It was, undeniably, Fanny whichever way you looked....
The contemplation of the Thursday arrangement however, induced a long
silence. They had a sort of hopeless, trapped feeling when they thought
of Kaethe.
Some thirteen years before she had married a brilliant young professor
of biology at the University, who now, as he accurately and baldly
stated, earned far less than the women who kept the toilets at the
Railway stations....
They had seven children,--lovely, white-skinned, pansy-eyed,
golden-haired children, or glowing-faced, starry-eyed, brown-haired.
Kaethe's was indeed a terrible situation, one that made her relatives
sad or angry according to their various temperaments and philosophical
reactions to life. Three of those children had been born, illadvisedly,
during the War and another since the Peace. Mizzi had soundly aired her
opinion of that last arrival, ending with her usual "dumm, but dumm!"
and casting her eyes up.
Out of the thick fog of his practical inexperience Professor Eberhardt
had gropingly tried various and mostly unsuccessful ways of providing
for his family, ways unrelated to his brains and his technical skill,
which suddenly seemed not of the slightest value. Time apparently
was the only thing he had and he was directly, unpleasantly aware of
its useless passage. He'd lived mostly in a blessed, timeless world
of theory and experiment. Courses were only intermittently held at
the University, in half empty aula reached through dusty, echoing
corridors. There was no money to keep up the laboratories and the
few students were apt to be as listless from undernourishment as the
professors themselves, or fiercely, disturbingly, redly subversive of
everything and everybody; and anyway the struggle to keep life in the
body was so terrible that it quite chilled any desire to know how it
came to be there in the first place. Nature's secrets, except of the
harvests, were at an entire discount.
He had duly tried several forms of those manual labors that alone
seemed to be worth money. The summer before he had helped with the
crops on a farm in Styria that a brother professor of geology, whose
case somewhat resembled his own, had told him about. At first he had
dreadful backaches and his long, delicate hands that could hold a
microscope or a retort so steadily, would shake after the day's work
and his thin palms were one great blister. Horrified he would hold
them out at evening and watch them tremble and wonder would they ever
be steady again for use in the laboratory. He had, however, made what
seemed to his inexperience quite a lot of money for that sort of work,
and he never knew what the peasants really thought of him. Some of the
money unfortunately had been stolen from him that last Sunday when
he had been incontinently dreaming about a certain theory that could
always, if he didn't look out, captivate his attention.... Still he
brought home enough to get them through the autumn ... and with what
Fanny would do....
But suddenly, or so it seemed to him, the crown began to fall. He would
sit flushing and paling as he read the descending quotations of the
national currency and the rising prices of food. In a few weeks that
money was gone. The Eberhardts had, relatively, gorged when they saw
it shrinking--next week it would be worth only half and the week after
only a quarter. They laughed a good deal, too, Kaethe and the children.
Kaethe even taught Lilli and Resl to waltz, humming "The beautiful,
blue Danube" as they spun around. The professor allowed himself to
think again of certain combinations ... once quietly back in the
laboratory.... Then came the collapse.
In desperation he tried street-cleaning. A late November morning on
looking out of the window he saw that it had snowed heavily during the
night. In spite of himself the beauty of the little crystals lying
against the panes entranced him. He shook himself free, however, of
such luxurious and wasteful thoughts and decided to try for a chance to
shovel off snow. He said nothing to Kaethe about it as he went briskly
out. But it proved not to be much of an idea after all, for he got a
heavy chill late that afternoon waiting in line to be paid, and when
he passed by his brother-in-law's office feeling very ill, Hermann had
administered a potion to him and told him to go immediately to bed and
stay there.
About Christmas time he was put wise by another colleague, a professor
of botany, to a certain address near the Stephansplatz where a midday
meal of a sort was provided by foreign benevolence for starving
university professors. A cup of cocoa, rice and a slice of bread;
a cup of cocoa, beans and a piece of zwieback. It was not designed
to fatten any of them; it was only meant to keep as many of them as
possible above ground ... keeping the sciences alive.... The calories
were carefully marked on each menu and the men of learning could take
their choice without paying.
Professor Eberhardt went there every day, but with his own physical
necessities ever so meagrely provided for, it was pure agony to go back
to those rooms where seven hungry children and a pale wife awaited his
return. He was always asked what he had had and how it had tasted. He
was often able to slip the bread or the zwieback into his pocket, but
there was no way of handling the cocoa and beans and rice except to eat
them.
Kaethe kept his only suit brushed and darned. Indeed it was getting to
be one large darn with areas of the original cloth making patterns. She
kept him in clean collars too, for a long time, but even at the last,
with his coat collar turned up, he had the unmistakable air of a man of
learning and a gentleman.
He loved his wife and children greatly. But it was a terrible life, a
cold, damp, undernourished life, the things of the brain and the spirit
slipping farther and farther from his sight. Brawn was indeed what
was wanted.... Unless one had that strange, mysterious but apparently
essential thing called money,--that some had and some hadn't.
Professor Eberhardt had never been fanned, even gently, by any breeze
of commercialism....
They had all been so proud of Leo and Kaethe in the old days; sometimes
Leo's name was mentioned in the newspapers and though they cared little
and knew less about the congresses held in Vienna, they would quickly
run their eyes over names and subjects, hunting for Leo's and "as proud
as dogs with two tails," according to Hermann, when they discovered it.
The plight of Leo and Kaethe and their lovely children kept the two
women silent a long time. Just as the thought of Hermann had made them
very still.... In fact viewed from any angle, the family fortunes were
now apt to engender silence.
"Oh yes ... if Fanny ..." said Tante Ilde at last, picking up the
thread where they had somewhat charily dropped it, "if Fanny...."
She had to concede that going to Kaethe's with something of the old
familiar gesture of giving to those she loved rather than receiving
from them, when obviously, they had none too much, put Thursday in
quite a different light.
"What do you think I could get to take them? How much do you think,"
she paused musingly, "Fanny will send?"
"I don't know, but it will be enough. You can look around and see what
you can get the most of for the money. There are so many of them," she
ended, the familiar phrase losing itself in a sigh.
Too many of them, doubtless, and yet those lovely children,--each one a
treasure, looking at you so confidingly with their big eyes in shades
of blue, except Resl's and Hansi's darkly flashing,--which one of them
would you not want? Not want Elsa who had a way of snuggling close and
seeking your hand as she looked up with those heaven-blue eyes? Not
want Carli, that gold and white angel of three summers, who couldn't
yet walk, his little legs would crumple up under him when he tried to
stand up, but he could smile in a way that went to your heart, and as
for the baby, a thing of such sweetness that one wanted to eat her up.
She was still at pale Kaethe's breast; rosy and fat, though heaven
alone knew how or why; and all the others. Lilli whose beauty made you
hold your breath; Resl to whom something nice was always happening, and
Maxy with his plans for supporting the family when he grew up. Any one
of them would have been the pride and joy of a childless home....
Tante Ilde felt herself pleasantly excited at the thought of
Thursday,--relieving want--no matter how--instead of adding to it. Her
eyes got quite bright.
Corinne, seeing the change, continued gayly, almost.
"And Friday, now guess," she paused, "Friday you'll have dinner with
me. I'll let you know where and we'll talk everything over. What fun
it will be! Saturday, I haven't arranged for Saturday yet but I'll
tell you in time. Sunday we don't have to plan about. I'll come as
usual with the meat for the boys' stew, and we'll have a nice time
all together. Perhaps in a few months we can arrange something quite
different. It's only to get you over the winter ... and you'll have
courage," she ended entreatingly. Courage, that angel, she was thinking
miserably to herself, as the unalterableness of her aunt's doom became
more and more apparent.
But suddenly it all seemed quite possible, even easy to Tante Ilde.
Yes, she would, she _could_ be brave. She had Corinne ... as long as
she had Corinne.... Corinne was so clever too, anything might happen
when Corinne took the reins in her slim, elfin way, guiding life
quickly, lightly along over the roughest spots.
"Now, dearest, don't worry about a single thing," Corinne repeated
faintly, the iron very deep in her soul as at last she got up and
stood lingeringly by her aunt's chair. She had again that horrible
realization of something irreparable being in process. It sharpened her
features and muffled her voice. "I'll see Frau Kerzl on the way out and
pay her up till tomorrow morning, and you can leave early." For all her
glimmering smile and close embrace she was increasingly consternated
at the collapse of her aunt's existence, not even slightly concealed
behind their words. She loved her more than ever in her final and
inevitable rout, for pity was swelling abundantly her love. But the
world! It cared little for old ladies in flight before Fate....
That courage momentarily imparted to Frau Stacher by her niece's
loving nearness fell heavily with the dragging hours in which more
and more miserably she went about the dim, chilly room, emptying the
bureau and wardrobe of their scanty contents and laying them in her
shabby valises. The very old brown leather one dated from her wedding
trip, for Frau Stacher had never been a traveller; it had always been
pleasanter to stay at home or go only to very near places for the day.
Now strangely she was become a pilgrim, and when she was hungry she was
to eat of other people's bread and she must go up other people's stairs
for shelter. The realization of the power of those nieces over her life
terrified her. It was complete if they chose to exercise it. Withdrawal
of their protection, she starved, she froze--just the not having those
few thousand crowns a year put her at the world's mercy....
Even Frau Kerzl's quite unctuous attentions at that last supper of
cabbage-turnip soup failed to dispel the deepening gloom of her
heart. Frau Kerzl was obviously though politely rejoicing. She had
indeed through an incredible bit of luck secured that foreigner, an
Englishman too, who would pay in shillings, in the magic "Devisen,"
for that room in which the very next night he was to sleep,--as soon
as that,--Frau Kerzl already basked and expanded in the approaching
light and heat of those shillings. The long Englishman strangely,
hated short, square feather beds and was bringing his own blankets. It
appeared, too, that he was in the commissary department of a certain
relief society. Anything could grow out of such a situation,--condensed
milk, butter, oatmeal.... The arrangement was undeniably of a marvelous
fertility.
Though Frau Stacher was truly glad of Frau Kerzl's good luck, it
but emphasized her own impending homelessness. She had been quite
miserable there, but at least her living-space had been provided with
a door, and blessed with a key,--ultimate desirabilities as she now
saw, and tomorrow she would move into the uncertain privacy of the
alcove. Then, too, in some way that she couldn't define Irma, her young
sister-in-law, terrified her.
Yes, homeless, in a new sense, she realized herself to be when she went
back into the luxury of her solitude for the last time, and as she
closed the door she knew, indeed, that she had "lived too long."...
In that bed, abundantly salted by the tears of her uncertainties, so
soon to know the deep slumbers of a care-free Englishman, Frau Stacher
lay long awake thinking of those homes, over whose thresholds, day by
day, week by week, she was to step.... She would love them so much, she
would be so grateful, she would hold so sacred the joys and sorrows
which might be disclosed....
But they seemed to her tired body to live, those nieces of hers, at the
ultimate points of the Viennese compass. Her feet and back ached at the
bare thought of those endless, cobbly streets, windswept, wet by rain
and snow. All roads led to Calvary. Those once charming streets of the
Imperial City were now but so many ways to the hill of charity, and it
was a hill that old age crept up timidly, anxiously. The cross was so
surely at the top.... Then she bethought herself how the days of the
week came only one at a time, the way after all that life was tempered
to mortality, one day, one thing at a time....
But it wasn't only troubles of food and raiment, of shelter; Frau
Stacher had grave theological difficulties as well, encrusted
confusingly about the admonition: "Be not solicitous for your life,
what you shall eat or for your body what you shall put on ... for your
Father knoweth that you have need of all these things." No, she had no
slightest understanding; and faith was but the dimmest of night-lights,
flickering so uncertainly that the dark masses of her difficulties
alone were apparent. She seemed to be caught terrifyingly between her
needs reduced though they were, really only a bed and enough food
to keep her alive, and the Divine withholding of those things. No,
she couldn't understand, and all through that last long night at Frau
Kerzl's she hung shiveringly over the dim puzzle of her life, which
once had fallen so easily into its bright and pleasant pattern....
For the dozenth time she pulled the little, hard, square feather-bed,
disdained of the Englishman, about her shoulders and drew her knees
up under it. At last out of her chill bewilderment she began to think
of Kaethe, of taking her the Thursday dinner, of what she could get,
in a world now filled mostly, it seemed, with inedible substances.
The thought of giving, even vicariously, lighted in her a glowing
eagerness. She found herself suddenly quite warm, even to her ankles
and feet, and as the late January light began to filter in through the
cracks of the brown rep curtains she fell, mercifully, into a deep
slumber.
II
LIESEL AND OTTO
_Allegretto amoroso._
Sorgen sind für
Morgen gut.
When belated and hurriedly Frau Stacher finally got away from Frau
Kerzl's, it was somewhat as a little war-bark after its time is up,
leaves an unpleasant port, but still a port, and puts out to sea in
sure signs of rough weather.
The once fat and merry Gusl had had one of his worst nights; spasms of
coughing were coming through the open door of the so-called south room
as the two women stood together for a last time in the sombre little
hallway, sadly stencilled in terra cotta on dark blue. The haggard
agony on that mother's face gave Frau Stacher a deep stab accompanied
by the first and only realization in her childless heart of the pain
mothers know for doomed children. It was something so sudden, so
poignant, as she stood saying a somewhat lifeless goodbye, (she hadn't
yet pulled herself together after being abruptly awakened out of that
timeless, death-like sleep by Frau Kerzl's loud knock,) that had it
remained with her an instant longer she would have fallen in a heap. It
seemed to her that now she was always running full tilt into griefs she
had never even suspected in the veiled and pleasant years.
The ring of the hungry colonel, only incompletely disguised as a
porter, who came to get her folding straw basket and her two lean
valises, broke in on the distress of the two women. Frau Kerzl
forgetting for a moment the blessings that would so surely follow
the Englishman into the house, embraced her, suddenly regretful, in
a rush of hot tears; Frau Stacher's sympathy was so immediate, so
real that it seemed to stand there with them. They hung a moment lip
on cheek murmuring to each other "courage" and again and again "auf
Wiedersehen;" then turned to their now separate paths, Frau Kerzl
running back to her son's room at a faint and gurgling sound and Frau
Stacher to continue what she called, (though no one knew it,) her
"March among the Ruins," walking close behind the porter, sweating
a neurasthenic sweat, in the raw January air under his unaccustomed
load. She felt safer quite near him for those once cosy, familiar
streets seemed now to converge to the unknown, to infinity even, and
the proximity of her valises somewhat steadied her. With genteel,
restrained little steps, her elbows pressed to her sides, her hands
clasped in front holding her umbrella and her shabby little bag that
always came unfastened if she didn't look out and somebody would tell
her it was open, she proceeded to the street off the Hoher Markt where
Irma, her brother's widow, half starved with her three boys on the
famous pension, together with what various members of the family gave
her and what she herself made by her beautiful "petit point," dimming
every year a little more those once hard, bright eyes.
Irma knowing that hunger stalked just around the corner, yet desiring
to live alone with her boys, had been immensely relieved and at the
same time almost uncontrollably irritated at the thought of the
arrangement by which Tante Ilde was to be given the very relative
freedom of the alcove. She had gone about the simple preparations for
her taking possession in the best obstructionist manner. The alcove
already contained the old brown plush divan, relic of the house in
Baden, but Irma had shown an amazing unwillingness to clear out a
certain little green and yellow chest of drawers which had "always"
been between the windows in her living room and contained an unrelated
accumulation of objects.
"But she's got to have something to keep her things in!" Corinne had
cried, at the time the fatal arrangement was being made.
This was so obvious that Irma had made no further demur than to say: "I
didn't think she had that much left."
"You've never heard about the lilies of the field?" Corinne asked with
her most oblique look, but it was lost on Irma who said:
"What?" as she noisily dragged the chest of drawers into the alcove.
"How these little pebbles hurt my feet," murmured Corinne further, and
when Irma answered: "What hurts your feet?" she turned aside. Irma was
clearly impervious. But she had emptied the drawers--all except the
top one--quite ostentatiously. Various blessings flowed from Corinne,
who brought their Sunday dinner and who could be counted on to get
the often expensive materials for her needlework; she knew, too, that
Corinne from time to time gave Mizzi a finely-pointed thrust of truth
about what Irma called "jewing her down" in her prices. Corinne could
quietly cut to the bone. Irma had been a skillful needlewoman even in
the old days, now through Mizzi she kept abreast of the latest styles.
That season the rage was for motifs of "petit point" which were being
inserted in Suède handbags, making one of the famous Viennese leather
novelties. She had once received 80,000 crowns, when 80,000 was
something, for a tiny medallion, so fine that she had only been able to
work on it on warm summer mornings with the window open, even the glass
panes seemed to blur it somewhat, though that north window up those
five flights of stairs was certainly as good a place as one could have
for working.
Irma being without sensibility, unconnected with her boys, had said
further to Corinne on that same occasion:
"Business is business," at which Corinne had ineffectually protested
that it was just what it wasn't,--business.
"You know how I am situated with the three boys," Irma had answered,
in the same tone she would have used to give new information rather
than to discuss a situation already threadbare, "so much for a cup of
coffee in the morning and you know what bread costs, then the soup in
the evening--a plateful--she won't need the thick part of it," she
proceeded baldly, "the boys are growing and so hungry. She'll only need
something to warm her up and when you think that she will have eaten
well every day at noon, she'll get on all right."
The family had never been able to accustom themselves to the shock of
certain unexpected thoughts appearing quite unclothed and without the
least shame from Irma's most intimate being. A chill visited Corinne's
backbone at the reference to the thin part of the soup, and a white
point appeared in her eyes, glacial as an iceberg in blue water, which,
however, did not attract Irma's attention nor reduce her temperature.
She was, anyway, a woman who easily got red in the face and was always
saying how hot she was when others were half frozen.
Having thus delivered herself of her inner thoughts she had proceeded
to draw, not uncheerfully, two nails out of the kitchen wall and drive
them neatly, loudly, deafeningly into two light-grey roses in the brown
wall-paper of the alcove, near the curtain where they wouldn't be seen,
and just a little too high to be reached comfortably. She had then
duly sewed the hook and eye on the curtains under Corinne's very gaze
and zealously, inexpensively flicked away any possible dust from the
gilt-framed engraving of Haydn leading the young Mozart by the hand,
and the flat white and gilt vase on the little bracket underneath,
sole embellishments of the alcove. But all the same in order to feel
the least bit amiable about it Irma had to keep reminding herself that
her sister-in-law would be paying for that same alcove. Indeed, with a
second bare, arctic look also lost on Irma, Corinne had put the money
for it for a whole month in advance into her hand. She had felt like
snatching her treasure up in her arms, conveying her a hundred, a
thousand miles and setting her down in some warm and pleasant spot. And
this, this was what she had prepared for her, this quite evident place
of tribulation. She made no answer to Irma's last words beyond drawing
her lips thinly together. They had all learned that they couldn't get
at their father's widow except through her sons, but just as soon as
she could turn around she'd get another niche for her Dresden china
auntie....