I am alone now; Roebuck has gone to bed; and there is a cool south wind
blowing in amongst my papers. The day has passed most wonderfully well,
and I am very happy.
Helen came, and she wasn't desperate at all. She was calm--calm as if
she were ten years older than when I saw her last. Or ten years
younger.... I hardly know which; I only know that a touch of her old
queer fascination has come back to her, making her wonderful again.
Perhaps the two days that have passed since our talk on the End House
lawn have really been ten years--long enough for her soul to escape from
turmoil.
There was no need for me not to mention Terry. She mentioned him
herself, but in such an odd way--as if, so it seemed to me, she were
very old and he a long while dead. She gossiped about him, almost;
anything, everything reminded her of him. When, for instance, I talked
of the new house, she said: "Oh, yes, that's in the architect's hands
now. There's no more for me to do. No more scrambling up hills with
Terry."
Quietly--half-mockingly--like _that_!
"Not that I ever liked hills," she went on. "I hated them. But Terry was
never happy except when he was consuming vast quantities of energy. If
it wasn't physical energy, then it was mental, and it wasn't mental,
then it was moral.... Didn't you ever notice that?"
I had noticed it. And then she went on again: "You ought to have seen
him years ago at those bacteriology lectures. He didn't _teach_
bacteriology--he _preached_ it. And it was the same sort of thing with
the hills--he didn't _climb_ them; he _conquered_ them."
She talked about him effortlessly, as if she were somehow drifting in a
strong and peaceful tide. When I put a question about Severn she had to
fight the tide while she gave a slow and reluctant answer.... Geoffrey,
she said, was very busy and perfectly the same.
But the oddest thing of all was her calm remark: "Of course it's quite
easy to see what will happen. Sooner or later he'll marry June. She's
quite in love with him, and he'll be with her after a while.... Do you
remember years ago you asked me what I would do with Terry in the end,
and I said I would hand him over when the right girl came along.... But
I never thought that the right girl would be June."
"You think June is the right girl?" I asked; and she answered: "I think
he will feel she is if he tries hard enough."
I forgave her for that mocking retort. I didn't tell her that already,
without trying at all, Terry had grown to see in June what, perhaps, he
had never seen in any other woman--a mirror of the future, calm and
bright with happiness. It would have been _too_ cruel to have told her
that, to have smashed her dear belief that she could have had Terry for
not much more than the asking. She has kept her word, and that counts
none the less because it wouldn't have greatly mattered if she hadn't
kept it.
We were in the midst of tea when the telegraph-boy arrived. I went out
into my small lobby, and when I came back she noticed the change in my
face; it was stupid not to have had more control of myself.
"Good news, I can see," she said.
And I stammered hazily something about a business affair that I had been
hoping would happen.... Oh, yes, _quite_ good news.
That telegram is before me now as I write ... Handed in at Oxford at
4.10 P.M. (What were they doing at Oxford? A motor excursion,
presumably.) ... Received at London, W.1. at 4.50 P.M.... And then:
"Took your advice succeeded thanks June."