The Vienna Melody (26 page)

Hans had been ready to kick himself for having taken the letter with him to school. But he had done it in one of those moments of absent-mindedness into which he sometimes allowed himself to sink.

“Please give the letter back to me, Papa,” he said, and his voice expressed all the irritation stored up in him.

“Not until you tell me who it's from,” his father replied.

“That I can't do,” the son explained.

“Don't play the knight. Who is she?”

“Forgive me, Papa. I've already said that I can't tell you her name.”

In the sales room, beyond the glass door, someone was playing a C-major scale.

Franz had jumped up in his rage. “If you talk to me like that you'll catch it! Idling around, learning nothing, and being impertinent to boot! You'll tell me her name this instant!” Arpeggios were being played next door. “No!” retorted his son.

“No?'' And with that Franz slapped him in the face.

Sinnce that hand had shot at someone who lay dead in a meadow violets Hans had never been able to look at it dispassionately. Now he shook it off. “I won't have you hit me!” he said.

“You dare oppose your own father, do you?” Again a violent blow.

His son, mastering himself by an effort of all his young strength, asked, “Are you my enemy, Papa?”

Foedermayer, the head clerk, appeared at the glass door and laid finger on his lips.

“Clear out of here!” Franz said in a low tone to his eldest son.

In the sales room stood a lady who could not make up her mind whether she wanted a concert or a baby-grand. The salesman was urging a concert-grand, “Madame has such a wonderful touch!”

Had he arrived at that conclusion from her playing the C-major scale or the arpeggios? People lie so to one another, it is scandalous! His face stinging from the slaps, his forehead on fire with rage, Hans ran down the Wiedner Hauptstrasse. A passionate hatred took possession of him more and more with every step, and when he realized that it was his father whom he hated he was frightened by his own emotions.

He stopped short, then he went on. He did not even notice that he was going in the wrong direction until he reached the Matzleinsdorfer Church; he rarely had been in this section. To think that some time soon he would have to come every day into this part of town! Papa wanted him to go into the factory as soon as he finished school.

“No!” he said.

“Are you talking to yourself?” asked a girl who had been trailing him for some distance. “Are you coming my way,
junger Herr
?” she added quickly in a whisper, and gave him a visiting card.

“Thanks. Excuse me!” he answered, turned, and ran in the opposite direction. His classmate Ebeseder had been spoken to by a prostitute, and he looked at least nineteen. Do I already look so grown-up? he thought to himself. This consoled him a little. Then he thought of Eugenie and that he had a rendezvous with her for the next day.

A numbing thought occurred to him. If Papa does not give me back that letter Eugenie's husband will find out about it! For every afternoon Mr. Einried played tarot with Papa from five to seven in the Cafe Matschakerhof, Eugenie had told him in imploring him to be careful.

What time is it? If I go to the Panorama I can kill time for three-quarters of an hour and be at the café to meet Papa. I shall tell him the letter is from “Mizzi Stepanek, District IV, Rotmuehlgasse 3, 2nd Floor, Apartment 6,” he read from the card he was still holding in his hand. Should I go back to his office and apologize? he thought; but immediately rejected the idea. In the first place his father would not allow him to be admitted, and secondly he had no desire to apologize.

In the Panorama he sat on a stool in front of a stereopticon box, turning the knob and looking at the “Waterworks at Castle Hellbrunn near Salzburg.” As the pictures of the rose garden, the deer park, and the lodge passed in plastic review before him to the tinkle of a bell at each change, the injustice to which he had been subjected was thrown into bold relief to his eyes. It was his father who should apologize. As though they had all been saints in their youth! Yes, all of them! Papa. His teachers. Grandfather Stein. Neni. His uncles at Number 10. And Mother? Not she. You could see that least she understood what was going on inside you. Christl had been right. She had drawn the proper conclusions! No one understood you. No one wanted to recall that they had once been young. His rage swept over him again and made him leave before he had had his pennyworth of pictures.

Even so, Eugenie's timetable proved to be inexact, for Papa was already engaged in his game of cards while Hans was still pacing up and down in the street before the café. Looking by accident through the big glass window, he saw him sitting there with his back turned to him. Which of the other two men was Eugenie's husband he not know.

He stood outside for a while thinking things over. Papa would probably not show the letter; the three of them were too absorbed in their game. Having reached this conclusion, he was on the point of going home. Then his father put his hand in his inside pocket and drew out his wallet.

An instant later Hans stood beside the card table. Papa had merely taken out a five-crown note to pay the waiter for some Virginia cigars he had brought.

“Never mind,” he said to Hans. He was thinking: The boy wants to apologize after all. It's some extravagance and fuss he has inherited from his mother. He might have restrained himself till I reached home! That he had slapped his son in the face only a short time before had vanished from his consciousness; in any case he had no qualms. If young scamps get impertinent, that is the only language you can use to them, and Hans, unfortunately, was in the most annoying period of his fledgling years.

“Go on home,” he said to him. Then, sorting his cards, he addressed: the other players: “A three-spot! Have you left me anything worth while in the stock, Herr Sektionschef?” Evidently the old gentleman with the bald spot was Eugenie's husband. He looked at Papa, absorbed in his cards, then at the small bronze plate over the card table inscribed with the words: “At this table Franz Grillparzer created his
Medea
,”
 
and finally answered Papa's question with a cautious, “Double!” Papa apparently had excepted something different, for when he picked up and glanced through the six cards lying on the table and added three of them to his hand he declared, “I certainly have a run of bad luck today! Did you ever see such a stock! Not a single tarot in it!”

The game went on; the men smoked their cigars and accompanied each trick with strange ejaculations such as “Meet me with a club,” or “The black widow.” Hans said good-bye and left.

The letter was retrieved for him the following day by his mother, and so that worry was removed. But the relation between father and son was not bettered at all. The intolerable prospect of being obliged to enter his father's factory never left Hans's mind. “Aren't you fond of music?” Eugenie had asked him when he let drop some remark about it. Oh, yes, he loved to sit in the fourth balcony in the opera, or in Bosendorfer Hall, and hear the Rose Quartet play; he played not too badly himself; that was something his mother had taught him. But to manufacture pianos! Oh, worse than that, to sell pianos! What had that to do with music? At most it was related to physics and figures, and he hated both. And it had to do with compulsion, with being under his father's supervision from morning to night—unthinkable! Why did he not tell his father so quite frankly? Eugenie had inquired. A lot she knew! Who could explain anything to Papa? For him there existed only one point of view—his own. “Then what you must do is to find the right approach. Then he'll begin to see things your way a little,” was Eugenie's opinion. Good God! “Diversions of fantasy which are often more noxious than beneficent,” the Emperor had asserted recently at the opening of a Hunting Exhibition, and Papa had read it aloud exultingly in the
Reichspost
at dinner. Since he had become Purveyor to the Court he apparently had taken the Emperor more than ever as his model.

But it was Hans's schoolmate Ebeseder who had a better idea. The son of an ironworker, who played a considerable part in the Social Democratic party as reorganized by Victor Adler, he had for years been reserved in his manner towards Hans. A mother's pet, a scion of capitalism, spoiled, petted, soft, and innocent, so Hans seemed to one coming up from below. But from the moment when Hans had praised a rebellious retort he made to their militaristic natural-science teacher, a kind of rapprochement had been effected. Ebeseder, with his cheap suits that he was always in the state of outgrowing with too-short sleeves and trousers, read into Hans's enthusiasm something more than enjoyment over the discomfiture of an unpopular professor. Subsequent conversations, which led constantly farther afield, confirmed this. In their next-to-last year the youth with the outgrown trousers had a violent clash with Miklau, the senior master, an incident which threatened to result in his being expelled from the school. While the matter was being weighed by the authorities he said to Hans with a shrug of the shoulders, “Chances for the University are gone now anyway. You can do me a favor. In a month I'm taking the entrance examinations for the Academy of Art. Your uncle teaches there. Put in a word for me!”

This Hans did, and he had even taken him drawings prepared by Ebeseder, which, frankly, he disliked. Some of them were indecent and others distorted. There was one of an emaciated woman with a hydrocephalic child at her breast and leading by the hand another, who looked half starved, which Hans thought was revolting. But Uncle Drauffer, presumably out of a spirit of contradiction, declared that it was that particular drawing which gave promise of “great talent” and said he would do what lay in his power. When Hans gave that message to his friend this latter remarked, “Now at least I have some patronage, and in Austria that's all one needs! By the way, why don't you make a try too? You've been daubing around for years, and if you really are set against going into your father's factory why don't you consider getting into the Academy? If you pass then your father can have nothing to say. And if you fail—well, he needn't know anything about it.”

With Hans's sudden and uncontrollable yearning for independence, these words fell on fertile ground. In his early years in school he had played with water colors for his own amusement and his product had been considered not too bad. The idea of becoming an artist now inflamed him. He could not imagine why he had never hit on this himself. An artist, of course! The only possible profession for him. But when the first wave of enthusiasm had passed and given way to cooler reason he thought doubtfully: “Uncle Drauffer is on the jury. Won't Papa hear about it through him?”

But Ebeseder was not to be upset. “The only thing is for him to find out in advance,” was his advice. “Once he sees you sitting there he won't wring your neck. Besides, I shall be there.”

That settled the matter, and a few weeks later, on October 19, 1907, at eight o'clock in the morning, the young people who in that Vienna autumn considered themselves artists entered the Art Academy building to take their entrance examinations. They were divided alphabetically, and a jury was assigned to each group of seven. Hans, as his family name began with A, was in the first. The aspirants with whom he was to compete were: Christ, Alois; Ebeseder, Heinrich; Gamillschegg, Kurt; Goldschmied, Emil; Hitler, Adolf; Hutterer, Heinrich. The rector himself presided, Professor Alfred Roller, a man of about fifty, lean, with a nonchalant manner, full beard, and glasses. There were innumerable anecdotes current about his unvarnished Viennese manner of speech, and every one knew that he drove Gustav Mahler, the head of the opera, to despair whenever he entrusted him with the staging of a production. The other bearded member of the jury was Uncle Drauffer. In addition to them it consisted of the landscape painter Poell and the water-colorist Isidor Levi, who was also an art critic.

“Are you out of your mind?” was Uncle Drauffer's only remark to his nephew. Then he laughed a great deal and pretended not to know him.

The entrants could choose among three projects: the façade of the Vienna Opera House or Burgtheater from memory, the head of an Academy model by the name of Zajiczek, a drawing of Raphael's Expulsion from Paradise. The medium, whether oils, water colors, or pencil, was also left to their choice, and they were given four hours. “It couldn't be easier!” said the landscape painter Poell.

Hans chose to do the head of old Zajiczek. The old man, a model for generations of Vienna art students, sat in a beautiful pose on a platform, his shining white locks hung low on his neck, his nose aquiline, his mouth nobly cut. He had been a singer and lost his voice. Full of repose, he sat up there, with his eyes so cleverly directed towards the candidates that he could at the same time see his Crown Journal, conveniently laid out before him on a stool. When he turned the pages he did it so adroitly that no one noticed the slightest change of position.

There was a deep furrow between Ebeseder's eyes. He was the only one who had chosen the Expulsion. On the other hand, there were three competitors besides Hans sitting in front of the model. The two remaining candidates had each taken up a post at a window of the hall from which they could see, not the facade, but at least the roof of the Opera House.

Hans felt that he was getting along swimmingly. He would hardly need the full four hours; long before that everything would have been accomplished according to his desires. He would come home as a full-fledged artist, rid of the Francis Joseph Gymnasium, relieved of the dread of final examinations. And, best of all, he would not need to have any traffic with the piano factory. Tomorrow he would be able to say to Eugenie: “That's no way to handle an artist!” He winked happily at Uncle Drauffer, who was busy with something at the green center table. But his uncle did not see him.