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.
It was only a short journey, hardly long enough for disappointment to
turn into apprehension. I hadn't, of course, _asked_ him to meet me, but
he knew the train by which I should arrive, and it seemed so very
unlikely that, if he were able, he wouldn't turn out for me.
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...."