We went, and the odd thing was that for the rest of the day he was actually more cheerful than I had known him since the beginning of his illness. The weather was perfect, and we splashed about in the Wey for an hour or two, had tea, and then returned along the Hog's Back and through Farnham.
"When you write back to Mizzi," he shouted into my ear as we were doing forty against a strong wind, "tell her to send on all my books and papers to the hotel, will you? ... Then on Guy Fawkes' Night we'll take them into Taplow's garden and make a damned great bonfire with the lot...."
He laughed loudly, and I think I have never heard so eerie a sound as his laughter then, borne far away from me by the wind and the speed....
CHAPTER EIGHT
I
I WAS out of town a good deal during that early autumn, and I saw very little of anyone. That Severn was getting more resigned to his unhappy condition I gathered from the brilliantly vivacious and epigrammatic letters he sent me from time to time. He was hard at work on the Disraeli book, which he hoped to finish soon after Christmas. "It will be something rather new in biographies," he wrote. "I shall show, if I can, that all genius has in it a touch of the flamboyant, the charlatan, if you like; and that the contrasting scrupulousness of, say, a man like Gladstone, is merely the absence of genius. No genius, for instance, can be entirely honest, or entirely truthful, or entirely faithful in marriage, or entirely anything—entireties being the stock-in-trade of the second-rate. That is why it is so astonishing to find a genius in politics, where, as everybody knows, mud is thicker than water, and a good deal easier to sling...."
Some of the letters are well worth publishing, and perhaps, some day, this may happen. The thing I remember best in them is a phrase about Terry. "He hasn't," Severn wrote, "quite got the knack of living in an imperfect world." That, I think, was the best summing-up I ever heard.
All this time Terry was still living at Hindhead, doing nothing and caring for nothing. And yet, looking back on it now, I have an idea that the sight of all his old books and papers stirred him to some sort of emotion, even though he showed none. They arrived from Vienna one roaring October afternoon of high wind and creaking trees—a Saturday, and the second unforgettable day of that autumn. I had motor-cycled from town in the morning, barely fighting through in the teeth of the gale, and after lunch Terry climbed with me to the lip of the Punch-Bowl. The wind there was terrific; the whole landscape of hill and valley seemed foundering like a ship in a wild storm. After a few shivering moments we walked briskly back to the hotel, and there, waiting for us, was Mizzi's parcel. I unpacked it for him in his room, while he sat on the bed, smoking and watching me with a curious detached interest. He made no comment except, when I had finished, an almost embarrassed: "It's awfully good of you to do all this.... The things aren't much use, but I suppose they may as well stay here as anywhere else."
We had tea, and afterwards I wrote a few letters while Terry went out, as he said, for another blow on the hill. It must have been about six o'clock when I finished writing, for I remember hurrying out into the lane to catch the last post of the day. I had walked a few hundred yards with eyes almost closed by the piercing wind, when I heard the sharp hoot of an approaching car; I should have been run down if the driver hadn't swerved smartly to avoid me. The car just grazed a gatepost and then stopped; I stopped also, composing in my mind the most handsome and abject apologies. The first thing I noticed (rather to my relief) was that the driver was a young woman; and the next thing I noticed was that the young woman was June. She climbed out of the car and viewed critically the long scratch on the door-panelling. Then she turned to me. "I suppose you know that you've had a narrow escape?" she said, before recognizing me. She added, a second later: "Oh, it's you, is it? Well, you ought to be ashamed of yourself."
"I not only ought but am," I replied, and she said: "That's right.... I suppose you're staying at the hotel?"