Part 13

Tante Ilde felt vaguely, pleasantly like a woman in a romance, interesting but unreal. It wasn't only the food, but that looking at the menu and ordering right out of the heart of it, without other guide than what was the best. It conjured up the agreeable ghosts of those far-off comfortable years; and then to be carried along on that stream of love and immediate affection. She blessèdly forgot the dark depths of those waters that surged about Pauli and Corinne....

"Next week, if you insist, we can be less grand," Pauli was saying, "boiled beef then, and the week after no meat at all. That's the way it goes in Vienna now," he continued cheerfully. And then Corinne in her pleasant way of alluding to pleasant things said:

"Auntie, you remember the 'marinierter' carp you used to give us at Baden on Friday?"

Frau Stacher flushed at this that was like a blow on memory, but she only said with a retrospective look,

"Yes, Frieda did do it well,--and the Fogosch too," she added. In those days the beautiful blue Danube had seemed to fill one of its natural uses in supplying her table with that, her favorite fish. But it all seemed strangely uninteresting to her. She was trying vainly to keep her thoughts, so unaccountably, so uncomfortably wandering, close within her body, within that pleasant room from which all three of them must too soon depart.

Pauli's love was almost visibly enfolding Corinne, just as his affection was flowing about Tante Ilde. So different the two, as different and distinct as two primary colors, yet blending. She felt wrapt in something warm and many-colored, and what its pattern was she no longer tried to see. Then suddenly and anxiously she was aware that there was still the transparency about Corinne that, as she watched her approach that morning, she thought had come up from the wet, shining streets, but there in the warm, dark restaurant it was the same....

Her likeness to Fanny, too, was very apparent, there were but two years in time between them, ... though so many other things.... She had never noticed it so clearly, not even when they were children. The same blue eyes, with their sudden oblique look; in Corinne it was disturbing, in Fanny devastating. The same pale, shining hair, the same fine nose; only in Fanny all was more accented, more complete. Her eyes were bigger and bluer, her hair yellower and thicker, her complexion more dazzling, the oval of her face more perfect. Yet Corinne ... her face had not indeed the glitter of Fanny's blinding, noonday beauty, but its moonbeam charm was forever working its own pale magic....

Then the half chicken for each with its little round mound of rice was brought on, and though Pauli took out his glass to look at his, and speculated on the evidently not distant hour of its hatching, still it was quite delicious, and that shining gravy over the rice!

"I'm speculating in everything," he continued vigorously, "I've joined the Black Bourse Brigade, it's where you pick up trillions," and with an airy gesture he pulled out a wallet and showed Tante Ilde some magic-working dollars and some potent English pounds, but which last in a subtle way gave place to the noisier charm of the dollars.

"Everybody speculates," he went on, "the lift boys in the hotels, the porters at the stations, the old women selling newspapers. Everybody. It's in the air."

Then as they were finishing the last of the rice and gravy, with little crumbs of bread added so that not a bit should be lost, Corinne gave voice slowly to what she had in mind, looking narrowly, slantingly at Pauli:

"Tante Ilde is going to Fanny's tomorrow for her dinner."

"To Fanny's tomorrow?" he questioned in an astonishment that caused Tante Ilde's face to flush a deep rose. To Pauli's way of thinking though a good many things were done, certain others weren't. Tante Ilde's going to Fanny's clearly fell under the latter head. Saints and sinners were mostly all the same to him. One could rarely tell which was which anyway, but somehow this....

"Fanny is so good to us--I don't think she always has it,--as easy as it seems," she faltered, feeling quite uncomfortable, not because she was going, but because of Pauli's strange look.

"Fanny _is_ a good fellow," he answered slowly, reflectively, but he looked at neither of the women as he spoke. The fact was that for all his experience of men and matters Pauli himself had come to a point where he didn't understand anything anymore than they did. Life was for him, as for them, one great confusion. Except his terrible need for Corinne, clear, urgent, urgent beyond any words.... But now this picture of Tante Ilde at Fanny's! Tante Ilde shining white, Tante Ilde who thought that all wolves were lambs inside and even in process of being devoured scarcely perceived their true nature. Life was, indeed, presenting itself in its most unreasonable and confounding aspect. "Much will be forgiven her because she has loved much," was all right for everything except just this ... or if a daughter had been in question. Then he tried honestly to think, not according to that feeling that had leapt up in him at Corinne's words, but according to his usual way of easy judgment.

"Fanny has a gold heart, I can't tell you not to go," he hesitated, "she deserves it," he finished at last, but evidently against the grain. Pauli was really very ill at ease at that special manifestation of the disorder of their world. _Where_ were your feet and where your head? Tante Ilde at Fanny's! What after all did it mean? All kinds of saints in the world, he knew. Still it was a pity, among a thousand other pities. Indeed Pauli was shocked in a way that neither of the women were. Pauli, to whom nothing human was foreign, was shocked at a little thing like Tante Ilde's going to Fanny's, when everybody, everywhere was up against real death and destruction--a detail like that and he who had seen everything was not only shocked but horrified. Riddle. Riddle. Then suddenly he changed the conversation and pulled out his wallet again, crying, without any noticeable preamble:

"Tante Ilde must have a presentli!"

Uncomfortably he felt that the special problem confronting them had grown out of material ruin; lack of security was, after all, regulating that situation. In a word when you didn't have money you did a lot of things that you didn't do when you had it. It was as plain and as stupid as that.... It put decency on an indecent footing or vice versa. And morality, why morality positively had its legs in the air.

What little he could do for Tante Ilde wouldn't be enough to give her existence a basis. He knew what he could do for her and what not. Life was now a small sheet on a big bed and whichever end was pulled, somebody was left bare.

Corinne gave Pauli one of her palely flashing looks that always left him blinded as he laid those bank notes by Tante Ilde's plate, almost in among the bare bones of the chicken. He had a strange expression on his face, something final that made Tante Ilde suddenly and terribly anxious, as he returned it.

"Oh, Pauli dear, you spoil me," she only said tremulously, glancing from him to Corinne, whose look like some slow-turning beacon was now shining upon her. But still she was anxious with a grim, new anxiety. Corinne's danger was so clearly imminent.

Then that fear too, passed; her existence seemed but a long street, with figures appearing and disappearing, signs and symbols were quickly flashed before her and too quickly gone for understanding. It was the processional of life that she was aware of for the first time. Then again things shifted and passed, and she found she was happy, not because of the money, though that was pleasant enough, but quite simply because she was warm and nourished and loved. She couldn't, in that moment, accept further calamities, nor even look at the shadows they cast before them....

Then with that money on the table, they turned quite inevitably to the everlasting subject of Exchange, which was plunging to unfathomable depths, and the whole population headlong after it.

But Frau Stacher for the moment continued to feel pleasantly distant from the abyss, and as the sounds of those once almost unreckonable sums flowed over her ears, she caught again the agreeable "rentier" feeling of happier days. Corinne could talk in figures, too, from the vantage ground of the Depositen Bank. She was doing well; next year she expected to be doing better. "Then," she looked lovingly at her aunt, "I will hunt for that tiny, tiny apartment."

"Next year!" interrupted Pauli, not included in the heaven Corinne's words evoked, and so deep was the longing in his voice, in his words that Frau Stacher bent her eyes quickly upon her plate.

He put his hand out over Corinne's. She was flushing and paling under his touch; his dark, unexpectedly small hand had, on the little finger, a thick gold ring in which was sunk a turquoise turned very green. That ring was somehow like Pauli. Color, Pauli loved it--and yet in moonbeam Corinne with no more color than the palest opal, than a pearl, lay all his desire.

Frau Stacher had long since forgotten what being in love was like, the love of man for woman, perhaps she had never known, but suddenly it seemed clear, the pulsing mystery of such love, and she was very frightened. Just Pauli's hand over Corinne's made it clear, much clearer than his words, than his tone even, as he cried:

"Oh, Corinne if everything were different, save you and I--and Tante Ilde! If I could only take you and care for you, never let you go to an office again--and always dress you in silver, Corinne, Corinne!"

"Next year," Corinne was repeating slowly. Her look was very oblique and distant, and her face was suddenly pale, though quite bright--as if consumed to pale, hot ashes in the look Pauli bent upon her, consumed to last resistance.

Between these two looks Frau Stacher was suddenly crushed; she could scarcely breathe, another intolerable distress came to join that pain in her chest.

Would they hold out, those two who loved each other so, hold out in the dark, grim city that now took heed of little save food? Would they build themselves a house without foundations, in a nameless street, above ruins? Or would Corinne wander alone till her sunset, homeless as a cloud?...

Then Frau Stacher became aware of a great exhaustion. The life-force had done with her, was slipping from her body, she could feel it retreating, something finally, inexorably destructive taking its place.... But those two in whom it surged so high, so hot?...

It was over. And how is anyone to know that something has happened for the last time until the irrecoverable afterwards? Corinne had, indeed, sweetly said goodby to her aunt, brightly, warmly, visibly leaving her, as always, the gift of her love. But every fibre was straining towards Pauli as she slipped away, a shadow palely-gold about the head, attenuated to last expression in the black sheathe of her coat. Pauli, (how pale, too, as he watched her disappear), was going back to the Travel Bureau he so ably managed, seeing to it that "Protection" and favoritism were practiced to their fullest extent for those travellers who could pay for them.... Pauli who spoke all known languages; Pauli who could conjure up special trains from the void; Pauli who smoothed the way incredibly for foreign millionaires come to see for themselves how things really were in Vienna, or for indigenous exchange lords who knew the time had come to travel; Pauli, to whom almost everything seemed easy.... "Get Birbach to attend to it" was the peace phrase that replaced the references to his luck during the war. Nothing was too good--or too bad--for those that could pay for it. On the other hand Pauli was often impelled to do something for those who couldn't pay. Lately, too, he had been drawn into politics, trying to help leash those dogs of destruction let loose upon his country. He was found to have something hotly convincing in his talk, or he could pierce an adversary with a thin point of ridicule that would make his listeners laugh till their sides ached. It wasn't a meal, but it certainly warmed them and Pauli was always sure of a full house. But now that love for Corinne had begun to waste him, to crumble his other interests and activities. His strength, his time were mostly spent madly, hotly hoping for something, anything, out of the void whence events come,--the void known to every longing heart. Pauli was temperamentally aware of the fluidity of life--for all except the very old, _they_ were caught like fragile shells in the hard stratum of age. It was one of the reasons for his tenderness towards Tante Ilde, and his farewell had in it much of the love of a son, and the pity of the very strong for the very weak. So many out of her little world, in their several ways, had been saying their farewells to her. Of them all, Pauli's alone had it been knowingly the last, could scarcely have been more tender.

* * * * *

Then she found herself once more alone in the Augustinerstrasse. You were always, when you were old, finding yourself alone like that. She went on, suddenly forlorn to desperation. The sun had long since disappeared behind some leaden clouds hanging over the Capuchin Church, the rain was coldly falling and the streets were getting slippery again. The warmth in her veins was gone, the color departed from her face. Those unpleasant, sick shivers were passing thickly up and down her back, and that point of pain stuck between her shoulders. She pressed her umbrella, needing a stitch at one of the points, the cloth had slipped quite far up--when it happened she couldn't think--close down about her head. The damp, hurrying crowds were jostling her unbearably, carelessly poking their umbrellas into hers. She finally turned in at one of the less frequented streets to get back to the Hoher Markt, a little longer, but out of the relentless pressure of the crowd. She kept thinking about Pauli's hand over Corinne's, on the table; the crumpled paper napkins, the few tiny bread crumbs, the wine glasses with their deep, red lees, Pauli's dark hand with the gold and turquoise ring over the slim, unringed whiteness of Corinne's.... She wanted suddenly there in the cold streets to weep for Corinne, for Pauli. She was conscious of some faint, wordless prayer that went up out of her weakness, just frightened supplication rather than thinking, and "Oh, my little, _little_ Inny!"...

Then her eyes were caught and held by the fatal, antique symbol of ultimate, entire misery that was inescapably presenting itself.

There, creeping along the walls of the houses, under their eaves, was a very tall, pale, heavy-eyed woman with a child in her arms covered by an end of her tattered, colorless shawl. She was soon, very soon, perhaps that very night, to bring another into that wintry world. At her skirts dragged a rachitic little boy of four or five.... Das Elend.... Misery.

Suddenly Frau Stacher's heart grew so big, so big with a desolate pity that she thought it would burst the thin walls of her aching chest. It was indeed the symbol, the living, cruel symbol of the misery of that wintry, starving city. It was all caught up into that wretched group, to which so soon that other, unwanted and unwanting, would be added, that child still safe in the womb.... She caught her breath stickingly, sharply.

Where did charity begin? She no longer knew. She had meant to take Irma the money Pauli had given her, that she might use it for those children of their own blood. But no, it was for this, so clearly for this, for beings whom she had never seen until that very instant and never would again. She was saying to herself--aloud though she did not know it--"Let them eat once." Then she accosted the woman who turned dull, unexpectant eyes upon her, while the little boy who knew only hard, cold, empty things clung tighter to his mother's damp skirts.

"Take this. Eat. Get warm for once before your time comes. Feed the children," she cried hoarsely, her voice still thick with her anguish.

The woman's claw-like hand closed over the money. Some stammered words of thanks, some muttered "Vergelt's Gott," fell on Frau Stacher's ears. She turned hastily away. She couldn't bear to look even for a moment longer into that hopeless face.

But she turned back after a few steps. The woman was walking almost quickly away in the direction whence she had come. She knew, doubtless, the miserable entrance to some very relative heaven where if she had money she could get food, and if she had money she could get warm and sit or perhaps even lie flat on something however hard,--out of the icy drizzle of the streets....

Then suddenly Frau Stacher became tremblingly afraid that there, so near the house, Irma, out on some little errand might have seen her. And never, never could she have made Irma understand. She didn't understand herself, only that it was something, however ill-considered, that she had had to do, out of that sudden feeling of the oneness of life....

But as she entered, there in the fading light Irma was unsuspectingly taking some last stitches standing with her work held up close to the window. She turned, not unexpectantly, as her sister-in-law entered; blessings often flowed in through Corinne. She carried no parcel, but it might so easily be that she would open her old black bag with its uncertain clasp and say:

"See what Corinne has sent!"

But Frau Stacher, quite pale and spent said not a single word even of greeting. She seemed to Irma very old and broken, quite different from the smiling woman who had gone out a few hours before. She wondered again in alarm if she were going to fall ill on her hands and need taking care of? But for once she didn't say all this, nor do more than frown when her sister-in-law dropped her wet umbrella on the floor. When she did speak it was only to ask:

"Well, what did Corinne give you to eat today?"

VII

FANNY

_Allegro con fuoco_

The Viennese Waltz.

Fanny had a cosy little apartment just off the Kaerntnerstrasse, a pleasant corner apartment only up one flight of stairs, easy to drop into. Her sitting room had windows looking down two ways, a south window and a west window. Superfluity was its especial note. It had been done up in varying styles at varying times,--French, English, Italian according to the vagaries of its mistress. The spring of 1915 had found it Italian, but when on that soft, May day the Italians declared war, Fanny had cried: "out with it!" and had got rid of all her transalpine furnishings. The room had then settled down permanently to its more logical expression of Viennese "Gemuethlichkeit," that was accented by the miseries of the once gay city that surged blackly about it. On the walls were reproductions of pictures of various well-known beauties, Helleu's etchings of the Duchess of Marlborough and of Madame Letellier, a copy of the Marchesa Casati in pastel by some one else. Fanny being quite sure that they and various others hanging on her walls, had no more than she herself to do with the war, had left them there. Between the two first-mentioned ladies was Ingres' "Source" which Fanny was thought to resemble.

The ill-fated Empress-queen hung over the door leading into Fanny's bedroom,--the picture of her in profile with her heavy coronet of black hair high above her imperial and beautiful brow, while the rest fell, a dark cascade, down her slender back. The Emperor, blue-uniformed, his breast a mass of decorations, smiled pleasantly and paternally from above the entrance door opposite.

The Archduke Franz Ferdinand and the Duchess of Hohenburg, head against head in a medallion, hung between the windows. Above them was a gilt laurel branch tied with crêpe.

On one of the tables was the Empress Zita, sitting with four of her children, the Emperor Karl standing behind her. Fanny was through and through monarchical. The new princelings, not of the blood, had their uses, but in her heart she despised them ... what they were, that is, not what they had.

Fanny's own portrait by a certain renowned Hungarian painter of lovely women, on an easel, showed her in one of the blue gowns for which she was so famous. Her sea-blue eyes looked beautifully, innocently from under her plainly-parted, pale yellow hair; one long curl, falling from the simple knot behind, lay on her white shoulder. Fanny's hair was stranger to hot tongs or curl papers.

The room was full to overflowing with bibelots of every description,--cigarette and cigar boxes, smoking sets, leather and enamel objects from the smart shops in the Graben and the Kohlmarkt.

On the table on which stood the photograph of the Empress Zita, was a collection of elephants in every imaginable precious or semi-precious stone. For a time Fanny let it be known that the elephant brought her luck and it rained elephants; but those animals, mostly with their trunks in the air, had been superseded as mascots by rabbits and on another table was an array of these rodents, also in every possible stone; jade, crystal, lapis lazuli, carnelian, amber, with jeweled eyes of varying sizes according to the pocket and the mood of the donor. The collection of rabbits being nearly completed Fanny had begun one of birds. Two little jade love-birds pecking at each other on a coral branch had lately flown in to join a pale amber canary with diamond eyes.

Fanny was an expert in the matter of getting gifts. There was a pleasant, compelling air of expectancy about her, and a pleasant child-like rejoicing when a gift was offered that induced giving. And then when she was out of temper those animals were an unfailing and resourceful subject of conversation, playing often useful as well as ornamental rôles.

There were deep leather chairs, and between the windows a pale blue silk divan, that symbol of Fanny herself, piled with every conceivable sort of blue cushion, cushions with ribbon motifs, with silver flowers, with lace flouncings, painted, embroidered, of every shape and style. The carpet was blue and thick and soft and covered the floor entirely. In one corner was a large, cream-colored porcelain stove that once lighted in the morning gave throughout the day its soft and genial heat. A comfortable room indeed. No books but some piles of fashion journals on a little table by some piles of the inevitable _Salon Blatt_. Fanny did like to know what the "Aristokraten" were about, dimmed and attenuated as their doings now were. She quite frankly said that she never read; indeed the book of life took all her time and she had turned some pages that she didn't care to remember.