Chapter TWELVE: I

SHE would keep her word....

All the way down in the train to Haslemere I was thinking of that. It was just such another day as its tragic predecessor--dry, windless, grey with heat that towards mid-day would become almost unbearable. If London at nine o'clock had been a tepid bath, Haslemere at eleven was a furnace. All around the grass and furze on the hills had caught fire, and the scorching, pungent smoke was drifting like a white mist over the town.

She would keep her word.... Through a night of broken perspiring sleep I had pondered over it, dreamed about it, and still there were corners of its vast ramifications that I hadn't explored. Was it for good or bad that things had happened as they had happened? Severn cooped endlessly in his chair, or Severn alive again, dazzling the world, drinking life to the full, charming, cynical, eternally young-old, with both hands ever ready to help the struggling youngster, and a paramour, might be, in every capital in Europe? Helen, living under his roof, but without love for him, without even respect, with nothing but grim and fearful rectitude; or Helen free--free to lead Terry once again into the sea of doubt and remorse? Which was the happier picture?

The night had been full of fears. They had attacked in legions from midnight till dawn, undermining everything that I had held true and axiomatic. One moment I was glad because, whatever else might happen, it was well that she should leave Terry alone. And then, the moment after, had come the fear that she might not leave him alone, even then; that she would see him, many more times, as a friend; that he would grow to love her again, without willing it, without even knowing it. Perhaps he had even begun already; perhaps that was his reason for not accepting the Australian offer. And what did it matter whether she kept her word or not, if the lure of her were already over him?

Such fears had grown by daylight, and were monstrous as I climbed that morning over the sun-scorched ridge of Hindhead. Why _hadn't_ he accepted the Australian offer?

It was one o'clock when I reached the hotel, and I was in time for lunch with him. I told him, without much in the way of preamble, what Hermann had said about Severn. Naturally he was shocked and disappointed. "Poor Helen!" were his first words of comment. Not "Poor Severn!" He added then, as if sensing my thoughts: "It will be a much greater blow to her than to him, I know. She was hoping so much--_too_ much--from the operation."

And June too--_she_ had been hoping. She had promised to motor down that afternoon, he said, but perhaps, in the altered circumstances, she wouldn't come.

We finished our meal in rather gloomy silence, but afterwards, in the garden, I asked him about his own future. The Australian offer mightn't remain open for long, I hinted broadly.... Had he yet made up his mind about it?

"Not quite," he replied. "Very soon I'll let Severn know definitely.... But a few days can't matter, surely?"

It was all (to me) very disquieting, and I was glad to talk of something else.

June came about tea-time. She had driven from town in under the hour, and her arms, hands, and face were almost nut-brown. She seemed depressed about her father's condition, though she said very little about it. She said very little, in fact, about anything; I had never known her so taciturn. After tea, though the sun was still hot, she went with Terry to the tennis-court, while I stayed in Taplow's garden with a pipe, a bottle of beer, and Severn's _Disraeli_. I hadn't read far before I knew that it was easily the best thing (in the way of literature) that he had done, and that it would cause something of a sensation. That pleased me a great deal; it was fine to think that he had it in him to excel in a rôle to which his condition offered no impediment. Disraeli, of course suited his ironic treatment; there was much in common, I thought, between the author and his subject. Both posed strenuously all their lives, and both are still enigmas.

Yet even Severn's delightful style (more French, by the way, than English) could not keep sleep away from me for long. I closed my eyes at six o'clock or thereabouts, and when I opened them it was quite dark, though not late, because the bar was still lit up. Taplow laughed when I went in. "You was sleeping, sir," he said, "and I didn't see no reason to disturb you. The others are out--said they didn't want any supper. Yours is laid ready in the coffee-room.... Will you take beer or wine, sir?"

Beer.... The coffee-room windows were wide open, and the night air, slightly cool, drifted in with waves of flower-perfume and moths that fluttered noisily round the lamp.... Beer, cold beef, pickles, bread, and a dig out of a huge Stilton.... Idyllic meal, almost (but not quite) sufficient to dispel all the fears that ever a human mind possessed.

Afterwards I sat out in a deck-chair under the blue-black sky and smoked a cigar. It was past eleven; Terry and June would be back soon, no doubt. Perhaps they had driven somewhere in the car, and there had been a breakdown. Was the car in the garage? I was too lazy to go and look....

There was no moonlight; only the silver stars. The yellow glow from the coffee-room window died down slowly; Taplow was carrying out the lamp.... The wind breathing idly through the trees, and the scent of hollyhocks, and sleep-sleep-sleep again....

II

Voices in the garden....

It was midnight, probably; it _felt_ midnight. The cigar in my hand had long ago gone out. On the lawn the heavy dew was glistening faintly; there was no light anywhere but starshine, and no sound anywhere but the voices.

Terry's voice. I heard him say: "Everybody gone to bed, of course. I've got the key, though."

And then, in answer, a whisper more to be felt than heard. "Oh, the lovely--_lovely_ night! ... Terry, can't we go for another walk?"

That was June.... They had entered by the side-gate, and were standing, so far as I could judge, outside the back-door of the bar--perhaps thirty or forty yards away from me.

He said: "_Now_? Why, it's long past midnight. Hilton will be sitting up for me."

"Never mind--he won't care.... Oh, Terry--Terry--I feel so utterly miserable to-night--I don't want to go in at all."

"We _must_, June. It's _too_ late to be out."

Silence for seconds--perhaps for a minute altogether.

And then: "Terry, are you going to take that job in Australia?"

I started so suddenly that my chair creaked, and I almost wondered if they would hear. But no ... the sound was drowned in a tiny murmur that swelled like a tide through the whole garden--as if the trees and the bushes and the tall hollyhocks were all stooping to listen to the answer.

It came.

"June, I've told you I must. It's a good post, June--I can't afford to let it go. It wouldn't be fair to your father."

"_He_ wouldn't trouble. I'm sure he wouldn't."

"_I_ should, though. I've got from Taplow a full account of all I've cost while I've been here, and when I'm earning money I shall pay back every penny of it. It's only fair."

"_Fair_? Terry, how can you _think_ it's fair, when the money that's such a lot to you is so little to him? It's absurd--he'd laugh at it."

"It doesn't matter. I can't live at his expense any longer, now there's a job been offered me."

"And you want the job?"

"Yes ... I want ... my work."

Another pause, and then, out of the velvet silence: "Terry.... _Don't go_...."

"June! ... _June_! ... _What_ do you mean?"

Was it an echo to him out of the past--the past that, so he had said, was just a blank that nobody remembered?

Footsteps crunched along the gravel; the latch of the side-gate was lifted up; they had gone out again into the pale, starlit lane....

III

It was past two when he came up to bed. No longer at all sleepy, I was waiting for him in the sole armchair that our room possessed; Severn's _Disraeli_ was open on my knee, but it had taken me over an hour to read five of its most fascinating pages.

He said nothing at first, beyond apologizing for his lateness. I thought he looked worried and unsettled; he went to the window, lit a cigarette, and stood there for a moment with his back towards me.

"Sleepy?" he said at last.

"Not particularly," I replied.

"Neither am I."

Was it an invitation to talk? I wondered, but I knew that if it were he would soon repeat it more definitely.

He said, after a pause: "I don't think I shall sleep at all to-night."

"No?"

The less you encouraged him the more likely he was to say what was in his mind. That had always been his way.

He swung round suddenly. "By the way, Hilton, I want to take that job in Australia."

"You do?"

"Yes.... _You_ think I ought to, don't you?"

I said: "From the purely personal point of view I'm just hating the thought of you taking it. But, on the other hand, you must admit it's a goodish job, as jobs go nowadays."

"Yes.... That's what I feel. And I can't go on like this...."

He dragged a small chair near to the window and sat down. "Aged thirty and beginning all over again," he went on. "No money. Heavily in debt. No position. Impossible to think of marriage--even if I wanted to.... And yet, for all that, in the things that really matter, I've succeeded. I _can_ feel that, can't I?"

I nodded. "From your own point of view, undoubtedly. But there are times when the material side of life is apt to come to the front rather awkwardly."

"Yes." His voice was eager, as if he had found me interpreting his own thoughts. "Hilton, to tell you the truth, I'm in a fix.... I want to take this job, as I said--in fact, I know I _must_ take it--and yet--and yet...." He hesitated, and then finished up: "There's such an odd sort of difficulty in the way."

And as always it had to be wormed out of him by degrees, though the task was easier through my fairly accurate knowledge of what was coming. June, he said, had all along been against his taking the job. She had said it was too far away, and that it wasn't good enough for him. "Of course I daresay the salary does seem ridiculous to her. She probably spends three hundred a year on her clothes."

I rather doubted that, but I made no interruption. He went on: "Anyhow, that doesn't matter.... The point is that after what she said I promised I'd think it over for a fortnight before deciding.... So now you understand why it was I couldn't give you a definite answer?"

Yes, I knew, and had guessed for over an hour, though I didn't tell him that.

"The fortnight ended to-night, and I told her I'd made up my mind to accept."

"Good."

"But then--more than ever--she seemed against the idea."

"In other words, she asked you not to go?"

"It amounted to that."

"What answer did you give?"

"I said ... I promised again ... that I'd think it over."

That, for some reason or other, made me laugh. "I'm afraid, Terry," I said, "my cross-examination of you is going to be rather stiff.... First of all, you say you _want_ to take the job?"

"Yes."

"And yet you told her you'd think it over?"

"Yes."

"Are you going to think it over?"

"I--I suppose so."

"So you haven't quite made up your mind?"

"Well--not absolutely."

"So it comes to this--that a woman's persuasion stands in the way of what you want to do?"

He shook his head. "No, no. I must take the job. There's no alternative--I quite see that. But--I don't like to disappoint her."

"Or yourself?"

He said, simply: "We've been very good friends, that's all I can say."

Then he began suddenly to talk in sharp jerks of words, as if speaking the thoughts that came to him.

"Of course, in _any_ case, it couldn't have gone on for long. She's young now--not twenty-one till next month.... Sooner or later, she's bound to marry somebody--somebody with wealth and position, most likely--and--naturally--it couldn't go on after that...."

"What couldn't go on?"

"Our--friendship."

I knew then, from the curious way he spoke the word "friendship", that he had begun to love her....

IV

Somehow I had never thought of that, had never even hoped for it.... And now, with all its train of dazzling possibilities, it was leaping towards me.... Not Helen--but June.... That wanted some realizing.... And with the realization, and the serenity of it, came just a faint flavour of sadness too. I think there is always a sadness in feeling that time _does_ count, and that _grandes passions can_ fade away.

Mother and daughter.... What sort of a battle had they been waging, silently, perhaps unconsciously, during the months that had passed? Helen, I know, had been scrupulously platonic, and maybe, after all, it was a just irony that he should come to desire no more than her friendship. But June? Was there more than friendship there?

I believe, if it comes to laying down a creed, that the love of Terry and June had grown very quietly and gradually until at last, in Taplow's garden that night, it had broken out into no more than those two words of hers--"Don't go..."

I don't know how exactly Terry and I got over the immense difficulty of his reserve. Perhaps we never did get over it; at any rate, he never admitted in so many words that he had grown to love June. But from a certain moment of that warm July night I began to talk to him as if he _had_ admitted it, as if it were something obvious and perfectly understood between us. I said, for instance: "No man ought ever to think he has no chance with any woman." He didn't ask me what on earth I was talking about as I had half expected. He just leaned back in his chair, puffed restlessly at a cigarette, and pondered--until I thought he was never going to answer at all. And then, when the reply did come, it was spoken in another tone--as if the whole plane and angle of our conversation had been shifted. "It's as you said, Hilton.... Material things crop up at awkward moments. What chance would a penniless man approaching middle age have with a young girl of wealth and position?"

"It depends, of course. It depends on whether she loves him or not."

"She doesn't."

"Then obviously he would stand no chance at all."

Silence for a while after that. He looked--if the combination is even possible--triumphant and despondent--triumphant at having led his argument to an apparent victory, and despondent over the deeper issues of the discussion. Then, rather daringly after a pause, I introduced the personal element by asking him why he thought June had been so keen on his declining the Australian offer.

"I suppose she thought that--in various ways--it wasn't suitable."

"Even after you assured her it was? Do you think that in such a matter she would set her opinion against yours, unless she had some deeper reason as a motive?"

"What deeper reason?"

"Do you really mean to pretend it doesn't occur to you? To me it seems the most perfectly obvious thing that ever was. She doesn't want you to go to Australia because she doesn't like the thought of being without you when you've gone."

"Oh ... that's absurd...."

"Not a bit absurd. Do you think she's known you all this time without growing fond of you?"

"We've been good friends, of course."

"_Friends_? ... Some people would smile if you told them that. They'd say, to begin with, that she's compromised herself with you pretty hopelessly by staying here to-night.... Mrs. Taplow as a chaperon wouldn't impress them."

"_What_! Do you mean to say----"

I said, interrupting him: "Whatever I mean is not the slightest reflection on either you or her. I really needn't say that. We're broad-minded people--we don't bother about silly conventions.... But some people do--you'd be surprised how many--and my point in mentioning the matter is simply this.... Is it likely that June would risk getting herself talked about in connection with a man of whom she wasn't rather fond?"

"I don't think she cares whether people talk about her or not."

"Then depend upon it," I answered, "the crisis has been reached. When a woman doesn't care whether people talk about her or not, there's only one conclusion to be drawn. She's in love."

"Oh, that's nonsense--if you're trying to make out that she's in love with _me_...."

"Perhaps you can think of somebody else, then?"

And so it went on. It was uphill work, I can tell you, trying to convince Terry that he wasn't the meanest little worm that ever crawled on the earth.

Towards three o'clock the moment came when I judged it safe to mention the word "marriage." If, I said, he thought there was any doubt about her feeling for him, why didn't he put the matter to the obvious test? "Go to her straightforwardly and say: 'I don't want to give up your charming society, but I really must have that job. If, however, you would care to marry me and accompany me to Australia, the difficulty would be rather neatly solved.'"

_Marriage_? It was absurd to think of it, he said. He had never dreamed of such a thing, and he never would dream of it. He wouldn't insult her by even discussing it abstractly. What prospects had he? What sort of a life could he ask her to share with him? ... There were some things too ridiculous to be worth discussing, and that was one.

Nevertheless, I objected, he had got to discuss it, because it was the only thing left to discuss. To my mind, I said, it was only fair that he _should_ give her the chance of accepting or refusing him. She had shown pretty plainly that she didn't want him to leave her; that was quite as much as she could be expected to do on her own. It was for him to take the next step.

"But--_think_ of it, man! Three hundred a year for the two of us, after the sort of life she's been used to! It's _monstrous_!"

"That's for her to decide. If she thinks it is, then it is. But if she thinks it isn't--"

"Well?"

"Then it mightn't be.... You never know. Miracles have been done on three hundred a year before now."

"No man has a right to expect miracles," he said.

"Every man has a right to perform them," I answered. (Really, for three o'clock in the morning, our conversation was quite brilliant.)

But no; he wouldn't consider the matter. "Whatever you say, Hilton, you won't alter my mind. I've no right to ask for such a sacrifice--no right even to _think_ of it.... If there's anything at all that I've learnt from experience, it ought to be this--that women can't bear to give up _things_--especially the sort of things that I don't much care about."

In some ways, that was the nearest we ever got to talking about the past.

"If _I've_ learnt anything from experience," I countered, "it's that one woman can be absolutely and entirely different from every other."

But it was still no use; he was adamant. Whatever I said, he had some rejoinder; there was no sign of his conversion. The dawn peered over the ridge of the hills before we left off talking, and I had to admit to myself that, so far as the immediate object of the discussion was concerned, I had failed altogether. The idea of proposing marriage to June seemed to afflict him with a kind of mental explosion whenever he thought about it. It was preposterous. Rather refuse or accept a thousand jobs than commit such tempestuous folly. Incredible that I should ever have seriously suggested it.... And so on.... And so on....

And then we went to bed and to sleep.

V

All that happened last night; or, to be precise, early this morning....

It is a strange thing to have caught up with the present after so long writing of the past. Ever since I arrived here I have been at my desk; I was tired when I began, but Roebuck's iced coffee and the achievement of bringing this record up-to-date have made me feel curiously fresh and exhilarated.

It is the business lunch-hour now, and all the seats in Lincoln's Inn Fields, which is just across the road from my window, are filled with office-workers enjoying their respite. They look happy; the whole world looks happy--but that, maybe, is because I am feeling happy myself. The skies have cleared miraculously during the past twenty-four hours--have shown me Terry enslaved to June's calm and inarticulate youth, and June (I think) no less attached to Terry.

Whether it comes to anything is, of course, another matter. June is very young, and Terry's prospects are certainly none too rosy. Besides that, there is all the difference in the world between being pleasantly fond of a man and wanting to emigrate with him to the other side of the world. I'm rather afraid I lost sight of that during my argument with Terry; it all seemed just a shade easier than it is. The main and incontrovertible facts are these--that Terry will never propose to her on his own, and that if he were to take the Australian job and go away, June would be left here miserable.

I always find it so hard to know what to do--whether to interfere or not. On the whole, I lean to interference; I hate minding my own business, which is usually so much less interesting than other people's. And yet, in this case, it _may_ have been a mistake to write that interfering note to June.

I wrote it in an immense hurry before leaving the hotel this morning. A sudden impulse seized me while I was having breakfast; it was 7.30; my train from Haslemere was due to leave at 8.15; and Taplow's Ford was already shaking its hoary sides in the yard. I scribbled it out in pencil and gave it to the maid to take up to June along with the morning cup of tea. But the extraordinary part of it is that I can't very well remember what I wrote. The general trend, I imagine, was to give June the tip that it wouldn't be any use her expecting _him_ to do the proposing; but I hope to God I didn't put it quite so crudely as that. Probably I didn't; perhaps it was a marvel of tactful insinuation. Anyhow, it's done now, and can't be helped.

Helen is coming here to tea this afternoon; I asked her two days ago, thinking it would be a change for her if she felt too desperate. Now I rather wish I hadn't asked her. I am altogether out of the mood for skating on thin ice. It is bound to be difficult, and Heaven alone knows what we shall talk about. I shan't--I can't--tell her anything about Terry and June....

VI

11 _P.M._

I am alone now; Roebuck has gone to bed; and there is a cool south wind blowing in amongst my papers. The day has passed most wonderfully well, and I am very happy.

Helen came, and she wasn't desperate at all. She was calm--calm as if she were ten years older than when I saw her last. Or ten years younger.... I hardly know which; I only know that a touch of her old queer fascination has come back to her, making her wonderful again. Perhaps the two days that have passed since our talk on the End House lawn have really been ten years--long enough for her soul to escape from turmoil.

There was no need for me not to mention Terry. She mentioned him herself, but in such an odd way--as if, so it seemed to me, she were very old and he a long while dead. She gossiped about him, almost; anything, everything reminded her of him. When, for instance, I talked of the new house, she said: "Oh, yes, that's in the architect's hands now. There's no more for me to do. No more scrambling up hills with Terry."

Quietly--half-mockingly--like _that_!

"Not that I ever liked hills," she went on. "I hated them. But Terry was never happy except when he was consuming vast quantities of energy. If it wasn't physical energy, then it was mental, and it wasn't mental, then it was moral.... Didn't you ever notice that?"

I had noticed it. And then she went on again: "You ought to have seen him years ago at those bacteriology lectures. He didn't _teach_ bacteriology--he _preached_ it. And it was the same sort of thing with the hills--he didn't _climb_ them; he _conquered_ them."

She talked about him effortlessly, as if she were somehow drifting in a strong and peaceful tide. When I put a question about Severn she had to fight the tide while she gave a slow and reluctant answer.... Geoffrey, she said, was very busy and perfectly the same.

But the oddest thing of all was her calm remark: "Of course it's quite easy to see what will happen. Sooner or later he'll marry June. She's quite in love with him, and he'll be with her after a while.... Do you remember years ago you asked me what I would do with Terry in the end, and I said I would hand him over when the right girl came along.... But I never thought that the right girl would be June."

"You think June is the right girl?" I asked; and she answered: "I think he will feel she is if he tries hard enough."

I forgave her for that mocking retort. I didn't tell her that already, without trying at all, Terry had grown to see in June what, perhaps, he had never seen in any other woman--a mirror of the future, calm and bright with happiness. It would have been _too_ cruel to have told her that, to have smashed her dear belief that she could have had Terry for not much more than the asking. She has kept her word, and that counts none the less because it wouldn't have greatly mattered if she hadn't kept it.

We were in the midst of tea when the telegraph-boy arrived. I went out into my small lobby, and when I came back she noticed the change in my face; it was stupid not to have had more control of myself.

"Good news, I can see," she said.

And I stammered hazily something about a business affair that I had been hoping would happen.... Oh, yes, _quite_ good news.

That telegram is before me now as I write ... Handed in at Oxford at 4.10 P.M. (What were they doing at Oxford? A motor excursion, presumably.) ... Received at London, W.1. at 4.50 P.M.... And then:

"Took your advice succeeded thanks June."

VII

_Later._

I've been to bed, but I can't sleep, and I might as well continue this as lie awake. The clock in Lincoln's Inn has just chimed two, and the street-cleaners in Holborn are noisily busy. In a little while the Covent Garden traffic will begin; there is never a silent minute from midnight to dawn in this part of London. Not that it troubles me in the least; it is happiness--excitement if you like--that is keeping me awake to-night.

So far as I can see, I have come now to the end of this record. The future seems pretty well decided; Severn will write his books on Robert Walpole and Pontius Pilate and become as famous in literature as in everything else that he has ever touched; Terry will marry June and live happily ever after. It's an absurd phrase, in nine contexts out of ten, but I really do think it's likely to be true of those two. They're such clear-hearted people; marriage will be so tremendously simple to them. Terry will never think of any woman but June, and June will never think of any man but Terry. They'll live in a bungalow in some blazing Australian suburb, and probably they'll have lots of children--far more than Terry could possibly afford on his own income. If he gets the chance, and I daresay he will, he'll do valuable but not exactly epoch-making work as a bacteriologist. A well-known scientist told me the other day that in his opinion the importance of the Karelsky discoveries had been greatly over-rated. "They're valuable," he said, "but they're only a beginning, and the world's been treating them as if they were the end...."

Perhaps Terry will carry them further on from that beginning. But whatever he does, I'm quite certain that his name will never echo across the world. I shall never earn stray guineas by writing 'The Great Man As I Knew Him' articles in the gossipy press.

Two are still left whose future is beyond prophecy. There's Helen.... What _will_ happen to her? When she hears the news about June and Terry, will she still cling to that eager, scornful belief in her own power over him? Will she keep her word for ever--will she stay with Severn as in duty bound, not to him, but to Terry? Is it even possible that in time there may grow in her some scrap of affection for the author of the best short book on Disraeli that has ever been written? Frankly, I like Severn, and I find it tremendously hard to understand how anybody else can help liking him. Yet Helen doesn't.... Perhaps, after all, they are incompatibles whom nothing, neither time nor calamity, can bring together.

And then ... Mizzi.... Strange, perhaps, that I should be thinking of her now, should see her so clearly in my mind. She writes to me from time to time, and always with some mention of Terry; her last letter came two months ago. The hotel, I gather, proceeds from strength to strength, and I shouldn't be at all surprised to hear that, having exhausted all the European languages, she's now tackling Aramaic or Siamese.... One thing I've quite decided; I shall go to Vienna this year and take this manuscript for her to read.

A quarter past by the clock in Lincoln's Inn.... Shall I write to her now and book my room? If Terry has to begin the Australian job in the autumn he'll probably be leaving England very soon, and June, I've an idea, will want to go with him. Severn and Helen are going for a sea-cruise during August, so I think, if I'm not to be left entirely alone, I'd better choose that month for Vienna. It will be very hot, but I shan't mind. I want to go to the Semmering, and up the Danube to Melk, and perhaps, in a happier mood, to Buda-Pesth again....

I'm tired now.... I'll finish the letter in the morning, and while I'm asleep it shall stay there on my desk with no more than the date on it and the words:

"DEAR MIZZI,--..."

THE END