Chapter TWO: I

I WAS away about five weeks. I wrote my special articles on the condition of the Lancashire cotton industry (Severn, by the way, had secured me the commission), and from time to time I went into Manchester and called at the post-office for letters. Terry didn't write, but I wasn't surprised at that. What did surprise me was a short note from Mrs. Severn. She wanted me to dine at the End House on the twelfth, if I were back in town on that date. Terry, she said, would be coming as well. (Had she begun calling him "Terry," I wondered?) She went on to inform me about the cat, and she wrote: "I think it is rather wonderful of him to have thought of such a thing. It shows that he is _beginning_ to be human."

All the rest of that sombre Manchester day I kept repeating to myself: He is beginning to be human....

When I returned to town I wondered if he was. _Something_ had happened to him, at any rate; there was a difference in him, slight, indeed, but plain enough. A sort of eagerness for something.... I reached London late on Saturday night, and early on Sunday he presented himself at my bedside and demanded that I should accompany him on one of his usual Sabbath tramps. For nobody else on earth would I have roused myself that morning, and not even for him, I believe, but for that curious, wistful eagerness.

It was Epping Forest this time. We walked from Chingford to Loughton, had lunch, walked on to Epping, had tea, and then walked on to Waltham--total, fourteen miles. But I enjoyed it more than I had expected, for the day was spring-like, full of blue sky and white clouds and the smell of earth. Most of the way as far as Epping I talked of my Lancashire adventures, and it was not until after tea that he spoke more than a few consecutive sentences. The dusk sank over us as we walked the last stage through the Forest, treading the sodden leaves of the old year and guiding ourselves by glimpses of Waltham's white tower in the valley below. But I think it was the bells that made him suddenly talk--the Abbey bells that flung us their distant echo as we descended. For he said, when a cool wave of air brought them very near to us: "It's strange how beauty, if you're in a certain mood, comes over you. You can't help it--it comes anyhow, just when and where it likes.... Those bells--to hear them like this--and all this Forest with the winding pathways through it, and the little lamp-lit town that we shall come to in half-an-hour."

A group of men and girls approached, heralded by the glow-worm brightness of the men's cigarettes, and he waited till they had gone past. Then he went on: "Don't you think it's strange that I should talk like this?"

Before I could answer he continued: "It _is_ strange. Everything is strange. There's something strange in this Forest to-night--something beautiful, and yet, in a way, sad. I feel that if I didn't fight against it, it would swamp me.... Are you thinking me off my head?"

"Oh, no," I answered. "A trifle morbid, perhaps, but no more than that."

He said slowly, as if talking to himself: "_Morbid_? That's the word _she_ used."

"Who?"

"Helen."

I think we both of us then stood suddenly still. We had entered a bright space of moonlight, and we both looked at each other, knowing exactly what we were thinking. I could see from his eyes that he hadn't meant to let me know that he called her Helen.

We took the train at Waltham, and nothing else that he said was of the least importance.

II

I suppose henceforward _I_ had better call her Helen. And, as a matter of fact, the first time I saw her after my return she asked me to do so. "Mrs. Severn," she said, sounded dreadfully stiff between friends. Perhaps it did, but I found it hard to break the habit.

I had met her one afternoon on the pavement outside University College. She asked me if I were just going up to see Terry, and I replied, with perhaps an implied rebuke: "Certainly not. Have you just been to see him?"

"Why 'certainly not'?"

"Because he hates to be interrupted in his working hours. But I suppose you _have_ been to see him?"

"Yes," she answered, smiling. "But not in the way you think I have. I've been to one of his lectures, that's all."

And then she told me details. She laughed over it in a way that seemed to betray an inward nervousness. She had begun a course in bacteriology. It was interesting. One ought to have _something_ serious in one's life, oughtn't one?

"Terry says so, I daresay," I replied.

"_You_ call him Terry?"

"I do. Have you any objection?"

She laughed again. "Of course not. I think the less formal we all are the better. That's what's the trouble with him--he's _too_ formal--he doesn't seem to believe in any pleasure, or amusement, or--or----" She couldn't, apparently, think of any third commodity that he didn't believe in. "But I think I'm managing to convert him gradually," she added.

"And he's managing to convert you a little at the same time, eh?"

She laughed again in the same curious, muffled-up manner. No, she said; Terry was _not_ converting her. Not really. He was only just showing her things that she had already felt or guessed. Bacteriology was a symbol rather than the thing itself.

I asked her whose idea it had been first of all, and she answered: "Not _his_, you can be sure." He, in fact, had been anything but keen about it. Perhaps he thought that her presence would make him nervous during his lectures. (Again the curious laugh.) But of course he hadn't any power to prevent her from paying the fee and joining.

She went on: "It's rather amusing--the way he treats me. Privately, of course, we're friends. But professionally, as a member of his class, I'm nothing. Not a word or a smile. When he's finished lecturing he picks up his papers and dashes out of the room as if he's afraid somebody might follow him."

"Perhaps he is."

She admitted the possibility. "But I have such an absurd ambition to make him take _some_ notice of me. _Isn't_ it absurd? I feel it would be good for him to be made to break all his neat little rules.... Anyhow, don't forget that you're both coming to dinner on the twelfth. And also, by the way...." And then came her request that I should join in the general informality by calling her Helen. "Or Helène," she added, "if you like to be really correct."

III

There is no entry in my diary for the 12th. I remember why. I had got back to my rooms very late, and was too sleepy to write anything. And the next morning when I looked at the blank space I thought I would leave it blank, to express and symbolize the puzzled blankness of my own mind.

It was a small party--just the Severns, Terry, and myself. The rather sensational Roebourne case had been concluded only that afternoon, and all the evening papers were full of praise for Severn, whose brilliant handling of exceptionally difficult material had brought victory to his side. It had been a fatiguing battle between two great financial interests, and Severn had not only consolidated his already high reputation as a pleader, but had earned also an almost fabulous sum in fees. Naturally his feelings were buoyant, and their buoyancy made him talk in a way which, even for him, was amazing. Before then I had sometimes harboured a suspicion that his knowledge of many things was superficial, but that night the suspicion almost disappeared. He really did seem to have been everywhere, to have read everything, and to have met everybody. One moment he was talking about the queer sorts of _hors-d'œuvres_ that he had sampled in various parts of the world; and the next he was discussing medical science with Terry in a way which would have tempted any outsider to assume that he was the master and Terry the rather dull pupil. With the accompaniment of excellent food and wine, the whole exhibition was a sheer delight to the onlooker like myself, and Severn's coal-black eyes gleamed all the while as if he too were thoroughly enjoying it. I believe he was slightly drunk, but that only made his talk better still.

Then, somehow or other, when we were in the drawing-room afterwards, the conversation grew personal. I don't mean "personal" in any unpleasant sense, but merely literally; we began to talk about ourselves. Or rather, perhaps, it was as if Mrs. Severn, Terry and I were suddenly being forced to expose our intimate lives to the full glare of Severn's arguments, while he alone remained aloof--interested but hardly perturbed. It began by his telling me what ought to be the successive stages of my advancement as a literary man. "In a few years," he said "you must have a sub-editorship--I'll see whether I can find one for you. You'll have to work like hell while you're at it, and in your spare time, if you have any, you must manage to write a novel--preferably one that will establish your reputation and bring you in not more than a hundred pounds altogether. After that you must take a flat in either Bloomsbury or Chelsea and decide whether you're going to plod along in Fleet Street, earning a middling salary and work jolly hard for it, or take to the wilder life of the professional fiction-writer, in which you may earn nothing at all or else fabulous sums.... On the whole, I think you had better become the successful novelist who is very shy and unapproachable. In that case you must write a stupid novel about Very Good People and Very Bad People, with a wedge of sex in between, and you must take care that all your most intimate private affairs are reported sensationally in the Press.... After your novel's in its second hundred thousand and your bank balance is beginning to stagger you, you must marry a society woman and arrange for your name to appear in the next birthday honours' list...."

And so on. Then, filling up his glass, he turned to Terry. The career of the successful scientist, he said, was in many ways a more delicate matter, but still in the main, it was conditioned by the same general principles. "Darwin," he said, "points the way for all scientists. His monkey idea was so simple that only a scientist could have any doubts about it.... Anyhow, you must do your best with the material that comes your way. First of all, you positively must go to Paris or Berlin or Vienna and put yourself under some fellow who, because his name isn't Smith or Brown or Jones, is thereby held in almost mythical esteem by the majority of Englishmen. Then, after picking the other fellow's brains as much as you can, you must launch out suddenly on your own--choosing a slack season when the newspapers haven't much to write about. You must have a new discovery, or a new theory of something--nearly anything will do, provided it is simple enough for the man in the street to misunderstand and laugh at. You might, for instance, discover that to crawl a quarter of a mile a day on hands and knees is a cure of dyspepsia. Get your disciples round you and start crawling--in public--with the cameras all round you! ... Then come back to England and make a fierce attack on the oldest, the most innocent, and altogether the most fatuous member of the Medical Council...."

Terry laughed and said that all that sort of thing was just what he would most of all loathe doing.

"But you _must_ do it," Severn urged. "Of course I've been joking about some of the details, but the principle of it all is sound enough. The key to success _in everything_ is advertisement."

"Not _my_ sort of success," said Terry, doggedly.

"He feels," said Mrs. Severn, "that his work in itself is so important that success doesn't matter. Of course, with you it's bound to be different. Championing one gang of thieves against another is nothing unless it's successful." (She was, I suppose, referring to the Roebourne case.)

Severn retorted by a good-humoured jibe at her recently discovered interest in bacteriology. "I'm sure a gang of thieves is as interesting as a gang of microbes," he said, "and certainly far more remunerative." She laughed then, but seemed afterwards to grow suddenly serious. "Remunerative?" she echoed after a pause, and added: "Is money _everything_? Oughtn't one to have the feeling that what one is doing is worth while? Do you feel that about the Roebourne case?"

"I'm not sure that I feel that about anything," Severn answered.

"Not even the work Terry's doing?" she queried; and he replied suavely: "I said I wasn't sure. That's the truth. I'm _not_ sure."

Then came the argument. I think he thoroughly enjoyed it, and all the more because he could see and watch its effect upon Terry. Briefly, his thesis was that there was no such thing, ultimately, as progress. We were here in the world, and we didn't know why we were here; and there wasn't a scrap of evidence to show that world-movements had any permanent direction. The world had been inhabited for millions of years, and it was merely parochial conceit to suppose that our own civilization was the highest that had ever been known. The Greeks had excelled us in many of the arts; why not some earlier civilization in chemistry or engineering or medical science? It was a fascinating speculation. Quite possibly all the great discoveries had been made and remade over and over again throughout the ages. Nor could it be optimistically assumed that each successive civilization touched a higher peak than its predecessor. It was far more likely that there had been vast cycles of civilizations--some of them with an upward trend, and others with a downward--and that these cycles, in turn, belonged to even vaster movements. It was all, he admitted, very hazy and speculative; but at any rate it gave little support to those worthy Victorians who thought that the laying of the Transatlantic cable represented another step towards the millennium.

"Then," I said, when he momentarily paused, "we might all of us just as well do evil as good."

He demurred to the use of the words "good" and "evil." There were no absolute standards; the world had fashions in such things just as it had in dress and manners. _Anything_ was fashionable sometime or somewhere or other--murder in wartime, for instance, or bigamy in Turkey....

"Then what _are_ we to do?"

"Do what you like. That's all the advice I can give you. _I_ always do what _I_ like. I like making speeches, for instance, and getting my name in the papers, and making plenty of money. But tastes differ, of course. And to those who live uncomfortably in this world in the hope of having everything made up to them in the next, my advice is just the same--If you _prefer_ having _that_ sort of a life and _that_ sort of a belief, then have them by all means."

It was all very devastatingly brilliant, but perhaps it was a little too reminiscent of an undergraduate debate. It was Severn himself, rather than what he said, that impressed. He _had_ succeeded; he _had_ made himself rich; those were the realest arguments. He had, in fact, done just what he liked with the world, and it had rewarded him far more generously than it did those who tamely let it do just what it liked with them. Yet, for all that, I found his arguments stimulating rather than convincing. Perhaps if he had been aiming them principally at me, they would have been different and more effective. But they weren't aimed at me. Terry was the target; and with him they certainly succeeded. Terry hadn't been an undergraduate at one of the older universities, and hadn't ever sat up till dawn shattering morality to bits and remoulding it nearer to the heart's desire. Severn's ideas were different not only in degree but in kind from any he had heard before, and the result was naturally severe.

All this leads up to what Helen did. (Yes, I _must_ call her Helen.) Severn, just before we left, had called me into his study for a farewell whisky. He was in high good humour. "You fellows think I've been joking all the time," he said, "but I haven't.... Only _some_ of the time." He laughed. "For instance, when I talked about Terry going abroad to Paris or Vienna or somewhere, I really meant it. I think it would be a splendid chance for him.... You might ask him, as you go home, how he'd care to have a few years working with Karelsky. He'll know who Karelsky is."

While we were drinking and chatting he had to answer the telephone. The matter, I gathered, was of a rather private nature, so I edged away towards the doorway that looked into the hall.

And then I saw Terry. His back was towards me, and in front of him, almost hidden from my sight by his tall and upright body, was Helen. The lights in the hall were very subdued, and all I could see of her distinctly was the knuckle of her right hand as she held the lapel of his coat.

She had been talking to him earnestly, and I caught what was evidently a final remark. "... and you mustn't take any notice of him, Terry--you _mustn't_.... I'd _hate_ you to be influenced by him at all...." Only that, whispered very eagerly.

He said nothing in reply, and then suddenly, glancing over his shoulder with a little side-movement of her head, she saw me. I know she did, although at that moment I had almost withdrawn myself into the study. It was not deliberate eavesdropping, anyhow.

IV

Looking back on it all now, I can see exactly what was happening. But I couldn't then. It puzzled me that Terry had been so concerned by what had seemed to me merely a brilliant improvisation by a born improviser. But when I told him what Severn had said about Karelsky his manner changed. He seemed rather dazed with the idea, and he insisted on taking me back to his rooms that night and showing me everything he could find that had anything to do with Karelsky. Apparently he was a scientific star of the first magnitude. There was a photograph of him in a recent number of _Discovery_, and an article by him in the _Science Review_ on the Function of the Nucleolus in the Life of the Animal Cell. His translated work "Eosinophilic Leucocytes in the Thymus of Postnatal Pigs" was, so Terry informed me, a monument of research; and he had also created a stir in the world of mathematics by a paper in a German journal on "Die Veranderlichkeit der Licht--und Farbe-Empfidnungen." Altogether he was undoubtedly a great man.

We sat up till nearly two in the morning discussing Karelsky and Vienna and so on. Terry's attitude astonished me, yet, in a way, it thrilled me also; it had, if the metaphor isn't too fanciful, the austere beauty of a Greek statue. What I mean is that he was thinking of nothing--nothing at all--except his work. The idea of having anything to do with the great Karelsky had stirred in him something that had always existed but had rarely permitted itself to be seen--a sort of frozen, white-hot passion for laboratory-research. It glowed in his eyes and trembled in his voice; it burned as fiercely as the art of any artist. It would be fine, he thought, to know Karelsky, and not only to know him, but to work with him and learn from him. It would be glorious to sit at the feet of the man who had discovered no fewer than three new species of _spalax monticola_.

V

Helen was a lovely woman. I don't think I ever realized it more forcibly than on the afternoon that followed that End House dinner. She had asked me to tea at Rumpelmayer's, and we sat at one of the tables overlooking the plutocratic hubbub of St. James Street. "I asked Terry as well," she said, "but of course he won't come." She rather overdid the casualness of her attitude, and as soon as I looked at her she began to blush. But she kept her head, adding vivaciously: "I like Rumpelmayer's. It's the only place in London that reminds me of Ostend."

Then, quite suddenly, she began to talk to me with eagerness, bending forward across the table till her head was only a few inches from mine. "You know, Jimmy--(you don't mind me calling you that, do you?)--I believe you're rather clever. Geoffrey says you are, but I don't mean _his_ sort of cleverness--I mean _my_ sort, which consists in understanding people. I believe you _do_ understand people, and I'm certain you notice most things that happen. You noticed, for instance, how I was talking to Terry last night. And you noticed how I blushed just now when I mentioned his name.... Didn't you?"

I admitted it.

She went on: "On the whole I'm rather glad Geoffrey talked last night as he did. I wouldn't like Terry to be really influenced by Geoffrey, but still, Geoffrey's rather good at shaking foundations. And Terry's foundations _need_ shaking."

"Were they shaken?"

"Just a little, I think. But _I_ did most of the shaking." She added very quietly: "I'm going to be perfectly frank with you and tell you the whole truth. I'm in love with Terry. There now--what do you make of that?"

What _could_ I make of it? You are sitting over a cup of tea in a fashionable café when your companion, a pretty married woman, tells you quite calmly that she is in love with one of your greatest friends. What is the correct thing to say? Should you exclaim: "Really? How thrilling!" or adopt an attitude of commiseration?

I did neither. I put into words the thought that came straightway into my head. I said: "Being in love's bound to happen, I suppose. If you keep cool about it, it isn't frightfully important."

"How do you know?"

"Well ... I've always been very slightly in love with you."

"How nice of you!" she exclaimed, with genuine appreciation of what is, after all, the extremest compliment a man can pay a woman. "It's a most wonderful thing to tell me, but I'm afraid it's not much use as a comparison. For you've only got it slightly, whereas I'm in love with Terry just ... just tremendously."

"Are you really?"

"Yes."

It was then that I realized how lovely she was. The admission had brought a heightened colour into her cheeks, and as she sat there, waiting for me to say something, I saw in her again that utmost beauty that includes and yet is beyond the merely physical--a challenge rather than a statement.

She smiled at me suddenly. "Don't look so serious. Have some more tea.... That's right.... I'm glad I've told you, anyway. Do you think it's _very_ awful?"

"It may be--for you," I answered.

"For _me_?" She laughed. "Why, I'm not a bit afraid. It's so wonderful and interesting--so far--that I wouldn't give it up whatever happened. Do you know--" her eyes glowed with sharp excitement--"since it began to--to happen--all life seems to have caught fire.... Do you know what I mean? Everything is so--so _different_--so _splendid_...."

There were bright tears in her eyes as she spoke. She went on: "But of course you're thinking of Geoffrey. Well, you needn't worry--_he'll_ never need to know anything about it. He's so sure of his own powers of fascination that he'd want a lot of convincing that I could possibly be interested in anybody else."

I nodded. That was shrewd and very probably true. "Well, anyhow," I said, after a pause, "what are you going to do about it?"

"_Do_ about it?" she repeated. "_Do_ about it? Why, there's nothing to do, except to go on being in love for the first time in my life."

"The _first_? You mean that----"

Yes, she meant it. She had begun by being frank with me, she said, and she might as well continue. No doubt I would be surprised to hear that her marriage hadn't been an affair of love--not on her side, at any rate.... She had been a _midinette_ in the Rue de la Paix, and Severn a chance customer. He had taken her about as he would have taken about any girl if he had fancied her sufficiently. "He dazzled me--he was so very charming and delightful, and I liked him because he wasn't a snob...." After the marriage there had been trouble with the Severn family, and--"He was splendid then. I liked him most of all when he hadn't more than five pounds in the world and he _would_ insist on taking me to Claridge's. He was always like that--he never feared to do what he wanted. And, of course, you know how marvellously--how _terribly_ successful he's been." She smiled and continued: "The quaint part of it is that most people must think me the luckiest person in the world. Geoffrey's so generous--I've nothing very much to complain of. It's just that as soon as I met Terry I knew--" She shrugged her shoulders and added: "Well, you know what I knew, don't you?"

She took a chocolate éclair and delicately pierced it with her fork. "You aren't saying very much," she went on, "but I hope you're understanding.... Try to understand how terrible it is to be married to a man who always gets what he wants. Everything that he said last night was perfectly true--he doesn't believe there's anything very much worth while in the world, except to do what you like and have a good time.... And then, on the other hand, there's Terry...."

"Yes?"

She went on, after a pause: "What seems to me so strange and fine is his way of doing his work very quietly because he thinks it's worth doing, and not because of money or fame or anything like that at all. Just think of it--Geoffrey's made out of this Roebourne case in three weeks as much as Terry may earn in ten years.... It's a shame."

It was, I admitted, but I pointed out that Terry himself would probably disagree. He didn't want a lot of money, and consequently he wasn't disappointed about not getting it. He had often said that three hundred a year would completely satisfy him. To which she replied: "Yes, I told that to Geoffrey not long ago, and he said he'd settle three hundred a year on him if he'd accept it."

"Of course he wouldn't," I answered. "But it was rather decent of Geoffrey to make the suggestion."

"Was it?" She spoke rather sadly. "I suppose it was. But at the time, it just made me feel that the whole world was hopeless."

She meant, she explained, that it hurt her to think that what meant so much to Terry could be bestowed by Geoffrey as a mere whim of the moment. "But there it is," she went on, enjoying her éclair, "Terry's happy, and I'm happy, and Geoffrey's happy, so I suppose it's all right. Being in love--even tremendously in love--seems to be quite a harmless luxury if you keep your head about it. And I'm not likely to lose mine.... Besides, I want to help Terry. I want to make him a little more at home in the world."

"Which is happening faster," I asked, "your conversion of him, or his of you?"

She didn't answer. There wasn't time, for at that moment we saw Terry coming towards us.

VI

He was very shy and nervous. He had decided at the last moment to accept her invitation, but he hadn't known where Rumpelmayer's was, and several bus-conductors had failed to give adequate information. (I think he expected something about as large as Selfridge's.) Anyhow, that accounted for the delay. He was sorry, and he hoped we hadn't been waiting long.

The awkward part of it was that I had to leave them almost immediately for an unpostponable duty in Fleet Street. It was unfortunate, I thought, because Helen might think I had invented the appointment in order to leave her alone with Terry. Perhaps she did; but at any rate she seemed not to care. "I hope you won't be late," she said, smiling as she shook hands with me. And then she summoned the waitress and gave a fresh order.

As I rode back on the top of a bus to Fleet Street, the whole interview seemed almost incredible. It was queer enough to find Terry breaking his cast-iron rules by having tea with her; but it was positively sensational for her to have calmly confessed to being in love with him, and for me to have comforted her with the assurance that being in love wasn't frightfully important. But that was the sort of thing she had power to do; she could have confessed murder, I believe, and have made you feel that murder wasn't frightfully important.

Often since then I have pondered over the matter and wondered what I _ought_ to have done. Whatever it was, it was probably more heroic than what I did, which was merely to wait, telling myself over and over again that neither the one nor the other of them was a fool, and that there were certain things which only fools did....

VII

And so it began. The difficulty is to say _what_ began. Terry told me so little, and Helen told me so much; and between the two was a vast hiatus of the inexplicable. At first, the affair seemed perfectly harmless. When a man, after habitually working three times as hard as he ought, slows down to twice as hard, there doesn't seem a great deal to complain of. Nor when the same man spends a wet Sunday afternoon listening to a pretty woman play Chopin, instead of drenching himself to the skin on some miserable hillside.

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, _much_ more. And--as I told you before--it's _wonderful_."

"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--he _couldn't_. It wouldn't occur to him. Oh, don't--don't--" she was beginning to laugh--"don't imagine it. It _couldn't_ happen."

"Then what _will_ happen--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, everything _was_ changed.

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. He _had_ been 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: "Why _shouldn't_ I 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 the _Times_. 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 (Severn _would_ do 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.

"He _has_ told 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 he _doesn't_ use 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

I _was_ drunk. 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, he _was_ laughing. 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.