CHAPTER IV.
A SHOT
A group of friends had gathered in the villa of Herbert Villoner, the author, in Alt-Aussee. Well-known men of letters, painters, sculptors, musicians, publishers. As a rule they went to the country resorts only after the summer had reached its height; but this year they had fled from the city in June, to escape as much as possible of the filthy spray of Viennese politics.
The evening meal was over. They were sitting on the terrace, leaning back in their wicker chairs; the lovely lake lay below, mirroring the moon--into the motionless air curled wreaths of cigarette smoke. Everyone was absorbed with his own thoughts, until Villoner broke the profound silence.
“So there is no doubt that most of us are spending our last summer in Aussee, and will have to shake the dust from our feet and proceed into foreign lands like vagabonds. Odd, isn’t it? My father, a famous physician who contributed not a little to the fame of the Viennese medical school--my grandfather, a merchant of Mariahilf whose family had long been resident there--and myself. Well, they say that my dramas and novels express the essence of Viennese life, that no one has matched my knowledge and descriptions of Viennese youth and the gay young thing. But now all this counts for nothing--I am merely an alien Jew, and must get out like some Galician refugee washed into Vienna on a tide of speculation.”
“Still,” Max Seider, a young poet, said in a low, quivering voice, “you will be able to feel at home even when you are far away from your ungrateful native land. Berlin will receive you with open arms, the intellectuals there are already planning to honor you. You are so strong and mature that you will be able to produce great works wherever you may be. But what can I do? I am only at the beginning, I can live and work only when I stroll through the green Wienerwald, when the graceful outline of the Kahlenberg shows me my way. From them an inexhaustible fountain of life flows forth. I must labor and struggle for every line, for every stanza--I can do this only in Vienna.”
“Nonsense,” Wallner, a composer, exclaimed angrily. “The devil take your Vienna and all the blockheads in it! I’m going to the South of Germany, where I’ll rent a little house in the Black Forest and live like a lord with my Lene. Won’t we, darling?”
The fair-haired young woman suffered her husband to lay her Madonna-like little head on his shoulder; but the shadow of a malicious smile hovered on her voluptuous lips as she exchanged a significant glance with the playwright Walter Haberer. The breast of the latter swelled with triumph. He knew that the composer’s wife would stay there--no one could force her to accompany her husband into exile. And they had agreed that when the husband would at last be out of the way she would become his.--But not only she,--all Vienna, all Austria would be his! For all those who had pushed him into the background, all those whose plays were being produced while his grew mouldy in the pigeon-holes of the directors’ desks--all of them, Villoner and Seider, Hoff and Thal, Meier and Marich, all would have to go away and leave him to rule the realm of the Muses.
Frau Lene nodded and smiled at him while her husband lovingly stroked her cheek.
With a thunderous roar of laughter Armin Horch, the great actor, burst forth:
“Gentlemen, now it must be told! I, too, will have to leave Austria! For I, whom the _Wehr_ and other papers have always extolled as the ideal of Aryan beauty,--I must confess to my Jewish descent. My father came from Brody, and his name was not Horch, but Storch!”
Peals of laughter broke out, the mirth became boundless, appropriate anecdotes were told.
“And you, Herr Pinkus--where will you transfer your publishing house?” someone asked the stout little publisher with the bowed legs and the unmistakably Jewish features.
“I? I stay here! Don’t you know that I’m a genuine Christian?”
And when everybody laughed he said, with a serene smile:
“All jokes aside, I am an unadulterated _goy_! My grandfather, Amsel Pinkus, was a cloth dealer in Frankfurt am Main, and a good, pious Jew. But when he fell in love with my grandmother, Christine Haberle, a little singer of Stuttgart, he became converted, as she wouldn’t marry him otherwise. Well, my father also married a Christian girl, so that I’m a third-generation Christian; and therefore I won’t be expelled, although I look and act exactly like my grandfather.”
“Long live Pinkus, the Christian,” merrily cried the host, and, laughing, all raised their glasses. Just then, like the lash of a whip, a report sounded from the lake. And Villoner, filled with a strange premonition, cried: “Where is Seider?”
But people were already bringing up the body of the young poet. He had shot himself, down there beside the lake, so that his sensitive, weary soul would not have to starve in a foreign land.