn't belong to him. Technically, it was the property of the University of London, but for all practical purposes it belonged to Hensler, who had prepared it especially for some work he was engaged on. To give it away would be, to say the least, a highly irregular proceeding.

But he wouldn't drop the idea. Hensler, he said, would only suffer a slight inconvenience, for there were other cats that would do just as well. Nor would the loss cause much commotion, for escapes did happen sometimes. Nobody would ever know about it except Mrs. Severn, and she would be _so_ pleased.

So we "agreed after discussion." Perhaps it would be truer to say that I was too sleepy to argue the point, especially as I could see he had quite made up his mind. He left me with great cheerfulness, and I finished my sleep. Later on in the day I had misgivings; the cat business struck me as being, on the whole, rather silly. Besides, it might easily be found out, and then there would be trouble with the authorities. I remember, as I travelled up to Manchester, working out the possibility that the cat, strolling in the neighbourhood of Hampstead Heath before its shaven fur had re-grown, might be met and recognized by Hensler himself....