The Vienna Melody (38 page)

Henriette was not sleeping any better on this night of November 21, 1916, than on any other, and she answered, “I don't know.” It seemed beyond all doubt to her that the man who had died that day, even by his death, could not bring happiness. “Go to bed,” she said to her daughter.

“Right away,” Martha Monica promised. But her head was still so full of thoughts requiring attention, and not one of them was depressing or frightening. In all her fifteen years of life she had had a wonderful time. She could not understand why her mother worried so. While the lovely young girl blew the smoke of a forbidden cigarette out of the window her mother called: “You aren't still standing at that open window, are you, Mono? It is frightfully cold!”

Yes, she was standing at the window, and she was thinking of the army post office letter she had received that day from her tennis partner, in which he wrote: “I love you madly!” Life was so wonderful. The bells which boomed with such irresistible metallic vibration were ringing in better times; of this she was sure.

“Those bells will be the death of me!” her mother said. And since Martha Monica thought she heard her coming she quickly hid her cigarette and jumped back into bed. But her mother did not come. In the dark the girl dreamed on with open eyes, finished her cigarette, threw it away, and went to sleep.

An hour later the fire engines were summoned to Number 10 by Otto Eberhard, himself. Sleepless with grief over his Emperor's death, he wandered about his rooms and thought he smelled smoke coming down from the upper floor. He investigated at once. The fourth floor, of course! That constant source of disorder and disquiet! That fourth floor which had to be built to become the center of disturbance! Now it was on the point of destroying itself, and with it Number 10, the hearth of tradition and decency!

But the fire, started in Martha Monica's little room by the cigarette she threw away, caused comparatively little damage. Apart from some slight shock, Martha Monica, who had been awakened by her mother, suffered only from inconsiderable burns. Henriette carried her down the staircase. Most of Hans's books and his sister's bed were destroyed; the velvet curtains, irreplaceable because of the existing shortage of materials, were charred, and through the open window the flames spread to the rafters which overhung Annagasse.

From below, the inhabitants of Number 10 watched the fire. “Already!” said Otto Eberhard to himself while the mourning bells for Francis Joseph still tolled. “Already! Disorder is quick to start!”

When the fire was brought under control and the red glow in an otherwise completely black sky had vanished, the Public Prosecutor's thoughts immediately went back to the greater misfortune of that night. To think that at this very hour the man who for almost seven decades had given life and honor, foundation and roof, to his Empire lay without life on his Spartan bedstead in Schönbrunn. Francis Joseph dead! Before Otto Eberhard's eyes appeared the venerable and familiar figure after whom, he, and innumerable others of his kind, had modelled their own lives, appearance, views, iron principles. Francis Joseph no more! The old man's eyes grew moist.

Martha Monica saw it. “I am so sorry,” she said: “Please, Uncle, don't take it so seriously! Nothing much has happened.”

“What do you mean?” the lawyer asked sternly.

“I thought you were weeping,” replied the bewildered girl.

“Nonsense! It is only that awful smoke.”

While the Alts were returning to their rescued home the mourning bells still had not ceased.

T
he day Franz came home he was past sixty-six and Austria had lost the war. It was November 17, 1918.
The ‘final victory' had been one of those dogmas never subject to doubt even up to the last minute. He had felt disgraced because his years prevented him from doing active duty at the front, a feeling mitigated only by the fact of his having two sons in the field. The older one, Hans, was a prisoner of war and only a sergeant, whereas Hermann, the younger one, was a hero with several medals.

When his train pulled into the North Station a lady was standing on the platform. She waved to him, and she was still beautiful. He struggled against the tears that came and against the fact that he still loved her so much. For a moment he forgot that Austria had been defeated.

As the elderly gentleman in a captain's uniform, with gleaming patent-leather boots, fresh-shaven despite the early morning hour, with two bags in his hands, came towards her, Henriette could not repress the warm rush of sympathy rising in her. For more than four years they had not lived under the same roof.

He put his bags down and kissed her hand. She kissed his cheek.

“It's good to be home again,” he said, brief as ever.

“I'm glad you have come,” she said. “Didn't you bring your orderly?”

“No,” he said. “The scamp deserted.”

They did not mention the revolution.

There were neither porters, nor taxis, nor cabs at the North Station, and they had to walk with the bags as far as the Praterstern to get a tram. It was so crowded that Franz had great difficulty in pushing his luggage on to the open platform of the back car and then forced his way into the closed part where Henriette stood. The passengers were mostly factory workmen on their way to work.

“You're looking splendid,” Franz told her, and glanced around the car. Those sitting down were practically all men. They might have given a seat to a lady, he thought.

“So are you,” she said, returning the compliment.

The critical way in which he inspected the sitting passengers had not gone unnoticed.

“Anything wrong?” asked a youngish man who sat beside a still younger one at the window reading a newspaper.

“Did you receive my express letter in time?” Henriette put in quickly.

But Franz answered the newspaper reader instead. “Don't you see there is a lady standing up?”

“I like to stand. It's just a few streets more,” Henriette said, hoping to head him off.

But from the other end of the car somebody had already yelled, “Brass-hat swine!”

That was the insult with which the angry and disillusioned mob gave vent to their feelings when they saw men who had ‘wangled' themselves jobs away from the front lines and put their skins in safety, in the rear. This officer of the Dragoons, so scrupulously clean-shaven, with gleaming buttons and boots, looked like one of them. Moreover, he was an officer, and it had been the officers who for four years had ordered them out to die.

The man who had yelled was a common soldier. He wore the field uniform of the Vienna home regiment, the Fourth Hoch-und-Deutschmeister, but the erstwhile blue of his collar could hardly be distinguished, so dirty was it with the blood and filth of the trenches.

“Private!” Franz said. “You will report to your superior officer. I shall see to it that you—”

“Like hell!” interrupted the man. “You've finished giving orders!”

Henriette, who in the five days since the revolution started had witnessed similar incidents, leaned over to Franz and whispered:

“It's no use!”

“No use!” he said angrily, “As long as a fellow like that wears His Majesty's uniform he's subject to discipline!”

Before the words were out of his mouth the man who was reading the newspaper had jumped up and made a sign with his head to the one next to him. Now they pushed their way up behind Franz; one of them grabbed his arms and held them in a vice-like grip, while the other tore the insignia from his officer's cap and the gold stars from his collar.

“There!” he said as he did it. “Now you have finished commanding!”

Henriette saw the veins stand out on Franz's temples, grown so gray, the sign of his flaring temper that she had so feared and hated in the past. Now, standing close by his side, she felt nothing but sympathy. He had hardly ever made her feel sorry for him, but in this instant she felt more sorry for him than for anyone ever before. She knew what was going on inside him. What she had gone through thirty years earlier, when her world crumbled for her, he was now feeling himself.

In an attempt to extricate himself with his hands and feet from the vice in which he was held, Franz said in a tone of infinite contempt, “You rabble!”

To a man all the passengers sided against him.

“Who's rabble?” yelled a woman with a stack of morning papers for delivery under her arm. “Two of my lads they shot, they did—and for what? Your Goddamn discipline!”

“That's right!” someone else yelled. “No food! No heat! And why? 'Cause we had to stand around, and click our heels, and say ‘Yes, sir' while you fine gentlemen in shiny boots ordered us out to be killed!”

“Throw him out!” suggested the newspaper reader.

Someone on the platform had already shoved Franz's bags off; they crashed on the pavement. The conductor stopped the car.

“The gentleman had better see to his luggage,” he told Henriette. His aversion to the officer was as obvious as that of the others.

“Come,” Henriette begged. For a moment she felt like saying to the people, “I also have two sons at the front.” But she only looked at them and they made way for her. As she stood in the street with Franz he grew dizzy, and she had to steady him. He recovered quickly, straightened his disordered uniform, picked up his bags, and refused to let her help him. He managed to struggle along with them until they found a taxi to drive them home.

During the ride he looked at her from time to time but said nothing. It was only when the angel with the trumpet came in sight that he said in a low voice, “What do you think of that?”

“You mustn't take it so hard,” she replied. “It's just that those people are having a miserable time of it.” She thought he meant the people in the tram.

But he meant a poster they had passed: “The reckoning with the Hapsburg Criminals. Read today's
Workers' Journal
.”

Herr Simmerl was standing at the entrance under the angel with the trumpet. “Welcome back, Captain,” he greeted his master, and gave no sign of noticing the defaced collar on the uniform and the cap on which the cockade of the Imperial house was missing.

Franz held out his hand to him. “Well, what do you say to all this, Herr Simmerl?”

“It is just a catastrophe, Captain,” answered the tall man in the Styrian jacket and spotless white cravat. It was impossible to say whether he was making excuses or complaining.

“You may well say that!” Franz declared, having decided he meant the latter. Then he expressed the request, “Get me today's
Workers' Journal
.”

It was only now that the tall man, who had been waiting at the door for two hours because his mistress would not allow him to go to the station, lost his composure. “Sir?” he asked, hoping that he had misheard, But the order was repeated.

As the couple went up the few steps from the entrance to the main floor Henriette noticed how heavily Franz was breathing.

“Don't you feel well?” she asked.

“Thank you. I'm quite well,” he answered gratefully. They had passed the door of Sophie's former apartment, and he thought. Who would have believed that Austria could go down to defeat? But that Henriette would be a bad wife they would all have sworn. Sophie, Otto Eberhard. He even admitted that for a while he was one of them. But Henriette was a good wife! She had made mistakes, as every one does. But she was a fine, good wife. The icy band around his heart, which had robbed him of his breath as he came into his home, now relaxed. “Is Otto Eberhard still unrelenting?” he asked, to please her, as they reached his doorway.

“Don't you want to see him?” she offered.

“Let's go in for a moment.”

“You too?”

“Why not?”

“That's really very friendly of you. Thank you ever so much. But I think it's a bit early. Otto Eberhard is no longer so young as he might be either. Excuse me; I meant myself, of course. You have remained marvellously young.”

As they went on upstairs he was tempted to offer her his arm out of that sense of somewhat exaggerated chivalry that belonged to bygone days. They all came back now, with the joys and with the griefs that followed them. “Do you remember the betrothal calls we made when we were engaged?” he asked.

“I was thinking of them too.”

They were now in front of the apartment where the Paskiewiczs had lived, now inhabited by Peter and his Prussian wife. Peter was indispensable to the Ministry of Instruction, so he had not seen active service.

“Is she still convinced that our German brothers protected us so wonderfully?” asked Franz, pointing to the apartment door. “Do you know who really got us into such a hole?” he added softly. “It was our German brothers! I've come to know them in the last four years! What intolerable arrogance! I'll tell you what. We Austrians would never have had the whole world against us if we had not had the worst man in the world, Kaiser Wilhelm, for us!” Again he was so overcome with excitement that his breath gave out.

“Let's stand here a bit,” she suggested. “There's no hurry.”

He did as she bade. “You are very sweet to me,” he said.

If such a slight thing makes an impression on him now, what must I have been like?
she thought. As they climbed from the first to the second story she said, “Come. Take my arm.”

With a round, embracing gesture, which long ago had been so distasteful to her, he accepted her suggestion. A remarkable man, she thought, taking the arm he held out to her, ignoring the fact that he was obviously reluctant to lean on her and preferred her to lean on him. Incorrigibly old-fashioned! He denies that the world has changed. He insists on a world that no longer exists.

As she was thinking of that and of what this man had done to her she instinctively drew away. “Am I too heavy for you?” he asked instantly. “Not at all,” she answered, pressing his arm closer. A man through whom you can see. Even now, as he is growing old, he still has the same traits of candour and simplicity of his earlier years. Not even old age can change a man so set against all change!