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.
And meanwhile I, who, thank heaven, am not attempting to present a
history of myself, lived on in London, still exiled from the End House,
and still seeking a precarious livelihood in the Street of Peradventure.
I lunched with Severn at White's from time to time, and I worked hard,
so that the months passed quickly; and then, just when I was about to
plan my yearly holidays in Vienna, Severn got me a _Messenger_:
commission that sent me roving round Honolulu and the South Seas
instead. And so, without seeing Terry, as I had intended, there came
another crowded year of work.
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.