then, very quickly, the other. Hunger, she knew about it, all about it.
This was something different and she was getting warm.
The silence that fell somewhat heavily upon the room, was broken by
Hansi recounting to his father, boastfully, stoutly, what they had had
for dinner and smacking his lips and showing him the colored picture
from the package of "feinste Keks"; then how Carli hadn't wanted his
rice and how they had had that too.
"Carli isn't well today," said Kaethe, "he seems so languid, but he's
asleep now. He dropped off as soon as he had had his milk."
"I'm coming every Thursday," put in Tante Ilde comfortably at this
point. She was feeling quite happy, almost joyous. "Fanny," she added
in an aside, "sent word by Maria that I was always to get enough for
everybody!"
Eberhardt flushed slightly but made no answer. Lilli and Resl were
getting on their coats. As Lilli again put on her mother's old black
cloak over her blue dress it was as if a snuffer had been put over
a light,--a white, blue and gold light. Her father was content that
it was so. About Resl they didn't worry. There was something strong,
inevitable about her, even in those young years. She was clearly one
who would get through. She was very like her mother, but behind that
soft, dark resemblance was something steely that Kaethe had never had.
Things were always happening to Resl,--pleasant things. Those
bright-dark eyes of hers, that round, smiling face that somehow kept
its roundness through all those terrible winters, had something
compelling about it. An American woman on one of the relief committees
had seen Resl on a windy day looking into a delicatessen shop, and had
taken a fancy to her. She had given her a meal a day for two months,
and shoes and other things, often something to take home, then she
had passed out of Resl's orbit into new circles of want. Another time
coming home from school, Resl had stopped to swell the crowd around a
smashed taxicab, and some one had cried, "Do look at that bright-eyed
little girl!" and had given her a ten shilling note,--just like
that! She hadn't understood what they said, but their smiles that
she promptly returned and the money that she dashed home with were
perfectly intelligible. Once she had found a gold piece in the street,
when she and Lilli were going along together; of course she had been
the one to find it. Lilli when she saw Resl pick it up, had hoped that
it had been dropped by some very rich person, instead of by some one
who hadn't anything else. To Resl, however, such fears were unknown,
she would always take unquestioningly whatever goods the gods provided.
Tante Ilde was telling them about the woman who had grabbed the milk
out of her very hand, and Hansi was saying with his chest out and his
eyes ablaze,
"I'd have beaten her well, Tante Ilde," when they heard a scream from
the next room,--a terrible scream, despair and supplication were in it.
Eberhardt and Tante Ilde rushed in followed by the children, Marichi
stayed behind, cowering again. That scream had something frighteningly
familiar about it.
Kaethe was holding Carli up to the window, where the light shone full
on his baby face ... quite gently, quite easily, Carli had slipped from
them leaving only his little waxen image.
* * * * *
Throughout that long night Tante Ilde kept miserably repeating to
herself: "A child came in, a child went out," finding herself in a
confusion of faith and doubt dark as the night that lay about her.
Irma was confirmed in her opinion that charity was dangerous.
VI
CORINNE
_A la Sourdine_
Das Herz ist ein weites Land.
But towards morning Frau Stacher's heart threw off its sorrow; she had
suddenly felt its weight leaving her breast, why or how she did not
know, for there in that distant house whence Carli had forever gone one
she loved was still weeping. Perhaps she was done with grief,--long
grief.
She was strangely all love that morning after the night of tears. Love
emanated from her with a gentle radiance and played about her warmly.
She loved even Irma. Even Irma who on account of her nerves couldn't
bear to see that fine, soft light in her sister-in-law's eyes. An
unreasonable, unseasonable light given the fact that one child had been
reft away and another might as easily be taken. She should properly
have been creeping about with her spirit quenched, instead of looking
almost happy. It struck Irma, who was inaccessible to metaphysical
changes, even as unseemly, and she proceeded to extinguish it,
somewhat as a wet finger on the flame of a candle.
"Corinne today, but who's taking you tomorrow?" she asked flatly,
meanly. Irma had a way, well tabulated in the family, of getting over
pleasant spots at the quickest pace possible.
"Tomorrow," Tante Ilde answered, the light in her eye indeed put
out, but her face quite pink as she stepped into the kitchen to put
the broom, worn down to its wooden handle, back in its dingy corner,
"Tomorrow," she continued resolutely as she reappeared, "I'm going to
Fanny's."
"To Fanny's!" echoed Irma blankly and started to cry "I find it
disgraceful!" But she stopped quite short as a thought came to her....
The easy way to do a hard thing. A little more of _that_ money! What
did she care? She wanted Ferry to live.
"Won't you tell Fanny about Ferry?" she began again, but gently, almost
imploringly.
There was a long pause, in which the thick-boned figure of the woman
her brother had loved loomed up before her in an imperative, almost
menacing attitude as she waited for the answer. She had been bending
closely over the hemstitching she was to finish that day for Mizzi. She
had large, square-shaped hands, but she held deftly and delicately the
diaphanous trifle that Mizzi would sell to some thick lady. Now she
laid it down and took off her glasses, showing her eyes very strained.
Her face seemed to broaden, her cheek bones to get higher, the spot of
color on her cheeks was dyed deeper, harder. Everything was accented
about Irma in that minute. Even the red of the little, fringed,
three-cornered shawl was like life-blood spilled over her shoulders
as she waited for her sister-in-law to answer and there was something
increasingly minatory about her.
Strange, Frau Stacher was thinking, that Heinie should have desired
her, Heinie almost an old man. But she couldn't really reason about
such things, certainly not in that pause. Her thoughts had wandered
because she was feeling quite dizzy and then, of course, she would
do it. Irma might have known that. Those three boys had to be helped
somehow into manhood, according to their needs. A generation lay
between the two women, yet for a moment Irma, with that ancient
mother-fierceness in her face, seemed the elder. She continued staccato:
"Ferry's got to go to the mountains. Fanny can send him if she will.
Fanny's rich. Fanny's in the only good business for women in Vienna."
Frau Stacher felt the blood rush to her face. But it was pity for Irma
that suddenly reddened her cheeks rather than shame for Fanny. All the
pity of her heart for a moment spent itself lavishly on that unloved
sister-in-law.
"It's one of the reasons I'm going--for Ferry. I'd thought of it too,
and tomorrow you know it is Fanny who is taking us all--with Carli,
to the cemetery," she answered finally with an immense gentleness. In
her heart she handed that business of Fanny's to God, and she hoped He
wouldn't take His price for it.
Irma suddenly broke into wild weeping.
"Don't speak to me about Carli again. I can't bear it. _My_ Ferry, _my_
son, _my_ first born, _he_ must live."
Then she tried to stop weeping. Those hot, salty tears that were
scalding and dimming her eyes were an indulgence she could ill afford.
"Tell Fanny everything about Ferry, help him not to go where Carli has
gone," and she stepped quite close to her sister-in-law, her hands
clasped. "You are truly good," she found herself unexpectedly, even
softly, ending.
Then Frau Stacher, warm with a love that was not for Irma, but whose
warmth spread infinitely, embraced her, saying:
"Don't weep, Irma, we'll surely arrange about our Ferry."
The two women spoke no more. Irma's sobs turned into long, quivering
sighs and her sister-in-law soon after slipped out.
Somewhat reproachfully the thought came to Irma that Tante Ilde did,
perhaps, bring a blessing into the house and that she, Irma, had
needlessly wiped away the look of happiness on her face. They all
knew that she adored Corinne. Why couldn't she have let her have her
pleasure, which was certainly not costing her, Irma, anything? And
she remembered how broken her look and voice had been as she told
about Carli the day before. Then repentantly almost, she thought that,
after all, Tante Ilde couldn't be comfortable in that little alcove,
though as she didn't know about the need of being alone, she couldn't
understand just how uncomfortable. Then she thought that she would not
ask her to draw back the curtains. She even fell to planning how when
Ferry went away she would put Gusl to sleep in the alcove and give the
little room to his aunt. Hermann had terrified her by saying that Gusl
ought not to sleep any longer with Ferry,--was it really as bad as
that? That was one of the things that made it a further nuisance having
Tante Ilde. Then suddenly with the whole wild strength of her being,
the strength of untamed generations living by the wild Plitvicer Lakes,
she thrust her arms out and would have burst the too-narrow walls of
that dwelling, made room, room, the way one had room there where she
was born--out of the terrible city.
* * * * *
Frau Stacher got out to find the sun shining on the slippery streets,
still covered, from the cold rain of the night, with a thin, glass-like
substance. She went cautiously, slowly along. From St. Stephen's
half-past eleven was sounding. She had plenty of time. Then she became
aware again of a new and evil discomfort that had made itself felt
from time to time that morning; not at all the usual undernourished,
discouraged feeling, but as if something inimical, foreign to her body,
had got into her circulation; unpleasant little shivers kept running
up and down her back. She was relieved, however, for the moment of the
weight of her penury. Corinne truly loved her. Corinne truly wanted
her to live. She knew _that_, knew it as she knew that she existed.
Corinne, lovely, loving Corinne. She could have sung a hymn to her.
She crossed the Revolutionsplatz. It was still a little too early to
go to the restaurant Zur Stadt Brunn where she was to meet Corinne
at noon,--and perhaps find herself alone in the restaurant with her
empty purse, if anything happened to prevent Corinne from coming. No,
she couldn't have borne any such "blamage." She was timid about so
many of the most usual things. She then crossed the Lobkowitz Place,
looking, for an unrelated instant, up at the Lobkowitz Palace--long the
French Embassy. She had once been used to read eagerly about Royalty
and the "First Society" going to receptions there, their titles, their
decorations, their gowns, and how their jewels shone in the great
marble ballroom;--now past, all past--both for them to do and for
her to enjoy. She slipped falteringly down the street to go into the
Augustinian Church. She wanted to pray for Corinne,--that Corinne might
have her happiness. But Corinne's happiness was a tangled affair.
Corinne's happiness could only come through Anna's death, and how wish
the death of any being? As she knelt down she found that she had to put
from her the thought that human destinies resemble hot peas jumping
about in a pan,--no more meaning than that. Then her heart repented the
wickedness of her thought and she was able to put it from her, and to
pray that, as it was quite evident that she, Ildefonse Stacher, could
not be trusted with a little happiness, the Lord might in some way
trust Corinne with it. Then she prayed for Carli, though Carli, bright
among the angels, needed no prayers ... for Kaethe, Leo, Hermann,
Ferry--Fanny.
Her knees were trembling as she knelt, and she felt a deathly cold,
a grey cold, it seemed to her, like that of the stones of the
high-vaulted church. She got up stiffly. Noon was sounding from
the tower as she passed the marble tomb of one of Maria Theresia's
daughters, so beloved by her sorrowing husband. She herself might well
have taken position among the carved, grey, mourning figures that stood
before the entrance to the tomb, so drooping, so shade-like was she.
As she went out the terrible, mumbling old man with sore eyes held
open the door for her; the pale, young cripple who stood by him didn't
move when he saw that spectre of genteel poverty. So many just like
that went in and out of the church. They had no more to give than he
himself....
The sun for a moment was fairly flooding the winter streets; they shone
in bright splashes of wetness. She stepped across the road into the
doorway of the restaurant. To enter a restaurant again! Such a simple
thing, she'd been doing it all her life. She felt like a fish suddenly
thrown back into its own waters.
Corinne was crossing the street. The light was very white and
dazzlingly enveloped her slender, swaying figure. How sweetly, softly
her blue eyes shone as she approached.
"My little Dresden china Auntie!" she cried and kissed her right there
in the doorway. Then they passed in and made their way to a table.
"For three," said Corinne, "a gentleman is coming. Shall we wait a
moment, Auntie dear, before ordering?" she asked as they sat down.
Now the smell of the small, fresh rolls that the waiter was counting
out, somewhat as he would once have counted gold, and three of which he
had put on their table made Frau Stacher suddenly quite faint, but the
feeling was so familiar and she was so happy to be there with Corinne
that she only said:
"But naturally," knowing, too, for whom they waited, and her eyes
looked more deeply into Corinne's than she herself was aware of.
Corinne glanced away with that oblique glance that could veil her
thoughts more completely than fallen lids. She flushed slightly.
When Tante Ilde spoke again it was to say:
"I just missed you last night. I was again at Kaethe's, only a few
minutes after you had gone.... Fanny was there." She leaned heavily
against the table and continued, "I couldn't bear not to go back. We
mustn't weep for Carli," but all the same tears filled her eyes and
Corinne's own were wet.
No, truly she knew one needn't weep for Carli, but she felt so stupidly
weak, there in that warm room with an abundant repast about to be
served to her; she leaned more heavily against the table, she wanted
terribly her soup, but after her way she said nothing and was able to
continue, as she broke off a piece of her roll and began to eat it:
"Kaethe's grieving for Carli just as if he were her only child," and
both childless women, soft as their hearts were, looked at each other
not quite understanding.
"You ought to see the wreath of white roses that Fanny brought and
coffee and cake. She was so sweet. She kissed Kaethe, in that way of
hers ... you know, and when she knelt by Carli she wept as if her heart
was going to break. She was always so fond of children when she was
a girl. She would kneel awhile by Carli and then she would come back
to Kaethe. She kept saying she should have done more, that she was
a wretch, a monster, you know how she is, and it ended by Kaethe's
comforting _her_. I made coffee for them all."
"I thought she'd go when she knew," began Corinne slowly, to add
suddenly as a child, with a wondering look: "Tante Ilde, I don't
understand anything about anything."
Though her aunt returned her gaze there was no answer in it. She didn't
understand the least beginning of anything either.
"I'm going to Fanny's for dinner tomorrow," she said at last picking
up the thought at its only concrete point. And this time there was no
blush in her face. Why always blush about Fanny?
"To Fanny's tomorrow?" Corinne echoed quickly and turned a deep
scarlet, the color flooding her face to disappear under the low brim
of her hat. Tante Ilde at Fanny's! It was the ultimate disorder in
their upset world, the rest of them, yes, any, all of them if need be,
but not Tante Ilde. There was something snow-white about Tante Ilde.
Three score years and ten in a grimy world had left on her no slightest
smirch, and even now in the process of her despoilment she was at times
blindingly white. That whiteness was the one ornament she still wore
and became her exceedingly.
"You can't, you mustn't," said Corinne slowly after a moment.
"I can, I must," answered Tante Ilde firmly, finding herself suddenly
in a new position, far the other side of both good and evil. "She
didn't want me to--at first,--but I begged her so. She brought me back
from Kaethe's in a taxi last night. Corinne, I _knew_ when I went there
again that I was going to be brought back, that I wouldn't have to
walk, though I couldn't know it would be Fanny.... She threw her arms
around me and wept and said she was miserable herself, that she would
be better off dead."
Neither of the two women let themselves wonder what her griefs were ...
Fanny's griefs....
"I thought tomorrow you would go to some nice little café or just buy
something for yourself and eat it at Irma's," continued Corinne lamely
for one so generally adequate.
"Perhaps another time," answered her aunt with an involuntary gesture
of putting the chalice from her as Corinne spoke of Irma. It was her
nearest approach to complaint, but Corinne quite knew what it meant.
"Except for Carli it hasn't _all_ been too bad?" she questioned
entreatingly.
"No, no, indeed, truly. Only I've seen so much, Inny," she answered
saying the baby name for Corinne, so long unused, "so much of--of
human beings," she ended quite detachèdly and her eyes got very wide
and wandered a little.
"Irma is hard, I know," and Corinne put her hand out to find her
aunt's, to hold her attention, "but she has that alcove and I thought,
too, it would be a way to help the boys. I'm always worrying about the
boys, and then it's almost impossible to find a place to lay one's
head."
"The foxes of the earth," began Tante Ilde with a still stranger look
on her face and then stopped.
Corinne was overcome by a quick anguish. Something was hurting her
terribly though she couldn't have said which one of many things, and
her aunt was suddenly as someone she had never known.
Tante Ilde had always had her little phrases and mottoes--but not like
that. "Time brings roses," she would say consolingly to any child who
was unhappy in the old days. "Hard work in youth is sweet rest in old
age," when the boys wouldn't study; and she often reminded the girls
that "Beauty goes, but virtue stays."
"You're looking so pale, darling, you're not ill, are you?" Corinne
asked, after a moment breaking anxiously into that new, disturbing
silence.
"No, just a little cold, my shoulders ache a bit,--then all the tears,"
she answered, "nothing more."
"Are you warmly enough dressed?" pursued Corinne, after another pause
during which her eyes had wandered again to the door.
"Oh, yes, I have on two waists," and she smiled weakly.
"I believe you're faint for food," said Corinne at last, with a
strange, burning look on her face, "we won't wait for Pauli, we'll have
our soup right now," and she called the waiter.
It was still early and few people were in the restaurant, the waiters
mostly standing idly around, smoothing their hair or flicking their
serving napkins about as they talked, but it seemed to Frau Stacher an
eternity before the order was taken and another endless period till the
soup was brought and the waiter poured it hotly, appetizingly from the
smoking metal cup into her plate. The first spoonful did its blessed
work and the palest shade of pink came into her face. It seemed more
delicious than anything she had ever tasted and she pitied all poor
creatures who felt as she had been feeling and were not, like her,
sitting before a steaming plate of bean soup.
"It's the tears and the fatigue, and perhaps a bit of a cold coming
on," thought Corinne as she, too, partook gratefully of her soup,
quite ready for it after her three hours at the bank, working at those
interminable billions that threatened to run into trillions. Life
at the bank was now composed of seemingly countless zeros, orgies of
zeros, and often a fine headache after.
As they took their soup, with what remained of their rolls, they ceased
to mourn for Carli, ... something bright and beautiful that had been
and was no more.... They didn't try either, to look into the wherefores
and whys of Fanny's existence, neither its splendors nor its miseries,
though as Tante Ilde was taking her last spoonful of soup, she leaned
across the table and said, a confidential note in her voice, something
deprecatory too:
"Last night the boys didn't wake up, but Lilli and Resl kept peeping in
at the door while Fanny was there. They followed me into the kitchen
when I was making coffee and asked about 'Tante Fanny;' if I'd noticed
how sweet her furs smelt and if I'd heard how her bracelets tinkled,
she wears a lot of bracelets, broad bands of jewels that jingle and
glitter. Lilli wanted to know who her husband was and Resl said, 'Ssh,
she hasn't any,'" ended Tante Ilde with a sigh. But Corinne had ceased
to listen, inherently fascinating as the theme of Fanny's bracelets
was, for behind that pale waiting she was in a turmoil. Suddenly she
flushed and then as suddenly grew white.
Pauli was standing at the door looking about. In a moment he was beside
them and as he sat down in that eager way of his, life seemed to stream
from him, more than he needed for himself, something overflowing,
always something to give.
He was just as kind to Tante Ilde as to Corinne. She didn't feel a bit
in the way ... for once ... like that. She was again in a world where
given enough to eat and a warm place to eat it in, human beings still
loved and longed for each other, not simply for food and shelter.
A whole cityful of human beings with hearts and brains as well as
stomachs thinking solely about what they were going to eat! It suddenly
seemed a terrible waste to her ... in a world where there was love,
beauty, wisdom, hidden, lost though they might be.
The waiter was standing by them with his pad in his hand waiting for
the ladies to decide or for the gentleman to decide for them. Nothing
like that had happened to Frau Stacher since the winter before she lost
her income. The soup had put new life into her, and if it hadn't been
for that vaguely evil thing she felt in her veins, she would have been
almost her own gentle, pleasing, easy self again.
"Don't look only at the prices, Tanterl," Pauli was saying with his
smile that so easily became a laugh. "How about half a young chicken
with rice for each?" he suggested lavishly, surprised to find it there
on the otherwise meagre list.
"Oh, Pauli, how reckless! If we're going to have _meat_, boiled beef
would be nice." Indeed to Frau Stacher, desperately needing the
stimulus of meat--any kind would have done, though the boiled beef
she humbly suggested didn't inhabit the Paradise where young chickens
abided, eternally cut in two waiting to be cooked and eaten.
"But not at all!" he cried, "we're going to have a feast," and he gave
the order for the chicken and asked for the wine-card, selecting an
Arleberger, that a friend in Budapest made a specialty of.
Tante Ilde felt vaguely, pleasantly like a woman in a romance,
interesting but unreal. It wasn't only the food, but that looking at
the menu and ordering right out of the heart of it, without other guide
than what was the best. It conjured up the agreeable ghosts of those
far-off comfortable years; and then to be carried along on that stream
of love and immediate affection. She blessèdly forgot the dark depths
of those waters that surged about Pauli and Corinne....
"Next week, if you insist, we can be less grand," Pauli was saying,
"boiled beef then, and the week after no meat at all. That's the way it
goes in Vienna now," he continued cheerfully. And then Corinne in her
pleasant way of alluding to pleasant things said:
"Auntie, you remember the 'marinierter' carp you used to give us at
Baden on Friday?"
Frau Stacher flushed at this that was like a blow on memory, but she
only said with a retrospective look,