Part 3

It was a tribute to his humanity, however, that Tante Ilde felt not the slightest distaste at going to his house ... even in "that way" as she called it to herself. He gave more freely than he received, and he did both easily. Probably for all his good intentions he would not be at dinner on Tuesday, he had an airy, dissolving way with him, akin to atmospheric changes,--brightness into cloud, cloud into sun and you never knew.... But Anna with her joylessness and her one ugly daughter as like her as the eighteen years between them permitted, Anna was her own flesh and blood, and she had been at Baden with her aunt during innumerable infantile illnesses. She was always catching something and when her hair came out after the measles Tante Ilde had faithfully brushed it back to a shining, brown abundance. It was even now Anna's one beauty. They had, after all, so many memories in common--she couldn't have forgotten all, everything.... On Tuesdays then.

"On Wednesdays you're to go to Mizzi's," Corinne was saying.

"To Mizzi's!" exclaimed her aunt in astonishment, throwing back her thin shoulders and sitting up very straight.

"Yes ... Fanny," here Corinne made the habitual pause that followed any mention of Fanny in the family,--"Fanny has arranged it. You know Mizzi's anxious to please her."

Again Frau Stacher showed no especial enthusiasm for the arrangement. It was getting into quite another category. After all Liesel and Anna were her own brother's children, but when you went into houses,--in that way,--kept up by nieces-in-law, it was quite a different matter. Mizzi was the family dragon too. Mizzi with a look or a word could quite ruthlessly devour aged aunts, superfluous children. A monster really, with a mouth and stomach, but no entrails. They all had come to know about Mizzi--in one way or another.

"Perhaps I better go without dinner on Wednesday," Frau Stacher suggested with a slight quiver of her lips, though not because of the food.

"You could perfectly well if you had too much or even enough at other times. But we've got to keep your strength up through the winter. You've just got to live," Corinne repeated sweetly, warmly, "and then think of poor Manny--he'll love having you."

"Oh, Manny," her aunt responded, "poor Manny's got nothing to say," but her voice had a note of loving compassion.

"Poor Manny, dear Manny," repeated Corinne slowly in the same tone, adding, "It isn't any of it forever,--next year I'll be making more money, and perhaps we can get a tiny, tiny apartment somewhere."

Now the "tiny, tiny apartment," even as she spoke, seemed to Corinne the mirage it truly was. People had been known to die of joy on getting a tiny, tiny apartment. That very morning in the newspaper she had read of a man who had fallen dead when he heard he was at last to have a certain apartment he had long needed for himself and his family, and a rich man too. Everybody was talking about it.

"I can't leave Elschen," continued Corinne, "it's a miracle anyway sharing that pleasant room with her while her sister's away."

"It makes me so happy to know you're there," said her aunt warmly, for Corinne was of the race of homeless ones, and her address apt to be uncertain. Then for all her patience, she couldn't help wondering about Thursday.

"On Thursday," continued Corinne, having got to the fourth of her slender fingers, "you're going to dear Kaethe's." Kaethe and Corinne were half sisters by Aunt Ilde's brother's first and second wife.

"To Kaethe's!" she interrupted, "but they're all starving. I couldn't eat a mouthful there."

"It's just because of that, that it's easy. When you go there on Thursday you are to take the whole dinner--for all of them. It'll be quite like old times when you always brought us things."

Though delicacy was an essential attribute of Frau Stacher, she could not, at this point, restrain a slightly inquiring look at her niece Corinne, who answered after the thinnest of pauses:

"It'll be all right ... Fanny's going to see about it. She does everything for them anyway that _is_ done."

Frau Stacher closed her eyes rapidly once or twice, but made no remark. It was, undeniably, Fanny whichever way you looked....

The contemplation of the Thursday arrangement however, induced a long silence. They had a sort of hopeless, trapped feeling when they thought of Kaethe.

Some thirteen years before she had married a brilliant young professor of biology at the University, who now, as he accurately and baldly stated, earned far less than the women who kept the toilets at the Railway stations....

They had seven children,--lovely, white-skinned, pansy-eyed, golden-haired children, or glowing-faced, starry-eyed, brown-haired. Kaethe's was indeed a terrible situation, one that made her relatives sad or angry according to their various temperaments and philosophical reactions to life. Three of those children had been born, illadvisedly, during the War and another since the Peace. Mizzi had soundly aired her opinion of that last arrival, ending with her usual "dumm, but dumm!" and casting her eyes up.

Out of the thick fog of his practical inexperience Professor Eberhardt had gropingly tried various and mostly unsuccessful ways of providing for his family, ways unrelated to his brains and his technical skill, which suddenly seemed not of the slightest value. Time apparently was the only thing he had and he was directly, unpleasantly aware of its useless passage. He'd lived mostly in a blessed, timeless world of theory and experiment. Courses were only intermittently held at the University, in half empty aula reached through dusty, echoing corridors. There was no money to keep up the laboratories and the few students were apt to be as listless from undernourishment as the professors themselves, or fiercely, disturbingly, redly subversive of everything and everybody; and anyway the struggle to keep life in the body was so terrible that it quite chilled any desire to know how it came to be there in the first place. Nature's secrets, except of the harvests, were at an entire discount.

He had duly tried several forms of those manual labors that alone seemed to be worth money. The summer before he had helped with the crops on a farm in Styria that a brother professor of geology, whose case somewhat resembled his own, had told him about. At first he had dreadful backaches and his long, delicate hands that could hold a microscope or a retort so steadily, would shake after the day's work and his thin palms were one great blister. Horrified he would hold them out at evening and watch them tremble and wonder would they ever be steady again for use in the laboratory. He had, however, made what seemed to his inexperience quite a lot of money for that sort of work, and he never knew what the peasants really thought of him. Some of the money unfortunately had been stolen from him that last Sunday when he had been incontinently dreaming about a certain theory that could always, if he didn't look out, captivate his attention.... Still he brought home enough to get them through the autumn ... and with what Fanny would do....

But suddenly, or so it seemed to him, the crown began to fall. He would sit flushing and paling as he read the descending quotations of the national currency and the rising prices of food. In a few weeks that money was gone. The Eberhardts had, relatively, gorged when they saw it shrinking--next week it would be worth only half and the week after only a quarter. They laughed a good deal, too, Kaethe and the children. Kaethe even taught Lilli and Resl to waltz, humming "The beautiful, blue Danube" as they spun around. The professor allowed himself to think again of certain combinations ... once quietly back in the laboratory.... Then came the collapse.

In desperation he tried street-cleaning. A late November morning on looking out of the window he saw that it had snowed heavily during the night. In spite of himself the beauty of the little crystals lying against the panes entranced him. He shook himself free, however, of such luxurious and wasteful thoughts and decided to try for a chance to shovel off snow. He said nothing to Kaethe about it as he went briskly out. But it proved not to be much of an idea after all, for he got a heavy chill late that afternoon waiting in line to be paid, and when he passed by his brother-in-law's office feeling very ill, Hermann had administered a potion to him and told him to go immediately to bed and stay there.

About Christmas time he was put wise by another colleague, a professor of botany, to a certain address near the Stephansplatz where a midday meal of a sort was provided by foreign benevolence for starving university professors. A cup of cocoa, rice and a slice of bread; a cup of cocoa, beans and a piece of zwieback. It was not designed to fatten any of them; it was only meant to keep as many of them as possible above ground ... keeping the sciences alive.... The calories were carefully marked on each menu and the men of learning could take their choice without paying.

Professor Eberhardt went there every day, but with his own physical necessities ever so meagrely provided for, it was pure agony to go back to those rooms where seven hungry children and a pale wife awaited his return. He was always asked what he had had and how it had tasted. He was often able to slip the bread or the zwieback into his pocket, but there was no way of handling the cocoa and beans and rice except to eat them.

Kaethe kept his only suit brushed and darned. Indeed it was getting to be one large darn with areas of the original cloth making patterns. She kept him in clean collars too, for a long time, but even at the last, with his coat collar turned up, he had the unmistakable air of a man of learning and a gentleman.

He loved his wife and children greatly. But it was a terrible life, a cold, damp, undernourished life, the things of the brain and the spirit slipping farther and farther from his sight. Brawn was indeed what was wanted.... Unless one had that strange, mysterious but apparently essential thing called money,--that some had and some hadn't. Professor Eberhardt had never been fanned, even gently, by any breeze of commercialism....

They had all been so proud of Leo and Kaethe in the old days; sometimes Leo's name was mentioned in the newspapers and though they cared little and knew less about the congresses held in Vienna, they would quickly run their eyes over names and subjects, hunting for Leo's and "as proud as dogs with two tails," according to Hermann, when they discovered it.

The plight of Leo and Kaethe and their lovely children kept the two women silent a long time. Just as the thought of Hermann had made them very still.... In fact viewed from any angle, the family fortunes were now apt to engender silence.

"Oh yes ... if Fanny ..." said Tante Ilde at last, picking up the thread where they had somewhat charily dropped it, "if Fanny...."

She had to concede that going to Kaethe's with something of the old familiar gesture of giving to those she loved rather than receiving from them, when obviously, they had none too much, put Thursday in quite a different light.

"What do you think I could get to take them? How much do you think," she paused musingly, "Fanny will send?"

"I don't know, but it will be enough. You can look around and see what you can get the most of for the money. There are so many of them," she ended, the familiar phrase losing itself in a sigh.

Too many of them, doubtless, and yet those lovely children,--each one a treasure, looking at you so confidingly with their big eyes in shades of blue, except Resl's and Hansi's darkly flashing,--which one of them would you not want? Not want Elsa who had a way of snuggling close and seeking your hand as she looked up with those heaven-blue eyes? Not want Carli, that gold and white angel of three summers, who couldn't yet walk, his little legs would crumple up under him when he tried to stand up, but he could smile in a way that went to your heart, and as for the baby, a thing of such sweetness that one wanted to eat her up. She was still at pale Kaethe's breast; rosy and fat, though heaven alone knew how or why; and all the others. Lilli whose beauty made you hold your breath; Resl to whom something nice was always happening, and Maxy with his plans for supporting the family when he grew up. Any one of them would have been the pride and joy of a childless home....

Tante Ilde felt herself pleasantly excited at the thought of Thursday,--relieving want--no matter how--instead of adding to it. Her eyes got quite bright.

Corinne, seeing the change, continued gayly, almost.

"And Friday, now guess," she paused, "Friday you'll have dinner with me. I'll let you know where and we'll talk everything over. What fun it will be! Saturday, I haven't arranged for Saturday yet but I'll tell you in time. Sunday we don't have to plan about. I'll come as usual with the meat for the boys' stew, and we'll have a nice time all together. Perhaps in a few months we can arrange something quite different. It's only to get you over the winter ... and you'll have courage," she ended entreatingly. Courage, that angel, she was thinking miserably to herself, as the unalterableness of her aunt's doom became more and more apparent.

But suddenly it all seemed quite possible, even easy to Tante Ilde. Yes, she would, she _could_ be brave. She had Corinne ... as long as she had Corinne.... Corinne was so clever too, anything might happen when Corinne took the reins in her slim, elfin way, guiding life quickly, lightly along over the roughest spots.

"Now, dearest, don't worry about a single thing," Corinne repeated faintly, the iron very deep in her soul as at last she got up and stood lingeringly by her aunt's chair. She had again that horrible realization of something irreparable being in process. It sharpened her features and muffled her voice. "I'll see Frau Kerzl on the way out and pay her up till tomorrow morning, and you can leave early." For all her glimmering smile and close embrace she was increasingly consternated at the collapse of her aunt's existence, not even slightly concealed behind their words. She loved her more than ever in her final and inevitable rout, for pity was swelling abundantly her love. But the world! It cared little for old ladies in flight before Fate....

That courage momentarily imparted to Frau Stacher by her niece's loving nearness fell heavily with the dragging hours in which more and more miserably she went about the dim, chilly room, emptying the bureau and wardrobe of their scanty contents and laying them in her shabby valises. The very old brown leather one dated from her wedding trip, for Frau Stacher had never been a traveller; it had always been pleasanter to stay at home or go only to very near places for the day. Now strangely she was become a pilgrim, and when she was hungry she was to eat of other people's bread and she must go up other people's stairs for shelter. The realization of the power of those nieces over her life terrified her. It was complete if they chose to exercise it. Withdrawal of their protection, she starved, she froze--just the not having those few thousand crowns a year put her at the world's mercy....

Even Frau Kerzl's quite unctuous attentions at that last supper of cabbage-turnip soup failed to dispel the deepening gloom of her heart. Frau Kerzl was obviously though politely rejoicing. She had indeed through an incredible bit of luck secured that foreigner, an Englishman too, who would pay in shillings, in the magic "Devisen," for that room in which the very next night he was to sleep,--as soon as that,--Frau Kerzl already basked and expanded in the approaching light and heat of those shillings. The long Englishman strangely, hated short, square feather beds and was bringing his own blankets. It appeared, too, that he was in the commissary department of a certain relief society. Anything could grow out of such a situation,--condensed milk, butter, oatmeal.... The arrangement was undeniably of a marvelous fertility.

Though Frau Stacher was truly glad of Frau Kerzl's good luck, it but emphasized her own impending homelessness. She had been quite miserable there, but at least her living-space had been provided with a door, and blessed with a key,--ultimate desirabilities as she now saw, and tomorrow she would move into the uncertain privacy of the alcove. Then, too, in some way that she couldn't define Irma, her young sister-in-law, terrified her.

Yes, homeless, in a new sense, she realized herself to be when she went back into the luxury of her solitude for the last time, and as she closed the door she knew, indeed, that she had "lived too long."...

In that bed, abundantly salted by the tears of her uncertainties, so soon to know the deep slumbers of a care-free Englishman, Frau Stacher lay long awake thinking of those homes, over whose thresholds, day by day, week by week, she was to step.... She would love them so much, she would be so grateful, she would hold so sacred the joys and sorrows which might be disclosed....

But they seemed to her tired body to live, those nieces of hers, at the ultimate points of the Viennese compass. Her feet and back ached at the bare thought of those endless, cobbly streets, windswept, wet by rain and snow. All roads led to Calvary. Those once charming streets of the Imperial City were now but so many ways to the hill of charity, and it was a hill that old age crept up timidly, anxiously. The cross was so surely at the top.... Then she bethought herself how the days of the week came only one at a time, the way after all that life was tempered to mortality, one day, one thing at a time....

But it wasn't only troubles of food and raiment, of shelter; Frau Stacher had grave theological difficulties as well, encrusted confusingly about the admonition: "Be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat or for your body what you shall put on ... for your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things." No, she had no slightest understanding; and faith was but the dimmest of night-lights, flickering so uncertainly that the dark masses of her difficulties alone were apparent. She seemed to be caught terrifyingly between her needs reduced though they were, really only a bed and enough food to keep her alive, and the Divine withholding of those things. No, she couldn't understand, and all through that last long night at Frau Kerzl's she hung shiveringly over the dim puzzle of her life, which once had fallen so easily into its bright and pleasant pattern....

For the dozenth time she pulled the little, hard, square feather-bed, disdained of the Englishman, about her shoulders and drew her knees up under it. At last out of her chill bewilderment she began to think of Kaethe, of taking her the Thursday dinner, of what she could get, in a world now filled mostly, it seemed, with inedible substances. The thought of giving, even vicariously, lighted in her a glowing eagerness. She found herself suddenly quite warm, even to her ankles and feet, and as the late January light began to filter in through the cracks of the brown rep curtains she fell, mercifully, into a deep slumber.

II

LIESEL AND OTTO

_Allegretto amoroso._

Sorgen sind für Morgen gut.

When belated and hurriedly Frau Stacher finally got away from Frau Kerzl's, it was somewhat as a little war-bark after its time is up, leaves an unpleasant port, but still a port, and puts out to sea in sure signs of rough weather.

The once fat and merry Gusl had had one of his worst nights; spasms of coughing were coming through the open door of the so-called south room as the two women stood together for a last time in the sombre little hallway, sadly stencilled in terra cotta on dark blue. The haggard agony on that mother's face gave Frau Stacher a deep stab accompanied by the first and only realization in her childless heart of the pain mothers know for doomed children. It was something so sudden, so poignant, as she stood saying a somewhat lifeless goodbye, (she hadn't yet pulled herself together after being abruptly awakened out of that timeless, death-like sleep by Frau Kerzl's loud knock,) that had it remained with her an instant longer she would have fallen in a heap. It seemed to her that now she was always running full tilt into griefs she had never even suspected in the veiled and pleasant years.

The ring of the hungry colonel, only incompletely disguised as a porter, who came to get her folding straw basket and her two lean valises, broke in on the distress of the two women. Frau Kerzl forgetting for a moment the blessings that would so surely follow the Englishman into the house, embraced her, suddenly regretful, in a rush of hot tears; Frau Stacher's sympathy was so immediate, so real that it seemed to stand there with them. They hung a moment lip on cheek murmuring to each other "courage" and again and again "auf Wiedersehen;" then turned to their now separate paths, Frau Kerzl running back to her son's room at a faint and gurgling sound and Frau Stacher to continue what she called, (though no one knew it,) her "March among the Ruins," walking close behind the porter, sweating a neurasthenic sweat, in the raw January air under his unaccustomed load. She felt safer quite near him for those once cosy, familiar streets seemed now to converge to the unknown, to infinity even, and the proximity of her valises somewhat steadied her. With genteel, restrained little steps, her elbows pressed to her sides, her hands clasped in front holding her umbrella and her shabby little bag that always came unfastened if she didn't look out and somebody would tell her it was open, she proceeded to the street off the Hoher Markt where Irma, her brother's widow, half starved with her three boys on the famous pension, together with what various members of the family gave her and what she herself made by her beautiful "petit point," dimming every year a little more those once hard, bright eyes.

Irma knowing that hunger stalked just around the corner, yet desiring to live alone with her boys, had been immensely relieved and at the same time almost uncontrollably irritated at the thought of the arrangement by which Tante Ilde was to be given the very relative freedom of the alcove. She had gone about the simple preparations for her taking possession in the best obstructionist manner. The alcove already contained the old brown plush divan, relic of the house in Baden, but Irma had shown an amazing unwillingness to clear out a certain little green and yellow chest of drawers which had "always" been between the windows in her living room and contained an unrelated accumulation of objects.