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?"