"All right, then." I agreed the more readily because it began to occur to me that the earlier the breakfast the less the chance of meeting Severn.
He told me while I washed and dressed that he hadn't been able to sleep a wink, and that the only interesting things had been a couple of cockroaches on his window-ledge. He said, with what was to me the most horrible casualness: "I lifted one chap up to have a look at him. He was much bigger than the English or even the Viennese kind, and had lots more joints in his antennæ. It was odd to see him squirming all over my hand in search of his mate...."
He was very pale, but also very calm.
XII
Half-an-hour later we were breakfasting and discussing, not my decision, but his. That's the way things usually happened. To waiters and cabmen and hotel-porters he always gave a wonderful display of submission to my wishes, but the larger affairs of life he decided for himself. Nor was there ever much hope of persuading him when once he had made up his mind. He told me once that I argued too cleverly; and that he always mistrusted cleverness in argument.
But that breakfast discussion didn't give me even the chance of being clever. He began by telling me, with a terrible sort of earnestness, that he had been thinking all night about Severn. (In the same tone and with the same look might a Methodist preacher have said that he had been wrestling all night with God.) "And—it seems to me—that to say—to be content to say—that we can do nothing—is cowardly. We must do something—we must help—if we can."
"Certainly, if we can. But how can we?"
That also he had pondered over. "First of all," he said, with a slow earnestness that went over me like a steam-roller, "we must have a talk with Severn."
"Good God!" I muttered under my breath. For it was diabolical, almost, the way he had planned everything during that night of sleeplessness. Six hours before, just after his interview with the hotel-clerk, he had been wild and excited; but now he was calm—deadly calm. And I don't know which condition made him look more ill. It was, anyhow, a sombre and unnerving calmness, and it somehow took the courage out of me. I found that I couldn't think clearly in the face of it, much less talk clearly; my mind was overburdened by the knowledge that he was ill. All I could say, when I had to say something, was that Severn's private affairs, however scandalous, were none of our business, and that we had better keep out of them. After all, what could we do? Talking to him wouldn't be much use. "As soon as he cares to tell us to mind our own business, we shall have to slink off. Don't you see?"
"I don't think I should slink off," he said, quietly, "if he told me to mind my own business."