Fanny adores the ground he walks on. A fine gentleman, a Cavalier,"
(Maria pronounced it "cawlier" in her soft, thick Viennese) "but not a
kreutzer to bless himself with and a South American girl whose Papa has
more head of cattle than in all Europe, is crazy about him and wants
to marry him. Whatever we'll do, I don't know. She's that jumpy when
the bell rings, she's afraid it's bad news coming in at the door. His
family is ruined by the Peace and his father commanding and his mother
praying him to save them, and four unmarried sisters too. A bad mess
we're in and what will be the end? I went to the fortune-teller a week
ago,--a wonder,--and she saw cattle, cattle everywhere and told me I
was to beware of them, but how can I beware of stupid cattle stamping
about in South America?" asked Maria helplessly, resentfully. "I knew
all the time what she meant--and saying, too, that she saw a letter
coming. Oh, I've been that worried! Naturally I haven't told Fanny, but
I've been waiting for that letter ever since. You don't know Fanny,"
Maria's eyes filled with tears, "one day she says she will kill herself
and another that she's going into a convent," she whispered dismally,
after a cautious look at the closed door; "and if Fanny ever gets
started _that_ way, she'll make Maria Magdalena look about like this,"
and she proceeded to measure a negligible quantity of the surrounding
atmosphere between her thumb and forefinger. There was, however, pride
in her voice.
Frau Stacher was listening vaguely. For all her deep interest in Fanny,
she was finding it difficult to focus her thoughts. Things were getting
blurred again.
Maria kept on, a warning note in her voice, "I'll feel sorry for the
family if Fanny doesn't hold out," (Maria, it will be seen, was at
the other side of "holding out"--the far side.) "She bought the villa
at Moedling last year and we put a lot of money in England through a
Jew," here Maria was quite contemptuous ... "but," she added in another
and fondly indulgent tone, "we had to let the Count, his people were
starving, have a lot of that. We still get some income from it, but
there are so many of us, and if Fanny should lose her nerve,"--Maria
broke off; only she didn't use the ordinary word for "nerve" but the
famous Vienna expression "Hamur," which means, beside nerve, a lot of
things that are both more and less.
Tears overflowed her small, dark, friendly eyes. There was no nonsense
about Maria. She adored Fanny, she was proud of Fanny and to have
the revered aunt sitting there made a priceless occasion on which to
relieve her feelings. Crossing her arms over her ample bosom she went
on:
"She gives everything away, not only to the family and naturally to
the Count, but yesterday--will you believe it,--to a shameless hussy,
no better than she should be, she gave a heap of money to keep her out
of the hospital, where she truly belongs. I told Fanny where I thought
she'd end herself if she didn't look out, but Fanny" ... she broke off
suddenly as the bedroom door opened.
"What are you gossiping about?" Fanny cried sharply to her, "Didn't
you hear the door bell ring?" Then as it rang again a contraction
passed over her face and she started to the door herself.
But Maria, in spite of her avoirdupois, was out like lightning. After a
moment's parleying in the hall she was back.
"Nothing," she said looking fondly, relievèdly at Fanny, "It's only to
say the carriage is there."
Fanny went slowly back into her room followed by Maria who shut the
door. Frau Stacher left alone, almost immediately fell into a doze; her
eyes closed heavily and she slipped deeply into the big chair. But she
couldn't quite lose herself for she had a feeling that it would soon be
time to go and kept trying to keep herself awake.
She sat up sharply, with a start, when Fanny reappeared, how long after
she could not have told, in a black costume whose long, fur-trimmed
cape fell smartly about her form. A tiny black velvet hat from which
she had just torn the cunningly, expensively placed blue aigrette, put
her eyes in a becoming, melancholy shadow. She had an extra pair of
black gloves in her hand and a fine dark leather bag that she had done
with, to replace the "horror" as she called it to herself that her aunt
was using.
"You've got such dear little hands," she was saying as she held out the
gloves, "These ar'n't big enough for me. I paid a heathen price for
them, and this bag's a bit handier than yours." But in spite of her
pleasant words, her pallor was so extreme as she held out the gloves
and bag, that her aunt whose eyes were again very bright and not alone
with fever, noted it anxiously.
"Oh, my little, little Fanny," she cried in quite a strong voice,
and even held out her arms. She shared, in a way she could not have
expressed, Fanny's grief whatever it was. She didn't want Fanny, dear,
gold Fanny to suffer. Fanny _mustn't_ suffer. Fanny _mustn't_ weep. She
wanted to live a long, long time, even uncomfortably, denudedly, so
that out of the whole careless world, Fanny might always have someone
who truly loved her.
Then she became aware, for the first time, of something that intimately
concerned herself. The shape and color of her own life.... Loving the
children of three other women had been _her_ life. Her middle class
life, undisturbing and for so long undisturbed. One day, one year, like
another, always loving the children of three other women ... looking
through the same windows at the same things. And suddenly now Fanny's
world, Fanny's strange world.... It had other horizons, red horizons
behind dark mountains with their secrets. But of these secrets her
aunt was not thinking. She only knew, as she stood close to Fanny,
that it was her own flesh and blood that was suffering,--beautiful and
suffering.
How Fanny's beauty threw a bright, blinding cloud about everything that
concerned her! She said again:
"My darling child, my beautiful child, don't weep," as Fanny pressed
against her, and she comforted her as she might have done in the far
off years for girlish griefs. Had she reflected she might have changed
her old motto into "Beauty stays, Virtue goes."
She was breaking in Fanny's house for a last time her alabaster box of
precious spikenard. From it, in the blue room, a strong fragrance came,
over-powering the scent of lily of the valley from an expensive shop in
the Graben that hung about Fanny's clothes, and the thin perfume of the
too-early blossomed plant. She was thinking only of Fanny's generosity
and why she could indulge those many generous impulses she thought not
at all,--just as if the family didn't lower their voices when speaking
of Fanny and look around to see that the children weren't there. She
felt, too, intimately joined to Fanny. Deeply beneath consciousness was
that feeling that Fanny was yet to give her something essential, had
some ultimate gift for her, that she must be there to receive.... That
it was to be her deathbed she didn't know. She only felt that something
final and priceless would come through Fanny.
And truly 'tis a great thing to give any one. For mostly each one, no
matter how he wanders or is denuded, has, in some strange way, his own.
* * * * *
They were driving slowly up over the noisy cobble stones of the
Jacquingasse on their way to the cemetery, Kaethe and Fanny and Tante
Ilde on the back seat of the big, black mourning coach. Kaethe, wedged
between them, was holding on her lap the white wreath. Opposite sat the
Professor. On his knees for a last time was Carli; Carli in his little
white box; Carli on his first and only journey.
The sable horses struck the cobble stones with their slow, accustomed
beat. It seemed to Frau Stacher the loudest sound she had ever
heard, and "some day for you, some day for you" seemed cadenced
unmistakably....
In the dark Minorite church Fanny had been a model of piety and
recollection. She crossed herself so slowly, so devoutly. She buried
her face in her hands and knelt long without fidgeting on the hard,
uncomfortable stool. She took holy water and held a tip of her finger
to Kaethe as they went out and then to Tante Ilde and to Leo. She and
Kaethe had always loved each other very much. Fanny after her wont was
going through the afternoon without stint or sloppiness. It would be,
in her hands, an "entire" matter.
As they drove along Kaethe rested her head on her sister's warm,
scented shoulder. Her eyes were dry, but her face was haggard from the
night.
No one noticed that Tante Ilde didn't say a word. Kaethe and Leo were
with their child a last time and Fanny, who generally selected pleasant
things to do, was finding it more wearing than she had thought and
was plunged in her own reflections. At one moment she said to herself
"I'm not going to be able to stick it out," and forgot their griefs
and miserably let her thoughts turn to the man she truly loved, and
if everything in the world, every last thing, had been different....
Then suddenly she fell to cursing in her heart a certain predatory
gentleman whom she had known in the "beginning," no, before the
"beginning," but she pulled herself up round, that carriage was no
place for curses, neither was it the moment. Then she caught sight of
her face above Eberhardt's right shoulder. It was distinctly mirrored
in the reflecting surface of the glass at his back, formed by the heavy
black flaps of the driver's coat. It was white, white as the coffin
on Eberhardt's lap, and the eyes were deep, dark pits, almost as if
the flesh had fallen away from them. She was horribly frightened. What
was the warm thing that went out of you and after it went out you were
put in a box?... She jerked her head so that it slipped from view. But
she got Tante Ilde's instead.... It was just dreadful.... All right as
long as you lived, but there came a time when beauty, which had been
so helpful, was clearly of no avail.... The activities of family and
town were concentrated on getting you into a box and then ... Fanny who
believed in hell and damnation, drew in her breath shudderingly. She
was thankful to feel Kaethe's warm, living head against her shoulder.
She wasn't dead yet--she was suddenly sure, too, that she'd have "time
to repent." She quite brightened up, and as she never did anything by
halves was apparently entirely herself by the time they got to the
cemetery.
Fanny in the bosom of her family, for once taking charge of things in
person, not just paying from a distance, was really worth seeing. Fanny
at last visibly the source of whatever mercies they received. Fanny,
as Pauli so truly called her, the family Doxology ... according to the
mysterious permissions of God the source of their only blessings.
Fanny weeping and praying by the little grave, supporting the stricken
mother--her sister, and laying on it the big wreath. Fanny taking them
to the café near the cemetery and giving them hot coffee after their
cold grief....
It was Fanny, too, who, when some extraordinarily stubbly semmels were
served with it, bearing not the slightest resemblance to the anciently
far-famed Viennese rolls, scolded the shambling, flat-footed waiter
and said loudly it was a "shame" and "disgusting," and ended by going
over to the desk and saying something in a lower tone to the gaunt
woman who sat there. The woman had promptly produced some coffee cake
and some crescents kept only for rich grief. She was used to pale,
tear-washed faces. Every day, every day, they came in and went out.
She had seen many a strange alteration in their looks after that hot
coffee, even after ersatz coffee. People kept on living for all they
had that momentary feeling that they couldn't. She had sat at that desk
for twenty years. Grief, she knew it, all kinds, ... and they kept on
living.
Even Kaethe, though her throat was stiff and dry with mother-grief,
even Kaethe had taken her coffee.
But Tante Ilde made no pretense at drinking hers, not even a sip.
Those little shivers had changed into a continuous trembling. She felt
both hot and cold. Her eyes were filmy. The only thing she wanted to
do really was to lie down, never to move again, to give way to that
over-powering lassitude that she could no longer struggle against.
She was only vaguely worried because she'd lost the new bag; dropped
it at the grave probably, though when Eberhardt went back to get it,
immediately when she noticed its loss, on coming out of the cemetery,
it had already vanished from the earth. After her first dismay, she
had strangely not cared, and now she was murmuring something about the
alcove, not at all what any of the others were thinking or talking of.
Suddenly Kaethe, startled out of her own grief at a trembling motion of
her aunt's shoulders, had looked at her in alarm.
"But what is the matter, Tante Ilde?" she asked.
"Why, she's really ill!" cried Fanny sharply, "we've got to get her
home."
Her aunt hearing the word home muttered once more something about the
alcove. Her face was ashen, but her pale, wide eyes shone strangely
through the film that again threatened to veil them.
"We must go right away," Fanny cried and hastily paid for the coffee.
Her aunt didn't even hear her. All her strength was engaged in getting
totteringly to the door, the professor's arm about her.
"I'm going to take her with me," Fanny whispered to Kaethe as they
followed out to get into the coach.
Kaethe looked at her deeply, there was much love in her glance, but she
only said:
"I don't think she likes it at Irma's. Irma's so fierce and she's so
gentle."
"Sour stick," said Fanny as usual when referring to her step-mother.
"I'll just keep her with me, for a day or two, till she's better," she
continued thinking boldly, swiftly, "Maria can look after her."
It seemed suddenly the most natural thing in the world to have Tante
Ilde with her for a day or two.
"Fanny, how good you are to us all," Kaethe whispered to her sister.
"Good--nothing!" said Fanny. But virtue was, all the same, its own
quite sufficient reward at that moment, though she felt horribly
self-reproachful at the thought that sometimes she'd let them go for
months ... suppose they had all died!
Tante Ilde kept slipping down between her nieces in the carriage,
though they were supporting her as well as they could. Her head was
hanging over her breast. She wanted to sleep, even bumping along over
those cobble stones. They all watched her anxiously. Once Fanny, her
nerves quite on edge, leaned out of the window and screamed to the
driver in a horrible voice that the others didn't recognize: "You,
sheepshead! Get along!"
Then somewhat restored she drew her head in and after a few minutes,
opening her immense gold bag gave Kaethe some money. No, Fanny wasn't
doing things by halves that day.
"Get something nice for supper,--for the children," she added with
sudden tears that were for the living children--no more for Carli who
was really forever safe, though they seemed to have left him alone, in
that chill Vienna earth, under that darkening January sky....
Frau Stacher scarcely knew how they got her upstairs. Only as from a
great distance she heard Maria's "Jesus, Marie, Josef!" as they went
in. She was beyond any more definite impression than that she had
ceased to struggle. Fortitude, cruel virtue, were no longer demanded of
her.
When she was gently laid on Fanny's bed she was conscious at first
of its soft comfort under her aching body. They were taking off her
clothes. She wished, but not anxiously, nor even ashamedly, that her
chemise had not been so old or so grey from being always washed out in
her little basin, but it didn't really matter she knew, and she quite
forgot about it when something fresh and silken and scented took its
place, lying smoothly against her back with its hot point of pain.
"Alcove," she continued to mutter from time to time between stertorous
breathings.
"Why's she talking so much about an alcove?" whispered Fanny to Maria
as they sat by the bed waiting for Hermann, whom Eberhardt was to get
and send back in the mourning coach.
"It's where she sleeps at Frau Irma's,--a sort of alcove, off the
living room. She's got her old brown divan in it, you remember in
Baden, but she needs a room of her own. When you get old you need to
have a door to close, and then Frau Irma is not always easy."
"Easy? A porcupine," Fanny whispered back and added something about
Croatians in general not complimentary to that former Crownland. Then
she looked restlessly at her watch.
"Why doesn't he come? Maria, I'm afraid," she ended with a break in her
voice.
"It _is_ going badly with her," nervously admitted Maria, who had once
been a great one at sick beds and who, when it was not so personal,
loved to be in at a death.
Frau Stacher's breathing was indeed very noisy. It whistled through her
thin chest, it came in gasps from her blue mouth.
"Do you think she's going to die?" cried Fanny suddenly in panic. "We'd
better get a priest anyway, only the poor heathen die without one!"
Fanny had always been interested in foreign missions and was in the
habit of giving propitiatory sums to the church when she got panicky,
for the purpose of conversions....
A ring at the door, a firm, long ring caused Maria to jump up.
It was Hermann, Hermann of the old days, despite his right arm hanging
straight, Hermann completely professional, quiet, strong, but loving
too.
He gave one look at his Tante Ilde.
"Pneumonia," he said, "she's been ill for a couple of days," and he
started to do the little there was to be done.
"But she never said anything except that she had a bit of a cold, the
angel, and going to the cemetery too!" answered Fanny aghast.
"To the cemetery in such a state!" he echoed in astonishment, "why she
won't get through the night. Fanny--I'm glad she's here."
As the brother and sister looked at each other their eyes filled with
tears. The way life was....
"I'm afraid she's already begun her agony," he whispered a few minutes
later, "dear, good, sweet Tante Ilde."
But he wrote a prescription for Maria to take out.
"It may last longer than we think. It's sometimes so hard for them to
go, even when they've nothing to stay for, but we can try to make it
easy for her."
Fanny ran out of the room after Maria.
"Go to the Kapuziners and bring some one back and quick," she whispered
imperatively.
Then she returned to the bedside. Hermann was bending over his aunt,
raising her up and Fanny ran again and got some of the softest cushions
from the blue divan, to put high, high under her head.
Suddenly Tante Ilde opened her eyes.
"Manny, dear, good Manny!" she cried, quite loud, then, "Fanny,
darling, you won't forget little Ferry?"
And then she called for Corinne, and called again and again. She loved
them all equally, but the flavor of Corinne's being was the flavor
of her own, Ildefonse Stacher's being, and that made a strange, an
essential difference at the end....
But at that very minute Corinne was sitting in a little restaurant
with Pauli, close together on a narrow, leather bench in a corner,
and Pauli's dark, small hand lay closely, hotly over hers. After they
had eaten he was going to take her to Kaethe's,--not to Fanny's where
a more merciful Fate would have lead them. And that is why stupidly,
horribly, Corinne was always to think, she wasn't at home when Maria
came to get her....
As Tante Ilde lay calling for Corinne, with her blue eyes widely open,
neither Fanny nor Hermann could know that flashingly, she was seeing,
as the day before, Pauli's dark, turquoise-ringed hand clasped tightly
over the slim whiteness of Corinne's, and that she was very frightened
for Corinne. She closed her eyes flutteringly several times, but still
she saw their hands. Then suddenly the cavities under her brow grew
very deep and she gave a long, whistling gasp.
"Not yet," whispered Hermann, seizing Fanny's hand, for at the sight
she had burst into wild weeping, "but soon,--dear, dear Auntie,"
and from his voice there was momentarily released all the pent-up
tenderness of his great heart. It flooded the room. It surged warmly
about his sister, about his dying aunt....
Then Frau Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg, began to pluck at the sheet
and talk in snatches of Baden and of Heinie, her brother, their father.
Once she smiled, but they didn't know that it was because the bed was
so soft and she was so comfortable, quite knowing that she would never
have to move again.... And certainly if this was dying it wasn't at all
what people thought.
* * * * *
Maria's key was in the door ... Maria's voice was respectfully ushering
someone into that silk-hung chamber,--a dark-bearded, deep-eyed
Capuchin monk. He threw back widely his brown-hooded cloak, and as he
did so glanced enfoldingly at the dying woman without a single other
look about the room. His work lay there....
Frau Stacher had fallen into a last unconsciousness, but her breathing
was still terribly loud, like wind through a vacant room. Fanny on her
knees by the bed, was weeping and praying and kissing her aunt's thin
hand rather extravagantly, after her way.
The monk's eyes, accustomed to the sight of death, knew without a
word from Hermann that the end was very near. On the little, white,
lace-covered table by the bed, on which Maria had placed a lighted
candle, a basin of water and a towel, he laid the Blessed Oils, those
final oils with which he was to anoint Frau Stacher's noisy tenement,
commending it to mercy....
Her broad-lidded blue eyes, that through tears would look no more on
misery, no more on starving children, no, never anymore....
Her ears, that would hear no further cries of woe, nor any unprofitable
discourse....
Her nostrils, that would no more weakly dilate at smell of needed
food....
Her tongue, that would frame no more its words of gentle, helpless
pity....
Her hands, that had once given so freely, would be held out no more to
receive. Never again would she have to suffer humble uncertainty for
the gifts of food and raiment. The body, no longer needing food, was
itself become as raiment, cast off....
Her feet, that had forever fallen away from the ranks of those who in
aged misery still flitted through the wintry streets of Vienna seeking
their midday meal of charity ... the Mariahilferstrasse, endless, the
Alserstrasse separated from the Hoher Markt by so many wide, open
places, the narrow, crowded Kaerntnerstrasse and all those other
streets that had sounded a last time to her diminished step....
Irma would never again give her the thin part of the soup, and never
again would she watch to see that her sister-in-law drew back the
curtains of the alcove. Alcove! Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg, in
the name of Principalities and Powers, in the name of the Cherubim and
Seraphim, was about to take possession of her whole heavenly mansion,
her very own from all time unto all time, and big and beautiful.
* * * * *
Fanny not only buried her aunt decently, but splendidly as such things
in such times were rated. A Requiem Mass was sung at the Capuchin
Church. Expensive wreaths were ordered in the name of each niece for
which Fanny herself paid; (except for Mizzi's, Mizzi got the bill,
unjustly, she considered, and she ran into the office and said some
horrible things to Hermann when it came)....
They were but more tokens of Fanny, those many flowers, Fanny
inescapably, confusingly beneficent to the end. Wet with the dew of the
Church's blessing, they almost concealed Tante Ilde's coffin, as to the
sound of those sable horses over the cobbly streets she was carried to
her grave ... at last to be alone behind the heaviest door known to
mortals....
As they drove back, each was saying in one or another tone, "what a
pity," that Tante Ilde couldn't have been there to enjoy it in her
fine, gentle way, and that if they had known she was going to die so
soon they would have arranged differently. They had spoken of Baden,
too, and of childhood things. They had mourned, yes, but their
mourning, as would have been any cheer, was after their several and
varying natures.
Anna had not gone to Fanny's to see her aunt laid out. No, indeed! She
and Hermine went only to the church and cemetery, as likewise did four
of Kaethe's children and Irma and her boys. Hermine had been all eyes
for her veiled, but still discernibly lovely aunt, whose crisp, deep
black stood out cypress-like against the greyer, cheaper hues of the
other mourning figures, and she had been pleasantly conscious of a sort
of pricking interest in some one in her very own family who, by all
accounts, would go straight to Hell when she died.
Ferry had wept over-much for his strength and years, but Resl in her
high, true voice had sung "In Paradise, In Paradise" about the house
for days.