I
I SAT by the window while she telephoned, and I smoked cigarette after
cigarette, and I tried to think--tried to think--tried to think of
Paris, and early morning, and what a train-accident would be like, and
whether, if Severn.... It was all numbing and bewildering at first; but
behind it, amazingly constant, was the thought of Terry.... How would it
affect _him_? Somehow I had the feeling that even in a train-accident
Severn could be relied on to look after himself.
I think I made some sort of stammering remark about the first reports
being probably exaggerated; and Mizzi answered, turning her face
momentarily away from the instrument: "It may be. We must wait till
there is further news. There will be the newspaper soon."
We waited. I see now in my mind that crowded little box of a room with
the sunlight streaming into it, and the map of Austria-Hungary on the
wall, and Mizzi's pale-golden hair shimmering against its background of
_Jahrbücher_ and _Wohnungsanzeiger_, and--most important of all--the
telephone. The telephone dominated--was no sooner put down than taken up
again; its shrill ringing pitched the highest and most excruciating
keynote of tension. "Everybody is telephoning," said Mizzi, after she
had rung up the _Stunde_ offices. "They do not know much, but it is
believed that several Wien people have been killed. Now I will try the
railway office."
And so on, telephoning here and there, and then here again, without
definite result. And, in the midst of it all, through her little glass
partition, she saw Terry coming down the stairs. "You had better go with
him," she told me hastily. "He must not know of this. Afterwards there
may be need to tell him, but not yet--not till we know ourselves...."