The Vienna Melody (62 page)

She was determined to bring her heaviest artillery into play. Inclined, as always, to form her judgments instantly, she now made her calculations: the Drauffers would make no difficulties. Peter, perhaps, but I'll bring him round. Old lady Paskiewicz doesn't count.

“The purpose of our gathering, as you all know, is the desire, or shall we say the request, of Aunt Henriette to:
(a)
dispose of her one-third interest in the house by sale to the other members, and
(b)
to obtain the consent of the family council to move out of the house and take up her abode in—Is it Vienna?” the chairman asked, interrupting himself.

“Yes, in Vienna,” Henriette replied with a smile.

“In some other part of Vienna. Have I reproduced your chain of thought correctly, Aunt?”

“Perfectly. You are a master of conciseness.”

“And you a model of amiability. Has anyone any question?” When none was forthcoming Henriette's good humor increased. “We can perhaps take up at once the question of the money,” she suggested, in accordance with the advice given her by Dr. Einried, who was not allowed to be present at the meeting. “I am ready either to sell my third to you share and share alike or, if you prefer, sell it in its entirety to one of you. I should be grateful if you would set the price on it which would meet with your ideas.” She had learned this by heart. Now she congratulated herself on having handled things pertaining to law and to finance correctly.

“Set the price which would meet with your ideas,” repeated the chairman, who was also taking down the minutes. “Does anyone care to take the floor?”

The old painter wished to do so. “I am, to be sure, only an authorized assistant, which in plain language means a fifth wheel to the coach,” he told them, and as he spoke he filled in the hatching in his caricature with sharper strokes. “Nevertheless, I think it is superfluous that we should be sitting here like a star-chamber court because someone wants to move out of the house. Actually, if I didn't see it with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it. I have heard of the family statutes of crowned heads, which are ceremoniously confirmed or amended on family occasions. I have even heard tell of the ‘Pragmatic Sanction' of the House of Hapsburg, which was supposed to protect it from disintegration. But in our case it's nothing short of a farce! Old Christopher, who, as we would say today, had a family complex and who, like me, must have heard of the pragmatic sanction, will forgive me if I say—incidentally, I'll tell him this to his face when I meet him up there shortly—there's no reasonable human being in the world today who can prevent another civilized human being from living where he chooses! If it suits Henriette today to move to Dobling then to Dobling she shall move; if she prefers Grinzing—all right, she shall live in Grinzing. I move we close the debate!”

“Forgive me, Uncle,” said Peter. “What you are bringing forward is not germane to the discussion. It's a matter of course that heirs, who have accepted and entered into a heritage, are not only justified in but obliged to obtain the fulfilment in every particular of the will of the testator in so far as this same—to quote our civil code—does not conflict with good morals or the penal code. I submit that neither of these points come into consideration in relation to my great-grandfather's last will. The founder of a family, who for good reasons—

“Which?” interrupted the painter.

“I am speaking, Uncle; pray excuse me.”

“Spare us the monkey business!” exclaimed the man with the St. Peter beard.

His wife Pauline, who had not heard everything, said, “Drauffer, behave yourself!”

Whereupon the old painter assumed an expression of resignation and went on drawing furiously.

“The reasons—if I were to answer Uncle's interpolation—were undoubtedly the best that exist,” said Otto Eberhard's son in defence of the very letter of the testament. “They consist of forging among the members and descendants of a family a bond so firm that it assures the continuation of the principles for which the founder of the family lived and died, namely those of an Austrian citizen devoted to the State, to the Church, and to art.”

“Rats!” exclaimed the painter, but this time in a lower voice. “In the first place, principles in themselves are nonsense, and in the second place, a family offers the best of all fields in which to ride them to death. To try to inject some metaphysical interpretation into the childishness of this will is absurd. It is—let us be polite about it—a misunderstood imitation of the ‘Pragmatic Sanction.' The piano-maker Christopher Alt lays down an Austrian house law! Comment is superfluous.”

The departmental chief rapped on the table with his sharply pointed pencil. “It strikes me as somewhat strange that you should at this particular juncture be speaking, Uncle, as though absolute freedom of choice of domicile were a foregone conclusion,” he remarked (in the tone of voice he was accustomed to use with a little air of superiority when in the Ministry he said, “My dear councillor, I regret to state that you are unfortunately misinformed on that point”). “Has it escaped your notice that at the present time in all Germany there is no one who is allowed to change his domicile or even his apartment without the authorization of his municipality?”

“I see,” remarked the painter, drawing a comical little moustache on his nephew's portrait. “You ascribe prophetic gifts to old Christopher! He foreshadowed my great colleague from Braunau on the Inn!”

“That is beside the point,” the nephew answered shortly. “I come back to the original proposition: Does anyone wish to speak on the subject of the sale price?”

The widow of Colonel Paskiewicz said, “I didn't know that Henriette wanted to move.”

“That is not under discussion now, Aunt,” Peter explained.

“You said that we knew it,” contradicted the little old lady, who had grown even more wizened than the former Miss Kubelka had in her day. “I, in any case, knew nothing about it.”

“Very well, you know it now, Gretl,” said Henriette, growing impatient.

“Why do you want to move out?” asked the old lady.

“Because she doesn't like it here any longer!” exploded the painter. “She's a highly eccentric person who does not like a house that is, as previously, eternally damp, eternally cold, eternally dark, and eternally sour!”

“Yes,” agreed the colonel's widow. “You're quite right, brother-in-law. She's eccentric. She always has been.”

“I was not aware of having inconvenienced you,” countered Henriette, who was beginning to lose her self-control. What did this old mummy want? No one even knew that she was still about. “You have inconvenienced me. And many others in the house.”

“If it had not been for you my Christl would have become a happy wife and I should have had grandchildren. You were the one that hindered that! With your eccentric ways! With your impious conduct! You squeezed people like lemons and then discarded them when they could no longer give you anything. Do you think we have been blind? You never went to mass! You deceived your husband. Not once –”

“Please, Aunt! I beg of you!” pleaded the departmental chief.

But the colonel's widow was not to be checked. “But often,” she concluded, “we have had cause to be ashamed of you indeed. Not only I. The whole house. Ask them! If they have any vestige of decency they will tell you to your face!”

Henriette pressed the tips of her fingers to her temples. Her heart had begun to throb uncomfortably again. “Then you should be all the more glad to be rid of an unworthy fellow inhabitant!” she answered, having grown deathly pale under her white powder.

The wizened old lady with the thin lips nodded and went on, her eyes intent on the table top in front of her. “That would suit you! Now that you think you have become your own mistress you want to move out and lead a riotous life! You demanded champagne!”

The departmental chief had reached the point of delivering a reprimand. Insults being hurled while he was in the chair! “For the last time,” he said, “I beg all those present to moderate their language. Please!” He had the same displeased, turned-down corners of the mouth as Otto Eberhard. Even his voice had grown to resemble that of the late Public Prosecutor. “We must look on Aunt Henriette as the widow of Uncle Franz. Don't let us forget that.”

“And the mother of Martha Monica!” added the wizened old lady.

“If the discussion is going to be continued on that basis I regret to state I cannot participate in it,” Peter declared, and laid down his pencil.

“It is superfluous anyhow,” was the rejoinder of Paskiewicz' widow as she rose. Standing beside her seated nephew, she barely came up to his shoulder. “The vote of the family council must be unanimous; that I know from the time when I had to obtain permission for Christl to take the veil. I refuse to give my consent,” and she turned to go.

“For heaven's sake, Gretl,” cried the painter, who felt that his earlier cantankerous remarks had caused all the trouble and who reproached himself for having harmed Henriette's cause. “Do consider things in a reasonable light. There is no logic in what you say. If you are against Henriette you should be in favor of her leaving the house!”

The old lady, who had already reached the door, looking straight ahead, said, “It's just because I consider how those who have had a hard time of it still stuck it out here. Why shouldn't she, who has had an easy time of it, stick it out? And if she cannot stick it out let it be her punishment. My sainted brother Franz hears me. She deserves it!” Then she refused to be detained any longer and left the room.

An embarrassed silence fell.

“With all due respect, she is simply no longer normal,” exclaimed the painter. “You will just have to act against her veto, Hetti, and the rest of us will give you our blessing.”

“Of course,” Pauline agreed comfortingly. This was the first part she had taken in the debate.

“I'm afraid that won't do. There is something more involved here this time than the construction of a lift,” said the departmental chief slowly.

“Then Henriette will have to have the old harpy's mental condition examined! That woman has a religious mania despite the twaddle about Christl's supposed tragedy. She's insanely proud of her holy daughter! She spends all her days on her knees at St. Anna's!”

“That would be a bad reflection on the house,” was the opinion of the departmental chief, finishing the minutes with a few nastily jotted down lines. “As a matter of fact, I regret to say I too am against Aunt Henriette's proposal. If she moved out, and thereby broke the will of the founder of the family, I should be compelled to restrain her by instituting a suit in confirmation of the will and obtaining a so-called temporary decree. That would be done, I repeat, in the name of my mother, whom I represent here, not against Aunt Henriette, obviously not. But it is just as obvious that our attitude is dictated by a desire not to allow a testament sacred to us to be profaned into a scrap of paper. Surely you would not wish to have my mental condition investigated, would you, Uncle?”

“You can go to the devil!” the old man retorted angrily. He left the cartoon on the table, jumped up, and said, “Come, Pauline; a wax-figure cabinet is no place for us,” and to his sister-in-law, to whom he had always been partial, “I give you my word of honor no one here will sue you! Don't worry about anything and do exactly as you please!”

Henriette felt her heart pound hard. “That's something I fear I've lost the knack of doing here in this house,” she said. Then she left the room and walked slowly up to die fourth door, like a schoolgirl bringing home a bad report. It was only when she had reached the second door that she remembered the lift. But she did not use it.

The force of habit had triumphed.

It is probably correct to say that world history is city history. By that, however, one is implying not only that world history is made in the cities, but also that the city has displaced the land; in other words, intellect has displaced nature. Apologists for the cities maintain that they are the centers of progress. In the cities, so they say, the inventions are made which lift mankind to a constantly higher level.

“To those who say that, I say: No. There are types of progress which do not advance man but, on the contrary, throw him back to his original point of departure in evolution, and it is to such types of progress that the city civilization of our epoch has come. I have no authority for my remarks, and I have no proof for my conviction except that it is my conviction. Yet, having been invited by you, brother masters, to share with you impressions gained in America, I feel that I am speaking to men who will admit such meagre proof and will even forgive me if I speak less in terms of facts about my journey than I shall in unfounded feelings about the future.

“I came back from America imbued with admiration for the Americans. For their achievements, for many of their institutions, and above all for their originality. For the very reason, however, that I believe in the boundless future for America, I am convinced that Europe is an irreplaceable factor for America. Consider, if you will, what I have to say as an
oratio pro domo Europee.
It is that. The indisputable fact which you can establish over there, the opinion that Europe is definitely finished, or, as they say, ‘done for,' was a challenge to me, and also, I admit, it wounded me. Yet the longer I thought of it, the surer I became that their opinion is a mistaken one. As far as I could judge, in the ridiculously brief time at my disposal, America's emancipation from Europe is an idea which has come to the fore in the general train of a tendency towards isolationism. To my mind it is a fundamentally erroneous idea … Am I going too fast, Fraulein Hübner?”

As he walked up and down in his office on the Wiedner Hauptstrasse, dictating the address he was to give that evening in the “Futura” Lodge of Freemasons, Hans looked inquiringly at the secretary, whom Mr. Foedermayer had recently engaged to take English and French correspondence. Foreign contracts were increasing.