"And when do you think that will be?"
She shrugged her pretty little shoulders and laughed outright. "How can I tell?—Perhaps in ten days—or ten months—or ten years. But it will happen—it is bound to happen—some day...."
The pages of my diary about this time bear witness to the number of times Terry and I dined at the End House. Generally we went on Wednesdays, and as time passed the "generally" became "always" and the dinners a habit. Once Helen was slightly unwell during one of Terry's Wednesday lectures, and he broke his fixed rule so far as to see her afterwards and escort her home in her car. And then, the following Wednesday, although she wasn't unwell at all, he repeated the courtesy, and that also became a habit.
They were always very jolly, informal affairs, those dinners. More often than not, Severn wasn't there; he was busy at his chambers, or dining at one of his clubs, or on duty in the House. Sometimes, by way of compensation, June, aged eleven, was home from her boarding-school, and Terry used often to amuse her by performing small chemical and physical experiments. I can remember him fixing a Bunsen burner on to the kitchen gas-stove, and to cook's amazement as well as June's, blowing a piece of glass tubing into various shapes. On another occasion he solemnly changed the colour of litmus-paper before our eyes.... He seemed very fond of the child, and she, I believe, thought he was some sort of magician.
All this happened while spring was deepening into summer. Even in my own most unsalubrious district of Camden Town the change of season was unmistakable; nay, even also in Gower Street, and even at the top of the Physics Building and along the corridor where the name "Dr. M. Terrington" rewarded the ardent bacteriological pilgrim after his six flights of labour. But the chief sign of change along that corridor was the fact that sometimes, and more often as the season progressed, the pilgrim knocked at the door, looked inside, and found the room empty.
VIII
He let go his work. It all happened so suddenly—as if some barrier inside him had collapsed. And also, to make the problem of analysis more difficult for me, it happened when I was away. I was only away a week, but a week was long enough to change everything; and when I came back, everything was changed.
He would tell me hardly anything, except that he felt he had been working too hard and needed a rest. (And that, of course, was plausible enough.) He also, in an unguarded moment, admitted to a certain spiritual change. "It was what Severn said—that night we went to dinner and we all argued about civilizations and progress and morality and what not—do you remember? Somehow it made me think of things I'd never thought of before.... In a sense, I was blind till then."
That also, I think, may very well have been true. He had been blind till then; he had been blind to the beauty of the world all around him; he had shut himself up in his laboratory attic, refusing pleasure and friendship and even, so far as he was able, contact with the world outside. Even his Sunday recreation had, in those old days, been taken medicinally; it had been nothing to him but so many miles walked and so much fresh air breathed. He had been wantonly blind, and it was quite possible that Severn's facile pessimism had given him the first sight-creating disturbance. But was there no middle course between being blind and working far too hard, and having sight and not working at all? And had not Helen helped to remove the blindness?
The weeks passed quickly, and I saw less and less of both of them, for the simple reason that they saw more and more of each other. One felt, instinctively, that whatever was happening could not go on for long. And then, towards the end of July, Severn wrote that he had been in communication with Karelsky, and that the latter was coming to England for a short visit and would be glad to take Terry back to Vienna with him. "It seems a good opening," Severn wrote, "and on the whole I think you would do well to accept it, though of course you must please yourself. Karelsky will be in London this week, and I am giving a dinner to him at the End House on Friday. You will come, of course...."