I said that it hadn't occurred to me that Mizzi was in the least like a man. Really, I must have been rather irritating, but he bore it all with exemplary patience. "She's the sort of woman I can stand, anyhow," he asserted.
"Then you'd better marry her," I replied jocularly, but he seemed to take it in all seriousness. "I don't want to marry at all," he repeated, "and neither does Mizzi. She doesn't bother with men. Her dream is to own a hotel, and she thinks a man would only get in her way...."
XIII
I find now that I have set down everything that I can definitely remember about that visit to Vienna. My diary doesn't help me, because I carelessly left it in London, and when I got back I just scrawled "Vienna" across the blank pages. All I can do is to think of a certain scene or place, and then, nine times out of ten, it's just a picture that comes to me, and not a happening at all. I can see, for instance, the tall yellow-painted houses in the Laudon Gasse, and the "Durchgang Verboten" notice on the door of Mizzi's private entrance, and the masses of velvet-red geraniums on the sills. Almost, as I write, I can smell those geraniums, and also the curious, half-musty aroma that haunts even the cleanest of those old Viennese houses.... I can see the wide, park-bordered boulevards, with the vermilion trams sparkling through the alternate sunlight and shadow, and (most clearly of all, this) the wrinkled old lady at the corner of the Opern Ring, who used to sell me citronnade. And I can see Mizzi standing in the porch to see me off, and automatically (since it was not her nature to waste even a moment) kicking away a few dead leaves that had blown on to the step. It was the night express that I was making for, and the evening sunlight was dancing on Mizzi's sherry-coloured hair as I turned and waved to her just as the car swung us round the corner into the Skoda Gasse. And Terry said: "The next time you come you won't need to put up at the Bristol. Mizzi told me that in future she'd always be glad to find you a room."
That "next time".... We had suggested that it should be at the end of another year, but it wasn't; it was at the end of five. So many things happened in the interval—things important enough in their own scheme of things, but not here. I got a decent sub-editorship, for instance, and chiefly owing to that the vaguely arranged trip fell through. It wasn't postponed; it was just cancelled; for a sub-editorship, more than anything else perhaps, curtails a man's freedom to roam over Europe on visits to even his most intimate friends. I sent Terry, however, a cordial invitation to visit me instead, but he declined for the usual reason—his Work.
To me, of course, those five years are anything but a gap; they're so crowded with business happenings that have no claim to be set down here. More than once I planned a visit to Vienna, but at the last moment something happened to prevent it; nor was I free even on holidays, for I usually combined them with business commissions that took me almost everywhere except to Central Europe. Terry's still regular letters expressed no disappointment, but then, they never expressed any emotion at all. Once he ended with "Mizzi sends you her kind regards," and then, after that, Mizzi always sent me her kind regards. No doubt he acquired the habit of writing it; and, anyhow, I regarded it as no more than an indication that Mizzi was still alive.
My diaries are rather a help to me here. I find in them quite a number of mentions of Severn, and even of Karelsky. Both men were almost continually in the limelight; if you take up any Messenger of the period the odds are that you will find either a Severn cross-examination or an account of Karelsky's rejuvenation of some illustrious personage. Fleet Street loved them both, the former for the constancy with which he yielded stimulating copy, and the latter for the uncanny accuracy with which he dropped sensations into the very heart of dead periods. I am thinking, of course, of the great Thibetan monastery sensation. Karelsky travelled, apparently, in Thibet, and somehow or other obtained an entrance into an old and inaccessible monastery in which, to his astonishment, he found that his own methods of rejuvenation had been practised for hundreds of years; so that, in fact, many of the monks were actually in their third and fourth centuries! Fleet Street "wrote up" the story in great glee, with maps of Thibet and excerpts from Sven Hedin and Younghusband all complete; but naturally Fleet Street did not believe a single word of it.
I remember discussing the matter with Severn at a sort of "house-warming" party I gave at my new rooms overlooking Lincoln's Inn Fields. Somebody said that Karelsky would have made a better journalist than scientist; and I think I answered that from my own professional point of view I would rather he remained a scientist, since as a journalist he would only be one liar amongst so many. Perhaps I said outright that in my opinion he was very little better than a charlatan and an impostor. But Severn shook his head. "Karelsky's more than that," he answered. "I shouldn't have recommended Terry with him if he'd been a mere market-place quack. Of course, there is something of the quack in him, and he's obviously running this Thibetan stuff for his own advertisement.... But I shouldn't like to call anything that Karelsky says an absolute lie. In my opinion he's one of the very few first-class geniuses the world possesses...."
"And you really think this story of his——"
Severn smiled. "I prefer to express no opinion," he said. "I am far from saying that Karelsky could not, if he wished, tell the most thundering of lies. But in this case ... well, I just don't know. Oddly enough, I met a well-known Harley Street physician only yesterday and he assured me, from his own personal and rather secret knowledge of Thibet, that Karelsky was perfectly right—although, of course, he deplored the sensationalism of it...."