I
Adagio assai."Sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier days."
Adagio assai.
"Sorrow's crown of sorrow is remembering happier days."
War and Peace had stripped Frau Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg, of everything except her physical being, leaving her quite naked in another but certainly not better world.
As the widow of a Viennese Kommerzienrath, dead after thirty years of service in the Finance Ministry, she had enjoyed a comfortable pension. She had been considered rich herself at the time of her marriage for she had had as dowry some shares in a beet-root industry in Bohemia, but when the Republic of Czecho-Slovakia was formed she found herself mysteriously and without appeal separated from those shares, which had been as much a part of her life as her hands and feet, and the separation though swift was to prove fatal, at least to her use and dignity.
During the long, pleasant years of her widowhood she had had a little house at Baden near Vienna, where her only brother, an official in the Northern Railways, and his various wives and many children had been in the habit of spending holidays and convalescences. If any child were ailing it was promptly sent to Tante Ilde, who could always be counted on to receive such gages of affection with open arms.
When her brother, accompanied by one or the other of those quickly succeeding wives, went off on his annual walking tour through the Semmering, as many as could be got into the little house were deposited there for safe-keeping. The family Christmas and New Year's dinners took place at Tante Ilde's, and on the 18th of August, the Emperor's birthday, they were all to be found again sitting about that well-laden table.
She was the first to know their joys and griefs, and "I'm going to tell Tante Ilde about it," was a familiar expression in the family.
A pleasant lady to look at, too, with a bit of lace flung over her shining white hair, a bit of it always about her neck. Her skin had a lustrous smoothness, the many tiny wrinkles no more disfiguring than the fine crackings in old ivory. Her nose was delicately arched and her lips kept long their agreeable red. But it was her eyes, more than all of these, that caught the attention. They were very large and were set quite flatly, shallowly in her face, pale blue lakes of indefectible innocence, and while time had wrought some changes in the areas surrounding them,—a wrinkle, a dent, a falling in or away,—their placidity had gently endured. They opened widely and though sometimes they had been obliged to gaze upon one or the other wicked spectacle of a wicked world, no shadow of its evil remained upon them. That wide, blue, child-like gaze from that aging face was what was first noticed about her and last forgot. The startled expression that appeared upon her countenance at the beginning of her misfortunes, towards the end was changed into one of almost formidable submission.
She had always been slender and graceful with a way of holding herself that verged on elegance and her clothes were put on with a pleasant precision. She had worn a long gold chain around her neck since any of them could remember, holding a little gold watch tucked in at her neat belt; she always wore, too, a pair of round gold bracelets that successive baby nephews and nieces had grasped at, leaving fine marks of little teeth upon them. Tante Ilde loved those tiny dents. There was often a gentle tinkle as she played with her chain with the hand bearing her wedding ring and a quite inconspicuous one of amethyst and pearls. Just as inconspicuous was Frau Stacher's being, her situation and her works, as that pale stone, those little, lustreless pearls. None save a doubly-blindfolded Fate, striking recklessly about at millions would have found so unimportant a mark.
Corinne, her best-loved niece, always called her "my Dresden china Auntie." There was between them some natural affinity, as well as special affection; though Tante Ilde loved them all, Corinne was the true child of her heart, what the best of daughters might have been. She had never had any children and her life had revolved beneficently about the family of her brother,—only her half-brother to be sure, but then they never thought of that. When he married for the third time, quite superfluously the family considered, the ostensible reason he gave was that it would be a pity to leave no one to enjoy the pension due whoever was fortunate enough to be his widow. His sister had smiled at this, her fine, soft smile, and even Heinie himself had been obliged to laugh though he cared little about jokes concerning his somewhat solemn being; and he had married the bright-cheeked, shining-eyed, full-figured, not over-intelligent young Croatian of his desire, Irma Milanovics, and they had had three sons in the four years he lived to be her husband. It made him the father of eleven children, all living at the time of the outbreak of the war, together with an adopted daughter, the child of a dead friend,—(one more, it couldn't matter where there were so many). He had always enjoyed the patriarchal feeling which would come over him as he sat at that big oval table, serving the most generous of portions, or when out buying objects by the half-dozen or dozen. In many other ways, too, that numerous, good-looking family had flattered his persistent paternity.
Two sons had been lost in the war, one last seen at the fall of the Fortress of Prszmysl, then traced to a prison camp in Siberia. After two years a card came through the Red Cross informing them of his death from typhus. The other had been killed in the last mad scuttle across the Piave. A daughter, too, had died of a wasting malady in the winter of 1915 after the death of her lover at the taking of Schabatz from the Serbs that first August of the war. But there were still eight of them in the thick of the fight for survival in post-war Vienna. Irma's three boys, nine, eleven and twelve years of age were not yet ready for the combat, but all the others were in it for victory or death.
To return to their aunt Ilde. The first two years of the peace had not been so bad. With some difficulty she got through and succeeded in keeping that roof that showed such unmistakable signs of collapse from falling about her head. Still in a small way she received them all on New Year's Day of 1921. For the customary roast pork was substituted a less expensive "Rindfleisch garniert" the classic boiled beef and vegetables, and there had been an Apfelstrudel, delight of all Viennese. Tradition maintained itself in a world now obviously composed of wreckage. But Frau Stacher had had an uneasy feeling as she sat, for what was indeed the last time, at the head of her table surrounded by her nieces and nephews. A week later she found, quite suddenly, that never again would she get anything from those Bohemian investments handed down from her father, the revered von Berg. She made some desperate, useless efforts, but she was always brought up round by the fact, once so pleasant, now disastrous, that she was the widow of an Austrian, and herself an Austrian. That sudden cleaving of things that she had supposed indissoluble, opened a gaping void in front of her, into which she was inevitably to fall. Behind her, far behind her lay the shining, solid, comfortable years, like another person's life, when she was Frau Kommerzienrath Stacher, born von Berg. That providential "von" had incredibly embellished her life. There was, indeed, all the difference in the world between being born a "von" or not a "von." She had always regretted that her mother's somewhat hasty second marriage to handsome Heinrich Bruckner, some years her junior, had not had the more sustaining qualities of a "von,"—then all Heinie's children too....
Now it appeared that nothing made any difference. Every landmark was gone. Authority was gone. Gone beauty, reverence, faith. All that warm, imperial lustre in which the middle classes had burnished themselves, proud and content that such things were, had faded into the night with Vienna's setting sun. Sweet things were gone not only out of her life, but out of the nation's, leaving black misery, or a crushing commercialism which, though it lent money, lent neither beauty nor honor.
It was all symbolized to Frau Stacher in the ruin of her own life, epitomized in the blank, useless loneliness of her downlyings and her uprisings. Life, once dear life, had become quite simply a monster that threatened to devour her and then spit her into the grave.
One warm, golden January Sabbath set like a jewel in the silver of the Baden winter, Frau Stacher had sat hour after hour at her window in chill, stark dismay, watching without seeing the soft afternoon light sift through the bare, velvety branches of the chestnut tree in front of her door. She was waiting for Corinne; but the moon had already risen and its silver glimmer had taken the place of the gold of afternoon before she heard a light step on the gravel. That light step carried the heaviest of hearts for Corinne had come out to discuss baldly matters till then not even thinkable....
But whichever way they turned and twisted and tried to avoid it, they were always finding themselves back at a certain dark spot. Finally they very quietly owned to each other, even saying the unthinkable thing aloud, that the Baden house would have to be given up. Then Corinne braced herself to meet those pale eyes, out of which the color had been suddenly washed.
"You can get quite a sum from the sale of the furniture," she ventured after a long silence in which she had looked as through a blur at the familiar appointments of the room. They sat knee to knee holding each other's hand tightly; Corinne felt as if she were watching her aunt drown in the Danube; she wanted to cry "Help," but she only said:
"Of course you must keep enough of your best things for a nice room near us all,—if we can find one."
The housing problem was beginning to loom up blackly, overshadowing quite a number of things already dark enough. She leaned closer and pressed her aunt's head against her loving young heart. There Frau Commercial Advisor Stacher, born von Berg, wept her only tears. She had a fine spirit which even then was not broken, but hurt, bent and vastly astonished. During the long hours that followed they mingled their pity and their love, which bore in the end a thin hope that "something would happen"; but all the same, when early the next morning Corinne went away she knew that the first stone had been cut for the sepulchre of her aunt's existence.
That "nice room near us all" proved indeed unobtainable. In a city that had once offered every imaginable sort of pleasant shelter, there didn't seem to be a single "nice, unfurnished room" to offer a homeless old lady,—and it was said so many had died in or because of the war,—no, Frau Stacher couldn't understand.
A few bits of furniture left from the sale were finally distributed about among the various nieces and Frau Stacher went to board, just as a makeshift—"till things get better" Corinne had assured her, at the house of an acquaintance, who in the palmier days had partaken of her easy bounty. There nights of aching, sleepless homesickness followed days of empty, useless longing for all that had once been hers, for her little situation in life that had enabled her, childless as she was to be a center of pleasure and comfort to the only beings she loved. It was finished, done with, that was quite clear. She sat more and more alone in her room. The clack of Frau Kerzl's tongue and her invectives at Fate, quite justified though they were, got finally and intolerably on her nerves. She thought she could not bear to hear another time that things were as they were because the Hapsburgs had taken all the gold out of Austria when they went, and left the "others" sitting with the paper money.
Frau Stacher was no intellectual and had attempted no mental appraisement of the national calamities. Even in the good days her most enjoyable reading had been theSalon Blatt, where what the Imperial and Royal family and the "Aristokraten" did, said, wore, and where and how they showed themselves was duly recorded for the delectation of an appreciative people. A morning paper had always been brought to the house, it is true, but she would only run quickly over world-events which had never so slightly modified her life, whereas the doings of the First Society lent it both lustre and interest.
She knew that Frau Kerzl, whose grief had dyed her political feelings a deep red, was going on in a stupid, even wicked, manner, when she so unjustly and blasphemously spoke of the Hapsburgs, but she had no satisfactory answer to make, so after her way she was silent, spending the long evenings alone in her room. She couldn't see to sew in it, nor indeed to do anything more complicated than move about. The single light was placed high up in the center of the ceiling and was reflected but dimly from the dark walls, the pieces of heavy furniture and the brown porcelain stove that was never lighted.
Fortitude was, seemingly, the only virtue that Frau Stacher, gentle, easy-going, unheroic, was called upon to practise.
But the thing couldn't last forever. Often she was glad she was seventy. It made the outlook easier. There couldn't be more than twenty years of treading up other people's stairs. The instinct of home was almost as strong in her as the instinct to live. No, there couldn't be more than twenty years of it.... Then, too, in a month, a day, an hour even, it might all be over. But one evening sitting in the shadowy room, her little, white, knitted shawl drawn about her shoulders, her hands crossed under it on her breast, she was suddenly and terrifyingly aware of the beating of her heart,—almost as if for the first time. She found she was as much afraid of death as of life—and that was a great deal....
Sometimes one or the other of "the children" remembered to come to see "poor Tante Ilde" and often Corinne, in her moonbeam way, would slip in and out, still and pale indeed like a ray of reflected light, and every Sunday after dinner she and Corinne would meet at Irma's. She went frequently to Kaethe's, too, that is, whenever she had anything to take to the children. It wasn't a place where one could go empty-handed.
But all, in one way or another, were caught up in the struggle for survival. In a starving, freezing city, not starving, not freezing, took the last flow of everybody's energy, so she was mostly alone. But solitude, for which nothing in her life had prepared her, had no charms for her. She had an almost unbearable longing to be in crowds, in happy, busy crowds, where people jostled each other as they went about little, pleasant errands.
But there was another thing beside being certain—vaguely—that she wouldn't live forever, which had come to make her sojourn at Frau Kerzl's not only endurable but desirable ... a cold, creeping premonition concerning the not distant time when even that measure of independence would be denied her. The money from the sale of the furniture was going, was gone.
One morning in that terrible "little hour before dawn" when anxiety had done its worst, she got up and counted and recounted the thin packet of crowns left in her purse. Then in panic she made a mental survey of her other remaining "values," of those things her nieces were "keeping" for her. The result had sent her shivering back to bed, where frightened by a fear beyond any she had ever known, even in nightmare, she had pulled the bedclothes up over her head. She was afraid, afraid. It was grinning at her....
She dozed finally. But she only knew she had been asleep when she found herself throwing the sheet aside with a start, thinking she heard Corinne's voice calling up the stairs in the house at Baden.... Perhaps something would happen.
But little can happen to women of seventy except more of the same, whatever it is....
When in that chill December twilight she first found her way to the pawnshop, to "Tante Dorothea's," familiar to her all her life as a sure object for humorous sallies, and left there her gold bracelets, that old life dropped finally and forever from her almost as if it had never been, leaving her unticketed, unbilleted, between time and eternity. Truly she found that there is no greater sorrow than in adversity remembering happier days.
She hadn't spoken to any of the children about that fatally impending visit to "Tante Dorothea's," though she had thought of consulting Pauli; Pauli who always gave the impression that nothing human was foreign to him. But he would have given her the money. Humbly she deplored the burden of her existence on that younger generation, that dead wood of her fate among those green trees, bent themselves in the blast of misery that swept over the city. Every day, every hour one had to look out, or one was quite certainly blown over. But Pauli was away. Corinne, dear, lovely Corinne, she couldn't bear to think of her pale light flashing in through the door of that pawn shop in the Spiegelgasse, that fatal "Tante Dorothea's," whom the mention of in the good old days, had always raised that ill-considered laugh. Once or twice her thoughts had played glimmeringly about Fanny instead of "Tante Dorothea,"—to go out in a sudden, chilly little gust blowing from the terra ignota of Fanny's life. In the end it was her business, not another's, that was in question. She realized for the first time the solitariness of her fate, of everybody's fate, so long hidden from her under the pleasant details of her daily existence which had seemed to bind it in a thousand ways to other lives.
When she finally slipped out, looking fearfully and guiltily about her long before she got to her destination, as if her shameful errand had been stamped in red upon her face, she was further intimidated rather than reassured to discover, as she turned into the Spiegelgasse, that she was by no means alone of her kind. All the human scrapings and combings of the Inner Town seemed to have been blown there too. Old women like herself with arched noses and deeply-circled, tearless eyes, thin, wan women, in once-good, now threadbare clothes, whose gentle mien, like her own, recalled unmistakably happier days,—how many of them there were! Pale spectres of that middle class whom the War and then the Peace had stripped of everything save their sorrows. The war loans they had invested in had gone up in the smoke of battle, or down in the bitter waters of Peace; the thousands, the tens of thousands of comfortable little incomes, left them by fathers, by husbands, had soundlessly, untraceably disappeared, and they were learning the way to "Tante Dorothea's."
The Dorotheum, if one's business there is not vital is one of the most interesting buildings of its kind in Europe. Five of its seven stories rise above ground, the other two are in deep subterranean spaces, reaching to the old catacombs, and where household and personal effects of the Viennese middle class are now stored so thickly and so high, once Roman mercenaries of the Xth Legion lay buried....
But Frau Stacher knew nothing of the Dorotheum in its historical aspect and had she known, it would have been of little interest to her.
A motley, miserable throng was pressing in at the doors, for many, like herself, chose the dusk for such an errand. She found herself pressed close to a young mother with an anxious, withered face who had a pallid baby sleeping on one arm, while under the other she carried a small bundle of linen, that last of all possessions to be offered to "Tante Dorothea." Behind her stood a former officer. It was easy to see what he had been. He was still erect, but he was very thin, with deep pits under his cheek bones, his coat was buttoned up to his chin and he kept his hand in his pocket.
The pale baby on the woman's arm waked up as they stood in line, and began a wretched wailing. The mother tried to quiet it as she passed up to the counter, where a being, necessarily without bowels, looked quickly at the poor contents of the bundle, gave her a ticket and a few bits of paper money. Silently she received them and made way for Frau Stacher, who in a distress that moistened her brow and dried her mouth, tremblingly produced her bracelets. She was brusquely pointed to another counter for precious objects, as also was the officer. There she found herself behind a woman selling a worn wedding ring, not much heavier than the money she got in exchange.
The bulging-eyed man, giving Frau Stacher a quick, circular look that further chilled the thin blood in her veins, proceeded to weigh the bracelets in the little scales on the counter. On their last golden gleam was borne in a flash by Frau Stacher those bright, warm years in which she had worn them. The dull ticket she received was the true symbol of her state. The money would soon be gone and she would have neither money nor bracelets, just nothing. As she turned away she saw that the officer was offering a small medallion and a miniature. Again she thought of the foolish jokes about "Tante Dorothea." This stark, final misery was what it really was.... This doomlike end of everything.
Two short weeks after, Frau Kerzl again showed signs of nervousness and talked loudly and significantly, or what Frau Stacher, who had got timid even about leaving her room, thought was loudly and significantly, concerning the price of food; and how money, even an hour over-due, represented in those days of falling currency, a fabulous loss. That afternoon she took out her watch and chain and her amethyst and pearl ring. It was less frightening the second time, but she felt much sadder, and she was unspeakably depressed by the old man just ahead of her who fainted as he stood waiting.
By January Frau Stacher's situation became finally and visibly desperate. She could obviously no longer pay to remain in Frau Kerzl's house and quite as obviously Frau Kerzl could not keep her just for the pleasure of it. The link in their lives got thinner day by day until it broke squarely in two that morning of the sixth of January when Frau Kerzl plainly hinted at the possibility, nay probability of being able to wrest from the black heavens that star of first magnitude,—a foreign lodger. No trouble, out all the time, solid, certain pay. She didn't cease to paint the foreigner in ever brighter colors. He stood out attractively, even flashily against the grey tenuity of her present boarder. Though she had feared that something of the kind was impending, it fell on Frau Stacher like a blow on a bruised spot; indeed she found she was one vast bruise. Anything that touched her nowadays was sure to hurt unspeakably, but being "turned out," as she called it, had about it an ultimate ignominy, not at all befitting the day. She had always loved the sixth of January, that noisy feast of the Three Kings, and though she had been wont to complain that she hadn't been able to sleep a wink because of the tooting of the horns, the blowing of the whistles, the beating of drums and countless other noises announcing their arrival, that racket had really appealed to her sentimental soul, heralding as it did three royal beings bringing gold and myrrh and frankincense. As she lay awake through the cold, dark night, though there had been no noise at all in the streets she suddenly remembered that it was Epiphany; a few thin, salty tears moistened her cheeks as she realized that in a world once seemingly full of gold and myrrh and frankincense she now possessed naught save the breath in her body and the remnants of raiment covering it.
She was clearly, unless "something happened," among the serried ranks of that middle class fated to disappear. Thousands, hundreds of thousands of them had disappeared, been absorbed in one or the other appalling manner into something nameless and then lost from the ways of men. The "aristocrats" were vaguely "away" economizing and waiting in their castles, living, as well or as ill as might be, from their lands. The working classes, much in evidence, were not at all badly off. Brawn had still some market value. But the middle classes, upper and lower? They could not all have died, the streets would have been heaped with bodies. There was some painful absorption of them into the life of those persisting, and this is what, for a very little while, happened to Frau Ildefonse Stacher, born von Berg; but one variation on the ubiquitous theme of genteel old age and sudden penury in post-war Vienna.
On the wet, black afternoon following the wet, black morning of which we have spoken, Frau Stacher and her niece Corinne might again have been seen, discussing whisperingly in the chilly room at Frau Kerzl's, the evident extremity of the situation. The eye in the ceiling that saw rather than was seen by, revealed them sitting even closer together than usual. Frau Kerzl had developed out of her former friendliness and respect, strange, spying, key-hole ways. She was as well aware of what Frau Stacher had done with her bracelets and her watch and chain and her ring as Frau Stacher herself. She hadn't noticed the disappearance of the bracelets, but when she no longer saw the gold chain and when her boarder incautiously asked her the time of day she knew the Stacher jig was up, and she wanted to know, further, to just what tune she herself was stepping. She had her own troubles,—the son who had gone off to the war, fat Gusl he was then called, so jolly, so full of Wiener quips and quirks, always humming about the house or playing his zither. He had been invalided home that last September of the war and was now coughing his life out in the room that was supposed to be to the South, but that the sun was really unacquainted with. A dark room in a dark, side street, one among hundreds of dark, windy side streets in Vienna where consumption has its breeding ground; the "Viennese malady," it is sometimes called....
The light had found and gleamingly mingled the pale gold of Corinne's hair and the silver of her aunt's; their hands were tightly clasped as they considered ways and means. There seemed to be few of one and none of the other.
"I've lived too long," Frau Stacher said at last, and in her heart was distilled a sudden but final grief that found its stinging way to her so-long untroubled eyes.
Corinne leaned swiftly over and embraced her.
"Why I can't think of life without you!" she cried suddenly and so glowingly that for a fleeting instant her aunt found herself warm in the fire of that love. The salt was even dried momentarily out of that bread and water of charity which was now so evidently to be her only nourishment.
Corinne had come with a scheme of existence, the barest draft of a scheme of existence, she knew it to be, for her precious Tante Ilde. For all she looked elusive, shadowy, with that one light hanging uncertainly above, her hair the brightest thing in the room, she was, in accord with a strangely practical streak in her make-up, considering the matter that engaged them in its true aspect. The sight terrified her, but she was there to give courage, not to get it....
She sat quite motionless in long, slim, graceful lines, (the family liking more substantial contours didn't know how handsome Corinne was, "flat as a pancake" being no recommendation to them). Familiar with those fireless, post-war rooms and their creeping, paralyzing chill she was still wrapt in her sheath-like black coat. Her little grey, fur-trimmed hat had been laid on the bed for Tante Ilde always liked to have her take it off, it made the visits seem less hurried; her dripping umbrella had been placed in the pail near the iron washstand with its diminutive bowl and pitcher; its handkerchief-like towel was folded across the little rack above it. With a disturbing, child-like confidence her aunt's wide, full gaze had followed every movement. Apparently mistress of herself and of the plunging situation, Corinne had been conscious of the most horrible feeling in the pit of her stomach when she finally met it full as she sat down and began to caress that thin hand in the uncertain light which seemed, however, bright enough to reveal the next step in all its horrid indignity.
Corinne was a tall, small-headed, blond woman with a finely-arched nose and shell-like ears lying close to her head. Between her very blue eyes with a recurring oblique look that could veil her thoughts more effectually than dropped lids, was a slanting line that of late had perceptibly deepened. "Very distinguished," was always said of Corinne in the family; always, too, that she was "different," not quite indeed of their own easy-going, somewhat irresponsible Viennese kind which knows so well, in a somewhat unanalytical way, how to get something out of life,—with half a chance, with a quarter of a chance. So little was really needed for happiness with a basis of enough to eat. Humming a new waltz, remodelling a pair of sleeves, getting hold of a bit of fat or sugar for the women; for the men sitting in a warm café drinking beer or black coffee, turning over theLustige Blätter, smoking a Trabuco or a Virginia,—joy was still as easy as that when momentarily far enough from the abyss not to be dizzy and sick with the fear of falling in. Corinne had had in common with Fanny a North German grandmother and though that explained, in a way, a lot of things, still there remained something about her that the family hadn't been able to label satisfactorily. Sometimes they called it cold, sometimes hard, they had all come up against it in one way or another in those days of elemental issues, but terribly clever, they conceded that. She could generally be counted on to find some little door in the thickest wall.
Since their father's death and the consequent breaking up of the home, Corinne had been safely, solidly and enviably, it seemed to the rest of them, employed in the Depositen Bank, whose personnel even in those uncertain days, was not doing badly; an expanding wage as the times demanded and at a place run by the bank an eatable midday meal at a possible price.
If it had been a matter of her aunt Ilde alone, Corinne could have managed, after a fashion, to keep that existence, so dear to her, from falling to pieces, though what she earned was not yet enough for two; but all whose heads were above water had not one but many drowning persons clinging tightly, stranglingly about their necks. Corinne was conscious of a finally sinking sensation as she proceeded to unfold the plan which appeared to her more and more what it really was—a last monstrous attack on her aunt's existence—pushing it nearer and nearer to the fatal edge. She had no single illusion as to what she was doing, and her voice was very soft in contrast to the hard, stark meaning of her words.
"I've spoken to them all, darling, you don't have to do a thing about it. Tomorrow you are to move to Irma's. It will be a sort of combination arrangement. You'll be paying, of course. It's a way to help Irma and the boys as well."
Now the famous pension on account of which Herr Bruckner had charitably made that third marriage, had shrunk in buying properties to such pigmy-like proportions, that they didn't count it any more when Irma's needs and necessities were being discussed. Yet Irma and the boys had to live, that establishment in one way or another had to be kept up a while longer.
"But I don't see where Irma can put me," Frau Stacher answered after a long silence.
Corinne flushed:
"Dear treasurekin ... the alcove.... It'll only be till I can look about, perhaps something will turn up; it's to get you out of here and remember you'll be paying Irma for it, you'll feel perfectly independent. I've talked it over with her. She's glad enough to be helped out. Don't forget the alcove has got that plush divan of yours that we've all slept on at Baden. It's upholstered, thick and soft, with happy memories. I think you've had a beautiful life," she ended tenderly, desperately.
Her aunt smiled, a ghost of a smile, at the mention of Baden, and the upholstery of the divan, and then her thin, broad lids closed flutteringly over the expanse of her blue eyes to keep the tears from falling, but she made no answer. There wasn't really anything to say.
"I felt of the curtains yesterday when I was there," continued Corinne in a voice that had quite lost its resonance, "they're good and thick and Irma sewed a big hook and eye on right in the middle, and when they're fastened you'll be almost by yourself," she ended but with a sudden quiver of her lips, as her aunt continued to look at her with her soft, wide, pale eyes in which the distaste she felt for the alcove in particular and the arrangement in general was clearly mirrored. She had never cared for Irma. Irma had something hard and strange, almost rough about her, that had never fitted into their own easy, pleasant ways. She did her duty, yes, but they were used to a pleasanter fulfillment of duty. However, it was too true that she was the only one of them having a living room with an alcove.... Life was like that.
"It won't be forever," pursued Corinne, "and I'll be there on Sundays for dinner."
She spoke cheerfully but she felt as if she were pointing her dear treasurekin to the winter road instead of to shelter. Could she but have lodged her really in her heart!
"I've been thinking about you all this week and planning ever since that hateful Kerzl woman" ... here Corinne was pulled up short by the sudden flush on her aunt's face, she couldn't bear to hear ofthateven from Corinne.... Frau Kerzl who once had been grateful for a smile or even for advice, to whom she'd sent broth a whole long winter.
Corinne continued gently as flowing water—but as inevitably as water seeking its own level:
"Darling,—and this is how I have arranged for your dinner every day," she spoke even more gently and her touch was soft, the softest touch that thin, trembling hand had ever known. A brightness beyond tears was in her eyes. What was she offering really to her precious, her fragile, her Dresden china aunt?
"On Mondays," she proceeded, striking the simplest chord at first, "Liesel wants you to take dinner with her. She said she'd love to have you."
This wasn't quite exact. What her sister Liesel, married since two years to a young official in the Finance Ministry, Liesel who was very happy, had really said was:
"Of course, I don't mind Tante Ilde coming once a week, we certainly ought to do what we can for her, ... but when Otto comes in he does like to find just me. However, we've got to look out for her, poor dear,—she was always so good to us."
Otto was one of some half or three quarters of a million government employees in Vienna and was doing fairly well, that is well enough for two. He was an expert accountant and as prices went up, so mercifully did his salary. They got along very comfortably in the tiny, three-roomed apartment that Liesel in her smiling way had conjured up out of the abyss of the housing crisis. It sufficed amply for their needs. They lived almost in the style that would have been theirs had they lived and loved a decade earlier. Sometimes in the evening they even went to the theatre, or to a moving picture. What use in keeping money when the next day's fall in exchange made it act like ice in hot water? So with many shrugs of her plump, handsome shoulders Liesel continued to wrest an immediate happiness from the miserable city, and with a special sapience born of love pursued her daily and absorbing round of making her Otto and herself comfortable. They cared a great deal for each other, though the family thought Otto rather a stick and wondered how he had come to find such favor in Liesel's soft, dark eyes. As a husband he had turned out to be vigilant and exclusive as well as loving, a sort of little Turk. Having small natural faith in men and still less in women, from the first he had set about guarding his treasure. It somehow suited Liesel. "But jealous!" she would boast, casting her eyes up delightedly, a finger at her red lip. They were so young too, that they could hope that something, in the many years they expected to live, would happen to place their upset world on its proper feet again, and while awaiting that miracle they were very happy.
Otto sometimes remembered Galicia.... When a certain look came into his face it was because he was hearing those terrible machine guns. He limped slightly, his right knee having been smashed by a ricochet bullet, and he had had his feet frozen in an Italian prison camp and lost the toes of the left foot.... Oh, that mountain camp, that terrible cold, that tiny blanket! If he didn't pull it up about his shoulders he shivered and shook with that deadly central cold and if he did pull it up his feet froze. Sometimes he dreamed of it in that warm bed with Liesel and would awake with a start to find her there, and drawing the feather-bed up higher would sink again into a blessed slumber. He knew that he had been lucky.
It was because Liesel was so happy that to her Corinne had first gone with her plan for Tante Ilde. Liesel had spent summer after summer in the house at Baden. Her aunt had always spoiled her. Everybody spoiled Liesel, so evidently made for happiness. As a little girl she was forever rummaging in the attic for bits of silk and lace for her dolls, and would turn out the nattiest things. Now for herself she did the same. She was round-faced, fresh-skinned and smiles played easily about her somewhat wide, very red mouth;—she would have been attractive in rags. But she had that peculiar Viennese talent for wearing clothes, a jaunty manner of pulling her belt in snugly that made the observer conscious of her very small waist under a full bust, above broad hips, a way of pressing her hat down upon her head at the most becoming angle; and her high-heeled shoes were always bright and neatly tied. These and a lot of other details of an extremely feminine sort added undeniably to her natural charms. Pauli said that though her soul was but a centimeter deep, you looked to the bottom through the clearest of waters. If in her happiness she sometimes forgot other people's miseries, it was but natural, and when she was reminded she was all solicitude and self-reproach.
"That will be nice," Tante Ilde was saying slowly after another long pause, and she was gladder than ever that she had added the knife-rests and napkin rings to the spoons when Liesel was married. Then as a sudden thought came to her, she quite brightened up, "I can do the dishes," she cried, "Liesel always used to hate to do anything that would spoil her hands."
"Well, she doesn't seem to mind spoiling her hands for Otto," answered Corinne rather drily.
"They're in love," returned Tante Ilde gently, glimmeringly.
A shadow fell over Corinne's face at the answer as if a ray of light had been interrupted, or as if something had been muted for a moment. Her aunt, who was not one to break into silent places, waited patiently, though she was wondering who and what was coming next.
"Pauli," the shadow was followed by a light in Corinne's face as she spoke the name lingeringly, "Pauli," she repeated, "wants you to go to Anna's on Tuesday. It's one of their meat days—when they can get it."
"Perhaps I better not go there then. It looks," she hesitated and there were sudden tears in her eyes, "so greedy."
"Not at all," cried Corinne. "Pauli wants you to go on Tuesday just because of that. He said he'd try to be there himself, that first time anyway. Anna and Hermine are quite worked up about it and wondering what they can give him to eat."
"Poor Anna," said her aunt very gently.
Corinne flushed. Again they were silent.
Frau Stacher bewildered at her own fate, felt quite incapable in that moment of picking up the threads of any other life, even of Corinne's. But her confidence awakened warmly at mention of Pauli. Pauli had a heart and was always showing it. Pauli understood, she felt sure, anything, everything.... Even poverty-stricken old aunts by marriage who had lived too long. Even to such Pauli was kind.
Pauli Birbach, the husband of her eldest niece Anna, had got through the war without a scratch or an illness,—of an unbelievable luck. When a bomb burst where he and his comrades were sitting or lying, he was certain to be unhurt and soon to be seen carrying the wounded in gently or burying the dead deeply. Typhus and dysentery alike avoided him. He was naturally a debonair and laughing soul, and his easy resourcefulness had endeared him to both officers and men. "As lucky as Pauli Birbach" was a phrase among his comrades. And even in little ways. Wasn't he always turning up with a handful of cigarettes or a bottle of wine or a chicken, got, heaven knew how, in a country picked bare as a bone? An excellent cook, too, he could instruct the warrior presiding over the pot how to make the very most of what little he had. Hot water and an onion under Pauli's direction became a delectable if not nourishing soup.
And the way he played the zimbalon he discovered in a castle they were quartered in during an interminable winter in the Carpathians, the Russians, millions of them it seemed, just opposite,—only half hidden by the snowy hill that some dark morning they must charge....
He had seen terrible things, terrible things to a laughing, soft-hearted man, things that knocked the laughter out of him like a blow on the chest.... The time he went out with a patrol at day break, the thermometer 40 below, and they thought they were coming to a tent or a little hovel in the grey half light.... But it was a dozen Kossacks huddled together, frozen stiff, their heavy boots sticking out....
And other things that had turned his pleasure-loving soul black with horror.... Christian Zimmermann, they'd been at the High School together, ... Christian, his comrade, three days in agony, hanging on that barbed wire and no one able to get at him and when Pauli finally did bring him in ... oh, no, you didn't think of such things.
And the Peace that stuck in his throat and lay on his chest, and the fierce angers it aroused, beyond, far beyond the blood-angers of the War ... Five years to repair the damages of the War—a century those of the Peace.... Still Pauli often laughed, even in that cold, grey Vienna, scarcely recognizable ghost of what had once throbbed and glowed, that funeral urn among cities; for he was naturally a man of hot hope, in spite of the fact that Fate at her most capricious had married him to Herr Bruckner's eldest daughter, a horse-faced, quite inarticulate woman, all of one color, with a solemn, brooding look in her eyes. She was so different from the glowing-eyed, sparkling-faced damsels about him that marriage with Anna Bruckner came to seem like the solving of some deep mystery. What lay behind those heavy, brooding eyes, with their curtain-like closing? She had rather fine broad shoulders, something long and big about her body, built in majestic proportions, or so it seemed to him. He got into a state where he had to know what it all meant—or die. He had been inexplicably mad about her all through his lyric years.... Anna his Sybil. Anna had been conscious of a flattered wonder, and her chill, slow blood had known its only warmth and quickening when she married Pauli Birbach. Then so soon.... Yes, Anna had gone through every hell, and there are many, reserved for stupid, jealous, ugly, virtuous women. She loved him more year by year. She was obsessed by the thought of Pauli, doggedly, uselessly obsessed, for early Pauli had passed to the contemplation of other mysteries.
It was a tribute to his humanity, however, that Tante Ilde felt not the slightest distaste at going to his house ... even in "that way" as she called it to herself. He gave more freely than he received, and he did both easily. Probably for all his good intentions he would not be at dinner on Tuesday, he had an airy, dissolving way with him, akin to atmospheric changes,—brightness into cloud, cloud into sun and you never knew.... But Anna with her joylessness and her one ugly daughter as like her as the eighteen years between them permitted, Anna was her own flesh and blood, and she had been at Baden with her aunt during innumerable infantile illnesses. She was always catching something and when her hair came out after the measles Tante Ilde had faithfully brushed it back to a shining, brown abundance. It was even now Anna's one beauty. They had, after all, so many memories in common—she couldn't have forgotten all, everything.... On Tuesdays then.
"On Wednesdays you're to go to Mizzi's," Corinne was saying.
"To Mizzi's!" exclaimed her aunt in astonishment, throwing back her thin shoulders and sitting up very straight.
"Yes ... Fanny," here Corinne made the habitual pause that followed any mention of Fanny in the family,—"Fanny has arranged it. You know Mizzi's anxious to please her."
Again Frau Stacher showed no especial enthusiasm for the arrangement. It was getting into quite another category. After all Liesel and Anna were her own brother's children, but when you went into houses,—in that way,—kept up by nieces-in-law, it was quite a different matter. Mizzi was the family dragon too. Mizzi with a look or a word could quite ruthlessly devour aged aunts, superfluous children. A monster really, with a mouth and stomach, but no entrails. They all had come to know about Mizzi—in one way or another.
"Perhaps I better go without dinner on Wednesday," Frau Stacher suggested with a slight quiver of her lips, though not because of the food.
"You could perfectly well if you had too much or even enough at other times. But we've got to keep your strength up through the winter. You've just got to live," Corinne repeated sweetly, warmly, "and then think of poor Manny—he'll love having you."
"Oh, Manny," her aunt responded, "poor Manny's got nothing to say," but her voice had a note of loving compassion.
"Poor Manny, dear Manny," repeated Corinne slowly in the same tone, adding, "It isn't any of it forever,—next year I'll be making more money, and perhaps we can get a tiny, tiny apartment somewhere."
Now the "tiny, tiny apartment," even as she spoke, seemed to Corinne the mirage it truly was. People had been known to die of joy on getting a tiny, tiny apartment. That very morning in the newspaper she had read of a man who had fallen dead when he heard he was at last to have a certain apartment he had long needed for himself and his family, and a rich man too. Everybody was talking about it.
"I can't leave Elschen," continued Corinne, "it's a miracle anyway sharing that pleasant room with her while her sister's away."
"It makes me so happy to know you're there," said her aunt warmly, for Corinne was of the race of homeless ones, and her address apt to be uncertain. Then for all her patience, she couldn't help wondering about Thursday.
"On Thursday," continued Corinne, having got to the fourth of her slender fingers, "you're going to dear Kaethe's." Kaethe and Corinne were half sisters by Aunt Ilde's brother's first and second wife.
"To Kaethe's!" she interrupted, "but they're all starving. I couldn't eat a mouthful there."
"It's just because of that, that it's easy. When you go there on Thursday you are to take the whole dinner—for all of them. It'll be quite like old times when you always brought us things."
Though delicacy was an essential attribute of Frau Stacher, she could not, at this point, restrain a slightly inquiring look at her niece Corinne, who answered after the thinnest of pauses:
"It'll be all right ... Fanny's going to see about it. She does everything for them anyway thatisdone."
Frau Stacher closed her eyes rapidly once or twice, but made no remark. It was, undeniably, Fanny whichever way you looked....
The contemplation of the Thursday arrangement however, induced a long silence. They had a sort of hopeless, trapped feeling when they thought of Kaethe.
Some thirteen years before she had married a brilliant young professor of biology at the University, who now, as he accurately and baldly stated, earned far less than the women who kept the toilets at the Railway stations....
They had seven children,—lovely, white-skinned, pansy-eyed, golden-haired children, or glowing-faced, starry-eyed, brown-haired. Kaethe's was indeed a terrible situation, one that made her relatives sad or angry according to their various temperaments and philosophical reactions to life. Three of those children had been born, illadvisedly, during the War and another since the Peace. Mizzi had soundly aired her opinion of that last arrival, ending with her usual "dumm, but dumm!" and casting her eyes up.
Out of the thick fog of his practical inexperience Professor Eberhardt had gropingly tried various and mostly unsuccessful ways of providing for his family, ways unrelated to his brains and his technical skill, which suddenly seemed not of the slightest value. Time apparently was the only thing he had and he was directly, unpleasantly aware of its useless passage. He'd lived mostly in a blessed, timeless world of theory and experiment. Courses were only intermittently held at the University, in half empty aula reached through dusty, echoing corridors. There was no money to keep up the laboratories and the few students were apt to be as listless from undernourishment as the professors themselves, or fiercely, disturbingly, redly subversive of everything and everybody; and anyway the struggle to keep life in the body was so terrible that it quite chilled any desire to know how it came to be there in the first place. Nature's secrets, except of the harvests, were at an entire discount.
He had duly tried several forms of those manual labors that alone seemed to be worth money. The summer before he had helped with the crops on a farm in Styria that a brother professor of geology, whose case somewhat resembled his own, had told him about. At first he had dreadful backaches and his long, delicate hands that could hold a microscope or a retort so steadily, would shake after the day's work and his thin palms were one great blister. Horrified he would hold them out at evening and watch them tremble and wonder would they ever be steady again for use in the laboratory. He had, however, made what seemed to his inexperience quite a lot of money for that sort of work, and he never knew what the peasants really thought of him. Some of the money unfortunately had been stolen from him that last Sunday when he had been incontinently dreaming about a certain theory that could always, if he didn't look out, captivate his attention.... Still he brought home enough to get them through the autumn ... and with what Fanny would do....
But suddenly, or so it seemed to him, the crown began to fall. He would sit flushing and paling as he read the descending quotations of the national currency and the rising prices of food. In a few weeks that money was gone. The Eberhardts had, relatively, gorged when they saw it shrinking—next week it would be worth only half and the week after only a quarter. They laughed a good deal, too, Kaethe and the children. Kaethe even taught Lilli and Resl to waltz, humming "The beautiful, blue Danube" as they spun around. The professor allowed himself to think again of certain combinations ... once quietly back in the laboratory.... Then came the collapse.
In desperation he tried street-cleaning. A late November morning on looking out of the window he saw that it had snowed heavily during the night. In spite of himself the beauty of the little crystals lying against the panes entranced him. He shook himself free, however, of such luxurious and wasteful thoughts and decided to try for a chance to shovel off snow. He said nothing to Kaethe about it as he went briskly out. But it proved not to be much of an idea after all, for he got a heavy chill late that afternoon waiting in line to be paid, and when he passed by his brother-in-law's office feeling very ill, Hermann had administered a potion to him and told him to go immediately to bed and stay there.
About Christmas time he was put wise by another colleague, a professor of botany, to a certain address near the Stephansplatz where a midday meal of a sort was provided by foreign benevolence for starving university professors. A cup of cocoa, rice and a slice of bread; a cup of cocoa, beans and a piece of zwieback. It was not designed to fatten any of them; it was only meant to keep as many of them as possible above ground ... keeping the sciences alive.... The calories were carefully marked on each menu and the men of learning could take their choice without paying.
Professor Eberhardt went there every day, but with his own physical necessities ever so meagrely provided for, it was pure agony to go back to those rooms where seven hungry children and a pale wife awaited his return. He was always asked what he had had and how it had tasted. He was often able to slip the bread or the zwieback into his pocket, but there was no way of handling the cocoa and beans and rice except to eat them.
Kaethe kept his only suit brushed and darned. Indeed it was getting to be one large darn with areas of the original cloth making patterns. She kept him in clean collars too, for a long time, but even at the last, with his coat collar turned up, he had the unmistakable air of a man of learning and a gentleman.
He loved his wife and children greatly. But it was a terrible life, a cold, damp, undernourished life, the things of the brain and the spirit slipping farther and farther from his sight. Brawn was indeed what was wanted.... Unless one had that strange, mysterious but apparently essential thing called money,—that some had and some hadn't. Professor Eberhardt had never been fanned, even gently, by any breeze of commercialism....
They had all been so proud of Leo and Kaethe in the old days; sometimes Leo's name was mentioned in the newspapers and though they cared little and knew less about the congresses held in Vienna, they would quickly run their eyes over names and subjects, hunting for Leo's and "as proud as dogs with two tails," according to Hermann, when they discovered it.
The plight of Leo and Kaethe and their lovely children kept the two women silent a long time. Just as the thought of Hermann had made them very still.... In fact viewed from any angle, the family fortunes were now apt to engender silence.
"Oh yes ... if Fanny ..." said Tante Ilde at last, picking up the thread where they had somewhat charily dropped it, "if Fanny...."
She had to concede that going to Kaethe's with something of the old familiar gesture of giving to those she loved rather than receiving from them, when obviously, they had none too much, put Thursday in quite a different light.
"What do you think I could get to take them? How much do you think," she paused musingly, "Fanny will send?"
"I don't know, but it will be enough. You can look around and see what you can get the most of for the money. There are so many of them," she ended, the familiar phrase losing itself in a sigh.
Too many of them, doubtless, and yet those lovely children,—each one a treasure, looking at you so confidingly with their big eyes in shades of blue, except Resl's and Hansi's darkly flashing,—which one of them would you not want? Not want Elsa who had a way of snuggling close and seeking your hand as she looked up with those heaven-blue eyes? Not want Carli, that gold and white angel of three summers, who couldn't yet walk, his little legs would crumple up under him when he tried to stand up, but he could smile in a way that went to your heart, and as for the baby, a thing of such sweetness that one wanted to eat her up. She was still at pale Kaethe's breast; rosy and fat, though heaven alone knew how or why; and all the others. Lilli whose beauty made you hold your breath; Resl to whom something nice was always happening, and Maxy with his plans for supporting the family when he grew up. Any one of them would have been the pride and joy of a childless home....
Tante Ilde felt herself pleasantly excited at the thought of Thursday,—relieving want—no matter how—instead of adding to it. Her eyes got quite bright.
Corinne, seeing the change, continued gayly, almost.
"And Friday, now guess," she paused, "Friday you'll have dinner with me. I'll let you know where and we'll talk everything over. What fun it will be! Saturday, I haven't arranged for Saturday yet but I'll tell you in time. Sunday we don't have to plan about. I'll come as usual with the meat for the boys' stew, and we'll have a nice time all together. Perhaps in a few months we can arrange something quite different. It's only to get you over the winter ... and you'll have courage," she ended entreatingly. Courage, that angel, she was thinking miserably to herself, as the unalterableness of her aunt's doom became more and more apparent.
But suddenly it all seemed quite possible, even easy to Tante Ilde. Yes, she would, shecouldbe brave. She had Corinne ... as long as she had Corinne.... Corinne was so clever too, anything might happen when Corinne took the reins in her slim, elfin way, guiding life quickly, lightly along over the roughest spots.
"Now, dearest, don't worry about a single thing," Corinne repeated faintly, the iron very deep in her soul as at last she got up and stood lingeringly by her aunt's chair. She had again that horrible realization of something irreparable being in process. It sharpened her features and muffled her voice. "I'll see Frau Kerzl on the way out and pay her up till tomorrow morning, and you can leave early." For all her glimmering smile and close embrace she was increasingly consternated at the collapse of her aunt's existence, not even slightly concealed behind their words. She loved her more than ever in her final and inevitable rout, for pity was swelling abundantly her love. But the world! It cared little for old ladies in flight before Fate....
That courage momentarily imparted to Frau Stacher by her niece's loving nearness fell heavily with the dragging hours in which more and more miserably she went about the dim, chilly room, emptying the bureau and wardrobe of their scanty contents and laying them in her shabby valises. The very old brown leather one dated from her wedding trip, for Frau Stacher had never been a traveller; it had always been pleasanter to stay at home or go only to very near places for the day. Now strangely she was become a pilgrim, and when she was hungry she was to eat of other people's bread and she must go up other people's stairs for shelter. The realization of the power of those nieces over her life terrified her. It was complete if they chose to exercise it. Withdrawal of their protection, she starved, she froze—just the not having those few thousand crowns a year put her at the world's mercy....
Even Frau Kerzl's quite unctuous attentions at that last supper of cabbage-turnip soup failed to dispel the deepening gloom of her heart. Frau Kerzl was obviously though politely rejoicing. She had indeed through an incredible bit of luck secured that foreigner, an Englishman too, who would pay in shillings, in the magic "Devisen," for that room in which the very next night he was to sleep,—as soon as that,—Frau Kerzl already basked and expanded in the approaching light and heat of those shillings. The long Englishman strangely, hated short, square feather beds and was bringing his own blankets. It appeared, too, that he was in the commissary department of a certain relief society. Anything could grow out of such a situation,—condensed milk, butter, oatmeal.... The arrangement was undeniably of a marvelous fertility.
Though Frau Stacher was truly glad of Frau Kerzl's good luck, it but emphasized her own impending homelessness. She had been quite miserable there, but at least her living-space had been provided with a door, and blessed with a key,—ultimate desirabilities as she now saw, and tomorrow she would move into the uncertain privacy of the alcove. Then, too, in some way that she couldn't define Irma, her young sister-in-law, terrified her.
Yes, homeless, in a new sense, she realized herself to be when she went back into the luxury of her solitude for the last time, and as she closed the door she knew, indeed, that she had "lived too long."...
In that bed, abundantly salted by the tears of her uncertainties, so soon to know the deep slumbers of a care-free Englishman, Frau Stacher lay long awake thinking of those homes, over whose thresholds, day by day, week by week, she was to step.... She would love them so much, she would be so grateful, she would hold so sacred the joys and sorrows which might be disclosed....
But they seemed to her tired body to live, those nieces of hers, at the ultimate points of the Viennese compass. Her feet and back ached at the bare thought of those endless, cobbly streets, windswept, wet by rain and snow. All roads led to Calvary. Those once charming streets of the Imperial City were now but so many ways to the hill of charity, and it was a hill that old age crept up timidly, anxiously. The cross was so surely at the top.... Then she bethought herself how the days of the week came only one at a time, the way after all that life was tempered to mortality, one day, one thing at a time....
But it wasn't only troubles of food and raiment, of shelter; Frau Stacher had grave theological difficulties as well, encrusted confusingly about the admonition: "Be not solicitous for your life, what you shall eat or for your body what you shall put on ... for your Father knoweth that you have need of all these things." No, she had no slightest understanding; and faith was but the dimmest of night-lights, flickering so uncertainly that the dark masses of her difficulties alone were apparent. She seemed to be caught terrifyingly between her needs reduced though they were, really only a bed and enough food to keep her alive, and the Divine withholding of those things. No, she couldn't understand, and all through that last long night at Frau Kerzl's she hung shiveringly over the dim puzzle of her life, which once had fallen so easily into its bright and pleasant pattern....
For the dozenth time she pulled the little, hard, square feather-bed, disdained of the Englishman, about her shoulders and drew her knees up under it. At last out of her chill bewilderment she began to think of Kaethe, of taking her the Thursday dinner, of what she could get, in a world now filled mostly, it seemed, with inedible substances. The thought of giving, even vicariously, lighted in her a glowing eagerness. She found herself suddenly quite warm, even to her ankles and feet, and as the late January light began to filter in through the cracks of the brown rep curtains she fell, mercifully, into a deep slumber.