Perhaps I was wrong to do that without his permission, but there are times when you risk being wrong. I wanted Mizzi to know everything about Terry because, in the end, I wanted her to marry him. I talked to her especially about the letters; they showed, I said, the tragic difference between Terry and Helen. "She was right when she said it was all or nothing with him.... Apparently she was quite willing to carry on a more or less decorous affair with him whilst still living with her husband. But he wasn't."
Mizzi nodded and asked me about the 'last night' mentioned in the second of the letters. I described briefly the Karelsky party and the odd way in which Terry and Helen had managed to separate themselves from the rest of the crowd. "I imagine," I said, "that sometime or other during that evening he asked her point-blank to come away with him. No doubt she either refused or else hesitated, and in the end it was arranged that he should decline the Vienna job and stay in London where they could go on meeting each other.... Then afterwards he felt the intolerableness of the situation. He couldn't bear at all what she, apparently, could bear quite easily—the having of things by halves. It wasn't in his nature.... So he cut the knot and came out here."
"I can understand ... I can understand him wanting all of her—or else none of her."
"So can I. And, in a way, I can understand her side, as well. After all, he had no money, and neither had she.... It would have been sheer madness for them to run away, and it was her nature to think of that, just as it was his nature not to."
Then we discussed the third and most extraordinary of the three letters. What sort of stuff must Terry have sent her to have evoked such a stinging reply? I suggested that he might have deliberately written her a rather caddish letter in order to kill her love for him, but Mizzi thought he wasn't calculating or clever enough for that. "I think," she said, "that he was perfectly sincere. He did think, then, that love would die when the mind was occupied by work. He did think that he had committed a sin, and that his love for her had been just a passion.... I think he meant every word of what he wrote."
"It's a pity we can't see his letter," I said, but she replied: "I don't think I want to see it. I feel I know what it would be like. Rather stiff and—and awful ... can't you imagine it?"
I tried to, but I'm afraid I hadn't, and never have had, her clairvoyant knowledge of Terry. I went on to explain the difficulties he was in, and how he felt responsible for the trouble between Helen and her husband, as well as for my quarrel with Helen, and Severn's "affair" in Buda-Pesth, and Heaven knew what else. "He's in a mood to take upon himself responsibility for all the suffering in the world," I said, "and it would be comic if it wasn't tragic. Everything is his fault—nothing anybody else's."
She said: "I can so easily believe that. He has a spirit in him—that makes him try to do perfect things—and then blames him when they aren't quite perfect...."
We were silent for a while, and then she went on: "All through the time I haf known him he has been like that—trying for the perfect goal and flogging himself because he couldn't reach it.... He would have made a great saint—in the Middle Ages ... but not to-day." She smiled as she added: "I remember when he taught me English—he taught me as if I were a sinner, and English the true faith...."
We talked on for a while about what we could do to help him, but at the end of it all only a few desirabilities emerged—that he should take a long holiday and make more friends and work less hard. As we shook hands at the foot of the stairs she said: "It iss so hard to help people who will not haf what they want. If only I could write to this Helen and ask her to come to him! Or if only some fate would send him back to her! ... But no—he will not haf what he wants. Nor will he want what he could haf.... He iss born to be unglücklich...."