Looking back on it all now, I can see exactly what was happening. But I
couldn't then. It puzzled me that Terry had been so concerned by what
had seemed to me merely a brilliant improvisation by a born improviser.
But when I told him what Severn had said about Karelsky his manner
changed. He seemed rather dazed with the idea, and he insisted on taking
me back to his rooms that night and showing me everything he could find
that had anything to do with Karelsky. Apparently he was a scientific
star of the first magnitude. There was a photograph of him in a recent
number of _Discovery_, and an article by him in the _Science Review_ on
the Function of the Nucleolus in the Life of the Animal Cell. His
translated work "Eosinophilic Leucocytes in the Thymus of Postnatal
Pigs" was, so Terry informed me, a monument of research; and he had also
created a stir in the world of mathematics by a paper in a German
journal on "Die Veranderlichkeit der Licht--und Farbe-Empfidnungen."
Altogether he was undoubtedly a great man.
We sat up till nearly two in the morning discussing Karelsky and Vienna
and so on. Terry's attitude astonished me, yet, in a way, it thrilled me
also; it had, if the metaphor isn't too fanciful, the austere beauty of
a Greek statue. What I mean is that he was thinking of nothing--nothing
at all--except his work. The idea of having anything to do with the
great Karelsky had stirred in him something that had always existed but
had rarely permitted itself to be seen--a sort of frozen, white-hot
passion for laboratory-research. It glowed in his eyes and trembled in
his voice; it burned as fiercely as the art of any artist. It would be
fine, he thought, to know Karelsky, and not only to know him, but to
work with him and learn from him. It would be glorious to sit at the
feet of the man who had discovered no fewer than three new species of
_spalax monticola_.
V
Helen was a lovely woman. I don't think I ever realized it more forcibly
than on the afternoon that followed that End House dinner. She had asked
me to tea at Rumpelmayer's, and we sat at one of the tables overlooking
the plutocratic hubbub of St. James Street. "I asked Terry as well," she
said, "but of course he won't come." She rather overdid the casualness
of her attitude, and as soon as I looked at her she began to blush. But
she kept her head, adding vivaciously: "I like Rumpelmayer's. It's the
only place in London that reminds me of Ostend."
Then, quite suddenly, she began to talk to me with eagerness, bending
forward across the table till her head was only a few inches from mine.
"You know, Jimmy--(you don't mind me calling you that, do you?)--I
believe you're rather clever. Geoffrey says you are, but I don't mean
_his_ sort of cleverness--I mean _my_ sort, which consists in
understanding people. I believe you _do_ understand people, and I'm
certain you notice most things that happen. You noticed, for instance,
how I was talking to Terry last night. And you noticed how I blushed
just now when I mentioned his name.... Didn't you?"