IX

He showed me Helen's letters that night. I had expected a small bundle,

but there were only three; and he asked me to read them, not while I was

with him, but later on when I was alone. The chance came after I had

bidden him good-night; I went downstairs into the lounge, switched on

one of the shaded table-lamps, lit a cigarette, and read the letters

very carefully. They were none of them long, and all had been written

and posted within a month of his arrival in Vienna. It was an odd

sensation to sit in a hotel-lounge at two o'clock in the morning and

disentangle a mystery; there was something eerie, almost, in trying to

build up from a few sheets of handwriting the complete picture of what

had happened seven years before. But there it was, in clear focus at

last, and one glance was enough to show how wrong my ideas had been.

Those letters were a revelation. They seemed to me the sort of letters

that Helen could never have written, but perhaps that is the usual

experience of outsiders who read other people's love-letters. Yes, they

_were_ love-letters, except that the description is a shade too

temperate.... And--to put the matter quite frankly--they were _not_ the

wayward, semi-harmless chits that a married woman might send to a young

exile in whom she was sentimentally interested. They were, on the

contrary, highly damaging and incriminating documents; and all the time

I was reading them I was picturing a packed Divorce Court in which some

cool, smooth-voiced advocate (like Severn) was doling them out, sentence

by sentence, and pausing with uplifted eyebrows at the end of each.

The earliest of the trio had evidently been written and posted within a

few hours of that quarrel with me in the Fleet Street tea-shop. There

was, of course, no mention of it in the letter, and at least half the

sentences were indignant questions. For instance:

"... Terry, what _does_ your scrappy little note really mean? Why have

you gone after all? What need was there for you to go? I feel dazed by

it, so far; I cannot understand how or why you could have done it, after

what we had arranged. Surely it was wonderful enough for us to be

together, meeting so often, and with all the summer before us that we

had planned--how could you _dare_ to break it all to pieces by going

away? Terry, I'm angry with you--I _did_ think you would keep your word

to me. Tell me what made you go--tell me _why_. And for God's sake, if

you find there's nothing for you in Vienna, have the courage to come

back. I'm frightened to think of you with that man Karelsky--he seems to

me to be everything you'll never guess he is till it's too late.... Oh,

you _are_ a fool for running away like this--it was our wonderful

chance, and you've bungled all of it. I don't know whether I can ever

forgive you...."

A pause of ten days, and then the next, evidently in answer to a letter

from him:

"Your letter arrived this morning at breakfast-time. Geoffrey said:

'Who's it from?', and I said: 'It's from Terry, saying he's arrived

safely and is settling down.' Then he said 'Good!' in a loud voice, and

I felt I wanted to knife him for saying 'good' when everything was so

bad.... Terry, it's almost killing me to think that I could have had you

that last night if only I had had the courage. I wish to God I _had_

had, but what's the good of that to me now? Terry, there _were_

difficulties--money and so on--and you oughtn't to have thought I didn't

love you enough, just because I didn't agree straightway. I love you

enough for _anything_, and I know it now that you've gone.... I just

feel I can't endure it--it's inhuman of you to give me no second

chance--and yet you always were like that, I know. Everything or

nothing--and now, I suppose, it's nothing.... What you say about being

sorry shows how different you are; _I'm_ not sorry, except that I didn't

seize the chance when it was offered me...."

And as a postscript the single sentence: "I don't think I can ever

_live_ without you, and you know what I mean by _living_, don't you?"

The third and last letter was the longest. Dated almost exactly a

calendar month after Terry's departure, it began:

"Your letter made me feel that I shall never want to write to you again,

and if, as you threaten, you don't reply to this, I certainly shan't.

What sort of a man are you that you can change so quickly? Your letter

might have been written by a parson--or did you, perhaps, get some

parson to collaborate with you? Please let me inform you that the old

Terry that I loved, and that I love still, was the only man on earth who

could ever have made me 'live usefully,' and that the new Terry, with

his moralisings and platitudes, only makes me feel I want to go straight

to the Devil. How _dare_ you mention Geoffrey's career as a reason why

_I_ should sacrifice my happiness? And even June--what has _she_ got to

do with it? I suppose you think that the 'che-ild' comes in rather

usefully, or else your parson collaborator put you up to the idea.... As

for your work--devote yourself to it by all means, but why should you

try to make me believe that you can't have more than _one_ thing in

life? My advice to you (since you have given yours so plentifully to me)

is to marry some Viennese girl who loves you and is also a business

woman--someone who'll stop you from making an utter fool of yourself. I

go white with rage when I read over parts of your letter. What do you

mean by saying that love dies soon when the mind is occupied by work?

Does _yours_? _Mine_ doesn't. And what do you mean by talking of your

great sin? There _was_ no sin, and if what might have been is a sin, then

it was I and not you who stopped short of it. Not that I want any credit

for that.... I can't understand you. I can't understand how you could

behave as you did that night and then, a month later, send me a sermon.

I don't feel that it is _you_--the real _you_--that wrote me that letter

at all, but somebody else--somebody I have never known. Did you ever

really love me at all, I wonder, or was it, on your side, merely the

passion you now profess to be ashamed of? It wasn't that on _my_ side; I

really loved you, more than I could love anybody else in the world; I

loved even your work and your ideals because they were yours.... I

_don't_ feel ashamed, and you _do_, and there's an end of it...."

X

While I was reading over that last letter for the second time, Mizzi

came in. She had seen the light through the window, and had wondered who

could be staying up so late. We shook hands gravely, and she said that

the porter had told her of our return, and that she was not altogether

surprised since Buda-Pesth in midsummer was so hot and--and

_unheimlich_. _That_--her using a German word instead of puzzling out an

English one--showed me that she was perturbed; and when she asked me how

Terry was, a sudden impulse made me place a chair for her opposite to

mine and tell her everything about him. _Everything_. And also I showed

her the letters.

Perhaps I was wrong to do that without his permission, but there are

times when you risk being wrong. I wanted Mizzi to know everything about

Terry because, in the end, I wanted her to marry him. I talked to her

especially about the letters; they showed, I said, the tragic difference

between Terry and Helen. "She was right when she said it was all or

nothing with him.... Apparently she was quite willing to carry on a more

or less decorous affair with him whilst still living with her husband.

But he _wasn't_."

Mizzi nodded and asked me about the 'last night' mentioned in the second

of the letters. I described briefly the Karelsky party and the odd way

in which Terry and Helen had managed to separate themselves from the

rest of the crowd. "I imagine," I said, "that sometime or other during

that evening he asked her point-blank to come away with him. No doubt

she either refused or else hesitated, and in the end it was arranged

that he should decline the Vienna job and stay in London where they

could go on meeting each other.... Then afterwards he felt the

intolerableness of the situation. He couldn't bear at all what she,

apparently, could bear quite easily--the having of things by halves. It

wasn't in his nature.... So he cut the knot and came out here."

"I can understand ... I can understand him wanting all of her--or else

none of her."

"So can I. And, in a way, I can understand _her_ side, as well. After

all, he had no money, and neither had she.... It would have been sheer

madness for them to run away, and it was her nature to think of that,

just as it was his nature not to."

Then we discussed the third and most extraordinary of the three letters.

What sort of stuff must Terry have sent her to have evoked such a

stinging reply? I suggested that he might have deliberately written her

a rather caddish letter in order to kill her love for him, but Mizzi

thought he wasn't calculating or clever enough for that. "I think," she

said, "that he was perfectly sincere. He _did_ think, then, that love

would die when the mind was occupied by work. He _did_ think that he had

committed a sin, and that his love for her had been just a passion.... I

think he meant every word of what he wrote."

"It's a pity we can't _see_ his letter," I said, but she replied: "I

don't think I want to see it. I feel I know what it would be like.

Rather stiff and--and awful ... can't you imagine it?"

I tried to, but I'm afraid I hadn't, and never have had, her clairvoyant

knowledge of Terry. I went on to explain the difficulties he was in, and

how he felt responsible for the trouble between Helen and her husband,

as well as for my quarrel with Helen, and Severn's "affair" in

Buda-Pesth, and Heaven knew what else. "He's in a mood to take upon

himself responsibility for all the suffering in the world," I said, "and

it would be comic if it wasn't tragic. Everything is _his_

fault--nothing anybody else's."

She said: "I can so easily believe that. He has a spirit in him--that

makes him try to do perfect things--and then blames him when they aren't

_quite_ perfect...."

We were silent for a while, and then she went on: "All through the time I

haf known him he has been like that--trying for the perfect goal and

flogging himself because he couldn't reach it.... He would have made a

great saint--in the Middle Ages ... but not to-day." She smiled as she

added: "I remember when he taught me English--he taught me as if I were

a sinner, and English the true faith...."

We talked on for a while about what we could do to help him, but at the

end of it all only a few desirabilities emerged--that he should take a

long holiday and make more friends and work less hard. As we shook hands

at the foot of the stairs she said: "It iss so hard to help people who

will not haf what they want. If only I could write to this Helen and ask

her to come to him! Or if only some fate would send him back to her! ...

But no--he will not haf what he wants. Nor will he want what he could

haf.... He iss born to be _unglücklich_...."