And so once more to the hotel in the Place du Hâvre. Terry seemed, if anything, more tired and listless than ever; but the doctor had said he could travel and so, after lunch, we left by the afternoon train for Dieppe, stayed there overnight, and went on to Newhaven by the mail-boat the next morning. Then London at last—after his seven years of absence. I wondered, as we pushed our way into a taxi, whether it meant anything to him—to return after so long an exile. I don't think it did. I think he was too tired to notice any difference between London and Paris. As we drove into Waterloo Station we saw a weekly paper's placard advertising in large type: "Karelsky on the Life-Force," and that—only that—seemed to give him a spasm of recollection. He put his hands to his eyes and said: "I wish I hadn't worked so hard out there. I seem to have made such a hash of things—getting crocked like this and wasting all your time.... It's ever so kind of you."
Two hours later the journey was over. It had been hot and rather tiresome, but it ended at the quaintest and prettiest hotel I have ever seen. It wasn't really more than a inn, and perhaps for fifty or a hundred years it had served mugs of beer to wayfarers on the road from Hindhead to Farnham. Then had come Severn with his "controlling interest," and in a single summer's afternoon a sign-painter had turned the old Brown Cow into the new Valley Hotel. Mercifully the transformation had involved little more than that.
But the interior comfort was as astonishing, almost, as the effect produced by Severn's letter of introduction. We were more than welcomed; we were fêted; and the manager, Taplow by name, assured us with great fervency that it would be a real pleasure to look after Terry and me and, indeed, everybody and anybody else who was a friend of Severn's. Severn, he informed us stoutly, was "the finest chap who ever breathed." And forthwith he served us with a dinner that was at least as good, if not so complicated, as many I have had in first-class city hotels. Even of wines and liqueurs he could provide an amazingly wide selection. "It's Mr. Severn that manages the wine-list, sir," he told me, as he brought my cordiale Médoc. "Ah, he's a real good judge of wines—and of most other things too, I should say. He had his ideas about this place right from the beginning—saw it one afternoon as he was motoring past and bought it on the spot, as you might say.... Such a pity about his accident—and I do hope he gets well again. Well, really, sir, it came as such a shock to me when I read about it in the papers, I do declare I couldn't eat my dinner after it—that I couldn't...."
V
There comes to me now, as I think of the Valley Hotel, a sense of strange and wonderful tranquillity. For it is here, in Taplow's garden, that I am writing these words; the furious, tragic interlude is over, and all at last seems stilled in the shadow of this English inn. Counting over the pages I have written, I find that more than half are concerned with those days in Buda-Pesth and Vienna and Paris; it would stagger me if I didn't remember how packed with happenings they were.... The miles I covered and the frontiers I crossed and re-crossed—the hotels and the trains and the steamers—the days of scurry and the long nights of wakefulness! ... But all—all are over now, quenched in the glory of this autumn day at Hindhead, with the hollyhocks waving over me and the far brown hills in the sunlight.
But Terry.... After all, this story is about him, not me. The trouble is that I can only describe what he said and did; I can't pretend to see into his mind and describe what he thought. And what he said and did during those first weeks at the Valley Hotel is so easily told; he just said and did nothing. I used to visit him at week-ends, and each time I found him a little stronger-looking, a little less thin and haggard; but in all other respects unchanged. He was cordial enough, but somehow he seemed not to care very much about anything—whether I came or went or even what news I brought him about Severn.
From Taplow came information as to how he spent his time. Apparently he still slept badly, and used often to rise at dawn and take a long walk before breakfast. Then, after that, he sometimes took another walk, but more usually sat in a deck-chair in Taplow's garden and slept for hours with the sun on his face. On wet days he would haunt the sitting-room like a lost soul. "It's like as if he was tired out," said Taplow. "And yet you wouldn't think so if you was to see him walking along the road. Four mile an hour to Farnham and back—that's what he did the other day. And then he wouldn't have any supper—nothing but a smoke and a drop of whisky...."
"Good God!" I exclaimed, "do you mean to say he's begun to smoke and drink?"
Taplow nodded. "But he don't do it like an ordinary human being. Now for myself, I like a cigar and a glass of stout every night before bedtime. But he don't seem to have any proper habits—sometimes he'll come into the bar before breakfast and ask for a double. Before breakfast, mind you—a thing I've never done in my life. And then, after that, maybe, he won't touch a drop for days and days...."
The next time I was with Terry alone I mentioned the matter, congratulating him on having dropped what I had always considered to be the rather stupid rule of strict abstinence. He answered quickly and almost curtly: "Oh, it isn't that—there's no need to congratulate me. It's just that I don't care what I do."