And she answered, with a bitter, mocking laugh: "Honestly—I don't think it'll be a good chance for him—and—honestly—I think you'd far better have minded your own business...."
That was a bad beginning. The whole interview lasted less than ten minutes. Then, metaphorically, it broke up in disorder. If she had been a man, we might even have come to blows; as it was, I could do nothing but sit and listen. She wasn't so much burning as burned with indignation; her words came out in an even flow that seemed alternately scorching and freezing. She was passionately certain that I had blundered. "Terry will have no chance in Vienna," she said, "except the chance of slogging away for someone else's benefit. You reckon to be a writer and to understand people and yet you don't understand either Karelsky or Terry.... Geoffrey's just as stupid—he thinks it's a great chance for Terry because, if he were in Terry's place, he would make it a great chance for him. No doubt it is a great chance, for anybody who can watch that he gets as much as he can out of Karelsky, and lets Karelsky get as little as possible out of him.... But Terry's not that sort. It'll never occur to him that Karelsky's out to get all the things in life that he doesn't care about at all.... But it's true—I know the Karelsky sort—I've met dozens of him before. All over the world there is the quiet type of man like Terry, and the acquisitive type like Karelsky and Geoffrey, and whenever they meet there's tragedy.... And yet you've deliberately made them meet."
She gave me no time either to explain or protest, but went on: "I know, of course, why you persuaded him. Not because you had any ideas at all about Vienna or Karelsky (you wouldn't stop to think about that), but simply because, with your trained, novelettish eye" (the phrase struck me as rather good) "you scented an intrigue, and wanted to get him out of the way at all costs. I believe you'd have banished him to the North Pole if there hadn't been anywhere else.... As if there ever was, or could have been an intrigue! But you, of course—your morality was shocked...."
I couldn't stand that. "Look here," I said quietly, "I'm not going to have you calling me a prig. It wasn't morality at all, though why, even if it was, you should sneer at it, I don't know.... But, as a matter of fact, it was nothing more than simple commonsense. You told me once that you were in love with him. Then, after he had accepted what seemed, on the face of it, a good post, you begged him not to go. And he gave in and promised he wouldn't. Do you blame me if I thought the situation rather dangerous? What were you to him that he should change his mind on such an important matter just because you asked him to?"
She answered, with a curious, far-away sadness in her voice: "I wasn't—anything—to him—except a teacher. I was teaching him all sorts of little things that he'll need to know in the world—little tricks of the trade of living—I was trying to lessen the probability that wherever he goes and whatever he does, he'll be the prey of men not half as strong and not a tenth as good. And I was trying to show him how big the world was, and how, even with his ideals, it couldn't all be seen from a laboratory window.... I took him to all sorts of places—educating him, in a sort of way—trying to—to——"
Oh, that talk of teaching and educating! From her lips it exasperated me as much as it had from his; it drove me into saying something that I have regretted ever since. "You may have tried," I interrupted sharply, "but you didn't succeed. Even you can't change the nature of him, and all the time you thought he was learning to be a social success, he was merely learning to love you.... That's what you taught him—nothing else. And that's why I judged the situation to be so dangerous that the sooner he cleared out of it the better."
I say I have regretted it ever since, and that's the bitter truth. I began regretting about a second after I had spoken, for she answered, with a calm smile and a thrill of pride in her voice: "I knew, of course, that he loved me, because he told me so. But he didn't tell you to tell me, and I despise you utterly for doing it. You have abused his confidence.... It's no good arguing after a thing like that.... I think you'd better get me a taxi and let me go...."
VI
I got her a taxi, and she went, and I didn't see or speak to her again for years. That is the sort of thing which, when one writes it down, gives one a sense of bewilderment. Such a little, paltry quarrel to have caused such a long estrangement! I wrote down in my diary on the evening of the day it happened: "Met H. in Fleet Street. Tiff over T." I was so sure, at the time, that it was only a tiff. I had to leave London the next morning for a week's reporting job in South Wales, and I never doubted that by the time I returned the quarrel would be forgotten.
Yet it wasn't. I remember in particular one hot August afternoon shortly after I came back. Severn had invited me to lunch with him at White's, and during the meal he talked and discussed in his usual brilliant way. But afterwards, while we mellowed ourselves with port, he said suddenly: "I say, Hilton, old chap, what on earth have you been saying to my wife?"