This is the important part. All the rest had been a mere forensic display, and I had already had more than enough of it, dazzling though it was. And yet, even when the whole damn truth came out, it was still marvellously under his control. He played with it; he let us have it in carefully arranged doses; it was the truth only if we cared to believe it was. He began by laughing at us for our unskilful attempts to cross-examine. Logic, he told us, was the great essential, and logic was what we lacked. "If you had attacked the matter logically, you would have deduced two principal reasons why a man can leave his wife. One is that he has got tired of her, and the other is that she had got tired of him.... Why were you in such a hurry to assume the former only?"
The colour rose sharply into Terry's face, but he said nothing, and neither did I. Severn, after looking at us both enquiringly, resumed: "I'm going to tell you very simply what's been happening during the last few years. It really is very simple.... Just this. My wife and I were quite happy together until—oh, a number of years ago. Then—very suddenly—she changed—and we haven't been at all happy since. That's all it amounts to. Didn't I say it was simple?"
Of course it wasn't simple at all, and he knew that as well as we did. And that's why I won't attempt to set down the story in Severn's own words. Like most men of marked ability, he had mannerisms—lightning gestures of hand and finger, sharp changes of tone, tricks of speech, and so on—all, no doubt, accentuated and standardized by his work at the Bar. Normally, in private conversation, he suppressed them, but now, as he told us about himself and Helen, they simply broke out all over the place. It was as if he were savagely and maliciously parodying himself; he pleaded his own case with an extravagant eloquence that was perfectly absurd before an audience of two. Perhaps his most irritating and persistent trick was the rhetorical question; he would say: "Now why do you think Helen changed?" and then, when neither of us answered, continue, as he might have done to a jury: "Well, why do women change? Shall we say Cherchez l'homme? ... I agree, but suppose you can't find any man—what then?" ... And so on, for well over half-an-hour.
And the upshot of it all was this.
First: Helen no longer loved him. He didn't know why she didn't; but then, neither had he, in former days, known why she did. Perhaps she had just grown tired.... He wasn't blaming her, of course; it wasn't her fault if she had no scrap of affection left for him. Very possibly it was his fault, although she had never said so.... Where her affection had gone to, he couldn't say—but he thought it hadn't gone to any other man. The important thing to him was that he no longer possessed it. He had even, he said begun to feel that she actively disliked him, and that something essential and unalterable in him got on her nerves.... Anyhow, what was he to do? Obviously, as soon as he began to realize that she might be happier with her freedom, he must find some way of giving it her. And in law, of course, (as he of all people knew well enough) there was only one way—the way that he had taken. "It isn't," he explained, "that I'm particularly keen on her getting a divorce. It's just that I want her to feel free. When I get home, I shall be able to say: Look here, if you don't want me, or can't stand me, or even would rather be without me, here's your grounds for divorce all neatly arranged and documented, so that you can file your petition at once.... Incidentally, there'll be no money difficulties—I've settled enough on her to keep her comfortable, whatever she does."
"And you give it as your honest opinion," I said, "that she'll really be happier divorced from you?"
"That's just what I don't know," he answered. "But I rather think she will, and in any case, it's giving her a chance, isn't it? ... Besides, there's my own side of the question. I should hate you to feel that I'm a mere bundle of altruistic motives. I'm not.... As I used to impress on you years ago, my code of morals is the very simple one of doing more or less what I like. And one of the things I don't like is being married to a woman who thinks I'm a scoundrel for being such a great big ugly success while so many other men are such divinely beautiful failures.... Understand?"
I nodded, but he said that he was sure I didn't understand. I didn't wish to argue the matter, in case Terry should recognize himself as one of the divinely beautiful failures, so I said, rather curtly: "What I can't understand is why you had to come out all the way here for—for the purpose."
He laughed. "The Conference," he answered. "Didn't I mention it at breakfast? Three weeks in Bukarest, wearing a morning-coat and topper with the temperature at ninety in the shade, discussing places you've never heard of with men whose names you can't pronounce; every damned speech repeated five times, first in French, then in Serbian, then in Greek, then in Bulgarian, and then in Turkish.... God!—it's enough to drive a man to anything.... But, apart from that, I prefer foreigners. When a man is compelled to take medicine, why should he not choose the nicest medicine there is? And where in England could you meet so charming a lady as Madame—in her profession?"
"I'm afraid I don't know any English women in her profession."