The long journey passed, and by the time we reached the Swiss frontier,
we knew all that the newspapers knew, at any rate, concerning the
tragedy. It was an ordinary enough story of a driver trying to make up
lost time and negotiating a curve ten miles an hour too fast. Result:
derailment and a death-roll, so far, of twenty-four. The Basle
newspapers, though they took great care to be incorrect about Severn's
life and career (one of them even called him "l'avocat général de
l'Angleterre"), gave no information as to the nature or extent of his
injury. Somehow the absence of detail, and the fact that we were already
nearer Paris than Vienna, overwhelmed me with a sense of this sharper
and more instant tragedy; perhaps for the first time I ceased to think
about Mizzi. I told Terry, as we stood at the buffet-counter at Troyes,
that I was glad we had come, because if we could help Severn even a
little, it would be worth while. He gripped my arm eagerly and replied:
"I _knew_ you would think that--I knew you would."
Early in the morning we passed very slowly the scene of the accident
(only a few miles from the Gare de l'Est), and saw the gigantic litter
of wreckage, and the break-down cranes still working over the shattered
and telescoped coaches. A dull drizzling rain was falling, and a
grinning baby advertising a famous soap looked down on the scene from
the wall of a near-by factory. Ten minutes later we were pacing the long
platform of the terminus. The entire station and precincts were packed
with English conducted tourists to the popular Swiss resorts; uniformed
guides were shepherding them into groups, and I heard one of them
promise his party that very soon they would be able to see "the place
where the train ran off the lines." A gratuitous tit-bit added by
Providence to their Ten Days in Lovely Lucerne.
We joined the crowd of anxious and grief-stricken inquirers in the
information bureau. The small, ugly room seethed, as it were, with its
burden of misery; and there was something hideously incongruous in the
wall-posters of smiling red-cheeked holiday-makers perched on the
summits of impossibly precipitous Alps. Women sobbed and chattered
amidst their sobbing; men shouted and gesticulated; the whole
_ensemble_, with the noises of trains and beating rain as an
accompaniment, made me understand how men can sometimes lose control of
themselves and run suddenly amok. The waiting lasted three-quarters of
an hour, and then, when our turn came, the official would hardly listen
when he found that we weren't _related_ to anyone concerned. We argued
(so far as my limited French would allow), and all the while the
official's nerves, as well as my own, were being strained nearer and
nearer to breaking-point. Who were we? We gave our names. What was our
connection with Severn? What were we--professionally? I took the liberty
of labelling Terry "médecin," but when I went on to describe myself as
"journaliste," everything everywhere seemed to snap suddenly. The
official shouted and waved his arms about; he appealed to the crowd; the
crowd shouted; I shouted; and Terry stood by me all the while, silent
and very pale. He knew so little French that the row could only have
puzzled him. It puzzled me, indeed, until I realized afterwards that I
had been mistaken for some newspaper ghoul in search of copy.
At last, after explaining over and over again that we were both near
friends of Severn and had travelled from Vienna especially to see him, I
was reluctantly allowed to learn that he had been taken to a hospital in
the Avenue Friedland. And five minutes after that, as we sat in the cab
that was bearing us at breakneck speed along the boulevards, Terry
collapsed.
That squabble in the station inquiry-office had been the last straw.
Till then he had never wholly given way, but that--that almost trivial
thing--shattered all the final strength he possessed. In the
semi-darkness of the cab he made total surrender. It seemed a sort of
fainting-fit; I wasn't skilled enough to diagnose exactly. But I
realized immediately that it was no use going on with him to the
hospital. He recovered when I opened both windows of the cab and let in
the wind and rain; and then I shouted to the driver to take us to the
nearest hotel. We pulled up almost straightway outside a large
establishment in the Place du Hâvre, and for the next hour I worked
like an automaton--getting Terry comfortable, calling in a doctor, and
making all the necessary arrangements with the hotel people. The doctor
reported a complete nervous collapse, and prescribed a long and absolute
rest-cure; it was what I had expected. What I had _not_ expected was
Terry's childlike acquiescence; all desire, it seemed, had gone out of
him. He didn't even want to see Severn. "_You_ can go," he said, with a
sort of tired sadness.
I said that I certainly would, and he smiled and closed his eyes. The
doctor had given him a draught, and within a few minutes he was heavily
asleep.