We had dinner in his room and talked afterwards until late, and I don't think I ever remember him so garrulous. Yes, garrulous. But he wouldn't, for all that, tell me what his success that day had been. He kept throwing out obscure hints—as if the guarding of the secret obsessed and worried him. Once I mentioned the word "cancer," but he shrugged his shoulders rather excitedly and told me to guess that, or anything else, if I liked. It wasn't he who insisted on secrecy, he said, but Karelsky, and of course he was under obligation to obey Karelsky's rule.... The whole matter seemed to me just slightly childish, for if he couldn't tell me anything of importance, why didn't he change the subject? But he didn't; perhaps he couldn't. He kept reverting to it at every pause in the conversation; he kept assuring me that his work had made him wonderfully happy; there was nothing, he said, in the whole world so wonderful as doing what was worth doing. All that sort of talk rather surprised me; it reminded me of a revivalist's rhapsody on the joys of salvation. I'm not sneering—don't think that. It's just that I couldn't have imagined him saying some of the things he did say. He was different—mightily different.
IV
We went to Buda-Pesth.
When I think of all that happened as a result of our going, the question occurs to me: What drove us there? That we were driven, by some kind of ironical fate, is a tempting theory if only because of the numerous reasons against going which were either ignored or overridden. I don't know even now why in the end I agreed to it. I positively loathed the thought of getting up early in the morning and, after two days and two nights of travel, embarking on a third day. Besides, I had left my work to visit a sick friend, not a friend who cheerfully invited me to go on holiday with him. Terry, of course, wasn't to know that. He thought I had come to Vienna on business, and as I had vaguely assured him that the business could be transacted at any time, the main avenue of argument against the Buda trip was closed to me. All I could say was that I was tired after the journey, to which he replied that nothing could be more suitable for a tired traveller than a whole day on a river-steamer. "Besides," he added, "I know how keen you were to see Buda the last time you were here." (That was true enough.) "And—to tell you the truth—I have never quite forgiven myself for not going with you then. It was selfish of me...."
What could I say or do after that? When I told Mizzi we were going she was both astonished and pleased. "And he suggested it himself?" she said, as she wrote me out the address of a hotel in Pesth. "That iss so good—and you are evidently such a big influence to him." (I think she was wrong there, whatever it was that she meant.) "But, of course, one week—it iss nothing. It iss when you are with him in Buda that you must persuade him again.... I think you know how to do it—oh, I am so glad that I sent for you!"
So we went on board the paddle-boat at the Praterkai the next morning. It was one of those dim preludes to a hot summer's day, when the sun climbs slowly through opaque mists, and the heat seems first of all to rise up like an exhalation from the earth. As the boat chugged its way downstream the air was deliciously cool and fragrant, and there was something indescribably drowsy in the mist-hung panorama of fields and homesteads. Terry sat with me on the top deck, and during the greater part of the journey I was busy making up my mind about him. I think it was his extraordinary buoyancy that was most disquieting, and that made me realize, in the end, that Mizzi hadn't brought me on a fool's errand. He was too exuberant; too talkative. Again, as on the evening before, the things he said were the things I couldn't have believed he would ever say. He told me, for example (and without being asked), that he had done with women. He liked Mizzi because there was no nonsense about her, because she never tried to "play the woman game" with him. Not that it would affect him if she did, except that he would think less of her.
I asked him if he ever heard from Helen, and he replied, almost triumphantly: "Never. Never since that last letter that I didn't answer."
I told him that she had taken to spending most of her time out of England, and he interrupted, with his triumph fading into mere excitement: "I don't want to hear about her. I tell you—haven't I already told you?—that I've cut myself adrift from all that part of my life? It's gone—it's almost forgotten—and now, with this far more wonderful happiness, I don't want to have anything to do with it—even in memory...." And he added, unnecessarily, that he had changed during those years that I had not seen him.
It was then that I suggested that he should marry Mizzi. Rather to my astonishment he didn't indignantly protest, or even repeat his assurance that he had done with women. He said merely: "It's a hundred to one she wouldn't want me. And, in any case, it seems a pity to interrupt our friendship."
He said that sincerely, mind—without the slightest trace of cynicism.