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.
X
I hadn't seen him for two years. That fact, so simple and so obvious,
was yet the hardest of all to realize. I kept on being startled by the
revelation of what it meant; it gave me almost a shock, for instance,
when I first heard him talking in fluent colloquial German. Those two
years ... how _had_ he managed to live them through? What had they meant
to him?
I should never have known but for Mizzi. Mizzi, I soon found, was a
person of great intelligence and even greater industry. It was she who
practically ran the apartment-house (her mother being a semi-invalid),
and it was under her energetic management that the general tone of the
establishment was being constantly improved. She rose at six in the
morning and worked till about midnight, and she had sent to her every
week from Chicago an immense portfolio of a magazine called
_Hotel-Keeping_. In appearance she might have been called good-looking
had not that elusive thing, personality, made you forget her looks
altogether. She was, as a matter of fact, rather an odd mixture of Latin
and Teutonic physical attributes; her broad and essentially German
forehead was balanced by dark eyes that might have been Spanish or
Italian. But it was her personality that counted. She could bring you a
cup of coffee and somehow, by the slightest of gestures, convey the fact
that she was not a servant, but rather a hostess honouring her guests.
"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."
I said that I thought both she and the doctor had acted very rightly,
and she went on, aloofly accepting my approval: "_I_ would have come to
meet you, but I did not know how you looked."
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.
The _leit-motif_ of it all had been Work. He had been working day after
day for two years, and except on Sunday afternoons he had taken no
holidays and had allowed himself no respite. "I tell him always to go to
the Semmering, but he will not, because it iss necessary to go for the
whole day." His hours in the laboratories were quite long enough in
themselves, but he supplemented them by extra hours of work in his own
room at night. He never went to theatre or concert or opera; he might
have been exiled in a backwoods village, instead of in the gayest city
in Europe. "He says to me that he likes not music," she said. But she
thought there might also be another reason--that he hadn't enough money.
"Karelsky," she said, "iss a very rich man, but he does not pay much to
anybody else. There iss a doctor here who knows him." I said that I
didn't know that Karelsky was rich, and she answered: "He gets the money
from America--where all the money comes from."
She told me also that Terry had made no friends. "He says to me that he
hass no father or mother or fiancée, 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.