Those few remaining hours in Buda-Pesth stay in my memory with nightmarish vividness. The heat—the dust—the smells of cooking; Blattae Orientales playing hide-and-seek on the floor; porters sweating and straining under loads of luggage; the Vienna train at the platform like a row of sweltering ovens, reeking with paprika and human bodies and half-molten varnish. Shade temperature in the station—thirty-four Centigrade.... And over and around the torture of it was the tragic atmosphere of illusion—Terry thinking all the time that he had really convinced and converted Severn, and Severn, on his side, having no suspicion of the Terry-Helen episode. Their crumpled heat-soaked unawareness was an infinitely pathetic thing.

Only Severn was cheerful. He talked to us endlessly, and without getting much in the way of answers, for even to open one's mouth to speak a single word was to cause an extra bead of perspiration to trickle disagreeably down one's forehead. But Severn seemed not to care, and when we reached Vienna, with a few hours' interval before the departure of the Paris express from another station, it was perhaps inevitable that he should take command. He knew Vienna well (what city didn't he know well?) and I rather wished he were staying on with us. Even the night was almost unbearably warm, and with sure instinct he led us to the cool Rathaus-Keller and ordered iced drinks. Terry spoke hardly at all, and neither did I; the ordeal of the train-journey had been too much for us. But Severn, of all the men I ever met, was the most impervious to physical surroundings; neither heat, nor train-journeys, nor even all-night sittings at the House could disturb that marvellous equanimity. He seemed, indeed, as he sat there in the Rathaus-Keller with his tankard of lager before him, a lithe and entrancingly-mannered boy; and even the stories he told of his life in Vienna twenty years before did not take away from him that extraordinary air of youthfulness. He had spent a year in the city, he said, picking up the language and having a good time. He had lived, and his eyes, seeing again the old familiar scenes, shone with it. This Rathaus-Keller—what times he had had there! ... And then on the wall he caught sight of an advertisement of a variety-show at Ronacher's, and it reminded him of the old Ronacher's, where he had seen Rannin, the Cingalese with the Iron Skin, who had climbed a ladder of sword-blades barefoot, and the Chevalier Cliquot, whose pastime had been to swallow twenty-two-inch cavalry sabres, and the Human Ostrich, and Madame Elise, the Parisian Strong Lady, and the rest of them.... Ah, those old days! ...

But the time drew near for the departure of the Paris train. The holiday season was at its height, and when we reached the East Station we found it packed with tourists bound for the Tyrol. Severn had not reserved a seat, and for a few moments it seemed doubtful whether he would even secure a cramped position in a first-class compartment. A berth in the wagon-lit was out of the question; all had been reserved weeks before. It was then, faced with these unexpected privations, that he suggested staying in Vienna till the morning train, which would probably be less crowded. "Supposing," he said, "we look in at Ronacher's, and then I'll take you the round of the sights—the Prater's rather worth seeing after midnight...."

"Mizzi could probably give him a room," I whispered to Terry. The postponement of the journey until the morning seemed to me perfectly reasonable, apart from the attractiveness of the alternative programme that Severn had sketched out.

But Terry said: "You promised you would get back at the very earliest moment you could, didn't you?"

And Severn then, with his most charming smile, replied: "I did, Terry, and I'll keep my word.... Perhaps there'll be more room on the train the other side of Innsbrück. Anyhow, don't wait for it to go out—it'll probably be hours late. And besides, I'm just as anxious really to get comfortable in my seat as you are to go back to your hotel.... Ronacher's and the rest will do the next time we are all of us here together...." (But there hasn't been, so far, and probably never will be, a next time.)

I liked him at that last moment more, I think, than I had ever done before. It's true, though odd perhaps, that it's not the big things that people do that win your heart to them, but often the very smallest. And so it is that all the big important things that Severn had done to help me hadn't made me like him so much as this gay, almost nonchalant farewell, and the thought I had of him sweltering the night through in a packed train, and then sweltering through the next day and the night after that—and all for no other reason than to help Terry. His last words, as he shook hands with me, were: "Ring me up as soon as you get back to town, and we'll fix up a lunch together."

There was a curious sadness after we had left him, and the warm streets were full of it. We strolled back to the Laudon Gasse with hardly a word between us. I wondered what Mizzi would say to our unexpected return, but she wasn't there when we arrived and the hall-porter told us she probably wouldn't be back until late.

IX

He showed me Helen's letters that night. I had expected a small bundle, but there were only three; and he asked me to read them, not while I was with him, but later on when I was alone. The chance came after I had bidden him good-night; I went downstairs into the lounge, switched on one of the shaded table-lamps, lit a cigarette, and read the letters very carefully. They were none of them long, and all had been written and posted within a month of his arrival in Vienna. It was an odd sensation to sit in a hotel-lounge at two o'clock in the morning and disentangle a mystery; there was something eerie, almost, in trying to build up from a few sheets of handwriting the complete picture of what had happened seven years before. But there it was, in clear focus at last, and one glance was enough to show how wrong my ideas had been.