CHAPTER VII.

ZWICKERL GOES INTO BANKRUPTCY

Herr Zwickerl was in a bad humor, venting his wrath by furious pokes at the cherry _Strudel_ on the plate before him. Frau Zwickerl anticipated the approaching storm:

“What’s eating you now, Anton? Isn’t business going?”

This was too much for Herr Zwickerl. He pushed away the cherry _Strudel_; and his face grew redder than the cherries as he roared:

“You bet business is going! To the devil, that’s where! I might as well tell you--I’ve got to go into bankruptcy!”

“Jesus Christ!” shrieked Frau Zwickerl. “How can that be? The store’s always been crowded, and everybody thinks you got a gold-mine from that Jew Lessner!”

“Yah,” sneered Zwickerl, “a gold-mine full o’ mud! The more people buy, the more I lose. And you know what? It’s all on account o’ that damnable exchange! It’s kronen, measly kronen, what I take in, while Czech crowns and francs fly out the window. I buy ten thousand yards of batiste in Reichenberg; a week later the salesman of that division comes to me, his silly face shining with joy, and says, ‘Herr Zwickerl, these goods fairly fly out of the store! Tomorrow there won’t be a single yard left in the house!’

“That’s fine, I think, and go to the bookkeeper; and when we go over the accounts I see I’ve lost on every yard, because the Czech crown has gone up again. And this is only one case out of a hundred. I always add three hundred per cent to every price, but the krone still falls quicker than I can raise the prices. I’m losing all the time; the Länderbank, which backed me when I took over the store, is demanding its money, and I can’t pay, because I have a terrific deficit. What’s more, I need another billion, because I can’t buy any more without it!”

Having let off steam, Herr Zwickerl now felt calmer. Drawing the cherry _Strudel_ toward him, he continued with a shrewd wink:

“Y’know, old girl, what we really need is just a couple o’ Jewish banks--that’s all! Before, when I had my little store in the Strumpergasse, then whenever I had to buy abroad I used to go to that hunchbacked Kohn of the Hermesbank, where I had my account, and he says to me, ‘Herr Zwickerl,’ he says, ‘now you’ve got to store up marks, because the mark’s going to go up;’ or he says, ‘The krone is going to be steadier now, so you buy kronen.’ And it always happened the way he said, and I made money not only on my goods, but on the exchange, too. But now--the monkeys what’s in that bank now don’t know nothin’, and I don’t know nothin’ about it either, and everything’s going to pieces, you mark my words!”

Herr Zwickerl was one of the many petty business men whom the anti-Jewish law had raised to great heights. With the aid of the now thoroughly Christian Länderbank he, the little small-scale merchant, had succeeded in acquiring the great dry goods store in the Mariahilferstrasse; and his first six months there had been a time of unalloyed happiness. When Herr Zwickerl stood on the balcony of the store and looked down at the throng below, he felt like a petty monarch, becoming quite drunk with the ringing of the cash registers, the rustling of silk, and the confused hum of voices. Every evening, at supper, he drank to the health of Schwertfeger, and repeated over and over again to his wife, (who now wore her kid gloves even into the kitchen):

“Now you see, old girl--now we can see how the Jews fleeced us! They had all the big stores, and we Christians had to worry along and work our heads off in dingy little shops. Thank God, that’s over now!”

But even the first semi-annual accounting was a terrible disappointment for Herr Zwickerl. In spite of the enormous turnover and the crowded store there was not the shadow of a profit--somehow or other some mistake had always been made in the speculation involved in purchases abroad. And more than once Herr Zwickerl sighed to himself: “If only I had a good Jew what could tell me what to do!”

Herr Zwickerl actually had to declare himself bankrupt, the store was closed, and was taken over by a realtor of the Gumpoldskirchen district, who made the great house over into a huge bar.

In the years that followed the war and revolution Vienna had developed more and more into the hub of Central-European extravagance, and the life of certain classes had grown so luxurious that it became the talk of all the world. The masses of Vienna, however--not only the laborers, but also the middle classes--had gnashed their teeth as they watched the foreign elements, especially the Galician, Roumanian, and Hungarian Jews, lord it over Vienna. Spending lavishly the practically worthless money of Austria, they drank champagne when the poor man could hardly pay for his glass of beer; they adorned their women with pearls and furs while the real aristocracy was forced to sell its family jewels one by one; they raced through the streets in their luxurious automobiles, they took away the homes of Viennese residents of long standing, and filled the cultured old city with their noisy ostentation.

When the Jews had been exiled all this was changed entirely overnight. The dumfounding extravagance disappeared, the Viennese rummage sales came to a stop, it no longer required superhuman effort to secure a seat for the opera, and life became calmer, simpler, more substantial. Until it developed that a city like Vienna cannot exist without luxury. At the beginning, the Christian business men who took over the Jewish shops had also taken possession of the Jewish automobiles; the general prosperity seemed to be unchanged, but merely to have been redistributed. The joy which the citizens of Vienna felt when they no longer had to bump into Jewish profiteers at every step, was as genuine as it was easily comprehensible. But when the krone soon began to drop again toward the infinitesimal, and prices rose like a tidal wave--when every business that depended on unlimited luxury, (like the exclusive stores, the cabarets, theatres, and princely restaurants and bars,) failed--when unemployment became general and the export trade with foreign countries grew less and less--then high living also had its wings clipped. The tens of thousands of automobiles that had gone over from Jewish into Christian hands were sold to foreign buyers for a handful of lire or francs, for business went so badly that it was impossible to buy gasoline; art dealers complained of a complete standstill in their business, the deficit of the state-subventioned theatres grew by leaps and bounds, and eminent Christian artists and scholars, especially the great physicians, emigrated to other countries because their own people no longer were willing or able to pay them the fees to which they had become accustomed in the Jewish era.

And it was impossible to stop the constant growth of discontent, irritation, and the realization that the country was on the downward path.