them first about Liesel and Otto, everything she could without making
Anna jealous; not, of course, about the sausage. Meat twice a day would
have scandalized Anna, and anyway Tante Ilde would never have been
guilty of the indelicacy of speaking about that sausage, wrapped up and
put away too. The fresh noodles in fresh butter were all that Anna and
Hermine could really stand; they would talk about them for days; but
she described in detail the package from the "Friends" at which Anna
and Hermine pricked up their big ears and cried: "You don't say!" and
Hermine ran and got an inch-long pencil and a piece of newspaper and
wrote the address on the margin. Then she and her mother nodded their
heads significantly at each other. They were both thinking that Irma
should have let them know immediately, and that some afternoon late,
when it was dark and they wouldn't be seen, they'd go for one of those
packages....
As Tante Ilde was talking Pauli noticed the white lace about her neck
and how genteel she contrived to look in spite of age and disaster.
Then his eyes travelled to his daughter, seeing her really for the
first time that day. Hermine had on a chocolate-colored dress with
trimmings of an unpleasant blue. Pauli turned his eyes again to Tante
Ilde's cameo face, from which the broad eyes seemed to look out more
and more bluely as the dinner went on. Pleasure, even a little, was
apt to put the color back into her eyes. Then he looked again at his
daughter. He was thinking that the devil could take him if he knew
what color would be becoming to his only child. Something, anything to
emphasize her, to put her on the chart, so he followed out his natural
taste as he said:
"I must give you a new dress, Hermine, pink or red or a good bright
blue?"
Hermine was delighted at this mark of paternal affection and Anna
astonished. When a long time after he saw the hard and vapid blue she
chose he was finally and forever discouraged. No, Hermine had no flair,
she always went wrong on colors, like Anna. His wife and daughter
were beyond Pauli. Just those two women out of all Vienna he could
rightfully go home to; Hermine was even named for his mother. "Na,
dos ist kein Leben," it's no life, he often thought in his broadest,
most expressive Viennese. Pauli who could speak perfectly half a dozen
languages, always chose that in which to clothe satisfactorily certain
unsatisfactory thoughts.
At last when Hermine was out in the kitchen smearing up with her finger
the bit of jam that remained on the platter from the Palatschinken,
Tante Ilde spoke the name Pauli had come to hear ... Corinne ... and
stupid Anna didn't care. It was the mention of Fanny that she could not
have borne. Anna never caught the truth about anything.
"I'm going to have dinner with Corinne on Friday," Tante Ilde said
finally, a soft radiance spreading over her face, and turned her eyes,
suddenly a lovely azure, full upon him. "Corinne is an angel."
Perhaps Tante Ilde shouldn't have said that right there before Anna, in
Anna's own house, but Anna created an unendurable vacuum about herself,
it made people want to throw something, anything into it to fill the
horrible void.
"She thinks you are one," answered Pauli with a sudden deep breath, and
there was a note in his voice that his wife, or at least his daughter,
standing at the kitchen door, should have noticed.
Then his eye wandered to the only bit of color in the room,--the
scarlet cloth covering his zimbalon.
"Shall I make a bit of music, Tante Ilde?" he suddenly cried with an
indecipherable gesture, and laid his cigarette down on his plate, where
wastefully in Anna's eyes, it smoked its life away. He pushed his chair
back from the table and getting up uncovered the instrument without
another word. He was suddenly one vast flame of love for Corinne. He
knew the feeling well,--consuming, he was really beside himself ...
in an instant ... like that. He began to play a wild Czardas of his
mother's land. The light grew brighter in his eyes, the color deepened
in his face, but it was of a moonbeam woman, shadow-thin, that he was
thinking.
The music beat mercilessly upon the three listeners, with its cruel,
splendid life-throb, with its piercing intimation that even a thousand
years of love would be all too short for the longing heart. From time
to time he emitted a wild cry and his nostrils would dilate; his body
swayed rhythmically above the instrument. He was indeed "thirsty in the
night and unslaked in the day."...
Anna remembered the short love-madness Pauli had once wrapped her in
and pressed her hand against her flat breast.
Tante Ilde thought, too, of things forever gone,--not of love, that was
too far off, but of her lost dignity and use, of all that would not,
could not be again; she had no time to wait upon events.
Hermine was possessed by vague, youthful expectations of what life
could so easily bring her, out of its whole long length, a life wherein
someone would surely love her,--for want of another the thin young
man she sometimes met on the stairs, who gave violin lessons to keep
a passionate soul in a delicate body. Perhaps, sensitive, artistic,
he would indeed be goaded on by that lurking, tricking spirit of the
will-to-live to take Hermine, dull Hermine for wife, wrapping her for
the brief moment necessary for the act in his own passion which would
so perfectly conceal her essential poverty....
Suddenly Pauli stopped, the blood had gone from his face, leaving him
very pale, but his eyes were full of a dark fire and in his bones was
a grinding pain. He was in a mad hurry to be gone from that house of
ghosts where he couldn't hold his being together.
"I'm rushed this afternoon, heaps of things to attend to," he cried as
he lay down his batons and threw the scarlet cloth over the zimbalon.
To his goodbye to Tante Ilde he added the reminder loudly, distinctly:
"It's understood, Tante Ilde, you're coming every Tuesday?" Then
suddenly he was gone leaving the room dim and chill.
Anna went over to the window and stood by it, though she couldn't see
into the street. Hermine almost immediately began to clear off the
table.
But Tante Ilde sat quite still. She was thinking, "poor Anna, poor
Anna." There was something very tender in her leave-taking, something
that Anna gratefully, dumbly accepted without knowing what it was that
was offered her, and then Tante Ilde slipped away to walk those several
miles back to the Hoher Markt.
She had vaguely, diffidently hoped that she might go away when Pauli
did, be carried along on his momentum. But he had gone so suddenly,
there hadn't been time for any little arrangement or suggestion.
It was beginning to rain. The wind blew flat, cold drops against her
face. She stood a moment looking at the trolleys clanging up and down
the Mariahilfer Street. Why hadn't she walked in the morning?
IV
HERMANN AND MIZZI
_Staccato_
Hin ist hin! Verloren ist verloren.
When Doctor Hermann Bruckner was suddenly called from the security of
his civil practice to take charge of a field-hospital, so great was the
joy of his secret heart that even his wife became aware of it, and in
her rustiest and most contentious tone asked him what on earth he was
so pleased about, he was going out to the "olly" front where he was
certain to be either killed or mutilated, and walking as if on air at
the idea of getting there!
Skilful in diagnosis, resourceful in treatment, compassionate
concerning the imponderable ailments of his patients as well as those
visible, he had, it is true, bestowed a brief anxiety on certain of
them left to the care of the diminishing number of proportionately
overworked physicians in Vienna; but for himself.... Home where his
heart was not, where Mizzi nagged and scolded, was icily disdainful or
loudly reproachful, had long been a place in which he was desperately
uncomfortable.
The day he left for the front his aunt Ilde had come in from Baden to
say goodbye to this much-loved, and as she knew, much-tried nephew.
Looking out of the window she had seen him settle back into his seat in
the motor, laughing in a gay, new way with the colleagues beside him as
he opened his cigarette case.
Hermann had indeed, been delivered by the war from something from
which he had thought never to escape. For years, almost his only
happy hours had been spent in his office, or hurrying about on his
sick calls. He had a particular and personal regard for each patient,
and the professional affection they awakened in him had a magnetic,
communicable warmth, even the uninteresting old women, the chronic
cases, received impartially, glowingly their share. His bedside manners
were truly consoling and his warm handclasp, his reassuring pat on
the shoulder made a visit to his office something to look forward to.
In fact just seeing Doctor Bruckner made his patients feel that with
his help they were not in any immediate danger of leaving this vale
of tears for a world which, though they had always been assured was
a better one, they had a singular distaste to entering. And then his
gentle way with suffering children. Doctor Hermann Bruckner, specialist
for women and children, was born to do just what he was doing.
But when he got home that flowing, busy life of his would suddenly
stop, turn back chokingly upon itself, obstructing his every thought
and feeling; for though Mizzi was unspeakably bored by him, she
couldn't let him alone. The very sight of his pleasant face, the easy
way he had of letting his six feet settle into an armchair, the slow
smoking of his Trabuco, in some extraordinary, always unexpected way,
would give rise to reproaches; never a moment when he could sit at
ease after a hard day's work and talk about pleasant things, little,
unimportant things. He never could tell just what would unbind Mizzi's
tongue or uncork her temper. He made an easy living and they could have
had many pleasures, but Mizzi was always wanting the one thing that the
hour had not brought. It was considered by the family that Hermann had
a hard time of it, that it was unfortunate that Mizzi was as she was,
and Hermann, for reasons in the beginning not at all related to his own
being, was now generally called by his relations "poor Manny."
They didn't realize any of them, that Mizzi was a woman of great
natural energy which had no outlet, and that that was one of the
reasons why the small supply of the milk of human kindness with which
her Maker had provided her, had early soured. She got quite stout, but
in her smart Austrian way, and each year became more easily annoyed
and controlled her irritation less. Even the war which opened out
activities to so many women had helped Mizzi not at all. She hated
misery, disorder in any form and the sight of blood made her sick. She
was inexpressibly bored by the whole thing and always spoke of it as
"dumm."
When the War claimed Doctor Bruckner he was a very tall,
broad-shouldered, deep-chested man. His mobile, smiling face was
ennobled by his prominent, but finely-formed nose and his very
black beard and moustache gave his whole person a last significant
accent. When the War had no further use for him and passed him into
the still more pitiless arms of the Peace, he was broken, disabled,
derelict, meaningless even. He reminded himself of a train wreck he
had seen near Lodz in the beginning, the telescoped cars, the messy,
shapeless débris.... That last month at Gorizia a bomb had fallen into
his field-hospital. It had solved effectually the problems of his
wounded, but it had increased his own. His right arm which had been
shattered and hurriedly attended to, now hung nerveless in his sleeve.
Mizzi's heart and temper had been briefly softened at the sight of
his misfortunes; they were so evidently complete. His helplessness,
however, soon induced a new note in her voice; one of condescension and
later of hard, unveiled impatience.
Finally neurasthenia, on the track of so many, claimed him for its
own. He developed a bad case of agoraphobia--could scarcely ever go
through open spaces without a discomfort that amounted at times to
agony, and Vienna seemed full of wide, open places. He would creep
along walls, close to houses and doors, but when it came to crossing
the street, unless, indeed, it were full of vehicles his eyes would
sink and darken, his nostrils get blue and pinched. It was but one
of various things,--that intolerably stupid going back and touching
objects a second even a third time on his bad days, that continual
putting on and taking off his coat when he was dressing, sometimes he
was hours getting into his clothes, and other equally asinine matters.
He still went to his office, across the hall,--but a one-armed,
neurasthenic doctor! Half the patients who came needed something done
that could only be done with two hands. His clientèle dwindled till
mostly the poor alone came. To them he was an angel of mercy. But they
made another complication. Mizzie hated the poor in any form, even the
new poor, who had once been rich and whom she had envied in the old
days, and when the quite thin pity engendered by his futile return had
evaporated, she was constantly reproaching him for having a clientèle
to whom he couldn't or wouldn't send bills. Hermann's life became a new
kind of hell from which there seemed to be no more escape than from
the final place of punishment. But for all Mizzi's unpleasant conjugal
traits she was, as we have indicated, a woman of ability. She stepped
out, on his return, when her practical sense showed her that the family
fortunes in Hermann's hand would inevitably go from bad to worse, to
retrieve them; and she did.
She boldly opened a lingerie shop, and with her good taste, her
industry, her heartlessness and her voice soft as honey to customers,
she soon began to do quite well. Fanny had advanced the necessary loan
and sent her the first customers who brought others in their train.
She developed an unsuspected talent for selling. Naturally impatient
she was accommodating to the last degree in her shop. She took back
things that had been paid for and returned the money with a smile. She
exchanged things, she adjusted things. She could always be counted
on to have extra sizes for the dark, stout, often bearded ladies who
patronized her in increasing numbers. They generally had the most
elemental of underwear, thick, machine-made garments, with machine-made
lace and terrible pink bows; some had none at all.
Mizzi initiated them into the pleasant mysteries of transparent
"dessous," real lace-trimmed and beribboned in delicate shades. And
they had money. "Jesus, Marie, Joseph!" Mizzi would often exclaim,
"what money! Great wads of it!"
Mizzi had a way of loosening their thick, high corsets and pulling them
down, thereby dropping those shelves of flesh from under their chins,
and with her cunningly-made brassières, those famous "Bustenhalter"
that reduced the mountains of fat, or at least distributed them towards
the back where the owners themselves couldn't see them, she was
especially successful. "Taktvoll kaschieren," tactfully conceal, was
what she modestly claimed to do with superfluous fat. Being inclined to
embonpoint herself, fostered by her love of the truly tempting sweet
dishes of her native land, yet having that smart, pleasing figure, she
could say confidently to the stoutest:
"I'm a good deal thicker than you are, and look at me!"
They looked at Mizzi in her impeccable loose black dress over her
snugly-worn corset and were both delighted and convinced. Mizzi's
business was inevitably destined to go from good to still better, just
as Hermann's was dwindling to those so begrudged office hours for the
very poor, now his only treasure.... His aunt Ilde, thought secretly
that Hermann must be greatly loved by his Creator to have been found
worthy of so many misfortunes.... He only occasionally took money
for his services and except for a few crowns spent in a certain café
sitting before his beer or his coffee, reading the newspaper, talking
to a chance acquaintance, or oftener just thinking, thinking, he
turned what little he did make back again, a pitiful drop, into the
river of black and fatal misery that flowed through his office.
Mizzi had something quite ruthless about her. Openly and cordially
disliking the poor in general and poor relatives in particular, the
last thing she would have thought of was having one of these latter
come to her regularly for a meal. But when Fanny sent old Maria to ask
if she could have Tante Ilde for dinner on Wednesday, or to choose
some other day if that wasn't convenient, though she had thought it a
monstrous nuisance, that day being no more convenient than any other of
the days of the week, she had said "Yes" in a voice gone quite white
from lack of enthusiasm. But, Fanny,--she couldn't afford to offend
Fanny....
The establishment once known as "Hermann's" was now known as "Mizzi's."
She had suggested his giving up his office and renting out the rooms to
Americans who would pay in dollars. They could make a "heathen money"
that way. But so strange, so terrifying was the look that had come into
his face that Mizzi for once had quailed before it. She hadn't felt
safe and anyway Fanny probably wouldn't have stood for it.
Her dream was to have a smart shop at Carlsbad. She had awakened to
a brief political interest when she found that almost overnight the
Czechs had become, unaccountably, the darlings of those against whom
they had so recently fought, and later she discovered that Carlsbad
was filled with victorious foreigners who turned their gold joyfully
into Czechish crowns and she was forever comparing the rising Czech
currency with the descending Austrian, and was visibly impatient
at the senseless fact that the war had left her, a perfectly good
Czecho-Slovak, high and dry in Vienna as the wife of a crippled
Austrian. There wasn't any sense in anything, and Mizzi vented
mercilessly her dissatisfaction on Hermann.
She was always thinking to herself and often proclaiming openly that
Hermann was "dumm, but dumm," as little of a "Nutznieser" as anyone
ever had the bad luck to be married to. With even the slightest sense
of values, he ought to have got something out of the war. Privately
Mizzi adored profiteers. But Hermann wasn't made that way.
In the end, he got tired of hearing what his father-in-law would
have done in this, that or the other case. That canny Czech, Ottokar
Maschka, had, unfortunately for Mizzi, died just as he was about
to gather in the fruits of his labors, and when Mizzi married the
promising young Viennese doctor the only visible goods she brought with
her was the furniture with which they furnished their home; large,
solid, comfortable pieces of mahogany and maple, and a lot of linen.
But all that Mizzi had long since changed. Mizzi was a forward looker
and liked to keep up with, when she couldn't run ahead of, the styles.
She had a flair about novelties that was to stand her in good stead.
Hermann had ineffectually protested when she got rid, bit by bit, of
the furnishings of the parental house. The only good thing about it
all was that it kept her busy. But when he found himself sleeping in
a narrow grey bed with conventionalized lotus flowers in low relief,
one at the head and one at the foot, he felt himself completely and
forever a stranger in that house. Then, too, the new chairs were
extraordinarily uncomfortable, the tables small, while the pale mauve
upholstery gave him a continual sense of being in a warehouse glancing
over things he had no intention of buying....
The small shop in the Plankengasse, with the tiniest but smartest of
show windows, was near enough the thoroughfares to be accessible and
not as expensive as the Graben, the Kärntnerstrasse or the Kohlmarkt.
Little by little Mizzi was wriggling her way into that world of the
new dispensation, peopled by the acquisitive wives, daughters, and
"friends" of profiteers,--that full, loud, clanking, overfed world,
that world of people mad to possess at last what "the others" had so
long possessed. Theirs was the world of plenty. The promised land
indeed. She was happier than she had ever been before. Her activities
had full scope. She had no heart to bleed over the miseries of the
starving city and she felt herself getting a really firm foothold in
that "Schieber" world of every tradesman's desire. That "First Society"
in whose uprisings and outgoings she had once delighted, in the
reflection of whose splendors she, with the rest of the worthy burghers
of Vienna, had once proudly shone, was gone, its glory the bare shadow
of a shade. For thin, ruined countesses, for economical princesses
Mizzi had no use, only in as much as she could say to the wife of one
of the new lords of creation:
"That's the very dressing gown the poor Countess Tollenberg was so
enchanted with, but not a kreutzer to bless herself with, only such
taste! It made me sad not to let her have it, but now I'm consoled, for
you, dear, gracious lady, it's just the thing." And the "dear, gracious
lady" would fall for it with a golden crash.
Yes, Mizzi was doing well and intended to do better. When she wasn't
selling, she was buying, like others in Vienna, who had little or much
cash in their pockets, trying to imprison the vanishing value of money
into objects that would remain visible, buying anything in fact that
wouldn't melt before their eyes. They called all this "Sachwerthe,"
real value. For the antics of money were extraordinary, no one realized
that better than Mizzi. No matter how carefully you guarded it, the
next day it was less, was gone. You couldn't store it up any more than
you could daylight.
* * * * *
As Tante Ilde that Wednesday noon was about to cross the
Revolutionsplatz, once the Mozartplatz, overlooked by the Jockey Club,
the Archduke Friedrich's Palace, the Opera and Sacher's Hotel, (the
last two alone continuing to fulfill their ancient uses) she caught
sight of a tall, familiar form hesitating by a lamp post. It was her
nephew Hermann, evidently about to cross the street. He stood so long
by the post that she easily caught up with him.
"Manny!" she cried and touched him on the arm, but he turned towards
her a face so strange that she was suddenly very frightened. Great
beads of perspiration stood on his brow, about his mouth; his eyes were
sunken, his nostrils blue and pinched.
"Auntie dear, you've come at the right moment. I can't," he hesitated,
a look of agony and shame on his face, "get across alone. Give me your
arm. I was waiting till some wagons came along. It's easier then. Don't
say anything about it to Mizzi. She doesn't understand," he ended
entreatingly. Bending, he passed his hand through her arm and with a
tightening of his body, slowly crossed the street, then kept close by
the houses, as far away from the curb as possible.
"You see," he said with difficulty, "I'm quite done for," tears stood
in his dark, kind eyes. "And I'm not going to die either," he added,
"I've seen so many others go just where I'm going."
"Manny, Manny, you'll get better. You must get better. Think of all
the good you do!" his aunt cried at last out of her grief for him. She
hadn't been able to say a word at first, only pressed more closely
against his side.
"All the good I do!" he laughed bitterly and stood quite still in the
street and couldn't seem to stop laughing.
What was happening to Manny, dear, kind, loving Manny? He made her even
sadder than Kaethe. Where could he get help? Perhaps Fanny ... they'd
been such a loving brother and sister. Perhaps if he could take a trip,
somewhere, anywhere....
They were proceeding at a snail's pace. Hermann's step had no life in
it. Frau Stacher began to be afraid they would be late and tried to
hurry him a little, but he continued to move mechanically with that
sort of heavy dip, and didn't seem to notice her hurry.
As they reached the house he pointed to his name in black letters on
the white porcelain sign, and then looked at her with a trembling of
the lips just as he used to do when he was a little boy and had some
childish grief.
"When I remember all the happy years ... why, I thought I was going
to heal the world," he said slowly, "and now"--then he added, suddenly
anxious too, "I hope we're not late."