I find now that I have set down everything that I can definitely
remember about that visit to Vienna. My diary doesn't help me, because I
carelessly left it in London, and when I got back I just scrawled
"Vienna" across the blank pages. All I can do is to think of a certain
scene or place, and then, nine times out of ten, it's just a picture
that comes to me, and not a happening at all. I can see, for instance,
the tall yellow-painted houses in the Laudon Gasse, and the "Durchgang
Verboten" notice on the door of Mizzi's private entrance, and the masses
of velvet-red geraniums on the sills. Almost, as I write, I can smell
those geraniums, and also the curious, half-musty aroma that haunts even
the cleanest of those old Viennese houses.... I can see the wide,
park-bordered boulevards, with the vermilion trams sparkling through the
alternate sunlight and shadow, and (most clearly of all, this) the
wrinkled old lady at the corner of the Opern Ring, who used to sell me
citronnade. And I can see Mizzi standing in the porch to see me off, and
automatically (since it was not her nature to waste even a moment)
kicking away a few dead leaves that had blown on to the step. It was the
night express that I was making for, and the evening sunlight was
dancing on Mizzi's sherry-coloured hair as I turned and waved to her
just as the car swung us round the corner into the Skoda Gasse. And Terry
said: "The next time you come you won't need to put up at the Bristol.
Mizzi told me that in future she'd always be glad to find you a room."
That "next time".... We had suggested that it should be at the end of
another year, but it wasn't; it was at the end of five. So many things
happened in the interval--things important enough in their own scheme of
things, but not here. I got a decent sub-editorship, for instance, and
chiefly owing to that the vaguely arranged trip fell through. It wasn't
postponed; it was just cancelled; for a sub-editorship, more than
anything else perhaps, curtails a man's freedom to roam over Europe on
visits to even his most intimate friends. I sent Terry, however, a
cordial invitation to visit me instead, but he declined for the usual
reason--his Work.
To me, of course, those five years are anything but a gap; they're so
crowded with business happenings that have no claim to be set down here.
More than once I planned a visit to Vienna, but at the last moment
something happened to prevent it; nor was I free even on holidays, for I
usually combined them with business commissions that took me almost
everywhere except to Central Europe. Terry's still regular letters
expressed no disappointment, but then, they never expressed any emotion
at all. Once he ended with "Mizzi sends you her kind regards," and then,
after that, Mizzi always sent me her kind regards. No doubt he acquired
the habit of writing it; and, anyhow, I regarded it as no more than an
indication that Mizzi was still alive.
My diaries are rather a help to me here. I find in them quite a number
of mentions of Severn, and even of Karelsky. Both men were almost
continually in the limelight; if you take up any _Messenger_ of the
period the odds are that you will find either a Severn cross-examination
or an account of Karelsky's rejuvenation of some illustrious personage.
Fleet Street loved them both, the former for the constancy with which he
yielded stimulating copy, and the latter for the uncanny accuracy with
which he dropped sensations into the very heart of dead periods. I am
thinking, of course, of the great Thibetan monastery sensation. Karelsky
travelled, apparently, in Thibet, and somehow or other obtained an
entrance into an old and inaccessible monastery in which, to his
astonishment, he found that his own methods of rejuvenation had been
practised for hundreds of years; so that, in fact, many of the monks
were actually in their third and fourth centuries! Fleet Street "wrote
up" the story in great glee, with maps of Thibet and excerpts from Sven
Hedin and Younghusband all complete; but naturally Fleet Street did not
believe a single word of it.
I remember discussing the matter with Severn at a sort of
"house-warming" party I gave at my new rooms overlooking Lincoln's Inn
Fields. Somebody said that Karelsky would have made a better journalist
than scientist; and I think I answered that from my own professional
point of view I would rather he remained a scientist, since as a
journalist he would only be one liar amongst so many. Perhaps I said
outright that in my opinion he was very little better than a charlatan
and an impostor. But Severn shook his head. "Karelsky's more than that,"
he answered. "I shouldn't have recommended Terry with him if he'd been a
mere market-place quack. Of course, there is something of the quack in
him, and he's obviously running this Thibetan stuff for his own
advertisement.... But I shouldn't like to call anything that Karelsky
says an absolute lie. In my opinion he's one of the very few first-class
geniuses the world possesses...."
"And you really think this story of his----"
Severn smiled. "I prefer to express no opinion," he said. "I am far from
saying that Karelsky could not, if he wished, tell the most thundering
of lies. But in this case ... well, I just don't know. Oddly enough, I
met a well-known Harley Street physician only yesterday and he assured
me, from his own personal and rather secret knowledge of Thibet, that
Karelsky was perfectly right--although, of course, he deplored the
sensationalism of it...."
And there the matter ended. I have mentioned it to show how impossible I
found it to make up my mind about Karelsky. He had been, and remained
still, an enigma.
During those years Severn and I contrived to meet fairly
often--sometimes in town and less often, when Helen was away, at the End
House. If ever I were tempted to think the worst of him, I should only
need to ask myself the question: Why _should_ he have troubled to help
me as much as he did? I know, of course, what his reply would be--a
suave smile and an assurance that he did it merely for the pleasure he
got in doing it, like any other voluptuary. I am to suppose, therefore,
that he voluptuously interviewed the editor of the _Messenger_ and
persuaded him that I was worth a sub-editorship. "My dear fellow," he
told me once, "I really do what I like, whatever it happens to be.
You'd be surprised if you knew what I was capable of.... For God's sake,
don't think of me as a sort of maundering philanthropist."
All this time he was rising rapidly in his profession. He loved
publicity for its own sake, and he specialized in cases that gave him
it--divorce, criminal, and civil. One year, it was freely rumoured, he
earned over fifty thousand pounds. At the same time in the House he had
made a first-class reputation, and was almost certain of the
Solicitor-Generalship when his party came into office. He had had
marvellous, almost incredible good fortune, and _he kept on having it_.
He couldn't write a book without it going into seven editions. He
couldn't dabble in art without exhibiting at the Paris Salon, and, under
a pseudonym, attracting a considerable amount of attention. A newspaper
friend of mine once summed him up rather neatly. We were speculating on
which of his many activities represented his real natural bent. "All of
them and none of them," was my friend's enigmatic opinion. "He's just
born to be one thing and one thing only--a _success_. It's only an
accident that he paints, writes, and harangues a jury. If he'd been a
rag-and-bone man down the Mile End Road he'd have been just as big a
success.... While other men, perhaps far better and just as clever, are
born to be failures...."
When I look back on those years, I see Severn most clearly of all in his
surroundings at White's. It is as if all the memories of meeting him
there were laid one on top of another to form a composite picture of a
single typical meeting. There were sherry, oysters, port, coffee,
cigars, and talk. The talk was always brilliant and the port was always
strong. Nothing very much was ever said about Helen, but Severn's
attitude to me was so cordial that I knew he must think her's rather
absurd. Sometimes he would tell me that she hadn't been well and that
she had gone abroad to recuperate. She must have been out of England a
very large proportion of those five years. I seem to remember asking the
question, "How's Helen?" and receiving always the answer: "Oh, she's at
Ostend...." (Or Etretat, Cannes, Biarritz, Palm Beach, or wherever it
was.) June, meanwhile, was at her boarding-school, and later on, at
Newnham. I met her only once, during a summer vacation; she had grown up
into a normal, healthy, sport-loving youngster with freckled cheeks and
just a touch of her mother's prettiness. She talked about nothing but
tennis.