«We deserve a beer or two after this blasted climb,» he said, eying me unhappily.
Panting from the climb, I translated to Albert, «Mr. Wells … invites you … to have a refreshment with us.»
The youngster was pitifully grateful, although he would order nothing stronger than tea. It was obvious that Thomson’s lecture had shattered him badly. So now we sat on uncomfortable cast-iron chairs and waited—they for the drinks they had ordered, me for the inevitable. I let the warm sunshine soak into me and hoped it would rebuild at least some of my strength.
The view was little short of breathtaking: the brooding castle across the river, the Danube itself streaming smoothly and actually blue as it glittered in the sunlight, the lakes beyond the city and the blue-white snow peaks of the Austrian Alps hovering in the distance like ghostly petals of some immense unworldly flower.
But Wells complained, «That has to be the ugliest castle I have ever seen.»
«What did the gentleman say?» Albert asked.
«He is stricken by the sight of the Emperor Friedrich’s castle,» I answered sweetly.
«Ah. Yes, it has a certain grandeur to it, doesn’t it?»
Wells had all the impatience of a frustrated journalist. «Where is that damnable waitress? Where is our beer?»
«I’ll find the waitress,» I said, rising uncertainly from my iron-hard chair. As his ostensible tour guide, I had to remain in character for a while longer, no matter how tired I felt. But then I saw what I had been waiting for.
«Look!» I pointed down the steep street. «Here comes the professor himself!»
William Thomson, First Baron Kelvin of Largs, was striding up the pavement with much more bounce and energy than any of us had shown. He was seventy-one, his silver-gray hair thinner than his impressive gray beard, lean almost to the point of looking frail. Yet he climbed the ascent that had made my heart thunder in my ears as if he were strolling amiably across some campus quadrangle.
Wells shot to his feet and leaned across the iron rail of the café. «Good afternoon, Your Lordship.» For a moment I thought he was going to tug at his forelock.
Kelvin squinted at him. «You were in my audience this morning, were you not?»
«Yes, m’lud. Permit me to introduce myself: I am H. G. Wells.»
«Ah. You’re a physicist?»
«A writer, sir.»
«Journalist?»
«Formerly. Now I am a novelist.»
«Really? How keen.»
Young Albert and I had also risen to our feet. Wells introduced us properly and invited Kelvin to join us.
«Although I must say,» Wells murmured as Kelvin came ‘round the railing and took the empty chair at our table, «that the service here leaves quite a bit to be desired.»
«Oh, you have to know how to deal with the Teutonic temperament,» said Kelvin jovially as we all sat down. He banged the flat of his hand on the table so hard it made us all jump. «Service!» he bellowed. «Service here!»
Miraculously, the waitress appeared from the doorway and trod stubbornly to our table. She looked very unhappy; sullen, in fact. Sallow pouting face with brooding brown eyes and downturned mouth. She pushed back a lock of hair that had strayed across her forehead.
«We’ve been waiting for our beer,» Wells said to her. «And now this gentleman has joined us—»
«Permit me, sir,» I said. It was my job, after all. In German I asked her to bring us three beers and the tea that Albert had ordered and to do it quickly.
She looked the four of us over as if we were smugglers or criminals of some sort, her eyes lingering briefly on Albert, then turned without a word or even a nod and went back inside the café.
I stole a glance at Albert. His eyes were riveted on Kelvin, his lips parted as if he wanted to speak but could not work up the nerve. He ran a hand nervously through his thick mop of hair. Kelvin seemed perfectly at ease, smiling affably, his hands laced across his stomach just below his beard; he was the man of authority, acknowledged by the world as the leading scientific figure of his generation.
«Can it be really true?» Albert blurted at last. «Have we learned everything of physics that can be learned?»
He spoke in German, of course, the only language he knew. I immediately translated for him, exactly as he asked his question.
Once he understood what Albert was asking, Kelvin nodded his gray old head sagely. «Yes, yes. The young men in the laboratories today are putting the final dots over the i’s, the final crossings of the t’s. We’ve just about finished physics; we know at last all there is to be known.»
Albert looked crushed.
Kelvin did not need a translator to understand the youngster’s emotion. «If you are thinking of a career in physics, young man, then I heartily advise you to think again. By the time you complete your education there will be nothing left for you to do.»
«Nothing?» Wells asked as I translated. «Nothing at all?»
«Oh, add a few decimal places here and there, I suppose. Tidy up a bit, that sort of thing.»
Albert had failed his admission test to the Federal Polytechnic in Zurich. He had never been a particularly good student. My goal was to get him to apply again to the Polytechnic and pass the exams.
Visibly screwing up his courage, Albert asked, «But what about the work of Roentgen?»
Once I had translated, Kelvin knit his brows. «Roentgen? Oh, you mean that report about mysterious rays that go through solid walls? X rays, is it?»
Albert nodded eagerly.
«Stuff and nonsense!» snapped the old man. «Absolute bosh. He may impress a few medical men who know little of science, but his X rays do not exist. Impossible! German daydreaming.»
Albert looked at me with his whole life trembling in his piteous eyes. I interpreted:
«The professor fears that X rays may be illusory, although he does not as yet have enough evidence to decide, one way or the other.»
Albert’s face lit up. «Then there is hope! We have not discovered everything as yet!»
I was thinking about how to translate that for Kelvin when Wells ran out of patience. «Where is that blasted waitress?»
I was grateful for the interruption. «I will find her, sir.»
Dragging myself up from the table, I left the three of them, Wells and Kelvin chatting amiably while Albert swiveled his head back and forth, understanding not a word. Every joint in my body ached, and I knew that there was nothing anyone in this world could do to help me. The café was dark inside, and smelled of stale beer. The waitress was standing at the bar, speaking rapidly, angrily, to the stout barkeep in a low venomous tone. The barkeep was polishing glasses with the end of his apron; he looked grim and, once he noticed me, embarrassed.
Three seidels of beer stood on a round tray next to her, with a single glass of tea. The beers were getting warm and flat, the tea cooling, while she blistered the bartender’s ears.
I interrupted her vicious monologue. «The gentlemen want their drinks,» I said in German.
She whirled on me, her eyes furious. «The gentlemen may have their beers when they get rid of that infernal Jew!»
Taken aback somewhat, I glanced at the barkeep. He turned away from me.
«No use asking him to do it,» the waitress hissed. «We do not serve Jews here. I do not serve Jews and neither will he!»
The café was almost empty this late in the afternoon. In the dim shadows I could make out only a pair of elderly gentlemen quietly smoking their pipes and a foursome, apparently two married couples, drinking beer. A six-year-old boy knelt at the far end of the bar, laboriously scrubbing the wooden floor.
«If it’s too much trouble for you,» I said, and started to reach for the tray.
She clutched at my outstretched arm. «No! No Jews will be served here! Never!»
I could have brushed her off. If my strength had not been drained away I could have broken every bone in her body and the barkeep’s, too. But I was nearing the end of my tether and I knew it.