The Vienna Melody (33 page)

“Do you know what the worst of it all is?” Henriette asked when she and Hans were out in that same Court Boulevard where no signs remained of the fact that on the day before people had been ridden down and
killed
here under the hooves of horses. “That everything turns out to be exactly what it seemed in the very first instant. No one is mistaken!” She was thinking of Franz and of her own life.

“I am not so sure,” her son answered doubtfully. A red spot on the hoarding near which they stood as they waited for the tram might just as well be color as blood. In any case, it was in keeping that the advertisement announcing the two hundred and fiftieth celebration performance of
The
Merry Widow
should be printed in red letters. “Isn't it perhaps worse that every one is convinced he is right?” he asked.

He was thinking of his father, of Fritz, of Otto Eberhard, of the drunks in the lock-up, of himself, and of his schoolmate Ebeseder. If he had a spark of decency he would try to do something about him at once. But he had to go at once to the factory where he would see his father. What if he couldn't ‘mediate'? What if he couldn't convince his father, who was so convinced of being right, that he was in the wrong? What if he used his authority to compel him to give in? What if everything went on unchanged as before? “No,” Hans said, correcting himself, “the worst of all is that in spite of everything, everything is allowed to go on as if nothing had happened. What should really be done to stop this terrible state of affairs?” He put the question more to himself than to her.

She replied, “Nothing. It always goes on.” She was thinking of Rudolf and of death.

Contrary to all expectations, Franz took a conciliatory attitude towards his eldest son. Perhaps the fact that he was responsible for Hans's having been arrested accounted for it; perhaps it was an attempt on his part, obviously in evidence since the Monday strike, to appear impartial and strictly fair. The threatened dismissals had been rescinded. When Vienna industry, after various sanguinary incidents in the provinces, resumed its course he even declared that he was ready “of his own free will” to raise wages. The rise consisted, not of fifty, but of twenty-five hellers per hand a week.

Not satisfied with that, he went on, in this sudden and remarkable display of tolerance, to sign a petition Hans was sending to the district recruiting office with the request for a postponement of his military service until he had finished his studies. That amounted to giving his consent to Hans's taking afternoon and evening courses at the University. What Papa's reason was for this unexpected attitude, Hans could not guess. It did not occur to him that it might simply be the way, the way of Franz Alt the man, to show remorse without admtting it. And he was too happy over the postponement of his military service, which had always filled him with terror since hearing Fritz's stories of barracks life, to go on cudgelling his brains about Papa. Postponed for four whole years! Any price was worth paying for that, even sitting on school benches again. And if his luck held then his younger brother Hermann, who in his last years the Kalksburg Institute fortunately was turning out to be a mediocre scholar, might be slipped into his stead in the factory. As it developed, when things went wrong Papa gave in. So Hans registred for a course (under Professor Guido Adler) in the history of music, since that was vaguely related to piano-making; moreover, in order to fill the requisite number of academic hours, he took three courses open as electives to Austrian students of philosophy: Ethics (under Professor Jodl), Philosophy of Religion (under the world preacher Laurence Muellner), and Analysis of Dream Life (under Professor Sigmund Freud). To forestall any change of heart on Papa's part he went through the matriculation formalities with utmost speed, so that barely two weeks after the strike he found himself in possession of the gray ‘index' booklet which made him a student of the Universitas Literaris Vindobonensis.

The thing he had not dared to hope for happened. His university studies, which he had undertaken to avoid the army and the factory, made another person of him. What a contrast between this and high school! Of course there were dark spots. Guido Adler was full of bombast, and Jodi was dry. And the duelling fraternity students were simply intolerable. With their scars on their faces, ridiculous little caps on their heads, black, red, and gold ribbons across their chests, they rioted around, attacking in turn the Czechs, the Jews, the Italians, swinging their knobby canes until blood flowed. If you could not avoid sitting at one of their
Kommers
, as they called their evening gatherings in restaurants, you were literally made sick by it. They obliged you to drink an immense mug of beer down to the last drop in one draught, and not just one, but one after another, something which to them seemed German and manly. On the other hand, how fascinating it was to attend the Muellner lectures, where none of the hard-drinking rowdies ever strayed, and to discover that there is no such thing as chance, but that everything which had been created or had occurred is obeying the law of necessity! When Hans had time free to do so he went to the lectures of his grandfather, who taught constitutional law with peerless wit; he assigned to the state the part of service and to the people in the state the part of governing. In the lectures of Freud, however, he experienced at first an almost physical revulsion; the very theme of them seemed to him to be a constant infringement of his sense of modesty. Later he succumbed to the personality of the lecturer, whose whole teaching radiated the inner purity of his diagnostic fantasy and lucidity.

This was the first time in Hans's life when the intellect talked to him. Until now the things that had held appeal for him were personal experience or routine or prejudice, or the cynicism of that peculiarly Viennese trick of justifying a witticism in order to be able to express one. Suddenly, in this engaging city of Vienna, where the saying “We shall never stand in need of any judge” was as current as an act of compromise, he found himself face to face with spirit pure and simple, which was incapable of concessions because it did not know them. He had been drawn to Fritz earlier because he sensed in him talent and opposition; but here he felt strongly that the same thing was raised to a much higher degree—to genius and conviction. It was an entirely different world. For the first time he was not obliged to accept teachings as something already proved, but he could be a helper and a witness in the process of their creation. This was what he, who as a child had loved to take things apart, had longed for all his life. But he had never dreamed that reintegration could be so absorbing or learning such a source of enjoyment. His attention was drawn to a girl who sat in front of him in Professor Muellner's classes and on the same bench with him in Professor Freud's. She was one of the few women students at the University at that time, and he was struck by the fact that she evinced equal enthusiasm for Muellner the preacher and Freud the sceptic, even before he was aware that she was pretty.

A few days later he had to admit that he had been mistaken in his estimate of her looks. She was not pretty, she was beautiful; but only, he realized, at certain times. Her beauty was like a light which she could turn on and off almost at will. There were days when her gray eyes—her quite remarkable eyes, the source of her curious power and the mirror of all her moods—seemed restive and unhappy. At such times she could seem even plain; at any rate, lacking in that radiance which made such an impression on him. A smile, however, could change her appearance completely. It lit her face up, beginning with her rather lofty brow, taking all suggestion of sharpness from her thin but finely chiselled nose, softening the line of her cheeks.

Her incandescence was not due solely to her eyes or her great warmth of smile. She had traits making it impossible for him to his eyes away from her: a way of tossing her head back to free her brow of the reddish-brown hair which made a careless fringe above it; a constant grace of pose which gave her thin and almost boyish body an attraction far above the healthy curves of most of the girls he knew; a light manner of walking, as though she moved without conscious effort. He was constantly surprised at the daring which had prompted her to wear her hair short, an almost unheardof thing; so short, in fact, that it revealed the shape of her head.

Once day the truth flashed on him: She was like an actress; a natural actress, however, still unaware of this power to project herself and her moods, but the more successful on that account.

Her name was Selma Rosner, and she was not yet nineteen. He found in a very few days that he had fallen passionately in love with her. There now began for him a time when he could not imagine that he had ever despised or cursed a single hour a single hour of this life. For him now life was magnificent. Vienna was like a perfect dream. To study was enchantment. Selma Rosner had done this for him; she had come into his life like a miracle.

She spoke to no one except the professors, and to them, in class, she gave irritatingly independent answers. She seemed to be constantly on the defensive, to assert herself and guard against the ridicule to which she was subject as a woman student among men. The first time Hans spoke to her for the purpose of asking her for a formula by Muellner that he had missed, she dictated it to him by memory and made further conversation impossible by her almost offensive curtness. This was repeated on a second attempt. Finally, though, they did get into a debate over the formula theory.

Hans maintained that Muellner's philosophy had a touch of genius. Selma thought that amount of praise was an “overdose.” She would call it at best, so she explained, a system but not a philosophy, then she interrupted herself quickly and said: “We are playing Goethe and Schiller!” He did not know at once what she meant until she reminded him that the first conversation between Goethe and Schiller, on the subject of the plant prototype, was initiated in almost the same fashion. With the girls of his acquaintance he could talk about nothing but tennis or society chitchat. And even his mother was no exception to the rule; and Eugenie only said, “I'm too old for you!” in order to have him reply, “No, you're young!” So he was all the more impressed with Selma. Without betraying it, however, he answered, “I trust our conversation will bear the same fruits in friendship.”

“Do you say that because it also grew out of aversion?”

“Certainly not on my side,” he told her bluntly.

“Thanks. Do you find it incredible that I should have thought so? I don't enjoy too much sympathy around here.”

Was this now real or ironical again? “I should feel sorry if you took the ragging here to heart,” he said stiffly. After all, a man had his pride.

“I don't,” she answered lightly. “Thanks just the same.”

That brought the conversation to a close.

It was shortly resumed when Selma, in reply to a question by Professor Muellner concerning basic motives for human reactions, gave fear as the origin of all; whereas the professor wished fear, love, joy, hunger, and revenge to be considered as reasons of equal validity. But Selma's position was that the four others were only “derivative,” having their origin in the one primary feeling of fear. The argument that arose in class on this point was carried on after the lecture was over.

“That's nonsense!” Hans declared. “Do you intend by that to make fear the father of all things?”

“That's what it is,” Selma told him and smiled in her surprisingly transforming way.

They were standing by a window in the high marble hall of the University, which led into the vaulted court containing the marble busts of dead men of learning.

Her smile and the change it brought about in her bewildered him. He was still easily upset. He would have given anything to have the brain behind that fine high brow finally take cognizance of his existence. She must at last—and despite her so-called “inferiority complex,” which Professor Freud was always bringing up and which she obviously over-compensated for with her brightness—realize that she had made an impression on him. More than any other girl he had ever met. He was discovering to his delight that she was marvellously clever, that he could talk to her on any subject. Why he could even ask her for advice, a man of a mere girl! To be loved by such a person—He decided to give up this silly beating about the bush. If he went on in this fashion she would be right and fear really was at the base of everything.

“How do you explain love?” he asked. “You can't possibly assert that love derives from fear? Revenge—well, I'll concede that point. But love certainly not. Nor hunger!” he added quickly.

“I most certainly do assert it,” she said, with her usual out-rageous self-confidence. “The first sound that a human being utters is a cry. He cries because the light hurts him. In any case he doesn't cry because of love, joy, hunger, or revenge. When man is one second old he has no desire for revenge, and presumably no appetite. He cries because he's afraid of life. Similarly, fear is the cause of his last sound, his last gesture. Because man is afraid of death. In between lies existence. As for love, it derives in the first instance from the fear of not pleasing. Think it over.”

If only she had not said, “Think it over,” with that outrageous superiority! She had no conception of how deeply he had been stirred by her fear hypothesis. Yet he could not tell her that, or she would be more conceited than ever. In his life he had had to face so much fear. It was because of that and because his fears were now swept away for all time that he was seized with such an insatiable hunger for life, and to be alive seemed so wonderful to him!

“Thanks for the kind permission,” he replied out of fear of making her more conceited and losing his chances with her. “And what about hunger? Does that also arise, according to your enlightened theory, from fear or just from the contraction of the nerves of the stomach?”