The Vienna Melody (17 page)

The chambermaid unfortunately had no experience to draw on, even if Henriette had dared to ask her, because in her only other place she had served an unfriendly, inelegant elderly lady, and therefore her admiration for her new mistress was boundless. She slowed things up instead of expediting them, because she was so enchanted with everything and gaped at each object before she handed it over. Yet speed was urgently necessary; the cab was already waiting downstairs, for the possibility of arriving late for an appointment, with Francis Joseph was beyond the realm of the conceivable. The audience had been announced half an hour earlier by a palace guardsman; it was due to begin in twelve minutes' time. Meanwhile she had to finish dressing and reach the appointed place.

Franz, who had run downstairs to get the cab, was waiting impatiently outside the Annagasse entrance. It was past six, but the February day was as dark as one in December. The gas streetlamps were still lighted. Franz had had the cab drive up to the Annagasse entrance because he thought it would be less noticeable there. Pulling his watch out and looking past the angel with the trumpet up to the lighted windows of the fourth story, he realized with despair how late she was.

Meanwhile she was standing in front of the mirror from Paris, putting on the hat she had decided to wear, the one trimmed with marten. She asked the chambermaid to tie her veil under the knot of her hair because her own fingers were stiff with cold. She had been hauled out of her bed like some criminal, it seemed to her. Her rebellious coiffure would not stay brushed smoothly enough at her temples, and her lips were too pale. She bit them with her teeth, but still there was no color in them. She drew on her gloves as she went down the staircase.

The house, which must not learn about all this, was still wrapped in slumber. The milk bottles and morning papers lay before the doors of the various apartments. Nearly all the members of the family read the Catholic daily. Only in front of the Drauffers' door lay a copy of the liberal
Presse.
She had left her fan upstairs after all!

“Hurry! Hurry!” Franz called from downstairs. “We have just five minutes!” He helped her into the closed carriage and then stepped in himself, for he had insisted on accompanying her.

“Our Emperor is an early riser!” he said reassuringly as they drove along, but it was obvious that he was worried. “And, of course, we were prepared for this,” he repeated twice over, as though that meant anything. But that did not fit in either. After she had refused to sign the declaration she was convinced that the Privy Chancellery chief would never let her go to this audience, and Franz agreed with her view.

“Am I very dishevelled?” she asked.

“Not in the least. You look as though you had just come out of a bandbox,” he declared. In the same breath he added nervously: “You're not too excited?” To be called to the Emperor, who except to his Ministers and generals was not accessible to any ordinary mortal, was an occasion of incomparable significance to any patriotic Viennese and a former officer in the reserve such as Franz. “And be sure not to speak unless he asks a question! You know no one is allowed to speak unless he asks a question. And back out when you leave him!” were his last instructions.

Yes, she knew that.

In the Franzenshof the gas streetlights were just being extinguished.

“All right then, I'll wait here for you,” he said as she passed the two huge guardsmen standing in their sentry boxes and entered the gray baroque portal. Inside she was taken in charge by the captain of the guard, who wrote down her name, after inquiring, “Frau Henriette Alt?”

“Yes.”

She was conducted up a staircase as cold as the one at 10 Seilerstatte and almost as dark. A few gas jets flickered here and there on the walls. On the first floor both wings of a high gold-and-white door flew open the instant Henriette and her escort stood before it. Then she reached an endless hall in which a general, holding his green-befeathered hat on his left hip and dragging the tip of his saber after him, was walking up and down with a gentleman in tails and white tie. As the hall was not carpeted but had a smooth parquet floor, one could hear the gentlemen as they walked, step by step. And the trailing saber, too. The general turned round stood still, and then, with a slight bow, inquired, “Frau Henriette Alt?”

“Yes.”

She recognized him from the pictures of his remarkable slanting mouth: it was the Adjutant-General, Count Paar. She did not recognize the gentleman in civilian clothing.

“Tell Count Paar next time he wants anything he'll have to take the trouble to come down to me himself!” the man whose voice no one would ever hear again had said. She heard that voice. And the gold-and-white door had opened just as noiselessly on that day too.

“I must beg you to be patient for a moment,” said the general with the green-befeathered hat, and resumed his promenade up and down the endless hall. The gentleman in tails walked beside him. Neither of them spoke.

Then another door opened and a black-bearded gentleman, also in tails, a top hat, and kid gloves in his hand, emerged. He joined the other two, and Henriette heard the Hungarian greeting, “
Jonapot kivánok
!” Whereupon she was signalled to enter the same door through which the black-bearded gentleman had just come. She found herself in a hall, quite alone. From there she came to the Emperor.

Francis Joseph stood in his small study beside an upright desk, his right arm resting lightly on it. He wore a blue tunic with a gold collar, the Golden Fleece and two other medals, the black trousers with the red stripes of a general—the uniform in which the Viennese were invariably accustomed to seeing him. The Viennese saying that he never changed and that, except for a few white hairs in his moustache and sideboards, at fifty-eight he looked as he did at forty was no longer true. In the last few days he had aged years.

The small room was lighted by a central chandelier with three frosted globes. Against the long wall was a chest of drawers covered with photographs, a writing table beside the one high arched window, and the upright desk above which hung a portrait of the Empress; an officer's cap, a saber with a gold sword knot, and a pair of white kid gloves lay on a little table.

At the door Henriette made the low curtsey every Viennese girl learned at her dancing class.

“Please come nearer,” were the words she heard while her head was still bowed. It was a businesslike, even gray tone which in no way reminded her of that other wild one. “Frau Alt, I presume?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

He made an inviting gesture in the direction of the only seat in the room besides the armchair at his desk. When she hesitated he said: “Please seat yourself.”

He himself remained standing at his desk, studying her. “You know my son?” he asked after a while.

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

‘‘How long?”

‘‘About a year and a half.”

“In the course of that time did you see him often?”

‘‘Yes, Your Majesty.”

His fingers tightened their hold on the desk. “Did he discuss any things with you?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“What things?”

“He had many interests.”

“Did he also discuss politics with you?”

She weighed her words and then said, “Almost never.” The pale light of the February morning began to fall through the high window that faced the Franzenshof, the Emperor Francis monument, and the sundial—which told no time, for it cast no shadow.

“I asked you to come here, Frau Alt, in order to get some information from you,” said the Emperor. His voice was unchanged, his words dry as straw. But she could see how tightly his fingers grasped the desk. “Do you prefer to have me question you? Or would you rather tell me what you know?”

“I beg Your Majesty to question me.” She suddenly had the impression that he thought the veil she was wearing over her face was inappropriate, so she tried to raise it. But her hands would not obey her, and it took some time before she succeeded in throwing it back over her hat. His face was unmoved. She seemed to have been mistaken.

“You believe my son committed suicide. You said so to the head of the Privy Chancellery, did you not?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“And you have formed an opinion as to what the reason for it was?” He was now holding fast to his desk with both hands. A look which she was barely able to stand accompanied his unchanging, routine tone of voice.

“No, Your Majesty.”

For the first time he faced her squarely. “No?” He cleared his throat, and when she did not speak he repeated, “No?”

“No, Your Majesty.”

In his stony face not a muscle moved. “Did my son ever communicate to you his feelings of lack of harmony between-—him and me? You may speak quite frankly. I promise you that not a word of what you say will go beyond these walls.” For a brief second his darkly encircled eyes sought hers, and then they fixed themselves on the threadbare red Smyrna carpet on the floor.

“His Imperial Highness never mentioned Your Majesty except with the deepest devotion and respect,” was her answer.

Francis Joseph again cleared his throat, then he drew a deep breath and studied his visitor for what seemed like an eternity to her. “Is that the truth, Frau Alt?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“You are a Catholic, I suppose?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“Would you be willing to take an oath on what you have just told me?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

The pallid light in the small room grew stronger. The lamps were superfluous now. “It's already growing light earlier,” commented Francis Joseph. His gray voice rang with a shade more of warmth. “You married recently?”

“Yes, Your Majesty.”

“I trust you are very happy.”

“Your Majesty is too gracious.”

He was silent. Then he drew a telegram out of his desk. “Before you leave I should like to show you something,” he said, and brought it over to her.

It was sent from Mayerling on January the twenty-eighth and read:

 

TO HIS MAJESTY THE EMPEROR, THE PALACE, VIENNA.

ENGEDELMET KYREK
,
HA LEM GYUVEK
.
KEVESET BETEG VAGYOK
.

TISZTELEMA FOEHERZEPNE
.

RUDOLF

 

“Do you know Hungarian?” he asked as she read it.

“A little, Your Majesty.”

“Then you will have seen that on the day before his death my son felt so ill that he was obliged to cancel an appointment with me. Do you not envisage the possibility that it was fear of illness which might have driven him to his fatal decision? You're young yourself; you must know that it's not always in their parents that children confide?” His tired, restless eyes demanded that she might answer yes.

She did.

He extended the finger tips of his icy hand. “You have given me valuable information, Fraü Alt. I thank you.”

She bowed low in a curtsey, then backed out of the room. The gold-and-white doors opened for her. Someone was there to escort her down the icy stairs, which she descended one after another without knowing what she did. Below stood Franz.

The sun had begun to shine, but the dial in the Franzenshof still cast no shadows. The walls were too high. It was so chill that one had a fierce yearning for some warmth.

“Let's go home,” she begged, and it was the first time she had spoken of the fourth story in that way.

Professor Stein had been there, as always on Thursday forenoons, between his lecture and his seminar. He had come and gone again with his usual punctuality and had sipped a glass of sherry which Simmerl had brought him with some thin slices of Westphalian ham in the guise of a light lunch. He had looked a bit worried, as he had a way of doing when he came to visit Henriette. Ever since her marriage all essential things had remained unsaid between father and daughter, except for an occasional fleeting look on his delicate, nervous face and a smile on hers. This meant: Are you beginning to grow accustomed to it? and: Yes. Always he treated her like a child, asked if she were clad warmly enough or ate enough, and, now that her confinement was approaching, he inquired what the doctor had said. “Your mother used to …” he would remind her, and constantly recommend to her, as an example, what her mother had done or found indispensable.

Today he had been in fine form, for he had expiated on his favorite political theme. According to him, Francis Joseph, since death two years before of both German Emperors William and Frederick, was now not only the senior partner of the Triple Alliance but its very head
—
“
primus inter non pares
,” as he expressed it. With his characteristic eloquence, which so enthralled his students in the lecture hall, he had expounded the special mission in European culture that he attributed to “
homo Austriacus
,” because he embodied in himself the ideal mixture of soul, grace, and proficiency, whereas “
homo Germanicus
” possessed mostly the latter, “
homo Italicus
” only the former, in the shape of art. And he considered Francis Joseph—with whom “the idea of the ruler overpowered that of the man, making his personal individuality its servant”—“the most underestimated monarch of modern times,” and Henriette was obliged to think: Can he be mistaken in that too? Yet she knew no one as gifted as he in raising you up into a higher, purer sphere. Where he had his being problems ceased to be physical and became intellectual.

“Your Herr Papa was looking splendid today,” Simmerl remarked as he cleared the table. Henriette nodded and sighed softly. During his visit she had not wanted to let herself go because he would immediately have worried so. “Are you coming in to clean the brass?” she asked the butler. For before her father had come Simmerl had been regaling her with his endless store of experiences in the Königswarter household, which she enjoyed listening to. He told such a lot of gossip with such a dignified expression, and curiosity was something she did not even attempt to combat. She simply did not understand people who knitted their brows over such things. Human beings were so immensely interesting!