Part 7

A one-legged young man, his leg gone to the thigh, in a tattered combination of military and civil coverings, stood always on that corner selling his miserable shoe laces....

But there was another note, quite another, that rang lustily out from the Kaerntner Street, for there the new feudal lords of Vienna, (which inevitably has lords of some kind), walked with ringing tread in the triumph of their plenty. That mushroom aristocracy come out of Israel and the war had pushed into some shadowy, scrawny underbrush of life that once great, powerful "First Society."

As Frau Stacher got near the Bristol the flooding crowd seemed almost entirely made up of large, showily-dressed women and bright, alert, stout men, whose prosperity was immediate and inescapable. Before it her seventy years of gentility were swept up, a bit of dust, into her otherwise bare corner. What had she to do with that new princedom arisen from the ruins of the war, or it with her? Their ways, their gestures, their looks were alien, inimical to those of the Princes, Counts and Barons of that old world; that old world the pride and joy even of those not of it. What the new Lords did and how they lived was a mystery to Frau Stacher that she had no desire to solve. Her fear increased. She felt but a bit of pallid wreckage in the flooding of that active, highly-colored element. It beat against her suffocatingly, frighteningly, that new blood flowing vehemently in Vienna's veins, its only blood indeed. In the familiar street she was both stranger and outcast daughter. She couldn't even look at the Bristol, whither so many of those new lords seemed bent, there where people still crumbled their bread at dinner instead of eating it.... It was Fanny's world. Perhaps even now Fanny would be on her way there with her light, straight, flying step, like a bird in the air. They all knew that walk of Fanny's....

That first comfortable feeling of owning the pavement, of independence had gone. She was increasingly confused by the myriad signs and symbols of money of which she had none. Everywhere "Cambio-Valute," "Devisen" in gilt letters, and banknotes laid out in patterns in the windows ... exchange bureaux, in which unholy rites were performed by those chosen men standing fatly, firmly on gold, while the rest of Vienna tottered and fell on paper. She was exhausted too, by the buffeting of the everlasting wind, and she suddenly and recklessly decided to take the three hundred crowns remaining in her purse and get on the trolley. There was one at the very corner that, mercifully, would take her up the interminability of the Mariahilfer Street. After lunch the wind would perhaps have fallen and she could walk back. She tried not to think how far it would be. She was too spent for thought by her impact with that new world, that world that suddenly had too much, trampling to death the world that almost as suddenly had too little or nothing. Outcast indeed.

The crowd was thickly waiting at the stopping place. In the rush for seats as the trolley slowed down, she was pushed frighteningly but fortunately along and up the high step and in a second found herself sitting, breathless and hidden between a man with a large sack of something that had, to the eager eyes of the other occupants, the interesting appearance of flour, and a pale young woman with a spindle-legged, big-eyed child of four or five in her arms. In her sympathy with the young mother and the doomed child and her relief at being seated Frau Stacher forgot her hunger and her fatigue and delivered herself up to the delightful sensation of being borne clangingly, powerfully along. She descended quite lightly at the crowded stopping place, though she was jostled and jammed again by the crowd fighting to get in. Crossing over she turned into a grey little street and entering a sombre doorway went up to the apartment where Anna was awaiting her husband and her aunt.

There was an air of expectancy about the room as Frau Stacher entered that somewhat relieved its terrible dullness. On the table was a fresh, fine linen cloth, from the days of comfort, and four places were set; a bottle of pale Tokay, like a streak of sunlight caught the eye. There was something sadly festive about it.

"I thought it was Pauli when I heard you outside in the hall," were Anna's words as she opened the door. But her aunt accepted the vicarious greeting without indeed noticing it. They all knew about Anna. That was the way she was.

Her heavy dark hair that Tante Ilde had once so faithfully brushed back into beauty was braided in a thick braid and twisted twice around her head; but when you had said that about Anna, that was all there was to be remarked. The rest was long, faded, shadowy. From those once noticeably broad, fine shoulders, now simply gaunt, her thin breast fell away into her flat waist above her bony hips. There was not one single thing about Anna Birbach to cause anyone to suspect that she belonged to a smiling, art-loving, easy-going, fatalistic race, with something of the West and much of the East in its make-up. Indeed the broad highway that leads east from the city is the straight road to the Orient, is already the Orient. Something only vaguely diagnosable, but highly-colored, slips in through that Eastern Gate to tint more deeply the Viennese population, a happy enough mixture when only a tenth of them, not nine-tenths, are starving. Hunger there has always been in Vienna. Even in the days of plenty there were thousands who, palely shadowing the street corners had nothing,--the bare, spectral want of the East without its sun and leisure....

Hermine was in the kitchen. She had no more knack at cooking than her mother, but the War had caught her in her earliest youth and the Peace had taught her a few lessons of culinary survival,--though her omelettes would always be hard and her pancakes tough.

The smell of the onions in the potato soup had its own peculiar charm, however. Tante Ilde found that she was very hungry and she was quite ashamed of certain uncontrollable, rolling sounds that proceeded from the empty region beneath her belt.

Anna began immediately to tell her that they had finally decided on a goulash,--it was safer and simpler to make than anything else. Both Hermine and her mother had an uneasy knowledge that Pauli was critical in regard to food, though he wouldn't say a word if a dish hadn't turned out right; only he wouldn't be seen again for a couple of months. Instinctively desiring to flatter him they had kept as far as possible along Hungarian lines; the potato soup had been a second choice, for Hermine's imagination had played at first opaquely about a Halászle, a fish soup that he loved, but she had no fish and she didn't know how to make it, so she slumped back on the potato soup as offering least resistance. She was hoping for great things from the Palatschinken, however, she had the batter prepared for cooking at the physiological moment and the can of gluey apricot jam (ersatz) was already open. Both women were obviously quite excited. Anna had those dull, maroon spots on her cheeks; Hermine was paler than usual and kept running into the kitchen and coming back and changing something on the table. It was a quarter of an hour later when they heard the somewhat rusty sound of the master's key in the door. He still kept that key hanging on his chain, though for all the use he made of it the bell would have sufficed. "The key of the cemetery" he called it to himself and was thankful as he went in that he would find Tante Ilde there among the graves.

He was a very handsome man of forty in a full-colored, ample way, inclining slightly to embonpoint. His brown eyes were forever flashing and going out as he lifted or let fall his pale, heavy lids. A rosy shade lay upon his cheeks contrasting pleasantly with the clear olive of his skin. A dark moustache did not conceal his white teeth when he laughed, which was often, and they gave an additional accent to the whole, the color scheme becoming even blinding when he wore, as on that day, one of his favorite red neckties.

Immediately he filled the grey room, or perhaps it dissolved about him.... Life, life. He brought the life of his pleasant, easy-going, musical Viennese father; the life of his impetuous, fiery, musical Hungarian mother, that strong, active element which the Magyars infuse so happily into the more "gemuetlich" qualities of the Austrians. Whenever anything happened in Vienna for good or evil in the old days, it was generally traceable to the more dynamic qualities of the Hungarians,--and doubtless will be so again.

There was no hint of war or post-war days on Pauli's face, rather some astounding avoidance of their ills, some unimpaired eagerness for life. His wife and daughter were unacquainted with a pale shadow that of late often dimmed it.

The women, except Tante Ilde, were blotted out. She felt the exhilaration, the immediate electrization of the air and sat up quite straight, her elbows elegantly pressed against her waist and began to smile her fine, sweet smile. Her presence lay about Pauli as a wreathing mist about a mountain on a sunny day. Again he was thankful to find her there.

Dutifully he gave Anna a robust but empty kiss on both cheeks, with a "Well, how goes it?" and the same to Hermine, standing close by her mother. He thought fleetingly for the thousandth time that it was a calamity for women to be ugly.

Then he turned the full blaze of his countenance on Tante Ilde:

"Ach, the dear, lovely Auntie," he cried, "she must also have a Busserl," and he proceeded to kiss each pale cheek and even to press her against his thick, warm breast.

"Not lovely, only loving," she returned, but she smiled, suddenly quite happy and Pauli felt his words had not been in vain. He liked to have happy faces about him and laughter and jokes, and if it were women who were being made happy all the better.

"I smell something good," he next said amiably sniffing in the air, "and I'm quite ready. In the Cafés," he continued, "it's 3,000 crowns for a piece of bread, 10,000 for a glass of beer and 5,000 for a smell of roast pork from the next table!" Again he sniffed gayly. Even when he barked his shins against a hard, low bench that stood unnaturally near the dining table, he gave no sign of the impatience that always possessed him when with Anna. But in spite of his remarks about his hunger, he took very little of the lukewarm soup which Hermine had poured out too soon. And when she dragged her sleeve in the goulash as she put it on the table, he indulgently recounted a joke he had seen in the _Meggendorfer Blätter_. How a certain woman going into a cheesemonger's had skilfully passed her long sleeve through a dish of white cheese, in that way removing an appreciable quantity, and how the cheesemonger in a rage made her come back to pay for it, threatening to have her up for theft.

Sallow Hermine was greatly in awe of her highly-colored father, who expected from her, she uncomfortably felt, something that she could not offer, but now she was giggling girlishly, and even Anna's face seemed less formless.

Yes, Pauli was doing his best to make it pleasant for the quite accidental beings who bore his name. Dispensing smiles that, after all, were so rightly, though so strangely, theirs. Life was truly mysterious; they were human beings too, come out of nothing, hurrying as fast as Time could take them, to the same end. It produced undeniably at moments a feeling of comradeship,--though Pauli intended to avoid Anna in the other world....

Tante Ilde was indeed making things easier, suaver; Tante Ilde was really an alabaster box of precious ointment, broken anew each time she went into one of those homes not hers, diffusing sweet odors about her. They would mostly, (perhaps not Pauli), have thought: "It's poor old Tante Ilde and we've got to do something for her," not dreaming that all the time it was she who was doing something priceless for them.

Now he was in a fever of longing to hear a beloved name. But she told them first about Liesel and Otto, everything she could without making Anna jealous; not, of course, about the sausage. Meat twice a day would have scandalized Anna, and anyway Tante Ilde would never have been guilty of the indelicacy of speaking about that sausage, wrapped up and put away too. The fresh noodles in fresh butter were all that Anna and Hermine could really stand; they would talk about them for days; but she described in detail the package from the "Friends" at which Anna and Hermine pricked up their big ears and cried: "You don't say!" and Hermine ran and got an inch-long pencil and a piece of newspaper and wrote the address on the margin. Then she and her mother nodded their heads significantly at each other. They were both thinking that Irma should have let them know immediately, and that some afternoon late, when it was dark and they wouldn't be seen, they'd go for one of those packages....

As Tante Ilde was talking Pauli noticed the white lace about her neck and how genteel she contrived to look in spite of age and disaster. Then his eyes travelled to his daughter, seeing her really for the first time that day. Hermine had on a chocolate-colored dress with trimmings of an unpleasant blue. Pauli turned his eyes again to Tante Ilde's cameo face, from which the broad eyes seemed to look out more and more bluely as the dinner went on. Pleasure, even a little, was apt to put the color back into her eyes. Then he looked again at his daughter. He was thinking that the devil could take him if he knew what color would be becoming to his only child. Something, anything to emphasize her, to put her on the chart, so he followed out his natural taste as he said:

"I must give you a new dress, Hermine, pink or red or a good bright blue?"

Hermine was delighted at this mark of paternal affection and Anna astonished. When a long time after he saw the hard and vapid blue she chose he was finally and forever discouraged. No, Hermine had no flair, she always went wrong on colors, like Anna. His wife and daughter were beyond Pauli. Just those two women out of all Vienna he could rightfully go home to; Hermine was even named for his mother. "Na, dos ist kein Leben," it's no life, he often thought in his broadest, most expressive Viennese. Pauli who could speak perfectly half a dozen languages, always chose that in which to clothe satisfactorily certain unsatisfactory thoughts.

At last when Hermine was out in the kitchen smearing up with her finger the bit of jam that remained on the platter from the Palatschinken, Tante Ilde spoke the name Pauli had come to hear ... Corinne ... and stupid Anna didn't care. It was the mention of Fanny that she could not have borne. Anna never caught the truth about anything.

"I'm going to have dinner with Corinne on Friday," Tante Ilde said finally, a soft radiance spreading over her face, and turned her eyes, suddenly a lovely azure, full upon him. "Corinne is an angel."

Perhaps Tante Ilde shouldn't have said that right there before Anna, in Anna's own house, but Anna created an unendurable vacuum about herself, it made people want to throw something, anything into it to fill the horrible void.

"She thinks you are one," answered Pauli with a sudden deep breath, and there was a note in his voice that his wife, or at least his daughter, standing at the kitchen door, should have noticed.

Then his eye wandered to the only bit of color in the room,--the scarlet cloth covering his zimbalon.

"Shall I make a bit of music, Tante Ilde?" he suddenly cried with an indecipherable gesture, and laid his cigarette down on his plate, where wastefully in Anna's eyes, it smoked its life away. He pushed his chair back from the table and getting up uncovered the instrument without another word. He was suddenly one vast flame of love for Corinne. He knew the feeling well,--consuming, he was really beside himself ... in an instant ... like that. He began to play a wild Czardas of his mother's land. The light grew brighter in his eyes, the color deepened in his face, but it was of a moonbeam woman, shadow-thin, that he was thinking.

The music beat mercilessly upon the three listeners, with its cruel, splendid life-throb, with its piercing intimation that even a thousand years of love would be all too short for the longing heart. From time to time he emitted a wild cry and his nostrils would dilate; his body swayed rhythmically above the instrument. He was indeed "thirsty in the night and unslaked in the day."...

Anna remembered the short love-madness Pauli had once wrapped her in and pressed her hand against her flat breast.

Tante Ilde thought, too, of things forever gone,--not of love, that was too far off, but of her lost dignity and use, of all that would not, could not be again; she had no time to wait upon events.

Hermine was possessed by vague, youthful expectations of what life could so easily bring her, out of its whole long length, a life wherein someone would surely love her,--for want of another the thin young man she sometimes met on the stairs, who gave violin lessons to keep a passionate soul in a delicate body. Perhaps, sensitive, artistic, he would indeed be goaded on by that lurking, tricking spirit of the will-to-live to take Hermine, dull Hermine for wife, wrapping her for the brief moment necessary for the act in his own passion which would so perfectly conceal her essential poverty....

Suddenly Pauli stopped, the blood had gone from his face, leaving him very pale, but his eyes were full of a dark fire and in his bones was a grinding pain. He was in a mad hurry to be gone from that house of ghosts where he couldn't hold his being together.

"I'm rushed this afternoon, heaps of things to attend to," he cried as he lay down his batons and threw the scarlet cloth over the zimbalon. To his goodbye to Tante Ilde he added the reminder loudly, distinctly:

"It's understood, Tante Ilde, you're coming every Tuesday?" Then suddenly he was gone leaving the room dim and chill.

Anna went over to the window and stood by it, though she couldn't see into the street. Hermine almost immediately began to clear off the table.

But Tante Ilde sat quite still. She was thinking, "poor Anna, poor Anna." There was something very tender in her leave-taking, something that Anna gratefully, dumbly accepted without knowing what it was that was offered her, and then Tante Ilde slipped away to walk those several miles back to the Hoher Markt.

She had vaguely, diffidently hoped that she might go away when Pauli did, be carried along on his momentum. But he had gone so suddenly, there hadn't been time for any little arrangement or suggestion.

It was beginning to rain. The wind blew flat, cold drops against her face. She stood a moment looking at the trolleys clanging up and down the Mariahilfer Street. Why hadn't she walked in the morning?

IV

HERMANN AND MIZZI

_Staccato_

Hin ist hin! Verloren ist verloren.

When Doctor Hermann Bruckner was suddenly called from the security of his civil practice to take charge of a field-hospital, so great was the joy of his secret heart that even his wife became aware of it, and in her rustiest and most contentious tone asked him what on earth he was so pleased about, he was going out to the "olly" front where he was certain to be either killed or mutilated, and walking as if on air at the idea of getting there!

Skilful in diagnosis, resourceful in treatment, compassionate concerning the imponderable ailments of his patients as well as those visible, he had, it is true, bestowed a brief anxiety on certain of them left to the care of the diminishing number of proportionately overworked physicians in Vienna; but for himself.... Home where his heart was not, where Mizzi nagged and scolded, was icily disdainful or loudly reproachful, had long been a place in which he was desperately uncomfortable.

The day he left for the front his aunt Ilde had come in from Baden to say goodbye to this much-loved, and as she knew, much-tried nephew. Looking out of the window she had seen him settle back into his seat in the motor, laughing in a gay, new way with the colleagues beside him as he opened his cigarette case.

Hermann had indeed, been delivered by the war from something from which he had thought never to escape. For years, almost his only happy hours had been spent in his office, or hurrying about on his sick calls. He had a particular and personal regard for each patient, and the professional affection they awakened in him had a magnetic, communicable warmth, even the uninteresting old women, the chronic cases, received impartially, glowingly their share. His bedside manners were truly consoling and his warm handclasp, his reassuring pat on the shoulder made a visit to his office something to look forward to. In fact just seeing Doctor Bruckner made his patients feel that with his help they were not in any immediate danger of leaving this vale of tears for a world which, though they had always been assured was a better one, they had a singular distaste to entering. And then his gentle way with suffering children. Doctor Hermann Bruckner, specialist for women and children, was born to do just what he was doing.

But when he got home that flowing, busy life of his would suddenly stop, turn back chokingly upon itself, obstructing his every thought and feeling; for though Mizzi was unspeakably bored by him, she couldn't let him alone. The very sight of his pleasant face, the easy way he had of letting his six feet settle into an armchair, the slow smoking of his Trabuco, in some extraordinary, always unexpected way, would give rise to reproaches; never a moment when he could sit at ease after a hard day's work and talk about pleasant things, little, unimportant things. He never could tell just what would unbind Mizzi's tongue or uncork her temper. He made an easy living and they could have had many pleasures, but Mizzi was always wanting the one thing that the hour had not brought. It was considered by the family that Hermann had a hard time of it, that it was unfortunate that Mizzi was as she was, and Hermann, for reasons in the beginning not at all related to his own being, was now generally called by his relations "poor Manny."