XI
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...."
XII
The time passed quickly enough, but in a sort of way I was disappointed. I had expected to see much more of Terry; I had had in mind all kinds of excursions, including, if possible, a week-end trip along the Danube to Buda-Pesth. But his Work—his almighty Work—stood in the way. Not, of course, that either he or I was in the least bored. He was so simply and obviously delighted to be with me that I was all the more enraged that he couldn't manage to be with me oftener. But it was no use attempting to persuade him; his Work was a jealous god.
Only once did he mention Helen. It was on the last evening before my return to England, and we had strolled into the Burg-garten, where the heavy dusk-smelling trees were like a belt of magic separating us from the dazzling boulevards. There was a high moon overhead, and an orchestra playing the overture to Egmont in the open-air, and a crowd of Viennese, of all ages and classes, listening in silent rapture. Many of them followed the score from large folios, and if a careless foreigner so much as whispered a word or struck a match, shocked eyes stared at him and quelled him into silence. After the day's heat and bustle the kiss of the muted violins seemed to stir the air into cool waves and ripples; it was all delicious, enchanting and utterly unlike anything that could possibly happen in Hyde Park.
After the final chord he asked me suddenly how Helen was. I thought I had better not tell him of our quarrel, so I replied merely that I believed she was all right, although I hadn't seen much of her lately. And then, emboldened by his broaching of the subject, I asked him if he had heard from her.
He said: "Yes. She has written to me several times."