Part 10

She had put on her oldest suit, with the black and white stripes without once thinking that it had always been a failure. Business--pleasant business was engaging her attention. But she stood at the door a moment too long, holding in one hand her umbrella, in the other a large, brown, string bag. In her worn pocket-book was money to buy wherewith to fill it. Her eyes were bright; in her cheeks was the faintest pink. Irma was irritated in spite of herself at the sight of that brisk fervor. She knew perfectly well the chronically desperate situation of the Eberhardts, yet to see her sister-in-law stepping lightly over the threshold with that bag in her hand, going out to buy food that she, Irma, could well have used for her own children, provoked an unreasoning envy. Frau Stacher had not dallied in face of that sombre look, that terrible look, born of the brooding solicitude about food, food, that seemed to hold but slightly in leash unnamable things. She fled hastily before it. Only Irma's nerves. But she had come to know a lot about Irma's nerves in those few days. Irma was a beast of prey for her children. No one and nothing that came into conflict with their interests had the slightest chance with her. Ferry's cough seemed suddenly from one day to the other to get worse. She had taken him to his Uncle Hermann, and his Uncle Hermann had said to Irma in the back office, while Ferry turned over a sport journal of eight years before in the front room:

"What's the use, Irma, he needs milk, eggs, high air."

Had he said pearls, diamonds, rubies, it would have been the same to Irma. How not to sink to irrecoverable depths with that sinking population of which they were a part, was Irma's one thought. The rent was a small matter. For a long time she hadn't paid anything. At least the "crazy government" prohibited turning families into the streets, even if they didn't pay. All the government really wanted to know was that every room of every apartment was filled to overflowing with samples of the Viennese populace.

In that back office Hermann had further said, tentatively:

"Perhaps ... Fanny would send him away for a while."

Irma had tartly answered: "Fanny, it's always Fanny."

But all the same the suggestion, though annoying, had fallen on fertile soil. She had been turning over certain possibilities, or rather methods of approach for twenty-four hours and she was terribly jumpy, ... if that slender, aging figure had stood a moment longer on the threshold with that string bag, sign and symbol of marketing.... Nerves, nerves. After a moment Irma had gone on with her petit point. She was putting the pale brown background around the delicate moss-roses,--really quite lovely. Mizzi, for all she'd hum and haw, would take it, but at her own price, Irma was reflecting bitterly. She pulled the red shawl closer about her and bit off absent-mindedly a piece of silk on a tooth that needed filling, then miserably, with a groan, she continued her work. Tante Ilde had said something about her own teeth that morning,--she had a loose front one that was beginning to hurt unmercifully every time she took anything hot. But at _that_ age, Irma had thought disdainfully, what did it matter if they all fell out? Money for a dentist at that age, in such times! Now she was full of Ferry's need, of plans for him. She hadn't yet decided how to go about the matter which presented certain undeniably delicate points. Even Irma, obsessed by mother-love and mother-fear, was aware of their delicacy.

* * * * *

The Eberhardts still lived in the apartment they had taken when they married, on a street in the Alsergrund, near the University. It had once seemed very big, magnificent even for two people,--now their handsome, hungry children overflowed it.

The family had been very proud of Kaethe's distinguished young husband; "a genius" they would always say impressively to less fortunate friends when speaking of him, and dwell delightedly on Kaethe's relations with the University and with certain distinguished people who visited Vienna when the Kaiserstadt was a font of wisdom. Her husband was indeed well-embarked on a brilliant career, any and all honours were possible; Privy Counselor certainly, and later perhaps a "von" to his name. When scientific Congresses met in Vienna, he was always called on to read papers, and colleagues from other cities were eager to confer with him. He often used to bring one or the other home with him for coffee, proud of his smiling, soft-eyed, bright-cheeked wife, of his lovely babies, his comfortable house. When things began to get bad, Kaethe would tell the children what she used to have for the "Jause," that extraordinary, incredible meal that came in the afternoon, _between_ other meals,--coffee and chocolate, with thick whipped cream, (the now quite legendary "Schlagobers"), apple tarts with butter dough, the fresh coffee cake, and certain little crescents that would fairly melt in the mouth. The children were in the habit of asking their exact color, shape and taste, they seemed quite unrelated to the War and Peace bread that alone they were acquainted with, and certainly they never could have sprung from the same harvest field. The real difference between milk and cream, too, was an absorbing topic, and they all loved Resl's joke that if it rained milk instead of water she would be out all the time looking up with her mouth open, though Maxy invariably reminded her that it would be better to take a pail and bring a lot home and then everybody could have some. When Lilli learned at school about the milky way, she taught them a game called living at number 1 Milk Street. But lately they hadn't talked much of the "Jause" of the old days, nor made so many little jokes. They were tired when they got home from school and only errands connected with food had any interest.

Though all of Herr Bruckner's family were musical in their easy way, Kaethe had a real talent; she could not only play through by ear the latest operette, but Beethoven, Schumann, Brahms, with a sure yet fiery touch. Eberhardt had played the 'cello since his boyhood. Sometimes Kaethe, her fingers tapping out a measure on the table after the piano went, would think with hot longing of certain quartettes to which those walls of hers had once resounded. Poor Amsel who led them ... his songs, written during a protracted period of starvation in a garret, were now being sung everywhere; but he had been killed on the Eastern front that very first month of the war,--he'd scarcely had time to send back a postcard,--and had been buried with his talent and a half a hundred luckless fellows in a huge mound, that had been promptly flattened and all trace of it obliterated by a retreating army. And Koellner, with his Amati violin. Kaethe often hummed a motif of that Mozart trio and thought of herself at the piano, Koellner swaying slimly, his eyes closed and the long black lock falling over his forehead,--they hadn't seen him after the signing of the Peace. As for Rosetti from Triest who played the viola, he hadn't been heard of since the day before the mobilization, certain rumors got around about him....

But all these things were really as distant to the Eberhardts as the Tertiary Period; they themselves had been thrown up by the convulsions of War and Peace into strangely diversified, completely unrelated strata.

For a long time, however, those bright days had left the glow of their setting on the sombre war period. And then wars didn't last forever, and when over, except for mourning mothers, things would doubtless be as they had been. No one foresaw the Peace....

It had lasted four years, that first full, happy life, during which time Kaethe had had three children,--Lilli a pansy-eyed, pale-haired little girl, now grown too beautiful for safe adolescence, another clever, dark child, Resl, and Maxy who had been a "sugar baby" something to eat up, as he lay gurgling and cooing in his mother's arms.

The pendulum of Eberhardt's life had swung unvaryingly between that beloved home and the equally beloved laboratory, where daily he pursued hotly, closely, certain secrets of nature, always enchantingly about to be caught; or with a warm note in his vibrant voice and a light in his grey, speculative eye, communicated to eager students those he had already seized....

On the 28th of June came the news of the assassinations at Sarajevo. Unbelievable news; the Dual Monarchy shaken to its foundations. Its heir, its keystone gone like that, in a foul moment. Still everybody talked of the Emperor's grief, not dreaming that each, in one way or another, would partake of that grief. They counted his many sorrows, scarce one save poverty was missing; the Emperor's sorrows had always been an absorbing theme; it had got so that there weren't enough fingers on both hands to record them. This, and this, and this and still this, had he suffered. Had not his son miserably perished by his own hand--or another's? Had not his lovely Empress been assassinated? Had not his brother been put to death in far off Mexico? Had not his sister-in-law been burned to death in a Charity Bazaar? Had he not been obliged to exile another brother from his court for nameless sins? Had not another heir died of a dread disease? And other, other griefs. Now this last, this fatal blow in his old age, personal, dynastic. Those catastrophic griefs, heaped high with the years, in a way had become a matter of pride to happy Austrians, and the unhappy ones because of them, had a feeling of kinship with their beloved "Franzerl." Who could have foretold that in five years they would seem remoter, less interesting than those of some Roman Emperor?...

For a few weeks things seemingly went on just the same. Suddenly Europe was in flames and from the conflagration no one could flee....

The first two years hadn't been so bad for the Eberhardts. The Professor had been detailed for laboratory work in Vienna, and things went on somewhat as they had been going. Two more children were born. Then unexpectedly, through some tragedy of errors, Eberhardt found himself in a delousing station on the Eastern front. By that time, everybody was talking about hygiene as well as victory. But he was only gone a few months, returning gaunt and white, a startled look in his once thoughtful eye, and evidently quite unfit for further service. He had been side-tracked for days with a dozen others, suffering from dysentery, heaped together in a luggage van. No food, and worst of all, no water. The whole first week after he had tottered in over the threshold of his home he had said nothing, except repeat the word "schrechlich"--terrible. Then, strangely, he got better, even well, and went to the nearly empty University every day, trying to knot the torn threads of learning. Then the terrible peace broke out. The war had been bad enough, but it was war and unless one was killed one knew how to take it. The peace was quite another matter, a starving, freezing matter for women and children in city streets. The civilian population was suddenly plunged into it, up to the neck in it.... That collapse of the winter of 1919, ... that terrible food-blockade over half Europe.... There was nothing to hope for, nothing to fight for except bread, bread, bread, in ever-diminishing quantities. More were going down in that battle in the windy city than before machine guns. Each street was a battle-field, heaped mostly with children's bodies or the bodies of the very old.

* * * * *

The Eberhardt's apartment was far, too, from the Hoher Markt, but not far like the Mariahilfer street, Frau Stacher kept reminding herself as she trudged along, her string bag full and her purse empty, and at the end of the walk there would be darling Kaethe and the lovely, hungry children.

It had not been easy, buying the most usual things, and the thin soup of the night before, and the ersatz coffee of the early breakfast had prepared her but illy for the venture. She had gone into various shops where unholy prices or empty shelves confronted her, for Vienna had mostly done its buying for the day when she started forth. It was late when at last she found herself, quite worn out, hesitating in a certain provision shop, between rice and lentils. One got a lot more of the latter, but what were they unless cooked with a bit of bacon or fat of some kind? And she was further confused by the sudden memory of a certain smoking dish of lentils, with shining bits of pork laid around the edge of the platter, that she had often served in the old Baden days.

There were a good many people in the shop and not much time for hesitating old ladies to make a final choice. Suddenly, tremblingly, she decided to take the rice, while it was there to take, for quite close to her, overtopping her, stood a large, hook-nosed, hard-eyed, befurred woman who was evidently ready to swoop down upon it all. Indeed, she was looking about her with an unmistakable look that could only come from money, a lot of it, in her pocket, as if, indeed, she could buy everybody as well as everything. No eggs, no butter, no fats of any kind were in that shop, but as Frau Stacher was paying for the rice, she suddenly saw on a lower shelf behind the counter an object that, had it been set in gold, could not have been more attractive: a tin of Nestlé's milk. She stammeringly asked for it, but as the man, placing his hand almost affectionately on it named the exorbitant price, and as trembling with excitement she was about to take it, the large, befurred female cried out harshly:

"I'll give you double what the old woman is paying!"

The man,--what decency could be left in that fight for food, for existence?--took it out of Frau Stacher's unresisting hand. A murmur went up from those watching the unseemly operation. But the shop-keeper only shrugged his shoulders, muttered something about the "pig" war, the still piggier peace, and the stout woman, hastily paying for it, departed to unmistakable allusions to "pig profiteers." That was the kind of world gentle Frau Stacher was living in. It would have been a frightening experience for her, but she, too, was armoured in that grim determination to get food. The great city's fight was for food, not against the enemy at the gates, but for the food that was at the gates, and shoulder to shoulder in serried lines, they fought for it against each other. She, Frau Stacher, once "rentier" in Baden, was fighting for it. She was lucky to have got even the rice. Leaving the shop she espied on the street corner a small fruit stand. Some shrivelled apples, so evidently grown in the four winds, were being offered in little piles of five, by a raw-boned peasant woman, whose hands were wrapped under her small, three-cornered grey shawl, while she stamped from foot to foot.

Frau Stacher remembered longingly the beautiful Tirolese fruit that had filled the Vienna markets in the days of plenty. Corinne had lately had a letter from the adopted daughter Jella, married to her tall, blue-eyed, yellow-haired, square-headed Tiroler, now Italian, saying that the fruit that autumn had lain rotting on the ground. There was no way of getting it over the frontiers, those invisible but none-the-less impregnable walls that had been suddenly built up around Vienna, north, south, east and west. Fruit and grain, sugar and fats could not pass over them nor get through them.

Now those little apples, even on that raw day, had a strange fascination for Frau Stacher, out of all proportion to their merits. They certainly resembled in no way the full, rosy-cheeked specimens she had been wont to pass out to visiting nieces and nephews and into which white teeth would promptly, juicily crunch, but they were a reminder, a symbol of them. She longed foolishly once more to see white teeth dig into apples. She bought hesitatingly a little pile, obviously she had lost her nerve about shopping for food since it had become a matter of life or death; in the old days she had been a lavish provider.... Not much more than a mouthful in each apple, and certainly they wouldn't be nourishing, but Frau Stacher was of a sentimental nature, and the pale, innocent eye she turned upon the fruit grew bluer, softer in expression. The woman, saving her crumpled bits of newspaper, dropped the apples into the string bag and quickly put her hands, swollen with chilblains, again under her shawl.

Then Frau Stacher began to think anxiously of little Carli, the next to the last of Kaethe's children, beautiful, smiling, little Carli who had no strength in his legs and whose face was alabaster. Fanny did send condensed milk for Carli, but there was always an urgent reason why one or the other of the children, with a cold or a sore throat or a stomach-ache, should have some of it. She wanted above all things to get a can of milk for Carli. Thinking desperately "Saint Anthony _must_ help me," she found herself outside a small grocery shop. Few of the usual articles for sale in such shops were visible in the dusty window,--varnish, boot-blacking, washing-soda and other inedibles safely showed themselves behind the grimy panes. Somewhat dizzily she went in and asked for the milk. She wanted that can of milk more than she had ever wanted anything, wanted it enough it seemed, to create it out of empty air. The man, to her relief rather than her surprise, reluctantly reached down under the counter and passed it silently out to her, doubtless thinking of his own undernourished children.

"I knew it," said Tante Ilde under her breath, and she suddenly found herself delightfully warm as she exercised a truly à propos gratitude to the Heavenly Powers. She was emboldened too, and almost loftily asked him if he had a can of green peas, she wanted them to put into the rice to make the "risi-bisi" that the children so loved. Of course he didn't have it and scarcely answered her foolish question. But she espied a very small piece of hard cheese under a very large glass,--it was extraordinary how many things there were in the world that you couldn't eat, and how much of them! Then she saw a small package of "feinste Keks", with its picture in blue and red of a child eating one in rapture. She took recklessly both cheese and cakes. She knew she had lost her head, and besides she was feeling quite faint. Buying food in those days, even when one of the Saints visibly stood by, was an exhausting matter. She brightened up, however, as she went out of the shop at the thought that another twenty minutes of putting one foot before the other would inevitably bring her to Kaethe's door and the heavier the bag the better....

Frau Stacher's ring brought a scurry of young feet to the door, she heard welcoming shouts, "Tante Ilde's come! Tante Ilde's come!" even before it was opened with a rush. She was smiling a breathless smile, after the stairs and the blessedly heavy bag, as she went in. It was known that she was coming with the dinner, but _what_ had she brought? They surrounded her, they embraced her, they overwhelmed her. They were all there save Maxy whose turn it was to eat his midday meal at the Bellevue Palace, and Lilli not yet back from fetching a few briquets.

Kaethe was nursing that youngest, rosiest of her children who knew, as yet, only the sweet fullness of her mother's breast. Carli was sitting at her feet, his head hanging listlessly against her knee. He hadn't run with the others to meet Tante Ilde because he couldn't even stand. He would laugh, a sweet, somewhat surprised little laugh when he tried to pull himself up by a chair and would fall down; but his mother always wanted to weep when she heard the soft little thud as he slipped to the floor. Carli was an angel. Carli, quite evidently to any but a mother's eye, was not to pass another winter on earth. Even in the week since Tante Ilde had seen him he had become more and more like something made of crystal, so smooth, so shining, so transparent was his little face. But she concealed the sudden fear that came over her as she looked from him to his mother.

"I'm nursing the baby earlier so I can be ready to help with the dinner," Kaethe said as her aunt bent over to kiss her and Anny,--one fat little hand spread out over her mother's breast, and making soft, contented noises,--little Anny, the last, she must be the last of Kaethe's children, Tante Ilde was thinking....

Kaethe wore a frayed but evidently once expensive, wadded, blue silk wrapper. It struck an unexpected note in that denuded room, whose immediate air of indigence was inescapable. Not only was the piano gone, and long since Eberhardt's 'cello, but gone one after the other the pleasant, superfluous tables and the little objects once set out upon them. Even the bookcases.... What remained of the books was piled in a corner and received many a careless kick from romping children.

Whenever Frau Stacher entered that room she was confronted by a quite flashy portrait of her mother in the Winterhalter style. It had been sent to Kaethe's for safe-keeping and now hung frameless on the wall. A dealer at the time she sold her furniture had offered her a surprising and unrefusable price for the frame. The young face that looked out at the aging daughter, though like her in many ways, had a point of competent malice in the wide, blue eyes, that was neither in her daughter's eyes nor in her heart. Sometimes, too, from under that broad, floppy, rose-trimmed hat with the long, pink streamers she seemed to look reproachfully, severely at her daughter,--leaving her elegant prettiness thus unset in so cold a world. Frau Stacher had never felt easy about selling that frame, and she sometimes had useless little night thoughts, or equally useless morning thoughts of getting another. But it had been hanging just like that since she gave up the house in Baden, near an enlarged photograph, (whose pressed wood frame picked out with gilt no one had wanted) of the departed Commercial Advisor. She would gladly have been unfaithful to the memory of her husband, now become exceedingly hazy anyway, and replaced his image by that of her mother. But her mother's portrait was square, and his photograph unprophetically had been taken in oblong form. Things were like that now. Nothing fitted....