"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...."
IX
A minute later I was with him.
I suppose he was bound to look slightly different after two years. He was sitting in an armchair with the sun on his face, and that, no doubt, gave him a look of thinness and pallor that wasn't real. Anyhow, he was delighted to see me. His eyes lit up with his delight—I could see that. He had been perfectly well, he said, until two days before, when somehow or other he had caught a chill. His temperature had been at one time as high as a hundred and two, but was now down to ninety-nine point five, which showed that he was almost better. He was so sorry I had had to find my own way from the station; he had badly wanted to come and meet me, but his doctor (who, incidentally, lived in the set of rooms immediately below) had absolutely forbidden him to go out. But he would be all right, he was certain, in a day or so.
There comes always, soon after the meeting of long-absent friends, a sudden hiatus when the first rapture of reunion is over and the quiet joy of companionship has hardly yet resumed its sway. At such a moment one says anything—anything—to break the awkward and intolerable silence. I, for example, when that moment came, made some remark about the comfort of his surroundings. "Better than Swinton Street, eh? ... And even a girl who speaks English—of a sort."
And he said: "Oh, yes, that's Mizzi." (He pronounced it "Mitzi.")
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.