Viennese Medley
By Edith O'Shaughnessy
Author of "A Diplomat's Wife in Mexico," "Diplomatic
Days," "Alsace in Rust and Gold," etc.
"'S giebt nur a Kaiserstadt,
'S giebt nur a Wien."
(There's only one right royal town,
There's only one Vienna.)
_New York_
_B. W. Huebsch, Inc._
_Mcmxxiv_
COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY
B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
To
COUNTESS MITON SZÉCHÉNYI
and
COUNTESS GLADYS SZÉCHÉNYI
FRIENDS OF THEN AND NOW
CONTENTS
I _Their Aunt Ilde_
II _Liesel and Otto_
III _Anna and Pauli_
IV _Hermann and Mizzi_
V _The Eberhardts_
VI _Corinne_
VII _Fanny_
I
THEIR AUNT ILDE
_Adagio assai._
"Sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier days."
War and Peace had stripped Frau Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg,
of everything except her physical being, leaving her quite naked in
another but certainly not better world.
As the widow of a Viennese Kommerzienrath, dead after thirty years of
service in the Finance Ministry, she had enjoyed a comfortable pension.
She had been considered rich herself at the time of her marriage for
she had had as dowry some shares in a beet-root industry in Bohemia,
but when the Republic of Czecho-Slovakia was formed she found herself
mysteriously and without appeal separated from those shares, which
had been as much a part of her life as her hands and feet, and the
separation though swift was to prove fatal, at least to her use and
dignity.
During the long, pleasant years of her widowhood she had had a little
house at Baden near Vienna, where her only brother, an official in the
Northern Railways, and his various wives and many children had been in
the habit of spending holidays and convalescences. If any child were
ailing it was promptly sent to Tante Ilde, who could always be counted
on to receive such gages of affection with open arms.
When her brother, accompanied by one or the other of those quickly
succeeding wives, went off on his annual walking tour through the
Semmering, as many as could be got into the little house were deposited
there for safe-keeping. The family Christmas and New Year's dinners
took place at Tante Ilde's, and on the 18th of August, the Emperor's
birthday, they were all to be found again sitting about that well-laden
table.
She was the first to know their joys and griefs, and "I'm going to tell
Tante Ilde about it," was a familiar expression in the family.
A pleasant lady to look at, too, with a bit of lace flung over her
shining white hair, a bit of it always about her neck. Her skin had a
lustrous smoothness, the many tiny wrinkles no more disfiguring than
the fine crackings in old ivory. Her nose was delicately arched and her
lips kept long their agreeable red. But it was her eyes, more than all
of these, that caught the attention. They were very large and were set
quite flatly, shallowly in her face, pale blue lakes of indefectible
innocence, and while time had wrought some changes in the areas
surrounding them,--a wrinkle, a dent, a falling in or away,--their
placidity had gently endured. They opened widely and though sometimes
they had been obliged to gaze upon one or the other wicked spectacle of
a wicked world, no shadow of its evil remained upon them. That wide,
blue, child-like gaze from that aging face was what was first noticed
about her and last forgot. The startled expression that appeared upon
her countenance at the beginning of her misfortunes, towards the end
was changed into one of almost formidable submission.
She had always been slender and graceful with a way of holding herself
that verged on elegance and her clothes were put on with a pleasant
precision. She had worn a long gold chain around her neck since any
of them could remember, holding a little gold watch tucked in at her
neat belt; she always wore, too, a pair of round gold bracelets that
successive baby nephews and nieces had grasped at, leaving fine marks
of little teeth upon them. Tante Ilde loved those tiny dents. There
was often a gentle tinkle as she played with her chain with the hand
bearing her wedding ring and a quite inconspicuous one of amethyst and
pearls. Just as inconspicuous was Frau Stacher's being, her situation
and her works, as that pale stone, those little, lustreless pearls.
None save a doubly-blindfolded Fate, striking recklessly about at
millions would have found so unimportant a mark.
Corinne, her best-loved niece, always called her "my Dresden china
Auntie." There was between them some natural affinity, as well as
special affection; though Tante Ilde loved them all, Corinne was the
true child of her heart, what the best of daughters might have been.
She had never had any children and her life had revolved beneficently
about the family of her brother,--only her half-brother to be sure, but
then they never thought of that. When he married for the third time,
quite superfluously the family considered, the ostensible reason he
gave was that it would be a pity to leave no one to enjoy the pension
due whoever was fortunate enough to be his widow. His sister had smiled
at this, her fine, soft smile, and even Heinie himself had been obliged
to laugh though he cared little about jokes concerning his somewhat
solemn being; and he had married the bright-cheeked, shining-eyed,
full-figured, not over-intelligent young Croatian of his desire, Irma
Milanovics, and they had had three sons in the four years he lived to
be her husband. It made him the father of eleven children, all living
at the time of the outbreak of the war, together with an adopted
daughter, the child of a dead friend,--(one more, it couldn't matter
where there were so many). He had always enjoyed the patriarchal
feeling which would come over him as he sat at that big oval table,
serving the most generous of portions, or when out buying objects
by the half-dozen or dozen. In many other ways, too, that numerous,
good-looking family had flattered his persistent paternity.
Two sons had been lost in the war, one last seen at the fall of the
Fortress of Prszmysl, then traced to a prison camp in Siberia. After
two years a card came through the Red Cross informing them of his death
from typhus. The other had been killed in the last mad scuttle across
the Piave. A daughter, too, had died of a wasting malady in the winter
of 1915 after the death of her lover at the taking of Schabatz from the
Serbs that first August of the war. But there were still eight of them
in the thick of the fight for survival in post-war Vienna. Irma's three
boys, nine, eleven and twelve years of age were not yet ready for the
combat, but all the others were in it for victory or death.
To return to their aunt Ilde. The first two years of the peace had not
been so bad. With some difficulty she got through and succeeded in
keeping that roof that showed such unmistakable signs of collapse from
falling about her head. Still in a small way she received them all on
New Year's Day of 1921. For the customary roast pork was substituted
a less expensive "Rindfleisch garniert" the classic boiled beef and
vegetables, and there had been an Apfelstrudel, delight of all
Viennese. Tradition maintained itself in a world now obviously composed
of wreckage. But Frau Stacher had had an uneasy feeling as she sat, for
what was indeed the last time, at the head of her table surrounded by
her nieces and nephews. A week later she found, quite suddenly, that
never again would she get anything from those Bohemian investments
handed down from her father, the revered von Berg. She made some
desperate, useless efforts, but she was always brought up round by the
fact, once so pleasant, now disastrous, that she was the widow of an
Austrian, and herself an Austrian. That sudden cleaving of things that
she had supposed indissoluble, opened a gaping void in front of her,
into which she was inevitably to fall. Behind her, far behind her lay
the shining, solid, comfortable years, like another person's life, when
she was Frau Kommerzienrath Stacher, born von Berg. That providential
"von" had incredibly embellished her life. There was, indeed, all the
difference in the world between being born a "von" or not a "von." She
had always regretted that her mother's somewhat hasty second marriage
to handsome Heinrich Bruckner, some years her junior, had not had the
more sustaining qualities of a "von,"--then all Heinie's children
too....
Now it appeared that nothing made any difference. Every landmark
was gone. Authority was gone. Gone beauty, reverence, faith. All
that warm, imperial lustre in which the middle classes had burnished
themselves, proud and content that such things were, had faded into the
night with Vienna's setting sun. Sweet things were gone not only out of
her life, but out of the nation's, leaving black misery, or a crushing
commercialism which, though it lent money, lent neither beauty nor
honor.
It was all symbolized to Frau Stacher in the ruin of her own life,
epitomized in the blank, useless loneliness of her downlyings and her
uprisings. Life, once dear life, had become quite simply a monster that
threatened to devour her and then spit her into the grave.
* * * * *
One warm, golden January Sabbath set like a jewel in the silver of
the Baden winter, Frau Stacher had sat hour after hour at her window
in chill, stark dismay, watching without seeing the soft afternoon
light sift through the bare, velvety branches of the chestnut tree
in front of her door. She was waiting for Corinne; but the moon had
already risen and its silver glimmer had taken the place of the gold
of afternoon before she heard a light step on the gravel. That light
step carried the heaviest of hearts for Corinne had come out to discuss
baldly matters till then not even thinkable....
But whichever way they turned and twisted and tried to avoid it, they
were always finding themselves back at a certain dark spot. Finally
they very quietly owned to each other, even saying the unthinkable
thing aloud, that the Baden house would have to be given up. Then
Corinne braced herself to meet those pale eyes, out of which the color
had been suddenly washed.
"You can get quite a sum from the sale of the furniture," she ventured
after a long silence in which she had looked as through a blur at the
familiar appointments of the room. They sat knee to knee holding each
other's hand tightly; Corinne felt as if she were watching her aunt
drown in the Danube; she wanted to cry "Help," but she only said:
"Of course you must keep enough of your best things for a nice room
near us all,--if we can find one."
The housing problem was beginning to loom up blackly, overshadowing
quite a number of things already dark enough. She leaned closer and
pressed her aunt's head against her loving young heart. There Frau
Commercial Advisor Stacher, born von Berg, wept her only tears. She had
a fine spirit which even then was not broken, but hurt, bent and vastly
astonished. During the long hours that followed they mingled their pity
and their love, which bore in the end a thin hope that "something would
happen"; but all the same, when early the next morning Corinne went
away she knew that the first stone had been cut for the sepulchre of
her aunt's existence.
* * * * *
That "nice room near us all" proved indeed unobtainable. In a city
that had once offered every imaginable sort of pleasant shelter, there
didn't seem to be a single "nice, unfurnished room" to offer a homeless
old lady,--and it was said so many had died in or because of the
war,--no, Frau Stacher couldn't understand.
A few bits of furniture left from the sale were finally distributed
about among the various nieces and Frau Stacher went to board, just as
a makeshift--"till things get better" Corinne had assured her, at the
house of an acquaintance, who in the palmier days had partaken of her
easy bounty. There nights of aching, sleepless homesickness followed
days of empty, useless longing for all that had once been hers, for her
little situation in life that had enabled her, childless as she was to
be a center of pleasure and comfort to the only beings she loved. It
was finished, done with, that was quite clear. She sat more and more
alone in her room. The clack of Frau Kerzl's tongue and her invectives
at Fate, quite justified though they were, got finally and intolerably
on her nerves. She thought she could not bear to hear another time that
things were as they were because the Hapsburgs had taken all the gold
out of Austria when they went, and left the "others" sitting with the
paper money.
Frau Stacher was no intellectual and had attempted no mental
appraisement of the national calamities. Even in the good days her most
enjoyable reading had been the _Salon Blatt_, where what the Imperial
and Royal family and the "Aristokraten" did, said, wore, and where and
how they showed themselves was duly recorded for the delectation of an
appreciative people. A morning paper had always been brought to the
house, it is true, but she would only run quickly over world-events
which had never so slightly modified her life, whereas the doings of
the First Society lent it both lustre and interest.
She knew that Frau Kerzl, whose grief had dyed her political feelings
a deep red, was going on in a stupid, even wicked, manner, when she
so unjustly and blasphemously spoke of the Hapsburgs, but she had no
satisfactory answer to make, so after her way she was silent, spending
the long evenings alone in her room. She couldn't see to sew in it,
nor indeed to do anything more complicated than move about. The single
light was placed high up in the center of the ceiling and was reflected
but dimly from the dark walls, the pieces of heavy furniture and the
brown porcelain stove that was never lighted.
Fortitude was, seemingly, the only virtue that Frau Stacher, gentle,
easy-going, unheroic, was called upon to practise.
But the thing couldn't last forever. Often she was glad she was
seventy. It made the outlook easier. There couldn't be more than twenty
years of treading up other people's stairs. The instinct of home was
almost as strong in her as the instinct to live. No, there couldn't
be more than twenty years of it.... Then, too, in a month, a day, an
hour even, it might all be over. But one evening sitting in the shadowy
room, her little, white, knitted shawl drawn about her shoulders, her
hands crossed under it on her breast, she was suddenly and terrifyingly
aware of the beating of her heart,--almost as if for the first time.
She found she was as much afraid of death as of life--and that was a
great deal....
Sometimes one or the other of "the children" remembered to come to see
"poor Tante Ilde" and often Corinne, in her moonbeam way, would slip in
and out, still and pale indeed like a ray of reflected light, and every
Sunday after dinner she and Corinne would meet at Irma's. She went
frequently to Kaethe's, too, that is, whenever she had anything to take
to the children. It wasn't a place where one could go empty-handed.
But all, in one way or another, were caught up in the struggle for
survival. In a starving, freezing city, not starving, not freezing,
took the last flow of everybody's energy, so she was mostly alone. But
solitude, for which nothing in her life had prepared her, had no charms
for her. She had an almost unbearable longing to be in crowds, in
happy, busy crowds, where people jostled each other as they went about
little, pleasant errands.
But there was another thing beside being certain--vaguely--that
she wouldn't live forever, which had come to make her sojourn at
Frau Kerzl's not only endurable but desirable ... a cold, creeping
premonition concerning the not distant time when even that measure
of independence would be denied her. The money from the sale of the
furniture was going, was gone.
One morning in that terrible "little hour before dawn" when anxiety had
done its worst, she got up and counted and recounted the thin packet of
crowns left in her purse. Then in panic she made a mental survey of her
other remaining "values," of those things her nieces were "keeping" for
her. The result had sent her shivering back to bed, where frightened
by a fear beyond any she had ever known, even in nightmare, she had
pulled the bedclothes up over her head. She was afraid, afraid. It was
grinning at her....
She dozed finally. But she only knew she had been asleep when she
found herself throwing the sheet aside with a start, thinking she
heard Corinne's voice calling up the stairs in the house at Baden....
Perhaps something would happen.
But little can happen to women of seventy except more of the same,
whatever it is....
When in that chill December twilight she first found her way to the
pawnshop, to "Tante Dorothea's," familiar to her all her life as a sure
object for humorous sallies, and left there her gold bracelets, that
old life dropped finally and forever from her almost as if it had never
been, leaving her unticketed, unbilleted, between time and eternity.
Truly she found that there is no greater sorrow than in adversity
remembering happier days.
She hadn't spoken to any of the children about that fatally impending
visit to "Tante Dorothea's," though she had thought of consulting
Pauli; Pauli who always gave the impression that nothing human was
foreign to him. But he would have given her the money. Humbly she
deplored the burden of her existence on that younger generation, that
dead wood of her fate among those green trees, bent themselves in the
blast of misery that swept over the city. Every day, every hour one
had to look out, or one was quite certainly blown over. But Pauli was
away. Corinne, dear, lovely Corinne, she couldn't bear to think of
her pale light flashing in through the door of that pawn shop in the
Spiegelgasse, that fatal "Tante Dorothea's," whom the mention of in
the good old days, had always raised that ill-considered laugh. Once
or twice her thoughts had played glimmeringly about Fanny instead of
"Tante Dorothea,"--to go out in a sudden, chilly little gust blowing
from the terra ignota of Fanny's life. In the end it was her business,
not another's, that was in question. She realized for the first time
the solitariness of her fate, of everybody's fate, so long hidden from
her under the pleasant details of her daily existence which had seemed
to bind it in a thousand ways to other lives.
When she finally slipped out, looking fearfully and guiltily about her
long before she got to her destination, as if her shameful errand had
been stamped in red upon her face, she was further intimidated rather
than reassured to discover, as she turned into the Spiegelgasse, that
she was by no means alone of her kind. All the human scrapings and
combings of the Inner Town seemed to have been blown there too. Old
women like herself with arched noses and deeply-circled, tearless eyes,
thin, wan women, in once-good, now threadbare clothes, whose gentle
mien, like her own, recalled unmistakably happier days,--how many of
them there were! Pale spectres of that middle class whom the War and
then the Peace had stripped of everything save their sorrows. The war
loans they had invested in had gone up in the smoke of battle, or down
in the bitter waters of Peace; the thousands, the tens of thousands
of comfortable little incomes, left them by fathers, by husbands, had
soundlessly, untraceably disappeared, and they were learning the way
to "Tante Dorothea's."
* * * * *
The Dorotheum, if one's business there is not vital is one of the most
interesting buildings of its kind in Europe. Five of its seven stories
rise above ground, the other two are in deep subterranean spaces,
reaching to the old catacombs, and where household and personal effects
of the Viennese middle class are now stored so thickly and so high,
once Roman mercenaries of the Xth Legion lay buried....
But Frau Stacher knew nothing of the Dorotheum in its historical aspect
and had she known, it would have been of little interest to her.
A motley, miserable throng was pressing in at the doors, for many, like
herself, chose the dusk for such an errand. She found herself pressed
close to a young mother with an anxious, withered face who had a pallid
baby sleeping on one arm, while under the other she carried a small
bundle of linen, that last of all possessions to be offered to "Tante
Dorothea." Behind her stood a former officer. It was easy to see what
he had been. He was still erect, but he was very thin, with deep pits
under his cheek bones, his coat was buttoned up to his chin and he kept
his hand in his pocket.
The pale baby on the woman's arm waked up as they stood in line, and
began a wretched wailing. The mother tried to quiet it as she passed
up to the counter, where a being, necessarily without bowels, looked
quickly at the poor contents of the bundle, gave her a ticket and a
few bits of paper money. Silently she received them and made way for
Frau Stacher, who in a distress that moistened her brow and dried her
mouth, tremblingly produced her bracelets. She was brusquely pointed to
another counter for precious objects, as also was the officer. There
she found herself behind a woman selling a worn wedding ring, not much
heavier than the money she got in exchange.
The bulging-eyed man, giving Frau Stacher a quick, circular look that
further chilled the thin blood in her veins, proceeded to weigh the
bracelets in the little scales on the counter. On their last golden
gleam was borne in a flash by Frau Stacher those bright, warm years
in which she had worn them. The dull ticket she received was the true
symbol of her state. The money would soon be gone and she would have
neither money nor bracelets, just nothing. As she turned away she saw
that the officer was offering a small medallion and a miniature. Again
she thought of the foolish jokes about "Tante Dorothea." This stark,
final misery was what it really was.... This doomlike end of everything.
Two short weeks after, Frau Kerzl again showed signs of nervousness
and talked loudly and significantly, or what Frau Stacher, who
had got timid even about leaving her room, thought was loudly and
significantly, concerning the price of food; and how money, even
an hour over-due, represented in those days of falling currency, a
fabulous loss. That afternoon she took out her watch and chain and her
amethyst and pearl ring. It was less frightening the second time, but
she felt much sadder, and she was unspeakably depressed by the old man
just ahead of her who fainted as he stood waiting.
By January Frau Stacher's situation became finally and visibly
desperate. She could obviously no longer pay to remain in Frau Kerzl's
house and quite as obviously Frau Kerzl could not keep her just for the
pleasure of it. The link in their lives got thinner day by day until
it broke squarely in two that morning of the sixth of January when
Frau Kerzl plainly hinted at the possibility, nay probability of being
able to wrest from the black heavens that star of first magnitude,--a
foreign lodger. No trouble, out all the time, solid, certain pay.
She didn't cease to paint the foreigner in ever brighter colors. He
stood out attractively, even flashily against the grey tenuity of her
present boarder. Though she had feared that something of the kind was
impending, it fell on Frau Stacher like a blow on a bruised spot;
indeed she found she was one vast bruise. Anything that touched her
nowadays was sure to hurt unspeakably, but being "turned out," as she
called it, had about it an ultimate ignominy, not at all befitting
the day. She had always loved the sixth of January, that noisy feast
of the Three Kings, and though she had been wont to complain that she
hadn't been able to sleep a wink because of the tooting of the horns,
the blowing of the whistles, the beating of drums and countless other
noises announcing their arrival, that racket had really appealed to
her sentimental soul, heralding as it did three royal beings bringing
gold and myrrh and frankincense. As she lay awake through the cold,
dark night, though there had been no noise at all in the streets she
suddenly remembered that it was Epiphany; a few thin, salty tears
moistened her cheeks as she realized that in a world once seemingly
full of gold and myrrh and frankincense she now possessed naught save
the breath in her body and the remnants of raiment covering it.
She was clearly, unless "something happened," among the serried ranks
of that middle class fated to disappear. Thousands, hundreds of
thousands of them had disappeared, been absorbed in one or the other
appalling manner into something nameless and then lost from the ways
of men. The "aristocrats" were vaguely "away" economizing and waiting
in their castles, living, as well or as ill as might be, from their
lands. The working classes, much in evidence, were not at all badly
off. Brawn had still some market value. But the middle classes, upper
and lower? They could not all have died, the streets would have been
heaped with bodies. There was some painful absorption of them into the
life of those persisting, and this is what, for a very little while,
happened to Frau Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg; but one variation on
the ubiquitous theme of genteel old age and sudden penury in post-war
Vienna.
On the wet, black afternoon following the wet, black morning of which
we have spoken, Frau Stacher and her niece Corinne might again have
been seen, discussing whisperingly in the chilly room at Frau Kerzl's,
the evident extremity of the situation. The eye in the ceiling that saw
rather than was seen by, revealed them sitting even closer together
than usual. Frau Kerzl had developed out of her former friendliness and
respect, strange, spying, key-hole ways. She was as well aware of what
Frau Stacher had done with her bracelets and her watch and chain and
her ring as Frau Stacher herself. She hadn't noticed the disappearance
of the bracelets, but when she no longer saw the gold chain and when
her boarder incautiously asked her the time of day she knew the Stacher
jig was up, and she wanted to know, further, to just what tune she
herself was stepping. She had her own troubles,--the son who had gone
off to the war, fat Gusl he was then called, so jolly, so full of
Wiener quips and quirks, always humming about the house or playing his
zither. He had been invalided home that last September of the war and
was now coughing his life out in the room that was supposed to be to
the South, but that the sun was really unacquainted with. A dark room
in a dark, side street, one among hundreds of dark, windy side streets
in Vienna where consumption has its breeding ground; the "Viennese
malady," it is sometimes called....
The light had found and gleamingly mingled the pale gold of Corinne's
hair and the silver of her aunt's; their hands were tightly clasped as
they considered ways and means. There seemed to be few of one and none
of the other.
"I've lived too long," Frau Stacher said at last, and in her heart was
distilled a sudden but final grief that found its stinging way to her
so-long untroubled eyes.
Corinne leaned swiftly over and embraced her.
"Why I can't think of life without you!" she cried suddenly and so
glowingly that for a fleeting instant her aunt found herself warm in
the fire of that love. The salt was even dried momentarily out of that
bread and water of charity which was now so evidently to be her only
nourishment.
Corinne had come with a scheme of existence, the barest draft of a
scheme of existence, she knew it to be, for her precious Tante Ilde.
For all she looked elusive, shadowy, with that one light hanging
uncertainly above, her hair the brightest thing in the room, she was,
in accord with a strangely practical streak in her make-up, considering
the matter that engaged them in its true aspect. The sight terrified
her, but she was there to give courage, not to get it....
She sat quite motionless in long, slim, graceful lines, (the family
liking more substantial contours didn't know how handsome Corinne was,
"flat as a pancake" being no recommendation to them). Familiar with
those fireless, post-war rooms and their creeping, paralyzing chill
she was still wrapt in her sheath-like black coat. Her little grey,
fur-trimmed hat had been laid on the bed for Tante Ilde always liked
to have her take it off, it made the visits seem less hurried; her
dripping umbrella had been placed in the pail near the iron washstand
with its diminutive bowl and pitcher; its handkerchief-like towel was
folded across the little rack above it. With a disturbing, child-like
confidence her aunt's wide, full gaze had followed every movement.
Apparently mistress of herself and of the plunging situation, Corinne
had been conscious of the most horrible feeling in the pit of her
stomach when she finally met it full as she sat down and began to
caress that thin hand in the uncertain light which seemed, however,
bright enough to reveal the next step in all its horrid indignity.
Corinne was a tall, small-headed, blond woman with a finely-arched
nose and shell-like ears lying close to her head. Between her very
blue eyes with a recurring oblique look that could veil her thoughts
more effectually than dropped lids, was a slanting line that of late
had perceptibly deepened. "Very distinguished," was always said of
Corinne in the family; always, too, that she was "different," not
quite indeed of their own easy-going, somewhat irresponsible Viennese
kind which knows so well, in a somewhat unanalytical way, how to get
something out of life,--with half a chance, with a quarter of a chance.
So little was really needed for happiness with a basis of enough to
eat. Humming a new waltz, remodelling a pair of sleeves, getting hold
of a bit of fat or sugar for the women; for the men sitting in a warm
café drinking beer or black coffee, turning over the _Lustige Blätter_,
smoking a Trabuco or a Virginia,--joy was still as easy as that when
momentarily far enough from the abyss not to be dizzy and sick with the
fear of falling in. Corinne had had in common with Fanny a North German
grandmother and though that explained, in a way, a lot of things, still
there remained something about her that the family hadn't been able to
label satisfactorily. Sometimes they called it cold, sometimes hard,
they had all come up against it in one way or another in those days of
elemental issues, but terribly clever, they conceded that. She could
generally be counted on to find some little door in the thickest wall.
Since their father's death and the consequent breaking up of the home,
Corinne had been safely, solidly and enviably, it seemed to the rest
of them, employed in the Depositen Bank, whose personnel even in those
uncertain days, was not doing badly; an expanding wage as the times
demanded and at a place run by the bank an eatable midday meal at a
possible price.
If it had been a matter of her aunt Ilde alone, Corinne could have
managed, after a fashion, to keep that existence, so dear to her, from
falling to pieces, though what she earned was not yet enough for two;
but all whose heads were above water had not one but many drowning
persons clinging tightly, stranglingly about their necks. Corinne was
conscious of a finally sinking sensation as she proceeded to unfold the
plan which appeared to her more and more what it really was--a last
monstrous attack on her aunt's existence--pushing it nearer and nearer
to the fatal edge. She had no single illusion as to what she was doing,
and her voice was very soft in contrast to the hard, stark meaning of
her words.
"I've spoken to them all, darling, you don't have to do a thing
about it. Tomorrow you are to move to Irma's. It will be a sort of
combination arrangement. You'll be paying, of course. It's a way to
help Irma and the boys as well."
Now the famous pension on account of which Herr Bruckner had charitably
made that third marriage, had shrunk in buying properties to such
pigmy-like proportions, that they didn't count it any more when Irma's
needs and necessities were being discussed. Yet Irma and the boys had
to live, that establishment in one way or another had to be kept up a
while longer.
"But I don't see where Irma can put me," Frau Stacher answered after a
long silence.
Corinne flushed:
"Dear treasurekin ... the alcove.... It'll only be till I can look
about, perhaps something will turn up; it's to get you out of here
and remember you'll be paying Irma for it, you'll feel perfectly
independent. I've talked it over with her. She's glad enough to be
helped out. Don't forget the alcove has got that plush divan of yours
that we've all slept on at Baden. It's upholstered, thick and soft,
with happy memories. I think you've had a beautiful life," she ended
tenderly, desperately.
Her aunt smiled, a ghost of a smile, at the mention of Baden, and
the upholstery of the divan, and then her thin, broad lids closed
flutteringly over the expanse of her blue eyes to keep the tears from
falling, but she made no answer. There wasn't really anything to say.
"I felt of the curtains yesterday when I was there," continued Corinne
in a voice that had quite lost its resonance, "they're good and thick
and Irma sewed a big hook and eye on right in the middle, and when
they're fastened you'll be almost by yourself," she ended but with a
sudden quiver of her lips, as her aunt continued to look at her with
her soft, wide, pale eyes in which the distaste she felt for the alcove
in particular and the arrangement in general was clearly mirrored. She
had never cared for Irma. Irma had something hard and strange, almost
rough about her, that had never fitted into their own easy, pleasant
ways. She did her duty, yes, but they were used to a pleasanter
fulfillment of duty. However, it was too true that she was the only one
of them having a living room with an alcove.... Life was like that.
"It won't be forever," pursued Corinne, "and I'll be there on Sundays
for dinner."
She spoke cheerfully but she felt as if she were pointing her dear
treasurekin to the winter road instead of to shelter. Could she but
have lodged her really in her heart!
"I've been thinking about you all this week and planning ever since
that hateful Kerzl woman" ... here Corinne was pulled up short by the
sudden flush on her aunt's face, she couldn't bear to hear of _that_
even from Corinne.... Frau Kerzl who once had been grateful for a smile
or even for advice, to whom she'd sent broth a whole long winter.
Corinne continued gently as flowing water--but as inevitably as water
seeking its own level:
"Darling,--and this is how I have arranged for your dinner every day,"
she spoke even more gently and her touch was soft, the softest touch
that thin, trembling hand had ever known. A brightness beyond tears was
in her eyes. What was she offering really to her precious, her fragile,
her Dresden china aunt?
"On Mondays," she proceeded, striking the simplest chord at first,
"Liesel wants you to take dinner with her. She said she'd love to have
you."
This wasn't quite exact. What her sister Liesel, married since two
years to a young official in the Finance Ministry, Liesel who was very
happy, had really said was:
"Of course, I don't mind Tante Ilde coming once a week, we certainly
ought to do what we can for her, ... but when Otto comes in he does
like to find just me. However, we've got to look out for her, poor
dear,--she was always so good to us."
Otto was one of some half or three quarters of a million government
employees in Vienna and was doing fairly well, that is well enough for
two. He was an expert accountant and as prices went up, so mercifully
did his salary. They got along very comfortably in the tiny,
three-roomed apartment that Liesel in her smiling way had conjured up
out of the abyss of the housing crisis. It sufficed amply for their
needs. They lived almost in the style that would have been theirs had
they lived and loved a decade earlier. Sometimes in the evening they
even went to the theatre, or to a moving picture. What use in keeping
money when the next day's fall in exchange made it act like ice in hot
water? So with many shrugs of her plump, handsome shoulders Liesel
continued to wrest an immediate happiness from the miserable city, and
with a special sapience born of love pursued her daily and absorbing
round of making her Otto and herself comfortable. They cared a great
deal for each other, though the family thought Otto rather a stick and
wondered how he had come to find such favor in Liesel's soft, dark
eyes. As a husband he had turned out to be vigilant and exclusive as
well as loving, a sort of little Turk. Having small natural faith in
men and still less in women, from the first he had set about guarding
his treasure. It somehow suited Liesel. "But jealous!" she would boast,
casting her eyes up delightedly, a finger at her red lip. They were so
young too, that they could hope that something, in the many years they
expected to live, would happen to place their upset world on its proper
feet again, and while awaiting that miracle they were very happy.
Otto sometimes remembered Galicia.... When a certain look came into
his face it was because he was hearing those terrible machine guns.
He limped slightly, his right knee having been smashed by a ricochet
bullet, and he had had his feet frozen in an Italian prison camp
and lost the toes of the left foot.... Oh, that mountain camp, that
terrible cold, that tiny blanket! If he didn't pull it up about his
shoulders he shivered and shook with that deadly central cold and if
he did pull it up his feet froze. Sometimes he dreamed of it in that
warm bed with Liesel and would awake with a start to find her there,
and drawing the feather-bed up higher would sink again into a blessed
slumber. He knew that he had been lucky.
It was because Liesel was so happy that to her Corinne had first gone
with her plan for Tante Ilde. Liesel had spent summer after summer in
the house at Baden. Her aunt had always spoiled her. Everybody spoiled
Liesel, so evidently made for happiness. As a little girl she was
forever rummaging in the attic for bits of silk and lace for her dolls,
and would turn out the nattiest things. Now for herself she did the
same. She was round-faced, fresh-skinned and smiles played easily about
her somewhat wide, very red mouth;--she would have been attractive in
rags. But she had that peculiar Viennese talent for wearing clothes,
a jaunty manner of pulling her belt in snugly that made the observer
conscious of her very small waist under a full bust, above broad hips,
a way of pressing her hat down upon her head at the most becoming
angle; and her high-heeled shoes were always bright and neatly tied.
These and a lot of other details of an extremely feminine sort added
undeniably to her natural charms. Pauli said that though her soul was
but a centimeter deep, you looked to the bottom through the clearest
of waters. If in her happiness she sometimes forgot other people's
miseries, it was but natural, and when she was reminded she was all
solicitude and self-reproach.
"That will be nice," Tante Ilde was saying slowly after another long
pause, and she was gladder than ever that she had added the knife-rests
and napkin rings to the spoons when Liesel was married. Then as a
sudden thought came to her, she quite brightened up, "I can do the
dishes," she cried, "Liesel always used to hate to do anything that
would spoil her hands."
"Well, she doesn't seem to mind spoiling her hands for Otto," answered
Corinne rather drily.
"They're in love," returned Tante Ilde gently, glimmeringly.
A shadow fell over Corinne's face at the answer as if a ray of
light had been interrupted, or as if something had been muted for a
moment. Her aunt, who was not one to break into silent places, waited
patiently, though she was wondering who and what was coming next.
"Pauli," the shadow was followed by a light in Corinne's face as she
spoke the name lingeringly, "Pauli," she repeated, "wants you to go to
Anna's on Tuesday. It's one of their meat days--when they can get it."
"Perhaps I better not go there then. It looks," she hesitated and there
were sudden tears in her eyes, "so greedy."
"Not at all," cried Corinne. "Pauli wants you to go on Tuesday just
because of that. He said he'd try to be there himself, that first time
anyway. Anna and Hermine are quite worked up about it and wondering
what they can give him to eat."
"Poor Anna," said her aunt very gently.
Corinne flushed. Again they were silent.
Frau Stacher bewildered at her own fate, felt quite incapable in that
moment of picking up the threads of any other life, even of Corinne's.
But her confidence awakened warmly at mention of Pauli. Pauli had a
heart and was always showing it. Pauli understood, she felt sure,
anything, everything.... Even poverty-stricken old aunts by marriage
who had lived too long. Even to such Pauli was kind.
* * * * *
Pauli Birbach, the husband of her eldest niece Anna, had got through
the war without a scratch or an illness,--of an unbelievable luck.
When a bomb burst where he and his comrades were sitting or lying, he
was certain to be unhurt and soon to be seen carrying the wounded in
gently or burying the dead deeply. Typhus and dysentery alike avoided
him. He was naturally a debonair and laughing soul, and his easy
resourcefulness had endeared him to both officers and men. "As lucky
as Pauli Birbach" was a phrase among his comrades. And even in little
ways. Wasn't he always turning up with a handful of cigarettes or a
bottle of wine or a chicken, got, heaven knew how, in a country picked
bare as a bone? An excellent cook, too, he could instruct the warrior
presiding over the pot how to make the very most of what little he had.
Hot water and an onion under Pauli's direction became a delectable if
not nourishing soup.
And the way he played the zimbalon he discovered in a castle they were
quartered in during an interminable winter in the Carpathians, the
Russians, millions of them it seemed, just opposite,--only half hidden
by the snowy hill that some dark morning they must charge....
He had seen terrible things, terrible things to a laughing,
soft-hearted man, things that knocked the laughter out of him like
a blow on the chest.... The time he went out with a patrol at day
break, the thermometer 40 below, and they thought they were coming to
a tent or a little hovel in the grey half light.... But it was a dozen
Kossacks huddled together, frozen stiff, their heavy boots sticking
out....
And other things that had turned his pleasure-loving soul black with
horror.... Christian Zimmermann, they'd been at the High School
together, ... Christian, his comrade, three days in agony, hanging on
that barbed wire and no one able to get at him and when Pauli finally
did bring him in ... oh, no, you didn't think of such things.
And the Peace that stuck in his throat and lay on his chest, and the
fierce angers it aroused, beyond, far beyond the blood-angers of the
War ... Five years to repair the damages of the War--a century those
of the Peace.... Still Pauli often laughed, even in that cold, grey
Vienna, scarcely recognizable ghost of what had once throbbed and
glowed, that funeral urn among cities; for he was naturally a man of
hot hope, in spite of the fact that Fate at her most capricious had
married him to Herr Bruckner's eldest daughter, a horse-faced, quite
inarticulate woman, all of one color, with a solemn, brooding look in
her eyes. She was so different from the glowing-eyed, sparkling-faced
damsels about him that marriage with Anna Bruckner came to seem like
the solving of some deep mystery. What lay behind those heavy, brooding
eyes, with their curtain-like closing? She had rather fine broad
shoulders, something long and big about her body, built in majestic
proportions, or so it seemed to him. He got into a state where he
had to know what it all meant--or die. He had been inexplicably mad
about her all through his lyric years.... Anna his Sybil. Anna had
been conscious of a flattered wonder, and her chill, slow blood had
known its only warmth and quickening when she married Pauli Birbach.
Then so soon.... Yes, Anna had gone through every hell, and there are
many, reserved for stupid, jealous, ugly, virtuous women. She loved him
more year by year. She was obsessed by the thought of Pauli, doggedly,
uselessly obsessed, for early Pauli had passed to the contemplation of
other mysteries.
It was a tribute to his humanity, however, that Tante Ilde felt not
the slightest distaste at going to his house ... even in "that way" as
she called it to herself. He gave more freely than he received, and he
did both easily. Probably for all his good intentions he would not be
at dinner on Tuesday, he had an airy, dissolving way with him, akin to
atmospheric changes,--brightness into cloud, cloud into sun and you
never knew.... But Anna with her joylessness and her one ugly daughter
as like her as the eighteen years between them permitted, Anna was her
own flesh and blood, and she had been at Baden with her aunt during
innumerable infantile illnesses. She was always catching something and
when her hair came out after the measles Tante Ilde had faithfully
brushed it back to a shining, brown abundance. It was even now Anna's
one beauty. They had, after all, so many memories in common--she
couldn't have forgotten all, everything.... On Tuesdays then.
"On Wednesdays you're to go to Mizzi's," Corinne was saying.
"To Mizzi's!" exclaimed her aunt in astonishment, throwing back her
thin shoulders and sitting up very straight.
"Yes ... Fanny," here Corinne made the habitual pause that followed
any mention of Fanny in the family,--"Fanny has arranged it. You know
Mizzi's anxious to please her."
Again Frau Stacher showed no especial enthusiasm for the arrangement.
It was getting into quite another category. After all Liesel and Anna
were her own brother's children, but when you went into houses,--in
that way,--kept up by nieces-in-law, it was quite a different matter.
Mizzi was the family dragon too. Mizzi with a look or a word could
quite ruthlessly devour aged aunts, superfluous children. A monster
really, with a mouth and stomach, but no entrails. They all had come to
know about Mizzi--in one way or another.
"Perhaps I better go without dinner on Wednesday," Frau Stacher
suggested with a slight quiver of her lips, though not because of the
food.
"You could perfectly well if you had too much or even enough at other
times. But we've got to keep your strength up through the winter.
You've just got to live," Corinne repeated sweetly, warmly, "and then
think of poor Manny--he'll love having you."
"Oh, Manny," her aunt responded, "poor Manny's got nothing to say," but
her voice had a note of loving compassion.
"Poor Manny, dear Manny," repeated Corinne slowly in the same tone,
adding, "It isn't any of it forever,--next year I'll be making more
money, and perhaps we can get a tiny, tiny apartment somewhere."
Now the "tiny, tiny apartment," even as she spoke, seemed to Corinne
the mirage it truly was. People had been known to die of joy on getting
a tiny, tiny apartment. That very morning in the newspaper she had read
of a man who had fallen dead when he heard he was at last to have a
certain apartment he had long needed for himself and his family, and a
rich man too. Everybody was talking about it.
"I can't leave Elschen," continued Corinne, "it's a miracle anyway
sharing that pleasant room with her while her sister's away."
"It makes me so happy to know you're there," said her aunt warmly, for
Corinne was of the race of homeless ones, and her address apt to be
uncertain. Then for all her patience, she couldn't help wondering about
Thursday.
"On Thursday," continued Corinne, having got to the fourth of her
slender fingers, "you're going to dear Kaethe's." Kaethe and Corinne
were half sisters by Aunt Ilde's brother's first and second wife.
"To Kaethe's!" she interrupted, "but they're all starving. I couldn't
eat a mouthful there."
"It's just because of that, that it's easy. When you go there on
Thursday you are to take the whole dinner--for all of them. It'll be
quite like old times when you always brought us things."
Though delicacy was an essential attribute of Frau Stacher, she could
not, at this point, restrain a slightly inquiring look at her niece
Corinne, who answered after the thinnest of pauses:
"It'll be all right ... Fanny's going to see about it. She does
everything for them anyway that _is_ done."