The Vienna Melody (28 page)

Out of the night came the sound of a gramophone:

 

“Georgie boy, buy me an automobile.

Georgie boy, then you'll
see
how I feel!”

 

No. Papa did hot believe it! He had had a lot of affairs before he married Mother: Aunt Pauline could tell stories on that score. He had even wanted to be a painter, so Uncle Drauffer had confided to Hans to comfort him. But now he said: “Ridiculous, one just doesn't become a painter!” when Hans was in question. So he was lying. So he was not on his side.

At this point Hans went off on a false trail, but precision was not his forte. “Inaccuracy is the curse of Austrians,” Grandfather Stein used to say, particularly in regard to this grandson. The longer Hans thought about it, the more indisputable it seemed to him that there were only two possibilities: either Papa had no conception of what goes on inside a young person, or he knew and didn't care. Finally he discovered a third possibility. Papa was old, fifty-six, and even so he was younger than most Vienna fathers. They married late (after they had had their fling, as Hermann Bahr said in his book about Vienna), and it was only late in their lives that they achieved worthwhile positions. Wasn't Vienna really run by graybeards? Anyone at forty was still “much too young” for any use. To become a Minister of State, a general, a councillor, or anybody who had a voice in affairs, one had to be at least sixty. To be young was decidedly a dreadful mistake. Perhaps all this was connected with the fact that the Emperor was so old he wished every one who governed with him, whether as fathers or otherwise, to be old too?

Ebeseder had declared that the Crown Prince had committed suicide because he could not get on with his father. Hans was inclined to believe that on the face of it.

His thoughts strayed off without probing to the bottom of the possibility. He thought of Ebeseder whom he no longer saw. Too bad. He had been the only one in school who said things that opened one's eyes. Of course Mother did too at times. Yet with all her captivating qualities she possessed neither logic nor consistency, Hans had to admit. She would say one thing one day and contradict it the next. He realized that everything depended with her on her sympathies and antipathies, by which she always allowed herself to be led.

“Georgie boy, the car isn't dear!”

Eugenie sang that idiotic song too. Sometimes her pretence at being so young was quite embarrassing.

Mother is the only person to whom I cannot make a single reproach
, he reflected.
Unless perhaps it was that she had been too hard on Christl? There are an untold number of things with which I can reproach Papa. “She can kiss the photograph on your desk!” How hateful!

With impetuous steps he crossed his narrow room. Next door in Mother's bedroom all was dark and still. Probably she was across the hall sitting by Mono's bed. And Papa, of course, was at his chess club.

That his mother had not been guilty of doing anything wrong with Count Traun he was prepared to swear. The scene of years ago, in the tiny red room at the Sophia Hall, rose vividly before his eyes. “Chambre séparée” was what they called such a place. The scenes in
Anatol
were laid in
chambres séparées
, he had learned since then. But Mother was no woman out of
Anatol
. When they drove out that time to the violet meadow Papa had said: “Your mother is above all suspicion.” Why then did he act so horridly now and cloud her with suspicion?

But what if he were right?

If Mother really had deceived Papa then?

If Mono was not Papa's child?

Then Papa would be right? And Mother wrong?

Each one of these thoughts choked him. He reflected, then he tore open the door into the next room, intending to run through to the nursery beyond, where he imagined his mother was. He simply must talk to her!

“Is that you, Hans?” her voice came out of the dark.

“Are you there, Mother?”

“Yes, I'm already in bed. Wait a moment, I'll turn on the light.”

“No, don't,” he begged. “I'd rather you didn't. May I stay a moment with you? Or are you too tired?”

The mull curtains, drawn over the half-open window, billowed in the breeze. The arc light on the corner of Seilerstätte and Annagasse threw an occasional flash on them.

“No, sit down by me.”

He seated himself by the narrow little bed where she had borne him.

“I heard you pacing up and down,” she said. “Can't you get to sleep?”

“It's that awful gramophone. Can't people be stopped from playing the same song for ever? It's enough to drive you crazy!”

“I'm afraid it can't be done,” she answered. “One can't forbid anyone anything—of that sort, I mean. Besides, it's a nice song, isn't it? I was just thinking perhaps you should ask Papa to buy an automobile. It would stir up a hornet's nest of talk in the house, but we are used to that. Then at least we could drive out somewhere every evening. To Laxenburg. Or to Baden. Or to—Couldn't we?”

“Mother,” Hans said, “would you be angry if I asked you something?”

I am used to that
, she thought to herself.
All this questioning has made me so tired, unutterably tired, less questions?
“What is it?” she replied.

If she knew what I want to ask! Hans thought, and he was so excited he could not speak.

But she knew.

“Don't think I want to butt into anything which doesn't concern me,” he began.

Quite right
, she thought,
it does not concern you. That is the reason why you ask
.

“But it is so important to me,” he went on, and then hesitated because it was hard to put into words.

It is not in the least important to you
, she thought.
If I was happy for a few hours in my life, of what did I rob you? I might have been happy all my life, do you know that? Then you would not have born, here in this dreadful house, and would not, at your birth, nearly have cost me my life
. “What is it that's so important to?” she asked.

He took heart. “I mean—what Papa said this evening. It isn't true, is it, Mother?”

She could not see his face.

Out of the darkness she answered, “It isn't true.”
In this room
, she thought,
there have always been lies told, from the very day when the walls were still damp, yes, from the day when the walls had not even been built
. What was one lie more or less? One charge more or less made no difference.
In this house I have been a defendant since I first crossed the threshold
. She remembered the ruby glass lamps down on the ground floor burning on either side of the sacred image. First it was Franz's relatives by whom she was accused. Then it was Franz himself. Now it was his son. That she loved the son she now forgot. She was too deeply wounded.

“Thank you!” he exclaimed with relief. He had jumped up and ted to kiss her.

“Not so impetuously!” she said, turning away. “Keep that for—others.”

Nevertheless he kissed her: “Are you crying, Mother?” he asked as his lips sensed that she was.

“No. But I'm very tired.”

The derby box holders met in the grandstand at the Freudenau race track. On this Sunday in June an unheard-of event had taken place; some of them, a growing minority, had come not in their private carriages or hired coaches, but in automobiles.

Henriette was jubilant. Until now she had not been able to get Franz to buy an automobile. “The Emperor always drives in a carriage,” he said, rejecting her extravagant proposal. People who didn't allow themselves to be taken in by every modern contraption, he declared, could get along without this new instrument of torture with its stinking smell and explosive noises. Bicycles? Well, all right, he would cede that point because they induced healthy physical exercise, and Hans could have one if he passed his second half-yearly exams. But as for gramophones, motor-cars, and all that modern rubbish, they would please be kind enough not to expect him to provide them. Music was to be made with hands or throat, and motion could be achieved by means of your own or horses' legs. What was good enough for the Emperor would not be too poor for Henriette! The time had gone by when he made every effort to gratify her least wish. Since that day in the violet-strewn meadow he had had the upper hand and he let it be felt.

It was near the Heustadlwasser, in the main avenue, however, that they witnessed the event: Princess Pauline Metternich and Priricess Croy were each riding at a whirlwind pace in a new, high, and mysteriously propelled vehicle.

“You see!” Henriette said to Franz. He merely shrugged his shoulders, “You can't take those two as an example. They always were crazy!”

Another thing she had never been able to wring from him was a season box for the races. He said it was a swindle. The Alts were no idlers. Or, if Henriette was really so interested in horse racing, would she like to watch it from the public stands? That would be in keeping for a simple citizen, and he had no objections to it. In this respect he was not so narrow-minded as his cousin Anna, the former Miss Kubelka's daughter and the deserted wife of Count Hegéssy.

They met her on the staircase as they were leaving Number 10 to go to the Derby, and as the deserted wife was in her black Sunday wearing even a brand-new hat, Franz jokingly asked her her she too was going to the Derby. She did not so much as answer, but turned pale with indignation.
How silly of that strange woman!
Franz thought.

But the other extreme was also against his nature, as was any extreme. Henriette wanted to sit in the grandstand, divided by only a glass partition from the highly aristocratic Jockey Club enclosure.

That was not where average people belonged, Franz had told her not once but many times. It did not and would not occur to him that every face in there brought back memories to her and that was the very reason why she came.

She wore a champagne-colored dress. It was in the latest French style, with a high neck, lace sleeves puffed at the shoulders, a long not pinched bodice, and a skirt reaching down below her shoes. Her hat was wide, with waving white ostrich plumes, and held in place by hatpins with broad, round heads of tortoiseshell and opals.

Her champagne-colored parasol had an ivory handle. Henriette was beautiful, and her gleaming white skin, thanks to the Paris powder she had begun to use, was whiter than ever, and her lips more red. She had learned to use cosmetics. Ever and again, even when it seemed most foolish and surprising, she felt herself overwhelmed by a desire she supposed she had long since suppressed. It was the desire to be seen. And at such times she wanted to be beautiful.

She stood by Franz in his regulation morning coat and narrowbrimmed, old-fashioned top hat, to which he clung even in everyday life out of a defiant attitude. They were in the uppermost tier of the granstand. That their places were so high up, directly beneath the tea room of the court caterer Demel, was what distinguished them from the holders of season boxes, who now began to fill the more desirable seats in the first, second, and third tiers. This was the first time for years that the Derby was not threatened with bad weather; the sky was gleaming blue, and new clothes and hats could be paraded without fear of rain. Besides, there were two derby favorites promising big returns from the heavy bets placed them; they were the three-year-old Heracles, from the stable of the Barons Springer, and the three-year-old mare Vilja, from the Rothschild stable. People were streaming in in droves.

The Springer stable was Jewish, and the owners of it, the two equally stout and eternally cigar-smoking brothers, Gustav and Heinrich, were just as popular as Gyulyas, their jockey. The Rothschild stable was Jewish, too, and on this Sunday their blue and yellow colors were being worn by three other candidates: two for a maiden handicap, one for a steeplechase. “The Judaization of the Vienna turf” had, on the previous Friday, been the subject of complaint in an article in the
Vienna Signals
. This in turn had called forth, on the Saturday before the races, an interpellation in the City Council; the author of which was Otto Drauffer and the mouthpiece was that city councillor Bielohlawek (who had said: “Tolstoy is an old nincompoop!”). The question in the interpellation was: “Is the burgermeister aware of the fact that one of the ornaments of Viennese public life, the sport of horse racing, is in danger of succumbing to Jewish influence and Jewish capital?”

Whereupon “our Wotan-bearded Burgermeister Lueger” had, as the liberal
Neue Freie Presse
pointed out with approval in its leading article of this morning, “given the answer of a
bon juge
who held to the policy that the middle course is the only right one,” when he said: “I am the one to decide who is a Jew!” To be sure the next item mentioned with commendation in the paper was a notice of the suspension of civil rights in Prague and Brünn. The Young Czech hotheads apparently had gone too far again in their unfounded claims for equal rights. “Since the unhappy cry of ‘Away from Rome!' has been set up by the fanatic Herr von Schoenerer,” said the liberal newspaper, “Austria has become an arena of national conflicts in the mixed language areas. Pan-Slavism, with its athletic clubs and youth organizations, has stirred up as much trouble as the ultramontane movement has in Catholic circles and Pan-Germanism has in the German nationalist and clerical quarters.” Having forgotten the middle way praised above, the liberal paper went on to state lower down, “The hotheads in all the camps are in need of a thorough cooling off.”

Henriette saw the two Springer brothers sitting in wicker armchairs on the lawn in the Jockey Club enclosure. She saw the tall figure of the very youthful Baroness Clarice Rothschild, née Montefiore, from London, as she took her place in her box in the front row under a shower of greetings from her neighbors on either side, the old Princess Croy and Prince Thassilo Festetics, while her husband and brothers-in-law sat behind the glass partition among the highest of the court-ranking nobility. They themselves, according to Henriette's conviction, looked like nobles of the best blood. Wherever the barriers raised by origin were broken down she had a sense of personal triumph. Down there too a captain in the Imperial Life Guards was greeting the owner of a third Jewish racing stable, Herr Horace Ritter von Landau. Henriette recalled that captain of the Imperial Life Guards. “Frau Henriette Alt?” he had inquired early one dark morning in a tone of unsurpassable disdain.