Part 1

Viennese Medley

By Edith O'Shaughnessy

Author of "A Diplomat's Wife in Mexico," "Diplomatic Days," "Alsace in Rust and Gold," etc.

"'S giebt nur a Kaiserstadt, 'S giebt nur a Wien."

(There's only one right royal town, There's only one Vienna.)

_New York_ _B. W. Huebsch, Inc._ _Mcmxxiv_

COPYRIGHT, 1924, BY B. W. HUEBSCH, INC.

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN U. S. A.

To COUNTESS MITON SZÉCHÉNYI and COUNTESS GLADYS SZÉCHÉNYI FRIENDS OF THEN AND NOW

CONTENTS

I _Their Aunt Ilde_

II _Liesel and Otto_

III _Anna and Pauli_

IV _Hermann and Mizzi_

V _The Eberhardts_

VI _Corinne_

VII _Fanny_

I

THEIR AUNT ILDE

_Adagio assai._

"Sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier days."

War and Peace had stripped Frau Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg, of everything except her physical being, leaving her quite naked in another but certainly not better world.

As the widow of a Viennese Kommerzienrath, dead after thirty years of service in the Finance Ministry, she had enjoyed a comfortable pension. She had been considered rich herself at the time of her marriage for she had had as dowry some shares in a beet-root industry in Bohemia, but when the Republic of Czecho-Slovakia was formed she found herself mysteriously and without appeal separated from those shares, which had been as much a part of her life as her hands and feet, and the separation though swift was to prove fatal, at least to her use and dignity.

During the long, pleasant years of her widowhood she had had a little house at Baden near Vienna, where her only brother, an official in the Northern Railways, and his various wives and many children had been in the habit of spending holidays and convalescences. If any child were ailing it was promptly sent to Tante Ilde, who could always be counted on to receive such gages of affection with open arms.

When her brother, accompanied by one or the other of those quickly succeeding wives, went off on his annual walking tour through the Semmering, as many as could be got into the little house were deposited there for safe-keeping. The family Christmas and New Year's dinners took place at Tante Ilde's, and on the 18th of August, the Emperor's birthday, they were all to be found again sitting about that well-laden table.

She was the first to know their joys and griefs, and "I'm going to tell Tante Ilde about it," was a familiar expression in the family.

A pleasant lady to look at, too, with a bit of lace flung over her shining white hair, a bit of it always about her neck. Her skin had a lustrous smoothness, the many tiny wrinkles no more disfiguring than the fine crackings in old ivory. Her nose was delicately arched and her lips kept long their agreeable red. But it was her eyes, more than all of these, that caught the attention. They were very large and were set quite flatly, shallowly in her face, pale blue lakes of indefectible innocence, and while time had wrought some changes in the areas surrounding them,--a wrinkle, a dent, a falling in or away,--their placidity had gently endured. They opened widely and though sometimes they had been obliged to gaze upon one or the other wicked spectacle of a wicked world, no shadow of its evil remained upon them. That wide, blue, child-like gaze from that aging face was what was first noticed about her and last forgot. The startled expression that appeared upon her countenance at the beginning of her misfortunes, towards the end was changed into one of almost formidable submission.

She had always been slender and graceful with a way of holding herself that verged on elegance and her clothes were put on with a pleasant precision. She had worn a long gold chain around her neck since any of them could remember, holding a little gold watch tucked in at her neat belt; she always wore, too, a pair of round gold bracelets that successive baby nephews and nieces had grasped at, leaving fine marks of little teeth upon them. Tante Ilde loved those tiny dents. There was often a gentle tinkle as she played with her chain with the hand bearing her wedding ring and a quite inconspicuous one of amethyst and pearls. Just as inconspicuous was Frau Stacher's being, her situation and her works, as that pale stone, those little, lustreless pearls. None save a doubly-blindfolded Fate, striking recklessly about at millions would have found so unimportant a mark.

Corinne, her best-loved niece, always called her "my Dresden china Auntie." There was between them some natural affinity, as well as special affection; though Tante Ilde loved them all, Corinne was the true child of her heart, what the best of daughters might have been. She had never had any children and her life had revolved beneficently about the family of her brother,--only her half-brother to be sure, but then they never thought of that. When he married for the third time, quite superfluously the family considered, the ostensible reason he gave was that it would be a pity to leave no one to enjoy the pension due whoever was fortunate enough to be his widow. His sister had smiled at this, her fine, soft smile, and even Heinie himself had been obliged to laugh though he cared little about jokes concerning his somewhat solemn being; and he had married the bright-cheeked, shining-eyed, full-figured, not over-intelligent young Croatian of his desire, Irma Milanovics, and they had had three sons in the four years he lived to be her husband. It made him the father of eleven children, all living at the time of the outbreak of the war, together with an adopted daughter, the child of a dead friend,--(one more, it couldn't matter where there were so many). He had always enjoyed the patriarchal feeling which would come over him as he sat at that big oval table, serving the most generous of portions, or when out buying objects by the half-dozen or dozen. In many other ways, too, that numerous, good-looking family had flattered his persistent paternity.

Two sons had been lost in the war, one last seen at the fall of the Fortress of Prszmysl, then traced to a prison camp in Siberia. After two years a card came through the Red Cross informing them of his death from typhus. The other had been killed in the last mad scuttle across the Piave. A daughter, too, had died of a wasting malady in the winter of 1915 after the death of her lover at the taking of Schabatz from the Serbs that first August of the war. But there were still eight of them in the thick of the fight for survival in post-war Vienna. Irma's three boys, nine, eleven and twelve years of age were not yet ready for the combat, but all the others were in it for victory or death.

To return to their aunt Ilde. The first two years of the peace had not been so bad. With some difficulty she got through and succeeded in keeping that roof that showed such unmistakable signs of collapse from falling about her head. Still in a small way she received them all on New Year's Day of 1921. For the customary roast pork was substituted a less expensive "Rindfleisch garniert" the classic boiled beef and vegetables, and there had been an Apfelstrudel, delight of all Viennese. Tradition maintained itself in a world now obviously composed of wreckage. But Frau Stacher had had an uneasy feeling as she sat, for what was indeed the last time, at the head of her table surrounded by her nieces and nephews. A week later she found, quite suddenly, that never again would she get anything from those Bohemian investments handed down from her father, the revered von Berg. She made some desperate, useless efforts, but she was always brought up round by the fact, once so pleasant, now disastrous, that she was the widow of an Austrian, and herself an Austrian. That sudden cleaving of things that she had supposed indissoluble, opened a gaping void in front of her, into which she was inevitably to fall. Behind her, far behind her lay the shining, solid, comfortable years, like another person's life, when she was Frau Kommerzienrath Stacher, born von Berg. That providential "von" had incredibly embellished her life. There was, indeed, all the difference in the world between being born a "von" or not a "von." She had always regretted that her mother's somewhat hasty second marriage to handsome Heinrich Bruckner, some years her junior, had not had the more sustaining qualities of a "von,"--then all Heinie's children too....

Now it appeared that nothing made any difference. Every landmark was gone. Authority was gone. Gone beauty, reverence, faith. All that warm, imperial lustre in which the middle classes had burnished themselves, proud and content that such things were, had faded into the night with Vienna's setting sun. Sweet things were gone not only out of her life, but out of the nation's, leaving black misery, or a crushing commercialism which, though it lent money, lent neither beauty nor honor.

It was all symbolized to Frau Stacher in the ruin of her own life, epitomized in the blank, useless loneliness of her downlyings and her uprisings. Life, once dear life, had become quite simply a monster that threatened to devour her and then spit her into the grave.

* * * * *

One warm, golden January Sabbath set like a jewel in the silver of the Baden winter, Frau Stacher had sat hour after hour at her window in chill, stark dismay, watching without seeing the soft afternoon light sift through the bare, velvety branches of the chestnut tree in front of her door. She was waiting for Corinne; but the moon had already risen and its silver glimmer had taken the place of the gold of afternoon before she heard a light step on the gravel. That light step carried the heaviest of hearts for Corinne had come out to discuss baldly matters till then not even thinkable....

But whichever way they turned and twisted and tried to avoid it, they were always finding themselves back at a certain dark spot. Finally they very quietly owned to each other, even saying the unthinkable thing aloud, that the Baden house would have to be given up. Then Corinne braced herself to meet those pale eyes, out of which the color had been suddenly washed.

"You can get quite a sum from the sale of the furniture," she ventured after a long silence in which she had looked as through a blur at the familiar appointments of the room. They sat knee to knee holding each other's hand tightly; Corinne felt as if she were watching her aunt drown in the Danube; she wanted to cry "Help," but she only said:

"Of course you must keep enough of your best things for a nice room near us all,--if we can find one."

The housing problem was beginning to loom up blackly, overshadowing quite a number of things already dark enough. She leaned closer and pressed her aunt's head against her loving young heart. There Frau Commercial Advisor Stacher, born von Berg, wept her only tears. She had a fine spirit which even then was not broken, but hurt, bent and vastly astonished. During the long hours that followed they mingled their pity and their love, which bore in the end a thin hope that "something would happen"; but all the same, when early the next morning Corinne went away she knew that the first stone had been cut for the sepulchre of her aunt's existence.

* * * * *

That "nice room near us all" proved indeed unobtainable. In a city that had once offered every imaginable sort of pleasant shelter, there didn't seem to be a single "nice, unfurnished room" to offer a homeless old lady,--and it was said so many had died in or because of the war,--no, Frau Stacher couldn't understand.

A few bits of furniture left from the sale were finally distributed about among the various nieces and Frau Stacher went to board, just as a makeshift--"till things get better" Corinne had assured her, at the house of an acquaintance, who in the palmier days had partaken of her easy bounty. There nights of aching, sleepless homesickness followed days of empty, useless longing for all that had once been hers, for her little situation in life that had enabled her, childless as she was to be a center of pleasure and comfort to the only beings she loved. It was finished, done with, that was quite clear. She sat more and more alone in her room. The clack of Frau Kerzl's tongue and her invectives at Fate, quite justified though they were, got finally and intolerably on her nerves. She thought she could not bear to hear another time that things were as they were because the Hapsburgs had taken all the gold out of Austria when they went, and left the "others" sitting with the paper money.

Frau Stacher was no intellectual and had attempted no mental appraisement of the national calamities. Even in the good days her most enjoyable reading had been the _Salon Blatt_, where what the Imperial and Royal family and the "Aristokraten" did, said, wore, and where and how they showed themselves was duly recorded for the delectation of an appreciative people. A morning paper had always been brought to the house, it is true, but she would only run quickly over world-events which had never so slightly modified her life, whereas the doings of the First Society lent it both lustre and interest.

She knew that Frau Kerzl, whose grief had dyed her political feelings a deep red, was going on in a stupid, even wicked, manner, when she so unjustly and blasphemously spoke of the Hapsburgs, but she had no satisfactory answer to make, so after her way she was silent, spending the long evenings alone in her room. She couldn't see to sew in it, nor indeed to do anything more complicated than move about. The single light was placed high up in the center of the ceiling and was reflected but dimly from the dark walls, the pieces of heavy furniture and the brown porcelain stove that was never lighted.

Fortitude was, seemingly, the only virtue that Frau Stacher, gentle, easy-going, unheroic, was called upon to practise.

But the thing couldn't last forever. Often she was glad she was seventy. It made the outlook easier. There couldn't be more than twenty years of treading up other people's stairs. The instinct of home was almost as strong in her as the instinct to live. No, there couldn't be more than twenty years of it.... Then, too, in a month, a day, an hour even, it might all be over. But one evening sitting in the shadowy room, her little, white, knitted shawl drawn about her shoulders, her hands crossed under it on her breast, she was suddenly and terrifyingly aware of the beating of her heart,--almost as if for the first time. She found she was as much afraid of death as of life--and that was a great deal....

Sometimes one or the other of "the children" remembered to come to see "poor Tante Ilde" and often Corinne, in her moonbeam way, would slip in and out, still and pale indeed like a ray of reflected light, and every Sunday after dinner she and Corinne would meet at Irma's. She went frequently to Kaethe's, too, that is, whenever she had anything to take to the children. It wasn't a place where one could go empty-handed.

But all, in one way or another, were caught up in the struggle for survival. In a starving, freezing city, not starving, not freezing, took the last flow of everybody's energy, so she was mostly alone. But solitude, for which nothing in her life had prepared her, had no charms for her. She had an almost unbearable longing to be in crowds, in happy, busy crowds, where people jostled each other as they went about little, pleasant errands.

But there was another thing beside being certain--vaguely--that she wouldn't live forever, which had come to make her sojourn at Frau Kerzl's not only endurable but desirable ... a cold, creeping premonition concerning the not distant time when even that measure of independence would be denied her. The money from the sale of the furniture was going, was gone.

One morning in that terrible "little hour before dawn" when anxiety had done its worst, she got up and counted and recounted the thin packet of crowns left in her purse. Then in panic she made a mental survey of her other remaining "values," of those things her nieces were "keeping" for her. The result had sent her shivering back to bed, where frightened by a fear beyond any she had ever known, even in nightmare, she had pulled the bedclothes up over her head. She was afraid, afraid. It was grinning at her....

She dozed finally. But she only knew she had been asleep when she found herself throwing the sheet aside with a start, thinking she heard Corinne's voice calling up the stairs in the house at Baden.... Perhaps something would happen.

But little can happen to women of seventy except more of the same, whatever it is....

When in that chill December twilight she first found her way to the pawnshop, to "Tante Dorothea's," familiar to her all her life as a sure object for humorous sallies, and left there her gold bracelets, that old life dropped finally and forever from her almost as if it had never been, leaving her unticketed, unbilleted, between time and eternity. Truly she found that there is no greater sorrow than in adversity remembering happier days.

She hadn't spoken to any of the children about that fatally impending visit to "Tante Dorothea's," though she had thought of consulting Pauli; Pauli who always gave the impression that nothing human was foreign to him. But he would have given her the money. Humbly she deplored the burden of her existence on that younger generation, that dead wood of her fate among those green trees, bent themselves in the blast of misery that swept over the city. Every day, every hour one had to look out, or one was quite certainly blown over. But Pauli was away. Corinne, dear, lovely Corinne, she couldn't bear to think of her pale light flashing in through the door of that pawn shop in the Spiegelgasse, that fatal "Tante Dorothea's," whom the mention of in the good old days, had always raised that ill-considered laugh. Once or twice her thoughts had played glimmeringly about Fanny instead of "Tante Dorothea,"--to go out in a sudden, chilly little gust blowing from the terra ignota of Fanny's life. In the end it was her business, not another's, that was in question. She realized for the first time the solitariness of her fate, of everybody's fate, so long hidden from her under the pleasant details of her daily existence which had seemed to bind it in a thousand ways to other lives.

When she finally slipped out, looking fearfully and guiltily about her long before she got to her destination, as if her shameful errand had been stamped in red upon her face, she was further intimidated rather than reassured to discover, as she turned into the Spiegelgasse, that she was by no means alone of her kind. All the human scrapings and combings of the Inner Town seemed to have been blown there too. Old women like herself with arched noses and deeply-circled, tearless eyes, thin, wan women, in once-good, now threadbare clothes, whose gentle mien, like her own, recalled unmistakably happier days,--how many of them there were! Pale spectres of that middle class whom the War and then the Peace had stripped of everything save their sorrows. The war loans they had invested in had gone up in the smoke of battle, or down in the bitter waters of Peace; the thousands, the tens of thousands of comfortable little incomes, left them by fathers, by husbands, had soundlessly, untraceably disappeared, and they were learning the way to "Tante Dorothea's."

* * * * *

The Dorotheum, if one's business there is not vital is one of the most interesting buildings of its kind in Europe. Five of its seven stories rise above ground, the other two are in deep subterranean spaces, reaching to the old catacombs, and where household and personal effects of the Viennese middle class are now stored so thickly and so high, once Roman mercenaries of the Xth Legion lay buried....

But Frau Stacher knew nothing of the Dorotheum in its historical aspect and had she known, it would have been of little interest to her.

A motley, miserable throng was pressing in at the doors, for many, like herself, chose the dusk for such an errand. She found herself pressed close to a young mother with an anxious, withered face who had a pallid baby sleeping on one arm, while under the other she carried a small bundle of linen, that last of all possessions to be offered to "Tante Dorothea." Behind her stood a former officer. It was easy to see what he had been. He was still erect, but he was very thin, with deep pits under his cheek bones, his coat was buttoned up to his chin and he kept his hand in his pocket.

The pale baby on the woman's arm waked up as they stood in line, and began a wretched wailing. The mother tried to quiet it as she passed up to the counter, where a being, necessarily without bowels, looked quickly at the poor contents of the bundle, gave her a ticket and a few bits of paper money. Silently she received them and made way for Frau Stacher, who in a distress that moistened her brow and dried her mouth, tremblingly produced her bracelets. She was brusquely pointed to another counter for precious objects, as also was the officer. There she found herself behind a woman selling a worn wedding ring, not much heavier than the money she got in exchange.

The bulging-eyed man, giving Frau Stacher a quick, circular look that further chilled the thin blood in her veins, proceeded to weigh the bracelets in the little scales on the counter. On their last golden gleam was borne in a flash by Frau Stacher those bright, warm years in which she had worn them. The dull ticket she received was the true symbol of her state. The money would soon be gone and she would have neither money nor bracelets, just nothing. As she turned away she saw that the officer was offering a small medallion and a miniature. Again she thought of the foolish jokes about "Tante Dorothea." This stark, final misery was what it really was.... This doomlike end of everything.

Two short weeks after, Frau Kerzl again showed signs of nervousness and talked loudly and significantly, or what Frau Stacher, who had got timid even about leaving her room, thought was loudly and significantly, concerning the price of food; and how money, even an hour over-due, represented in those days of falling currency, a fabulous loss. That afternoon she took out her watch and chain and her amethyst and pearl ring. It was less frightening the second time, but she felt much sadder, and she was unspeakably depressed by the old man just ahead of her who fainted as he stood waiting.