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Ebook has 1052 lines and 73447 words, and 22 pages

"Which you called highbrow bunkum."

"Never mind that. Come to the point.... Is your relationship with her perfectly all-square and above board?"

"I don't quite know what you mean."

"Is it the sort of thing you could let Severn know about?"

"No.... It isn't the sort of thing I could let anybody know about."

"You mean you're in love with her?"

"No--don't ask me that. Don't ask me any more. I can't and I shan't answer any more."

Deadlock--and then the storm broke. But the rain seemed to change the feeling of the world; it opened, as it were, a window in the sky, and a cool breeze floated through, scouring and freshening every corner. We were cool at last, and then cold, and then, with tremendous suddenness, tired. Too tired to go on arguing, too tired to think of how to get back, too tired to do anything but stand under the Embankment tramway shelter and wait for the clouds to exhaust themselves.

When the rain had nearly stopped we hastened northwards through the swirling and deserted streets. It was three o'clock. We spoke very little on the way, and by tacit agreement the argument was not resumed. Only once was it so much as referred to, and that was when, bidding him good-bye at the door of his lodgings, I said: "I don't retract anything I said a little while ago, but I'm sorry I lost my temper over it."

TERRY."

She said: "Nowhere. I was waiting for you to come out."

"Who told you I was here?"

"Your landlady. I called at your rooms."

"But why on earth didn't you send up a message to the office? Or 'phone me? I could have been with you half an hour ago if I'd known."

She answered: "I should have done, but--I thought you might not want to see me."

She shrugged her shoulder and then said: "Oh, never mind.... Let's go somewhere--where we can talk."

We threaded our way amongst the marble-topped tables, and as she passed a waitress she gave a rather defiant order for two cups of tea. Then she selected a table, sat down, and began immediately, with a sort of point-blank hostility: "So--after all--you've managed to persuade him?"

"You--you mean--Terry?"

And she answered, with that peculiar greenish glint in her eyes that made her look rather more wonderful than ever: "Yes, I mean Terry."

She was watching me mercilessly across the table; yet, even then, I couldn't see what cause she had to be displeased with me. I said, with genuine sincerity: "Well--honestly--don't you really think it'll be a good chance for him--going to Vienna with Karelsky?"

I got her a taxi, and she went, and I didn't see or speak to her again for years. That is the sort of thing which, when one writes it down, gives one a sense of bewilderment. Such a little, paltry quarrel to have caused such a long estrangement! I wrote down in my diary on the evening of the day it happened: "Met H. in Fleet Street. Tiff over T." I was so sure, at the time, that it was only a tiff. I had to leave London the next morning for a week's reporting job in South Wales, and I never doubted that by the time I returned the quarrel would be forgotten.

Yet it wasn't. I remember in particular one hot August afternoon shortly after I came back. Severn had invited me to lunch with him at White's, and during the meal he talked and discussed in his usual brilliant way. But afterwards, while we mellowed ourselves with port, he said suddenly: "I say, Hilton, old chap, what on earth have you been saying to my wife?"

"Yes. I was intending to reply to it to-night."

"Accepting?"

"Well--yes."

He filled up my glass and said: "Can't understand it a bit--why she's taken up such an extraordinary attitude. But she won't have you--won't have you up to the house at any price--not even for this party. Says she'll walk out if you come.... Awkward, eh?"

Of course I suggested that I should consider the invitation cancelled, and after formally protesting, he agreed. "Decent of you not to mind," he said. "If you ever marry, you'll find it's always best to humour a woman when she begins to take absurd dislikes.... We're going for a month to the Canaries--perhaps that'll do her good."

Letters from Terry began to arrive with marvellous regularity every fortnight. If they were a post late I knew there had been an avalanche in the Tirol or a storm in mid-Channel or some other act of God. They were always very short, and nearly always quite uninteresting. They never mentioned Severn or Helen, and never referred to the argument we had had upon the night of the storm. They were, in fact, the sort of letters a public-school boy might write to his mother. Two items they very rarely lacked--a brief reference to continued good health, and a rough summary of the weather. On the few occasions that the former item was omitted, I was free to guess rather than to know that he had been unwell.

He didn't mention that he had made or was making any friends; but then, of course, that wasn't the sort of thing that he ever would mention. He didn't even say whether he liked Vienna as a city to live in. One or two people wandered in and out of his letters like characters in a Russian play; there was Karelsky, naturally, and Frau Scholz, who kept the apartment-house where he lodged, and "Mizzi," her daughter... Besides these few--absolutely nobody.... Of miscellaneous information, the most frequent reference was to his progress in the German language. No mention ever of theatres or concerts or operas. He was, I gathered, living the sort of life he had had before meeting Helen, and the fact that it had a Viennese instead of a London setting was not, perhaps, so very important.

That was the year, you may remember, in which Karelsky burst upon the world with his astonishing Longevity Theory. In a slack season it descended upon Fleet Street like manna from heaven. Karelsky in the course of a lecture at the Sorbonne, announced the discovery of what he called "a new method of revitalizing life-force," and to this he added the startling assertion that, having experimented with it upon himself, he had every hope of beating the famous record of Methusaleh. Naturally the newspapers went wild about it, and so did joke-manufacturers and music-hall comedians all over the world. For a few months Karelsky was almost a household word. Then after a Brixton gentleman had cut his wife into six small pieces, it was generally recognized in Fleet Street that the Karelsky-Methusaleh episode was finished.... I remember asking Terry in a letter what he thought about it all, and receiving a non-committal reply that he couldn't express any opinion because his own work hadn't brought him into any contact with it. Karelsky, I gathered, was a man of many-sided activities.

Severn was more outspoken. "Whether it's all rot or not," he said, "you must admit that Karelsky's played the game rather well. You newspaper-men ought to pass him a vote of thanks. He's saved you from having to rake up the Sea-serpent, anyhow."

But all that is really by the bye. The newspapers of the time are full of the Methusaleh business, just as they are of Severn's speeches in the House, and anybody deeply interested in either can search the files and read till he is tired.

I went to Vienna in the summer of that second year.

Terry had sent me a most cordial letter of welcome; I had engaged through Cook's a room at the Bristol; I had amassed a fair sum of money after a profitable year, and I was prepared to spend as much as need be on a deserved holiday. I chose the middle weeks of July, and it was gloriously sunny on the morning I arrived at Vienna. All the way from London I had been looking forward to that moment, for I felt confident that Terry would be on the platform to meet me. Yet he wasn't. I loitered for a while about the station precincts, thinking he might have been delayed on the way; and then, when he still didn't come, I took a cab to the address in the Laudon Gasse where he lodged.

The streets, I remember, were crowded with early-morning workers, and with the sun shining down upon it all, the panorama of blue sky and green trees and red trams and yellow houses might almost have been especially designed to cheer the traveller who hadn't been met. Even the tall apartment-house in the Laudon Gasse struck a cheerful note; it had been recently painted, and window-boxes of bright flowers gave it an almost gay appearance. But there was no sign of Terry. I waited some moments in the hall, and then, just when I was on the point of making as much row as I could on the door-bell, a girl emerged from somewhere in the interior.

"You wish to see Meester Terrington?" she said, with an atrocious accent.

I told her I did, and she answered, with a rather peremptory gesture: "Then you please to come with me."

She led me furlongs, I should think, along winding passages and up and down crooked stairways. Two or three houses had evidently been joined together, and the result, if a trifle bewildering, was certainly homely. I could have been quite happy in such a place myself.

Then, of course, I was thinking chiefly about Terry. "Is he ill?" I ventured to ask, as I followed the girl, and in case she might be unsure of my meaning, I translated the question into schoolboyish German. But she ignored it, and answered, with an absurd but comforting precision: "He iss not ill, but he hass a temperature...."

A minute later I was with him.

I suppose he was bound to look slightly different after two years. He was sitting in an armchair with the sun on his face, and that, no doubt, gave him a look of thinness and pallor that wasn't real. Anyhow, he was delighted to see me. His eyes lit up with his delight--I could see that. He had been perfectly well, he said, until two days before, when somehow or other he had caught a chill. His temperature had been at one time as high as a hundred and two, but was now down to ninety-nine point five, which showed that he was almost better. He was so sorry I had had to find my own way from the station; he had badly wanted to come and meet me, but his doctor had absolutely forbidden him to go out. But he would be all right, he was certain, in a day or so.

And he said: "Oh, yes, that's Mizzi."

Then we began to talk about his work, and that finally bridged the hiatus. He said that he had plenty to do; and that he was working hard. I asked him if he were doing more than he could have done in London, and he said that he thought so. Then I asked him how he liked Karelsky, and he replied cautiously that he thought he was very clever.... He seemed even more than usually reticent, and when I hinted that I would like to be taken over Karelsky's laboratories, he told me that it wouldn't be possible. They were secret, apparently, and he had had to sign a paper that he wouldn't divulge anything of what went on in them. "Anybody would think you were inventing submarines, not serums!" I said laughingly and there the matter ended.

"Meester Terrington," she told me, as on that first evening she unlocked the front-door to let me out, "iss always at work. Too hard, I think.... You must tell him not to be so hard at work. He wished to go to work even with hiss temperature, but I call the doctor, and he said not. He not let him go even this morning to the station to meet you."

That was our first conversation. We had many others afterwards, and it was from them that I began to have an idea of what had been happening to Terry during those two years.

She told me also that Terry had made no friends. "He says to me that he hass no father or mother or fianc?e, and I am sorry for that. He also says that he hass no friend except you, but I think that iss his own fault, for there are many very nice people in Wien.... But he will not make friends. I think he likes nothing except hiss work. That iss why I give him the big room at the top of the new house, so that the others, if they come in a little drunken, shall not derange him."

I said to her: "Well, anyhow, he's not going to work so hard while I'm here. And next Sunday, whether he wants or not, he's coming with me to that place you mentioned--what was it?"

"The Semmering," she replied. "It hass wonderful mountains, but--do not forget--it iss necessary to haf the whole day. And he will say to you what he says always to me--that he cannot go because he must feed hiss mice at eleven o'clock.... Every Sunday at eleven o'clock he goes to feed hiss mice! What would you do to him?" There was a touch of indignation in her voice.

She was right about the mice. They put a veto on the Semmering excursion. It was absolutely impossible, he said, to leave the delicate creatures for a whole twenty-four hours. If they were not fed regularly, the whole value of the experiments conducted on them would be destroyed. Could not, I suggested, somebody else feed them for once? He said there was nobody else on the premises on a Sunday. I asked who fed them while he had been away, and he said: "Some of the other men, but it would be impossible for them to do it on a Sunday." And so the mountains of the Semmering lay beyond our reach--barred from us by mice.

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