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.
In the meantime there were the evenings. He couldn't, he said, however
hard he tried, take time off during the day-time. Perhaps, if he hadn't
been ill, he might have stolen a day, but as it was .... And so, with a
regretful smile, he left me every morning to spend the warm and sunny
hours as best I could, lounging about the cafés and boulevards, and
occasionally, when such a busy person could spare me a moment, gossiping
with Mizzi. Her accent was certainly atrocious, but her knowledge of
English idiom and grammar surprised me by its completeness. It was only
quite accidentally that I learned that Terry had taught her.
There comes to me now, as I write, the memory of a remark made years
afterwards by someone who looked at Terry from a different angle. "Leave
him alone with somebody," was this remark, "and in a quarter of an hour
he'll either have said nothing at all, or else he'll have begun to
teach. He loves teaching because he loves giving more than taking away,
and teaching is _that_."
I wasn't, even at the time, surprised that he had taught Mizzi. It
seemed natural, since she had wanted to learn English and he had wanted
to learn German. She told me that English was her third foreign
language--French and Italian being already known to her. I asked her
once why she was so keen to be a linguist. I was standing in the porch,
smoking my after-breakfast cigar in the sunlight, and Mizzi's hands,
everlastingly busy, were tending the flowers in the ground-floor
window-boxes. She said, with a little shrug of her shoulders: "It will
be very useful to me--someday...." And then, as if she had suddenly made
up her mind that I could be trusted, she added: "I tell you this in
confidence. Some day, when I haf the money, I shall buy all the houses
along here and make them into one big hotel.... And then I will haf an
omnibus at the station, and I will talk to English and French and
Italian in their own language, so that it will all be very--what do you
say?--_heimlich_...."