Part 9

"Well, are you ready, Tante Ilde?" Frau Stacher hastily put on her coat, that is as hastily as possible. It had tight sleeves and they always stuck on the little white shawl she wore underneath for warmth. Mizzi came to the rescue, gave it a poke down the back, a pull about the shoulders and crossed it over the frail chest with a final energetic punch that left Frau Stacher breathless. Then she slipped easily into her own ample coat and turned up its large beaver collar. But after all Mizzi pleased, Mizzi on the road to success, was not so terrifying. She was safely diverted out of family discontent by the pleasantly exciting difficulties and triumphs of her business. Then, too, those thin, pale girls who sat by the window at the back of the shop, and worked without looking up when Mizzi was there, were continual escape-valves.

Even little Tilly with fingers like a fairy, got her share. No one could tie a bow like Tilly, not even Mizzi herself, and then those diaphanous garments that she turned out, delicate bits of nothing, the very stitches themselves were like trimming. Mizzi knew first class work when she saw it, and she further saw that she got the greatest amount possible done in the day.

Tilly's mother was dying in a back room, reached by a third stairway in the court of an old house, and Tilly never answered Mizzi back, was never "fresh" and it was quite evident that she never dreamed of giving notice but only of giving satisfaction.

In face of Mizzi's pleasant, flowing briskness that could, however, so easily curdle into thick displeasure, Tante Ilde, though she longed to stay, could but say goodbye to Hermann, with a secret pressure of his hand. For a moment she felt the encircling warmth of his great chest and shoulders as he bent down to kiss her. Then he sank heavily back into his chair. She turned at the door for a last sight of him, but already he was plunged in his thoughts and did not look up again. She could have wept for Hermann then and there.

As she followed Mizzi down the stairs, they met two young-old women with pale, head-heavy babies in their arms.

"Manny's patients," said Mizzi who was really a terrible woman, an abysmal contempt in her voice, "I don't know how I put up with it."

"Manny is very ill," answered Tante Ilde gently.

"Nerves," returned Mizzi promptly, finally. "We'd starve if I hadn't started in."

"You are a wonder," said Tante Ilde, and quite honestly she thought it was little short of a miracle, how Mizzi in that dreadful city had not only wooed but won fortune.

Of course, they all knew that Fanny had started her, but even so she was a wonder, making money that way. She would survive. It was beings like Hermann who went under,--gentle, loving, wise, once-strong Hermann.

Her thoughts clung tenaciously to Hermann, slumped down into his chair, Hermann who hadn't looked back at her. She couldn't know that he had, for quite a while, been conscious of her loving touch on his arm, and that he was thinking, "sometime I'll tell Tante Ilde about Marie." Yes, while he was still able to talk clearly of precious things. It was one of his worst days. Often on such days he didn't keep his office hours ... the uselessness of the terrible struggle. In that city of misery, let a few more die in those black hours before dawn, without warmth or food or even a match to strike a light that those who loved them could see them go. He was losing, and was conscious of its slipping from him, that strong professional feeling of saving life, any life, just to save it, fulfilling a deep instinct, working according to habit that was as natural to him as breathing. Sometimes nothing mattered, not even Mizzi's lash-like tongue on his bare nerves. On other days, difficult as it was to get over the open places, he would leave the house quite early in the morning, trying to shake off its devitalizing atmosphere. There was a café off the Opernring, he didn't have to cross the Ring itself to get to it, where they knew him and his little ways; sometimes he would sit for hours at a certain table watching the coming and going.

But that morning he'd got there too early; it was still deserted and he had been witness to certain dismal preparations for the day. A pale woman in damp, thin garments was washing up the floor, ends of burnt-out matches and cigarettes were piled in a corner, in a little heap on a chair were a few carefully collected cigar ends. The pikkolo under the emphatic direction of a waiter was brushing off the billiard table, the Tarok games were being laid out, the newspapers put into their holders. The pikkolo, who put one in upside down, had forthwith received a box on the ear from the waiter, supplemented by a kick on that part of his undersized person where, however, it would be least injurious; but his reaction was not against the donor of these morning favors, but rather induced the consoling thought that if he ever got to be head-waiter he would return it with interest to whatever pikkolo was then about.

The arrival, a bit late, of the buffet Fräulein, with her blond hair too tightly crimped, too thickly puffed, started things at a more lively gait. A pale lavender tint lay over her face--the hair bleach, the rice powder, the long hours in the crowded room. Energetically she proceeded to count out a few lumps of sugar, unlocked noisily from behind the counter; then she looked scrutinizingly at the liqueur and fruit-juice bottles, holding them up to the light, her pale eye appraising the exact condition of their contents.

One by one frequenters of the café began to come in, dissipating more and more the forlornness of the place, wiping their feet on the wire mat, putting their bulging umbrellas into the stand, hanging up their dull hats, sitting down in their overcoats, taking packages of paper money from their pockets and putting them on the table just as if it weren't money. Finally the café was quite full and Hermann sitting before his empty cup, smoking and watching apathetically the familiar sights, became conscious of the passage of time. He remembered that Tante Ilde was coming to dinner that day and he wondered what Fanny could have said to make the arrangement possible, it was so unlike Mizzi. Then he looked at his watch and saw with immense relief that he still had a little time, ... a calamity to be even that short distance from home, ... he hoped he'd get back, ... sometime probably he wouldn't. He had been thinking all that morning with an obsessing, nightmarish horror of something that had happened to him in his own office the day before.... Because a pale, uncertain-yeared woman had had nose-bleed, he had been overcome by a horrible nausea, an intolerable, hitherto unknown feeling in the pit of his stomach. Why, he had seen blood, felt blood, smelt blood, worked swiftly, calmly in blood against time and death--and now a pale woman with a nose-bleed.... He'd had to go into the inner office.... It was unbelievable that just _that_ could happen to him. Then after she had gone, after they all had gone, he sat thinking about it and he had laughed terribly, loudly, and then trembled and wept and Mizzi on the other side of the landing knew nothing about it, no one knew, no one must ever know just _that_. Yes, he was going very fast. He knew it himself; knew that he was headed for the madhouse, as straight even as towards death. Some day he'd do something of a sort that nobody had any right to do. Often he would awake, icy cold, at the fear of what he might do. He couldn't imagine at all what it would be, but something that people who were dwelling freely among their fellowmen were not allowed to do--and rightly....

Sometimes his thoughts would turn with nostalgic longing to the gay, full years of his student-life; those busy years as intern at the Allgemeine Krankenhaus. The luck he'd had when old Professor Schulrath but a year before his death, had taken him as assistant.... The eager beginnings of his own private practice; that unforgettable thrill the first time he had seen his shingle hanging outside his own door.... Pride bound up with a hot intention to conquer misery, pain, death even. Soon he had found himself fully launched on the tide of an ever-swelling general practice. Then one Sunday at Pauli's he had met Mizzi,--full-bosomed, soft-voiced Mizzi, underneath as hard as a rock, as cruel as the grave, crueller than the grave....

That whole first year of the war he had been among those detailed for general duty in the great city. Afterwards, the civilian population was left to be born or die as best it could. Every available physician was rushed to the front. The mortality among the wounded had become too great. Poor fellows sent back from one or the other fronts would sometimes have been two or three weeks in their uniforms, still in their first-aid bandages, or not bandaged at all; and when they got to Vienna after the torture of their transport in springless luggage-vans, there was often little to be done for them except bury them in those great mounds that grew and grew as the hospitals eased themselves of their dead. It had to be managed less wastefully. Lives were to be saved that they might be thrown again into the struggle....

He had partaken of the tragic, senseless exaltation that able-bodied men everywhere were experiencing on starting for the front.... Then deliverance from the carping tongue of Mizzi; the simplest things more and more caused her to fly unexpectedly up in the air like a rocket; there would be a sputtering and something would darken and go out. These were among the reasons why Hermann had settled back in the motor that day and with a laugh set out for the front. But there was something else that none of them had known about, that then, that now, was always in his mind, in his heart, in every fibre of his being. Even when he was watching the most indifferent things, such as the buffet Fräulein that very morning,--he didn't need to be alone--suddenly _she_ would be with him and fling her lost radiance around him once again, and wrap him up into that magnetic world of longing for the might have been. He wouldn't hear the "wer giebt," "Pagat," "an' dreier" of the Tarok players, or the rustling of newspapers being turned on their sticks, or the "Sie, Ober," or the "Pikkolo, du dummer,"--_she_ was always more real than anything else, ... even at the café, when he would be holding the _Neue Freie Presse_ and pretending to read. She was everywhere and all. Even as he dropped back in that chair, with Tante Ilde's touch still warm upon his arm and his eyes apparently fixed on the quite uninteresting enlarged and colored photograph of Mizzi's dead father, (Mizzi, year by year was getting to be his very image, with that hint of moustache) he was thinking only of her--Marie.

* * * * *

That January of 1915, one windy, icy twilight, he had had a hurry call from the Elizabethspital and had put off many patients still waiting and closed his office.

Before he got to the gate of the hospital grounds, out in the street even, he found row upon row of stretchers laid down low upon the earth, bearing shattered forms whose silence was more terrible than groans; their grey cloaks were wrapped about them, their poor boots, in which they had marched to destruction at the word of command, were mostly tied to the handles.... Pale faces, bandaged heads, arms crossed on their breasts or inert by their sides, under their capes.... Raised but a foot from the ground where the stretcher bearers had deposited them they looked already like their own graves, as grey, as voiceless. Yet the biting cold of that windy twilight was heavily charged with their unuttered groans.

Within the hospital it was still the same. The corridors were blocked. Outside the douche rooms they waited for their turn. At last clean, sheet-covered, they waited again at the door of the operating room.

He had met Marie von Sternberg that very evening ... so quiet, so deft, her pale blue eyes so compassionate under her heavy, dark brows and lashes, her jaw so nobly strong, her hands so beautiful in spite of the discoloration of acids and disinfectants. He had suddenly noticed her hands as she was passing him a probe.

But he hadn't looked at her face then, it was only some hours after,--not even in a pause, for still the men were being brought in,--when a young, yellow-haired Tirolese had been put on the table. As Doctor Bruckner bent over him, he had cried out in a loud voice "Mother" and had suddenly given up his youthful ghost. Then Doctor Bruckner found that he was looking full into the blue eyes, so heavily lashed, so darkly circled, of the woman at his side. He saw there a spark of the same everlasting pity that flamed in his own. They hadn't said anything even then, for quickly the youth had been carried away and his place had been filled by a swarthy family man from one of the Slavic Crownlands, his wedding ring still hanging about the finger of his mangled hand. Hermann had never forgotten either of those two men, for in between them was set, like a jewel in death and pain, that look that he and Marie von Sternberg had exchanged.

All that winter, that winter of his content, of his happiness, they breathed the same air, did the same work, to the same end. Those afternoon hours had been, quite strangely, enough for happiness. In the early summer she had been sent to the Russian front. When he was mobilized she was still there, and that was the true reason why he was laughing the day he left Vienna. A thousand miles of battle-field and ruined towns might lie between them; then again she, like himself, might be sent where the need was greatest, their roads could easily converge. He hoped blindly, confidently from the war; all his hope was in its vicissitudes.

Then one evening, after the fiery setting of a hard, red sun over a scorched, interminable plain, the dim air thick with odors of blood and death, cut now and then feebly by disinfectants used not too generously, as he stood outside that hospital tent, thinking of her, longing desperately for her, a quick, light step approached, he heard her voice:

"Hermann, it is I."

And all the dust and fatigue, the blood and agony that covered his body and his spirit fell away and turning he had cried out her name in straining passion.

They had embraced in such deep longing that they seemed to be lost out of time and space ... to be together, even for that minute ... even in that way....

The battle-field with its dreadful débris had seemed to Hermann Bruckner like some paradisaical garden.... And those glorified days of September, October that followed, the unit keeping up as best it could with the great army throwing its roads and bridges across the Pripet marshes....

Then one day she had had fever; two degrees only, but suddenly she had sickened terribly, sickened hopelessly, and died immediately of typhus.... Hermann who had hung over her hadn't taken it, but he hadn't been able to live or die since. He'd just gone from bad to worse; he'd done his work, yes, that was what was left; she would have been doing hers if he had died....

But after Gorizia, he had known it was all over with him, as a man that is; as a poor hulk of flesh and blood and bones and nerves, oh, there were perhaps many years waiting for him. Sometimes when he looked at his nerveless arm he remembered how warm and firm his clasp had been in hers, hers in his.... There were so many things to think of before he ceased to remember.... Rarely her spirit visited him in that house of Mizzi's.... But in his office continually he found her, sometimes in each ailing, miserable body he seemed to find her, beautiful and of an endless pity. Oh, he needed her. Even without his arm, _that_ way it would have been all right. Something could always be done if the will is there.... But without her he no longer willed anything.

Yes, he was very ill, but not in a way to die. Death might not come to him till he had forgotten everything, even Marie....

Mizzi was like a sharp point in his being. She had worn sore spots all over him, and strangely from Mizzi he must receive that which would keep his will-less breath in his useless body....

But Mizzi really knew nothing about her husband, indeed never had known anything about him, beyond his name and age and personal appearance and a few of his habits. Now he weighed a thousand tons upon her life.

When with her aunt in tow she turned into the Plankengasse, she was in the usual pleasingly expectant state with which she was wont to approach her shop. As they neared it they saw a dark, stout, ponderous female dressed in a thick, brown cloth suit, a heavy black hat with waving ostrich plumes, a long sable scarf hung inelegantly about her heavy shoulders, projecting herself cumbersomely from a much bebrassed auto.

"That's one of them," said Mizzi, eagerly, greedily, "it's Frau Fuchs. You'll die laughing, she doesn't know beans about anything, but that big bag of hers is full of banknotes."

In a moment, Mizzi, in velvety accents was greeting Frau Fuchs as if she were a queen. She touched appreciatively the sable scarf, lauded its beauty, saying, "You certainly get the best of everything." Then she turned and presented her aunt, Frau Kommerzienrath Stacher, born von Berg. Mizzi laid it on thick, resting some of her 75 kilos on the Kommerzienrath, adding the full weight of the others to the "von." Then she proceeded to show Frau Fuchs a certain red velvet jacket with a little gold border, and Frau Fuchs had gone into raptures over it, and had said she must have it, and then her eye had lighted on a leather hand bag ornamented with Irma's medallion of "petit point." Though Frau Stacher recognized it, she was somehow not surprised to hear Mizzi, as she drew attention to its workmanship, say that it had been made by a certain Archduchess, positively starving, and Frau Fuchs sniffing up the subtle perfume of royalty that Mizzi's words caused to rise from the bag, had taken it eagerly. "No, is it true?" she had cried in ecstasy, and had drawn her glove from her thick, beringed hand and opened her humpy alligator skin bag with its loud green and gilt clasp and counted out a sheaf of banknotes. Mizzi herself had wrapped the bag and the dressing sack up in her finest paper and sent one of the girls (the one who did the least good work) out to put the parcels into Frau Fuchs' Mercedes.

"Isn't she awful?" said Mizzi when they were alone, "but without her and a lot more like her, we'd starve. Her husband is stone-rich, has an Exchange Bureau in the Kärntnerring. How she used to hate to pay out the money! But I changed that, she's a bit afraid of me."

There was indeed something awe-inspiring at moments about Mizzi, something that she could invoke to decide wavering purchasers. Then still under the charm of Tante Ilde's gentle but quiet appreciation, also under that of good business dispatched, Mizzi gave her a little handkerchief. It had a yellow stain on it that they hadn't been able to get out, still it was a handkerchief and a gift, and Tante Ilde gratefully receiving the attention for much more than it was worth, thought perhaps she had misjudged Mizzi.

It hadn't been at all bad going to her for dinner, except for that terrible depression when she thought of Hermann. No, it hadn't been at all bad that first time, and she repulsed certain lurking suspicions that every week might prove too much for Mizzi's longanimity.

Then, too, she had good news to take back to Irma; the bag had been sold, Mizzi had counted out the money that she had promised Irma for the medallion, and though it didn't in the slightest correspond to the price Mizzi had received for the bag, Tante Ilde could be trusted to keep that hidden in her breast. Indeed Mizzi said it had cost her a monstrous amount of money to get the bag mounted, that she didn't know how she could afford to take anything else from Irma, she hadn't made a kreutzer on that bag, she only did it to help Irma, etc., etc. No, Tante Ilde didn't repeat from one to the other. Those little households that day by day were spilling their secrets before her whom they received in charity,--out of their goodness, out of their pity,--were sacred to her.

That night, as she lay awake hearing Ferry's hacking little cough, she was thinking almost entirely of the plight of Manny. Nothing had ever been too much for Manny, when it came to doing something for some one else and now.... If the time did come for Manny to be put somewhere, Mizzi would have money to pay for him, and what she didn't do, why Fanny, there was always Fanny. Down which ever miserable road of their misfortunes they looked, Fanny glitteringly stood, Fanny dispensing benefits generously, easily, not always wisely, after her own special way. Tante Ilde suddenly felt she didn't understand the first thing about life, and she had filled the three-score and ten of the allotted span. When did one begin to understand?

V

THE EBERHARDTS

_Rallentando_

"Süsses Leben! Schöne, freundliche Gewohnheit des Daseins und Wirkens! von dir soll ich scheiden!"

Frau Stacher had folded up the light brown camel's hair blanket with the dark brown Greek border that she had slept under for years and the sheets with the von B-S monogram and put them, together with the equally familiar pillow on which her head now so uneasily lay, into the divan and shut it down. Then she stood up on it and dusted the flat white and gilt vase under the picture of Haydn leading the young Mozart by the hand. Finally she pulled back the curtains of the alcove, which last gesture always seemed to wipe her completely from the room, somewhat as if she had been carried out in the final box. Her movements were brisk, with a businesslike dispatch about them. She looked years younger than when she had stood that afternoon gazing at the trolleys clanging down Mariahilfer Street, and which, striking out their noisy, powerful flashes of light, had seemed like heavenly chariots, conveying certain fortunate ones, strongly, swiftly over immeasurable cobbly and asphalt stretches to their homes, to their alcoves even, out of sight and touch of the damp, cold misery of the streets.