doorway. It would be a calamity to be late. Mizzi could generate about
her a thick, cold, opaque atmosphere when she was displeased that could
take away the appetite or impede the digestion of a starving person.
They both knew that it wouldn't at all do to be late, and in spite of
age and disabilities they made quite a dash up the stairs.
Mizzi kept a servant and kept her busy. No "Faulenzers" in her house.
Gretl instantly opened the door, then quickly resumed her occupation
of setting the table, putting a pleasant, soft-looking little bread at
each place.
Mizzi, sitting up very straight in a mauve arm chair, was measuring
with a tape measure lengths of pale shining French ribbons, billowing
over a little grey table. She was a woman in the early thirties, with
dark eyes inclining to opacity, abundant dark hair and an agreeable,
smooth, rather bright complexion, pleasant enough to look at, though
her features were negligible. She held herself very erect, even as
she sat there was no lolling or relaxing, and when she stood that
full, smart figure of hers was impressive, even commanding. Pauli who
detested her, said she ought to have been a midwife, though perhaps
in that he was unjust to the profession; but it was undeniable that
Mizzi had an eye that in a few years would, as he had further remarked,
have no more expression than a hard boiled egg confronted with arriving
mortality.
The little table was drawn up by the window with its lavender hangings
striped yellow by light and years, and held back by faded ribbons. It
was all quite different from the smart freshness of the shop where was
Mizzi's heart. Between the windows was a picture of the Prague Gate and
in rummaging about she had unearthed, for less than a song, a fine old
engraving of Wallenstein conspiring at Pilsen. Where could one find a
more loyal Czecho-Slovak than Mizzi Bruckner, bound hand and foot to
Austria?--Till she got to that little shop in Carlsbad, over how many
dead bodies she cared not--that little shop especially designed for
easing foreigners of their golden loads, that she was unswervingly
headed towards and would inevitably reach.
As they entered aunt and nephew gave each other an involuntary look of
relief. They had made it.
"Well, Tante Ilde, how are you?" Mizzi asked amiably enough as she
looked up, but there was something steely in her tone. She had no
objection to Tante Ilde, except that Tante Ilde was so definitely, and
it was easy to prophesy, permanently in the class of poor relations,
and to such a certain tone came spontaneously to her voice. No trace
of the sugary accents that she used in speaking to the large, dark
women who made commerce take its only steps in the paralyzed city. She
was polite, but she was cold beyond the power of any thermometer to
register. Of her husband, Mizzi took not the slightest notice.
Frau Stacher felt something shrink and shrivel in her. A shameful
consciousness of being very poor, of being very old, of being very
useless tinted her pale cheeks.
She hadn't wanted to come to Mizzi's. She had known that she would feel
just that way if she did. They all knew about Mizzi, hard as a rock,
somebody for the old, the feeble, the dependent to steer clear of.
Then a thick, smoking lentil soup was put on the table. Some pleasing
suggestion of having been cooked with a ham-bone came from it. In a
quite definite way it changed the atmosphere. Good food in Vienna that
winter could work miracles. Natural and unnatural antipathies would
melt as dew before the morning sun when enemies found themselves seated
together at a full table.
Mizzi herself underwent a subtle change and she was nearly smiling as
they sat down. Hermann was still pale, but the blue look had gone from
his nostrils, the sweat about his brow and mouth had dried. Tante Ilde
was permeated by the delightful sensations of the hungry person about
to be filled.... The nose, the eyes, then the first mouthful....
The soup quite fulfilled the expectations awakened by its odor. Mizzi
never had materials wasted through poor cooking in her house. She
always got the best available and this last maid had a light hand.
Mizzi had turned one girl after another away till she got the pearl for
which she was looking.
The repast, as far as her own feelings went, proved a surprise to
Mizzi, though she didn't analyze the increasingly pleasant sensation
that animated her as the conversation got easier and easier. Mizzi
didn't for an instant, suspect that that despised, poor relation was
distilling about her an odor suaver than that of the lentil soup, even
with its suggestion of ham-bone.
By the time the herrings, and the potatoes boiled in their skins, and
actually served with butter were put on, Mizzi was in full flood of
conversation; her tongue was hung easily anyway, quite in the middle.
During the soup, she had been distinctly grand with Tante Ilde, the
immensely superior lady bountiful dispensing mercies, but Tante Ilde
was so greatly and so genuinely interested in the shop and asked such
tactful questions, just the sort Mizzi was delighted to answer, that
things got pleasanter and pleasanter. She showed signs of irritation,
howeven when Hermann, not too successfully, tried with his left hand
to separate the meat of his herring from its backbone, and gave an
impatient click of her tongue and cried harshly, "give it here." But
that passed and when the Apfelstrudel was put on, she fell to telling
amusing stories of the unbelievable ways of the various stupid geese,
those wives of profiteers who had, all the same, lead her, Mizzi, out
of the captivity of hunger and cold. She made fun of their horrible
underclothes and told how she changed all that, opening their eyes
to a lot of other things to which they'd evidently been born blind.
Even Hermann got less pale and from time to time looked affectionately
across at his aunt. When they were having their coffee, just as they
used to in the good old days, real mocha, that one of those very
"Schieberinnen" had given her, Mizzi even said quite gently to Hermann:
"Aren't you going to smoke?" Hermann was surprised and grateful
beyond measure. Very little would once have made so soft-hearted a
man as Hermann unduly and permanently grateful. Mizzi, though she
hadn't the slightest idea of it, was continuously responding to the
pleasant harmonies struck from the gentle being of her poor old aunt
by marriage, and when they had drunk the last drop of coffee and were
still enjoying the pleasant memories of the Apfelstrudel, she found
herself saying, somewhat to her own surprise:
"Tante Ilde, come with me, I want to show you the shop. It's time for
me to get back. The girls don't take a stitch while I'm away!"
Then she stepped into the kitchen to put on a plate, for Gretl's
dinner, a head of one of the herrings and two potatoes (the others were
to be saved for salad that evening), and to the amazement of Gretl, she
added a bit of the Strudel, casting at the same time an appraising eye
over what was left and which she certainly expected to find intact on
her return.
Tante Ilde longed to stay with Hermann whose plight was more and more
engaging her thought and sympathy. She had had time while Mizzi was in
the kitchen to press his hand lovingly and to tell him she was going
to Kaethe's tomorrow, and to try to get there too, Kaethe was worrying
about Carli. He had answered listlessly,
"Yes, if I have a fairly decent day. You've seen how hard it is for me
to get about."
Instinctively she had not mentioned the Eberhardts in Mizzi's presence.
It would have darkened her brow and salted unduly the repast. People
that couldn't get a living somehow! Mizzi had no use at all for them.
In some mysterious, but certain way, it was their own fault. Even the
Peace was no excuse in Mizzi's eyes.
When she came back from the kitchen saying briskly, and they realized,
without appeal:
"Well, are you ready, Tante Ilde?" Frau Stacher hastily put on
her coat, that is as hastily as possible. It had tight sleeves and
they always stuck on the little white shawl she wore underneath for
warmth. Mizzi came to the rescue, gave it a poke down the back, a pull
about the shoulders and crossed it over the frail chest with a final
energetic punch that left Frau Stacher breathless. Then she slipped
easily into her own ample coat and turned up its large beaver collar.
But after all Mizzi pleased, Mizzi on the road to success, was not
so terrifying. She was safely diverted out of family discontent by
the pleasantly exciting difficulties and triumphs of her business.
Then, too, those thin, pale girls who sat by the window at the back
of the shop, and worked without looking up when Mizzi was there, were
continual escape-valves.
Even little Tilly with fingers like a fairy, got her share. No one
could tie a bow like Tilly, not even Mizzi herself, and then those
diaphanous garments that she turned out, delicate bits of nothing, the
very stitches themselves were like trimming. Mizzi knew first class
work when she saw it, and she further saw that she got the greatest
amount possible done in the day.
Tilly's mother was dying in a back room, reached by a third stairway
in the court of an old house, and Tilly never answered Mizzi back,
was never "fresh" and it was quite evident that she never dreamed of
giving notice but only of giving satisfaction.
In face of Mizzi's pleasant, flowing briskness that could, however, so
easily curdle into thick displeasure, Tante Ilde, though she longed to
stay, could but say goodbye to Hermann, with a secret pressure of his
hand. For a moment she felt the encircling warmth of his great chest
and shoulders as he bent down to kiss her. Then he sank heavily back
into his chair. She turned at the door for a last sight of him, but
already he was plunged in his thoughts and did not look up again. She
could have wept for Hermann then and there.
As she followed Mizzi down the stairs, they met two young-old women
with pale, head-heavy babies in their arms.
"Manny's patients," said Mizzi who was really a terrible woman, an
abysmal contempt in her voice, "I don't know how I put up with it."
"Manny is very ill," answered Tante Ilde gently.
"Nerves," returned Mizzi promptly, finally. "We'd starve if I hadn't
started in."
"You are a wonder," said Tante Ilde, and quite honestly she thought it
was little short of a miracle, how Mizzi in that dreadful city had not
only wooed but won fortune.
Of course, they all knew that Fanny had started her, but even so she
was a wonder, making money that way. She would survive. It was beings
like Hermann who went under,--gentle, loving, wise, once-strong Hermann.
Her thoughts clung tenaciously to Hermann, slumped down into his chair,
Hermann who hadn't looked back at her. She couldn't know that he had,
for quite a while, been conscious of her loving touch on his arm, and
that he was thinking, "sometime I'll tell Tante Ilde about Marie." Yes,
while he was still able to talk clearly of precious things. It was one
of his worst days. Often on such days he didn't keep his office
hours ... the uselessness of the terrible struggle. In that city of
misery, let a few more die in those black hours before dawn, without
warmth or food or even a match to strike a light that those who loved
them could see them go. He was losing, and was conscious of its
slipping from him, that strong professional feeling of saving life, any
life, just to save it, fulfilling a deep instinct, working according
to habit that was as natural to him as breathing. Sometimes nothing
mattered, not even Mizzi's lash-like tongue on his bare nerves. On
other days, difficult as it was to get over the open places, he would
leave the house quite early in the morning, trying to shake off its
devitalizing atmosphere. There was a café off the Opernring, he didn't
have to cross the Ring itself to get to it, where they knew him and
his little ways; sometimes he would sit for hours at a certain table
watching the coming and going.
But that morning he'd got there too early; it was still deserted and
he had been witness to certain dismal preparations for the day. A
pale woman in damp, thin garments was washing up the floor, ends of
burnt-out matches and cigarettes were piled in a corner, in a little
heap on a chair were a few carefully collected cigar ends. The pikkolo
under the emphatic direction of a waiter was brushing off the billiard
table, the Tarok games were being laid out, the newspapers put into
their holders. The pikkolo, who put one in upside down, had forthwith
received a box on the ear from the waiter, supplemented by a kick on
that part of his undersized person where, however, it would be least
injurious; but his reaction was not against the donor of these morning
favors, but rather induced the consoling thought that if he ever got to
be head-waiter he would return it with interest to whatever pikkolo was
then about.
The arrival, a bit late, of the buffet Fräulein, with her blond hair
too tightly crimped, too thickly puffed, started things at a more
lively gait. A pale lavender tint lay over her face--the hair bleach,
the rice powder, the long hours in the crowded room. Energetically she
proceeded to count out a few lumps of sugar, unlocked noisily from
behind the counter; then she looked scrutinizingly at the liqueur
and fruit-juice bottles, holding them up to the light, her pale eye
appraising the exact condition of their contents.
One by one frequenters of the café began to come in, dissipating more
and more the forlornness of the place, wiping their feet on the wire
mat, putting their bulging umbrellas into the stand, hanging up their
dull hats, sitting down in their overcoats, taking packages of paper
money from their pockets and putting them on the table just as if it
weren't money. Finally the café was quite full and Hermann sitting
before his empty cup, smoking and watching apathetically the familiar
sights, became conscious of the passage of time. He remembered that
Tante Ilde was coming to dinner that day and he wondered what Fanny
could have said to make the arrangement possible, it was so unlike
Mizzi. Then he looked at his watch and saw with immense relief that
he still had a little time, ... a calamity to be even that short
distance from home, ... he hoped he'd get back, ... sometime probably
he wouldn't. He had been thinking all that morning with an obsessing,
nightmarish horror of something that had happened to him in his own
office the day before.... Because a pale, uncertain-yeared woman
had had nose-bleed, he had been overcome by a horrible nausea, an
intolerable, hitherto unknown feeling in the pit of his stomach.
Why, he had seen blood, felt blood, smelt blood, worked swiftly,
calmly in blood against time and death--and now a pale woman with
a nose-bleed.... He'd had to go into the inner office.... It was
unbelievable that just _that_ could happen to him. Then after she had
gone, after they all had gone, he sat thinking about it and he had
laughed terribly, loudly, and then trembled and wept and Mizzi on the
other side of the landing knew nothing about it, no one knew, no one
must ever know just _that_. Yes, he was going very fast. He knew it
himself; knew that he was headed for the madhouse, as straight even as
towards death. Some day he'd do something of a sort that nobody had any
right to do. Often he would awake, icy cold, at the fear of what he
might do. He couldn't imagine at all what it would be, but something
that people who were dwelling freely among their fellowmen were not
allowed to do--and rightly....
Sometimes his thoughts would turn with nostalgic longing to the gay,
full years of his student-life; those busy years as intern at the
Allgemeine Krankenhaus. The luck he'd had when old Professor Schulrath
but a year before his death, had taken him as assistant.... The eager
beginnings of his own private practice; that unforgettable thrill the
first time he had seen his shingle hanging outside his own door....
Pride bound up with a hot intention to conquer misery, pain, death
even. Soon he had found himself fully launched on the tide of an
ever-swelling general practice. Then one Sunday at Pauli's he had met
Mizzi,--full-bosomed, soft-voiced Mizzi, underneath as hard as a rock,
as cruel as the grave, crueller than the grave....
That whole first year of the war he had been among those detailed for
general duty in the great city. Afterwards, the civilian population
was left to be born or die as best it could. Every available physician
was rushed to the front. The mortality among the wounded had become
too great. Poor fellows sent back from one or the other fronts would
sometimes have been two or three weeks in their uniforms, still in
their first-aid bandages, or not bandaged at all; and when they got to
Vienna after the torture of their transport in springless luggage-vans,
there was often little to be done for them except bury them in those
great mounds that grew and grew as the hospitals eased themselves of
their dead. It had to be managed less wastefully. Lives were to be
saved that they might be thrown again into the struggle....
He had partaken of the tragic, senseless exaltation that able-bodied
men everywhere were experiencing on starting for the front.... Then
deliverance from the carping tongue of Mizzi; the simplest things more
and more caused her to fly unexpectedly up in the air like a rocket;
there would be a sputtering and something would darken and go out.
These were among the reasons why Hermann had settled back in the
motor that day and with a laugh set out for the front. But there was
something else that none of them had known about, that then, that now,
was always in his mind, in his heart, in every fibre of his being. Even
when he was watching the most indifferent things, such as the buffet
Fräulein that very morning,--he didn't need to be alone--suddenly _she_
would be with him and fling her lost radiance around him once again,
and wrap him up into that magnetic world of longing for the might have
been. He wouldn't hear the "wer giebt," "Pagat," "an' dreier" of the
Tarok players, or the rustling of newspapers being turned on their
sticks, or the "Sie, Ober," or the "Pikkolo, du dummer,"--_she_ was
always more real than anything else, ... even at the café, when he
would be holding the _Neue Freie Presse_ and pretending to read. She
was everywhere and all. Even as he dropped back in that chair, with
Tante Ilde's touch still warm upon his arm and his eyes apparently
fixed on the quite uninteresting enlarged and colored photograph of
Mizzi's dead father, (Mizzi, year by year was getting to be his very
image, with that hint of moustache) he was thinking only of her--Marie.
* * * * *
That January of 1915, one windy, icy twilight, he had had a hurry call
from the Elizabethspital and had put off many patients still waiting
and closed his office.
Before he got to the gate of the hospital grounds, out in the street
even, he found row upon row of stretchers laid down low upon the earth,
bearing shattered forms whose silence was more terrible than groans;
their grey cloaks were wrapped about them, their poor boots, in which
they had marched to destruction at the word of command, were mostly
tied to the handles.... Pale faces, bandaged heads, arms crossed on
their breasts or inert by their sides, under their capes.... Raised but
a foot from the ground where the stretcher bearers had deposited them
they looked already like their own graves, as grey, as voiceless. Yet
the biting cold of that windy twilight was heavily charged with their
unuttered groans.
Within the hospital it was still the same. The corridors were blocked.
Outside the douche rooms they waited for their turn. At last clean,
sheet-covered, they waited again at the door of the operating room.
He had met Marie von Sternberg that very evening ... so quiet, so deft,
her pale blue eyes so compassionate under her heavy, dark brows and
lashes, her jaw so nobly strong, her hands so beautiful in spite of the
discoloration of acids and disinfectants. He had suddenly noticed her
hands as she was passing him a probe.
But he hadn't looked at her face then, it was only some hours
after,--not even in a pause, for still the men were being brought
in,--when a young, yellow-haired Tirolese had been put on the table.
As Doctor Bruckner bent over him, he had cried out in a loud voice
"Mother" and had suddenly given up his youthful ghost. Then Doctor
Bruckner found that he was looking full into the blue eyes, so heavily
lashed, so darkly circled, of the woman at his side. He saw there a
spark of the same everlasting pity that flamed in his own. They hadn't
said anything even then, for quickly the youth had been carried away
and his place had been filled by a swarthy family man from one of the
Slavic Crownlands, his wedding ring still hanging about the finger of
his mangled hand. Hermann had never forgotten either of those two men,
for in between them was set, like a jewel in death and pain, that look
that he and Marie von Sternberg had exchanged.
All that winter, that winter of his content, of his happiness, they
breathed the same air, did the same work, to the same end. Those
afternoon hours had been, quite strangely, enough for happiness. In
the early summer she had been sent to the Russian front. When he was
mobilized she was still there, and that was the true reason why he was
laughing the day he left Vienna. A thousand miles of battle-field and
ruined towns might lie between them; then again she, like himself,
might be sent where the need was greatest, their roads could easily
converge. He hoped blindly, confidently from the war; all his hope was
in its vicissitudes.
Then one evening, after the fiery setting of a hard, red sun over a
scorched, interminable plain, the dim air thick with odors of blood
and death, cut now and then feebly by disinfectants used not too
generously, as he stood outside that hospital tent, thinking of her,
longing desperately for her, a quick, light step approached, he heard
her voice:
"Hermann, it is I."
And all the dust and fatigue, the blood and agony that covered his
body and his spirit fell away and turning he had cried out her name in
straining passion.
They had embraced in such deep longing that they seemed to be lost out
of time and space ... to be together, even for that minute ... even in
that way....
The battle-field with its dreadful débris had seemed to Hermann
Bruckner like some paradisaical garden.... And those glorified days of
September, October that followed, the unit keeping up as best it could
with the great army throwing its roads and bridges across the Pripet
marshes....
Then one day she had had fever; two degrees only, but suddenly she
had sickened terribly, sickened hopelessly, and died immediately of
typhus.... Hermann who had hung over her hadn't taken it, but he
hadn't been able to live or die since. He'd just gone from bad to
worse; he'd done his work, yes, that was what was left; she would have
been doing hers if he had died....
But after Gorizia, he had known it was all over with him, as a man that
is; as a poor hulk of flesh and blood and bones and nerves, oh, there
were perhaps many years waiting for him. Sometimes when he looked at
his nerveless arm he remembered how warm and firm his clasp had been in
hers, hers in his.... There were so many things to think of before he
ceased to remember.... Rarely her spirit visited him in that house of
Mizzi's.... But in his office continually he found her, sometimes in
each ailing, miserable body he seemed to find her, beautiful and of an
endless pity. Oh, he needed her. Even without his arm, _that_ way it
would have been all right. Something could always be done if the will
is there.... But without her he no longer willed anything.
Yes, he was very ill, but not in a way to die. Death might not come to
him till he had forgotten everything, even Marie....
Mizzi was like a sharp point in his being. She had worn sore spots all
over him, and strangely from Mizzi he must receive that which would
keep his will-less breath in his useless body....
But Mizzi really knew nothing about her husband, indeed never had known
anything about him, beyond his name and age and personal appearance
and a few of his habits. Now he weighed a thousand tons upon her life.