The Vienna Melody (41 page)

On the morning of the dress rehearsal a rumor was going round that the Austrian prisoners of war would be exchanged witnin the next two weeks. I was in such a state of bliss that I was a quarter of an hour late, for I had been waiting at the Ministry of War for confirmation. An unknown actress by the name of Selma Rosner, daughter of a tobacconist, about to make her debut, and she arrives late at a dress rehearsal in the former Imperial and Royal Burgtheater—you can imagine! The court actors and court actresses who had been looking askance at me now looked clean through me as though I were air. Before the curtain went up the stage-hands were saying that the news about the prisoners had been officially confirmed. I was so good that the honorable die-hards all around me grew stiffer than ever. The stage-hands—in general I was considered a Red—applauded me from the wings. Hermann Bahr came to me in the interval and whispered, “For God's sake, don't tell anyone that I congratulated you. You will have the biggest success anyone can achieve in Vienna. People will fight over you!”

On the opening night I was feeling terrible because the news about the prisoners didn't mean those ‘without documents.' But it was probably on account of my frightful shyness that I made a hit. Reimers (handsome George!) said to me in his pompous manner and with his resounding vowels, “My che-ild, you are the che-arming!” And gorgeous Otto Tressler wanted me to drive out to Grinzing for supper with him.

Hans! I am an actress of the Burgtheater! With a five-year contract! How often have we ridiculed the outmoded way of acting of the court theater. Nevertheless, I am tremendously proud. (I know you won't be—see above—and your family most certainly are not, for they have shown no signs of life.) My next part is Viola, with Tressler as Malvolio. Now you know.

When you arrive my marks on the calendars must plead for me with you. (Other marks, even those I might want to conceal from you, there are none.) Forgive me for presenting you with this fait accompli, and especially one which will in addition make trouble for you with your family. First a dancer and now an actress. And a Red, at that! Well, I am just an egotist who loves you. Do you know a better expression for that certainty than that you cling to a person as you do to your own breath?

SELMA

 

P.S. I was almost tempted to rent an enchanting place, which has just been vacated out at Grinzing, for us to live in. It is an adorable little house with an old garden, right opposite the vineyard slopes. Must it be Seilerstätte for us, irrevocably and for ever? Is there no such thing as vis major? Do endless years of separation, a lost war, and the incontrovertible evidence that the wrong people made it for the wrong reason not add up to one? Think about this and do not jump to the conclusion that it is
lèse-majesti
. In a crashing world even the will of a great-grandfather can perhaps eventually lose its validity.

 

The return of the two brothers occurred with a long and unexpected interval between. Hermann came first.

When he appeared before Henriette she looked in vain for any familiar trait in this young man whom she had not seen for so long. The war had transformed him. He had grown much stockier; his face, with its small eyes and unusually low forehead which he wrinkled up when he was serious, was surmounted by hair parted on the side, and he wore a jauntily upturned moustache. The wrist of his left hand was ornamented with a gold bracelet. He was in civilian clothes, and as he spoke he shot his shirt-cuffs forward. Henriette, who no longer allowed herself the luxury of illusions, thought he looked rather comic.

Their greeting was formal. His mother had not forgotten that of the four children Hermann was the only one who had always, no matter how seldom he was in her vicinity, preferred being with his father. Now too he immediately asked to see his father.

“For only a moment,” his mother said. “And don't tell him anything that might excite him.” (Old Dr. Herz meanwhile had modified his protective tactics and admitted “a slight stroke,” warning against excitement because of “certain fluctuations of blood pressure.”)

“Self-evidently,” remarked the son, using an expression he had picked up in army communications.

“He is a hero,” she reasoned. The ribbon of the Military Merit Cross was in his buttonhole.

As they went into the sickroom, Henriette, who was on the lookout for things that would speak in favor of this son, noticed that he was frightened by the sight of his father.

Franz no longer lay in bed. He was allowed to walk around in the house, but no farther, for Dr. Herz thought the staircase too steep. Constant confinement indoors had robbed his face of its customary ruddiness; its mouth remained twisted. But it was one of his unnoticed achievements that he had overcome the babbling sounds with which he had accompanied his gestures during the early weeks of his illness. What he had to say he wrote down. He had acquired the habit of stroking his upper lip with his hand, thus concealing the mouth.

Hermann kissed the hand of his father, who nodded to him repeatedly. That meant, I am proud of you. Then he wrote: “What are your plans?”

“To tell the truth, Father, what I should like to do most would be to enter the factory.”

Franz seemed pleased. He was saying what Hans had never said! “Are you no longer interested in lithography?” he wrote.

“No,” Hermann answered. “I was only interested in that as long as I thought it would be possible to found a large publishing house in Vienna. But that's impossible now. Our Austrian writers will prefer German publishers more than ever, and my idea of publishing German authors in Vienna is completely out of the question now. The gentlemen in St. Germain have seen to that too. The scoundrels!” he added, and pulled out his shirt-cuffs.

Again Franz nodded. His son was speaking his own inmost thoughts.

“Where do you intend to live?” he wrote.

“Here, of course. Or should I bother you?”

Henriette liked him less than ever. “Certainly not,” she said. “Would you like to fix up the little study?”

“Where will Hans live when he comes home?” Hermann asked.

“In Aunt Sophie's former apartment,” his mother told him.

“Too bad. I should have liked that ground-floor apartment,” Hermann said.

“That unfortunately is out of the question,” Henriette said firmly.

“Why, if I may make so bold as to ask?” Hermann said.

“Because Hans, as you know, is married, and two people need more room than one.”

“Is that still intact? I thought that had blown up long ago! What's the little Jewess called?”

Franz reprimanded this lack of tact with a shake of his head. He did not care for the daughter-in-law who had been forced on him by a war marriage. But she was Hans's wife. It was bad enough that they had left her to live at home with her mother instead of having her in the house.

Henriette, on the other hand, found herself in the remarkable position of defending her daughter-in-law, about whom she was probably even less enthusiastic than Franz. “The little Jewess is called Selma Rosner, and she has had a great success at die Burgtheater,” she said. “I haven't had time yet to see her, but the consensus of opinion was that she was quite excellent.”

“Really. The Burgtheater is now under a departmental chief called Vetter,” the young man said, “and isn't he a violent Social Democrat?''

“That I don't know,” Henriette answered evasively. “The director of the theater is Hermann Bahr.”

But Franz had nodded. Vetter was really a Red.

“Then I'm not surprised that this Fraulein Rosner is suddenly able to get into the Burgtheater,” Hermann said to his father. “She's a member of the Social Democratic party. But you knew that anyhow.”

No! No one in the house knew that. There had been talk of the peculiar political views the actress was supposed to hold. But a party member? Franz's face clouded.

“That is probably just gossip,” Henriette suggested. All this concerned Hans, and there was nothing to do except stand up for the much too clever know-it-all girl. If only he were back! “It's quite authentic, Mother,” Hermann told her with a glibness characteristic of all he did and said. “Incidentally, that explains Hans's conduct. He was under my command, as you know. I tell you, a real Sozi would not have behaved differently.”

“Getting typhus! And a wound—”

“In his right arm!”

“What are you implying?” Henriette asked indignantly.

“A shot in the right arm,” explained Hermann, “is what we called a thousand-gulden shot. That was what it was worth to the man who was wounded. There were even those who perpetrated them on themselves.”

Franz pointed at him violently with his index finger. “You go too far!” this indicated.

“Naturally I was not referring to Hans,” said Hermann, hastily retracting his words. “I merely meant that his attitude struck me. After all, he let himself be taken prisoner by the Russians.”

“And what is that intended to imply?” Henriette asked.

“There were people who refused to let themselves be taken prisoner. Especially by the Russians. You don't have to let yourself be taken if you don't want to, Mother.”

“I suppose you would like to have a bath?” Henriette said.

“I really should have liked that ground floor apartment for myself,” repeated Hermann. “Where is our master composer Fritz living?”

“In his old apartment in the mezzanine.”

“Really, these gentlemen who sat around composing operas while the rest of us were at the front should make room for men like us. Don't you find, Father, that there's a certain claim there?”

Franz's face, usually so easy to read, was bereft of all expression. Yet Henriette could have sworn that he was on the side of this son who was making such upsetting claims.

“Fritz was at the front for five months,” she said. “Then he was ordered home on account of his defective eyesight.”

“Four months,” her son corrected. “And his twin brother Otto spent three years at Press Headquarters where other fine gentlemen like Rilke, Stefan Zweig, and God knows what other heroic minds fattened and battened. And Cousin Peter was safely stowed in the Ministry of Education. I have the impression sometimes you think those four and a half years out there were just a lark!”

Franz shook his head as if to say, “No one believes that!” But Hermann shrugged his shoulders. At this point he looked bewildered. For the first time since he came home Henriette felt sorry for him. “No one believes that,” she also said. “We did our full share of trembling for you.”

“You? For me?” he asked.

Then Martha Monica came in. “You have been here for ages, and Simmerl has only just told me,” she said, running over to her brother, and kissing him soundly. “Let's look at you! Do you realize I've never seen you in civvies? You're positively fetching! Isn't he, Mama?”

Since she had come into it the usually darkened sickroom seemed to be lighter.

“I can return the compliment,” her brother said. “You've grown into a real beauty, Mono.”

“Really?” she asked, delighted. “As a matter of fact, I know terribly little about you. I'll tell you what. You take the small study for your room. That is next to mine. Then we can chat all night through the door. Yes?”

To Henriette's astonishment, he answered without hesitation, “Yes.”

Franz tried to smile. Then he pointed to Martha Monica's evening dress.

“I am going to a dinner party at Liesl's, and I am supposed to help her with laying the table,” she explained, accustomed to interpreting her father's sign language. Franz, for his part, was accustomed to forget that she was not his child. “Do I please you?” she asked, with a touch of flattery. “Gracious! It's almost seven! Good night, Papa; get well quick! Good night, Mama! Good night, Hermann! We'll begin our chats this very night! I'll tell you what the party was like, and you can tell me about your deeds of heroism!” And she ran out as quickly as she had come in. Martha Monica was always in a hurry, always leaving for or coming from parties. No one had seen her yet in a bad mood. She liked every minute of everything. It was not that she didn't realize what life was like. It was just that she found it so wonderful to be alive.

Franz nodded after her. She pleased him.

“Come,” Henriette said to Hermann. “I'll show you where everything is.”

Later, in the study, when he was taking his treasured, meagre old belongings out of his battered bag, she again felt sorry for him.

“You'll have to get some clothing, it's so long since you've worn mufti,” she ventured, taking from, him various things he had wrapped in newspapers: stiff collars, much too high; a double breasted pearl-gray waistcoat in the style of 1914; ties with ghastly patterns. “Have you enough money?”

He had emptied the bag in which his civilian stuff had been stored and had begun to unpack a second one containing his military effects. “For the time being,” he rejected her implied offer. “Thanks just the same.” The headlines on the newspaper which had served to wrap his belongings announced great Austrian victories.

Having laid the small amount of linen he possessed in the bureau, she turned round to him. It seemed wiser to her to clear up the situation between them right in the beginning. “What have you against me?” she asked. “Do you imagine that I'm not aware of your preference for your father? As far as I know, I have never done you an ill turn.”

He was holding his tunic in both hands. “Nor yet a good one,” he said, flicking the dust off it. As he did it the medals and decorations attached to it tinkled.

“Do you know what you are saying, Hermann?”

“Definitely. Do you think I never noticed, when I was only home for those few holiday weeks each year, how you could hardly wait for me to go away again?” He gave his tunic a more violent shake. “Or are you of the opinion that I had a happy time of it for eight years at the Institute and four and a half at the front? A dog's life is what I've had. But what did you care? In the eight years I was at Kalksburg you visited me twice. I wasn't Hans, that's all!”