I
I DID, after all, turn up at that interview with Severn. It wasn't my
intention to take sides; I was prepared to mediate, to put the brake on
where necessary--in short, to keep the whole discussion well under
blood-heat. Perhaps I succeeded. Perhaps it was really a compliment to
my impartiality when Severn exclaimed, about half-an-hour after we had
begun: "Look here, Hilton, what _are_ you in this game--prosecuting
counsel, defending counsel, judge, jury, hangman, or what?"
I might have answered that I held a watching brief, but that's the sort
of clever reply one doesn't think of till afterwards. And yet it
absolutely summed up my position; I _was_ watching, and with a
diffidence that gradually, as the affair proceeded, developed into
rather dissatisfied disgust. For, as I had feared, the whole thing was
almost a fiasco. Terry was sheerly defenceless against Severn; he
couldn't think or talk a quarter as fast; he had none of the arts of
suavity or blandness; he could only sit there, minute after minute, in a
sort of dogged, stupefied silence.... Really, it was no fight at all; it
was merely Severn giving a free exhibition of himself.
Perhaps you have heard Severn defending a difficult case in a court of
law. He rises quickly to his feet, all smiles and courtesy to everybody;
he talks calmly and suavely for a few moments, just to give the
prosecution time to reflect what a charming man he is; and then, quite
suddenly, he says something unexpected. Perhaps he startles by some
unguessed admission, or brings forth a new and unlooked-for item of
evidence. But anyhow, after politely upsetting most of the ideas you
already have, he proceeds, still politely, to build up in you the ideas
he wants you to have. And that is the way he earns his hundreds of
pounds a week.
You can picture him, therefore, striding into the lounge of the
Andrassy, bestowing on everybody a charming smile, ordering drinks,
offering cigars, remarking on the hot weather, and generally, in fact,
behaving as if he hadn't a ghost of an idea what we wanted him for. And
you can picture Terry, clenching his hands with a queer sort of nervous
firmness, declining the drink and the cigar, and going straight ahead to
the vital question--was this woman, this Greek dancer, Severn's
mistress?
Terry was too nervous to lead up to the question gradually. And Severn
was too clever to lead down from it gradually. He answered, as sharply
and instantly as a pistol-shot: "Yes. And what of it?"