1913
I
George von Wergenthin sat at table quite alone to-day. His elder
brother Felician had chosen to dine out with friends for the first time
after a longish interval. But George felt no particular inclination
to renew his acquaintance with Ralph Skelton, Count Schönstein or any
of the other young people, whose gossip usually afforded him so much
pleasure; for the time being he did not feel in the mood for any kind
of society.
The servant cleared away and disappeared. George lit a cigarette
and then in accordance with his habit walked up and down the big
three-windowed rather low room, while he wondered how it was that this
very room which had for many weeks seemed to him so gloomy was now
gradually beginning to regain its former air of cheerfulness. He could
not help letting his glance linger on the empty chair at the top end of
the table, over which the September sun was streaming through the open
window in the centre. He felt as though he had seen his father, who
had died two months ago, sit there only an hour back, as he visualised
with great clearness the very slightest mannerisms of the dead man,
even down to his trick of pushing his coffee-cup away, adjusting his
pince-nez or turning over the leaves of a pamphlet.
George thought of one of his last conversations with his father which
had occurred in the late spring before they had moved to the villa
on the Veldeser Lake. George had just then come back from Sicily,
where he had spent April with Grace on a melancholy and somewhat
boring farewell tour before his mistress's final return to America.
He had done no real work for six months or more, and had not even
copied out the plaintive adagio which he had heard in the plashing
of the waves on a windy morning in Palermo as he walked along the
beach. George had played over the theme to his father and improvised
on it with an exaggerated wealth of harmonies which almost swamped
the original melody, and when he had launched into a wildly modulated
variation, his father had smilingly asked him from the other end of
the piano--"Whither away, whither away?" George had felt abashed and
allowed the swell of the notes to subside, and his father had begun a
discussion about his son's future with all his usual affection, but
with rather more than his usual seriousness. This conversation ran
through his mind to-day as though it had been pregnant with presage. He
stood at the window and looked out. The park outside was fairly empty.
An old woman wearing an old-fashioned cloak with glass beads sat on
a seat. A nursemaid walked past holding one child by the hand while
another, a little boy, in a hussar uniform, with a buckled-on sabre
and a pistol in his belt, ran past, looked haughtily round and saluted
a veteran who came down the path smoking. Further down the grounds
were a few people sitting round the kiosk, drinking coffee and reading
the papers. The foliage was still fairly thick, and the park looked
depressed and dusty and altogether far more summer-like than usual for
late September.
George rested his arms on the window-sill, leant forwards and looked at
the sky. He had not left Vienna since his father's death, though he had
had many opportunities of so doing. He could have gone with Felician to
the Schönstein estate; Frau Ehrenberg had written him a charming letter
inviting him to come to Auhof; he could easily have found a companion
for that long-planned cycle-tour through Carinthia and the Tyrol, which
he had not the energy to undertake alone. But he preferred to stay
in Vienna and occupy his time with perusing and putting in order the
old family papers. He found archives which went as far back as his
great-grandfather Anastasius von Wergenthin, who haled from the Rhine
district and had by his marriage with a Fräulein Recco become possessed
of an old castle near Bozen which had been uninhabitable for a long
period. There were also documents dealing with the history of George's
grandfather, a major of artillery who had fallen before Chlum in the
year 1866.
The major's son, the father of Felician and himself, had devoted
himself to scientific studies, principally botany, and had taken at
Innsbruck the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. At the age of twenty-four
he had made the acquaintance of a young girl of an old family of
Austrian officials, who had brought her up to be a singer, more
with a view to rendering her independent of the limited, not to say
impoverished, resources of the household, than because she had any real
vocation. Baron von Wergenthin saw and heard her for the first time at
a concert-performance of the Missa Solemnis and in the following May
she became his wife. Three years later the health of the Baroness began
to fail, and she was ordered South by the doctors. She did not recover
as soon as was anticipated, with the result that the house in Vienna
was given up, and the Baron and his family lived for several years a
kind of hotel-life, as they travelled from one place to another. His
business and studies frequently summoned the Baron to Vienna, but the
sons never left their mother. The family lived in Sicily, Rome, Tunis,
Corfu, Athens, Malta, Merano, the Riviera, and finally in Florence;
never in very great style, but fairly well nevertheless, and without
curtailing their expenditure sufficiently to prevent a substantial part
of the Baron's fortune being gradually eaten up. George was eighteen
when his mother died. Nine years had passed since then, but the memory
of that spring evening was still as vivid as ever, when his father and
brother had happened to be out, and he had stood alone and helpless by
his mother's death-bed, while the talk and laughter of the passers-by
had flowed in with the spring air through the hastily opened windows
with all the jar of its unwelcome noise.
The survivors took their mother's body back to Vienna. The Baron
devoted himself to his studies with new and desperate zeal. He had
formerly enjoyed the reputation of an aristocratic dilettante, but he
now began to be taken quite seriously even in academic circles, and
when he was elected honorary president of the Botanical Society he
owed that distinction to something more than the accident of a noble
name. Felician and George entered themselves as law students. But after
some time their father himself encouraged the boys to abandon their
university studies, and go in for a more general education and one
more in accordance with their musical tendencies. George felt thankful
and relieved at this new departure. But even in this sphere which he
had chosen himself, he was by no means industrious, and he would often
occupy himself for weeks on end with all manner of things that had
nothing at all to do with his musical career.
It was this same trait of dilettantism which made him now go through
the old family documents as seriously as though he were investigating
some important secrets of the past. He spent many hours busying
himself with letters which his parents had exchanged in years gone by,
wistful letters and superficial letters, melancholy letters and placid
letters, which brought back again to life not merely the departed ones
themselves but other men and women half sunk in oblivion. His German
tutor now appeared to him again with his sad pale forehead just as he
used to declaim his Horace to him on their long walks, there floated up
in his mind the wild brown boyish face of Prince Alexander of Macedon
in whose company George had had his first riding lessons in Rome; and
then the Pyramids of Cestius limned as though in a dream with black
lines on a pale blue horizon reared their peaks, just as George had
seen them once in the twilight as he came home from his first ride in
the Campagna. And as he abandoned himself still more to his reverie
there appeared sea-shores, gardens and streets, though he had no
knowledge of the landscape or the town that had furnished them to his
memory; images of human beings swept past him; some of these, whom he
had met casually on some trivial occasion, were very clear, others
again, with whom he might at some time or other have passed many days,
were shadowy and distant.
When George had finished inspecting the old letters and was putting
his own papers in order, he found in an old green case some musical
jottings of his boyhood, whose very existence had so completely
vanished from his memory, that if they had been put before him as the
records of some one else he would not have known the difference. Some
affected him with a kind of pleasant pain, for they seemed to him to
contain promises which he was perhaps never to fulfil. And yet he had
been feeling lately that something had been hatching within him. He saw
his development as a mysterious but definite line which showed the way
from those first promising notes in the green case to quite new ideas,
and this much he knew--the two songs out of the "Westöstliche Divan"
which he had set to music this summer on a sultry afternoon, while
Felician lay in his hammock and his father worked in his armchair on
the cool terrace, could not have been composed by your ordinary person.
George moved back a step from the window as though surprised by an
absolutely unexpected thought. He had never before realised with such
clearness that there had been an absolute break in his life since
his father's death down to to-day. During the whole time he had not
given a single thought to Anna Rosner to whom he had sent the songs
in manuscript. And he felt pleasurably thrilled at the thought that
he could hear her melodious melancholy voice again and accompany her
singing on that somewhat heavy piano, as soon as he wished. And he
remembered the old house in the Paulanergasse, with its low door and
badly lighted stairs which he had not been up more than three or four
times, in the mood in which a man thinks of something which he has
known very long and held very dear.
A slight soughing traversed the leaves in the park outside. Thin clouds
appeared over the spire of the Stephan Tower, which stood directly
opposite the window, on the other side of the park, and over a largish
part of the town. George was faced with a long afternoon without any
engagements. It seemed to him as though all his former friendships
during the two months of mourning had dissolved or broken up. He
thought of the past spring and winter with all their complications
and mad whirl of gaiety, and all kinds of images came back into his
memory--the ride with Frau Marianne in the closed fiacre through
the snow-covered forest. The masked ball at Ehrenberg's with Else's
subtly-naive remarks about "Hedda Gabler" with whom she insisted she
felt a certain affinity, and with Sissy's hasty kiss from under the
black lace of her mask. A mountain expedition in the snow from Edlach
up to the Rax with Count Schönstein and Oskar Ehrenberg, who, though
very far from being a born mountaineer, had jumped at the opportunity
of tacking himself on to two blue-blooded gentlemen. The evening at
Ronacher's with Grace and young Labinski, who had shot himself four
days afterwards either on account of Grace, debts, satiety, or as a
sheer piece of affectation. The strange hot and cold conversation with
Grace in the cemetery in the melting February snow two days after
Labinski's funeral. The evening in the hot lofty fencing-room where
Felician's sword had crossed the dangerous blade of the Italian
master. The walk at night after the Paderewski concert when his father
had spoken to him more intimately than ever before of that long-past
evening on which his dead mother had sung in the Missa Solemnis in the
very hall which they had just come out of. And finally Anna Rosner's
tall quiet figure appeared to him, leaning on the piano, with the score
in her hand, and her smiling blue eyes turned towards the keys, and he
even heard her voice reverberating in his soul.
While he stood like this at the window and looked down at the park
which was gradually becoming animated, he felt a certain consolation
in the fact that he had no close ties with any human being, and that
there were so many people to whom he could attach himself once more
and whose set he could enter again as soon as the fancy took him. He
felt at the same time wonderfully rested and more in the vein for
work and happiness than he had ever been. He was full of great bold
resolutions and joyfully conscious of his youth and independence. He
no doubt felt a certain shame at the thought that at any rate at the
present moment his grief for his dead father was much alleviated; but
he found a relief for this indifference of his in the thought of his
dear father's painless end. He had been walking up and down the garden
chatting with his two sons, had suddenly looked round him as though he
heard voices in the distance, had then looked up towards the sky and
had suddenly dropped down dead on the sward, without a cry of pain or
even a twitching of the lips.
George went back into the room, got ready to go out and left the house.
He intended to walk about for a couple of hours wherever chance might
take him, and in the evening to work again at his quintette, for which
he now felt in the right mood. He crossed the street and went into the
park. The sultriness had passed. The old woman in the cloak still sat
on the seat and stared in front of her. Children were playing on the
sandy playground round the trees. All the chairs round the kiosk were
taken. A clean-shaven gentleman sat in the summer-house whom George
knew by sight and who had impressed him by his likeness to the elder
Grillparzer. By the pond George met a governess with two well-dressed
children and received a flashing glance. When he got out of the Park
into the Ringstrasse he met Willy Eissler who was wearing a long autumn
overcoat with dark stripes and began to speak to him.
"Good afternoon, Baron, so you've come back to Vienna again."
"I've been back a long time," answered George. "I didn't leave Vienna
again after my father's death."
"Yes, yes, quite so.... Allow me, once again...." And Willy shook hands
with George.
"And what have you been doing this summer?" asked George.
"All kinds of things. Played tennis, and painted, rotted about, had
some amusing times and a lot of boring ones...." Willy spoke extremely
quickly, with a deliberate though slight hoarseness, briskly and yet
nonchalantly with a combination of the Hungarian, French, Viennese and
Jewish accents. "Anyway, I came early to-day, just as you see me now,
from Przemysl," he continued.
"Drill?"
"Yes, the last one. I'm sorry to say so. Though I'm nearly an old man,
I've always found it a joke to trot about with my yellow epaulettes,
clanking my spurs, dragging my sabre along, spreading an atmosphere of
impending peril, and being taken by incompetent Lavaters for a noble
count." They walked along by the side of the railing of the Stadtpark.
"Going to Ehrenbergs' by any chance?" asked Willy.
"No, I never thought of it."
"Because this is the way. I say, have you heard, Fräulein Else is
supposed to be engaged?"
"Really?" queried George slowly. "And whom to?"
"Guess, Baron."
"Come, Hofrat Wilt?"
"Great heavens!" cried Willy, "I'm sure it's never entered his head!
Becoming S. Ehrenberg's son-in-law might result in prejudicing his
government career--nowadays."