The Vienna Melody (39 page)

They climbed with extreme slowness. With an optimism which only she could muster when everything looked black (“an inopportune optimist” was what her father sometimes called her), she laid it to the after-effects of the shock he had received in the tramcar.

“It's all over for people of our kind,” he said suddenly and unexpectedly. His words echoed through the dark, cold staircase like a verdict.

Before he spoke she had been thinking:
If he had not been of such small caliber things might have been different between us
. But when he had uttered his judgment she not only was moved again by sympathy for him, but thought:
Since I have known this man he has never taken a step that was devious or disgraceful. He has always gone straight. He has never concealed anything. He has been as punctual as clockwork. His reliability has been matchless. He has conducted his business on strict principles. Whether he acts rightly or wrongly, he does it out of conviction
.

“You must allow yourself a few days of absolute rest, Franz,” she said in a warmer tone.

“Impossible,” was his firm reply. “I must be in my office not later than nine o'clock. Foedermayer is expecting, me. Even so, everything will be topsy-turvy. Thanks just the same for your thoughtfulness.”

His gratitude put her to shame, and that he should call it thoughtfulness was almost unbearable. How thoughtless she must have been in the past!

The walls from the entrance up to the ‘party rooms' on the uninhabited second story were so full of cracks that Franz shook his head. And when they passed the door on the third floor which led to his former bachelor quarters, and which were now occupied by Otto Drauffer, he commented: “Not growing any younger either!” He might be referring to the disrepair of the door or to his recurrent breathlessness. He held fast to the banister, looking down the three stories he used to climb so lightly as a young man at night, alone or (to Sophie's annoyance) in company.
Men like me have had so much to enjoy in the past
, came into his mind as he glanced at the woman by his side with tenderness.
One can't very easily ask others to be satisfied with so little!

“I am afraid I haven't made things easy for you,” he said as they reached the fourth story he had built for her.

This confession, which she had waited for from him for heaven knows how long but had never heard, so upset her that it was several moments before she could answer, in the best manner of Number 10, “Surely you haven't grown sentimental! First you shall have some nice hot coffee. I can't guarantee that it will taste exactly like coffee, but there will be eight real coffee beans in it!”

He laughed. “That's four more than we brass-hat swine have been accustomed to for the last year.” Then he cleared his throat and asked, “And how are you, Martha Monica?”

The girl was standing in the open door of the apartment and held her arms out to the homecomer. “Papa!” she cried with delight. He stroked her hair and said: “You've grown into a real beauty.” She was so beautiful and radiated such joyousness that she seemed to light up the darkness of the staircase.

Hanni, the former chambermaid who had become Frau Simmerl and was the mother of a daughter, immediately appeared on the scene. She greeted, in her usual manner, the man for whom her mistress was much too good, “Welcome home, sir.”

These were the present occupants of the fourth story. For Hans was a prisoner of war, and Hermann was still with his regiment, waiting for his release from the Isonzo front. Neni was dead; the cook had been dismissed, and the Simmerl child was being brought up in the country. After Francis Joseph's death Franziska and her husband, Dr. Baier, had moved to Salzburg, where there were not so many Reds and people still went to mass.

With Henriette on his right and Martha Monica on his left Franz crossed the threshold of his home. “At last!” he said. Some trace of comfort and protection enfolded him. The rooms were heated as well as possible. In the dining room the table was laid for breakfast; the tall silver coffee pot, with its chicory content, and the smaller jug, with bluish, watery milk, gleamed brightly. The maize bread, modified with bran, had been toasted so that the gray flecks in it were not noticeable, and the jam made of carrots and turnips, when put in a crystal container, looked deceptively like the best marmalade.

“What in the world has happened to the master's—”

But before Hanni could finish her question about what her master had done with the three gold stars on his collar, Henriette's glance and the return of Herr Simmerl checked her. Her words stuck in her throat. But her eyes, which had never looked with favor on her master, remained glued on his torn collar with its aspect of infinite disorder. He had always been so meticulous, so uncomfortable in the order he exacted.

Herr Simmerl conducted himself less objectionably. The newspaper he had been ordered to fetch he had dutifully obtained at the tobacconist's at Number 7, for even in times like the present it would never have occurred to him to refuse to do anything he was told. There were masters and servants in the world; it had been that way and it would always be that way, because it was right, no matter what the loud-mouthed people in the street bellowed. And even when an order verged on insanity, such as bringing a Red sheet into the house of highborn people, where the members of the family were spoken to with respectful titles and letters bore special modes of address, an order was an order. At best one could lay the filthy rag away somewhere out of sight. This is what the tall man proceeded to do and thereby hoped to spare himself the spectacle of an imperial and royal officer and a court purveyor reading the words of Messrs. Victor Adler, Friedrich Austerlitz, and Company, who had turned our magnificent imperial city into the capital of a poverty-stricken, miserable, shabby little republic!

“The coffee—excellent,” praised Franz. He also took a bit of margarine on a slice of suspiciously dark-colored toast, spread it with the questionable sweet concoction, and asked, “Did you get me that paper, Simmerl?”

What could the tall man do except answer “Yes, sir,” and hand over the disgusting sheet with a bow.

“Thanks, Simmerl,” replied his master, and proceeded to do with the
Workers' Journal
what he had done for years with the
Reichspost
. He propped it up against his glass while he ate.

“Oh, don't read that stuff,” Henriette said. “You'll only get all excited.”

“I'll be finished in a moment,” he answered. He was ready to admit that justifiable bitterness could make people blind. To be sure, reproaches could be made to the Prussians. Probably to the generals too. But there were certain limits beyond which even the best-founded bitterness must not go. These limits included the Imperial House, to whom every Austrian, and above all every Viennese, owed everything he had and was.

With a pair of horn-rimmed glasses on his nose, a piece of toast in his hand, he read the leading article by the editor, Karl Leuthner, published that morning:

 

Of the fifty-five million people who were condemned to form the grandeur of the Hapsburgs, at least thirty-five million wanted the defeat of Austria-Hungary and placed their hopes on the victory of the Entente. To think that a state in which the overwhelming majority want to have nothing to do with it, who actually hate and abhor it, should be able to endure! Moreover, this state had the criminal audacity to provoke a war. A handful of unscrupulous scoundrels—Berchtold and two or three of his henchmen, Hoetzendorf, Stuergkh, Tisza—had the power to unchain this wanton war out of bravado and plunge mankind into misery. Yet those who started it and those who prolonged it still think they were in the right!

You see them swarming together like vermin—the court parasites, the officers, the officials of the entire one-time Empire, who lacked every attribute to help man rise above his lowest instincts. In the service of their employer they were mere mercenaries both by outlook and by morals. At present, however, these counter-revolutionary criminals bow before the storm of our November the twelfth revolution. But they are ready to pounce! They congregate at the apartment of some fallen prince. The apartment of a fallen prince, be it ever so small, is a court—and what has a court and what have court parasites to do in a republic? Who would not be ready to pay a reasonable sum to be rid at last of our beloved dynasty? We deplore, of course, the irreparable losses and devastation of the war. Yet its outcome affords us pleasure, and we esteem the collapse of the Hapsburg Empire as compensation for all we have suffered and lost.

 

Franz's hand dropped the piece of grayish bread. Henriette, who was accustomed to his old habit of reading his paper at meal-time, had taken the opportunity of describing in low tones to Martha Monica what had happened in the tram. It was the grating sound of the falling bread that caused her to look up.

“That is beyond anything!” Franz exclaimed, and pointed to the place in the paper on which his eyes rested. “That is” he repeated, and then his mouth made some inarticulate, babbling sounds. Then he was unable to say any more.

Dr. Herz, still the family physician, and still against speaking the ruthless truth, did not say the court purveyor had lost his speech, but stated that it was a “nervous derangement,” which with proper rest and in time would, he hoped, be overcome. And as Henriette sat by the bed in which Franz had been obliged to rest, and saw how helplessly he moved his lips, she thought of Hans, who also had been unable to speak. One of her fantastic, superstitious ideas flashed through her mind: Christl had by some miracle brought Hans to speak. Christl must come!

Without reflecting for even a minute, she told Martha Monica what to do for Papa and instantly left the house. It was only when she was on her way to Salesianergasse that she admitted to herself that for several years she had neither seen nor wished to see the woman to whom she was hurrying.

 

“It is inexcusable of me,” she said when they stood face to face. “I can't justify it. But if you knew what my life has been, perhaps you would understand why I have felt shy about coming to see you.”

“I know your life,” said the nun, who, when she had walked into the bare reception room, had grown as white as her starched collar. Her forty years lay lightly on her. She still had the charm and slimness of her youth; it was only a deep-set line around her mouth and the look in her eyes that betrayed her loneliness and renunciation.

Henriette asked in surprise: “How can you know about my life?”

“I have always asked about you,” the nun answered simply.

“But your informants have no doubt had a lot to criticize in me?” Henriette asked of the woman who once so idolized her, and who now stood before her like a judge.

“You've been a very good mother,” the nun said.

“Thank you,” Henriette said. It was incomprehensible to her how completely their roles had been exchanged and that she now was in the position of an inferior. Was it because of the stiff headgear and the white cord on which there hung a cross? Surely I am not going to capitulate to a costume! she thought. Christl had grown arrogant!

But the nun did not need to ask, “How have things gone with you?” in the unchanged tone of the past in order to put her in the wrong. “Thank you, well,” answered Henriette, with a feeling of shame she had already experienced so often that morning. “And how have things gone with you, Christl? Excuse me, I should say, Sister Agatha.”

“It makes no difference. Call me Christl. I like to have you do it. Thank you, things have gone well with me.”

Then they talked about Hans, for Henriette could not bring herself to say why she had come. It seemed to her that Christl thought she had come because at last she wished to see her again.

“Did you want me to do something for you?” the nun asked. “I should be so happy if I could be of help to you.”

“You can help me. Only you can do it,” was Henriette's instant reply. Then she asked, “Are you really not angry with me any more?”

Sister Agatha gazed at the worldly woman. It was a look of such deep affection that Henriette dropped her eyes. “I was never angry with you,” said the nun.

“But you came here because of me? I mean into the convent?” Henriette dared at last to stand the trial she had never faced and make her defence, of which she had graver doubts as time went by.

“Yes,” admitted the nun freely. “I thought you needed someone to pray for you.”

That was the second verdict Henriette had heard that morning. She asked, “Do you still hold it against me?”

The nun reflected for an instant. “I never did. I wanted you to be happy.”

Henriette was silent. When she finally decided to tell her, a smile flitted across Sister Agatha's face and vanished. “How lovely that you still believe in miracles,” she said. “In other ways, too, you have hardly changed.” Then she grew more serious. “I didn't know that Uncle Franz is ill.”

“He isn't ill. He got too excited and had a shock. Dr. Herz—you remember him?—does not consider it a stroke, but a temporary derangement.”

The nun recalled Dr. Herz's tactful diagnosis of Colonel Paskiewicz's attacks as “asthma.” Again the terrifying odour of oxygen seemed to enfold her as she left the bare reception room and went to the mother superior to ask for permission to visit a sickbed, her first request since she had been there and had had her training in the convent hospital. Receiving the necessary permission, she and Henriette started off.

“I remember so well that time when Hans began to talk. He did it quite by himself,” she said as they walked along the street; it made her feel dizzy, so unused had she grown to the outside air and to people. She had resolved to stay away from both for the rest of her life. Her feet moved with such difficulty that she could not keep up with her hurrying companion.