Frau Nirlanger was next. When we spoke of Vienna she caught her breath sharply.
“Vienna!” she repeated, and the longing in her voice was an actual pain. “Vienna! Gott! Shall I ever see it again? Vienna! My boy is there. Perhaps—”
“Perhaps,” I said, gently. “Stranger things have happened. Perhaps if I could see them, and talk to them—if I could tell them—they might be made to understand. I haven’t been a newspaper reporter all these years without acquiring a golden gift of persuasiveness. Perhaps—who knows?—we may meet again in Vienna. Stranger things have happened.”
Frau Nirlanger shook her head with a little hopeless sigh. “You do not know Vienna; you do not know the iron strength of caste, and custom and stiff-necked pride. I am dead in Vienna. And the dead should rest in peace.”
It was late in the afternoon when Von Gerhard and I turned the corner which led to the building that held the Post. I had saved that for the last.
“I hope that heaven is not a place of golden streets, and twanging harps and angel choruses,” I said, softly. “Little, nervous, slangy, restless Blackie, how bored and ill at ease he would be in such a heaven! How lonely, without his old black pipe, and his checked waistcoats, and his diamonds, and his sporting extra. Oh, I hope they have all those comforting, everyday things up there, for Blackie’s sake.”
“How you grew to understand him in that short year,” mused Von Gerhard. “I sometimes used to resent the bond between you and this little Blackie whose name was always on your tongue.”
“Ah, that was because you did not comprehend. It is given to very few women to know the beauty of a man’s real friendship. That was the bond between Blackie and me. To me he was a comrade, and to him I was a good-fellow girl—one to whom he could talk without excusing his pipe or cigarette. Love and love-making were things to bring a kindly, amused chuckle from Blackie.”
Von Gerhard was silent. Something in his silence held a vague irritation for me. I extracted a penny from my purse, and placed it in his hand.
“I was thinking,” he said, “that none are so blind as those who will not see.”