The Vienna Melody (34 page)

She did not answer but smiled her absolutely enthralling smile.

Don't argue with her, kiss her!
was what went through his mind. But with her that was out of the question. She would only make a person painfully ridiculous.

“Oh, Fräulein Rosner, you belong to those people who want to be different at any price. That's why you wear your hair short, no doubt.”

“If you must know I cut my hair because it's comfortable and hygienic.”

“And because you know it's becoming to you!”

“Do you think it is?”

He was pleased to find in her this first trace of coquetry. But she immediately wiped it out with her assertion: “As for hunger, you can't deny that it belongs to the impulses. Recendy I took out a book by a certain Nietzsche. It's called
Beyond Good and Evil
, and in it is this sentence: ‘Without exception impulses are begotten by fear, born by fear, and buried by fear.' I'll bring it to show you if you're interested?”

He begged her to do it, for it was at least a point of contact. How absurd! Here she was discussing impulses with him without the slightest embarrassment, whereas the girls and women of his acquaintance blushed at the very mention of the word “naked.” And even more strange was the fact that he would have made no bones at all about kissing one of these society girls, whereas he felt that it was quite unthinkable even to call Selma by her first name. Besides, if he did she would not bring the book.

But she did bring it to him, and it had been a long time since he had been made as happy by anything as by that black-bound volume from the lending library, which he read through in one single night and returned the next afternoon. He longed to discuss it with her. As there was no time for that at the University, he accompanied her home. She lived in the Landstrasse District, a good three-quarters of an hour away, and fortunately seemed to prefer walking to taking the tram. That she was anxious to save the fare never entered his head. Who in the world would ever think about those few pennies! But Sechs-Krügelgasse, the narrow street where she lived behind St. Roch's, was in a part of town he never visited, and it impressed him as rather dreary. When he inquired about her parents she said that only her mother was living. Her mother had a tobacco shop and was ailing, so that Selma had to help her sell cigars, cigarettes, and newspapers. That was why she could take only the afternoon and evening courses at the University. All this, however, he learned later.

For the time being Nietzsche was the subject of discussion, and after him came Karl Kraus, writer and publisher of the satiric periodical
The Torch
, and Peter Altenberg, a Viennese devotee un-Viennese things. After that the painters were taken up. Selma lauded Klimt, the Secessionists, the insurgent “Wiener Werkstaette” with their “true fabric” art handicrafts, and she inveighed violently against the “calcified baroque angels” among painters still painting as in the days of Watteau. After they had walked up and down the narrow, poverty-stricken Sechs-Krügelgasse three times a thought occurred to her and she said, “I had quite forgotten that I really shouldn't have said that! You have a painter uncle, haven't you?”

What he had drawn from her words was less the disparagement of Uncle Drauffer than the fact that she must have made inquiries about him, Hans. Consequently she must be interested in him! “My uncle does quite nice things,” he said jubilantly. He was careful not to admit that on one October day he had cherished the dream of being a painter and had drawn the portrait of a broken-down singer with silvery hair, but it seemed appropriate to him to dampem her all-knowing attitude with the remark: “Anyhow, that's a matter of taste. The person who still enjoys Watteau will find beauty in the painting of calcified baroque angels, although I don't find your expression particularly apt. If you'll pardon my saying so.”

“Why not?” she asked. “We no longer travel by post horses or light our homes with oil lamps. Art should mirror its epoch or interpret it. Otherwise it is trash.”

How simple that was. And yet no one had ever stated it to him in such striking terms. Not even Fritz.

“It must be wonderful to be so clever,” he said innocently.

She did not believe in innocence (something he also found out later). Consequently she took it for derision and was ready, with one toss of her lofty-browed head, to annihilate the small degree which they had moved towards one another. This he prevented her from doing. “Selma,” he said, making an effort to overcome his shyness, and taking her hand in his, “why do you instinctively always think the worst of a person? And why do you keep feeling that you must assert yourself when that is no longer necessary?”

She tolerated the use of her first name and did not take away her hand. “Do I do that?” was her astonished reply.

Thus began their love.

Henriette gave the last family party this summer. It was a double holiday, with Sunday and the festival of Peter and Paul, and although the expression “week-end” had not yet been heard in Vienna, many Viennese had already left town on Friday evening to go to nearby Semmering or even nearer Bruehl. Franz spent the holiday out hunting. His old inclinations came back more freely as he took fewer pains to appear to Henriette to be anything except himself. He had finally abandoned all attempts to make her like him, which did not mean he did not love her any more. But he was reconciled now to his own inability to please her. Hunting was obnoxious to her and had been since the Mayerling days. Yet he had always been an impassioned hunter, although for her sake there had been a time when he pretended not to be. Now there was no longer any reason for his self-denial. And since he had come to that sober realization he had gone out more often to Lobau to shoot deer.

The Sunday afternoon parties on the fourth floor were a standing event, frequented also by many who were not members of the family. On this occasion, however, the gathering was focused exclusively on the Baiers, newly returned from their wedding journey, for Dr. Baier's wife was Henriette's daughter Franziska. Having finished at Sacré Coeur, she had lost no time in falling in love with the young assistant to the Emperor's personal physician. After a brief two-month engagement they were married and visited Venice and Rome. Their obvious happiness made Henriette melancholy. Sooner or later the prospect was that she would be a grandmother. How life rushed by!

She never seemed old to herself, although a woman of forty-nine was positively aged. Why did one observe it only in the mirror or in others but never in oneself? Inwardly she felt not the slightest change; she still hated some people the very instant she laid eyes on them and took violent dislikes. For example, there was her close-lipped son-in-law, who might at least have brought back an Italian sunburn from Italy instead of remaining so freckled and pale. To think that anyone could fall in love with such a creature! She herself might have fallen in love any day if she hadn't known she was forty-nine. Between today and the time when Henriette had come back from Venice there lay a lifetime. The interval of resignation, when she had made herself believe that all was ended and that she must limit herself to being a mother, that period had come and gone, as everything else came and went. It had now made way for the present epoch, in which she preferred to dress herself like a woman of thirty. She would in any case dress herself better than Franziska, whose reseda-green dress she found was horribly insipid; that girl inherited her taste from Franz.

Professor Stein was also present at the party because he had been prevented from making his usual call the previous Thursday morning; he had had to deliver a speech in the Upper Chamber for an understanding with the South Slavs. There was Hermann, too, finishing his year of voluntary military service with the local Vienna regiment, the Fourth Hoch-und-Deutschmeister, and he was causing quite a stir with his yellow stripes of an acting cadet officer. Who could have persuaded him to grow that silly little moustache? And without question he was using pomade on his hair. When he opened his mouth he poured out pure nonsense.

Henriette, in a blue-and-white-striped dress which was short enough to reveal the silk stockings on her slenderly perfect legs, was astonished that these were her children. Perhaps in both cases it was the eight years when they were away at boarding school, and against which she had argued with Franz so violently, that were the cause of this. In any event she felt like a complete stranger to this homely and ridiculously enamoured young bride and this rather comical and certainly not clever young man in uniform. When she compared this with her feeling for Hans (who was late again because he was running around with that highbrow girl) or for Martha Monica, who sat beside her and at thirteen was a striking beauty, she was almost convinced that she had just two children; not four.

The bride and groom were waited on by another pair of newlyweds. Herr Simmerl had married Hanni Kern the chambermaid, the same who from the very first had admired Henriette so extravagantly and was also so devoted to Herr Simmerl that moral Franz had called the butler to his office one day. As a result of the interview a wedding had taken place in the church of St. Anna, where only a month later the Baiers had been pronounced man and wife. The feeling of being bound more than ever to the family relaxed the butler's sedate features each time he poured the coffee for Dr. Baier or passed the whipped cream for his wife's. He too had taken Hanni on a wedding journey, not of four weeks but of one, to the pilgrimage center of Mariazell in Styria; and although Mariazell naturally did not compare with Italy, still they went there in apple blossom time. As for Hanni, she grew red in the face as she passed the traditional
Sachertorte
, served in the house since the days of Sophie. For a person of her age, and the recent date of her marriage, her figure was indecorously large; yet instead of sending her away somewhere until she became presentable again (that was Henriette's suggestion), Franz, a stickler for principles like the others in Number 10, had insisted on the religious ceremony.

As so often under this roof, Sophie's shadow slipped in, and, strangely enough, it was Henriette who took over her role. Without her having suspected or wanted it, the house had left its mark on her. In Sophie's stead she was now the one to deprecate the Sacher cake and the middle-aged newlywed who was serving it. At Hanni's age, according to her, one should not have children or blush like a schoolgirl.

“Well, when are you leaving?” Professor Stein asked. He did not mention the destination, as that was understood. Since Francis Joseph had made Ischl, that green little hill town in Upper Austria, his summer residence, the patricians of Vienna went there for their summer holidays. Sophie had done it; Otto Eberhard had his own villa there; Franz rented one; and the Paskiewicz family, as long as the colonel was alive, spent several weeks regularly in the Hotel Kaiserin Elisabeth. It was only the Drauffers who preferred the seashore.

“On the fifteenth. When Mono's school is out,” Henriette replied.

The living room in which they were gathered already showed signs of the summer dismantling which always began three weeks to the day before they took the train from the Western Station. Then curtains were taken down and laid in camphor; carpets were cleaned with sauerkraut; the floors were washed, refinished, and waxed; the furniture and chandeliers were covered with newspapers and gray calico slips; the windows were blocked with brown cardboard, and everywhere man-high packing cases filled with shavings were stacked up to such a degree that living in the apartment grew to be quite a problem. For the present all this was still in the preliminary stage, yet it reeked so of camphor that all the windows had to be opened despite the hot sun.

“Lavender to buy, two penny worth a bunch; buy lavender!” came the melodious cry that had rung through Vienna's streets for centuries in summer. It was the women who had come in from the country to go from house to house with their baskets full of fragrant blue bunches of lavender, offering them for sale.

“Why don't you use lavender instead of camphor, Mother?” asked Martha Monica, who did not even remotely realize the outrageousness of such a question. She had made it with the complete unself-consciousness with which she did everything, and meanwhile went on eating her piece of cake. Yet Henriette knew Number 10 well enough not to be surprised that Herr Simnjerl had his breath so taken away by this question from her youngest daughter that for a moment he could not go on serving.

“Camphor is what is used,” she said evasively.

“But it smells so,” Martha Monica said.

“That is why it is used,” her mother told her. “A long time from now you will discover that the art of perfect housekeeping means that you make your days as difficult and burdensome as possible. To be a good
Hausfrau
means to lead a miserable life, and care for things instead of for people.” A remark like that she dared to make only when Franz was not at home. But with the protecting presence of her father and under the shocked expression of her son-in-law, who was positively goggle-eyed, she took a fiendish delight in saying them. It was her retort to the spirit of tradition and perfection against which she had raged in vain since the very beginning, until, although she did not admit it, she had somewhat succumbed to it.

“You must not take everything your mother says at its face value,” was the instructive advice given to Mono by her grandfather, who was always ready to make concessions in Parliament or in life although not in his classroom.

“Oh, but I love it!” answered the lovely young girl. “It's so entertaining when Mummy says things like that!”

Henriette beamed. This child spoke her language. It was not exactly that of Number 10 and rather more suited, let's say, to the Palais Coburg across the street.

“And so you did not see the Palazzo Vendramin,” she turned to her elder daughter, in order not to reveal her partiality for Martha Monica too much. “What do you say to that, Papa?”