Part 8

They didn't realize any of them, that Mizzi was a woman of great natural energy which had no outlet, and that that was one of the reasons why the small supply of the milk of human kindness with which her Maker had provided her, had early soured. She got quite stout, but in her smart Austrian way, and each year became more easily annoyed and controlled her irritation less. Even the war which opened out activities to so many women had helped Mizzi not at all. She hated misery, disorder in any form and the sight of blood made her sick. She was inexpressibly bored by the whole thing and always spoke of it as "dumm."

When the War claimed Doctor Bruckner he was a very tall, broad-shouldered, deep-chested man. His mobile, smiling face was ennobled by his prominent, but finely-formed nose and his very black beard and moustache gave his whole person a last significant accent. When the War had no further use for him and passed him into the still more pitiless arms of the Peace, he was broken, disabled, derelict, meaningless even. He reminded himself of a train wreck he had seen near Lodz in the beginning, the telescoped cars, the messy, shapeless débris.... That last month at Gorizia a bomb had fallen into his field-hospital. It had solved effectually the problems of his wounded, but it had increased his own. His right arm which had been shattered and hurriedly attended to, now hung nerveless in his sleeve. Mizzi's heart and temper had been briefly softened at the sight of his misfortunes; they were so evidently complete. His helplessness, however, soon induced a new note in her voice; one of condescension and later of hard, unveiled impatience.

Finally neurasthenia, on the track of so many, claimed him for its own. He developed a bad case of agoraphobia--could scarcely ever go through open spaces without a discomfort that amounted at times to agony, and Vienna seemed full of wide, open places. He would creep along walls, close to houses and doors, but when it came to crossing the street, unless, indeed, it were full of vehicles his eyes would sink and darken, his nostrils get blue and pinched. It was but one of various things,--that intolerably stupid going back and touching objects a second even a third time on his bad days, that continual putting on and taking off his coat when he was dressing, sometimes he was hours getting into his clothes, and other equally asinine matters. He still went to his office, across the hall,--but a one-armed, neurasthenic doctor! Half the patients who came needed something done that could only be done with two hands. His clientèle dwindled till mostly the poor alone came. To them he was an angel of mercy. But they made another complication. Mizzie hated the poor in any form, even the new poor, who had once been rich and whom she had envied in the old days, and when the quite thin pity engendered by his futile return had evaporated, she was constantly reproaching him for having a clientèle to whom he couldn't or wouldn't send bills. Hermann's life became a new kind of hell from which there seemed to be no more escape than from the final place of punishment. But for all Mizzi's unpleasant conjugal traits she was, as we have indicated, a woman of ability. She stepped out, on his return, when her practical sense showed her that the family fortunes in Hermann's hand would inevitably go from bad to worse, to retrieve them; and she did.

She boldly opened a lingerie shop, and with her good taste, her industry, her heartlessness and her voice soft as honey to customers, she soon began to do quite well. Fanny had advanced the necessary loan and sent her the first customers who brought others in their train. She developed an unsuspected talent for selling. Naturally impatient she was accommodating to the last degree in her shop. She took back things that had been paid for and returned the money with a smile. She exchanged things, she adjusted things. She could always be counted on to have extra sizes for the dark, stout, often bearded ladies who patronized her in increasing numbers. They generally had the most elemental of underwear, thick, machine-made garments, with machine-made lace and terrible pink bows; some had none at all.

Mizzi initiated them into the pleasant mysteries of transparent "dessous," real lace-trimmed and beribboned in delicate shades. And they had money. "Jesus, Marie, Joseph!" Mizzi would often exclaim, "what money! Great wads of it!"

Mizzi had a way of loosening their thick, high corsets and pulling them down, thereby dropping those shelves of flesh from under their chins, and with her cunningly-made brassières, those famous "Bustenhalter" that reduced the mountains of fat, or at least distributed them towards the back where the owners themselves couldn't see them, she was especially successful. "Taktvoll kaschieren," tactfully conceal, was what she modestly claimed to do with superfluous fat. Being inclined to embonpoint herself, fostered by her love of the truly tempting sweet dishes of her native land, yet having that smart, pleasing figure, she could say confidently to the stoutest:

"I'm a good deal thicker than you are, and look at me!"

They looked at Mizzi in her impeccable loose black dress over her snugly-worn corset and were both delighted and convinced. Mizzi's business was inevitably destined to go from good to still better, just as Hermann's was dwindling to those so begrudged office hours for the very poor, now his only treasure.... His aunt Ilde, thought secretly that Hermann must be greatly loved by his Creator to have been found worthy of so many misfortunes.... He only occasionally took money for his services and except for a few crowns spent in a certain café sitting before his beer or his coffee, reading the newspaper, talking to a chance acquaintance, or oftener just thinking, thinking, he turned what little he did make back again, a pitiful drop, into the river of black and fatal misery that flowed through his office.

Mizzi had something quite ruthless about her. Openly and cordially disliking the poor in general and poor relatives in particular, the last thing she would have thought of was having one of these latter come to her regularly for a meal. But when Fanny sent old Maria to ask if she could have Tante Ilde for dinner on Wednesday, or to choose some other day if that wasn't convenient, though she had thought it a monstrous nuisance, that day being no more convenient than any other of the days of the week, she had said "Yes" in a voice gone quite white from lack of enthusiasm. But, Fanny,--she couldn't afford to offend Fanny....

The establishment once known as "Hermann's" was now known as "Mizzi's." She had suggested his giving up his office and renting out the rooms to Americans who would pay in dollars. They could make a "heathen money" that way. But so strange, so terrifying was the look that had come into his face that Mizzi for once had quailed before it. She hadn't felt safe and anyway Fanny probably wouldn't have stood for it.

Her dream was to have a smart shop at Carlsbad. She had awakened to a brief political interest when she found that almost overnight the Czechs had become, unaccountably, the darlings of those against whom they had so recently fought, and later she discovered that Carlsbad was filled with victorious foreigners who turned their gold joyfully into Czechish crowns and she was forever comparing the rising Czech currency with the descending Austrian, and was visibly impatient at the senseless fact that the war had left her, a perfectly good Czecho-Slovak, high and dry in Vienna as the wife of a crippled Austrian. There wasn't any sense in anything, and Mizzi vented mercilessly her dissatisfaction on Hermann.

She was always thinking to herself and often proclaiming openly that Hermann was "dumm, but dumm," as little of a "Nutznieser" as anyone ever had the bad luck to be married to. With even the slightest sense of values, he ought to have got something out of the war. Privately Mizzi adored profiteers. But Hermann wasn't made that way.

In the end, he got tired of hearing what his father-in-law would have done in this, that or the other case. That canny Czech, Ottokar Maschka, had, unfortunately for Mizzi, died just as he was about to gather in the fruits of his labors, and when Mizzi married the promising young Viennese doctor the only visible goods she brought with her was the furniture with which they furnished their home; large, solid, comfortable pieces of mahogany and maple, and a lot of linen. But all that Mizzi had long since changed. Mizzi was a forward looker and liked to keep up with, when she couldn't run ahead of, the styles. She had a flair about novelties that was to stand her in good stead.

Hermann had ineffectually protested when she got rid, bit by bit, of the furnishings of the parental house. The only good thing about it all was that it kept her busy. But when he found himself sleeping in a narrow grey bed with conventionalized lotus flowers in low relief, one at the head and one at the foot, he felt himself completely and forever a stranger in that house. Then, too, the new chairs were extraordinarily uncomfortable, the tables small, while the pale mauve upholstery gave him a continual sense of being in a warehouse glancing over things he had no intention of buying....

The small shop in the Plankengasse, with the tiniest but smartest of show windows, was near enough the thoroughfares to be accessible and not as expensive as the Graben, the Kärntnerstrasse or the Kohlmarkt. Little by little Mizzi was wriggling her way into that world of the new dispensation, peopled by the acquisitive wives, daughters, and "friends" of profiteers,--that full, loud, clanking, overfed world, that world of people mad to possess at last what "the others" had so long possessed. Theirs was the world of plenty. The promised land indeed. She was happier than she had ever been before. Her activities had full scope. She had no heart to bleed over the miseries of the starving city and she felt herself getting a really firm foothold in that "Schieber" world of every tradesman's desire. That "First Society" in whose uprisings and outgoings she had once delighted, in the reflection of whose splendors she, with the rest of the worthy burghers of Vienna, had once proudly shone, was gone, its glory the bare shadow of a shade. For thin, ruined countesses, for economical princesses Mizzi had no use, only in as much as she could say to the wife of one of the new lords of creation:

"That's the very dressing gown the poor Countess Tollenberg was so enchanted with, but not a kreutzer to bless herself with, only such taste! It made me sad not to let her have it, but now I'm consoled, for you, dear, gracious lady, it's just the thing." And the "dear, gracious lady" would fall for it with a golden crash.

Yes, Mizzi was doing well and intended to do better. When she wasn't selling, she was buying, like others in Vienna, who had little or much cash in their pockets, trying to imprison the vanishing value of money into objects that would remain visible, buying anything in fact that wouldn't melt before their eyes. They called all this "Sachwerthe," real value. For the antics of money were extraordinary, no one realized that better than Mizzi. No matter how carefully you guarded it, the next day it was less, was gone. You couldn't store it up any more than you could daylight.

* * * * *

As Tante Ilde that Wednesday noon was about to cross the Revolutionsplatz, once the Mozartplatz, overlooked by the Jockey Club, the Archduke Friedrich's Palace, the Opera and Sacher's Hotel, (the last two alone continuing to fulfill their ancient uses) she caught sight of a tall, familiar form hesitating by a lamp post. It was her nephew Hermann, evidently about to cross the street. He stood so long by the post that she easily caught up with him.

"Manny!" she cried and touched him on the arm, but he turned towards her a face so strange that she was suddenly very frightened. Great beads of perspiration stood on his brow, about his mouth; his eyes were sunken, his nostrils blue and pinched.

"Auntie dear, you've come at the right moment. I can't," he hesitated, a look of agony and shame on his face, "get across alone. Give me your arm. I was waiting till some wagons came along. It's easier then. Don't say anything about it to Mizzi. She doesn't understand," he ended entreatingly. Bending, he passed his hand through her arm and with a tightening of his body, slowly crossed the street, then kept close by the houses, as far away from the curb as possible.

"You see," he said with difficulty, "I'm quite done for," tears stood in his dark, kind eyes. "And I'm not going to die either," he added, "I've seen so many others go just where I'm going."

"Manny, Manny, you'll get better. You must get better. Think of all the good you do!" his aunt cried at last out of her grief for him. She hadn't been able to say a word at first, only pressed more closely against his side.

"All the good I do!" he laughed bitterly and stood quite still in the street and couldn't seem to stop laughing.

What was happening to Manny, dear, kind, loving Manny? He made her even sadder than Kaethe. Where could he get help? Perhaps Fanny ... they'd been such a loving brother and sister. Perhaps if he could take a trip, somewhere, anywhere....

They were proceeding at a snail's pace. Hermann's step had no life in it. Frau Stacher began to be afraid they would be late and tried to hurry him a little, but he continued to move mechanically with that sort of heavy dip, and didn't seem to notice her hurry.

As they reached the house he pointed to his name in black letters on the white porcelain sign, and then looked at her with a trembling of the lips just as he used to do when he was a little boy and had some childish grief.

"When I remember all the happy years ... why, I thought I was going to heal the world," he said slowly, "and now"--then he added, suddenly anxious too, "I hope we're not late."

Tante Ilde gladly quickened her step and they almost ran in at the doorway. It would be a calamity to be late. Mizzi could generate about her a thick, cold, opaque atmosphere when she was displeased that could take away the appetite or impede the digestion of a starving person. They both knew that it wouldn't at all do to be late, and in spite of age and disabilities they made quite a dash up the stairs.

Mizzi kept a servant and kept her busy. No "Faulenzers" in her house. Gretl instantly opened the door, then quickly resumed her occupation of setting the table, putting a pleasant, soft-looking little bread at each place.

Mizzi, sitting up very straight in a mauve arm chair, was measuring with a tape measure lengths of pale shining French ribbons, billowing over a little grey table. She was a woman in the early thirties, with dark eyes inclining to opacity, abundant dark hair and an agreeable, smooth, rather bright complexion, pleasant enough to look at, though her features were negligible. She held herself very erect, even as she sat there was no lolling or relaxing, and when she stood that full, smart figure of hers was impressive, even commanding. Pauli who detested her, said she ought to have been a midwife, though perhaps in that he was unjust to the profession; but it was undeniable that Mizzi had an eye that in a few years would, as he had further remarked, have no more expression than a hard boiled egg confronted with arriving mortality.

The little table was drawn up by the window with its lavender hangings striped yellow by light and years, and held back by faded ribbons. It was all quite different from the smart freshness of the shop where was Mizzi's heart. Between the windows was a picture of the Prague Gate and in rummaging about she had unearthed, for less than a song, a fine old engraving of Wallenstein conspiring at Pilsen. Where could one find a more loyal Czecho-Slovak than Mizzi Bruckner, bound hand and foot to Austria?--Till she got to that little shop in Carlsbad, over how many dead bodies she cared not--that little shop especially designed for easing foreigners of their golden loads, that she was unswervingly headed towards and would inevitably reach.

As they entered aunt and nephew gave each other an involuntary look of relief. They had made it.

"Well, Tante Ilde, how are you?" Mizzi asked amiably enough as she looked up, but there was something steely in her tone. She had no objection to Tante Ilde, except that Tante Ilde was so definitely, and it was easy to prophesy, permanently in the class of poor relations, and to such a certain tone came spontaneously to her voice. No trace of the sugary accents that she used in speaking to the large, dark women who made commerce take its only steps in the paralyzed city. She was polite, but she was cold beyond the power of any thermometer to register. Of her husband, Mizzi took not the slightest notice.

Frau Stacher felt something shrink and shrivel in her. A shameful consciousness of being very poor, of being very old, of being very useless tinted her pale cheeks.

She hadn't wanted to come to Mizzi's. She had known that she would feel just that way if she did. They all knew about Mizzi, hard as a rock, somebody for the old, the feeble, the dependent to steer clear of.

Then a thick, smoking lentil soup was put on the table. Some pleasing suggestion of having been cooked with a ham-bone came from it. In a quite definite way it changed the atmosphere. Good food in Vienna that winter could work miracles. Natural and unnatural antipathies would melt as dew before the morning sun when enemies found themselves seated together at a full table.

Mizzi herself underwent a subtle change and she was nearly smiling as they sat down. Hermann was still pale, but the blue look had gone from his nostrils, the sweat about his brow and mouth had dried. Tante Ilde was permeated by the delightful sensations of the hungry person about to be filled.... The nose, the eyes, then the first mouthful....

The soup quite fulfilled the expectations awakened by its odor. Mizzi never had materials wasted through poor cooking in her house. She always got the best available and this last maid had a light hand. Mizzi had turned one girl after another away till she got the pearl for which she was looking.

The repast, as far as her own feelings went, proved a surprise to Mizzi, though she didn't analyze the increasingly pleasant sensation that animated her as the conversation got easier and easier. Mizzi didn't for an instant, suspect that that despised, poor relation was distilling about her an odor suaver than that of the lentil soup, even with its suggestion of ham-bone.

By the time the herrings, and the potatoes boiled in their skins, and actually served with butter were put on, Mizzi was in full flood of conversation; her tongue was hung easily anyway, quite in the middle. During the soup, she had been distinctly grand with Tante Ilde, the immensely superior lady bountiful dispensing mercies, but Tante Ilde was so greatly and so genuinely interested in the shop and asked such tactful questions, just the sort Mizzi was delighted to answer, that things got pleasanter and pleasanter. She showed signs of irritation, howeven when Hermann, not too successfully, tried with his left hand to separate the meat of his herring from its backbone, and gave an impatient click of her tongue and cried harshly, "give it here." But that passed and when the Apfelstrudel was put on, she fell to telling amusing stories of the unbelievable ways of the various stupid geese, those wives of profiteers who had, all the same, lead her, Mizzi, out of the captivity of hunger and cold. She made fun of their horrible underclothes and told how she changed all that, opening their eyes to a lot of other things to which they'd evidently been born blind. Even Hermann got less pale and from time to time looked affectionately across at his aunt. When they were having their coffee, just as they used to in the good old days, real mocha, that one of those very "Schieberinnen" had given her, Mizzi even said quite gently to Hermann: "Aren't you going to smoke?" Hermann was surprised and grateful beyond measure. Very little would once have made so soft-hearted a man as Hermann unduly and permanently grateful. Mizzi, though she hadn't the slightest idea of it, was continuously responding to the pleasant harmonies struck from the gentle being of her poor old aunt by marriage, and when they had drunk the last drop of coffee and were still enjoying the pleasant memories of the Apfelstrudel, she found herself saying, somewhat to her own surprise:

"Tante Ilde, come with me, I want to show you the shop. It's time for me to get back. The girls don't take a stitch while I'm away!"

Then she stepped into the kitchen to put on a plate, for Gretl's dinner, a head of one of the herrings and two potatoes (the others were to be saved for salad that evening), and to the amazement of Gretl, she added a bit of the Strudel, casting at the same time an appraising eye over what was left and which she certainly expected to find intact on her return.

Tante Ilde longed to stay with Hermann whose plight was more and more engaging her thought and sympathy. She had had time while Mizzi was in the kitchen to press his hand lovingly and to tell him she was going to Kaethe's tomorrow, and to try to get there too, Kaethe was worrying about Carli. He had answered listlessly,

"Yes, if I have a fairly decent day. You've seen how hard it is for me to get about."

Instinctively she had not mentioned the Eberhardts in Mizzi's presence. It would have darkened her brow and salted unduly the repast. People that couldn't get a living somehow! Mizzi had no use at all for them. In some mysterious, but certain way, it was their own fault. Even the Peace was no excuse in Mizzi's eyes.

When she came back from the kitchen saying briskly, and they realized, without appeal: