II
Allegretto amoroso.Sorgen sind fürMorgen gut.
Allegretto amoroso.
Sorgen sind fürMorgen gut.
Sorgen sind fürMorgen gut.
Sorgen sind fürMorgen gut.
Sorgen sind für
Morgen gut.
When belated and hurriedly Frau Stacher finally got away from Frau Kerzl's, it was somewhat as a little war-bark after its time is up, leaves an unpleasant port, but still a port, and puts out to sea in sure signs of rough weather.
The once fat and merry Gusl had had one of his worst nights; spasms of coughing were coming through the open door of the so-called south room as the two women stood together for a last time in the sombre little hallway, sadly stencilled in terra cotta on dark blue. The haggard agony on that mother's face gave Frau Stacher a deep stab accompanied by the first and only realization in her childless heart of the pain mothers know for doomed children. It was something so sudden, so poignant, as she stood saying a somewhat lifeless goodbye, (she hadn't yet pulled herself together after being abruptly awakened out of that timeless, death-like sleep by Frau Kerzl's loud knock,) that had it remained with her an instant longer she would have fallen in a heap. It seemed to her that now she was always running full tilt into griefs she had never even suspected in the veiled and pleasant years.
The ring of the hungry colonel, only incompletely disguised as a porter, who came to get her folding straw basket and her two lean valises, broke in on the distress of the two women. Frau Kerzl forgetting for a moment the blessings that would so surely follow the Englishman into the house, embraced her, suddenly regretful, in a rush of hot tears; Frau Stacher's sympathy was so immediate, so real that it seemed to stand there with them. They hung a moment lip on cheek murmuring to each other "courage" and again and again "auf Wiedersehen;" then turned to their now separate paths, Frau Kerzl running back to her son's room at a faint and gurgling sound and Frau Stacher to continue what she called, (though no one knew it,) her "March among the Ruins," walking close behind the porter, sweating a neurasthenic sweat, in the raw January air under his unaccustomed load. She felt safer quite near him for those once cosy, familiar streets seemed now to converge to the unknown, to infinity even, and the proximity of her valises somewhat steadied her. With genteel, restrained little steps, her elbows pressed to her sides, her hands clasped in front holding her umbrella and her shabby little bag that always came unfastened if she didn't look out and somebody would tell her it was open, she proceeded to the street off the Hoher Markt where Irma, her brother's widow, half starved with her three boys on the famous pension, together with what various members of the family gave her and what she herself made by her beautiful "petit point," dimming every year a little more those once hard, bright eyes.
Irma knowing that hunger stalked just around the corner, yet desiring to live alone with her boys, had been immensely relieved and at the same time almost uncontrollably irritated at the thought of the arrangement by which Tante Ilde was to be given the very relative freedom of the alcove. She had gone about the simple preparations for her taking possession in the best obstructionist manner. The alcove already contained the old brown plush divan, relic of the house in Baden, but Irma had shown an amazing unwillingness to clear out a certain little green and yellow chest of drawers which had "always" been between the windows in her living room and contained an unrelated accumulation of objects.
"But she's got to have something to keep her things in!" Corinne had cried, at the time the fatal arrangement was being made.
This was so obvious that Irma had made no further demur than to say: "I didn't think she had that much left."
"You've never heard about the lilies of the field?" Corinne asked with her most oblique look, but it was lost on Irma who said:
"What?" as she noisily dragged the chest of drawers into the alcove.
"How these little pebbles hurt my feet," murmured Corinne further, and when Irma answered: "What hurts your feet?" she turned aside. Irma was clearly impervious. But she had emptied the drawers—all except the top one—quite ostentatiously. Various blessings flowed from Corinne, who brought their Sunday dinner and who could be counted on to get the often expensive materials for her needlework; she knew, too, that Corinne from time to time gave Mizzi a finely-pointed thrust of truth about what Irma called "jewing her down" in her prices. Corinne could quietly cut to the bone. Irma had been a skillful needlewoman even in the old days, now through Mizzi she kept abreast of the latest styles. That season the rage was for motifs of "petit point" which were being inserted in Suède handbags, making one of the famous Viennese leather novelties. She had once received 80,000 crowns, when 80,000 was something, for a tiny medallion, so fine that she had only been able to work on it on warm summer mornings with the window open, even the glass panes seemed to blur it somewhat, though that north window up those five flights of stairs was certainly as good a place as one could have for working.
Irma being without sensibility, unconnected with her boys, had said further to Corinne on that same occasion:
"Business is business," at which Corinne had ineffectually protested that it was just what it wasn't,—business.
"You know how I am situated with the three boys," Irma had answered, in the same tone she would have used to give new information rather than to discuss a situation already threadbare, "so much for a cup of coffee in the morning and you know what bread costs, then the soup in the evening—a plateful—she won't need the thick part of it," she proceeded baldly, "the boys are growing and so hungry. She'll only need something to warm her up and when you think that she will have eaten well every day at noon, she'll get on all right."
The family had never been able to accustom themselves to the shock of certain unexpected thoughts appearing quite unclothed and without the least shame from Irma's most intimate being. A chill visited Corinne's backbone at the reference to the thin part of the soup, and a white point appeared in her eyes, glacial as an iceberg in blue water, which, however, did not attract Irma's attention nor reduce her temperature. She was, anyway, a woman who easily got red in the face and was always saying how hot she was when others were half frozen.
Having thus delivered herself of her inner thoughts she had proceeded to draw, not uncheerfully, two nails out of the kitchen wall and drive them neatly, loudly, deafeningly into two light-grey roses in the brown wall-paper of the alcove, near the curtain where they wouldn't be seen, and just a little too high to be reached comfortably. She had then duly sewed the hook and eye on the curtains under Corinne's very gaze and zealously, inexpensively flicked away any possible dust from the gilt-framed engraving of Haydn leading the young Mozart by the hand, and the flat white and gilt vase on the little bracket underneath, sole embellishments of the alcove. But all the same in order to feel the least bit amiable about it Irma had to keep reminding herself that her sister-in-law would be paying for that same alcove. Indeed, with a second bare, arctic look also lost on Irma, Corinne had put the money for it for a whole month in advance into her hand. She had felt like snatching her treasure up in her arms, conveying her a hundred, a thousand miles and setting her down in some warm and pleasant spot. And this, this was what she had prepared for her, this quite evident place of tribulation. She made no answer to Irma's last words beyond drawing her lips thinly together. They had all learned that they couldn't get at their father's widow except through her sons, but just as soon as she could turn around she'd get another niche for her Dresden china auntie....
No one, not even Corinne was ever to know what Frau Stacher's thoughts or rather feelings were, as soundlessly, in the narrow confines of the alcove, she unpacked her few possessions. When those designed for the lower drawer of the little chest were laid in, it stuck obstinately in a three cornered way as she tried to close it. The upper one had proved to be still full of old letters, postcards and photographs. A faded reminder of Heinie and Irma with knapsacks and alpenstocks off on their honeymoon in the Dolomites, caught her eye, which was further held by a likeness of her unsuspecting self staring at her from under an oak in the Stadtpark at Baden, with Anna's baby, the first-born grandchild on her knee. Andthiswas to what it was all leading up she thought in unaccustomed irritation, as she gave another push to the lower drawer, which went in with a jerk that left her breathless. When she wanted to hang up her coat she found that she had to stand on the divan to reach the nail. Her eyes taking in the details of that very evident tent of a night were at their palest, scarcely a trace of blue left in them. She was quite alone. Irma waiting impatiently to open the door for her sister-in-law's belated arrival had almost immediately departed to engage in the protracted and militant operation of marketing. The three boys were at school. Irma's welcome had been hasty and without warmth. The room itself was cold with the insidious chill of a room in a damp climate that has not had a fire in it since the day before. The white porcelain stove, as Frau Stacher stepped shiveringly over to it possessed not even a reminder of heat, though she put her hands knowingly on certain tiles, hoping possibly to find one still warm from the previous evening. Irma never lighted the fire till the boys got back in the afternoon. She herself would sit at her embroidery frame with a round, grey, stone bottle of hot water, wrapt in a piece of old flannel, in her lap. Frau Stacher tried to think that the place would be warmer in many ways when the boys came home.
Then the cuckoo clock struck eleven hollow strokes and hurriedly she began to lay out her very best things to wear to Liesel's. Liesel adored good clothes and always noticed what people wore. A large part of her conversation was about making over old things or the possibility of getting new ones, and the discussion of what was being worn that season and might be worn the next could induce in her sensations bordering on rapture.
Frau Stacher was still wearing for "best" with a measure of decency, some stancher remnants of the years of plenty. She now proceeded to put on her black cloth suit with the embroidered black and white lapels, the last thing she had bought before her "crac," arranging softly about her neck, which was already encircled by a bit of narrow black velvet, a certain piece of oft-washed and much-mended old lace that she had worn for twenty years, pinning it with an oxydized silver bar pin on which was stamped "Karlsbad," unlosable, valueless relic of a journey in the happier days. She carefully brushed her black hat, with its purple velvet knot faded into grey, giving it a few supplementary pinches and pats before putting it on, instinctively at an angle that was dignified, even becoming; then she rolled tightly her black cotton umbrella and drew on her neatly darned black gloves. She paused on the threshold to give a strange, pale glance about the familiar room become suddenly not only unfamiliar, but odious. The cold north light lay whitely upon it, bringing out every thread in the worn spots of the old rug, by the door, under the table, as you went into the kitchen; she remembered that Heinie's feet had had their part in wearing them threadbare, Heinie now seven years in his grave. There by the window was the unwieldy, red upholstered armchair that he had sat in all through that last winter of his life, with smooth, shining, dark spots on the arms and at the top. She shivered again but this time it was not from the cold of the room. As she passed out, her arms held more closely than ever to her sides, her head very erect, her little pride all indeed that she had left to her out of a whole life full of things, she still looked the Frau Commercial Advisor Stacher, born von Berg. Her gentility was ineffaceable.
Liesel was busy in the tiny kitchen when her aunt rang gently, apologetically. As she opened the door an entrancing smell, unmistakably of fresh noodles in fresh butter, was wafted on the air. It wasn't the sort of scent that hung around Frau Kerzl's apartment nor about Irma's. Frau Stacher found herself sniffing it up eagerly, and certainly Liesel's warm welcome fittingly accompanied it. Where on earth did Liesel get the butter? she was thinking as she felt her niece's bright cheek against hers and her soft breast warmly near. Her spirits began to rise. She was momentarily out of sight and hearing of the combat for food, enveloped sustainingly in that delightful union of scents—above lilies and roses—fresh flour, fresh, warm butter! Her heart was suddenly flooded with an immense gratitude, not alone for the food, as she returned the soft embrace.
It was a comfortable little living room into which she then stepped, crowded with furniture, mostly Biedermayer, that had belonged to Otto's mother and his grandmother before her. Mellow, pale brown furniture decorated here and there with a black motif. A writing desk, with high shelves and glass doors destined for books, now held a mauve and white tea-set in old Vienna ware. A green porcelain stove stood in one corner and was beginning to give forth its gentle heat. Liesel lighted it about an hour before Otto returned and then all day long into the evening it could be depended on to give out generously its pleasant, even warmth. Between it and the window were Otto's armchair and his special stool for his lame leg, near it a little table with a rack for his pipes, his wallet of tobacco and a box of Trabucos. Ottohadto have his cigar after supper and when luxuriously he had smoked it he would pull at his pipe and read theWiener Journalor perhaps get out his flute. They talked of renting a piano when things got better and then Liesel could play his accompaniments. After busy days, pleasant evenings. Liesel's deft fingers were always at work salvaging something old,—her darning was famous in the family, or smartly fashioning something new. She had a way of standing in front of him and asking him if the stripes were more becoming across or up and down, or she would sit in his lap and ask him if his treasure could wear her dress as short asthat, only so much stuff, every centimeter counted, that enchanted his uxorious soul. He would pinch her ankles and say that anybody who wore a 35 shoe could do as she liked, or as far up as the police permitted, and Liesel would be delighted and laugh and laugh. After hearing what had happened at the Ministry, she would tell of those even more vitally interesting visits to provision shops, where evidently the tradespeople liked to see her, and as far as was wise she would let him into the secret of her ways of ferreting out the little that was hidden; her ready smile, those two soft dimples and her even softer brown eyes counting for much in such operations. Once, but that was in the very beginning, she had started to tell Otto of the quite fresh remarks of the cheesemonger—a good-looking fellow—but he'd pouted for two days and though secretly Liesel was gratified by these signs of jealousy—once in awhile, like that—in the end she wisely kept the not at all displeasing personal attentions she received while marketing to herself.
Liesel had no books and never dreamed of opening the newspaper,—world-events were nothing to her. After supper as she sewed, Otto would sometimes read her amusing bits under the caption "Around about the Globe": "A dangerous Don Juan," "The most useful tree in the world," "The Adonis of the American film world," "Solemn mourning for a cat," and such like. Liesel adored cats. She wanted a cat, a piano and a baby; otherwise she had really little left to wish for.
Occasionally they followed a case through the criminal courts, especially if it had an amusing side. Liesel loved to laugh and laugh she often did in the weeping city.... And a jewel robbery made her eyes shine. But Liesel's real use for newspapers was to soak them in water, then roll them into tight balls and set them to dry. They made excellent fuel, one or two, put knowingly into the porcelain stove with a couple of briquets. There were always a few drying on the window-ledge in the kitchen.
Otto's own reactions to the problems of the Fatherland as set forth in the Press were not much more vigorous than his wife's. When he read of a new difficulty he would in his mind straightway blame some far-off, unreachable individual or circumstance for the national misfortunes in general and particular. He had then done all that could be required of him; effort was ended and he was quits with the situation. He didn't blame openly the Republic, he got his living and his Liesel's from it as from the Monarchy, and he rarely used the now familiar expression "Dos homma von da Republik," (that's the fault of the Republic) but he thought it. It was, further, a source of evils, that he, Otto Steiner, could not be expected to purify. What, indeed, could he do about the Republic, about the Jews, about the Freemasons, about the Exchange? Nothing, quite evidently nothing, and it let him comfortably out of all responsibility. He just kept on at his work, came home to his Liesel, who in turn pursued her agreeable and busy round of making him happy. So endless were the combinations and strategies involved in this once simple matter that she had her hands and time full.
She felt very sorry for her Tante Ilde, losing her money and being old and alone, for Kaethe and her children, for Irma and the boys, and sometimes she took them things to eat. Quite often she found her way to Mizzie's shop where she was always sure of a warm welcome, for undeniably Liesel understood the niceties of Mizzi's business. She sometimes even thought of going in with her, but she felt that she was, momentarily at least, better employed in using Otto's salary to the fullest advantage, and "with things as they are," (which was Liesel's nearest approach to intellectual participation in the national misfortunes)thattook all her time and thought. Standing in those everlasting cues, running as she said, "from Pontius to Pilatus," bringing everything home herself, though the aged porter at the corner of the Kohlmarkt and the Wallnerstrasse always helped when it was a question of coals, glad to serve once more a handsome woman,—handsome in the traditional way he so thoroughly understood. Liesel would listen, quite truly interested, as they walked along to his tales of other days when gentlemen were "cavaliers" and ladies hard to win; of whilom young attachés at the not distant Foreign Office, that imposing Ballplatz, who had been wont to send him with love letters and flowers and bonbons. The telephone had given the first blow to such romantic expressions of love; and as for the War and the Peace, they were equally and finally calamitous....
She could well afford to greet her aunt lovingly, and her "dearest aunties" and her "how sweet you look" and her "I'm so glad to have you," came gushingly out of the abundance of her heart. She was so happy that she could add cheer to her food without the slightest effort.
The table was already spread. Aunt Ilde's involuntary though delicate glance showed her three places set, just the same for all; three wine glasses, three plates, three knives even, (on those knife-rests that she had so fortunately added to the coffee spoons and napkin rings when Liesel was married,) knives meant meat, but she then and there made up her mind not to take any—perhaps a little wine. The carafe stood on the table filled with a Voslauer, a pleasant, light, open wine, gently quite gently warming to the stomach. It grew on those very slopes about Baden.
Then she bethought herself cheerfully of the moment, when she would say to Liesel: "Now you stay with Otto, I'm going to do the dishes, but I must have an apron."
She had taken her things off and hung them up on one of the pegs in the little hallway. She had wished even as she did so that she didn't have to leave them there. They'd be the first things Otto would see and perhaps ... But such misgivings and some others had given way before that delicious odor and Liesel's warm welcome. She looked so pretty, so appetizing, in that big, pink apron. As she went back into the kitchen her aunt could hear her singing an old waltz from the "Graf von Luxenburg," "Bist meine liebe, kleine Frau."
Frau Stacher had for a moment the illusion that she was still living at Baden and that she had only come in for the day. There, too, was her little inlaid worktable that had belonged to her own mother and that Liesel had taken for safe-keeping when the house was given up. She'd always kept her wools and her fine darning in it and Liesel did the same.
"Can't I help?" she asked, as she continued to look at it, rent by a sudden, terrible homesickness, that made her voice quite weak.
"No, you just sit quiet and rest. Everything is ready. It's time for Otto to come, anyway," Liesel answered with a look at her wrist watch. "He's always to the minute. He only has an hour for dinner and must find everything ready."
Indeed as she spoke the rattle of a key was heard at the front door. She flew to it. There were the unmistakable, immemorial sounds of embracing and then a whispered word from Liesel.
"Ach, yes, yes," Tante Ilde heard him answer.
He had hung up his green plush hat with the little grey feather at the back on its own invariable peg, had divested himself of his overcoat, with its rather high, tight belt and hung it up on the next by Tante Ilde's hat and coat, just as she had known he would, but without the inhospitable thoughts her humility had attributed to him. As he entered he was combing his hair and moustache with his little pocket comb and smiling his somewhat fatuous smile.
Otto Steiner was the son of a small government official, the grandson of one. He had gone into the Ministry of Agriculture when he was eighteen, and had been there seven years, when at a certain hour the war found him, in a certain room, at a certain desk, bending over a certain big ledger. And out of that secure and dusty routine, as natural to him as breathing, he had been thrown to the Russian front, then to the French front where he had been wounded. He had been healed and thrown to the Italian front, every nerve in his body making its agonized appeal against going through certain perfectly definite horrors again. He was thankful when his knee, which was supposed to be quite cured, began once more to stiffen and swell, when in a short time quite certainly he wouldn't be able to get about and they'd have to send him home. Then before he could be demobilized he had been taken prisoner and put in that Italian camp where his feet had frozen. Such strange things to happen to one who found his pleasure as well as his daily bread in those dusty ledgers, and whose conversation was largely made up of references to "Das Ministerium." It was one of the first words he remembered from his childhood days, as familiar as "guten Morgen."
Now after all the agonies, the incredible agonies, it had been granted to him, out of so many who had been heaped in nameless graves everywhere in Europe, to be coming into his own home from that very same Ministry, greeted by that delightful odor of food, prepared by a beloved, loving and lovely wife. "I'm certainly lucky," he often said to himself and asked no further grace of heaven than to grow old in the Ministry, moving slowly, as his forbears had moved, up through various rooms, indicative of various grades.
He was pale and wore eye-glasses. His face was the somewhat round-cheeked face of the average Viennese, with rather small nose and rather full lips under a brown moustache. Unmistakably a government employee who would set no river on fire but could be depended on to go his serviceable little way, hour by hour, day by day, year by year ... the traditional "rond de cuir."
There were always rumors of reducing the number of employees, but Steiner's work was so exact, his handwriting and figures so beautifully neat, that he was as safe as anybody in those unsafe days. He could, furthermore, answer any question put to him by any superior, even the strange questions of new men, who, momentarily "protected," came into the Ministry in the upper grades, passing in and then out. The administration was fairly snowed under by employees. It was reckoned often, (not, however, by those employed, they kept such statistics as much as possible to themselves) that 750,000 out of the 2,500,000 lived on and by the different departments of government. But mostly their positions were no more secure than yellowing leaves in Autumn. A gust of zeal on the part of some one high up and they fell in showers from the governmental tree, disappearing into the dark, wet, windy streets of hyemal Vienna. The question with each and every one was how to hang on....
Hydrocephalous Austria, with that terrible will to live! A mangled trunk supported its great head, Vienna. The members through which the blood should have circulated had been lopped off, the head was growing bigger, sicker....
But Otto Steiner wasn't thinking of any of these things as he greeted his aunt Ilde. He saluted her affectionately; some not very urgent realization that she "had had it hard" put an additional cordiality into his voice. He was further melted by the odor of those fresh noodles and hot butter just as she had been.
A sizzling sound, like sweetest music, coming from the kitchen, next fell on their ears. Liesel disappeared anxiously.
"What have you got today?" he cried through the door, "do I really smell noodles and butter? I'm just dying of hunger!"
A moment after, Liesel, divested of her pink apron, in the neatest one-piece dark blue dress, a red leather belt holding it snugly about her waist, appeared rosily bearing a smoking black and white checkered soup tureen. Little tendrils of dark hair lay softly, damply about her brow, her dimples were very deep, her eyes very bright. She was sure of that soup, cunningly made of left-over crusts of black bread, roasted crisply in the oven and then ground up with a bountiful seasoning of onions and various other more discreetly sustaining herbs. On that dark January day it put heart into them all. Their spoons clicked joyously. Then those shining noodles! Liesel had strewn over them the crispest little heaps of fried crumbs. A very, very small golden-brown veal cutlet was put closely, significantly by Otto's plate. Generally he and Liesel halved their small bits of meat, but today she set the example of taking none. It was plainly fitting that the wage-earner, the master should have it all and more especially in those days when nourishment was the first need, the last preoccupation. Above saving one's soul for eternity was that of saving one's body for a span.
When the pale wine was poured out Liesel said sweetly:
"We must drink to Tante Ilde's health!" and Otto cried promptly, "Prosit" looking at her affectionately through his pince-nez, across the brim of his glass.
She began to feel herself a new woman. Food, youth, love, happiness, the taste, the sight, the feeling of it all! Paradise in some way regained. She forgot that she was there as a poor old relative, who for decency's sake, had to have her breath kept yet awhile in her body by the efforts and sacrifices of those of her blood; no, she was again Tante Ilde of Baden who would soon say:
"Well, children, are you coming out to me for dinner on Sunday, and will you have an Apfelstrudel or an apricot tart?"
Then Otto began to tell about the hard case of his friend, Karl Schober, who though a war-cripple had been inexplicably dismissed that very day. There were four cripples in Otto's room, for that is where,—in the rooms of some Ministry, with a little "protection," they mostly and justly landed. After they had called it a shame, and unbelievable, and had given a shudder, (being dismissed in those times was like being condemned to death without the preliminary security of prison) insensibly they fell to talking of other days. Tante Ilde, who had forgotten nothing that had ever happened to any of the children, began to tell the most interesting things about Liesel when she was little. How she had fallen from the apple tree in the garden of the Baden house and broken her wrist, and how Tante Ilde had held her other hand when the doctor was setting the bone and that Liesel had been so brave and hadn't cried, at which Otto leaned over and gave his wife a pat on the arm. And the time she had taken Liesel to the races so conveniently near; Liesel remembered that well, that was the day she had first put her hair up and wore the lovely wine-colored dress with little pleated ruffles and had gone out with her aunt Ilde as Fräulein Bruckner instead of "die Liesel." They had put money on a certain Herr Hafner's four year-old and Liesel had actually won 20 Krones!
Otto listened with his somewhat full lips parted, entranced by these tales of his treasure's earliest youth, and all of a sudden they found they had eaten everything there was on the table and drunk every drop of wine, but they continued to sit for a while longer, pleasantly engaged in picking their teeth and sucking in their tongues. Liesel always did things well and kept the two little blue glass toothpick holders filled. They had been given by Mizzi, who went so far and no further in the matter of presents, even to some one she liked, on the occasion of Liesel's marriage. When shown to the various members of the family they had, one and all, wondered how Mizzi had had the face....
Then when Otto lighted his Trabuco, Tante Ilde found herself saying just as she had planned:
"I'm going to do the dishes. You stay with Otto, but I must have an apron."
Liesel had been very dear and had said:
"But no, Tante Ilde, you mustn't work when you come to us."
Suddenly her aunt's eyes had filled with tears:
"It would make me so truly happy," she entreated. Then Otto had cried:
"But yes, little goose, let Tante Ilde do as she will!"
So Liesel stayed with Otto and as Tante Ilde went in and out she could hear them talking as if they hadn't seen each other for a week, trying to decide if they would go, that very evening, to a cosy little cabaret in the Annagasse, a stone's throw from their house and Liesel wear her new pink dress; or whether they would go to the Circus Busch movie in the Prater Stern, where it didn't matter what you wore and where they were giving a wonderful moral drama in six acts called "Sinful Blood," and where they would hold hands in the dark just as if they weren't going to spend the night together.
Tante Ilde herself even began to hum that waltz tune from the Graf von Luxenburg, though she had long been nobody's "dear little wife."
When she was putting tenderly away in the tiny cupboard the white plates with the gold "S" that Liesel was also "keeping" for her, she got suddenly a quite unexpected whiff of the once familiar salami, proceeding irrepressibly from a tightly-tied up little package.
"Sausage for Otto's supper!" she murmured to herself, and then wondered if she were mistaken, though Lieselwasequal to anything ... but all without any envy. She'd had a good meal, flavored with love and happiness, and suddenly a thousand other thoughts and feelings pressed in upon her that she'd forgotten existed. She was increasingly glad of Liesel's youth and love, that out of the starving, mourning city she had grasped her comfortable joy....
Finally Otto saying warmly, "auf Wiedersehen, Auntie," had given her a sounding kiss on both cheeks, and placing several on Liesel's red lips had contentedly limped off to the Ministry.
Then Liesel had proceeded to initiate her into some of the secrets of her wonderful management, but as they were inseparable from her youth and dimples and shining eyes, they were of little practical use to her aged aunt. The fortune-teller whom Liesel had just consulted had assured her that she would have good luck in all her undertakings. One glance at Liesel's open, happy face, framed in that glossy abundance of waving dark hair was enough to start the least gifted of seers off in the right direction. She had, further, informed her that a blond, blue-eyed woman was to be avoided. Lieselhadstared at that, but when she told her aunt about it they avoided each other's eyes, though Tante Ilde did murmur something about its being "singular." Liesel was dying to keep the conversation on lines that would inevitably have led to the enthralling and inexhaustible topic of Fanny, but there were certain matters that you just couldn't talk about with Tante Ilde, not when you could see her eyes, so Liesel only said that the fortune-teller had further told her that she had the exclusive love of a man with dark hair and eye-glasses who had been wounded in the war. Well, you had to admit that there was something in it all, when they hit so many nails on the head, (even though, as Tante Ilde couldn't help thinking, those nails were positively sticking up asking to be hit).
Liesel found that having Tante Ilde for dinner wasn't at all bad. On the contrary she had thoroughly enjoyed it. At the end she gave her some macaroni and a few spoonsful of brown sugar to take home to Irma, also a couple of Otto's old shirts; he had to look a certain way at the Ministry and she had darned those till they weren't decent any more, but for the boys.... And Liesel had been so sweet when she kissed her goodbye, saying, "Now, Auntie, don't forget you're to come next Monday and I'll see about getting something extra nice for dinner. What about a Schmarrn?"
Frau Stacher had positively tripped from the Annagasse to the Hoher Markt, in unaccustomed light-heartedness. "Happiness,—it's even more contagious than misery," she thought, grateful to have been exposed to the dear infection, and forgot that she'd been timid about going.
But the extraordinary part about it all was that that good meal, instead of making her less hungry, seemed to engender an intolerable desire for another. She was just wild for more noodles and butter when night came, ready for a whole cutlet for herself. As they sat round the supper-table, the three hungry boys with their eyes on the soup-tureen, and Irma dipping the ladle in so carefully for Tante Ilde's share that the few bubbles of life-giving fat would not slip into it, yet so shallowly that none of the thick part came up, then Tante Ilde was, for once, not faint for food, not at all. She was just wild for food. This, however, she was able to keep hidden in her breast. Indeed she was greatly ashamed of her sudden access of gluttony, and the next time she went to confession....
When under the stimulating effect of the pleasant meal at Liesel's, she had smilingly, but as it proved unwisely told Irma about the noodles and butter, Irma, taking some last stitches by the waning light of her north window, had listened with that intent expression the habitually undernourished have in their faces when food is being talked about, but her only answer had been:
"Well, with a meal like that you certainly won't be able to eat any supper." She had fairly snatched the sugar and macaroni from her sister-in-law's hands, then she had held the shirts, embellished with their lace-like darns, up to the light, which had no difficulty in getting through, saying:
"I should think she would send them! They're on their last legs."
No, Irma couldn't be gracious, she'd always been that way, even when she was young and pretty and sheltered; and since the Peace....
But when Frau Stacher finally dipped her spoon into that watery soup, after having broken into it the thin slice of bread pushed towards her by Irma's careful yet resolute hand, she suddenly found that she didn't really want even that, the boys ought to have every drop, every crumb. She felt old, tired, completely superfluous, and she would have loved above all things, even above food, to have had a room of her own wherein she could hide the shame of her superfluity, shut the door on it, turn the key and drop a few secret tears over it....
After the meal consumed with lightning rapidity by the hungry boys and more slowly cleared away by their mother and aunt, they all placed themselves around the table with its heavy red felt cover, and the boys began to do their lessons for the next day in the light of the swinging lamp pulled down very low. Irma took out those shirts of Otto's, holding them again up to the light and making a clicking sound with her tongue against her teeth as she did so.
Then there was silence except for the rubbing of the boys' feet on the chair rungs and floor, the turning of the pages of their theme books and the ticking of the brown cuckoo clock with its long, swinging pendulum.
Frau Stacher sat just outside the circle of light, in deep shadow; if she had put her hand out she could have touched the curtain of the alcove. She felt increasingly useless and lonely. They would be sitting there just the same if she were dead.
Irma was continually taking off her glasses and wiping them on the piece of old linen she kept by her for that purpose. She knew her eyes were getting worse and sometimes she was very frightened. The light caught her big, capable hands, fell on the heap of white linen in her lap, glowed about the fringe of the little, red, three-cornered shawl crossed over her low, heavy breasts. She had brought it from Agram in those days that as the calendar ran were not so far away, but might have been, for all their resemblance to the present, of another century. Her face was left in deep shadow which did not soften something roughhewn about it. It was broad through the forehead and her cheeks with their deep-dyed spots of color had very prominent bones, her nose alone was the rather formless kind that escapes memory or description. Above her short, full upper lip was a dark duvet, like a thick smudge put on with a careless finger and getting darker every year. Twisted about her head were heavy coils of rather oily black hair that anxiety had neither greyed nor thinned, though her eyes, once so bright under that low, full forehead with those two other wide, black smudges for eyebrows, had got quite dull. It gave her a strange expression at times, all except the eyes keeping its freshness that way. Shehadgood looks, the family had to admit it, in a bright, square, hard way, like a strongly-outlined, heavily-colored poster; like a poster of a peasant woman binding sheaves that one might come across in a Railway station, meant to be looked at from a distance and to encourage travel. But somehow Irma hadn't worked out comfortably in the shorter perspectives of a city. Why Heinie had been mad about her, his sister had never understood. But Heinie had been a marrier. She couldn't think of Heinie not married, though why just Irma, uncomplaisant, worrying Irma strayed into that Viennese world of theirs, familiar and dear to them as their own breath, with its comfortable, care-free ways. There had been so many attractive young women about with easy smiles and pleasant habits who would have flavored his lengthening years. Now the family were, one and all, horribly bored by Irma, left heavily on their hands. They forgot that Pauli had said when his father-in-law married that she reminded him of a late harvest, with vermilion melons and stacks of yellow grain against black earth, and that Heinie knew winter was near.
There in the shadow, her useless hands lying folded in her thin lap, her colorless head bent, her pale lids dropped close over her eyes, Frau Stacher shivered, suddenly remembering that phrase about winter being near. In the warm haze of the protracted Indian summer of her life she hadn't in the least understood what it meant. She fell to thinking of that and of other long past things; of present things she had no thoughts, only confused, painful sensations, which were cutting deeper wrinkles and scars in her face than all the living through of her pleasant three-score years and ten.
Ferry, the eldest boy, thin and tall for his years, with very long black lashes shadowing his blue eyes and falling upon his thin cheeks with their tiny spot of bright color, had closed his books and taken a rattling, illy-jointed knife out of one coat pocket and a little figure in wood that he was working on out of the other. Even with that poor blade he had given it a touch of life,—a woman with her arms hanging at her sides.
"I'm going to make two little buckets to put into her hands, one for apples and one for pears," he whispered to his mother as he held it up,—"see how she's already bending under the weight," he added with his slight but persistent cough.
He had, for all his pale adolescence, a strong resemblance to his aunt Ilde. She had always cared a lot for Ferry; he'd been a snuggling, affectionate baby, something inexpressibly dear and unexpected in her elderly life; they had, in a way, she and her brother, forgotten such things. Now she was aware of a hot yearning to give him a new knife. From somewhere that knife must come.
Gusl, the next, was formed in his mother's image: thick-set, short with a certain roughness in his ways and those same bright, hard eyes under a full brow and shaggy dark hair.... The peasant caught in the city, and what he would do with the city or it with him was still tightly rolled on the lap of the gods. Ferry's future was easier to foretell—he would betake himself and his talent to some garret and starve, after the immemorial way of poverty, youth and genius. Gusl hated desperately his books and he was always hungry. Any meal that his mother set out he could have eaten alone. Calories were nothing to him. He wanted lots, lots. But Ferry was always dreaming, sometimes even over his food.
Little Heinie had almost immediately fallen asleep, leaning against the table, a ring of brown curls and two big ears catching the light as it played about his bent head.
Yes, that was the way they would be sitting if she were not there, if she were dead. She felt thinly miserable, like something that had been and no longer was ... like her own ghost. Irma was wiping her spectacles again.
"Give me the mending," said her sister-in-law, but somewhat timidly, she never quite knew what Irma would do, "I haven't used my eyes today."
Irma passed it over to her silently and changed places with her. She felt a little less useless then; coming into the circle of light with the boys seemed to take her out of that shadowy, unpleasant world where superfluous, dependent old women were waiting uncertainly, wretchedly, to get into the cold grave. No, Irma's ways were not comfortable ways, and it was all a part of the general misfit of things that it was Irma who was the widow and had the alcove and the three sons and needed help.
When from time to time Ferry coughed, just a tiny cough, but quite regular, almost like the slow, sure tick of the clock, his mother's black brows would contract at that spectre of the "Viennese malady" which had found its way into her home. Her sister-in-law wasn't the only ghost there.
Irma was from the Plitvicer Lakes, beyond Agram, now become Serb. There was always that something rough, even fierce about her, not at all like the easy-going Viennese, not like the fiery Hungarians, not like anything Frau Stacher was familiar with. Perhaps it was what had attracted Heinie. But she was vaguely afraid of it.
Irma had at one time tried to go back to her own country, to her people, with her sons—a woman bringing sons would be welcome. Then the extraordinary, the unbelievable thing revealed itself. She found she didn't exist there any more, no more than if she were dead; less than that even, for then she would have had a grave. Austrian papers were of no use to her and Servian papers she could not get. The little town where she was born, on the wild Milanovac Lake was no longer a Crownland. Her people were no longer her people; even her brother was no longer her brother. The white house with the warm brown roof and the vine growing over the door that got so red in the autumn, and the chestnut tree that got so yellow, there in front with the circular seat—all that, their father's legacy to them—she no longer had any share in it. There were, it appeared, many of these spots, these veritable no man's lands, where children had no rights and strange people went over thresholds worn by parental feet and strange people slept in the beds they were born in. If only she could have gone back there with her boys and wrested her living in some way from the wild soil, ... and Ferry in the mountain air! No wonder Irma was sombre, was fierce, and bore her sorrows heavily.
Frau Stacher kept reminding herself of all this, but what could she or anybody do about it? They were all caught in a trap ... simple and terrible as that. As she sat measuring the tuck in a shirt sleeve, she was suddenly aware of being worn to exhaustion with the changes and excitements of the new order of her days. Such desperate exertions just to keep the breath in her body! She wanted to get her clothes off, lie down, shut her eyes, be in darkness with the effortless night before her. But she sat on silently, drawing the thread weakly in and out of the thin stuff and now and then looking up at the boys. They were pale, but they were young. They could—even Ferry—expect more brightly-colored, fuller years. But for herself!... With difficulty she kept the tears from falling over her work, but only when Irma said:
"Now, boys, to bed, you've studied enough," did she feel free to lay it aside.
Then Irma quite ostentatiously told the children to say good night, though Ferry was already leaning affectionately, after his way, against his aunt and saying that he would help make up the divan, but Irma who suffered terribly from jealousy and could ill endure these signs of love, told him it was late and that she would help Tante Ilde. The three then kissed her resoundingly, but sleepily. When she felt the nearness of those young bodies, their adolescent strength held in leash by that sapping undernourishment, she realized all the more that she was useless, her sands run. She forgot that she was paying for the alcove and wondered if this was the way things would always be, as she finally laid herself down on the old brown divan, on that divan that had for years been in the sitting room at Baden, and when all the beds were in use had offered a pleasant night's rest to the last-come child. Now she was sleeping on it herself, but as an intruder, fitfully, unquietly, from time to time hearing Ferry cough and turn in his bed, and always Irma's loud, empty snore.