It was I, perhaps, who was the more depressed during that slow, rumbling night-journey towards the mountains. Terry had his alternate moods of optimism and despondency, but I was uniformly oppressed with a sort of Wehmut or Weltschmerz or whatever untranslatable thing the Germans call it. The cold dawn came as we ran into Salzburg, and by noon the sun was blazing on the red-roofed chalets above Innsbrück. All the time I was thinking far more of the past than of the future; the parting with Mizzi seemed to me far more pitiable than anything that had or could have happened to Severn. I didn't talk to Terry about it, for he, who never understood a woman at all, had certainly never understood Mizzi. Only once, indeed, was she even mentioned, and that was when he said, quite casually: "Odd, wasn't it, that Mizzi should ask me to recommend her hotel? She might have known I should do, if ever I got the chance. But I suppose the hotel's always in her mind—it seems to be what she lives for, anyhow."
"Do you think so?"
"She told me so herself, only yesterday. She said she didn't care for anything or anybody in the world except her hotel."
I didn't argue the point. But I guessed then (and I still think my guess was right) that that had been her way of refusing him. And perhaps, after all, it was the best way—the best because it could not but leave him with a tinge of disappointment in her. After such words, it would be hard for him to feel pity for her loneliness. Sometimes now I wonder what would have happened if I had said to him outright: "Mizzi loves you, despite her refusal, and her misery now that you've gone is more your fault than any of these other things, and also far easier to undo. Go back and love her and be happy...." He mightn't have believed me, and he certainly wouldn't have obeyed me; but perhaps, in his moments of deepest remorse, he would have tacked on Mizzi's unhappiness to the already heavy enough load of his own responsibilities. And that, of course, was the chief reason why I didn't tell him.
VII
The long journey passed, and by the time we reached the Swiss frontier, we knew all that the newspapers knew, at any rate, concerning the tragedy. It was an ordinary enough story of a driver trying to make up lost time and negotiating a curve ten miles an hour too fast. Result: derailment and a death-roll, so far, of twenty-four. The Basle newspapers, though they took great care to be incorrect about Severn's life and career (one of them even called him "l'avocat général de l'Angleterre"), gave no information as to the nature or extent of his injury. Somehow the absence of detail, and the fact that we were already nearer Paris than Vienna, overwhelmed me with a sense of this sharper and more instant tragedy; perhaps for the first time I ceased to think about Mizzi. I told Terry, as we stood at the buffet-counter at Troyes, that I was glad we had come, because if we could help Severn even a little, it would be worth while. He gripped my arm eagerly and replied: "I knew you would think that—I knew you would."
Early in the morning we passed very slowly the scene of the accident (only a few miles from the Gare de l'Est), and saw the gigantic litter of wreckage, and the break-down cranes still working over the shattered and telescoped coaches. A dull drizzling rain was falling, and a grinning baby advertising a famous soap looked down on the scene from the wall of a near-by factory. Ten minutes later we were pacing the long platform of the terminus. The entire station and precincts were packed with English conducted tourists to the popular Swiss resorts; uniformed guides were shepherding them into groups, and I heard one of them promise his party that very soon they would be able to see "the place where the train ran off the lines." A gratuitous tit-bit added by Providence to their Ten Days in Lovely Lucerne.
We joined the crowd of anxious and grief-stricken inquirers in the information bureau. The small, ugly room seethed, as it were, with its burden of misery; and there was something hideously incongruous in the wall-posters of smiling red-cheeked holiday-makers perched on the summits of impossibly precipitous Alps. Women sobbed and chattered amidst their sobbing; men shouted and gesticulated; the whole ensemble, with the noises of trains and beating rain as an accompaniment, made me understand how men can sometimes lose control of themselves and run suddenly amok. The waiting lasted three-quarters of an hour, and then, when our turn came, the official would hardly listen when he found that we weren't related to anyone concerned. We argued (so far as my limited French would allow), and all the while the official's nerves, as well as my own, were being strained nearer and nearer to breaking-point. Who were we? We gave our names. What was our connection with Severn? What were we—professionally? I took the liberty of labelling Terry "médecin," but when I went on to describe myself as "journaliste," everything everywhere seemed to snap suddenly. The official shouted and waved his arms about; he appealed to the crowd; the crowd shouted; I shouted; and Terry stood by me all the while, silent and very pale. He knew so little French that the row could only have puzzled him. It puzzled me, indeed, until I realized afterwards that I had been mistaken for some newspaper ghoul in search of copy.
At last, after explaining over and over again that we were both near friends of Severn and had travelled from Vienna especially to see him, I was reluctantly allowed to learn that he had been taken to a hospital in the Avenue Friedland. And five minutes after that, as we sat in the cab that was bearing us at breakneck speed along the boulevards, Terry collapsed.
That squabble in the station inquiry-office had been the last straw. Till then he had never wholly given way, but that—that almost trivial thing—shattered all the final strength he possessed. In the semi-darkness of the cab he made total surrender. It seemed a sort of fainting-fit; I wasn't skilled enough to diagnose exactly. But I realized immediately that it was no use going on with him to the hospital. He recovered when I opened both windows of the cab and let in the wind and rain; and then I shouted to the driver to take us to the nearest hotel. We pulled up almost straightway outside a large establishment in the Place du Hâvre, and for the next hour I worked like an automaton—getting Terry comfortable, calling in a doctor, and making all the necessary arrangements with the hotel people. The doctor reported a complete nervous collapse, and prescribed a long and absolute rest-cure; it was what I had expected. What I had not expected was Terry's childlike acquiescence; all desire, it seemed, had gone out of him. He didn't even want to see Severn. "You can go," he said, with a sort of tired sadness.