June's eyes as she shook hands with me at the gate that evening were
shining with delight. "It's marvellous," she whispered softly, for Terry
wasn't far away. "It's wonderful to think that he knows everything now,
and that we have nothing more to fear...."
The night had a glow of moonlight, and in it her eyes were shining--with
delight, as I said, but also (I wondered) with something more than
delight? I could even see her mother in her then--her mother as she had
been years before.
Terry and I, having bidden our farewells, walked back down the moonlit
lane to the Tube Station. He was staying with me for the night--indeed,
for just as long as he wished, though the thought of his unfinished work
made him eager to return to Hindhead.
He said, amidst the clatter of the Tube train, that Severn, despite the
accident, was really just the same, but that Helen seemed to have
changed. "I didn't understand her," he confessed.
I answered that eight years were bound to have made a difference, and
that the last year had made perhaps the biggest difference of all. He
nodded then, and was silent for a while. It was obvious that talking
about her both attracted him and made him embarrassed.
He never mentioned now his old half-crazed idea, that he was personally
responsible for all the misfortunes of the Severn family. But the idea
was somewhere still in his mind, in essence the same though maybe
transmuted into another semblance; and I could sense it easily enough
behind the slow, baffled words with which he broke the silence
eventually. "I'm more than ever sorry for her now," he told me.
That was all he said about her, but before going to bed we talked for
hours about his work and prospects. He told me frankly that one of the
chief causes of his earlier despondency had been the thought, which he
never dared to express in words, that his work was no good. Karelsky's
shabby financial dealings with him had increased that fear; he had begun
to sink beneath the awful realization that he was a failure. It wasn't
any spectacular success that he wanted; he had no envy of those who made
their names prominent in the world's view. All he wanted was the secret
inward conviction that he was doing something worth doing. And now he
had it.
"All this may sound priggish," he added, "but I don't think it really _is_
priggish. Because, after all. I'm only choosing the easiest path for
myself. I should hate Karelsky's life of fame and sensation, just as
he'd hate my life of hard work and insignificance.... We're just made
differently, that's all, and we can't help ourselves."
"All the same," I said, "you ought to have what you're entitled to, if
only to stop others from having more than they're entitled to. You've
done the work; you ought to get the credit."
"Can't you see that it doesn't matter who gets the credit?"
"Frankly," I retorted, "I'm incapable of feeling like that about it. If
there's any fame or credit to be got out of my work, I'll be glad to
have it. It may be a lower attitude than yours, but it's more
appropriate for earning a living in the twentieth century."
That seemed to embarrass him. He assured me that he had never reckoned
my attitude as 'lower' than his in any way; it was just 'different.'
"Yours is medieval," I said, laughingly. "You ought to have been a
craftsman on a fourteenth century cathedral, putting your whole life and
soul into the carving of a single gargoyle."
He said that gargoyles weren't much in his line. "But, anyhow, doing
that would be a nobler way of spending a lifetime than lots of the
things that are done to-day--selling rubbishy patent medicines, for
instance, or writing rubbishy books...."
And so we argued, half-seriously, half jocularly, far into the night.
One thing rather astonished me--the extent to which he had thought about
things. He disliked the modern world, on the whole, and he had his
reasons for it. He said that newspapers, modern advertising, and big
cities, always afflicted him with a sort of terror. He felt he couldn't
'cope with them.' It was odd, really, his being a scientist, because
science was supposed to be the key-note of the new age....
"Sometimes," I said, "I think you aren't a scientist at all, but a
theologian gone astray."
Oh, no. He wouldn't admit that. He had no sympathy with dogmas. But he
did feel that somehow you either had to accept the modern world with an
easy cynical fatalism such as Severn's, or else hate it, as he did
himself, and long for something warmer and simpler....
And then he made a curious confession--perhaps the most curious he ever
made. "When I thought I had failed altogether at the work I liked most,
I had to try to think what I would do in the future.... And I had half
made up my mind that--if they'd have me--I'd join some sort of mission
affair and get sent abroad."
"And how about the dogmas then?" I asked, and he answered puzzledly: "I
don't know.... I _really_ don't know.... They'd have been a great
nuisance, I admit--but still...."
_Some sort of mission affair_! I think he had been engaged on that all
his life.
The next morning he left for Hindhead, full of eagerness for whatever
the future might bring. And a few days later Helen visited him there.