The Vienna Melody (24 page)

It was only a few blocks away from the house where she had been born. Yet those few blocks had put an unbridgeable distance between her and her birthplace.

A billowing white dress had made a bride of her. The white veil and the ring, which the bishop consecrated on the epistle side of the high altar, were to make her the bride of the Saviour.

The silver bells of the altar boys rang out. The nuns sang as they kneeled to receive the holy communion to be offered by them to their future sister. The young voice of the candidate in their midst soared above the choir, “
Veni
,
Creator Spiritus
—
mentes tuorum visita
.
Imple superna gratia
—
quae tu creasti pectora
—”

The suffragan bishop had sprinkled the veil and the ring with holy water and perfumed them with incense. The mother superior had risen from her knees and gone over to the candidate, to whom she had said, “Offer to God the sacrifice of praise. Candidate Christine Anna Maria Paskiewicz.”

To this the nuns had added, “And pay thy vows to the Most High.”

Whereupon the candidate had risen to her feet, looking so slim, tall, and erect in her white dress, and had taken a step towards the bishop, saying: “I will pay my vows to the Lord in the sight of all His people, in the courts of the house of the Lord.”

The singing died away. The organ ceased. A great silence fell, during which the odour of incense was suffocating.

“If thou art prepared to pay thy vows say yes,” the suffragan bishop addressed the bride.

The listening congregation heard the word ‘yes.'

“Pay thy vows,” the suffragan bishop said.

The candidate took a second step in his direction, and said with a voice which towards the end was barely perceptible, “In the name of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, and under the protection of His Immaculate Mother Mary, ever Virgin, I, called in religion Sister Agatha, do vow and promise to God, poverty, chastity, and obedience, and the service of the poor, sick, and ignorant, and to persevere until death in this congregation.”

The aged man raised his right arm high over her head. “What God hath commenced in thee may He Himself perfect, and may the body of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve thy soul unto everlasting life.”

Those who were seated on the first rows of benches were all inhabitants of 10 Seilerstätte. For the first time the house took cognizance of the young girl on whom they had heretofore wasted no attention, not to speak of sympathy, and whom they had always considered highly strung.

Otto Eberhard had taken the first seats in the first row of the central nave reserved for the family; his wife Elsa and his son Peter sat beside him. The Public Prosecutor was now an Aulic Councillor, and his hair was almost white; his wife still had her pompous manner and arrogant look, and the fat boy Peter had grown up into a portly Korps-student, member of the “Ostmark” fraternity; the bandage under his left eye testified to the fact that in addition to the scar he already had on his face, as a result of duelling, a second had now been added. The Dragoon Regiment twins, Fritz and Otto Drauffer, who had made a special journey from Enns, declared later that they preferred the incense to the smell of carbolic exuded by their cousin. Their father still looked like Saint Peter, except that he gave somewhat freer rein to his hair and beard, in which he seemed to be following the example of the composer Brahms and the writer Hermann Bahr. He had made successful portraits of these two and had exhibited them in the Künstlerhaus (unfortunately Sophie had not lived to see him do this ‘real' painting). His wife Pauline had kept her jolly eyes, but her apple-cheeked plumpness was gone. The women in the house withered early. Pauline's older sister, Gretl Paskiewicz, mother of the novice, might have been taken for an old crone. Only Countess Hegéssy showed scarcely any signs of change. Dressed in her customary black, she attended this family event, too, as though it were a funeral.

Hans, with his sister and brother, Franziska and Hermann, and his mother and father, sat in the second row of reserved seats. Although it was an ordinary Thursday, he had been let out of school, and tomorrow he would carry with him an ‘excuse' signed by his father to the effect that “due to a festive family event he had unfortunately been prevented from attending his classes.” To Hans that was the one good thing in the whole matter. As for the solemn occasion itself, the suggestions forwarded by Herr Simmerl (he was present together with the other servants from Number 10, and Hanni, the chambermaid, sat beside him) did not please Hans at all. The incense made him feel sick, and he could not see why Christl had to become a nun. The habit of a nun was connected in his mind with illness, because as soon as anyone fell ill a nun appeared; but you called her “Sister” instead of nun.

Why? How incomprehensible that Christl should have chosen that! Yet since the incomprehensible had gained such prevalence in Hans's life he had given up asking “Why?”; one never could get the truth out of grown-ups in any case. So he would not see Christl again? For Herr Simmerl, who was as well informed in ecclesiastical matters as in mundane ones, had told him that the order which she was entering was one of the strictest and that there could be no question for the present of a novice's going out into the world. In a year or so one might occasionally be allowed to visit her in the convent. After a year! Hans was still so young that a year to him was an eternity.

Yet for Henriette, towards whom the curious and watchful looks of the family were directed on this occasion, as on every other in the twelve years of her life under their roof, the time of puzzles was past. Everything had become crystal clear. “The only mistake is life itself,” Rudolf had asserted. How right he had been! For when one understood life, as she believed she did, and knew it so well that she was no longer capable of any illusions, it was not worth living. Henriette could not forgive Franz. No matter if her reason told her a hundred times that he had had nothing at all to do with Rudolf's death, that his suicide on her wedding day had been a pure coincidence, still her feelings whispered to her a thousand times the opposite. In any case, he had murdered Count Traun—out of hatred, out of jealousy for the tiny bit of happiness which at last had fallen to her lot. “Where the house, which thou inhabitest, knows no rejoicing except that which comes from duty, and no joy except that from grace,” the suffragan bishop had said in his first address. That much Christl could have had at Number 10 too. Number 10 Seilerstätte knew no rejoicing, and it murdered happiness.

As her eyes rested on the girl who had renounced happiness, she knew that there was a connection between them. Some took the veil; others married men like Franz. Christl, too, had felt herself betrayed and bartered, and why? Because she simply could not forgive her, Henriette, the happiness she had sensed in her at the time of her own distress, when Hans had brought her from the ball to the colonel's deathbed. “I was frivolous enough to be happy at the wrong time,” Henriette thought. And during the “Veni, Creator Spiritus,” it occurred to her, How remarkable is the love human beings bear to one another! If Christl's love for me had been really great then must she not have said to herself: “I do not begrudge her this bit of rejoicing?”

The tenderness she had felt for the novice since the Jarescu days was now submerged by her conviction that the ceremony before the high altar was nothing else than a demonstration against her. “I believed in you and you destroyed my faith in human beings!” the girl in her white veil kept crying to her. Oh, she heard it well!

Henriette's bitterness had assumed proportions which to her were not a persecution mania but perfectly simple—yes, even self-evident. She had lost not only the power but also even the desire to be just. Feeling herself to be in the vortex of disfavor in the house, her resistance to it waxed with every hour. But the worst of it was that she saw no way out. “Condemned for life to Seilerstätte,” she had written in her diary shortly after the duel.

Many voices were singing “
Gloria Patri et Filio et Spiritu Sancto
.” When that had died away the ceremony was concluded. Sister Agatha, dead to the world, bride of eternity, without turning round, without seeing anything, joined the ranks of the other nuns at the high altar.

“Christl!” cried Hans.

“Will you keep still!” came the angry reprimand of his mother.

But the novice looked directly at the spot where he and his mother were sitting. With a gesture of final renunciation she raised her hand a little way and then let it fall again. Then the companion of his wonderful, wordless, carefree years vanished.

“Mammi!” Hans said, beside himself.

“She is happier than we are,” Papa told him, and put on his narrow-brimmed silk hat, for now they were out in the street. All the rest of the family was gathered there too, so that they walked back together through Salesianergasse to Annagasse and home.

“There's no end to these family celebrations,” Otto Eberhard declared as he parted from his brother at the angel-with-the-trumpet entrance. “Will it be a big party? I'm only asking on Elsa's account. She's teasing me about getting a new dress.”

“I don't think that I've teased you much,” objected the councillor's wife. “In any case, Franz will have only one fiftieth-birthday celebration in his lifetime.”

“You see how she favors you, although you don't deserve it,” Otto Eberhard remarked to his younger brother, who had cost him many a sleepless night; it had been no child's play to avert an investigation into the duel.

 

When, eight days later, it was being celebrated in the ‘party rooms' of the second floor, all the ladies of the family appeared in new dresses, all but Henriette. She had on the yellow velvet gown she had worn to the Metternich Ball.

After dinner little Hermann recited to his father a poem which Neni had composed, and of which the first verse ran:

 

In this little heart of mine,

See, for you, my father dear,

There is nought but love, and it

Grows from year to year.

 

Papa and the uncles and aunts said, “Charming!” Mammi said nothing. Hans thought the verses were silly.

He searched everywhere for Christl, now called Sister Agatha, although he was quite aware that she could not be there.

Mammi looked lovely, but he could not stand that dress, that disastrous dress, and it was terrifying to see how strangely she looked at Papa.

Being for the first time at a ‘party,' he did not know that these rooms, where her wedding reception had been celebrated, filled his mother with aversion. He still had much to learn.

The family and guests were gathered in the yellow drawing-room when a telegram from the Imperial Privy Chancellery arrived. His Apostolic Majesty had been gracious enough to honor Franz Alt, commercial councillor, with an appointment as Imperial and Royal Purveyor to the Court.

“Congratulations!” said Otto Eberhard, who felt that this appointment removed a load from his mind. So the affair of the duel was now finally shelved.

“Congratulations!” said the other relatives and guests.

“Congratulations!” said Professor Stein, member of the Upper Chamber, to his son-in-law. “His Majesty has always know how to appreciate true merit.”

“Congratulations!” Hans heard his mother say to his father.

“His Majesty wipes out old scores.”

Hans was almost seventeen when Mrs. Einried began to appear at the tutoring lessons her son was giving him in crystallography. Crystallography was a hobby of the natural science professor, the ex-captain, and the whole class trembled whenever he had the tray with the paper models on it carried in. Then he would finger his notebook, call a name, and begin in honeyed tones to say: “Some nice boy will now trot up and tell me. There would be an anxious pause, during which the teacher, with agonizing slowness, chose a model, which he thrust with an abrupt gesture into the pupil's hand: “What is this?” (the three last words being hurled out like the blast of a trumpet), whereupon the nice boy had exactly one minute in which to study the model. “Don't turn it!” the examiner would yell, his watch in hand, if the examinee in his anxiety turned the model in his fingers. If in the next thirty seconds he did not succeed in identifying it correctly as a rhombododecagon, icositetradon, or whatever it might be, the ex-captain would snatch the model disgustedly away from him, throw it down with the others on a tray, enter a minus score in his notebook, and give the order, “About turn!” This proceeding upset the youngsters' nerves every time it was repeated.

Einried was the best student at crystallography, and the retired captain had recommended that Alt, as a poor scholar, should take some tutoring lessons from his competent comrade. For that purpose Hans went to his house three afternoons a week. In the beginning he never laid eyes on Mrs. Einried, but when the tutoring lessons had been in progress some time she used to make a practice of coming in for a moment or two and saying, “Don't let me disturb you.” She would smoke a cigarette in one corner of the room, disappear, come back with a plate of fruit or cakes, stroke her son's hair, and then leave. She was about forty, and Hans imagined she was much younger. He admired her red hair. Her perfume disconcerted him. It became increasingly difficult for him not to feel disturbed when she was in the room.

She stayed longer, as the lessons went on, for she was interested, so she said, in natural science. That was lucky, thought Hans, who had never considered crystallography as a natural science, and hated it as he did everything connected with precision. Nor did he like his brilliant schoolmate. He had never met the boy's father, who was a chief of division in the Finance Ministry.

When he arrived one Saturday afternoon as usual at three o'clock Mrs. Einried told him that her son had at the last minute got a ticket, for the matinee at the Burgtheater and there had not been any time to cancel the lesson. The play was
Emilia Galotti
, by Lessing. She hoped Hans was not angry. “Not in the least,” he declared, bowed, and wanted to leave. Mrs. Einried asked him if he would not like a piece of
Gugelhupf.
“Thank you, yes,” Hans answered, although he did not particularly care for crumb cake.