Last hours with the beloved one.—Public feeling in the prospect of war.—The parting.—Employments of the women at home.—Anxieties over the news from the seat of war.—Ill-success of Austria.—Friends in trouble.—The Patriotic Aid Association.—Visit to a friend.—Dreadful news.
Last hours with the beloved one.—Public feeling in the prospect of war.—The parting.—Employments of the women at home.—Anxieties over the news from the seat of war.—Ill-success of Austria.—Friends in trouble.—The Patriotic Aid Association.—Visit to a friend.—Dreadful news.
FORa week I had been prepared for the catastrophe, and yet its occurrence gave me a bitter blow. I threw myself sobbing on the sofa, and hid my face in the cushion when Arno brought me the news.
He sat down by me, and began gently to comfort me.
“My darling! Courage! Compose yourself! It is not so bad after all. In a short time we shall return as conquerors. Then we two shall be doubly happy. Do not weep so—it breaks my heart. I am almost sorry that I have engaged to go in any case. But, no; just think, if my comrades are forced to go, with what right could I remain at home? You yourself would feel ashamed of me. No. I must experience the baptism of fire some time, and till that has happened I do not feel myself truly a man or a soldier. Only think how delightful if I come back with a third star on my collar—perhaps with the cross on my breast.”
I rested my head on his shoulder, and kept on weeping the more. But I reflected how small such things were. Stars and crosses seemed to be at that moment only empty spangles. Not ten grand crosses on that dear breast could offer me any recompense for the terrible possibility that a ball might shatter it.
Arno kissed me on the forehead, put me softly aside, and stood up.
“I must go out now, my dear, to my colonel. Have your cry out. When I come back I hope to find you firm and cheerful. That is what I have need of, and not to be shaken with sad anticipations. At such a decisive moment as this my own dear little wife surely will do nothing to take the heart out of me or damp my ardour for exploits? Good-bye, my treasure.” And he departed.
I collected myself. His last words were still ringing in my ears. Yes, plainly my duty now was not merely not to damp, but as far as possible to increase, his spirit and his ardour for exploits. That is the only way in which we women can exercise our patriotism, in which we can take any share in the glory our husbands bring from the battlefields. “Battlefields”—it is surprising how this word suddenly presented itself to my mind in two radically different meanings. Partly in the accustomed historical signification, so pathetic, and so calculated to awake the highest admiration; partly in the loathsomeness of the bloody, brutal syllable “fight”. Yes, those poor men who were being hurried out had to lie stricken down on the field, with their gaping, bleeding wounds, and among them perhaps—and a loud shriek escaped me as the thought passed through my mind.
My maid Betty came running in all in a fright. “For God’s sake, my lady, what has happened?” she asked trembling.
I looked at the girl. Her eyes also were red with weeping. I guessed; she knew the tidings already, and her lover was a soldier. I felt as if I could press my sister in misfortune to my heart.
“It is nothing, my child,” I said softly. “Those who go away will surely return.”
“Ah, my gracious lady, not all,” she replied, breaking out anew into tears.
My aunt now came in, and Betty withdrew.
“I am come, Martha, to speak comfort to you,” said the old lady as she embraced me, “and to preach to you resignation in this trial.”
“So you know it?”
“The whole city knows it, and great joy prevails, for this war is very popular.”
“Joy, Aunt Mary?”
“Oh, yes, among those who see no beloved member of their families ordered out. I could easily understand that you must be sad, and so I hastened here. Your papa will also come directly, but not to comfort, only to congratulate. He is quite beside himself with joy that it is to go on, and looks on it as a noble chance for Arno to take part in it. And he is right in the main. For a soldier there is nothing better than a war. And that is the way you must look at it, my dear child. To fulfil the duty of your calling is before everything. What must be——”
“Yes, you are right, aunt; what must be, what is inevitable——”
“What is the will of God——” put in Aunt Mary in corroboration.
“Must be borne with composure and resignation.”
“Bravo, Martha. It is certain that everything happens as is before determined by a wise and all-merciful Providence in His immutable counsels. Every one’s death-hour is fixed and written down at the hour of his birth. And for our dear warriors we will pray so much and so earnestly!”
I did not stop to debate more closely the contradiction that lay between the two assumptions that a fatal event was at the same time ordained and also could be turned aside by prayer. I was myself not clear on the point, and had from my whole education a vague impression that in such sacred matters one ought not to embark on reasonings. And, indeed, if I had given voice to such scruples before my aunt it would have grievously shocked her. Nothing could hurt her more than for people to express rational doubt on certain points. “Not to argue about it” is the conventional commandment in matters mysterious. As etiquette forbids to address questions to a king, so it is a kind of impious breach of etiquette to want to make inquiries or criticise about a dogma. “Not to argueabout it” is also a commandment easily obeyed, and on this occasion I followed it very willingly; and so I did not enter into any contention with my aunt, but on the contrary clung to the consolation that lay in the resort to prayer. Yes, during the whole time my lord was absent, I determined to beg so earnestly for the protection of Heaven, that it should turn aside every bullet in the volley from Arno. Turn them aside! Whither? To the breast of another, for whom, nevertheless, prayers were also being made?... And, besides, what had been demonstrated to me in my course of physics about the accurately computable and infallible effects of matter and its motion?... What, another doubt? Away with it.
“Yes, aunt,” I said aloud, in order to break short these contradictions that kept crossing each other in my mind. “Yes, we will pray continually and God will hear us. Arno will keep unhurt.”
“You see—you see, dear child, how in heavy times the soul still flies to religion.... Perhaps the Almighty sends you this trial in order that you may lay aside your former lukewarmness.”
This again did not strike me as correct. That the whole misunderstanding between Austria and Sardinia, dating even from the Crimean War, all the negotiations, the despatch of the ultimatum and its rejection, could have been ordained by God, in order to warm up my lukewarm spirit!
But to express this doubt would also have been a breach of propriety. As soon as any one introduces the name of the Almighty, the claims connected with that name give him a kind of spiritual immunity. But with regard to the charge of lukewarmness, it had some foundation. My aunt’s religious feeling came from the depths of her heart, while my piety was more external. My father was in this respect quite indifferent, and so was my husband; and so I had had no stimulus from either the one or the other to any particular zeal of belief. I had never had any means either of plunging deeply into ecclesiastical learning, since I had always been able to leavesuch things unattacked on the “not-argue-about-them” principle. True, I went every week to mass and every year to confession, and attended these services with much reverence and devotion; but the whole thing was still more or less an observance of the etiquette becoming to my position: I fulfilled my religious duties with the same correctness as I went through the figures of the Lancers at the state ball and made the state courtesy when the empress came into the room. Our chaplain at the château in Lower Austria and the nuntio in Vienna could have nothing to say against me—yet the charge which my aunt brought against me was perfectly justified.
“Yes, my child,” she went on, “in prosperity and happiness people easily forget their home above; but if sickness or fear of death breaks in on us—or, still more, on those we love—if we are stricken down or in sorrow——”
She would have gone on in this style for a long time, but the door burst open, and my father rushed in.
“Hurrah, it’s begun now,” was his joyful greeting to us. “They wanted a whipping, these puppies, did they? And a whipping they shall have—that they shall!”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
It was a time of excitement. The war “has broken out”. People forget that it is really two masses of men who are rushing to fight each other, and conceive of the event as if it was some exalted overruling third power, whose outbreak compels these two masses into the fight. The whole responsibility falls on this power, lying beyond the wills of individuals, and which on its side merely produces the fulfilment of the destined fate of the nations. Such is the dark and awful conception which the majority of mankind have of war, and which was mine too. There was no question of my feeling any revolt against making war in general. What I suffered from was only that my beloved husband had to go out into the danger and I to stay behind in anxiety and solitude. I rummaged up all my old impressions from the days of my historical studies, in order to strengthen and inspire me with the conviction that it was thehighest of human duties which called my dear one away, and that thereby the possibility was offered to him of covering himself with glory and honour. Now at any rate I was living in the midst of an epoch of history, and this again was a peculiarly elevating thought. Since from Herodotus and Tacitus, down to the historians of modern times, wars have always been represented as the events of most importance and of weightiest consequence, I concluded that at the present time also a war of this sort would pass with future historians as an event to serve for the title of a chapter.
This elevated tone, overpowering in its impressiveness, was that which prevailed everywhere else. Nothing else was spoken of in rooms or streets, nothing else read in the newspapers, nothing else prayed about in the churches. Wherever one went one found everywhere the same excited faces, the same eager talk about the possibilities of the war. Everything else which engaged the people’s interest at other times—the theatre, business, art—was now looked on as perfectly insignificant. It seemed to one as if it were not right to think of anything else whilst the opening scene in this great drama of the destiny of the world was being played out. And the different orders to the army with the well-known phrases of the certainty of victory and promise of glory; and the troops marching out with clanging music and waving banners; and the leading articles and public speeches conceived in the most glowing tone of loyalty and patriotism; the eternal appeal to virtue, honour, duty, courage, self-sacrifice; the assurances made on both sides that their nation was known to be the most invincible, most courageous, most certainly destined to a higher extension of power, the best and the noblest—all this spread around an atmosphere of heroism, which filled the whole population with pride and called out in each individual the belief that he was a great citizen in a great state.
Such bad qualities, however, as these—lust of conquest, love of fighting, hatred, cruelty, guile, were also certainly to be found, and were admitted to be shown in war, but always by“the enemy”. To him, his being in the wrong was quite clear. Quite apart from the political necessity of the campaign just commenced, apart also from the patriotic advantages which undoubtedly grew out of it, the conquest over one’s adversary was a moral work, a discipline carried out by the genius of culture. These Italians! what a foul, false, sensual, light-minded, conceited people! And this Louis Napoleon! what a mixture of ambition and the spirit of intrigue! When his proclamation of war, published on April 29, appeared with its motto, “Italy free to the Adriatic Sea,” it called out amongst us a storm of indignation. I did allow myself a feeble remark that this was at least an unselfish and noble idea, which must have an inspiriting influence on Italian patriots, but I was soon put to silence. The dogma that “Louis Napoleon is a scoundrel” was not to be shaken as long as he was “the enemy”. Everything proceeding from him wasab initio“scoundrelly”.
Another slight doubt arose in me. In all the battle-stories of history I had found that the sympathy and admiration of the relaters were always expressed for the party who wanted to free themselves from a foreign yoke and who fought for freedom. It is true that I was not capable of giving any distinct idea of the meaning of the word “yoke,” or of that of “freedom,” though so abundantly sung about; but one thing seemed to me perfectly clear,viz., that “the shaking off of the yoke” and “the struggle for freedom” lay this time on the side, not of Austria, but of Italy. But even for these scruples, timidly conceived as they were, and still more timidly expressed, I was thundered down. For, here I was so unlucky as again to trench on a sacred principle—namely, that our government—i.e., the government under which one happened to have been born—could never result in a yoke, but only in a blessing; that any who wished to tear themselves loose from “us” could not be warriors of freedom but only simple rebels; and that generally and in all circumstances “we” were always and everywhere wholly in the right.
In the early days of May—they were luckily cold and rainydays—sunny spring weather would have made too painful a contrast—the regiment into which Arno had exchanged marched. At seven in the morning——
Ah, the preceding night! what a terrible night it was! If the dear one had only been going on a journey of business, free from any danger, the parting would have made me unspeakably sorrowful—parting is indeed so sad! but to the war! to meet the fiery shower of the enemy’s bullets! Why could I no longer on that night apprehend at all in that word “war” its elevated historical signification, but only its terror and threatening of death?
Arno had fallen asleep. He lay there breathing quietly, with a cheerful expression on his features. I had lighted a fresh candle and put it behind a screen; I could not be in the dark that night. Of sleep there was no question whatever for me in that, thelast, night. I felt that I must spend the whole time in gazing at least into the beloved face. I lay on our bed wrapped in a dressing-gown, and, with my elbow on the pillow, and my chin resting on the palm of my hand, looked down on the sleeper and wept silently. “How I love you, how I love you, my own one—and you are going away from me! Why is fate so cruel? How shall I live without you? O that you may soon come back to me! O God! my good God! my merciful Father above! let him come back soon—him and all. Let there soon be peace! Why then cannot there be peace always? We were so happy—perhaps too happy—for there cannot be any perfect happiness on earth. Oh, rapture! if he comes home unhurt, and then lies at my side as he is doing now, and no parting threatened for the morrow! How quietly you are sleeping, O my dear, brave husband! But how shall you sleep there? There there is no soft bed for you hung with silk and lace; there you must lie on the hard wet earth—perhaps in some ditch—helpless—wounded!” And with this thought I could not help picturing a gaping sabre-cut on his forehead with the blood trickling from it, or a bullet-wound in his breast—and a hot pang of compassionseized me. How I should have liked to throw my arms round him and kiss him—but I dared not wake him, he wanted this invigorating sleep. Not six o’clock yet!—tick-tack, tick-tack, unpityingly swift and sure time marches on to every mark. This indifferent tick-tack distressed me. The light, too, burned just as indifferently behind its screen as this clock ticked with its silly, motionless Cupid.... Can it be that all these things have no perception that it is ourlastnight? My tearful lids fell together, my consciousness gradually went away, and letting my head sink on the pillow, I fell asleep at last myself. But only for a short time. Hardly had I lost my sense in the fog of some formless dream, when my heart suddenly contracted painfully, and I awoke with a violent palpitation, and the same feeling of fear as when one is awakened by a cry for help or an alarm of fire. “Parting, parting!” was the alarm cry. When I had started so out of sleep for the tenth or twelfth time it was day, and the candle was flickering out. A knock came at the door.
“Six o’clock, lieutenant,” said the orderly, who had been ordered to wake him in good time.
Arno rose up. So now the hour was come—now was to be spoken this sad, sad word—“Farewell”.
It had been settled that I was not to go to the railway with him. The one quarter of an hour more or less together—that was not worth much. And the pain of tearing ourselves asunder at last! That I did not wish to show to strangers. I wanted to be alone in my room when we exchanged the parting kiss, that I might be able to throw myself on the floor and shriek—shriek out loud.
Arno put on his clothes quickly. As he was doing so he made me all kinds of comforting speeches.
“Courage, Martha! In two months at the most the affair will be over, and I shall be back again at cuckoo-time; only one in a thousand bullets hits, and that one must not hit me. Others before me have come back from the wars—look at your papa. It must happen sometime or other. You did not marryan officer of hussars with the notion that his business was to grow hyacinths. I will write to you as often as possible, and tell you how pleasantly and livelily the whole campaign is going on. If anything bad were destined for me I could not feel so cheerful. I am going only to win an order, nothing else. Take great care here of yourself and our Ruru; and if I get promotion he shall have another step too. Kiss him for me; I will not repeat the parting of last night. The time will come when it will be a treat for him to have his father tell him how in the year ’59 he was present at the great victory over Italy.”
I listened to him greedily. This confident chatter did me good. He was going away all pleased and in good spirits, and so my suffering must be egotistic and therefore wrong; this thought ought to give me strength to conquer it.
Another knock at the door.
“Time now, lieutenant.”
“I am quite ready; coming directly.” He spread out his arms. “Now then, Martha—my wife—my love.”
I lay at once on his breast. I could not speak a word. The word “farewell” would not pass my lips. I felt that in saying that word I should give way, and I did not dare to poison the peace, the cheerfulness of his departure. I reserved the outbreak of my pain as a kind of reward for my solitude.
But now he spoke the heartbreaking word.
“Good-bye, my all, good-bye,” and pressed his lips closely to mine.
We could not tear ourselves out of this embrace—as though it were our last. Then on a sudden I felt how his lips were trembling, how convulsively his bosom heaved, and then releasing me, he covered his face and sobbed aloud.
That was too much for me. I thought I was going out of my mind.
“Arno, Arno!” I cried out, throwing my arms round him, “stay, stay!” I knew I was asking what was impossible; still I cried out persistently: “Stay, stay!”
“Lieutenant,” we heard from outside, “it is now quite time.”
One more kiss—the last of all—and he rushed out.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
To tear charpie, to read the news in the papers, to stick pins with flags into our maps in order to follow the movements of the two armies, and try to solve the chess problems that followed from them in the sense that “Austria attacks and gives mate at the fourth move”; to pray continually in the churches for the protection of our loved ones and the victory of our country’s arms; to talk of nothing except the news that came in from the theatre of war; such was what filled up my existence now and that of my relatives and acquaintance. Life with all its other interests appeared suspended as it were during the term of the campaign. Everything except the question “How and when will this war end?” was bereft of importance—nay, almost of reality. One ate, drank, read, saw after one’s affairs, but all this had no real concern for us; one thing only concerned us thoroughly—the telegrams from Italy.
My chief gleams of light were, of course, the news that I received from Arno himself. They were in a curt style—letter-writing had never been his strong point—but they brought me the most cheering testimony that he was still alive and unwounded. These letters and despatches could not indeed arrive with much regularity, for the communications were often interrupted, or when an action was impending the field-post was suspended.
If a few days had passed thus, without my hearing from Arno, and a list of killed and wounded was published, with what terror did I not read over the names! It is as great a strain as for the holder of a lottery ticket to look through the winning numbers in the list of a drawing—but in the opposite sense; what one seeks in this case, well knowing, thank God, that the chance is against one, is the chief prize in misery.
The first time that I read the names of the slain—and I had been four days without news—and saw that the name of Arno Dotzky was not among them, I folded my hands and cried aloud: “My God, I thank Thee!” But the words were hardlyout of my mouth when it seemed to me like a shrill discord. I took the paper in my hand again and looked at the list of names once more. So I thank God because Adolf Schmidt and Carl Müller and many others were slain, but not Arno Dotzky. Then the same thanksgiving would have been appropriate if it had risen to heaven from the hearts of those who trembled for Schmidt and Müller, if they had read “Dotzky” instead of those names. And why should my thanks in particular be more pleasing to Heaven than theirs? Yes, this was the shrill discord of my ejaculation, the presumption and the self-seeking which lay in it, in believing that Arno had been spared in love for me, and thanking God that not I but Schmidt’s mother and Müller’s affianced and fifty others had to burst out in tears over that list.
On the same day I received from Arno another letter:—
“Yesterday we had another stout fight. Unfortunately—unfortunately a defeat. But comfort yourself, my beloved Martha, the next battle will bring us victory. It was my first great affair. I was standing in the midst of a heavy storm of bullets—a peculiar feeling. I will tell you by word of mouth—but it is frightful. The poor fellows whom one sees falling around one, and must leave there in spite of their sad cries—c’est la guerre! Hope to see you soon again, my dear. If we can once dictate terms of peace at Turin, you shall travel after to meet me. Aunt Mary will be kind enough to take care of our little corporal.”
But if the receipt of letters like these constituted the sunshine of my life, its darkest shadows were my nights. If I woke out of some dream of blessed forgetfulness, and the horrible reality with its horrible possibilities came before my consciousness, I was seized with an almost intolerable pain, and could not sleep again for hours. I could not get rid of the idea that Arno was perhaps at that moment lying in a ditch groaning and dying—thirsting after a drop of water, and calling longingly for me. The only way that I could gradually compose myself was by bringing, with all my force, the scene of his returnbefore my imagination. This was, at any rate, as probable—nay, perhaps more probable than his lonely death; and so I pictured him to myself as bursting into the room, and how I should fling myself on his bosom, and how I should then lead him to Ruru’s cradle, and how happy and how joyful we might then once more be.
My father was much cast down. One bad news came upon another. First Montebello, then Magenta. And not he alone, but all Vienna was cast down. We had at the beginning so confidently hoped that uninterrupted messages of victory would give occasion for mounting flags on our houses and singingTe Deums, but instead of this the flags were waving and the priests singing at Turin. There the word now was: “Lord God, we praise Thee that Thou hast helped us to strike down the wicked ‘Tedeschi’ ”.
“Do not you think, papa,” I began, “that if another defeat was to happen to us, peace would then be made? In that case I should wish that——”
“Are you not ashamed to say anything of the kind? I had rather it should be a seven years’—aye, a thirty years’ war, so that our arms should conquer at last, and we dictate the terms of peace! What do men go to war for? I suppose not to get out of it again as quickly as possible; if so, they might as well remain at home!”
“And that would be by far the best,” sighed I.
“What a cowardly lot you women folk are! Even you—you, who have been so well grounded in the principles of love of country and feelings of honour, are yet quite out of heart already, and prize your personal quiet more than the welfare and fame of your country.”
“Ah! if I did not love my Arno so dearly.”
“Love of your husband, love of your family—all that is very good; but it ought only to occupy the second place.”
“Oughtit?”
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The list of killed had already brought the names of severalofficers whom I had known personally. Among others, that of the son—her only one—of an old lady for whom I had conceived a great feeling of respect.
That day I determined to visit the poor lady. It was, for me, a painful, heavy journey. I could certainly give her no consolation—could only weep with her. But it was the duty of affection, and so I set out.
When I got to Frau v. Ullmann’s dwelling, I long hesitated before pulling the bell. The last time I had been there was to a cheerful little dance. The dear old mistress of the house was herself then full of joy. “Martha,” she said to me in the course of the evening, “we are the two most enviable women in Vienna. You have the handsomest of husbands, and I the most excellent of sons.” And to-day? I still, indeed, had my husband. But who knows? The shells and grape-shot were flying there still without ceasing. The minute just past might have made me a widow: and I began to weep before the door. That was the proper temper for so mournful a visit. I rang. No one came. I rang a second time. Again no answer. Then some one put his head out of the door of one of the other floors.
“It is no good ringing, miss. The dwelling is empty.”
“What! Has Frau v. Ullmann gone?”
“She was taken to a lunatic asylum three days since.” And the head disappeared again as the door shut.
I remained for a minute or two motionless, rooted to the spot, and the scenes which must have been going on here passed before my eyes. To what a height must the poor lady’s sufferings have risen before her agony broke out in madness!
“And there is my father wishing that the war might last thirty years for the welfare of the country! How many more such mothers in the country would have been driven to desperation!”
I went down the stairs shaken to my inmost depth. I determined that I would pay another visit to a young lady, afriend of mine, whose husband, like mine, was at the theatre of war.
My way led me through the Herrengasse, past the building called the Landhaus, where the “Patriotic Aid Association” had established its offices. At that time there was not as yet any “Convention of Geneva,” any “Red Cross,” and this aid association had been formed as a forerunner of these humane institutions, its task being to receive alms of all kinds, in money, linen, charpie, bandages, etc., for the poor wounded, and forward them to the seat of war. The gifts came flowing in abundantly from all sides; it was necessary to have whole shops to receive them, and scarcely were the different articles packed up and sent off when new ones were piled up again in their place.
I went in. I was in distress till I could hand over to the committee all that I had in my purse. Perhaps that might bring health and deliverance to some suffering soldier, and savehismother from madness.
I knew the president. “Is Prince C—— here?” I asked the porter.
“Not just now. But the vice-president, Baron S——, is upstairs.” He showed me the way to the room where the alms in money were paid. I had to pass through several halls, where on long tables were the packets lying in rows. Parcels of linen, cigars, tobacco, and especially mountains of charpie. It made me shudder. How many wounds must be bleeding there, to be covered with all this torn linen? “And there was my father,” I thought again, “wishing that for the country’s good the war might last another thirty years! How many of the country’s sons must in that case sink under their wounds!”
Baron S—— received my contribution with thanks, and gave me the most ready information about the working of the association in reply to my numerous questions. It was joyful and comforting to hear how much good was thus done. Just at the time came the postman with some letters that had newly arrived, and announced that two barrows of offerings had to bedelivered from the country. I placed myself on a sofa which was in the lower part of the room to watch the reception of the packets. They were, however, delivered in another room. A very old gentleman now came in, who by his bearing was evidently an old soldier.
“Permit me, baron,” he said, as he drew out his purse and sat down on a stool by the table, “permit me to add my little mite too to your noble work.” And he gave him a note for a hundred florins. “I look on all this organisation of yours as really angelic; you see I am an old soldier myself,” and he gave his name as General ——, “and I can judge what an enormous blessing it is to the poor fellows who are fighting out there. I served in the campaigns of the years ’9 and ’13—at that time there was no ‘Patriotic Aid Association’—at that time no one sent chests of bandages and charpie after the wounded. How many must then have bled to death in misery when the resources of the army surgeons were exhausted, who might have been saved by sending such things as I see here! Ah! yours is a blessed work. You good noble men, you do not know—no, you do not know—how much good you are doing there.” And two great tears fell on the old man’s white moustache.
A noise of steps and voices arose outside. Both leaves of the entrance door were thrown open and a guardsman announced “Her Majesty the Empress”.
The vice-president hurried out to the gate to receive his exalted visitor, as beseemed, at the foot of the stairs, but she had already got into the ante-room.
I, from my concealed position, looked with admiration on the young sovereign who in common walking dress appeared to me almost lovelier than in her state robes at the court ball.
“I am come,” she said to Baron S——, “because I received a letter to-day from the emperor from the seat of war, in which he writes to tell me how useful and acceptable the gifts of the Patriotic Aid Association have proved, and so I wished to lookinto the matter myself, and put the committee in receipt of the emperor’s acknowledgment.”
On this she made them give her information about all the details of the working of the association, and examined as she went along the various objects from their stores. “Just look, countess,” she said to the mistress of the robes, who was with her, taking an article of underclothing in her hand, “how good this linen is, and how beautifully sewn.” Then she begged the vice-president to conduct her into another of the rooms, and left the hall by his side. She spoke to him with visible contentment, and I heard her say besides: “It is a fine patriotic undertaking, and to the poor soldiers——”
I could not catch any more. “Poor soldiers,” the word kept coming back to me for a long time, she had pronounced it with so much pity. Yes, “poor” indeed, and the more one could do to send them help and comfort the better. But it ran through my head: “If they had not sent these poor people into this misery at all, would not that have been much better?”
I tried to scare away the thought. It must be so! It must be so! There is no other excuse for the cruelty of making war except what is contained in the little word “must”.
Now I went on my way again. The friend whom I was going to visit lived quite close to the Landhaus on the Kohlmarkt. As I walked along I went into a book and print shop to buy myself a new map of Upper Italy—ours had become quite riddled with sticking in the little flags on pins. Besides me there were many other customers in the place. All were asking for maps, diagrams, and so forth. Now came my turn.
“Do you want the theatre of war, too, please?” asked the bookseller.
“You have guessed it.”
“No difficulty in that. There is hardly anything else bought.”
He went to get what I wanted, and while he wrapped up the roll in paper for me, he said to a gentleman standing next to me: “You see, professor, just now things go badly for thosewho write or publish books onbelles lettresor science. No one asks for such things. As long as the war lasts no interest is taken by any one in intellectual matters. It is a bad time for writers and booksellers.”
“And a bad time for the nation,” replied the professor, “since a loss of interest in such things is naturally followed by its decline in the intellectual scale.”
“And there is my father wishing,” thought I for the third time, “that for the good of the country a thirty years’ war——”
I now took part audibly in the conversation.
“So your business is doing badly?”
“Mine only? No, almost all, your ladyship,” answered the bookseller. “Except the providers for the army there are no tradesmen to whom the war has not brought untold loss. Everything is at a standstill; work in the factories; work in the fields; men without number are without places and without bread. Our paper is falling; the exchange rising; all desire for enterprise is decaying; many firms must go bankrupt—in short, it is a misery! a misery!”
“And there is my father wishing——” I repeated in silence as I left the shop.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
My friend was at home.
Countess Lori Griesbach was in more than one respect the sharer of my lot. A general’s daughter, like me—married for only a short time to an officer, like me—and, like me, a “grass widow”. In one thing she went beyond me: she had not only a husband, but two brothers also at the war. But Lori was not of an apprehensive nature; she was fully persuaded that her dear ones were under the peculiar protection of a saint whom she highly venerated, and she counted confidently on their return.
She received me with open arms.
“Ah! God bless you, Martha; it is indeed good of you to come and see me. But how pale and worn you are looking; you have not had any bad news from the seat of war?”
“No, thank God! But the whole thing is so sad.”
“Ah, yes! You mean the defeat. But you must not think too much of that, the next news may announce a victory.”
“Whether we conquer or are conquered, war is in itself dreadful altogether. Would it not be better if there could be nothing of the kind?”
“Then what would be the good of soldiers?”
“What, indeed!” I assented; “then there would be none——”
“What nonsense you are talking. That would be a nice state of things; nothing but civilians! It makes me shudder. Happily that is impossible.”
“Impossible? Yes, you must be right. Iwillbelieve so, or else I could not conceive that it would not long since have happened.”
“What happened?”
“The abolition of war. But, no; I might as well talk of the abolition of earthquakes.”
“I don’t know what you mean. As far as I am concerned I am glad this war has broken out, because I hope that my Louis will distinguish himself. And for my brothers, too, it is a good thing. Promotion has been going on so slowly; now they have at least a chance.”
“Have you had any news lately?” I interrupted. “Are your relatives all well?”
“No, not for a pretty long time now. But, you know, the postal service is often interrupted, and when people are tired out with a hot march or a battle, they have not much taste for writing. I am quite easy. Both Louis and my brothers wear blessed amulets. Mamma hung them on herself.”
“What would you expect to happen, Lori, in a war in which every man in both armies wore an amulet? If the bullets were flying on both sides, would they retire back into the clouds and do no harm?”
“I do not understand you. You are so lukewarm in faith. Your Aunt Mary often laments about it to me.”
“Why do you not answer my question?”
“Because it involves a sneer at a thing which to me is sacred.”
“Sneer; oh, no! only a reasonable reflection.”
“But you must know that it is a sin to entrust your own reason with the power of judging in things which are above us.”
“Well, I have done, Lori. You may be right. Reflection and research are of no use. For sometime all kinds of doubts have risen within me about my most ancient convictions, and I find only pain from them. If I were to lose the conviction that it was a necessity and a good thing to begin this war, I should never be able to forgive him who——”
“You mean Louis Napoleon. What an intriguer he is!”
“Whether he or another, I should like to remain in the undisturbed belief that there are no men at all who have caused the war, but that it ‘broke out’ of itself—broke out, like a nervous fever, like the eruption of Vesuvius.”
“How excited you get, my love. But let us speak reasonably; so listen to me. In a short time the war will be over and our husbands will come back captains. I will then try to get mine to obtain four or six weeks’ leave, and take a trip with me to a watering-place. It will do him good after all the fatigues he will have undergone; and me also, after the heat, and the ennui, and the anxiety I have undergone. For you must not think that I have no fear at all. It may be God’s will after all that one of my dear ones should meet with a soldier’s death—and even though it is a noble, enviable death, on the field of honour, for emperor and fatherland——”
“Why, you are speaking just like one of the proclamations to the army!”
“Yet it would be frightful—poor mamma!—if anything was to happen to Gustave or Karl. Don’t let us talk about it! And so, to refresh us after all our terror, it would be good to have a gay season at a watering-place. I should prefer Carlsbad, and I went there when I was a girl, and amused myself amazingly.”
“I too went to Marienbad. It was there I made Arno’s acquaintance. But why are we sitting here idle like this? Have you no linen at hand that we could tear into charpie? I was at the Patriotic Aid Association to-day, and there came in, who do you think?”
Here I was interrupted. A footman brought in a letter.
“From Gustave,” cried Lori joyfully, as she broke the seal.
When she had read two lines she gave a shriek, the paper fell out of her hand and she threw herself on my neck.
“Lori, my poor dear, what is it?” I cried, deeply moved; “your husband?”
“O God, O God!” she groaned. “Read for yourself.”
I took the letter from the floor and began to read. I can reproduce the phraseology exactly, because afterwards I begged the letter from Lori to copy it into my diary.
“Read out loud,” she said; “I was not able to read it through.”
I did as she wished.
“Dear Sister,—Yesterday we had a hot combat; there must be a long list of casualties. In order that you, and in order that our poor mother may not hear in that way of the misfortune, that you may be able to prepare her for it gradually (tell her he is severely wounded), I write at once, my dear, to tell you that our brave brother Karl is of the number of the warriors who have died for their country.”
I interrupted my reading to embrace my friend.
“I had got so far,” she said gently.
With tearful voice I read on.
“Your husband is untouched, and so am I. Would that the enemy’s bullet had hit me instead! I envy Karl his hero’s death. He fell at the beginning of the battle, and did not know that this one again was lost. It is really too bitter. I saw him fall, for we were riding near each other. I jumped down at once to pick him up. Only one look and he was dead. The bullet must have passed through his lungs or heart. It was a quick painless death. How many others had to suffer for hours, and to lie helpless on the field inthe heat of the battle, till death released them! It was a murderous day—more than a thousand corpses, friend and enemy, covered the battlefield. I recognised among the dead the faces of so many dear friends; and, amongst others, there is poor”—here I had to turn the page—“poor Arno Dotzky.”
I fell unconscious on the floor.
First years of widowhood.—Solitude, study, enlarged views.—I return into society.—Renewed enjoyment of life.—Thoughts of second marriage.—I chaperon my younger sisters.—I am introduced to Baron Tilling.—He brings me an account of the manner of Arno’s death.
First years of widowhood.—Solitude, study, enlarged views.—I return into society.—Renewed enjoyment of life.—Thoughts of second marriage.—I chaperon my younger sisters.—I am introduced to Baron Tilling.—He brings me an account of the manner of Arno’s death.
“NOW, Martha, it is all over. Solferino was decisive—we are beaten.”
My father came hastily one morning on to the terrace, with these words, where I was sitting under the shadow of a clump of lime trees.
I had gone back home, to the house of my girlhood, with my little Ruru. A week after the great battle, which had struck me down, my family moved to Grumitz, our country house in Lower Austria, and I with them. I should have been in despair alone. Now all were again around me, just as before my marriage—papa, Aunt Mary, my little brother, and my two growing sisters. All of them did what they possibly could to mitigate my grief, and treated me with a certain consideration which did me good. Evidently they found in my sad fate a sort of consecration, a something which raised me above those around me, even a kind of merit. Next to the blood which soldiers pour out on the altar of their country, the tears which the bereaved mothers, wives, and sweethearts of the soldiers pour on the same altar become a libation hardly less sacred. And thus it was a slight feeling of pride, a consciousness that to have lost a beloved husband on the field of honour conferred a kind of military merit, which helped memost to bear my pain; and I was far from being the only one. How many, ah! how many women in the whole of the country were then mourning over their loved ones sleeping in Italian earth!
At that time no further particulars were known to me of Arno’s end. He had been found dead, recognised, and buried. That was all I knew. His last thought doubtless had flown towards me and our little darling, and his consolation in the last moment must have been: “I have done my duty, and more than my duty”.
“We are beaten,” repeated my father gloomily, as he sat down by me on the garden seat.
“So those who have been sacrificed were sacrificed in vain.” I sighed.
“Those who have been sacrificed are to be envied, for they know nothing of the shame which has befallen us. But we will soon pick up again for all that, even if at present peace, as they say, must be concluded.”
“Ah, God grant it,” I interrupted. “Too late, indeed, for my poor Arno, but still thousands of others will be spared.”
“You are always thinking of yourself and of individuals. But in this matter it is Austria which is in question.”
“Well, but does not she consist entirely of individuals?”
“My dear, a kingdom, a state, lives a longer and more important life than individuals do. They disappear, generation after generation, while the state expands still farther, grows into glory, greatness and power, or sinks and crumples up and disappears, if it allows itself to be overcome by other kingdoms. Therefore the most important and the highest aim for which any individual has to struggle, and for which he ought to be glad to die, is the existence, the greatness and the well-being of the kingdom.”
I impressed these words on my mind in order to put them down the same day in the red volume. They seemed to me to express so clearly and strongly the feeling which I had derived in my student days from the books of history, a feelingwhich in these last times, after Arno’s departure, had been driven out of my mind by fear and pity. I wanted to cleave to it again as close as possible, in order to find consolation and support in the idea that my darling had fallen in a great cause, and that my misfortune itself was only one element in this great cause.
Aunt Mary had, on the other hand, a different source of consolation ready.
“Do not weep, dear child,” she used to say, when I was sunk in profound grief. “Do not be so selfish as to bewail him who is now so happy. He is among the blessed, and is looking down on you with blessing. After a few quickly passing years on earth you will find him again in the fulness of his glory. For those who have fallen on the field of battle Heaven reserves its fairest dwellings. Happy those who were called away just at the moment when they were fulfilling a holy duty. The dying soldier stands next in merit to the dying martyr.”
“Then I am to be glad that Arno——”
“No, not to be glad, that would be asking too much, but to bear your lot with humble resignation. It is a probation that Heaven sends you, and from which you should emerge purified and strengthened in faith.”
“So, in order that I might be tried and purified, Arno had to——”
“No, not on that account. But who dare seek to sound the hidden ways of Providence? Not I at least.”
Although such objections always would rise in me against Aunt Mary’s consolations, yet in the depths of my heart I readily fell in with the mystical assumption that my glorified one was now enjoying in Heaven the reward of his death of sacrifice, and that his memory on earth was adorned with the eternal glory of sainthood.
How exalting, though painful at the same time, was the effect on me of the great mourning celebration at which I was present in the cathedral of St. Stephen’s on the day of our departure! It was theDe Profundisfor our warriors who hadfallen on foreign soil and were buried there. In the centre of the church a high catafalque had been erected, surrounded by a hundred lighted candles and decorated with military emblems, flags and arms. From the choir came down the moving strains of the requiem, and those present, chiefly women in mourning, were almost all weeping aloud. And each one was weeping not only for him whom she had lost, but for the rest who had met with the same death, for all of them together, all the poor brave brothers-in-arms, who had given their young lives for us all—that is, for the country, the honour of the nation. And the living soldiers who attended this ceremony—all the generals and officers who had remained behind in Vienna were there, and several companies of soldiers filled the background—all were waiting and ready to follow their fallen comrades without delay, without murmur, without fear. Yes, with the clouds of incense, with the pealing bells, and the voice of the organ, with the tears poured out in a common woe, there must surely have risen a well-pleasing sacrifice to Heaven, and the Lord of armies must shower His blessing down on those to whom this catafalque was erected.
So I thought at that time. At least these were the words with which the red book describes this mourning ceremony.
About fourteen days later than the news of the defeat of Solferino came the news of the signing of the preliminaries of peace at Villafranca. My father took all the pains possible to explain to me that for political reasons it was a matter of pressing necessity to conclude this peace, on which I assured him that it seemed to me joyful news anyhow that this fighting and dying should come to an end. But my good papa would not be hindered from setting forth at length all his exculpatory statements.
“You must not think that we are afraid. Even if it has a look as if we had made concessions, yet we forego nothing of our dignity, and know perfectly what we are about. If it concerned ourselves only we should never have given up the game on account of this little check at Solferino. Oh, no! far fromit. We should only have had to send down anothercorps d’armée, and the enemy would have been obliged to evacuate Milan again in quick time. But you know, Martha, that other things are concerned—general interests and principles. We renounced the further prosecution of the war for this reason: in order to secure the other principalities in Italy which are menaced—those that the captain of the Sardinian robbers, with his French hangman-ally, would be glad to fall upon also. They want to advance against Modena, Tuscany—where, as you know, dynasties are in power related to our own imperial family—nay, even against Rome, against the Pope, the Vandals. If we do provisionally give up Lombardy, yet we keep Venetia all the time, and are able to assure the south Italian states and the Holy See of our support. So you perceive that it is merely for political reasons, and in the interest of the balance of power in Europe——”
“Oh, yes, father,” I broke in; “I perceive it. But oh that these reasons had prevailed before Magenta!” I continued, sighing bitterly. Then, to change the subject, I pointed to a parcel of books that had come in that day from Vienna.
“See here! the bookseller has sent us several things on approval. Amongst them there is the work of an English natural philosopher—one Darwin—The Origin of Species, and he calls our attention to it as being of special interest, and likely to be of epoch-making importance.”
“My worthy friend must excuse me. Who, in such a momentous time as this, could take an interest in these tomfooleries? What can a book about the kinds of beasts and plants contain of epoch-making importance for us men? The confederation of the Italian states, the hegemony of Austria in the German Bund—these are matters of far-stretching influence; these will long keep their place in history, when no living man shall any longer know anything about that English book there. Mark my words.”
I did mark them.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Four years later, my two sisters, now seventeen and eighteen years old, were to be presented at court. On this occasion I determined that I would also again “go into society”.
The time which had elapsed had done its work, and gradually mitigated my pain. Despair changed into mourning, mourning into sorrow, sorrow into indifference, and even this at last into renewed pleasure in life. I woke one fine morning to the conviction that I really was in an enviable condition, and one that promised happiness. Twenty-three years old, beautiful, rich, high-born, free, the mother of a darling child, a member of an affectionate family—was not all this enough to make my life pleasant?
The short year of my married life lay behind me like a dream. No doubt I had been desperately in love with my handsome hussar—no doubt my loving husband had made me very happy—no doubt the parting had caused me grievous pain and his loss wild agony! but that was all over—over! My love had assuredly never grown so closely into the whole existence of my soul that I could never have survived its uprooting, never have lost the pain of it; our life together had been too short for that. We had adored each other like a pair of ardent lovers; but to have entered into each other, heart to heart, soul to soul, to be fast bound to each other in mutual reverence and friendship, to have shared for long years our joys and our sorrows—this, which is the lot of some married people, had not been given to us two. Even I was assuredly not his highest object, not something indispensable, otherwise he could not so cheerfully and with no compulsion of duty (for his own regiment was never ordered out) have left me. Besides, in these four years I had gradually become another creature, my spiritual horizon had enlarged in many respects, I had come into possession of acquirements and views of which I had no notion when I married, and of which Arno also—as I could now perceive—had no idea either, and so—if he could have risen again—he would have stood in the position of a strangertowards many parts of my present spiritual life. How had this change come about with me? This is how it happened.
One year of my widowhood had passed. The first phase—despair—had given place to mourning. But it was very deep mourning, and my heart was bleeding. Of any renewal of the intercourse of society I would not hear. I thought that from this time my life must be occupied only with the education of my son Rudolf. I called the child no longer Ruru, or corporal. The baby-jokes of the pair of married lovers were over. The little one turned into “my son Rudolf”—the sacred centre of all my effort, hope, and love. In order to be one day a good teacher for him, or rather in order to follow his studies, and be able to become his intellectual companion, I wanted to acquire myself all the knowledge that I could, and with this view reading was the only amusement I allowed myself; and so I plunged anew into the treasures of the library of our château. I was especially impelled to take up again the study which was my peculiar favourite—history. Latterly, when the war had demanded such heavy sacrifices from my contemporaries and myself, my former enthusiasm had become much cooled, and I now wished to light it up again by appropriate reading. And, in fact, it brought me sometimes a kind of consolation, if I had been reading a few pages of accounts of battles with the praises of the heroes which are the natural continuation of those accounts, to think that the death of my poor husband and my own widowed grief were comprised as items in a similar grand historical process. I say “sometimes”—not always. I could not get myself back entirely and absolutely into the feelings of my girlhood, when I wanted to rival the Maid of Orleans. Much, very much, in the over-wrought tirades of glory, which accompanied the accounts of the battles, sounded to me false and hollow, if at the same time I set before me the terrors of the fight—as false and hollow as a sham coin paid as the price for a genuine pearl. The pearl, life—can it be fairly paid for with the tinsel phrases of historical glory?
I had soon exhausted the provision of historical works to befound in our library. I begged our bookseller to send me some new historical work to look at. He sent Thomas Buckle’sHistory of Civilisation in England. “The work is not finished,” wrote the bookseller, “but the accompanying two volumes, which form the introduction, compose by themselves a complete whole, and their appearance has excited, not only in England, but in the rest of the educated world, the greatest attention. The author, it is said, has in this work laid the foundation for a new conception of history.”
Yes, indeed, quite a new one. When I had read these two volumes, and then read them again, I felt like a man who had dwelt all his life in the bottom of a narrow valley, and then, for the first time, had been taken up to one of the mountain tops around, from which a long stretch of country was to be seen, covered with buildings and gardens and ending in the boundless ocean. I will not assert that I—only twenty years old and who had received only the well-known superficial “young lady’s” education—understood the book in all the extent of its bearings, or, to keep to the former metaphor, that I appreciated the loftiness of the monumental buildings and the immensity of the ocean which lay before my astonished gaze; but I was dazzled, overcome; I saw that beyond the narrow valley in which I was born there lay a wide, wide world, of which, up to this time, I had never heard. It is not till now that, after fifteen or twenty years I have read the book again and have studied other works conceived in the same spirit, I may, perhaps, take it on myself to say that I understand it. One thing, however, was clear to me even then: that the history of mankind was not decided by, as the old theory taught, kings and statesmen, nor by the wars and treaties that were created by the greed of the former or the cunning of the latter, but by the gradual development of the intellect. The chronicles of courts and battles which are strung together in the history books represent isolated phenomena of the condition of culture at those epochs, not the causes which produce those conditions. Of the old-fashioned admiration with which other historicalwriters are accustomed to relate the lives of mighty conquerors and devastators of countries I could find absolutely nothing in Buckle. On the contrary, he brings proof that the estimation in which the warrior class is held is in inverse ratio to the height of culture which the nation has reached; the lower you go in the barbaric past, the more frequent are the wars of the time, the narrower the limits of peace, province against province, city against city, family against family. He lays stress on the fact that, as society progresses, not only war itself, but the love of war will be found to diminish. That word spoke to my innermost heart. Even in my short spiritual experience this diminution had been going on, and though I had often repressed this movement as something cowardly or unworthy, believing that I alone was the cause of such a fault within me, now, on the contrary, I perceived that this feeling in me was only the faint echo of the spirit of the age, that learned men and thinkers, like this English historian, and innumerable men along with him, had lost the old idolatry for war, which, just as it had been a phase of my childhood, was represented in this book as being also a phase of the childhood of society.
And so in Buckle’sHistory of CivilisationI had found just the opposite of what I sought. And yet I counted what I found as all pure gain. I felt myself elevated by it, enlightened, pacified. Once I tried to talk with my father about this point of view that I had just attained, but in vain. He would not follow me up the mountain,i.e., he would not read the book, and so it was to no purpose to talk with him of things which one could only see from the top of it.
Now followed the year—my second phase—in which mourning turned into melancholy. I now read and studied with even greater assiduity. This first work of Buckle had given me an appetite for reflection, and given me an inkling of an enlarged view of the world. I wanted now to enjoy this yet more and more; and therefore I followed this book up with a great many more conceived in the same spirit. And the interest, the enjoyment, which I found in these studies helpedme to pass into the third phase,i.e., to cause the disappearance of my melancholy. But when the last change was wrought in me,i.e., when my joy in life awoke again, then all at once books contented me no longer, then I saw all at once that ethnography and anthropology, comparative mythology, and all the other ’ologies and ’graphies were insufficient to set my longings at rest, that for a young woman in my position, life had other flowers of bliss all ready, and for which I had only to stretch my hand out. And so it came about that in the winter of 1863 I offered myself to introduce my younger sisters into the world and opened my saloons to Vienna society.
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
“Martha, Countess Dotzky, a rich young widow.” It was under this promising title that I had to play my part in the comedy of the “great world”. And I must say that the character suited me. It is no slight pleasure to get greetings from all sides, to befêted, spoiled, on all hands, and overwhelmed with distinctions. It is no slight enjoyment, after nearly four years’ separation from the world, to come all at once into a whirlpool of all sorts of pleasures, to make the acquaintance of interesting and influential persons, to be present at some splendid entertainment almost every day, and when there to feel yourself the centre of universal attention.
We three sisters had got the nickname of the “three goddesses of Mount Ida”; and the “Apples of Discord,” which the several young Parises distributed amongst us, were innumerable. I, of course, in the dignity of my description in the list ofdramatis personæas “rich young widow,” was the one generally preferred. Besides it was taken as a settled thing in our family, and even ever so little in my own inward consciousness, that I was to marry again. Aunt Mary was no longer in the habit in her homilies of dwelling on the blessed one who “was waiting for me above,” for if I, in my few short years on earth that separated me from the grave, united myself to a second husband, an event desired by Aunt Mary herself, the pleasantnessof the meeting again in Heaven would be a good deal spoiled thereby.
Every one around me seemed to have forgotten Arno’s existence. I was the only one who did not. Though time had relieved my pain about him, his image had not been extinguished. One may cease to mourn for one’s dead; mourning does not depend quite on the will, but one ought not to forget them. I looked on this dead silence about the dead, which was preserved by myentourage, as a second and additional slaughter, and shrank from killing the poor fellow in my thoughts. I had made it my duty to speak every day to little Rudolf of his father, and the child had always to say in his prayers at night: “God make me good and brave as my dear father Arno would have me!”
My sisters and I “amused” ourselves extremely, and certainly I not less than they. It was, so to speak, mydébutalso in society. The first time I was introduced as an engaged girl, and a newly-married woman; and so all admirers had of course held aloof from me; and what is a higher enjoyment in society than the admirers? But, strange to say, however much I was pleased to be surrounded by a crowd of worshippers, none of them made any deep impression on me. There was a bar between them and me which was quite impassable. And this bar was what I had been erecting during my three years of lonely study and thought. All these brilliant young gentlemen, whose interests in life culminated in sport, the ballet, the chatter of the court, or (with those who soared highest) in professional ambition (for most were soldiers), had not the faintest idea of the things which I had looked at from afar in my books, and on which my soul’s life depended. That language, of which I grant I had only as yet learned the elements—but as to which I was assured that it was in it that men of science would debate and ultimately decide the highest questions—that language was to them not Greek merely, but Patagonian.
From this category of young folks I was not going to selecta husband; that was quite settled. Besides, I was in no hurry to give up once more my freedom, which was very pleasant to me. I managed to keep my would-be suitors sufficiently at a distance to prevent any from making an offer, and at the same time to prevent anybody in society from putting about concerning me the compromising rumour that I was laying myself out for lovers. My son Rudolf should hereafter be able to feel proud of his mother, no breath of suspicion should sully the pure mirror of her reputation. But if the case should occur that my heart should glow once more with love—and that could only be for one worthy of it—then I was fully disposed to realise the claim which my youth still had to happiness in this world, and enter into a second marriage.
Meanwhile, apart from love or happiness, I thoroughly enjoyed myself. The dance, the theatre, dress—I found the liveliest pleasure in all of them. But I did not for them neglect either my little Rudolf or my own education. It was not that I plunged into special studies, but I always keptau courantwith the movement of the intellectual world, by procuring all the most prominent new productions in the literature of the age, and regularly reading attentively all the articles, even the most scientific, in theRevue des deux Mondesand similar magazines. These occupations had indeed the result that the bar I have just spoken of, which cut off my inward life from the surrounding world of young men of fashion, became constantly higher—but it was right that it should be so. I would gladly have drawn into my saloons a few persons from the world of literature and scholarship, but that could hardly be done in the society in which I moved. Bourgeois elements could not be mixed with what was called “the circles” of Vienna. Especially at that period—since then this exclusive spirit has somewhat changed, and it has become the fashion to open one’s saloons to individual representatives of art and science. At the time of which I speak this was not the case yet; any one not “Hof-fähig,”i.e., who could not count sixteen ancestors, was excluded thence. Our ordinary society wouldhave been most unpleasantly surprised to have met at my house people not ennobled, and could not have hit on the right tone to converse with them. And these persons themselves would certainly have found my drawing-room, full of countesses and sportsmen, old generals and old canonesses, intolerably dull. What part could men of intellect and science, writers and artists, take in the eternally same conversation—who had given a dance yesterday and who would give one to-morrow—whether Schwarzenberg, or Pallavicini, or the Court—what love affairs Baroness Pacher was causing—which party Countess Palffy was opposing—how many estates Prince Croy possessed—what right the young Lady Almasy possessed to the title of a lady of rank, whether as a Festetics or a Wentheim, and if a Wentheim whether by that Wentheim whose mother became a Khevenhüller, etc.? That was indeed the matter of most of the conversations that went on around me. Even the intellectual and educated people, some of whom were really to be found in our circle, statesmen and so forth, thought themselves bound when they associated with us, the young folks who danced, to adopt the same frivolous and meaningless tone. How gladly would I often have gone to some dinner in a quiet corner at which one or two of our travelled diplomatists or eloquent parliamentarians, or other men of mark might express their opinions on weighty questions!—but that was not feasible. I had to keep along with the other young ladies, and talk of the toilettes that we were getting ready for the next great ball. And even if I had squeezed into such a company the conversations that might have been just begun about the economy of nations, about Byron’s poetry, about the theories of Strauss and Renan, would have been hushed, and the talk would have been: “Ah, Countess Dotzky, how charming you looked yesterday at the ladies’ pic-nic; and are you going to-morrow to the reception at the Russian embassy?”
“Allow me, dear Martha,” said my cousin Conrad Althaus, “to introduce to you Lieutenant-Colonel Baron Tilling.”
I bowed. The introducer went away, and the one introduceddid not speak. I took this for an invitation to dance, and rose from my seat with my left arm raised and bent, ready to lay it on Baron Tilling’s shoulder.
“Forgive me, countess,” he said, with a slight smile, which showed his dazzlingly white teeth, “I do not dance.”
“Indeed! so much the better,” I answered, sitting down again. “I had just retreated here to get a little repose.”
“And I had requested the honour of being introduced to you, countess, as I had a communication to make to you.”
I looked up in amazement. The baron put on a very serious face. He was altogether a man who looked very serious, no longer young, somewhere about forty, with a few streaks of grey on the temples—on the whole, a prepossessing sympathetic look. I had accustomed myself to look sharply on each new introduction with the question: “Are you a suitor? and should I take you?” Both questions I answered in this case with a prompt negative. The person before me had not that expression of intimate adoration which all those are in the habit of assuming who approach ladies with “views,” as the saying is, and the other question was resolved in the negative at once by his uniform. I would give my hand to no soldier a second time, that I had absolutely fixed with myself, not alone because I would not be again exposed to the horrible pain of seeing my husband depart to the campaign, but because since that time I had arrived at views about war in which it would be impossible for me to agree with a soldier.