The Vienna Melody (30 page)

Fortunately the other earsplitting noises, from the metal casting and wire drawing, were confined to a lower story—namely, the cellar. It was so damp there that water ran from the walls. These dripping blotches, which kept appearing in different places, were the only decoration in the three elongated, crypt-like vaults; they were still lighted in part by unshielded gas jets, together with the smallest, cheapest electric light bulbs suspended from unprotected wires, producing a most inharmonious light. If your foot came in contact with any soft object the chances were that it would almost certainly be a rat.

But why in French?
Hans protested furiously, and again could comprehend why a factory of harmonious instruments produced such horrible noises. “The Austrian has a fatherland and loves it, and has reason, too, to love it!” The quotation, from Schiller's
Wallenstein's Death
, which was the theme he had had to write on for his final examinations, occurred to him. “If the Austrian had a fatherland why did he prefer all other countries to it? If he had cause to love it, why this deference and reverence towards everything foreign? If Austria had classic writers like Grillparzer, Raimund, Nestroy, Lenau, Stifter, Schnitzer, and Hofmannsthal, why did it make sheep's eyes at Maupassant, Dotoevsky, and Hauptmann? If it was true that Austria dominated the world of music with its Mozart, Haydn, Schubert, Beethoven, Brahms, Johann Strauss, and Bruckner, why the courting of Richard Strauss? If it was not lack of riches it must be a poverty of self-confidence that makes love of country a rare phenomenon in Austria.”

Hans remembered every word of what he had written and also the criticism in red ink at the end: “Not unlaudable in train of tought. But delight in contradiction for the sake of contradiction leads to faulty judgment and to a cynical presumptuousness which is alien to Austrian character. From such eulogists may a kindly providence preserve us! The theme is unsatisfactory.”

He still went hot and cold when he thought of the disgrace of his final oral examinations. When Professor Miklau, the jailer of his eight years in jail, gave him the passage he was to translate from the Latin, the description of the death of Agrippina from Tacitus, he had remarked, “Alt, Hans, the passage is not easy. But one must have some conscience about sending people like you out into life. I cannot prevent your one day becoming a journalist or engaging in some other frivolous occupation in which to dish up some so-called modern literature. But, by God, I can delay that time!” With this blank cheque of prospective failure, Hans had stood there, dressed in a long, buttoned-up black dress coat and white kid gloves on a painfully hot morning in July in the public hall of the Francis Joseph Gymnasium. It was not any knowledge of the Latin tongue, but the deadly enmity he felt for the slave driver Miklau, which prompted him to succeed in his translation. Afterwards his new dress suit was so permeated with the sweat of his agony that he could never wear it again. The only occasion, however, on which he might have used it would have been at the examinations of the University where attendance was denied to him. Although he had now been declared ‘mature' enough to attend it, and although he had implored his father most urgently to let him go there, and had been backed up in this by his mother, it was forbidden him. “You barely scraped through,” Papa had declared. “You have no head for science. As soon as possible we must make a useful member of society out of you.” Whereupon a cubbyhole was walled off for him next to the cabinet-making in the factory.

As for Papa, Hans now had to admit his superiority in a field he had never been aware of before—that of an expert. He ran his business with minutely detailed practicality and besides had a gift for tonal effects which bordered on creativeness. If Papa had looked on the production of musical instruments a little more from the musician's standpoint and not principally as a turner, wire-drawer, metal-caster, and salesman, Hans could have been on more understanding terms with him. But everywhere he looked he was discouraged. At home it was like living on a volcano; his parents hardly spoke to each other. His affair with Eugenie was dragging along listlessly, the more so as the jealous and ageing woman clung to Hans's youth. As to friends, he was like his mother in this—he had none. When his mother's proposal that his brother Hermann, three years his junior, be put sooner or later in his place in the factory was finally turned down (that Hermann was a vastly better student than Hans was given as the reason for the refusal), he saw the last avenue of escape barred. Nothing now stood between him and the drudgery of a hateful occupation under his father's constant supervision. Finally he was threatened with military service, before which he quailed as he did before any compulsion. He toyed with ideas of suicide, a not unusual game at his age and in his circle.

At this point help came to him from a quarter where he least expected it: from Number 10. Fritz Drauffer, his much older cousin, had engaged him in casual conversation as they walked upstairs together. The subject was Stifter's
Indian Summer
, which Fritz asserted was the most beautiful piece of German prose since Goethe, whereas Hans had preferred Grillparzer's
The Poor Fiddler
.
 
Other conversations followed, and Hans found to his amazement that a delightful man lived under the roof of Number 10. With the enthusiasm he was capable of giving to anything creative, became devoted to his musician cousin; what his prickly pride would not allow him to take from others he accepted from Fritz. He let him call him an idiot, and Fritz apparently had no objection to bring called one himself. In Hans's lifetime Fritz was the first ‘grown-up' who had not treated him with arrogance, and consequently his influence was all the greater.

Fritz, for his part, had not yet freed himself from the influence which his idolized Gustav Mahler exercised on him and all young Viennese musicians. He wore his hair like Mahler; in speaking he used the same flowing gestures and the abrupt jerk of the bespectacled head. No wonder, then, that in his opinion he was a mouthpiece for the maestro who had taken him in to play for the rehearsals of the singers. When Vienna let this opera director fall from favor Fritz Drauffer took it as a personal affront and was through with Vienna. He refused to serve under Mahler's successors and preferred to sit at home and fume, to give piano lessons, and to compose an opera for which a young Austrian lyrical poet, Anton Wildgans, wrote the libretto.

Consequently he was quite in the mood to sympathize with another malcontent. “Get it into your head once and for all,” he had said encouragingly to Hans, “that you never disturb me. What I am composing is a mess anyhow. The oftener you interrupt me, the better.” So they sat together in the congenial atmosphere of the music room, when Hans came home from the factory, at first occasionally and later on nearly every day. Fritz sat on the revolving piano stool, but Hans walked up and down because his restlessness kept him from staying in one place; there were so many questions which as a rule began with the house and wound up far away outside. Fritz would not tolerate the idea that it was a “catastrophe” to work in a famous piano factory, and he emphatically declared that it was the height of nonsense and the arrogance of an imbecile to believe that the “free professions” were preferable to manual labour. He did not even like to hear criticism of the family; in that respect he was surprisingly prejudiced. If Hans pinned a particularly ill-natured remark on Otto Eberhard, then Fritz would look at him over his glasses, twirl around on the piano stool, stop short, and say, “Look here, you are an idiot. You forget that you and I are making other demands on life. What you and I want is to be alone! What your uncle and your father want is to be together!”

“But I don't want to be alone,” Hans would contradict. “On the contrary, I want—”

“I know,” Fritz would promptly interrupt. “That's why we're talking. Uncle Otto Eberhard—who, by the way, has his merits, although I doubt if you have discovered them yet; after all, absolute propriety is something—is convinced that being together, once you are together, has a higher significance. You either separate at once, or never. Anywhere else than in Austria that would be considered madness. But in Austria there's a method in it. Did it never occur to you that Austria is a compulsory bringing together of people?—of a lot of inhabitants who do not belong together? The Czechs cannot stand the Germans. Nor the Poles the Czechs. Nor the Italians the Germans. Nor the Slovaks the Czechs. Nor the Slovenes the Slovaks. Nor the Ruthenians the Slovenes. Nor the Serbs the Italians. Nor the Romanians the Ruthenians. And of course the Hungarians cannot stand anyone else in the world—‘
extra Hungariam non est vita et si est vita
,
non est ita
!' What you scrambled together in your final examination theme and were so proud of is arrant nonsense. What is an Austrian anyway? There's no such animal! It is a designation thought up by the Hapsburgs to excuse the power of their house. The Austrians are no nation. They are twelve odd nations—that is, none at all. If an Austrian speaks German as you and I do he considers himself the
 
Austrian and imagines meanwhile that the Czech or the Italian or the Pole feels just the way he does, proud of Vienna, the Imperial City, of Mozart, of the waltzes and the local wine. Ridiculous! The Pole in Przemysl or the Italian in Trient or the Bohemian in Budweis has no other thought in his head but the one: How am I to get out of this infernal prison where my own language is not the ‘official language' but a second-rate Hindu dialect, where I have it dinned into me from morning to night that I am a third-rate creature, and yet where they force me to serve for three years in the army and to pay taxes all my life for the first-class creatures, the Viennese? What is a Frenchman? A man who speaks French and feels French. What is an Austrian? A man who speaks Ruthenian or Slovak and is supposed to feel Viennese! And for what reason, I ask you, you mature Austrian? Because at some remote time—I am weak on dates—the Turks threatened us, and it seemed reasonable to gather together any nations that were handy and throw them in for our defence. The Turkish peril—you learned that, and I learned that. It was the ‘Mission of Austria,' and the Italian and the Czech agreed to it. It was better to be Hapsburg than Turkish. But what, pray tell me, is going to convince him in this day and generation that it is better for him to be governed by Francis Joseph, to have unpleasant neighbors living unpleasantly with him, instead of being independent in his own house or at least on his own floor people of his own choosing? That is what I mean by being let alone. You can interpret it, incidentally, in terms of the spirit as Well as in those of a nation.”

Thereupon Hans would be shocked into reflection and then say, “Then you don't want to be an Austrian?”

And with an indignant toss of his head Fritz would reply, “Haven't you any ear, you unmusical wretch? I never even breathed such a thing. I never under any circumstances whatsoever want to be anything but an Austrian. When my train pulls into the Anhalter station in Berlin exactly on time, and I am offered the first fruits of German thoroughness, my stomach turns, and I long for our own sloppiness. When I go to the opera in Paris I bless every Viennese box usher. I thumb my nose at American civilization where they shoot into the sky in an ‘elevator' and with their skyscraping civilization smother culture. But I am an Austrian who realizes that Austria exists only for the House of Hapsburg and the Viennese. Perhaps for Salzburgers too.”

Or he would say, “Don't you believe your grandfather Stein! He is a very shrewd man, but alas, he is a liberal patriot of the stamp of the historian Friedjung, and consequently confuses Francis Joseph with Joseph II. In all seriousness! He thinks Francis Joseph is an underestimated monarch! But our Emperor is a disgrace. He actually said to an American President, ‘You see in me the last monarch of the old school,' and was proud of the disgrace! For that old school of monarchy was firmly convinced that it was the duty of subjects to sacrifice themselves for the dynasty instead of the other way round. It also believed, because it upheld the impersonal conception of empire or kingdom, that the emperor or king stood above every one and was unimpeachable, even when he was a nonentity. Take Queen Victoria, the feminine counterpart of Francis Joseph, only cleverer. In all his life the fact has never penetrated Francis Joseph's skull that there could exist any Austrian patriotism which is not bound up with devotion to his person. And in this fixed belief that it is the dynasty which stands above national interest he has completely forgotten what Joseph II knew a hundred years ago: that a dynasty is a unifying idea only so long as its subjects prosper. But to take and not to give in return is a fatal error. To rule is to give!”

Hans was beginning to see things and people from this point of view now and had ceased to demand that thistles produce roses (a phrase favored by Fritz), when events transpired in the Wiedner Hauptstrasse factory which the liberal
Press of Vienna
at first completely ignored and later covered with a few lines in smallest type.

It was only
The Workers' Journal
, the organ of the Socialist movement developing in the train of the industrialization of Austria, which featured the occurrence.
The London Times
sent a special reporter to Vienna, and a New York paper had their correspondent cable a report to which they put the heading “A Historic Day for the World.” A special article in the Paris
Figaro
seemed, however, to link the happenings of Monday, September 17, 1910, with a demonstration on the previous Sunday which led thousands of Viennese to go out to the Vienna Woods.

These Viennese, wrote the French journalist M. Mercier, had gone out there as harmless holidaymakers, taking their wives and children and picnic baskets as on any ordinary Sunday, and had come back as rebels. Their excursion was undertaken in connection with the tenth anniversary of the death of a certain Joseph Schoeffel, who, in the 1870's, had succeeded in blocking a capitalistic enterprise to cut down the Vienna Woods. That the loveliest woods in the world still provide cool green refreshment to a world capital, the only one which lies as it were in a forest, is to the immortal credit of that same Schoieffel: so said the poetic Frenchman. Yet the modern-day generation of Viennese do not even know his name. They accept the millions of beech trees, elms, and oaks covering the gentle hills in front of their very doors as a matter of course. Wherefore, then, this sudden decision to honor this forgotten man, to whom, to be sure, a monument was erected somewhere, although not two Viennese put of a hundred could say where?